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Five Quick Publishing Links And One Long One

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Let’s round up a bit of publishing this and that with some links and brief comment. Very brief, in face, since today’s a big writing day.

1) Remember way back in the misty dawn of yesterday morning when I pointed out that Paula Deen, having been dropped by one corporate partner after another, saw her next cookbook shoot to the top of the Amazon.com bestseller list even though it doesn’t come out until October? And that her last book was sitting pretty in the number two spot?

Well, that upcoming book isn’t listed on Amazon anymore because Random House cancelled the contract.

Yeah, they had a lot of pre-orders through the online giant, but if Wal-Mart, Target, et al were no longer willing to carry her work, the P&L must have looked pretty dire.

2) Hey, did you guys know that, in the original submission draft of Child of Fire (then called Harvest of Fire) Ray Lilly wept for the child who was so horrifyingly transformed and destroyed in that first chapter? Completely true. The kid died of an acute case of Evil Magic, his own family forgot he ever existed to the point of denying him, and Ray mixed up his feelings about the kid’s unmourned loss with his own imminent unmourned death. Then he wept.

This was the first thing my editor asked me to change. She said it made the character seem weak, and one of the other readers at the publisher immediately assumed Ray was a woman (it’s a first-person narrative, for those who haven’t read it, so there were no helpful pronouns).

Me, I hated the idea of changing that bit, because if a tough guy can’t weep over a dead child, what the fuck?

Still, was this the hill I would fight and die on? My first note in the first chapter of my first published book?

So I turned to a mailing list of readers, writers and friends to ask them what they thought. The overwhelming majority of the responses were along the lines of: “The main character is a guy? And he cries? Sounds sketchy.”

I was surprised and disappointed. I also thought it was a bullshit assumption, but if it was so wide-spread, was I really the one to fight it? So I revised that part of my book (whole chapter available here) like this:

I watched them go, feeling my adrenaline ebb. I couldn’t stop thinking about that little boy, or how fiercely hot the flames had been. I looked down at my own undamaged hands. I felt woozy and sick.

Annalise called my name again. I turned away, ran to the edge of the lot, and puked into the bushes.

When that was over, I had tears in my eyes from the strain of it. They were the only tears that little boy was ever going to get. I tried to spit the acid taste out of my mouth, but it wouldn’t go away.

I wiped my eyes dry. My hands were shaking and my stomach was in knots. That kid had no one to mourn for him except me, and I didn’t have that much longer in this world, either. Something had to be done for him. I didn’t know what it was, but as I wiped at my eyes again, I knew there had to be something.

I heard footsteps behind me. “Don’t get maudlin,” Annalise said.

That passed muster, apparently, because Ray’s eyes well up from tossing his cookies and totally not because he is feeling grief, horror and loss.

Why am I bringing this up? Because this is the proverbial stopped clock in Rod Rees thoroughly embarrassing blog post on whether men can write female characters. (Update: the post seems to have been taken down.)(Now it’s back.)

That link was making the rounds yesterday while the whole Frenkel/harassment issue was going on so I didn’t give it much attention until later. Yeesh, is it a tone deaf mess.

However, on this topic I will say: just because the stereotypes male characters face limit you doesn’t justify using the stereotypes female characters face.

3) But there’s more bullshit in that Rod Rees post, but rather than try to pick it all apart, I’m going to link to someone who’s done a fantastic job already.

I’ll just add that Rees seems like a pretty terrible writer, based on the samples and on the content of his post, but I suspect he’s terrible in a way that will earn him a bit of success. Still, someone should explain to him that certain scenes will break reader disbelief not because of the characters or behaviors the scene describes, but because of the way they’re written. Word choice is character, too, and it matters.

4) In even stranger news, Weird Tales has begun releasing unpublished stories back to the authors. Not due to quality, either; several of the stories have been described as excellent in the past. They’re doing it because they have a backlog of fiction and the pressure to open to new submissions has been intense.

I’m not even sure what to say about this. A magazine is not its slush pile. Still, if the publisher and editor is missing the thrill of going to conventions and meeting people who are desperate to be published in their pages, maybe they could put out a few issues. Maybe they could publish those stories rather than return them.

Why did these guys want this magazine in the first place?

