words

NaNoWriMo post (being more prolific)

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It’s almost November so I thought I’d post a little something about NaNoWriMo.

First of all, why does this happen every year in November? It seems like such a bad choice, what with Turkey Day falling near the end (for U.S. residents) when it can be tough to keep to the daily grind, not to mention the preparations for Giftmas. April would be better. Maybe March.

Next, there are always people who feel a little overwhelmed by the idea of fifty thousand words in thirty days. Don’t be one of them. The numbers might sound large but that’s less than 1,700 words a day.

Not every writer finds that sort of pace comfortable. When I was writing KING KHAN I was doing about 3K words a day, but EPIC FANTASY WITH NO DULL PARTS has been much slower, between 1.5K to 2.5K a day. Other writers might do 800 words a day on average, or a single page. There’s nothing wrong with that, because every writer works in their own way, at their own pace.

However! Many, many writers would consider 1.7K words a mediocre or disappointing day, so don’t be intimidated. One of the most valuable things about an exercise like NaNoWriMo is that it gives you a chance to stretch yourself and prove that you can do more than you expected.

That said, there are a number of ways to increase productivity and get those pages done. Since this is something I’ve been working on personally, I have some tips:

Just get it on the page. You can always rewrite later. Not every writer works this way (some make each paragraph perfect then move on and never return to it) but if you can get momentum, keep it going. If you don’t have momentum, force yourself to push until you get it.

Don’t stop at the end of a chapter or scene. If possible, end in the middle of a scene when you know what’s going to happen next. When you return the next day, the half-scene will help give regain the previous day’s momentum.

Know what you’re going to write before the writing starts. You don’t want to spend your writing time thinking about what you ought to write. Use your teeth-brushing time, your shower time, your commute time, whatever for that. Turn off the news/music/TV/whatever and plan the next day’s work. It helps.

Reduce your distractions while you write. I have to write at a coffee shop, because it’s impossible for me to ignore my wife’s and son’s voices. A few weeks ago I looked up from my revisions on KING KHAN and was surprised to see EMT’s in the shop working on a man who’d collapsed at the other end of the room. Apparently, the guy fell, 911 was called, the ambulance arrived and the paramedics came through the door to check on him, and I noticed none of it (-10 to Listen checks). But if my wife says “Hmph!” at the other end of the room I completely lose my concentration (and my wife is an extrovert, so it can be challenging for her to leave me alone.)

That’s why I get out of the apartment to get my pages done and, before I go I turn on Mac Freedom to thwart the temptation to check email or Twitter. Freedom doesn’t work for everyone, but there are a helluva lot of productivity programs out there to choose from. Try to find one that works for you.

Prioritize. Everyone has important things that need to be taken care of every day. The writing will only be done if you put writing time on that list. No one ever finds time for writing, they only steal it from something else. If you find yourself at the end of your day without having written a word, it should be clear that everything you did that day was more important to you. The little choices in our lives demonstrate the things we value most.

And there are many, many things more important than writing: caring for your kids, caring for sick loved ones, making your rent, caring for your own self. If you’re one of those people who can’t write because you are overwhelmed with important responsibilities, then you have my best wishes and I hope life stops leaning on you so heavily. If you didn’t get any writing done but managed to watch your favorite shows or argue politics on Facebook, that’s no big deal in the larger sense, but you’re showing what’s truly important to you.

Don’t get writer’s block. I know, right? There are some kinds of writer’s block that can’t be avoided: sometimes you’re depressed. Sometimes you’re grieving. Sometimes life stresses are so huge that the idea of sitting down and working out how to thwart an alien robot invasion seems trivial and overwhelming at once. Those writer’s blocks are legit, and don’t let anyone tell you differently.

But if you’re “blocked” because you don’t know what will happen next, there are a series of questions that can help resolve plot issues. Make a list of the characters and ask: What does each character want in this particular situation? What resources can they access? How far are they willing to go? What line will they never cross?

Also, what tone are you trying to go for? It’s always easier to create conflict conflict conflict by making certain characters into irredeemable villains, but if you don’t want that, you’re going to need to work out a way for decent people to have conflicting goals that they absolutely must achieve.

This is what I just did for an upcoming chapter in my book: all the ideas I had were unworkable and/or cliche (including, I kid you not, an arena fight scene). I left my laptop at home and took a notepad and pen instead, making long lists of possible plot complications for that part of the story. The bad and cliche ideas went onto the page first so I could get beyond them, and within a half-hour I had what I needed.

