moi?

I’ll be at the UW Bookstore event on Friday, 2/26

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As I mentioned before, I appeared in the anthology UNBOUND. Check out the list of authors. Pretty amazing, right? How’d I sneak in there?

Anyway, there’s a launch party at the UW Bookstore this Friday, the 26th, and I’ll be there. The event description doesn’t include my name, but I’ll be there.

Come by! Say hello. It’s a Terry Brooks thing, so there might be a whole lot of people. It’d be cool if you were one of them. (You don’t have to buy anything.)

Today’s Twitter Confession

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Sometimes I squelch the urge to say things that are true but seem obvious. I probably shouldn’t.

And this is why Wren, an app that lets me send Tweets without being distracted by reading anyone else’s, is a great way to let off steam when I’m writing.

Holiday time with my family, plus secular symbolism

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I’m not a Christian, but like many Americans I’ll be celebrating the holiday today. We have our niece visiting from out of town, and the tree has lots of gifts under it, four stockings hang over the fireplace, the fridge is stuffed with the traditional foods, and the shelves are full of board games waiting to be played.

Twenty years ago I would spend the holidays alone, making ravioli and writing. Personally, I prefer this. If you find yourself spending the day in a way that makes you feel awful, please reach out. There are folks out there who want to hear from you; you don’t have to be alone.

Whether you celebrate or not, I hope you have a wonderful day. If you like, you can check out my post from two years ago about secular symbolism over the holidays.

Best wishes to you.

New blog series: I went to Portugal

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I have recently taken a “social media vacation” that lasted about a month. I wasn’t completely gone, but I wasn’t posting much, wasn’t reading much, and barely responded to people. The reason was simple:

I was on a month-long vacation in Portugal with my family.

My wife’s sister and her husband have lived in Lisboa and Porto for over ten years, and this was our first visit. We set aside a whole month at the end of the tourist season, late September through October, to see the sights, drink cafe on the sidewalks, and generally hang out and get to know the country. We did some things designed for the turista and some that locals do.

And yeah, the trip has been a secret, mostly, because I don’t think it’s wise to tell the world when the whole family is going out of the country together. It’s not that I’m afraid people would rush to my empty home to rob it, it’s that they’d rush to our home to rob it and find my niece living there, house-sitting for us.

So: trip reports, with pictures, coming up.

An email I was not expecting

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On the list of things I was not expecting, here’s something new: a note from iTunes/iBooks saying that my short fiction collection, which I published in July of last year, was now for sale in their store.

Me, I was a little surprised. I thought it had been for sale fourteen months ago. Shows what I know.

Anyway, short fiction collection! It’s ebook-only, but there’s a new Twenty Palaces novelette in there. Here’s the cover, done by my movie special effects buddy Jim Myers.

Cover art for Bad Little Girls Die Horrible Deaths And Other Tales Of Dark Fantasy

Thanks, Jim

As I said yesterday, I’m on a bit of a social media break, mainly to steal back some time for writing and family. So far it’s going well.

Taking some time away

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This is a brief notice to say that I’ll be taking some time away from social media for the next few weeks. I’m not going on a fast, and I’m not moving to an internet-free cabin in the mountains, but I’m am going to interact with fewer people online and with more people offline. I’m also going to focus more on my book. I expect to be checking my email regularly, but not every day. I also expect to check Facebook, Twitter, and G+ once in a while, but not often.

More and more, I’m tempted to just stop maintaining any social media whatsoever. Maybe this little break will cure me of the urge.

What makes a classic, according to a 13 year old

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On Thursday afternoon, I was working with my son on his homeschool reading. He’d just finished Fahrenheit 451, and he explained that he liked the chase scenes at the end more than the setup at the beginning and middle.

“It seems to me,” he explained, “that in books that are considered classics, they’re more concerned with the… psychology of the characters than in the chase stuff.”

I agreed with him.

That night was family movie night. we picked MARATHON MAN, which was on Netflix Streaming. Spy thrillers are a big hit with the kid, because he’s a big fan of, as he puts it, “smart people being smart.” That’s why he prefers Mission Impossible to James Bond, and why he had an allergic reaction to Dumb and Dumber.

Anyway, Marathon Man’s dental stuff went by without much comment, but the movie was slow (compared to the stuff we make the time to see in the theater) and it was low-key, and it was concerned with the relationship between the characters. When it was over, I asked him what he thought.

“I liked some parts.”

That’s his answer when he finds long stretches of a film kinda dull.

“It’s a classic seventies thriller. Remember what we said earlier about classics? The long shots of people’s faces, or the awkward conversations they have, are their to show the psychology, like you said. Maybe the greatest story ever would combine the character and the exciting event, but we can’t all be Shakespeare.”

Then he nodded and pointed at me, and retreated to his bedroom to draw or read his latest light novel. Anything to avoid a longer conversation about a movie or book.

My wife squeezed my hand and said “Very good. Very good.” She’s happy when we can explicitly tie movie night into his schooling. “But it was pretty slow.”

The Only Reason You Do [X] Is So People Will See You Doing [X]

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So, there’s this annoying conversation that comes up in social media every few weeks that goes basically like this:

Person 1: “Writers who write in coffee shops are just hoping that someone will ask them what they’re writing.”

Person 2: “Yeah!”

Which is weird, right? You see people on their laptops at a cafe, and what you think is I can see them. That means they want to be seen.

Or maybe, and more insidiously: I can see them there. That means what they’re doing is a performance aimed at me.

