Learn Writing with Uncle Jim, Volume 1

[RGame]

On the subject of contests, I think writers of sci-fi, horror and fantasy should consider the Writers of the Future contest. It's a quarterly contest that not only pays good money for 1st, 2nd and 3rd place finishers, but also publishes a mass maket paperback every year. So you get money AND get to be published.

I haven't entered the contest in years, but I think it's still going on. It started at least 15 years ago, and a lot of its winners have gone on to publish books regularly. You have to have three or less professional short story sales. I had a story place as a finalist a few years ago. They publish a few finalist stories in the anthology every year, but of course mine was turned down. Then I tried sending it to magazines, figuring if it was good enough to finish so close to the top among hundreds or thousands of quarterly entries, it would be a cinch to sell it to a magazine. I couldn't even sell it for half a penny a word. Then I tried Weird Tales and they requested a small rewrite of the last page, and bingo, probably my biggest sale.

So basically I'm saying the contest is a good one. It inspires you to send off a story every three months and they even have a week-long workshop for the winners and an award ceremony every year.

[James D. Macdonald]

They can call it a contest if they like, but it's really an open anthology series.

(Some people don't like WOTF's connection with Scientology -- let your conscience be your guide.)

Worthwhile "contests" have a) no entry fee, b) don't pay in publication alone, and c) books that show up on bookstore shelves.

[Sailor Kenshin]

I'm almost caught up. Yes, I came over from EvilBoard kicking and screaming, but I'm here.

Jim had posted a couple of opener pages from John Grisham novels. I know published novelists who look down their noses at Grisham, but I found his style clean and spare, and (big plus here) it didn't get in the way of the storytelling.

PS: Just wondering: I don't see a way to get Reply Notices from this forum. What am I missing?

[reph]

Sailor K., when you're reading posts, look for the Subscribe option under Thread Tools, a few inches below the last post in a thread. When you're posting, look under Additional Options, below the Submit Reply button.

[gp101]

First post on this new-look version... still getting used to it.

UJ: thanks again for your tidbits. You wrote that for the start of a new chap we need to go down halfway on the page with the chapter number, then double-space and start the prose.

I saw a sample page of a manuscript that was supposedly published and started the chap number at the top of the page, then skipped six, seven spaces and started with the prose. This was for every chap not just the first.

Are both acceptable, or is the manner you described the ONE that is expected?

Thx.

[James D. Macdonald]

Are both acceptable, or is the manner you described the ONE that is expected?


The one I mentioned is the usual one. No one is going to reject a manuscript just based on the position of the chapter title on the page.

What you're doing is giving the editor room to put notes, instructions to the typesetter, and so on. (Lots of editing is done by hand, with pencil.) It also clearly marks The Is The Start Of A New Chapter.

[Shiny_Penguin]

I'd also add that Sometimes the Magic Works by Terry Brooks has been a help for me in ways that On Writing (Stephen King's book mentioned waaay earlier in the thread) hasn't.
Thanks Again!
--Dev

I just finished Sometimes the Magic Works and I loved it. His working style sounds alot like mine and it was good for me to hear someone successful works like I do.

[lindylou45]

have been very successful! I've written a total of 48 pages in the last three days -- for me that's amazing!

Thanks, Uncle Jim! :Hail:

Linda

[Lenora Rose]

In General, I would have agreed with ALL UJ's advice below.

Except I did it.

In the instance of a novella already rejected by all pro-paying magazines that took novella length, at a time when no open anthologies seemed to want a 20k story. First prize would have been the best single payment I could get for the story out of all semi-pro level opportunities I could find, and I couldn't see a lot of difference in the level of exposure between one small 'zine and the next. (Second would have been about the third-best.)

And I won first prize. I'm not sure if that proves anything but that sometimes stupidity wins out even when it darn well doesn't deserve to.

Why not contests?

Because unless it's something major, like the Pulitzer or the Nobel Prize, who's heard of them? The East Amberg Community College Literature Award isn't going to impress anyone.

Next, if your writing is good enough to win a contest, it's good enough for someone to buy. Actually being published does give you a worthwhile credit.

Third, writing contests that cost money violate Yog's Law.

Fourth, writing contests may blow your First Rights if the winning entries are printed somewhere.

==============

Every publisher in the world has a contest every day. The cost of entry is postage, and the prize is paid publication.

[James D. Macdonald]

In the instance of a novella already rejected by all pro-paying magazines that took novella length, at a time when no open anthologies seemed to want a 20k story.

We aren't talking about novellas or short stories (much) in this area. Novellas in particular are very tough to place. It's not a popular length. (It works out to one story taking too great a percentage of a given magazine or anthology.

Still, I'd exhaust every possible market before trying a contest, and even then I'd only pick ones that paid with more than mere publication, and I'd avoid paying an entry fee.

"Anything is better than unpublished" isn't a good motto. (Among other things, being badly published is worse than remaining unpublished.)

In the end you know your own situation, and your own goals, best.

[James D. Macdonald]

Since the subject of contests has been raised, here's a page of scam contests (http://windpub.com/literary.scams/).

[Sailor Kenshin]

Good link, Uncle Jim. As a former poetry mag editor, I am well familiar with the "National Phone Book of Poetry." :p

[Dev]

Uncle Jim, I've got a question that you may have answered already. At the rate my WIP is going, there's no way I'll be able to "wrap it up" in 100k words. I'm thinking at least twice that. I could conceivably make it a two-volume story, but how do you pitch that to an editor or agent? Finish both parts before worrying with marketing, or give them the layout for both books while submitting the first one?

[black winged fighter]

I have just finished reading the condensed version of this, so I'm just about caught up with the reading.
I have a question, though. You talked about contests and such; I recently entered a short story contest. There was no entry fee and no prize except getting published. It allowed me to retain all the rights to my stories.
Was entering the competition a bad move? Isn't exposure to judges a good thing?

[HConn]

Fighter, if they publish your story, you don't get to keep all rights. You'll have granted one to the contest-holder, depending on what format it's going to be published in.

If they publish online, you're granting them first worldwide internet publication rights. If it's a North American magazine, you're granting them first North American Serial rights. And so on.

Do they pay for publication?

[black winged fighter]

As far as I know.
I did ask whether I controlled what happened to my story, and they assured me that I did. This is if it wins - if it doesn't, there's no issue.

[James D. Macdonald]

Today I'll be in Connecticut, at UConn, talking to a couple of classes who are taking "Publishing."

Heaven help me. And them.

[katiemac]

Good luck, Jim! I've got a couple of pals over at UConn, but I doubt any of them are going to be in your crowds.

[HConn]

Good luck, Jim.

I think you should start by saying: "Never trust anything your professors tell you about publishing. They're always wrong."

:)

[James D. Macdonald]

I kept waiting for some student to leap to his feet and say "Thanks to the Xerox® DocuTech™ machine, everyone can be published!" just so I could laugh at him cruelly and say "Printing isn't publishing."

[James D. Macdonald]

One way to improve almost any manuscript is to go through and remove any poetry you find, regardless of its source.

Leaving the copyright/permissions question entirely aside, most poetry is bad. Even if no lyrics are used, most references to popular music only serve to date the story more quickly.

Assuming that your readers are a) familiar with a particular song, and b) will have the same emotional reaction to that song that you do, is probably a bad assumption.

[Lenora Rose]

One way to improve almost any manuscript is to go through and remove any poetry you find, regardless of its source.

Amen...


Anyhow, a serious question, or rather, an interconnected series thereof. UJ, you usually write in collaboration. I usually don't, and I usually get as proprietary about my characters as I can and still allow an editor's input, but I did one project that way (though it got trunked), and batted the idea of another one back and forth before we both lost interest.

Have you found particular pros and cons to this? Do you have specific advice for collaborating successfully, and is your usual way of collaborating (Which you suggest at in things like the intro to The Stars Asunder) much like the methods of other collaborators you know?

How much input do you think another person should have on the final product before they stop being a first reader/draft editor/copyeditor and start counting as an actual partner? Do they have to be involved from the zero draft, or can they come in later if they end up changing the plot enough?

[Kate Nepveu]

Leaving the copyright/permissions question entirely aside, most poetry is bad. Even if no lyrics are used, most references to popular music only serve to date the story more quickly.
I find this is particularly true with quoted lyrics, because far more often than not they only work when set to music; they don't work at all as poetry.

[Galoot]

Uncle Jim wrote as a teen... I wrote as a teen. - Check.
Uncle Jim stopped writing as a teen... I stopped writing as a teen. - Check.
Uncle Jim picked it up again in his mid-30s... I picked it up again in my mid-30s. - Check.
Uncle Jim has long hair and a leather jacket... I have long hair and a leather jacket. - Check.
Uncle Jim has a proven marketable talent... I have long hair and a leather jacket.

I'm 80% there!

Hi everyone, I'm new. I'll get to the intro forum eventually.

I just finished spending the last four days not following Jim's advice. My butt was in the chair, honest, but I spent more time reading this thread than writing. Even so, I dug out the novel I started years ago, re-read it, gagged, burned it, and promptly started something new.

Chapter one is now done. Only 300 pages left to go.

Thanks for all the info, Jim. Even if I lose the URL to this thread tomorrow it will have served a valuable purpose to me simply by getting me writing again. At the very least it prompted me to destroy that old first manuscript, thus raising my karma score. Thanks!

[James D. Macdonald]

I'm 80% there!


Welcome, Galoot! We kinda have fun here, messing around with writing.

Too many people don't burn their first novels (Hemingway dropped his over the side of a ship in mid-Atlantic, which also counts). That's an excellent first step.

[James D. Macdonald]

Have you found particular pros and cons to this? Do you have specific advice for collaborating successfully, and is your usual way of collaborating (Which you suggest at in things like the intro to The Stars Asunder) much like the methods of other collaborators you know?


There are as many different ways of collaborating as there are different collaborators. All of them, however, depend on one thing: the collaborators bring different strengths to the mix, and work in their area of strength.

Some alternate chapters, each one trying with a cliffhanger ending to put the partner in a "what do I do now?" situation. It's a goad to getting the work finished, and turns the project into a game. (Eventual publication is a happy benefit.) Others hash out what will happen verbally; the writing either could do as a mechanical process afterward. I've heard of another set of collaborators wherein one person lay on a couch sending thought-waves to the other, who sat in a different room transcribing them. It may seem wacky, but they thought of themselves as collaborators, and who's to say they were wrong?

All of thes have one thing in common: They involve getting the words on paper.



How much input do you think another person should have on the final product before they stop being a first reader/draft editor/copyeditor and start counting as an actual partner? Do they have to be involved from the zero draft, or can they come in later if they end up changing the plot enough?

That's a real "let your conscience be your guide" kind of question. In my own case, all that Dr. Doyle added to one story was three linebreaks... and she got co-author credit. In another, entire chapters were hers alone, and I got co-author credit. We long ago decided that the way our partnership worked, the amount of "writing" wasn't what counted. I get final say on what happens, she gets final say on how it's said, and we continue.

I will say this: Collaboration on fiction is the closest relationship two people can have. Perhaps that will help you decide the difference between a beta reader and a collaborator. Or -- if whether to make a particular change is your decision alone, and you can make it or not without caring how the other person feels about your decision, you aren't collaborating.

[maestrowork]

A few of us here on AW collaborated on a short story a few months ago (and no, it wasn't Atlanta Nights). We had three writers with different styles and different strengths. We wrote alternate scenes, giving each other prompts to continue, and turn and twist the story. Then there were some other folks who helped us do research. We had arguments, concerns, and sometimes a little bit of online fights. The result was pretty darn good (we have yet to decide on its fate as far as publishing goes). Most important, the experience was great -- fun, productive, and I think it drew us closer as friends AND fellow writers.

[johnnycannuk]

A few of us here on AW collaborated on a short story a few months ago (and no, it wasn't Atlanta Nights). We had three writers with different styles and different strengths. We wrote alternate scenes, giving each other prompts to continue, and turn and twist the story. Then there were some other folks who helped us do research. We had arguments, concerns, and sometimes a little bit of online fights. The result was pretty darn good (we have yet to decide on its fate as far as publishing goes). Most important, the experience was great -- fun, productive, and I think it drew us closer as friends AND fellow writers.

maestro, is that story available online or have you submitted it for publication? I would love to read it.

