Not a rant

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In the “This is freaking annoying” category, the increasingly out of touch Wall Street Journal tries to cover The Death of the Slush Pile. Never mind that the author trots out the same old chestnuts about bestsellers being rejected and Pultizer-winners being plucked from the slush, she adds a dose of “Wasn’t the internet supposed to fix this?” and “Connections still matter!” then goes straight to confusing book publishing slush with film/TV script slush. Grrr.

Here’s an instructive experiment: try sending an unsolicited filmscript query to a Hollywood film agency. One that represents writers.

It’s a waste of time and trees. If you want to be in movies or TV, you ought to be making connections. You ought to be making friends who are trying to break in, too. Help them with their projects. They help you with yours. Meet people. Don’t be crazy. Get an entry-level job or gig.

Publishing isn’t like that. You can write a letter from anywhere and mail it in. A certain percentage of agents will reject you, and the same is true of publishers. Probably, it’ll be a large percentage. That’s not something to worry about; you just need to find the right person to put your book in front of readers.

But this is an article that wraps up by calculating the odds of selling a story to a magazine by comparing the number of stories published with the number of stories submitted, so it’s pretty clear this is a ignorant mish-mash.

Nice place you have here. Buy my book.

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I’d planned to drop a link to this article into a “Randomness” entry for later posting, but actually I want to talk about it.

Click through and check it out, please: Stephen Elliott did an unusual sort of book tour to promote The Adderall Diaries: A Memoir of Moods, Masochism, and Murder: he did readings in people’s homes. They were all complete strangers to him, but they agreed to pick him up at the airport and host a party for 20 people, minimun, in which he’d read from and talk about his book. At the end of the party, he slept on their couch.

It sounds like it worked out very well for him, mostly–so well, in fact, that he got himself an article in the New York Times (which I imagine will sell more books than the tour did). Personally, I think it’s a great idea for a non-fiction writer. I don’t think it would work for me.

For one thing, I don’t really like to talk about my book, especially with people who haven’t read it. For another, I’m uncomfortable visiting my friends at their homes. Traveling from one stranger’s house to another, unable to leave, sleeping on their couch… ::shudders:: It would be misery.

His lending library idea is simpler and more doable for me, but less interesting, too.

The reason I bring this up is that my wife attended a slightly unusual book tour event last night: She went to a “Words & Wine” event for Sir Ken Robinson, author of The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. For $25, she got a copy of the book (signed, ‘natch), a little wine and hors d’oeuvres, a front row seat while the author was interviewed, and a chance to talk to him later. Annoyingly, the interviewer seemed to think the book was about finding yourself or finding happiness, when the author and the audience kept turning it back to its actual subject: education reform.

Still, she had a great time. She also spoke with the woman who ran it, who told her they don’t do sf/f. They tried it once, but the crowd didn’t match the elegant/affluent tone. And that’s fine by me; my wife loves me and liked to promote my work to the people she meets, but she’s a socializer. I’m not. I find the idea of mingling in a hotel reception room with a bunch of strangers much less uncomfortable than doing in a home, but I’d still rather kick back at home with a book.

Me, I’m still doing email interviews. Just yesterday I had a request for another one. ::shrugs:: It’s not exactly revolutionary, but I’m not exactly brimming over with new ideas for meeting new people.

For D&D players out there

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The Skill Amongst Skills
see more deMotivational Posters

Perspective

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For a while today, this book had a much better Amazon.com sales ranking than mine.

Now I’m going to bed.

I support this cause

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Support Doctors Without Borders in Haiti

Or you can donate to the Red Cross and receive a copy of BATTLE FOR TERRA from one of the film’s producers. Details here.

Just in case it wasn’t clear

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“I do shoot [guns], and I shoot them at things that can’t shoot back. And will continue to do that. And by that, I want to be clear, I don’t mean children.”

— Harold Ford

I have one beta reader

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That would be my long-suffering agent.

While I’ve been going through Man Bites World, polishing it up, she’s been reading the first draft.* Yesterday, her notes arrived just as I finished my morning revision, and I read through them all.

Well, once the pouting and foot-stamping was over, I have to admit that they’re damn good notes. Almost all of them either make the work more commercial without cheating on the intent of the book, or they address elements that I’ve been uncertain about.

Mainly, they deal with unifying the book. Currently, there’s a “front plot” and a “back plot.” I’ve tried this before, but not in a long-form story that will ever see the light of day. It follows the two-antagonist[2] rule [3], but in this instance the first plot problem that the protagonist faces (ie: the “front plot”) eventually turns out to be caused by a plot problem (the “back plot”) which doesn’t appear until past the mid-point and is so much more important that it overshadows the front plot.

I hope I can make it work this time.

Anyway, the two plots are connected–which they need to be–but the connection is too tenuous. I need to make them more of a web than a strand; the disparate character goals make the novel too diffuse, at least until the last 70 pages or so, when it all dovetails.

Most of the other notes she’s given me are straight-forward enough: punching up this or that character, clarifying a relationship, hanging on to so-and-so’s essential appeal. There are also a few moments that break the tone. I’ll have another look at those.

There’s only one note that genuinely troubles me. One of the notes I got on Game of Cages was “too many secondary characters”–and I don’t mean that I got it once. I revised and combined and trimmed that book, but pretty much every set of notes included something like “I’d forgotten X by the time she reappeared.”

So, in writing MBW, I needed to a) delineate the secondary characters better[4] and b) have fewer secondary characters. Which I thought I did, but garsh, there’s that note again. I believe I need to start making character lists for books like mine, to gauge the point at with no amount of a) can make up for a failure to b).

Anyway, I’m on my lunch break, which means it’s time to take out my (paper) notebook and copy down her notes in my own words. I have lists to make and graphs to draw. Fun!

[1] Which means she’s been enduring my weird, semi-random paragraph constructions and word repetitions. Embarrassing for me, but I think it will help make me more conscious of the way I lay out my sentences as I write. I learn well through shame.

[2] Or more, obviously.

[3] Which I learned by watching endless episodes of DR. WHO.

[4] But god, I thought I already did this. I work really, really hard on this every time.

Domo-Kun Arrives in a New Neighborhood

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New Domo! Page_1

New Domo! Page_2

Context.

Randomness for 1/12

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1) Two Gentlemen of Lebowski (I realize this has been going around, but I collect these links over time, so just assume I found it first, even if I posted it last, okay?)

2) Readers send emails to writers. Heh. My recommendation: never email a grammar question to me. I’ll just copy and paste into Word and look for a green underline. Then I’ll replay with just a blank message, so you’ll think there’s something wrong with my email client.

For the record, I’ve gotten more than a few emails from readers, and they’ve been wonderful. Thank you. Someday I’ll get a snarky or nasty one, and I promise to post it on the blog, just as I include the slam reviews in my review round-up.

3) All of Great Britain cries out: “Atlantic Gulf Stream, come home! We miss you!”

4) Biosphere 2, falling into ruin. Amazing images. via James Nicoll

5) Early notes on the origin of Superman. If you’re like me, you find Jerry Siegel’s early ideas for the character fascinating. It’s so different from what it eventually became, even if he kept the “Man of Tomorrow” moniker.

6) How long will it last? Forget about Peak Oil. We appear to have reached Peak Indium already. Like the guy I snagged this from, I curious how accurate it is. It’s a bit scary, though. via mightygodking

7) How to be a class act.

Polish Progress

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I’m on page 156 of Man Bites World. In two hours, I’ll be putting my son in the bathtub. Let’s see how far I get.

Added later: Page 207! For me, that’s pretty good.