In all seriousness, people talking shit about writers at Starbucks is a petty thing. It bugs me a little if I’m having a hard day because I’m one of those writers, but folks assuming that I’m there because I’m hoping to be interrupted?… well, I wonder if they’re really thinking clearly.

Also:

If you like big epic fantasy with lots of great female characters, check out Kate’s work.

Personally, I’ve been writing in coffee shops (mainly Starbucks, but not always) for 13 years. Thirteen also happens to be my son’s age. COINCIDENCE? Guess again.

When he was born, my wife’s family descended upon us. We had nine people in a two bedroom apartment–including a newborne, a teenager, and my wife’s elderly parents–that was already crowded with stuff. Writing at home became impossible, so I slipped out to the local Starbucks before everyone woke up and I did my work.

What I quickly discovered is that a) no, no one ever asks what you’re doing–In the 13 years I’ve been writing in cafes I’ve been asked about it three times[1]–and b) I got a lot more done than usual.

Home is where my distractions are. I’m a very distractible person, and the lure of the TBR pile, internet, TV, fridge, chores, whatever is powerful. Even more powerful are the voices of my wife and son; when they speak, my attention turns to them. I can’t help it. At the cafe, as long as I have my internet disabled (nowadays I use a program called Focus for that) my distractions are few[2].

As for hoping people will ask what I’m writing, let’s run that through a common sense check: Fantasy is about 6% of the market. Do I want to be interrupted in the middle of a thought by people who are 94% likely to be totally uninterested in what I do? And of the remaining 6%, how many are interested in my exact sort of fantasy? And those numbers look even worse when you acknowledge that they’re based on the assumption that everyone reads novels, which they don’t.

The answer is obvious. Starbucks is not a convention, where you get to meet admiring readers. It’s a place where you can ignore people and do some work.

Which is why a lot of people in different fields see cafes as a refuge where they can accomplish work. I have managed to sneak peeks at other people’s computers at those long Starbucks tables; what I mostly see is people writing code, not fiction. What’s more, if you click on Kate Elliot’s tweet up there, you’ll see more people talking about their reasons for slipping off to Starbucks to get stuff done.

But like I said: petty. In the specifics, anyway. In a more general sense, the twin notions that I can’t imagine a reason other than X, so X must be the reason and That person can be seen in this place doing X, so being seen must be the reason they’re doing it here are a genuine issue.

I’d like to think that most intelligent people recognize the problems with those sentences. I’d like to hope that most people understand, just to take an example, that just because (to take a not-so-random example) someone is wearing something sexy doesn’t mean they’re wearing it to please you.

And for those who have learned that specific lesson, they need to apply the principle more broadly.

[1] Two were asked dismissively, as in that other person had their laptop open to do REAL work. The third was when an old guy rapped me on top of my head with a folded up newspaper because he wanted to chat but I was wearing headphones. We didn’t chat.

[2] Not non-existent, but few. Very rarely someone with issues in their brain chemistry will distract me. Much more common are adorable tots. I don’t mind them at all. I like kids, and I’m happy to take a brief break to smile and wave at them, or to smile at their mortified parents when the kids act up.

I helped another writer make a sale (in a very small way)

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Ideas are cheap.

Everyone knows that. They’re optional, since you can have a great story without an unoriginal idea behind it. They’re common as dirt–so common, in fact, that most writers have more than they could ever find time to write–and they’re only one very small component of a finished piece of fiction. Without solid execution, even the greatest ideas are useless.

But a cool story idea is valuable in one way: it can make people excited about a story.

That’s why I give my story ideas away right here on the blog. Sometimes I have an idea that’ll tickle my brain, but I don’t have the time (or, frankly, the inclination) to write it. Sometimes it’s just a title or an interesting mashup. Maybe it’s in a medium I don’t write in. Maybe it’s a genre that’s wrong for me. Maybe there’s something else about that, while it sounds interesting, makes me want to put it aside.

The best way I’ve found to put them out of my mind is to add them to my Story Seeds posts, then give them away to the world.

Last night, for the first time ever, I received an email from a writer who’d taken one of those seeds, written a story, and sold it. Obviously, my role in that sale was incredibly small–it was the writer who did the bulk of the work. Still, it feels good.

It only gets harder once you’re published (mostly)

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Some days ago, Chuck Wendig wrote a blog post about how writing books gets harder after you get published, not easier as some people seem to think. Yesterday, Clarke Award winner Tricia Sullivan wrote about breaking in and then fighting to stay in.

I used to say all the time that it’s easier to break in than to stay in, and Wendig and Sullivan have different paths. Wendig has been growing his readership and having success. Sullivan’s experience is closer to mine: struggling to find a substantial readership and to get her work out there, although she’s been doing it longer and has that award on her mantel.

I have ten books out, and on Tuesday I passed 30K words on book 11. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to get a NY publishing contract for this one, so the backlist bump will hit my self-published work.

And Chuck’s right: I still have all the same insecurities and doubts about the work I’m doing. Worse, actually, is that I sometimes feel that I’ve lost a certain attitude I had when I wrote Child of Fire. I was pretty frustrated when I wrote that book, and I attacked it with an attitude of Fuck it. I’m going to do what I want.

I’m still doing what I want, but the fuck it doesn’t have the same bite. Why? Because that publishing contract was a tremendous relief. I didn’t celebrate it by jumping around and cheering; I flopped into a chair and sighed. I haven’t wasted my life after all.

It’s easy to forget that feeling as the years go by. Even if I never make the midlist and die in obscurity, at least one professional in the field thought my work was worthwhile. Before I was published, I really wanted that. Afterwards, I learned that it’s not enough. It’s something–something good–but it’s just the start.