Mike

[maestrowork]

We haven't decided what to do with it. The problem is that it's about 25K -- too long for a short story, and too short for a novel. It's a novella, and there's probably not a lot of market for it. But mostly everyone just got so busy with their own lives and work... I'll raise the question and see if we can maybe post a snippet here? Well, it's not my decision to make. ;)

[MacAllister]

Heh--Ray, I STILL say we could cut another 10-12K words, and it wouldn't hurt it, any....<evil grin>

[maestrowork]

Hey! On the contrary, I think we should make it novel length. Better markets.

;)

[Matubrembrem]

...or, perhaps, the slacker as I neglected to read every entry in this forum and my answer may very well be contained there in. Either way, I've a simple question to pose to all of you big brains here, "What is a solid word length for a Sci-Fi novel?" I'm aiming at 125K but it looks like I may be aiming high from what I've seen in this and other forums. Should I hurry up and kill the bad guy at around 100K or less? Perhaps I should just write until I feel it's done. Color me confused.

BTW, going way back in time, I listen to techno or industrial when I'm writing, I feel it fits the genre I'm trying to break into. The little banana emoticon is dancing in time with the song I'm playing. Don't you love harmonic convergence? I know I do.

[tjwriter]

I would say to go ahead and write the story the way it needs to be told. There will be editing, and it is much easier to condense than to fall short. It would be much worse to have a story that got wrapped up too quick.

Also, a great article below on revision and that feeling of trying to make something smaller that you would like.

http://hollylisle.com/fm/Articles/wc2-4.html

[black winged fighter]

This has been bothering me for a long time, and now I finally have a community to ask:
How hard is it to get published by a USA publisher/UK publisher if you live in Saudi Arabia or Dubai? Or anywhere else, for that matter.
Insight would be incredibly welcome.

[Galoot]

I would imagine the difference to be negligible. Aside from postage, of course.

[edited because "the" is apparently harder to spell than "negligible."]

[three seven]

Too many people don't burn their first novels (Hemingway dropped his over the side of a ship in mid-Atlantic, which also counts). That's an excellent first step.
I held mine really close to a magnet. Does that count?

[reph]

I held mine really close to a magnet. Does that count?
Ah, the generation gap. The revelation above confused me for a while. I kept thinking "What kind of paper was it typed on?"

[Zane Curtis]

Ah, the generation gap. The revelation above confused me for a while. I kept thinking "What kind of paper was it typed on?"

Ah, never mind. I was once chatting with a young woman who told me she'd just burned a CD of something or other. And I, imagining some Hendrix-inspired conflagration with a can of lighter fluid and a box of matches, said, "Burnt it? That's a bit extreme, isn't it?" But, minor embarrassments aside, I've always found it better to keep up to the century rather than up to the minute. I've leapfrogged over entire technological cycles whose lasting impact was so slight that I haven't suffered one little bit.

Too many people don't burn their first novels...

Too true. I wrote three novels, two novellas, and a dozen short stories before I felt I could write prose that even approached publishable. I can't quite bring myself to burn or throw out these early attempts, but if they found their way into print, I would be mortified.

[three seven]

Ah, the generation gap. The revelation above confused me for a while. I kept thinking "What kind of paper was it typed on?"

The youth of today, eh?
If it helps, it was on a floppy ;)

[Zane Curtis]

If it helps, it was on a floppy ;)

Hey I remember them things. Little bits of of plastic, right? I haven't seen one for years.

:Hammer:

[James D. Macdonald]

This has been bothering me for a long time, and now I finally have a community to ask:
How hard is it to get published by a USA publisher/UK publisher if you live in Saudi Arabia or Dubai? Or anywhere else, for that matter.
Insight would be incredibly welcome.


Sold my first short story and two novels while active duty deployed in the Republic of Panama. All you need for this business is a mailbox.

(Oh, yes, and a story that grabs on and won't let go.)

[James D. Macdonald]

Two of 'em! This one's funny (http://www.worldoflongmire.com/features/romance_novels/).

This one not so much (http://www.lex18.com/Global/story.asp?S=2989614).

All I can say is that's a stupid law, and should be treated with contempt. I will refrain from commenting on the intelligence of those who proposed the law, passed it, and are presently enforcing it.

[katiemac]

Wow, Jim. That should really encourage more students to sign up for Creative Writing.

[tjwriter]

I can feel the 1st amendment dissipating as I breathe the air around me. I am close, and I mean close to Kentucky. I have relatives there, as my dad grew up in the great KY. That is just awful. I can't believe a judge would let that go to court, and I hope the kid gets a good lawyer.

But really, what person in their right mind, would discourage a kid from creativity? School is somthing kids know about, and what do we always hear about? Write what you know. It's a natural response. Zombies=terrorists? I think that's actually a good analogy. :Thumbs:

Now that I am finished with one of my two major pet peeves about the way children are being raised today, I will shut up. :crazy:

[ashnistrike]

Wow. When I was in high school, I was in the Writer's Club. It consisted entirely of alienated kids making up stories about assassins. We had long, loud debates on the school bus about the best techniques (of assassination, not writing). The girls all went for the subtle, nobody-knows-you-were-there, methods; the boys prefered big explosions. It never bothered our teachers--we were all high achievers, and as far as I know none of us even owned a weapon. I was widely considered to be a goody-two-shoes, and never got detention a day in my life. When I watched what happened to schools after Columbine, I was disturbed to think that we all might have gotten expelled if we had been going to school a few years later.

It never occurred to me that it could get worse than that. I am a science fiction writer, and ought to know better, but really, this never occurred to me.

Properly speaking, couldn't they apply this law to any young adult book in which a confrontation takes place at a school?

[Denis Castellan]

"Anytime you make any threat or possess matter involving a school or function it's a felony in the state of Kentucky"

Does that mean that just for carrying a book dealing with such matters you could be arrested, even if you're not the author ? Or am I getting something wrong ?

[James D. Macdonald]

After what he did in Carrie I sure hope Stephen King doesn't try to visit Kentucky.....

[WVWriterGirl]

I don't think I should mention my ties to Kentucky State Penal Code...I may get stoned to death. Let's just say a close member of my family writes Ky criminal law and leave it at that, shall we?

WVWG

[katiemac]

Jim, you seem to be a fan of internet gadgets. Have you seen Gizoogle (http://www.gizoogle.com/)?

My anthropology notes will never be the same.

[Eowen]

Leaving the copyright/permissions question entirely aside, most poetry is bad. Even if no lyrics are used, most references to popular music only serve to date the story more quickly.

I find this is particularly true with quoted lyrics, because far more often than not they only work when set to music; they don't work at all as poetry.

I have a few questions regarding song lyrics/poetry when used in the body of a novel. Some things I already understand; as with anything else, they have to contribute something to the story (foreshadowing, emphasis of past events, character revelation, etc.), and anything with a copyright held by someone other than the novel's author comes with it's very own set of legal hoops to jump through before you can use it.

Given all that, I was wondering if Uncle Jim would be willing to answer some questions about some very specific instances where he has used song lyrics in some of his novels. First, how did you come up with the lyrics used in the Mageworlds novels? Are they in any way inspired by specific real folk songs, or are they wholy original? Second, do any of the songs have verses that were not used in the novels? And for the non-musically inclined, do you have a better explanation than mine for why the song lyrics were more appropriate than a section of prose in the places where they were used? (My explanation is something along the lines of, It Just Fits.) Finally, did you have any particular melodies in mind for any of the lyrics you used? I ask because I can half hear certain folk songs in the back of my mind when I read the lyrics.

Eowen

[James D. Macdonald]

Given all that, I was wondering if Uncle Jim would be willing to answer some questions about some very specific instances where he has used song lyrics in some of his novels.


Okay.

First, how did you come up with the lyrics used in the Mageworlds novels?

Wrote 'em.

Are they in any way inspired by specific real folk songs, or are they wholy original?

In one case, a WWI aviator's song ("Beside a Belgian Staminet"), which was itself a parody of a 19th c. dying hobo song ("Beside a Western Water Tank"). In the other, a song from the Klondike gold rush ("The Young Britsh Rancher"), which was a parody of Kipling's "Young British Soldier."

Second, do any of the songs have verses that were not used in the novels?

In those cases, no. In the cases of other songs, for other books, there are entire songs that aren't used at all.

And for the non-musically inclined, do you have a better explanation than mine for why the song lyrics were more appropriate than a section of prose in the places where they were used? (My explanation is something along the lines of, It Just Fits.)

It was something that was going on at the time (a drunken wake, for example), not the point of the scene. And it was brief. And funny all on its own. And -- if I were writing those books today I might not have used them.

Finally, did you have any particular melodies in mind for any of the lyrics you used? I ask because I can half hear certain folk songs in the back of my mind when I read the lyrics.


I always have melodies in mind; that's what keeps the rhyme and meter working.


One book, (Horror High #7, Pep Rally, by "Nicholas Adams" was based entirely on a song -- but that was special circumstances. The series editor had gone on maternity leave without comissioning the last two books of the series, but without telling anyone, either. So ... one day at the publisher's, they noticed when the printing date was coming up, that they didn't have a text to send to the printer. "Ooops!" they said, and called Known Fast Writers. We landed that one.

The song ...

We decided on a heroine who would be menaced. Her name was Rachel Atmore (changed to Cathy in the finished book, for reasons that ... well, it was stupid, but global search-and-replace fixed it). Story would have worked better with the original name. Y'see, as Rachel, her nickname would have been Rache, which is German for Revenge (Study in Scarlet, anyone?) which was her function in the plot. So, who was going to be dead for her to avenge? Her buddy, Jennie. Who became Jenny Buddy, thence Jenny Brody. Which led to the song, (to the tune of John Brown's Body)

Jennie Brody's bloody body's bundled in a body bag,
Jennie Brody's bloody body's bundled in a body bag,
Jennie Brody's bloody body's bundled in a body bag,
But her legs go marching on.

Gory, gory, Jenny Brody....

Which gave enough plot to drive the story.

[NicoleJLeBoeuf]

Jennie Brody's bloody body's bundled in a body bag,
Jennie Brody's bloody body's bundled in a body bag,
Jennie Brody's bloody body's bundled in a body bag,
But her legs go marching on....and thus we come back full circle to zombie attacks. *snrk*

Seriously, "Gods forfend Stephen King had been a student at that school; Carrie would never have gotten written" was running through my head. What can we do, other than write "shame on you" letters to Kentucky's legislators?

Gah. I have two friends who were still in high school the year after Columbine. They both own very lovely trenchcoats, and one of them was told she'd be expelled if she kept wearing it to school. I think she managed to resist that one via reducto ad absurdum: "And should I stop wearing underwear, too? And shirts? How about I come to school naked? I mean, the Columbine murderers weren't just wearing trenchcoats; they were wearing clothes!

[Galoot]

I've got a question for those of you who've done time in the slush pile. I'm in the middle of Mylanta Nights (I hope I spelled that right) and wondering how it compares to the actual submissions you've seen.

I'm not trying to knock other writers, I'm just curious. Roughly what percentage of slush is as bad as that? For discussion purposes, assume the chapters of AN were actually in order.

Please, for the sake of my sanity, tell me it's not that bad out there. If it is, I have some old stories from gradeschool I need to mail out right now.

[James D. Macdonald]

As slush goes, Atlanta Nights is actually pretty good. It's got punctuation and most of the sentences have verbs.

Atlanta Nights falls into the category of So Bad It's Good. Most of your basic slush falls into the categories of Bad, Just Plain Bad, and So Bad It's Bad.

You want the Slushreading Experience? Go over to fanfiction.net (http://www.fanfiction.net), start anywhere, and read story after story for four straight hours.

For far more on this, check out Slushkiller (http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004641.html).


I promise you: If you can write two consecutive pages of grammatical English with standard spelling you are already in the top ten percent of the slush heap. (This shouldn't give you too much hope, because the sales come from the top one percent, but still....)

[maestrowork]

That's it, Jim. Fanficiton.net. After reading that for four hours straight as you suggested, I am now blind and will never write again.

Happy?

[James D. Macdonald]

To the tune of Okie from Muskogee

We don't write 'bout zombies in Kentucky
We don't write 'bout vamps or boogiemen
We don't set our stories in the high schools
Or cops will come and take us to the pen.