5) Can I just make mention of how humble and grateful I am that folks are so kindly pledging in my name for the Clarion West Write-a-thon? So far, we have raised almost $400 for the workshop and I really didn’t expect so much. It’s a great cause. Thank you all for pledging.

6) Have I mentioned something crazy? When you write a lot, books get done faster. I know, right? The Great Way is nearing completion at a much faster pace that I expected. In fact, I’m entering the series of climactic confrontations about three hundred words from now. Then the first draft will be done and I can start fretting over the Kickstarter.

Playing Your Assigned Familial Role

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The thing about being in a family is, you get assigned a role within the family. They decide you’re a certain kind of person and, for the most part, treat you that way for most of your life. Growing up, I was the lazy kid who always made as little effort as possible just to get by. Even when I was a grown man, getting up at 2 am to write before I went to a 5 am dayjob shift, I still believed that’s who I was.

Anyway, we have family roles in our home, too. For instance, my wife is the one who Won’t Throw Anything Away. We live with a lot of clutter. I’ve always told myself that, if it were up to me, I would pitch out a great dumpster full of stuff so we would have more room. Can’t do that, though, because my wife collects blue glass bottles that she will Do Something With Someday, and jars of stones that she collected on a trip somewhere, which reminds her of the people and that time.

And it’s a touchy subject. From her perspective, we have a lot of useful things that could be kept neatly if we could just put them away. From mine, there’s no way I could know where everything goes and it would be like a wizard’s medicinal shop around here, with a thousand little drawers and shelves and boxes and cabinets. My failing is that I’m good at cleaning but terrible at creating order out of chaos. If it’s not simple, I can’t deal.

So imagine my surprise last Friday when my wife just went nuts on the kitchen, digging out all the old equipment that we never use and will never use, so she can donate it.

The result: our kitchen is much nicer than it was. Other result, I had a mild hoarder’s reaction to seeing all my old cooking stuff in plastic bags marked “BLIND”. The insulated cookie sheets that are genuinely awesome (but we don’t bake anymore). The potato cutter that never really worked. The plastic mandolin that’s just too fragile. That old pan! I used to cook with that pan all the time! And… this thing? What is it? It might be useful if I figured out what it’s for.

Essentially, the family role that I’d imagined for myself was taken by my wife, and I found myself fighting the same urge to hold on to possessions that I’d always attributed to her.

Ugh.

If she’s ready to let go of things, I think it’s great and I support her. I certainly don’t want to undermine the work she’s doing. I just have to guard against playing her “role” now that she’s letting go of it.

Re-revised book has been sent

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My agent just confirmed that she received the new version of THE WAY INTO CHAOS. That’s just the first part of a long-ass story that’s not even finished, but I have post-project blues anyway. Christ.

I am a dummy sometimes: marketing as luck-seeking behavior

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As a followup to yesterday’s post about our bias toward survivors, skill, luck, and the creating of luck, I wanted to make one little note here about how wrong I’ve been on one aspect of book marketing.

It’s often said that publicists and marketers will do all sorts of things to get the word out about a particular book, but they know that 90% of it will be wasted effort–they just don’t know which will be in the 90%, so they do it all.

For me and a lot of other people, I suspect, this sounds like a poorly-researched, poorly-planned activity. How can you not know what works and what doesn’t? Why not just find out what’s effective? Do polling/market research/whatever to answer questions like: Do book reviews in Locus sell copies? Do convention appearances? Do radio interviews?

Obviously, this wouldn’t be easy but it sounds doable. What’s more, there’s money on the line and if there’s one thing that begs for careful research into the acquiring of it, it’s money.

But that’s because I hadn’t really thought about it correctly. As mentioned in yesterday’s post, people who are lucky tend to put themselves into new situations often. They’re flexible. They don’t try to control situations. They try new things.

Yesterday, while I was mulling over the prospect that it was my own damn choices that made the Twenty Palaces books so unlucky, it dawned on me that the whole point of “90% is wasted effort” is that it’s luck-seeking behavior. It’s putting information out into the world hoping that it starts catching people’s attention in a big way. People will say things like “I took out an ad on Reddit Fantasy” or “I did a guest post for [Name Author]” or “I got a nice review on [Non-Book Site]” but that’s a kind of suvivorship bias, too. The book was marketed and publicized in a lot of ways, but those were the times that luck hit.

