1) This makes a school bus trip seem like a delight. Actually, I’d probably homeschool.
2) Guys who pay women to play video games with them.
4) And, as an antidote to those of you who were annoyed by the critique of police procedure in CASTLE: A show that get’s the procedure right. FYI, I don’t post these links to harsh peoples’ buzz on their favorite shows; there’s a lot to learn here for writers and readers.
If you saw this:
A KEY, AN EGG, AN UNFORTUNATE REMARK
as a book’s title, what inferences would you draw about the content of the novel?
Stick with it to at least the midpoint for a nice twist. (Facebook people, this is an embedded video; you can watch it at the blog, if you want.)
1) As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve finished my agent’s revisions to Man Bites World. I have, in my backpack, a printed copy of the latest version. My agent prefers to read on paper, so I’ll be (priority) mailing a copy to her over lunch.
2) With luck, she’ll declare it ready to submit sometime next week. Without luck, she’ll point out a glaring problem I failed to address sufficiently or introduced in this draft, and there will be more changes make. Hopefully, I’ll have luck.
3) Have I mentioned this book was due on September 1st?
4) I won’t be attending Norwescon after all. My application materials were never received (which is probably my fault, somehow), and although they generously offered to squeeze me into a panel or two I decided not to go at all. I’ve spent the last several weekends working all day long on MBW, which means it’s way past time to stop skimping on Family Day. My wife and son have been neglected for too long. I’m thinking we should go to the Air and Space Museum–I moved to Seattle in 1989 and I’ve still never been. My first sf convention will have to be some other event.
5) 1989? Jesus, I’ve been here a long time.
6) I voted for SFWA leadership, but I’ve thrown away my Nebula ballot. Of everything nominated, movies included, Boneshaker is the only thing I’ve read or seen. No, I haven’t seen the rebooted STAR TREK or AVATAR or DISTRICT 9 or whatever. The short fiction is largely online, but I don’t like reading fiction on my computer screen.
What’s more, it felt like an obligation that I just don’t care about. I find myself doing these things once in a while–a couple weeks ago I made a stab at spreading word that I’m eligible for a particular award, but I felt stupid during and after, and I’m not doing it anymore. I’m not condemning people who self-pimp for awards–that’s their choice and I don’t have a problem with it. I don’t read those posts or click those links, but whatever.
7) Having finished this latest version of book three, I rewarded myself by getting a full eight hours of sleep last night. Crazy, I know! Tomorrow I’ll be getting up at my usual Unbearable O’clock to work on the goof for Project Number Next. I have no contract for this one and no clue if it’s a good idea or not (only that it intrigues me and would be refreshingly different than the Twenty Palaces books).
You know what feels best about this, though? No one knows a thing about this project but me.
My agent has asked me to stop looking at Child of Fire’s sales rankings on Amazon.com. She knows I know that they don’t really mean anything, but she also knows that it’s one of the few tools a writer has to see how the book is doing. Are sale trending upward? Is interest fading away? How does it compare to book X, released at the same time (which is never always fun)?
Her point (and, as always, it’s a good one) is that Amazon.com isn’t representative of certain kinds of book sales. It doesn’t match well with them and I shouldn’t even distract myself with it because it could be suggesting something that’s the opposite of what’s really going on. And I’ve taken her advice. I only visit the Amazon.com page to see if there’s a new review, although I sometimes will accidentally allow my gaze to fall on the ranking. Oops! Utterly meaningless!
The reason it’s been easy to kick the Amazon.com sales ranking habit is that I found a new, better form of crack. See, Random House has a nice list of books on their website, and if I click “science fiction/fantasy” right there in the left sidebar, they will automatically sort them by how well they’re selling that week. And, since they only update once a week, I’m not tempted to obsess
Currently, I’m on page 20 out of 99 of all Random House sf/f. Not bad (probably)! The top slots are almost always Laurell K. Hamilton, Star Wars novels and Farenheit 451. Me, I’ve been as far back and page 30, and as far forward as 12 (I wish I’d known about this when my book first came out).