[Galoot]

You want the Slushreading Experience? Go over to fanfiction.net (http://www.fanfiction.net), start anywhere, and read story after story for four straight hours.Sending me there was a very mean thing to do. You don't even know me.

[James D. Macdonald]

The usual response to reading slush is to suddenly discover that you're a much better writer than you thought you were.

[Jonathon Michaels]

The usual response to reading slush is to suddenly discover that you're a much better writer than you thought you were.

This is so true. Even the little bit we've gone through now amazes me.

I'd always realized that everyone can't write. I guess I'd just assumed most of those who can't realized it and didn't try to submit.

You know what they say when you assume...

[reph]

That was my first glimpse of fanfiction.net. I was tempted to bring a few choice sentences back here for display, but I balk at ridiculing anyone in public.

[aplath]

Fanfic.net. Wow.

You see, I'm not a native english speaker (or writer for that matter) and I write mostly in portuguese. While I've only recently started working on my first novel, I've written a few short stories. However since the (paying) market for short stories here in Brazil is next to non-existent, I've never bothered to try and publish them.

But after reading some of the fanfic.net material an idea struck me. You see, I think I can write a much (way much) better english text than most of what I read there. At least as far as grammar and spelling goes, I'm pretty sure of it.

And as for content, well, I do like my stories and though I firmly believe I'll never be able to read one of them without finding several things I might change, I think they are quite decent.

So I guess my questions are ...

1) If I can get my act straight in english as far as grammar and spelling goes and assuming that my stories are worth translating from portuguese, do you think the fact that I'm a foreign writer would be a hindrance in any way when submiting my stories?

2) Even though I believe my english is quite decent, having a few native english speakers beta readers is probably a good idea. Is it possible to find people willing to do that through the net (here for instance)?

3) Although I realize that there are several paying markets for short stories in the US (and perhaps UK), I am not aware of them since I live abroad. Where can I find reliable information on those including genre and submission guidelines (and perhaps examples of what kind of stories they publish).

Thanks for any help you may give me on this. Oh, and thanks for a great thread. Even though it sometimes keeps me from my writing it's been a very interesting read.

Andreas

[James D. Macdonald]

Nevertheless, I promise you that some of the stories at fanfiction.net are good, because these are stories that can't be legally published (copyright and trademark violations if anyone tries).

With the general run of on-line fiction, there's a ceiling to how good it is -- by the time someone is writing mysteries that are of publishable quality, they go off and get published. Not so of fanfic: No matter how good your Star Trek story is, if you weren't commissioned by Paramount, it's never going to be printed.

Can you imagine going through all the stories there trying to find the good one? That's the slush heap.

Okay, how many of you have seen the movie All That Jazz? Go see it, okay?

Look at the opening scenes, with all the dancers on the bare stage. Think of those dancers as stories in the slush heap. See that guy in the boots, telling some of them to leave and asking some of them to stay? Think of him as the editor. See those guys sitting in the audience? They're the editor-in-chief and the publisher.

[James D. Macdonald]

Hi, Andreas!

My father lived and worked in Brasil for many years (for Eucatex, near Sao Paulo). Lessee about your questions:



1) If I can get my act straight in english as far as grammar and spelling goes and assuming that my stories are worth translating from portuguese, do you think the fact that I'm a foreign writer would be a hindrance in any way when submiting my stories?

No, where you live won't make any difference to US publications. The quality of the story really is what counts.


2) Even though I believe my english is quite decent, having a few native english speakers beta readers is probably a good idea. Is it possible to find people willing to do that through the net (here for instance)?

Yes, definitely get a native speaker or two among your beta-readers. Check out some of the on-line workshops, if you don't happen to have a native English speaker who lives nearby (and who would be interested).


3) Although I realize that there are several paying markets for short stories in the US (and perhaps UK), I am not aware of them since I live abroad. Where can I find reliable information on those including genre and submission guidelines (and perhaps examples of what kind of stories they publish).

How about the on-line version of Writer's Market (http://www.writersmarket.com)?

For Fantasy/Science Fiction, you could try ralan.com (http://www.ralan.com/)
For mystery, try ClueLass (http://www.cluelass.com/MystHome/WritersGuide.html)
For romance, try Gila Queen (http://gilaqueen.us/)

Many magazines have their own web pages with their guidelines listed. Once you know the name of the 'zine, start searching. (And, really, read an issue or two of any market you're planning to submit to. See if what you've written would fit there, and see if they've got a 'zine you'd want your work to appear in.)

If you can lay your hands on any "Year's Best" anthologies, see where the stories first appeared. Those will be your top markets.

[maestrowork]

Writing stories is hard. It takes talent and skills and practice. I'm sure many seasoned novelists would look back on their first works and shake their heads: What was I thinking?

Many people can write competently. They can construct grammatically correct sentences, write a well thought-out letter, express themselves fluently in personal essays. But when they sit down and write a "story," they stumble. I did. I still do sometimes. There are a lot of skills going into writing an interesting, gripping, page-turning story with good characters. Many people don't bother to learn these skills, and that's why they're in slush.

[reph]

Maestro posted:

Many people can write competently. They can construct grammatically correct sentences, write a well thought-out letter, express themselves fluently in personal essays.

That's me, all right.

But when they sit down and write a "story," they stumble....

That's me, too.

There are a lot of skills going into writing an interesting, gripping, page-turning story with good characters. Many people don't bother to learn these skills....

Interesting that you call them "skills." I think of them as "personality traits that the Talent Fairy chose to bestow on somebody else." Even more interesting that you imply they can be learned.

Can someone whose chief identified strength is wit "learn" to produce commercially acceptable fiction pieces longer than one sentence?

[aplath]

Can someone whose chief identified strength is wit "learn" to produce commercially acceptable fiction pieces longer than one sentence?

Write down that one sentence. And then keep writing.

Andreas

[aplath]

My father lived and worked in Brasil for many years (for Eucatex, near Sao Paulo).

Cool. I live near Sao Paulo. ;-)

Thanks for the answers.

I've looked through the lists and found a few magazines that look promising. I've just wrote a friend of mine that lives in Seatle to look them up and see if he can send some of them to me.

I'll wait those arrive before starting the translation job though ... afterall, I still have to finish that damn novel.

Andreas

[James D. Macdonald]

Can someone whose chief identified strength is wit "learn" to produce commercially acceptable fiction pieces longer than one sentence?

Yes, I believe so (else I'm wasting my time and everyone else's time here).

Here's something for you to try. Take an old, bad joke.

Write it out at short-story length, with description, dialog, scene, and so on.

Here you go: Write this one at 5,000-7,500 words. Modern, realistic. Then send it out to paying markets 'til Hell won't have it:

There are these two guys going on a skiing vacation. They drive way up into Vermont, and they get lost. It's late, it's snowing, the roads are narrow and all look alike ... when they see a light on in a farmhouse. They pull up the drive and knock on the door.

A beautiful young lady answers the door. They explain their predicament, and ask if they can stay the night.

She says, "Yes, I suppose so, but it wouldn't be right for you to stay in the house, since I've recently become a widow and I'm alone here." They agree to stay in the barn.

The next morning comes, the guys get up, the lady gives them breakfast and directions to the highway, and they're off. They have a great vacation.

Nine months later...

One of the guys is sitting in his office when he gets a long-distance phone call. He listens for a while, very quiet. Then he dials his buddy.

He says, "Do you remember when we went on that vacation last year?"

"Sure do," his buddy says.

"And you remember getting lost?"

"Yep, sure do."

"And do you remember sleeping in the barn there?"

"Yeah. The straw sure was scratchy."

"Well, did you happen to wake up durning the night?"

"Yeah, I did. I had to go to the bathroom."

"And did you happen go up to the house?"

"Well, there wasn't a toilet in the barn...."

"And while you were up there, did you maybe make mad, passionate love with that nice young lady?"

"Yeah, I guess I did...."

"And did you happen to accidentally tell her you were me?"

"I meant to tell you, honest!"

"Well, I just got a call from her lawyer ... and she's died and left me fourteen million dollars in her will."

-=--

Note: The story you write doesn't have to be funny, or even have the same punchline. It can continue past that point. Other things can happen.

Now, go write the story.

[maestrowork]

Ooo, Jim, that's good. Can I post that in "Exercise and Prompts"?

[James D. Macdonald]

Sure, Maestro. Just point back to here.

Refinement on the exercise: take two old, bad, unrelated jokes, and combine them into a single story. Same requirements.

[Renee]

I just wanted to say hello and that I am reading this very long thread. I'm not sure where I fit in here, but surely will find a spot soon.

Jim, thanks for all the information you so freely give throughout AW.

[Zane Curtis]

As slush goes, Atlanta Nights is actually pretty good. It's got punctuation and most of the sentences have verbs.

You know, I read that and thought it was just one of those things you say to make a point. But then I went and visited fanfiction.net and the second sentence of the first story I've ever read on that site ever didn't have a verb in it. :scared:

The mind boggles.

[reph]

Write down that one sentence. And then keep writing.

Andreas
Oh, you don't understand. My first published story was one sentence. It was complete in itself without needing a second sentence.

My second published story was two sentences.

Hmm.

Here's something for you to try. Take an old, bad joke....There are these two guys going on a skiing vacation. They drive way up into Vermont, and they get lost. It's late, it's snowing, the roads are narrow and all look alike ... Now, go write the story.

I'd have to leave out some things, because I have very little experience with snow or driving. So maybe I could do it in three sentences.

[Mistook]

Reph, if every sentence you write contains an entire story, then you should have no problem writing the largest (by magnintudes) epic in history, in under sixty K!

Think of the possibilities Reph!

if capturing the universe in every sentence is your STRONG suit... consider yourself blessed.

If you fail to use it for the benefit of Novel-kind. Consider yourself cursed. ;)

[Julian Black]

That was my first glimpse of fanfiction.net. I was tempted to bring a few choice sentences back here for display, but I balk at ridiculing anyone in public.

[laughs]

The folks over at Godawful FanFiction (http://www.godawful.net) aren't so squeamish about dishing out well-deserved ridicule.

Whenever I get discouraged about my abilities as a writer, I head on over to ff.net and browse awhile. It's my equivalent of reading slush, and it helps every time.

[allion]

Um, Julian, I'm not sure if I should say thanks for giving that website address.

I laughed so hard I cried. My husband looked at me and asked what the matter was. I was laughing so hard I hurt myself.

Thank you for giving me a laugh today.

And it does help make you feel better. It really does.

Karen (still wiping the tears from her eyes...)

[reph]

Somebody please tell me the median item in a professional slushpile (i.e., real publisher) is better than those fan fiction pieces. Please.

[katiemac]

Julian, that link is truly inspiration.

My favorite line, I believe went something like this: "He screamed in pain like a pregnant woman giving bith, but he wasn't giving birth."

Plus, you know, the one about Legolas going to Hawaii and hitting up the local Wal-Mart. That one was pretty priceless.

...Running off to write. Yeah, I know, that was your point!

[maestrowork]

I love the Godzilla ones...

[SRHowen]

People write "Lion King" fan fic? The "Lion King?" Ahh, huh, ummm---Shawn is speechless. Make a mark in your books--I am never speechless. I just just just--

:Smack: :Wha: :crazy: :Jaw: :eek: :confused: :scared: :roll: :roll:

[Julian Black]

Another Internet slushpile worth checking out, if fanfiction isn't your cup of tea, is fanfiction.net's conjoined twin, FictionPress (http://www.fictionpress.com).

One thing about fanfiction.net is that the writers tend to be very young--you get a lot of kids posting stuff there. I don't think very many of them intend to become writers; many write fanfic just because their friends are doing it. At FictionPress, there aren't any teenage fanbrats, and the authors tend to take their writing seriously.

Still, all the love and work and good intentions aside, it's tough to find anything readable there. Even when the grammar, punctuation, and spelling are correct, the prose is often unendurable. Sometimes I read things posted there, if only as object lessons in what not to do. If you want to see a thousand examples of bad beginnings, for example, that's your place. It can be quite an education.

I'd say FictionPress is probably closer to what you would see on a regular slushpile than fanfiction.net. The last time I read slush, however, nearly all of it was produced on typewriters, so yeah, I could be wrong...