Maybe that’s obvious to everyone in the world but me, but this is my blog, so…

Here I’ve been thinking that most marketing is Not Useful. Maybe I should rethink.

Why does a reader pick one book over another?

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Chuck Wendig hosts a discussion on what gets people to buy a book and (this is one of those times when you should read the comments) the results are interesting. A lot more people rely on blurbs than I would have expected, and several people say that glance at the first page or paragraph to decide yay or nay.

I reminded me of kicking back with my son to watch movies from the 80’s. When ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK starts, there’s nothing but a black screen, synth music and the credits, because it was made for a time when you bought the ticket and sat down in a theater. Nobody was holding a remote in their hand, thumb over the FF button.

When I pointed this out to my son, he asked to skip the credits but I wouldn’t. “This is the movie,” I told him.

Anyway, I understand the value people place on first pages, but sometimes they can be misleading. I really enjoyed THE NAME OF THE WIND but I only persevered past the “three kinds of silence” opening because people assured me the style would change.

For myself, I buy books mainly because of the author, the book is a classic of a genre, or a recent(ish) book is so widely lauded that it seems likely to become a classic. I read very slowly, so I can’t just be grabbing stuff willy-nilly.

What did I learn on my internet fast?

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Actually, not all that much that was knew. Too much of my online time is rat/lever/food pellet time. Twitter is most interesting and most fun but also most time-consuming. Tumblr is a site I never thought about except that I get to see my in-laws’ art there. Google pluse and Facebook are mostly interesting for the links I find on them.

Also, I get a fair amount of email but very little of it actually requires a response. Most of it I can skim and delete.

Yes, I did make a lot of headway on THE WAY INTO CHAOS but it’s not finished. Much more needs to be done. For right now, though, I’m going to post something stupid to Twitter.

Getting shit done and going offline.

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So, this is a little embarrassing and I just have to come out and talk about it.

I haven’t released a new book in a long time.

Duh, right? It’s not like you guys don’t know this. My last novel was CIRCLE OF ENEMIES, which came out Labor Day 2011. What’s more, I’ve already mentioned that I finished the first draft of CoE in 2010, before GAME OF CAGES came out.

So what the hell have I been doing?

Well, the first thing I did is write A KEY, AND EGG, AN UNFORTUNATE REMARK, which I had high hopes for but screwed up badly. I could probably whip it into shape in a month or so once I figure out how to manage the voice, but it’s back-burnered.

There’s also the Spirit of the Century novel I wrote for the game company Evil Hat. Kickstarter backers have already received their copies, but everyone else has to wait for this fall.

And there’s some short fiction, which I plan to collect and release as an ebook next month.

So what the hell? Where are the books?

Here’s the thing: When I started THE WAY INTO CHAOS (originally titled A BLESSING OF MONSTERS–you can decide which title you hate more) I’d planned to wrap up the whole story in 120K words. One volume.

That hasn’t happened. I’m at 270K right now and the end is in sight. However, I’ve stopped forward progress and gone back to the beginning for a major revision. It’s taking up a lot of my time and driving me a little nuts.

The whole thing is taking too long. I need to finish this and move on to another project; it hasn’t even sold and I’m sick to death of it. Also, it can take a year or more from the time my agent sells something to the time it’s released. Do I want my next novel to hit the shelves in 2015? 2016?

That’s too long.

So, in order to get more done and focus in on this project, I’m going on an internet fast. It’ll be at least this whole week, possibly longer. I will check my email once a day, but that’s it: no Facebook mentions, no Twitter replies, no LJ comments, nothing.

In the meantime, I will be doubling down on this book. I won’t finish in that time, but I plan to double my progress, at least.

I’ll also have some time to do some much needed chores.

In truth, I really enjoy social media but I feel over-committed at the moment. It’s become a bit of an obligation, so I’m shedding everything for w bit. When I come back I’ll take stock and see what I’ll need to change.

Funnily enough, just as I decided to do this, a guy hit the internet with his big “I just took a year away from the internet, and it didn’t solve all my problems” article. I understood the dude’s urge to change his routine, but is it really any surprise that his problems were internal rather than external?

Anyway, I’m not trying to fix my life here. I’m just freeing up time to work. There will be a couple of blog posts that will go live while I’m away, but you know.

Wish me luck.

Finally got to play Race to Adventure last night

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Now that season one of Veronica Mars is over, the family finally had a chance to play RACE TO ADVENTURE, which I backed as a Kickstarter.