Smart choices aren’t always the easiest ones. Writers we all admire–the ones who write moving, surprising books–sometimes seem as though what they do is magic. And sometimes it is (or at least, it seems to come from a part of the brain we don’t understand all that well so it seems like magic). But usually what’s happening is that they are generating a whole bunch of ideas and discarding the ones that aren’t excellent.

One of the best ways to bring momentum to your writing–and to be prolific–is to be excited about what comes next. So plan the next part of your book before you start writing it, take the time to consider all the creative choices available, and choose the best.

Good luck.

Against “Hardness”: Genreville’s Implausibility post

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I can’t help but think that subject header is nothing more than an invitation for people to Beevis and Butthead this post.

Anyway, I enjoyed Rose Fox’s post on Genreville calling for stories that are less concerned with the plausible. People are feeling jaded and BTDT about the genre, yes? So why not break out of the boundaries we set ourselves regarding realism and believability?

Reading this reminded me of “hard fantasy,” a movement that writers and readers have tried to kickstart twice in the past ten years or so. The first time was supposed to be about fantasy based closely on mythology and folklore–essentially treating them as source material and avoiding other fantastical interpretations. The second time it came up was not very long after, in which hard fantasy was supposed to be little more than a well-researched story.

Which… fine. Nothing wrong with that. As stories go, having that element is neither good nor bad; other factors determine whether the story has value or not. However, back when people were talking about these movements, there was definitely a valorizing tone. “Hardness” was a virtue. Hardness was the way serious people who didn’t mind doing the hard work wrote their books. Googling “hard fantasy” brings up a few condescending blog posts on the subject.

Nevermind that remaining true to folklore is a silly metric. Never mind that showing detailed worldbuilding on the page is not appropriate for every story. This is about demonstrating science fiction-style hardness, and therefore your superiority to the rest of the genre.

And it’s misguided. There’s nothing wrong with hard science fiction as a category or an artistic goal, but the “hardness” of sf isn’t what makes it interesting, imo. I know there are other readers out there who put plausibility uber alles, but they’re a vocal minority. I don’t want to knock their tastes but I also don’t want a bunch of Stockholm Syndrome bullshit driving writers and readers toward the idea that it’s only serious (and therefore good) if it’s plausible.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to calculate the calories in an ounce of (fantasy-land) travel rations so I know how much my characters ought to pack.

By the way, if you find yourself burned out on a genre, take a break from it. Read something else: Westerns, romances, mysteries, popular literary fiction, high-tech thrillers. We all get old. We all grow tired of our favorite things once in a while. Feeling jaded? Walk away for a while, says I.

Passing into a new world: Portal fantasy

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Rachel Manija Brown posted something provocative about so-called “portal fantasy.” For those who didn’t click the link: essentially it’s a Narnia-style story, in which a person or persons from our mundane world is transported to a second-world fantasy setting. Apparently, agents reject those stories at the query stage without ever requesting a full manuscript, and the reasons described in the post (all frustratingly second-hand) strike me as extraordinarily bogus.

They’re talking about non-adult books: YA and MG, but I don’t remember seeing a lot of adult-oriented portal fantasies.

But it’s only after I read a post on Making Light that I realize I myself have been All Over Portals in my books.

Now, that Making Light post is talking about Fantasy With Portals In Them rather than Portal Fantasies, which is not exactly a subtle distinction. For one thing, modern person transported to fantasy world setting is a very specific thing. Still, Circle of Enemies and Twenty Palaces both contain literal portals in which Things Intrude Into Our World, and the other two books have implied portals.

What’s more, EPIC FANTASY WITH NO DULL PARTS is full of portals; the barely-Iron-Age society conducts trade through them and they are the center of the plot.

It’s not portal fantasy, per se, but… is this my subconscious calling to me? Has the online discussion finally made me look into my heart and realize that what I’ve really longed to do all this time was write a book about a mafia hitman transported to pseudo-Narnia? Or a pipe-fitter in Osgiliath?

Well, maybe not, but it’s fun to think about.

One year anniversary of the end of 20 Palaces

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I’m writing this ahead of time because I expect to be hanging with my son at the tournament when this posts, but today is exactly one year since I announced that Del Rey would not be picking up any new Twenty Palaces novels and that I was putting the series on hiatus, with all the ominous implications of the word.