[Sailor Kenshin]

I think I broke a rib! :roll:

[Mistook]

There's a lot of levels of bad, and amateur web fiction is down there, but I don't know if I like the whole karmic aspect of mocking these writers.

It's one thing if something has made it to paperback and it stinks, because here's a publishing house trying to say it's good writing. And if something on the slush-pile stinks, well, here's somebody who thinks they're ready for publication in the dog-eat-dog, real world.

But come on, fanfic is fanfic.

Do Major-League hopefuls going down to the kitty park to rip on how uncoordinated the second graders are? Yikes.

[astonwest]

The usual response to reading slush is to suddenly discover that you're a much better writer than you thought you were.

Oh, my...just got back from reading...I think my eyes are going to explode.

But on the plus side, I don't feel as bad about my writing as I did before...as Jim alluded to...

[James D. Macdonald]

There's a lot of levels of bad, and amateur web fiction is down there, but I don't know if I like the whole karmic aspect of mocking these writers.


These writers aren't being mocked, at least by me.

First, when you've published something (and posting it on the web is publishing), that opens it up to comment.

Second, if you want to see what typical slush looks like, that's what it looks like. (With the exception of the use of trademarked and/or copyrighted characters -- just global search-and-replace "Legolas" with "Busreail" and you've got it.)

[maestrowork]

We're commenting on the work, not the writers. I can probably write something truly awful and put it out there, too, just for fun (and heck, some of us have done that -- look at Atlanta Nights). It has nothing to do me the person/writer. It's just my work being commented.

[Julian Black]

These writers aren't being mocked, at least by me.

First, when you've published something (and posting it on the web is publishing), that opens it up to comment.

Exactly. A lot of fanfic writers don't seem to understand that, or perhaps don't want to. If you're going to post something for all the world to see, you'd better be ready to deal with criticism.

I've seen fanfic writers start flamewars over thoughtful, constructive criticism of their stories. Lately, there has been a trend in which writers tell the readers at the outset that they don't want any criticism at all. Funny how these are usually the worst writers. I see this as literary Darwinism in action.

Second, if you want to see what typical slush looks like, that's what it looks like...

Uncle Jim, you have just made my day. My week. My whole writing life, for that matter.

[opens up MSWord]

Catch y'all later--I have some writing to do...

[black winged fighter]

Second, if you want to see what typical slush looks like, that's what it looks like.

I had no idea...

On the other hand, I am now so motivated... Thank you!

[Galoot]

A lot of folks have trouble with the whole outline concept. Uncle Jim has given examples of several different ways he goes about it, from Celtic knots to index cards. But it sounds like UJ usually just tells his story in short form, fleshing it out later. Well, "short" for him. His outlines can come in at over 100 pages long. :)A strong outline will be dozens (if not scores) of pages long, and will resemble you telling a friend about a book that you read. You'll include the major scenes, and sparkling bits of description, you'll start to fill in dialog.

From this, write your novel.I was surfing (instead of writing) and came across Robert J. Sawyer's site, which includes a bunch of outlines for his SF novels (http://www.sfwriter.com/ouindex.htm). I thought folks might find them helpful examples of what dear Uncle Jim is talking about. As he says, it comes out like describing a book to a friend.

I suppose it's obvious, and Sawyer reminds you too, but these outlines contain spoilers. Read them at your own risk.

(BTW, there's other good stuff about writing on his site. Look around. Sawyer's swell. You know it's true because he's a Canuck. :D)

On a different note, a helpful exercise might be to write an outline for a novel you've enjoyed. As long as it doesn't take away from your BIC time, that is. http://absolutewrite.com/forums/images/icons/icon7.gif

[James D. Macdonald]

Writers, on their web pages, should not include music. And they should especially not include the Floating Butterfly (http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex4/butterfly_dev.htm) java script.

[Susan Gable]

Just popping in to say I completely agree about music on websites - any websites. <G>

And - fanfiction! (Okay, I only skimmed this last page and saw a small discussion about fanfiction.)

I got my start writing fanfiction. I got lucky enough to find some fanfic writers who took their craft seriously, saw potential in my first stuff, and decided to teach me a thing or two. Or a hundred. I'll always be very grateful to them, and also to my first "fans" who were some of those fanfic readers. (of course, I also had to unlearn some of the stuff I learned from a few writers who misguided me. :Ssh: )

But yes, some of it is just horrible, and it does seem to be those who don't want constructive comments on the stories. I recall one time in my fandom when there was some talk of having awards, and another time when there was talk of compiling a "book" of some of the stories. Several people popped out of the woodwork to bellyache that it wouldn't be FAIR to have awards because some people's feelings would be hurt if they didn't get one, and that if we made a book, it would "have to be a really big book because all the stories should be included because it wouldn't be FAIR to leave someone out, or to try to make judgement calls on which stories were good enough to be included."

Yes, those whining people were the people whose stories were sometimes less than stellar. I nearly busted a gut about not making judgement calls over which stories were good enough, and told them that's what editors do every day.

I know of other now-published authors who also got their start in fanfiction. It's a good place to play, to begin to learn. You don't have to create your own entire world/set of characters, you can focus on plot/craft/and just a few characters. Of course, that's only if you care about your craft.

Susan G. - hoping Uncle Jim doesn't mind me popping in here. :Sun:

[JohnLynch]

Writers, on their web pages, should not include music. And they should especially not include the Floating Butterfly (http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex4/butterfly_dev.htm) java script.Very rarely should someone include music on their website, and I can't think of ANY situation where someone should include the floating butterfly :Smack:

Thanks a lot for this helpful thread James :D I've actually found it quite helpful, and used some of the advice in my writing (no, unfortunately I don't spend 2 hours each day writing, but then again I'm just writing for my own enjoyment at the moment, not because of a desire to become a writer).

I also later found out that I use to enjoy reading your books way back in 1997 when I was just starting high-school. The library had the first three or so Circle of Magic books (no, don't ask me how I remembered that ;))

[Zane Curtis]

For my outline, I do the whole hierarchical numbers and letters thing. But I only fill out the top level of the hierarchy -- the most general -- before I start. I fill in the more detailed stuff as I write. That way, I have a loose idea of where I'm going, but I'm not railroading myself into a specific course of events.

I use Keynote (http://www.tranglos.com/free/keynote.html) to keep track of it all.

[James D. Macdonald]

Welcome, Susan. Pipe up any time.

There's nothing wrong with fanfic (and I've mentioned using it to learn some parts of storytelling waaaay upthread). And some of it is excellent. But (like the slush heap in general) most of it is less-excellent.

Zane -- if you use the numbers/letters/roman numerals thing to outline, and you make it work -- more power to you.

[James D. Macdonald]

I also later found out that I use to enjoy reading your books way back in 1997 when I was just starting high-school. The library had the first three or so Circle of Magic books (no, don't ask me how I remembered that ;))


Way back in '97 ... oh, dear. You make me feel old. But I'm glad you liked the books. (Pick up the last three and find out how it all turned out....)

Nothing wrong with not wanting to be a pro writer, but still wanting to write as well as possible. For Your Own Enjoyment is the best possible reason to write. (But... if you're writing you are a writer. You can't escape.)

[Zane Curtis]

Zane -- if you use the numbers/letters/roman numerals thing to outline, and you make it work -- more power to you.

While I'm on the subject of outlines, there's a conversation with Michael Moorcock I like to link to, because I find it intriguing and quite useful:

Night Shade Books... (http://nightshadebooks.com/discus/messages/381/382.html)

[James D. Macdonald]

In case you haven't got enough things to waste your time, here's a page to help you check the popularity of your web page (http://www.widexl.com/remote/link-popularity/index.html).

Wax that cat!

[JohnLynch]

I'm glad you liked the books. (Pick up the last three and find out how it all turned out....)Aaawh, I'm probably a bit old for them now ;) I tend to avoid books I really liked when I was younger (e.g. Hobbit, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factor, Dr Dolittle) because I probably wouldn't enjoy them anymore. So by not re-reading them, I get to keep my fond memories untainted :)

While my name isn't Jim and I'm not an Uncle, I thought people might like to check out this small exercise (http://www.deep-magic.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=1241). I often find such exercises to be extremely helpful in practising a particular technique :)

[black winged fighter]

That's a great challenge. I'm going to mull it over for a while though, and let my thoughts grow for a while.

[James D. Macdonald]

I'm going to copy in a fairly long post of mine from the old board, from another thread there. While it's mostly about another publisher (one that I hope no one here is contemplating), I've got some general stuff about publishing that I think might be useful, and I don't think it should be buried elsewhere.

----------------------------------------


Let us look at Denison "Denny" Hatch, PA author and apologist. In his article, About U.S. Book Publishing and PublishAmerica (http://pricelineandthemedia.com/doc/aboutpa.html) I believe we have the ur-source for a great deal of the nonsense that PA's Infocenter regularly spouts.

Hatch is a real writer, with serious publishing experience (mostly in the 1960s-1980s).

In the late '90s he wrote a book about Priceline.com:The priceline.com book is a business how-to title, but more a case study than anything else. My regular publishers were not interested; it did not fit their list.

I sent it to Bloomberg and Wiley who turned me down. Suggested it to a Norton senior editor who said, "This is not my kind of book."
By its looks, he's got a specialized non-fiction book with a defined niche. He's gotten some rejections. So he goes with the fast acceptance from PublishAmerica. So far, he says, he's satisfied.

Fair enough, he's a big boy and can make his own decisions.

As the author of a specialized non-fiction niche book, he's in one of the few places where a self-published author can make significant sales. Mr. Hatch is an expert in direct-mail marketing -- he's written several books on the subject -- so he knows something about marketing. If anyone is going to succeed at PublishAmerica, he's the guy. And if he'd left his comments at that, I wouldn't have a thing to say about his article.

But now he's generalizing his experience to areas where it isn't applicable, and his comments are likely to mislead new authors who are considering PublishAmerica.Am I happy with PublishAmerica as opposed to a traditional publisher? So far, the answer is an emphatic YES.
I note that he made that remark before his first PA royalties would have come in. Interesting that he said "as opposed to a traditional publisher," when PA spends so much time and makes such efforts to call themselves a "traditional publisher." But more on this anon."Traditional book publishing is very efficient at one thing and one thing only: creating landfill. Otherwise, it is the most screwed-up, wasteful, and depressing business model ever cobbled together by people who should have known better and done something to change it."
Mr. Hatch is doing an elaborate version of "all these people are just stupid."

Come, come. Traditional book publishing is very efficient at one other thing: Getting books into the hands of the reading public. What this statement clearly establishes is that Denny Hatch doesn't understand how publishing works. He's looked at a set of complex interlocking non-intuitive systems, and decided that the only reason publishers do things the way they do is because it's never occurred to them to try anything else.

Part of what's going on in publishing is that publishers are running their advertising and product distribution through the same channel. Books are self-advertising. There's no such thing as a 100% success rate on any advertising message.

In the case of mass market publishing, they're also piggybacking on existing distribution systems. There are associated costs, most notably stripped books, but piggybacking is cheaper than putting together a dedicated system to reach non-bookstore outlets.

"The one-word profit killer-Returns" Denny says, noting that returns have been around since the 1930s, but not noting that publishing has apparently been conducted profitably every year since, and not noticing that even today bookstores have tiny profit margins. If you want to put a bunch of bookstores out of business, end the return system. That won't increase book sales. The returns system means there are lots more bookstores, and lots more books get shipped to them. Remember: A book on a shelf isn't just a product for sale. It's also an advertisement for itself.

Denny then gives an example of how returns work -- but it's an extreme and untypical example:* A bookstore orders 20 copies of ABC by Sample A. Sample on a 60-day net payment arrangement.
* Of those 20 copies, 4 sell within 40 days, leaving 16 in inventory.
* Bookseller pays for the 4 copies it sold (at a discount of somewhere between 40% and 55%), and returns the unsold 16 copies.
* Bookseller then orders 4 copies to keep in inventory.
* Over the next 40 days bookseller sells 1 copy, leaving 3 in inventory.
* Bookseller pays publisher for the one sold copy and returns the 3 unsold copies.
* Bookseller orders 1 copy for inventory.
Under this cockamamie business model, the publisher has shipped to the bookseller 25 copies in three shipments; the bookseller has returned 20 copies two shipments; the publisher has been paid for five copies that were sold and has 15 copies sitting in the warehouse gathering dust. Yes, the bookseller pays for return shipping. But the publisher has printed books and paid for all the handling and warehousing. Profitability is impossible.
Of the twenty books printed in the example he gives, five have sold. That's a 25% sell-through he's showing. Under that cockamamie example, author "Sample A. Sample" would be well-advised to change his name and his agent, grow a beard, and move to another state before he tries to publish anything else. More typically, paperbacks see a 60% sell-through. Hardcovers get a 70% sell-through. Everyone makes money, everyone's happy.