Here’s the layout near the start of the game. Of course I played Prof. Khan.

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You can see I’ve collected the passports for the USA and Switzerland, while to the right my son has collected USA and GB. However! I am about to collect Nepal in that very turn, while my son was hoarding clues at the Library of Congress.

Yeah, that’s my kid giving the thumbs up.

My wife… I’m not sure what she was doing. Let’s just say she had a busy day and wasn’t concentrating too well.

Here we are at the end of the game, when I had returned to the Century Club, said (house rule: no shouting) “I have returned!” and won the game.

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The others also collected all of their passports (and rescued the prisoner from Atlantis) but, having saved Egypt for last, they were still cursed. They were also way behind. Mwah-ah-ah-ah!

As for the game, it was terrific. I think I’d like to play it once or twice more on the tan side of the tiles before flipping them to the more advanced “shadow” game. We stumbled a little bit with the rules at first, like we do with every game, but by the end the turns were flying by. This might be the first game ever that says it takes 30 minutes to play and really means it.

The nice thing is that there’s no luck involved (no blowing your plans because of a lousy roll of the die) and the strategy elements were light but still effective. It’ll be a good fast game when we just want to play something fun without a ton of calculation.

On a day when the news was filled with blood, horror, and people coming together to help each other in dire need, it was good to sit with my family and play a game.

Ten Years Ago I Turned Away From My Ideals And Supported Evil

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Ten years ago tomorrow was the start of the Invasion of Iraq. To my shame (not chagrin, not embarrassment. Shame.) I was an early supporter of the war.

I had long believed that war never be taken on as an adventure overseas, but I let myself be turned by the propaganda leading up to the attack. Did I believe the evidence supporting the presence of WMDs? No, actually, but I thought Hussein needed to allow inspections to continue. Did I believe Iraqi oil reserves were part of the reason we went to war? Yes, of course I did, but I thought there was good to be done anyway.

Which is completely ridiculous. Of course it is. How often are the tools of empire and destruction put of a positive use?

What’s more, I was a grown man who knew better. So what happened? I let myself get caught up in all the talk of chemical weapons used against Iraqi citizens and “rape rooms.” I let myself be convinced that the Iraqi people would be grateful.

At the time, there were anti-war marches in the streets. I remember looking out my window at them as they passed the office building where I worked: they were the usual far left hippie types with their giant puppets, long hair, and birkenstocks. They agreed with me that the war was about oil (a stance that was sneered at in the media at the time) but they were sure it was a huge mistake.

Of course they were right. Of course they were. At the time I thought their protests were ridiculous and self-marginalizing. They seemed more interested in confirming their cultural cred as outsiders than in winning people to their side. The civil rights marchers in the sixties wore coats and ties; these people were in tie dye and sandals that showed their dirty feet. These people don’t represent me.

And that’s utterly ridiculous. They weren’t trying to represent me. They were warning us that the nation was about to make a huge mistake, and they were 100% correct.

Shortly before the invasion, when talk of war was ever-present, I remember Hans Blix coming to the media to say that Hussein had knuckled under and agreed to allow inspections again. I spent half a day foolishly thinking that the invasion planning had done it’s job… until Bush administration officials declared that it was too little too late and the invasion was going to happen anyway. That’s when I realized what an immature asshole I’d been, although I still held out thin hope things would turn out all right.

It didn’t.

What I realize now is that I should have been out in the streets with those protesters. I should have held on to my beliefs and my mistrust and marched against the war. It’s not the responsibility of political protesters to make themselves palatable to me; it’s my job to recognize right from wrong and speak out about it.

EMP followup

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Remember last week when I mentioned that I had taken my family to an EMP event to see a specific panel and the room was so packed we missed it? No? Well, you better click on that link then.

I never did get an email back, but I did get a phone call. The dude was quite apologetic and very nice. Unfortunately, there was no recording of the event; apparently the companies many of the presenters work for had a bug up their butt about what could be recorded and what art they were going to show. Understandable, really, except that the panel we wanted was two local educators, so I suspect they would have been cool with a camcorder or two, but never mind. It’s done.

On the plus side, EMP intends to refund the cost of the tickets.

That’s very nice of them. While they might have made an error in planning their event, their customer service was pretty great.