And of course, I always have to click back one more page so I can trash talk the books trailing me in the list. “Eat my DUST, Stephen R. Donaldson! With your 30-something year old novel that’s still selling strong! How do you like the bottoms of my shoes! HAH!”
I consider this healthy.
And today it’s all about me me me!
* As of last Monday, I am officially six months overdue on delivering Man Bites World. My agent has given me firm instructions: Do not panic. The deadline for production is August, but I’m going to be turning it in that late. I’m just about finished with a round of revisions for my agent (she had a couple little notes) and once she reads and approves them, I’ll turn the book in.
Looking back, I can see it was damn smart of my editor to hold off the publication of Child of Fire for as long as she did. And I’m sorry that Game of Cages was switched from May of this year to August. Hopefully, the path in the future will be more smooth.
* In MS Word for Mac (I know. You don’t have to say it), the word count appears at the bottom of the window… unless the count goes into six figures, at which point it disappears. I hate that. I like maps, clocks, WYSIWYG, and word counts. I like to know where I am. That’s why I feel a certain joyful satisfaction when I trim a manuscript below the 100,000 word mark and the total count suddenly appears onscreen.
Yesterday, I was tempted to stop revising ten minutes early so I could write “I’m at 99,999 words now!” in this post, but I resisted. See point one.
* Am I going to Norwescon? I don’t know! I received an invitation around Christmastime, filled it out and sent it in, but I haven’t heard back. It’s less than a month away and my name isn’t on the long list of “panel participants.” Now, I’ve never been to a convention before, so maybe it’s commonplace for a confirmation to arrive less than a month before the event. Maybe it’s common for an invitation to be rescinded (which would be understandable, since I can only go one day) without notifying the attendee. I dunno, but I’ve sent an email to registration to inquire.
I’m half-hoping they’ll tell me I’ve been struck from the list. Saturdays are supposed to be family time for me, but revisions have been eating all my time, and then there’d be a convention, and the following week…
* I’m going to have a signing at the Tukwila Barnes & Noble on April 10th at 1 pm. It won’t be a reading (Ixnay on the Eadingray!), just a signing and talk with four authors: Gayle Ann Williams (Tsunami Blue), Jessa Slade (Seducing the Shadows), Mark Henry (Battle of the Network Zombies), and little ole me. If you live in the Puget Sound area, swing on by.
* You know what amazes me? I can revise a book three times and, on the fourth runthrough, discover an incredible number of word echoes, clumsy sentence constructions, responses to sensory input before the sensory input, and dialog that would register as “eyeroll” on a Turing test. It still astonishes me that my own errors can be so difficult to see.
* Only two entries so far in the Child of Fire giveaway contest (Here’s the LiveJournal version). Just sayin’. This is the last giveaway I’m going to do for a while. I have a small stack of books I’m going to save for late summer, in case CoF isn’t available in stores when Game of Cages comes out.
Even though it’s been five months since Child of Fire came out, I’m still contacting reviewers, hoping to get a little more exposure. I’ve slowed down quite a bit, but I still mail off the odd book now and then.
So, as I was looking over N.K. Jemison’s new book on Big River dot com to see if it’s a hardcover (and thus too spendy to buy at my local shop) I saw a review posted there by sacramentobookreview.com.
Interesting! So I pop over to their site and poke around. No they haven’t reviewed CoF before. Yes, here are there guidelines for authors who want to send them a book. And here are their prices for a sponsored review.
Cue needle-scratching-an-LP sound. A “sponsored” review?? Well, yes. You can pay to have a review “expedited” which costs $99 for a Standard Turnaround (9-12 weeks) up to $299 for an Expedited Turnaround (2-4 weeks).
They don’t promise a positive review, only a “professional” one, and they don’t promise that a paid review will appear in the paper. However, if they don’t, the author will receive an advertisement instead and the size of the ad depends on which “turnaround” price they pay.