Sell-through can dip to 50%, and people won't be as happy, but they'll still be making money.

Publishers know there are costs associated with publishing a book. Distribution and shipping are among those costs. They plan for them, budget for them, and set prices to cover them.

If profitability is impossible, how is it that publishers demonstrably make profits?

As the Author's Guild (http://www.authorsguild.org/miscfiles/midlist.pdf) reports, "returns have never been important enough to cause fundamental economic trouble."

Here's what the returns policy really gets you: More bookstores can open in more towns. More writers can write more books, and more marginal books can be published. Readers can find a wider selection on the shelves.

A realistic example? The bookstore orders five, sells three, returns two. Those two hang around the warehouse. They may be shipped to another bookstore, or they may be remaindered.

Denny worked in publishing, he's been an author, he must know that the story he's presenting is bogus. Why is he putting out bad information? Perhaps one reason he's slagging off the returns system is because PA doesn't do returns. He's trying to present this as a good thing.

In the real world, what a no-returns policy does is kill any chance PA authors might have had of getting real bookstore distribution.So how do publishers make money?

* One way is to sign up guaranteed best sellers by Stephen King, Michael Crichton, Bob Woodward, Andrew Weil, J.K. Rowling, or Princess Di's butler.
If there really is a "guaranteed" best seller it's the best-kept secret in publishing.

Before he sold his first novel, Carrie, Stephen King was a guy living in a trailer in Maine, working nights in an industrial laundry and selling short stories to men's skin mags. Rowling was a single mother living on the dole in Edinburgh. Crichton was a newly graduated MD, unknown by anyone outside of his family and friends. How did the publishers who bought those authors' first novels know they were "guaranteed best sellers"?

By the time you know some author is a bestseller, they'll have top-gun agents who will have raised their asking price to right around the maximum the publisher is willing to pay. Not only that, but their current publisher will have their next several books signed up already. Suppose I ran a publishing house, and I wanted to guarantee a best seller. Could I say, "Well, I'll just publish the next Harry Potter novel"? No, I couldn't. It isn't for sale to me at any price.

As to the celebrity books -- they're a tiny part of the market. Three to seven percent. When they do well, they provide cash to pay for smaller works by less-well-known authors.* Or they shoot craps and get very, very lucky, as they did with Hillary Clinton and Laura (Seabiscuit) Hillenbrand.
Why didn't Denny put Hillary in the "guaranteed best seller" category? To Laura (Seabiscuit) Hillenbrand you can add Charles (Cold Mountain) Frazier, Nicholas (The Notebook) Sparks, Jennifer (Good in Bed) Weiner, and every other published novelist with two books in your favorite bookstore.

Spotting likely books is why editors get salaries and have job titles. When one is shooting craps, the man who understands the odds and knows when to fade the shooter has an edge over the man who doesn't. An even better analogy for publishing would be professional card-counters playing blackjack.

As one major poker player puts it: "Your job is not to win hands. It's to make good bets." That's what real editors and publishers are doing. They're trying to make good bets. Not every bet succeeds. Not every hand they stay with to the end will win. But if they do it right, they'll make money.* Or they come out with a hot subject, such as Soctt Berg's biography of Katherine Hepburn that made it onto bookstore shelves less than two weeks after she died.
Berg's biography of Hepburn had been written (and sold) years before. It wasn't released until after Ms. Hepburn's death, at her request.

Denny should have put Princess Di's Butler and Bob Woodward in this category.* Or they have a series, such as Norton's Aubrey-Maturin nautical adventures by Patrick O'Brien that keep attracting new readers and continue sell year after year (with serious help from Peter Weir's film version of Master and Commander starring Russell Crowe).The Jack Aubrey series was popular long before there was a movie. Russell Crowe was only five years old in 1969 when the first book came out. In fact, O'Brien died in 2000; the film was released in 2003. That series isn't popular because there was a movie; the movie was made because the series was popular. So add to that "crap shoot" above, Patrick ( Master and Commander) O'Brien.

Who made the Jack Aubrey books sell? The readers, that's who. Readers who found the books in bookstores. Fully returnable books. Readers who recommended the books to one another. That's what really did it. Readers buy books for the same reasons you do.* Or they build up a critical mass of special-interest titles that appeal to specific markets (e.g., titles on cooking, automobiles, boats, gardening, health and fitness, crafts, music, etc.)
Specialized non-fiction will sell to those who want that specialized information. People don't buy nonfiction books by publisher. They buy them by interest, by recommendations from knowledgeable sources, or they can recognize the sound of expertise. Publishers can specialize too. That means that their editors know What the Foo about the subject, and will know if an author is talking rot, or providing information that isn't readily available elsewhere. It's always about the reader.

And wait one red-hot minute here. All the books Denny has been mentioning are sold under the same returns system that he just got done saying made profits impossible. If the returns system alone is the problem, you don't address it by running different content through it. The only way his examples can be profitable is if their sales patterns are significantly different from the example he gave at the beginning.

How do publishers actually make money? They know books and they know readers. They know them as well as they possibly can. That's why they can publish some very odd books by unknowns and still keep the lights on. This isn't just a game of chance, it's a game of skill.My first job was in book publishing-writing press releases and getting authors on radio and television-for the trade book division of Prentice-Hall. The year was 1960, during which 15,000 new titles were published. Today, 150,000 new titles are published every year, so you will quickly realize that all across the country, book warehouses have walls bulging and floors sagging with unsold books (a.k.a. future landfill).
What Hatch fails to mention is that book sales have gone up as the number of new titles have gone up. Books are no longer selling in 1960 quantities. The number of bookstores has increased by an order of magnitude. More people are buying more books than ever before.My first boss in the business, children's book publisher Franklin Watts, was a hard living, hard drinking ex-traveling book salesman who used to storm into the office every year on his birthday and announce loudly, "Do not wish me many happy returns! There is no such thing as a happy return!"
Mr. Watts was just making a publishing joke about "many happy returns." He wasn't formally denouncing the returns system, and it's absurd to read him as though he were.

PublishAmerica doesn't have any traveling book salesmen, hard living, hard drinking, or not.For a bookstore to stock just one copy of every new book published would require an additional 3-1/2 miles of shelving every year-and that is spine out.

For the full cover to be displayed would require 14 miles of shelving. Stacked on top of each other, these 150,000 books would be the equivalent of 14 Sears Towers. Bookstores have access to this avalanche of titles and they can be special ordered and delivered in as little as a day or two.
Ah ha! The origin of PublishAmerica Infocenter's infamous "15 feet of new bookshelf each and every day" meaningless statistic! Many books are published, and yet it's observable that books find space on shelves. Remember that in the example that Hatch himself gave at the start of his article, the net change in bookstore shelving required was zero, and five books were sold.

Bookstores don't try to stock one copy of every new book published. A good number of those books aren't meant for bookstore sales in the first place -- law books, book club editions, encyclopedias, textbooks, catalogs, reference books, etc.

For the rest of the titles, bookstore managers and chain store buyers choose how many of which ones they want to stock in their stores, then keep a close eye on which ones are selling. Chain buyers live and die by their weekly sales figures.

What you should remember is that taken as a whole, all trade books are intended for bookstore display. If you take the set of all trade books and all bookstores, most of them get that display. (And not just in dribs and drabs, one here, two there, if the author comes in and begs.)

Books with longer print runs have more copies on more bookstore shelves. Books with shorter print runs have fewer copies on fewer bookstore shelves. About the same percentage of each run is shelved.

Reality check: Hatch is saying that it's impossible to achieve what we can observe for ourselves is happening every day.

While titles come and titles go, bookshelves remain.In the immortal words of publishing guru Dan Poynter, "Bookstores are a lousy place to sell books."
And if, like Dan Poynter, you're self-published and self-promoting, it's probably true. Here perhaps we see the origin of Miranda Prather's astounding comment, "It's a common myth that bookstore placement equals sales."

Publishers distribute their books to bookstores because that's where they sell best.

Bookstore placement is great for sales -- really, the best starting point known. Lack of bookstore placement kills sales for commercial trade books, particularly novels.

If bookstores aren't a good place to sell books, name me another venue that will sell twenty thousand copies of your book in a year.Authors are a publisher's major asset. Without authors, the publishing industry would not exist.

So how do publishers treat aspiring authors?

Quite simply, we are treated like dirt.

The odds are that an unknown author sending in a query to a book publisher by mail or e-mail will get no response. Or a brush-off answer such as, "We do not accept unsolicited material" or "We only accept manuscripts from recognized agents."
Remember that "We do not accept unsolicited material" means "Send a query first," and "We only accept manuscripts from recognized agents" means "Get an agent." If you're hearing either of those lines, it means you didn't follow that publisher's guidelines.

Worth noting is that 80% of books sold to major publishers come through agents. The other 20% of the titles that major publishers print the authors sell on their own.

While we're at it, having a publisher tell you that they don't want to publish your book isn't the same thing as treating you like dirt.

Oh -- and authors aren't a publisher's major asset. Publishable manuscripts are.Those publishers that do encourage authors to send in manuscripts throw them into a "slush pile" where they sit for weeks or months until some supercilious twenty-something who could not write his or her way out of a paper bag gives it the once-over and sends a rejection slip. For example, my manuscript languished in the Wiley slush pile for over a month.

In fact, the idea that a writer's work is confined to a "slush pile"-as if all unpublished manuscripts were "slush"-is, to me, truly offensive. Another offensive term book publishers use to describe an marked-up manuscript proofs: "foul matter."
I'm sorry for his sensibilities. (Though I find it amusing that he described what he was doing from 1976 to the late '90s as "writing junk mail." Isn't the term "junk mail" offensive to direct mail advertisers?) All unpublished manuscripts aren't slush. Only unsolicited ones are.

But back, for a moment, to that "supercilious twenty-something who could not write his or her way out of a paper bag." Remember who your readers are. They'll include supercilious twenty-somethings who can't write their way out of paper bags, standing in front of a bookshelf at Barnes&Noble trying to decide on a book to read during their lunch hour. Feel fortunate if they give your book the "once over." Be respectful of your audience, my friend. They're paying your bills.

More on those first-pass slush readers: Regardless of their age, their sympathy, or their writing ability, they're sorting out the books that are obviously unsuitable (the epic poem submitted to the non-fiction house, the hard-core porn to the Christian inspirational publisher, the book by a schizophrenic who is unable to form complete sentences, etc.) and handing the remainder off to experienced editors.In short, traditional publishers are snotty and patronizing to authors unless your name is Ken Follet, or Tom Clancy.
I can just see the scene at the Naval Institute Press when the manuscript for Tom Clancy's first novel arrived: Editor One: "Ha ha! I have given this book, The Hunt for Red October, the once-over. Quick, fetch the snotty rejection slip!"

Editor Two: "Be respectful! That's Tom Clancy! Soon he will be a best seller!"Or over at Everest Books: Editor One: "Look at this book! The Big Needle by Simon Myles! A tawdry crime thriller. Doesn't he know that I am a supercilious twenty-something who can't write? Let me reject it in a patronizing manner, then brew up a cup of tea!"

Editor Two: "Be respectful! That's Ken Follett writing under a pseudonym!"
In sober fact, when new slush readers first come in contact with slush, after their eyes get back to normal size and they catch their breaths, they realize that they're much better writers than they thought they were.

Denny's argument isn't with publishing, it's with the English language. He doesn't like the word "slush"? My heart bleeds. He doesn't like the term "foul matter"? That's production-speak for pages with pencil marks on 'em; it has nothing to do with the quality of the words on those pages.

What he's doing is playing with word associations in an attempt to create a false impression. While he may not be ignorant of the real meanings of those words, he's betting that his readers are.