And that fucking post is still the most popular thing on my blog. More people have read about my failure than ever read my books.

What has changed since then? Well, A Key, An Egg, An Unfortunate Remark is on indefinite hold. The book itself is a major misfire–not in concept but in execution. It needs a massive rewrite before it’s ready to be shown anywhere and that’s not a very high priority for me right now.

What about Epic Fantasy With No Dull Parts? aka A Blessing of Monsters? Well, shit. We’ll see, won’t we? One big change is that I seriously underestimated the amount of story there; what I’d planned to complete in one volume is not, in fact, complete after 140K words. So it will become two books. Possibly three. We’ll see what my publisher says, assuming I find one for it.

As for me, I’m working on a Twenty Palaces short story, which won’t be told from Ray’s POV. I’m hoping to have it finished soonest so I can get to work on Epic Sequel With No Dull Parts. I’m still waiting on editorial notes for King Khan, the game tie-in book I wrote for Evil Hat’s Spirit of the Century role-playing game, and that will likely be the only book release for me in 2013.

I know. 2012 saw only two anthologies: Don’t Read This Book and Tales of the Emerald Serpent, and next year will almost certainly be a single game tie-in novel. I like all of that work and I’m proud of it, but I need to put out original novel-length fiction if I want to keep my career going.

Amazon Author Rank: Utterly irrelevant to me (plus free fiction)

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It’s pretty clear what the new Amazon Author Rank system is supposed to do. (For those who haven’t heard of it: they now show sales rank numbers for authors as well as their books.) It’s supposed to be a way for authors to promote themselves.

The author becomes a “top ten” author on Amazon (for an hour) and starts using that in their publicity, as though it’s some sort of bestseller list. Not only does this get Amazon’s name out in front of people but it will inevitably push some authors to work like crazy to bump their sales. Writers, while pursuing that supposedly-valuable label, put money in Amazon’s bank accounts.

Me, I don’t much care. I stopped following Amazon’s sales rankings for my books right around the time Random House started giving me accurate sales figures, updated weekly. Do I want to look at “rankings” which only compare me to other authors without giving me actual sales data, and which are calculated in secret, or do I want to look at the number of books sold? No contest for me at all.

In other news, tomorrow I take a long, long weekend away from home. My son and I are catching a train for northern California so he can compete in the Pokemon regionals. I have no idea what sort of internet connectivity I’ll have (certainly none on the train) so don’t expect to see me around much. I’ll do my best to visit at least one Starbucks a day to check email, but I’m not sure I can promise even that much.

Finally, Black Gate has begun to feature fiction on their website, and their latest offering in the first short story I ever sold. To be honest, it’s been available for free since it was published, but they’re featuring it again. Check it out. Special thanks to author Martha Wells for pointing it out. Good thing I read her LiveJournal, eh?

All right. There are errands and packing to do. Signing off for a while.

Brickcon pics to come, but first…

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Something happened over the weekend that I found a little unnerving. As I mentioned on Twitter, I took my son and his buddy to Brickcon last Sunday and it was cool and all (until my camera battery died) but afterwards we stopped for a couple of slices.

On the way to the pizza place, we passed a used book store. “Ooo, books,” buddy said, and I suggested we stop off there after lunch.

We did, and my son was a complete pain about it.

The first thing I did, as always was look for a copy of my own book. Once I found it, I checked the title page; it had been inscribed to “Patty” and overall looked very lightly handled. We joked about apologizing to her and then my son was ready to go.

His buddy and I were interested in browsing the shelves, snapping up stuff by authors we had heard about, looking for books in series we hadn’t finished, all the usual stuff. But my son just wanted to joke about making messes in the valuable book section and complain about going home to play Minecraft.

It was a little disheartening.

My kid does read. Currently he’s on a tear through YA post-apocalyptic thrillers and obviously he reads for school. But his mom and I delight in books, while he doesn’t seem to care at all.

Maybe it’s a phase. Maybe he’s the cobbler’s barefoot son. Maybe it’s that I’ve been bringing him new library books every Saturday for years and he’s become blase.

But it’s pretty annoying.

12 one-star reviews that will make you want to read THE CASUAL VACANCY and one that won’t

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So! The new J.K. Rowling novel The Casual Vacancy has hit the stores, it has nothing to do with Harry Potter and it’s for adults. There’s no doubt at all that it will top the best seller lists.