They also promise to put the review into their “publication pipeline” which apparently means Amazon.com, their syndication service, and their website.
As I said above, there’s nothing on the site (that I could find) that promises a rave review. I also didn’t find a disclaimer specifically explaining that cutting a check is no guarantee of a positive review. Still, it strikes me as fishy; I wouldn’t send them anything simply because a reader might wonder if I slipped a couple of bucks into the book, and jeez, people, I’d send a copy to your sickly grandmother if she had a blog.
Vaguely uncool. I’m going to email writer beware about it.
Oh, and because I should make this clear, I am in no way suggesting that N.K. Jemison wrote a check for the review they gave her. In. No. Way.
1) I wish someone could explain to me the causes of the great Balloons Monkey War. Added later: Ah! It was unprovoked Monkey aggression.
2) Five links about selling books.
3) The Venn Diagram of Monsters.
4) Now that Harriet the Spy is being updated as Harriet the blogger, Jezebel.com offers other classics of children’s lit that could be updated for modern times.
5) What Science TV is like. via nihilistic_kid
6) Math A Capella (the internet triples its total nerdiness with one video)
7) If Pitagora Suichi made a music video. Yeah, this one is seriously cool, possibly the coolest thing I’ve linked to in a long time. Don’t skip it.
The announcement just went up on Publisher’s Marketplace, so I guess I can announce it here: My agency has sold French language rights for Child of Fire and Game of Cages to Bibliothèque Interdite! Whoo-hoo! That makes two foreign language sales (so far) Russian and French.
Profitez des bons moments!
A couple of days ago, I linked to the Ten Rules for Writers in the Books section of the Guardian. They’re fun to read, completely contradictory, and simultaneously wonderful and irrelevant. (Wanna make a sour face over them? Head over to the Globe and Mail.)
But why should those writers have all the fun (just because they’re all incredibly successful)? I can write a contradictory list of rules for writers, and so can you. So, I’m going to whip up ten useful and useless “rules” that work for me (except when they don’t) and I recommend everyone do the same.
(It’s a meme!)
By the way, I’m using second person in these rules, but the “you” I’m addressing is the confused-looking guy in the mirror, not any of my readers.
1- You can’t “find” time to write; you can only steal it. In short, you have to give something up. If you find you can’t give anything up to make time for your book, good for you! Your life is too awesome to be wasted writing books.
2- People are more interesting than monsters. Sometimes the person is monster-shaped and sometimes the monster is person-shaped, but the rule holds.
3- No rituals. Try to avoid having any habits you associate closely with writing. If conditions change and you have to drop the habit–even if it’s something as innocuous as “play quiet music”–you may find it hard to put words on the page.
4- Blame yourself. If you get a rejection, always assume it’s because of something in your writing, even if it’s not objectively true. The person who takes the blame is the person who has authority and responsibility, and when it comes to writing, that should be the writer. Blaming others gives away your power.
5- Don’t cheat the concept. If the reader is thinking “Oh my God, is he going to go there?” The answer should be “Yes! He went there!” Don’t shy away from uncomfortable implications of your concept.
6- Cheat the concept sometimes. Don’t be an asshole about rule 5. If “going there” means being lurid, tedious, cliche, or repulsive, figure out a better way.
7- Text is very linear and artificial. Use that to your advantage.
8- Never put the word “into” immediately after the word “and” except in the dialog of an annoying character.
9- Talent is accuracy. In writing, talent is accurately predicting what effect a particular string of words is likely to have on a reader. The more rare the string of words, or the more rare and powerful the effect, the more talent the writer will be thought to have. And yeah, by my definition, it’s the reader who determines whether a writer has talent, and the thing people call talent can be learned. (Isn’t that good news?)
10- If you feel mildly bored with a scene you’re writing, stop working and go do something you hate as punishment. The only real “rule” in writing is Be interesting. All the rest are tools to be used or discarded as needed. (Tools, not rules!)
So, write and post your own ten rules. Why not? They don’t have to be useful to anyone except you.