If you're taking the word "slush" as an affront, and failing to read the submission guidelines, and can't tell "we don't want to buy your book" from "we think you're dirt," perhaps you shouldn't be giving advice to new writers.

The overall impression that Mr. Hatch gives is that he thinks a publisher's editorial department doesn't exist. That there can't possibly be people who can judge a book's saleability, so it must be pure chance that Bloomsbury spotted both J. K. Rowling and Susannah Clarke.

Editors work, day in and day out, year after year, on books: Editing and packaging and selling thereof; and yet (according to Denny) they can't possibly calculate the probable sales of a new author's book.

Why are publishers forever wanting to know what other books this new book is like? It's not because they think all books should be alike. It's because there are sales figures on those other books. They want to be able to tell the printing plant to print 5,000 copies, or 50,000, or 500,000.


We move on to a section called "About Agents," where we learn that agents are horrible, except for his agent, who was a prince among people. (This is much like folks' attitudes toward lawyers: Lawyers are money-grubbing land sharks, except for their lawyer, who stands one notch below Superman in his defense of truth, justice, and the American way.)

What's wrong with agents according to Denny? They try to get their authors the best deals they can. Wooooo! And what's wrong with that?

According to Hatch again:...many a deal has been queered by an avaricious agent trying to hold a publisher up for a big advance. And my guess is that 90 percent of all books never earn out their advance.
A deal queered by an avaricious agent? No. Not unless the agent gets huffy and walks away. Otherwise, the agent asks for the sun, moon, and stars, the publisher replies with a small non-metallic asteroid, and after that it's all dickering.

The agents who queer "many a deal" don't stay in business too long. Minor quibble -- it isn't 90% of all books that never earn out their advances, it's 70%. This would seem bad enough, but you must understand that its entirely possible for a publisher to make a profit on a book that doesn't earn out. All that "Didn't earn out" means is that the publisher paid a higher-than-contracted-for royalty rate. If I can be allowed to make my own guess, the books that didn't earn out by twenty bucks far outnumber the ones that didn't earn out by twenty thousand. Best sellers cover a lot of shortfalls.

This, though, may well be the origin of PA's claim that most books don't pay royalties. It's because the separate royalty checks only come after the book earns out -- that is, earns royalties in excess of the advance already paid to the author. What you need to remember is that the advance itself is a royalty payment -- paid in advance. Publishers like to set the advance equal to what they think the author's final earnings will be. The higher the advance, the more they expect to sell. This should make you wonder exactly how many copies a publisher expects to sell if they set the advance at $1.00.

There's another reason Denny may be trying to poison new writers' minds against agents: Legitimate agents won't touch PublishAmerica.However, publishers and authors must beware of agents. They make money only when they sell something and get a commission. If an agent represents an author to a publisher, his aim is to get as fat an advance as possible-money paid up front against future royalties.
Yes, that's how it works. But a good agent isn't always going to aim for the biggest advance, period. There are lots of other considerations. An agent will try to get the best deal with a publisher who will publish the book well. That isn't always the highest advance.

Now on to page two (http://pricelineandthemedia.com/doc/aboutpa2.html).

Denny gives a pretty good description of offset. Then he immediately gets himself in trouble when he moves on to POD.

First off, what he's describing isn't Print On Demand -- it's digital printing technology. Keeping the terms equivalent is one of the basic requirements of comparisons.A radical new printing process has been devised whereby books can be printed economically one at a time on a giant photocopy machine that requires little or no set-up time.The word you need to watch out for there is "economically." Mr. Hatch wants you to think it means that digital printing technology can print books as or more economically than offset presses. They don't. The current generation of digital printing technology prints books more economically than last-generation digital printing technology, and it prints them more economically than an offset press would if you used it to print five copies. When you're printing books in any kind of quantity, offset printing only costs a fraction as much as digital printing technology.

Print on Demand has been around since the days of monks hand copying manuscripts. Digital printing is faster and more economical than those monks. Digital printing isn't faster and more economical for printing commercial quantities of commercial trade books than an offset press. By a weird coincidence your competition for trade books, the books that wind up in bookstores, is using offset presses.A great many forces are at work trying to stop this extraordinary development (e.g., book printers, binders, paper companies-all of whom stand to lose a lot of business if the book publishing industry goes to POD (Print On Demand). What is more, the book trade stands to be turned on its ear if POD is widely accepted.
This paragraph is ... deeply mistaken ... from start to finish. Papermakers don't care how ink gets transferred to paper. Their interest stops the moment the paper leaves the mill. Printers and binders aren't worried; they know they're in a different line of work and digital technology isn't their competition. If readers suddenly decided to buy books sight unseen and wait days or weeks to get them, that would certainly turn the book trade on its ear. There's no reason to believe that's going to happen.Yet in terms of inventory management, this is efficient. It saves money, saves trees, saves gasoline (books being transported to and from warehouses). Without question, this is the future of book publishing.
Without question? Doesn't take me two seconds to question it. Print on demand doesn't save any of those things; it probably costs more. It's a business model based on a technology that has no economies of scale. It was designed to do a few copies at a time. There's a real use for that. But digital print technology as we know it now is not going to supplant offset printing and a distribution system that sends millions of books to thousands of stores.

All the digital printing equipment in the country right now couldn't keep up with one week's demand for one current bestseller -- and there are a lot of bestsellers hitting the bookstores every week. There are a lot more books hitting the stores that aren't bestsellers, but will sell just fine and turn a small profit just the same. Digital printing technology is not the wave of the future. At the moment, it's like e-books: a small but interesting component of the future.As Dan Poynter says, "Print on Demand is not a way of printing; it's a way of doing business."
You don't need to quote Dan Poynter: You can quote me (http://www.sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/publishing.htm). Print on Demand is a business model. You could conceivably Print On Demand with linoleum blocks. Digital printing is a technology.

Do traditional publishers use the Print on Demand business model? Depends on how you look at it, but ... if they figure a particular title will sell 5,000 copies, they'll tell their printers to run off 7,000. If they figure the title will sell 50,000 they'll tell their printers to print 70,000. If the publisher is wrong, and there's more demand, they'll tell the printer to run off more. (That's what the terms "second printing" and "back to press" mean.)

Do they use digital printing technology? Sure, when it's faster and cheaper than doing some job on an offset press. Otherwise, no. Remember that Print on Demand isn't the same thing as digital printing.Until recently, the entire publishing industry looked down its collective nose at authors who published their own works. Self-publishing was given the pejorative sobriquet of "vanity publishing."
What's this "until recently" thing? As of this morning the entire publishing industry (right the way down to individual bookstore owners and readers in the street) continues to look down its nose at vanity publishing.Never mind that Rogers & Hammerstein and the Gershwins used to produce their own musicals, that a many actors and directors formed their own production companies to create their own films, or that politicians spend quantities of their own money to get themselves elected.
And isn't that startlingly irrelevant? Shall we mention plumbers who are expected to bring their own tools to the job too?For some reason a vanity author was (and is) considered slime.No, not slime. Just a vanity author.Further, vanity publishers-who operated under the old offset printing model-tended to be terrible shysters. They would charge an author for the setup, for printing, for binding, and for storage-often with a 500-book minimum. A year later there might be 400 copies left in the warehouse, whereupon the publisher would write the author and say that unless the author wanted to buy these 400 copies, they would be turned into landfill. But the author had already bought and paid for the 400 copies! The publisher was going to charge double. Most authors did not know the difference, could not bear the thought of their work being trashed, and paid up.
So? No one has said that going with a vanity press was a good idea. (I note, in passing, that Mr. Hatch knows one vanity publisher very well: Before he founded PublishAmerica, Willem Meiners ran a straight-up vanity press, Erica House. Is Mr. Hatch describing Mr. Meiners' business practices?)

No one reads slush for fun. No one reads slush twice without getting paid to do it. Why not? Because most times those books suck. Even if vanity-printed books don't suck, the fact that they look like other sucky vanity books the reader has seen means the reader won't go near them.

Vanity presses cheat their authors, play with their ignorance, and prey on their dreams. Granted.However POD now has two meanings: (1) Print on Demand and (2) Publish on Demand. Print on Demand has been previously discussed. "Publish on Demand" means an author is paying to have a book published. POD (Print on Demand) is good; most traditional publishers are using it for back titles-printing as needed. POD (Publish on Demand) is held by many in the same low esteem that vanity publishing was years ago.
It looks like we've found the original source for this particular piece of PublishAmerica Infocenter twaddle. PublishAmerica is the only operation that uses these definitions and makes this distinction between Print on Demand and Publish on Demand.

Print On Demand and Publish On Demand are actually interchangeable terms. The only purpose for promulgating this nonexistent distinction is so that PublishAmerica can claim that whatever bad things you've heard about POD publishing operations apply only to the other kind of POD.

Now the article moves in for the kill: Enter Publish America

PublishAmerica is the brainchild of two disaffected entrepreneurs. One of the partners is Larry Clopper, a laid-back, bearded American who unsuccessfully tried to get two books published and became roundly disgusted with the publishing world. The second partner is an enormous, larger-than-life Dutchman named Willem Meiners who can speak with passion about books and publishing at one moment and can turn around and rip off a Bach fugue on a church organ or cocktail music on an old upright piano. Both Clopper and Meiners had a vision that they wanted to do something would enable unpublished authors to see their books in print.
Nothing that Denny's said about Willem and Larry is pertinent to their publishing expertise.

What we have here seems to be two guys who couldn't get their books published, so they founded their own vanity press. That's been a pretty common pattern since digital printing technology has lowered the startup cost.

The problem has never been that unpublished authors can't get their books into print. The problem is that some authors write books with insufficient appeal to the reading public for them to be economically viable. PublishAmerica can put those books in print. What it can't do, and doesn't try to do, is get them read.Founded in 1999, PublishAmerica takes no money from authors with the exception that we can buy from them our books at a discount.
And that's the real kicker, isn't it? That's one heck of an exception. Breezed over in that one line is the heart and soul of PublishAmerica's operation.

Authors love their own books and will tell everyone they know about them. They plus their friends and relations will, on average, buy around 75 copies of their book if there's no other way to get it. PublishAmerica knows that if they do a cheapjack job on production, use modern digital printing technology with its super-low setup costs, and price the books high enough (considerably higher than other comparable books printed on the same digital presses), they can make a profit off those 75 copies.

That's the beauty of it: No matter how good or how bad their books are, PA is bound to make money. The authors plus friends and relations are always going to buy enough copies for PA to make a tidy profit. Under those circumstances, it's not necessary for PublishAmerica to get reviews, bookstore distribution, and library placement -- and, in fact, they don't. They don't even try.

When the author buys his own books, the business model is pure vanity press. Old-style vanity presses needed the author to buy 500 copies to make their profit? PA's figured out how to make a profit on fifty.Otherwise, the principals are pathologically averse to taking cash from their authors-even to the point of refusing to sell or recommend publicity and promotion services-for fear of being labeled a Publish On Demand company.
Odd that Mr. Hatch should use the word "pathologically." But listing publicity and promotion services isn't what makes a press a vanity press. It's selling books primarily to their own authors that makes a press a vanity press. They refuse to offer or recommend publicity and promotion services because they don't care about sales. Sales are a bother and a distraction. They don't even care about being labeled a "Publish on Demand" company (a term they made up themselves). The thing they want to avoid being called is a vanity press, although that's what they are.

===========
Update: PublishAmerica currently links to publicity and promotion services from their web page.
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PublishAmerica has no aversion to taking cash from their authors. They put excessively high cover prices on their books -- effectively, a surcharge -- and wait for the authors to pay it. They routinely send mail to their authors urging them to buy their own books. That's where they get their income. It certainly doesn't come from retail book purchases.So when Publish America told me the book had been accepted, I went to the Website to see who they were and what they did. The featured book that day was 1001 Ways to Market Your Book by John Kremer. I knew Kremer to be a first rate book promotion guy and figured it PublishAmerica was okay for Kremer it was okay by me. I signed with PublishAmerica.
Mr. Hatch submitted a book to a publisher that he hadn't checked out? He only looked at their website after his book was accepted? Since PublishAmerica isn't listed in Writer's Market, how did he find PA if not from their web site?