It’s also racking up the one-star reviews!

If you’re like me, those reviews are like candy: unhealthy in the extreme but irresistible. They fall into four basic groups, and if you’re at all like me (which I doubt) the first three groups will make you want to pick up a copy.

Screencapped Amazon reviews behind the cut. I’m not sure how well they’ll turn out in this format, but you can click through to read them if you want.

First we have the most predictable group of all: the alarmists who are terrible unhappy that a child might read a book meant for an adult (My God! It’s like Romance novel trash!) Continue reading

Randonmess for 9/17

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1) In a Mass Knife Fight to the Death Between Every American President, Who Would Win and Why?

2) Little kittens battle each other in B&N review section: “Will you make an alliance with tigerclan?”

3) The Proper Way To Lock Your Bicycle.

4) Bat Man of Shanghai. Video.

5) Real Lady Sleuths.

6) How to cut your own hair.

7) Over-the-counter DIY witchcraft from the 19th century: The (annotated) Long Lost Friend. Available on Amazon.com

The worst four-letter word in the whole fucking world.

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Occasionally, I suffer from hope.

See, I write these books that some readers (and me) like, but I occasionally get this idea that this or that particular story is going to be a big hit with a very large readership.

That’s hope, and it’s an awful thing. It distracts and disappoints. It makes me take my eye off what matters most. It tricks me into thinking there’s some external standard that I need to meet.

I was just discussing this elsewhere in another author’s private space: there’s this sense that we’re writing the wrong thing, and readers turn away from us and our work as if we were beggars shaking a tin cup at them. We get a few sales, a few reviews, then our books fade away because everyone moves on to some other thing they’re excited about. It goes without saying that no one “owes” a writer anything, but it also goes without saying that we can’t help but give in to that four-letter word when we release something new.

I can say from experience that it is incredibly painful to put a year of work into a book only to have it widely ignored. It’s not as painful as that time no kids showed for my son’s birthday party, but it’s still pretty bad.

But there’s one thing I can’t compare it to: I have no idea how it feels to write something because you think it must be “the right thing” for commercial success, and have it fail anyway.

Here’s a true story that I’ve talked about here once or twice: My editor wanted me to change the ending of Game of Cages. Specifically, she wanted me to change The Sentence (if you’ve read the book you know the 500+ word sentence I’m talking about). She knew it was a powerful scene, but it was not a commercial choice at all. Too dark.

She suggested, quite sensibly, that I revise it so the protagonist could be more of a hero. Readers like heroes.

Now, I was seriously torn over this. Child of Fire wouldn’t come out for months, so I wasn’t even a published writer yet, who was I to disagree? Besides, I loved that scene–the whole book was aimed to create it.

My agent (who is awesome) said my editor was right about that creative choice being anti-commercial, but she was ready to support whatever decision I made. The truth is, I could have changed that ending, and no one would have known by my editor, agent, and me. No one would have had a clue.

But what I told her, finally, was that I was afraid that I would replace that dark, harsh scene with something more Indiana Jones-heroic, but the book would fail anyway. Then I wouldn’t even be failing with my book.

It was almost certainly a stupid decision, career-wise, but I made it and I’m still living with it. You know what else I’m living with?

Hope for the new book I’m revising.

Check this blog post out: An Unexpected Ass Kicking. It’s worth reading, for real, especially if you use computers and/or care about elder wisdom. The OP’s takeaway is:

1. Nothing is withheld from us which we have conceived to do.

2. Do things that have never been done.

Me, I’ve tried to be original in my work, but I’ve never felt I was original enough. I’d really like to do better in that area.

As for what I “have conceived to do,” I have conceived to be my own marketing category, to write books are are uniquely mine, and to have a large readership who want to read them as soon as they’re available. Not because those books make the smart commercial choices or they are about the right subjects, but because I think they’re cool.

But seriously, read the linked post. It’s short.

Anyway, I have to pursue this stupid goal of mine, but I have to do it without killing myself hoping it will come true.

Guns, Germs, And Private Equity

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I’ve been pretty busy–too busy to do a lot of blogging–but I thought I should point this out:

I didn’t realize that, for some time, Mitt Romney has been quoting from Guns, Germs, and Steel to explain his view of the world and the way to develop healthy economies.

Normally when I talk about a book I put up a buy link for interested readers, but not this time. While Diamond’s book is interesting, it’s not something you want to base an economic policy on.