Denny somehow failed to notice that John Kremer didn't publish with PublishAmerica. 1001 Ways to Market Your Book came out from Open Horizons. All that PublishAmerica had done was link to Kremer's book.

You wouldn't think a man who'd worked in junk mail all those years would make a mistake like that. For one thing, the business he was in doesn't attract naive do-gooders. For another, direct mail specialists are all about paying attention to the tiny fine details of their advertisements, because they can chart the effectiveness of one detail vs. another by tracking the response percentages of each variant of the same mailing. These are the guys who know exactly which shade of blue used to print the "signature" on a letter will bring in the most responses.

So, here we have a published author shopping for a new publisher, who uncritically buys into that publisher's misleading ad, and fails to notice that John Kremer, whom he professes to admire, is not published by them.

If he's being disingenuous he's dishonest, and you shouldn't take his advice. If he's being honest then he's not too bright, and you still shouldn't take his advice.The contract I signed: I receive a $1 good faith advance. Standard royalties. Split 50-50 extra rights (books clubs, mass-market paperback, film, TV, etc.). PublishAmerica arranges for the ISBN# (the standard book identification number registered with the Library of Congress) and gets it listed on Amazon.com, BarnesAndNoble.com and all the other online book selling services.
The ISBN comes from Bowker. The copyright is registered (at the author's expense) with the Library of Congress.

What's *not* registered with the Library of Congress is the book's CIP (Cataloging-in-Publication) data. This is the coded information the Library of Congress assigns to other publishers' books, to be printed on their copyright pages for the use of librarians. It's extremely difficult to make any library sales without one. PA lies about this, but the reason they have no CIP data is that the Library of Congress won't issue it to books published by vanity presses. Not only will PA authors not see their books in bookstores; they won't see them in libraries, either. (Standard exception: Author goes in person, gets down on his knees, begs.)

PA's royalties aren't standard. Standard royalties are calculated on the book's cover price. PA calculates royalties on the book's net price. There's no way that Denny Hatch, a published author, wouldn't know that.

PA's 50-50 subrights split is illusory. Their books sell in negligible quantities, and they make no effort to market their subrights. There'll be no book club or mass-market editions. How often have you seen movies or TV shows based on a PublishAmerica book? They might as well write in subrights splits for sales to alien planets, or serialization on cupcake wrappers. Doesn't matter. They're not going to happen.

What do PA books really get? Same thing every other vanity press book gets: Listings at Amazon and BN.com, on the publisher's website, and on other online bookselling services. And when you're talking about an unedited unreviewed unheard-of book by an unknown author, sales from online stores are as close to nothing as you can get.The company will also send the author two finished copies of his book. And that is basically that. All books are first published as trade paperbacks. If the title has legs, it might get hardcover treatment. The contract promises that book orders will be fulfilled-either by them or by the central book printing and fulfillment company, Ingram. Books that are ordered can be delivered within a week. And, oh yes, PublishAmerica will not take returns.
And that basically is that. The word "published" slides in under its very minimum definition.

"If the title has legs"? I assume he's talking about the Independence Books imprint. As of this morning, PA has 7,674 books listed at Amazon. Of those, exactly six have those "legs." That's a terrible record. That's eight one-hundredths of one percent of all PublishAmerica books.

In the autumn after Denny wrote his article, Ingram, which is the largest book distributor in the country, stopped stocking POD books -- including PublishAmerica's. If success was desperately hard for PA's authors to achieve before, it was now something close to impossible. Months later, PA has still not acknowledged that Ingram's change of policy was a disaster for their authors.The author pays nothing to get published. However, the process of editing, copy editing and legal vetting (if necessary) are up to the author.
That doesn't sound too bad, unless you know how much a good edit costs. A very clean manuscript with no structural problems might get edited for a three-figure sum, but four figures is what most PA authors are going to be looking at -- unless they skip over all the editing, copyediting, proofreading, and other pre-press production work.

One interesting thing about Denny Hatch's remarks here is that on its website, PublishAmerica says it edits its authors' books, and you'll find a huge number of PublishAmerica authors who believe that their books will be, or have been, edited.

PA doesn't actually edit. Hatch is quite right in saying that if you want your PA title properly edited you'll have to pay extra to have someone do it; but that unhappy fact is not known to the general run of PA authors.In addition, publicity and promotion are up to the author, which sounds at first like a huge disadvantage compared to being published with a traditional publishing house.
That sounds like a huge disadvantage ... because it is.

The most an author can do in the way of publicity and promotion is less effective than the least you can expect a conventional publisher to do for your modest first novel. If a conventional publisher puts out a novel that sells 2,500 copies, everyone nods sympathetically, says well, it is a first novel after all, and prepares to do better with the author's second novel. If a PA title sold 2,500 copies, they'd declare a national day of rejoicing.

The other difference is that the author who's being published by the conventional house will spend the next year writing another book. The PA author will have spent it doing promotion, and is out of pocket for all the associated expenses.

For those PublishAmerica authors, the path is always a steep uphill climb. PA doesn't take returns. They don't offer the full standard bookseller's discount. The cover prices are higher than comparable books. The book's packaging -- its cover design, cover copy, all those little fine points that help a book insinuate itself into a reader's hands -- is perfunctory. And among people who know bookselling and publishing, the publisher's reputation is terrible. They know PA stands for "Publish Anything."

It would literally be easier for these authors to get bookstores to take their books if they'd had them run up by a local printer with no pretensions to being called a publisher.However, a publisher with 600 titles a year is able to give each title about half a day's worth of publicity. In actuality, each title gets much, much less, since the "big books" by the "star authors" (those in which the company has invested the most money) get the major attention by the publicity department. Any non-best-selling author gets back-of-the-hand, perfunctory treatment by publicity departments and had better figure on doing his or her own promotion or the book will die.
First, he's skewed the figures, the same trick he tried earlier with his example of returns. His numbers here only work if you assume the publisher only has one publicist. 600 titles in a year is a large publisher, not a small one. I find it hard to believe that a large publisher would only have one person doing publicity. At a real publisher about half the staff is in the publicity and marketing departments. Second, a good publicist handles multiple books every day -- writing a press release for one, sending out galleys for another, excerpting quotes for a third, setting up a signing for a fourth. The concept of a half-day of publicity per title is nonsensical. Nobody calculates publicity in those terms. Third, publishers put their resources where they'll do the most good. This doesn't usually include lavishing huge amounts of hype on a nice modest little first novel. However, it doesn't mean no effort is made to promote them. Every best-selling author once published a first novel. Describing the efforts made on behalf of such books as "back-of-the-hand perfunctory treatment" implies a degree of callousness publishers don't feel. Fourth, publicity is only one aspect of the book's promotion. A real publisher has a real catalog, and a real sales force to sell the books in it. No PA title ever gets that.

Remember, what the conventional publishing industry would consider a very modest sales record for a very modest book, PublishAmerica would regard as a complete miracle. And in their case, it would be.

Denny Hatch should know all this ... after all, his first job, he says, "was in book publishing-writing press releases and getting authors on radio and television-for the trade book division of Prentice-Hall." Therefore, I conclude, he's deliberately lying.A first hand example was the case of my third novel, The Stork which got no reviews. In desperation I surveyed the major reviewers across the country who replied that they had never heard of the book and had never received a copy for review. It turned out that on the day the publicity department was to work on my book, a new publicity director took over. In the transition, none of the labels were generated and sent to the warehouse. I was devastated. Two years of my life were shot.
No mailing labels were sent to the warehouse? As in, mailing finished copies out to reviewers? What happened to all the advance copies that should have gone out a month or two or three earlier? And why didn't the person responsible for generating the labels take care of it the next day, or the day after? This story does not add up.

But let's assume it was true. What it tells us is that there was a screwed-up situation that day at Morrow -- and that that wasn't normal. You don't have a publicity department screwup if you don't have a publicity department.

If true, it's an example of bad things happening to good books. And bad things do happen. But it's also an example of how your worst day at a major publisher will be better than your best day at PublishAmerica.

I bet that when Denny complained to Morrow about his book not getting sent out for review, that the answer that came back wasn't "don't take that tone with us," and a note than any future correspondence from him would be discarded unread. Furthermore, I'll bet that his book (a hardcover) was distributed to bookstores all over the country. I also notice that it went to mass market paperback a year later, and was optioned for film. And I'll make one more bet that the advance check was substantially more than one dollar.

I'd really like a look at the front and back covers of the Jove paperback edition. I'd be able to see whether there were any quotes from reviewers. Interesting question, eh?

But let's say his story is true. He assumed that review copies would be sent out in advance of publication. With real publishers, advance reading copies and review copies are expected. With PublishAmerica we know that won't happen.The result is that PublishAmerica is closing in on 5,000 titles in print and legion of proud, enthusiastic authors is running around the countryside busily promoting their books. Where traditional publishers have to sell 5,000, 10,000, and sometimes 15,000 of a title before they break even, PublishAmerica needs sales that are a tiny fraction of that amount.
Not to be confused with the legion of bitterly disappointed authors running around the countryside complaining to the legal authorities, the press, and anyone else who will listen about the shabby treatment they got from PublishAmerica, the false advertising, the broken promises, and the verbal abuse. The only true part is where he says PublishAmerica only needs sales that are a tiny fraction of conventional publishers' sales. They do indeed. That's why their authors are running all over the countryside trying to sell books, while PA sits on its collective arse and does nothing to help them.Instead of making authors feel like dirt, PublishAmerica is in the business of making authors feel good about themselves, their work and their value on this planet.
This is assuming that publishers make authors feel like dirt. If so, you have to wonder why so many people want to be authors, and why they occasionally dedicate their books to their publishers and editors.

But does PublishAmerica make their authors feel good? The answer is, it does. Some of them it makes rapturously happy. This lasts right up until the point when the book comes out. Then they discover that bookstores won't stock it, self-promotion won't sell it, reviewers won't touch it, and that all PA will do is sneer at them for not reading their (extremely deceptive) contract closely enough, and for thinking that anyone was going to want to buy their book in the first place.

PA's most fervent supporters are their authors. Their most fervent detractors are also their authors. The divide between the two is clear cut: the detractors' books have been out for a while.

PublishAmerica shouldn't be in the business of making authors feel good about themselves. They should be in the business of selling books to the public. As far as making authors feel like dirt, shall I quote one of the typical boilerplate letters PA's "Author Support Team" routinely sends to authors who question any aspect of PublishAmerica's business model? Dear XXX:

Do not address us in such a tone. Your facts are wrong, your accusations are wrong, and your insinuations are wrong. Worst of all, and most unusual of all, you call our integrity into question.

The content of your statements is so unusual, so far from reality, and so very bizarre, that we will not stoop to even respond to them. The word libelous would be appropriate. Suffice it to say, that everything you say is simply, factually, wrong, and is easily proven to be so. Whomever gave you this misinformation is very pathetically misinformed.

Your request is denied, and we will expect your apology.

Thank you,
Author Support Team
support@publishamerica.com
Oh, yes. And unlike traditional book publishers, whose publicity departments schedule book signings and then forget to have books at the venue, all the books were there for us to sign.
Sound of hollow laughter. If PA couldn't get the books in place for a signing where the company's owners were in attendance, well, that would be beyond lame.

Actually, in the world of legitimate publishing, one of the biggest causes of signings where there are no books to sign is authors who are doing their own publicity. Manufacturing and shipping the quantities of books America's bookstores require is an industrial process. Inexperienced authors will schedule signings the day the book is scheduled to be released, not realizing that though there are now some copies, there aren't yet cartons and cartons available, or if there are, they may still be in transit.

This is a different problem from that experienced by PA authors who set up signings. In their case, the company takes the order for the signing copies, has the author pay for them (including shipping) in advance, promises they'll arrive in time for the event, then blows it off. The books may arrive weeks later. This has happened repeatedly.The one hang-up to vast distribution of PublishAmerica titles is the no-returns policy.

There are two other hang-ups: Very high cover prices and short discounts.
But the royalty statement from my last book from a traditional publisher stated sales of 2,400 copies and returns of 3,000. Not pretty.
Only 5,400 shipped, 3,000 of them were returned, and none of those went back out on reorders? That's painful.

When those low orders came in, the publisher didn't cancel its announced pubdate and try to re-sell it in a later season, so they clearly understood it to be a small book. What one has to understand, then, is that having no returns system wouldn't mean those 3,000 copies would have gone out and stayed out. It means the book would never have been published in the first place. Who's going to eat the cost of those extra copies? The bookstores? No way. They have to stay in business. And it's no use saying that in a different system those 3,000 copies would never have been printed, because there's a big per-unit cost difference between printing 2,500 copies and printing 5,000 copies. If the publisher had only printed 2,500 copies, they'd have been obliged to charge more for the book, and it would have sold even worse than it did.

Somewhere along the line, somebody has to take a chance. Taking returns means the publisher is the one making the bet. And that's only right, because he's the one who picked the book out, and packaged it, and did the advance sales work on it. So now he's out there saying "I'll bet you'll love this book. I bet it'll sell. I'll bet your customers will come back to see if there are any more like this one. I bet it'll do better for you than whatever book would otherwise occupy that piece of real estate. And what will I bet? The author's advance. The editor's salary. Production, art, sales, marketing, publicity, printing, shipping, and all the associated distribution costs. And if I'm wrong, you can send it back free of charge."

Every book is a risk to somebody. If a publisher refuses to take returns, the risk has to land somewhere else. But on whom? Not the bookstores. If you think you can't get published now, try getting published in a system where every book that comes into a shop is a potential loss for the owner. "Proven sellers" doesn't begin to cover it. Alternately, the risk could be displaced to the authors. That's where PA offloads it. That's what vanity publishing is all about.

I shake my head when I hear PA authors rhapsodizing about how PublishAmerica has "taken a chance" on them. That's exactly what PA hasn't done. Their model has PA making money no matter how badly your book tanks. They don't have to choose which books to publish; the only customers they count on are the people who'd buy a copy of that title if half its pages were upside-down. They take no risks at all.

PublishAmerica has a particularly slick line of marketing patter, selling their services to aspiring authors. Denny Hatch is a professional marketer. He knows Willem and Larry personally, and went on a junket to Iceland with them. I wonder if we've just met the guy behind the infamous "Facts and Figures" page, the "Partnership with the New York Times" letter, and all the rest of PublishAmerica's marketing efforts.

[James D. Macdonald]

That was a little heavy.

Here's your reward for fighting your way through it:

Everything you wanted to know about writing erotica (http://www.darkerotica.net/EroticQuills.html).

(Remember, kiddies, Sex Sells!)

[Ivonia]

Long post, but very informative! Thanks for the info Uncle Jim! It's certainly nice that there are people out there looking out for others, instead of everyone just being a potential shark (I've been burnt on enough things, and I certainly don't want to get burnt on my book).

[JohnLynch]

What Hatch fails to mention is that book sales have gone up as the number of new titles have gone up. Books are no longer selling in 1960 quantities. The number of bookstores has increased by an order of magnitude. More people are buying more books than ever before.That's good to know. There's the opinion that it's "uncool" to read books, and that with movies people are reading less books.

[Galoot]

That's good to know. There's the opinion that it's "uncool" to read books, and that with movies people are reading less books.I remember highschool. The cool kids only accounted for maybe ten percent of the student body, and half of those were surprised to learn that the books I read didn't have pictures in them.

I'm happy catering to the nerds.

[James D. Macdonald]

Not only are more people buying more books than ever before, but they're reading them later in life.

A part of that, I think, is that it's now socially acceptable to wear corrective lenses in public. (Speaking of movies, you know those movies from the forties and fifties -- "Miss Smithers! Without your glasses you're ... beautiful!") That was the social situation where wearing glasses was, all by itself, enough of a disguise for Clark Kent. Real men didn't wear glasses.

Now not only isn't there a social stigma on glasses, there are really good contact lenses, and laser surgery.

Booksales are going up every year.

Now this is both good and bad. Call it the Mustard Problem.

Used to be if you went to the store for mustard, you had French's yellow mustard and, if you had a big store in a big city, Gulden's brown mustard.

They sold a lot of mustard, Gulden's and French's, between the two of them.

Now ... you go into a grocery store and there's four shelves of mustards. You have your Gulden's and your French's still, and you have your Grey Poupon, and you have your State of Maine Sea Salt Mustard, and your Beer Mustard, and your Whole Seed Garlic Mustard, and your Creamy Dill Mustard ... and a lot more mustards beside.

More people are buying more mustard ... but no individual mustard is selling particularly well. The whole pie is divided by more slices.

Used to be you came out with a paperback original and if it sold less thanl 100,000 copies you'd wonder what was wrong. Nowadays, you come out with the same paperback original and if it sells 20,000 copies you're happy.

Royalty rates are still about the same, but the royalties are on a $8.00 paperback rather than on a $0.35 paperback, so the money is about the same overall. But in 1960 you could buy a house for $20,000, and now you can't. Bigger pie, smaller slices. Same problem as the mustard makers have.

This is a good thing for the readers, though, just like more choices are good for mustard users.

More different books published means more chances for quirky, original works to get published and distributed. This is a good thing.

And this is all oversimplified, but that's another picture of writing.

[pianoman5]

Great post, UJ. As good an overview of the mechanics/economics of publishing as I've seen in a while.

I read Denny Hatch's article recently and had sympathy for some aspects of his rant (not realising that he was an apologist for PA), but you've put those in perspective.

One aspect of the publishing industry equation that concerns me is the wastefulness of returns. The high proportion of books that become landfill must add significantly to their listed retail price, which necessarily also affects to some extent the quantity sold. As a business model it is not dissimilar to the perishable food industry, where items have a shelf life after which they cannot or will not be sold, so they are marked-up accordingly, to reflect anticipated wastage yet still return a profit.

Overall, though, the resultant cost-per-unit-sold is still probably less than a typical digitally-printed book, so one's concern is properly only environmental, not economic. The 'returns' system has certainly worked in creating a more vibrant market for authors, booksellers, and buyers alike by absorbing and managing the risk for so many new titles. As Jim points out, a title is self-promoting by its mere presence on a shelf.

The publishing industry today clearly has its faults and inefficiencies, including many frustrations for the neophyte; but as Winston Churchill observed of another activity:

"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried."

[Zane Curtis]

The overall impression that Mr. Hatch gives is that he thinks a publisher's editorial department doesn't exist. That there can't possibly be people who can judge a book's saleability, so it must be pure chance that Bloomsbury spotted both J. K. Rowling and Susannah Clarke.

I'm getting the same sort of vibe from this guy (http://grumpyoldbookman.blogspot.com/), only he says he is an editor. He's written a longish essay called On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile (http://www.kingsfieldpublications.co.uk/rats.html) where he goes on about the utter randomness of breakout best-sellers, and all the alleged masterpieces that get left behind on the slush pile. Maybe I've misread it, but I have the impression that he thinks all the manuscripts on a slush pile could be best sellers too, if only they got the chance -- and if only the world was a better place when the sun shone brighter, and the flowers grew taller, and all the little children slept safe and cozy in their beds at night, protected from the predation of the evil first reader and the dreaded fallacy of survivor bias.

[James D. Macdonald]

Trade books (hardcovers and trade paperbacks) are whole-copy returnable.

Mass market books are the ones that are stripped and discarded, and that's a byproduct of hitching book distribution onto the existing distribution mechanism for newspapers and magazines.

You don't return yesterday's newspapers and last week's TV Guide to the warehouse and try to sell them to some other news stand -- they're stripped, the cover (or masthead) sent back for credit on the next shipment, and the rest tossed in a dumpster. If you're going to use the distribution system, you take the bad with the good. It's cheaper and faster (and less wasteful in terms of trucks and fuel) than building a whole 'nother distribution system to reach grocery stores, bus stations, and news stands.

Stripping and discarding paperbacks may seem wasteful, but...

a) Paper comes from pulpwood, and pulpwood is a cash crop. It's planted, tended, and harvested to make paper. "Use less paper! Save the trees!" makes as much sense as "Eat less bread! Save the wheat!"

b) It's quite literally cheaper to throw out the copy of a mass market paperback and print a new one than it would be to return it, inspect it, and repack it in a warehouse if it's still in saleable condition. Think Economy of Scale. Publishers could throw out half of a printrun and still make a profit. Prices are set for it, the entire system is geared toward it.

c) Paper is biodegradable and recycleable.

Think of mass market books as weird-looking issues of Newsweek, and you'll get the idea.

[BlueTexas]

On the whole returns thing...

Most product has the price of its return included in the original price. How else on earth could a manufacturer warranty a product?

Uncle Jim mentioned glasses above...I sell glasses. Most people who buy glasses ask me about the warranty policy. I tell them that it's warranted for a year--this means if they break their glasses, they bring them back and I replace them. For me to do this, my costs on the replacement pair have to be covered in the original sale, or else I either a) lose money or b) lose customers who are furious that the glasses they sat on and smashed won't be replaced, by me, who did not do the smashing.

The manufacturer knows this, and the prices they charge me for the frame and lenses include the cost of me sending unusable product back to them. The frame manufacturers also know that if a frame sits on my board for a few months and no one buys it, I'm sending it back for one that will sell, and again, their price to me reflects this. They also know that the frames I reorder again and again will make up for the ones I send back.

All retail trade works this way. You wouldn't buy a stereo, a car, or an electric shaver without a warranty. And a retailer won't stock a product that they can't return. No one can make money if something can't be returned. Books are products, and while they don't get returned by consumers in broken bits, they do languish on shelves, and retailers who can't freshen their stock will sell less, causing the whole industry to slow down.

That would be bad for manufacturers (authors) and for consumers (readers). Who wants that?

The next time someone whines about book returns being the ruin of the book world, they should check and see how many warranty cards they've sent in, and shush! Ridiculous!

[James D. Macdonald]

Yeah, I read the Rats essay a while ago.

Nothing's perfect, and bad things happen to good books, but the slushpiles aren't full of unrecognized gems.

[alaskamatt17]

Hi, I'm fairly new here. I've been reading this thread for about a week trying to catch up, but the task seems monumental, so I decided to skip ahead a little bit (I still have thread seventy-something open in another window). I'm just jumping ahead to introduce myself, and say that I've been following the BIC method for awhile. I'm doing pretty well at it I think, though I'm not always able to get 2,000 words a day (I go by that standard rather than an hourly count.)

Thanks for all you're doing, Uncle Jim.

--Matt

[James D. Macdonald]

Welcome, Matt.

==================

Let me expand on my earlier comment about the slushpiles not being full of unrecognized gems.

We've all heard of publishable manuscripts, including famous best-selling ones, bouncing through a dozen slushpiles before finding a home.

True, it happens.

But isn't that a contradiction to my statement about the slushpiles not being full of unrecognized gems? What about the slushpiles they were in?

Well -- first there's the "full" thing. In a pile a hundred manuscripts deep only ten or so will be readable, and only one or two will be publishable. What the slushheap is "full" of is things only generally recognizable as English.

But take those one or two. They're publishable. But are they publishable here? The publisher only has so many slots a year. If they publish twenty books a year, and the slush pile is 4,000 manuscripts deep ... forty to eighty of those manuscripts are publishable, but twenty to sixty (wonderful, potentially award-winning and best-selling as they may be) will get rejection slips. Or more -- those twenty books the publisher can afford will include books by established authors contracted years before, the latest episode in a series, the novel that the editor solicited, and so forth and so on.

Or the book may be wonderful, but just two days before they bought a slightly inferior but very similar book from someone else. Or it may not quite fit their line. Or they might love it but not know how to market it.

When you're close, that's when you start seeing those hopeful little notes, like "Please send us your next," or handwritten "I loved this book, but alas! I can't buy it. I'm sure you'll soon find a home for this wonderful story."

When you're in the top one or two percent, the game changes.

All those horrible books you see on the shelves -- those were the best books that publisher could find. You should have seen the others.

Don't lose faith. Just write another book, and keep sending them around. And learn. Study the craft. Write new things, better things, different things.

[aplath]

Does anyone have a ballpark figure on the rate between publishable manuscripts spotted by a publisher in his slushpile and those that actually get published?

I mean, that should give a better idea of the odds of getting published than the rate between books that actually get published against the whole slush pile.

From a purely statistic point of view, if such odds were around 5% (one in twenty publishable manuscripts found in a given slush pile sees actual publication), it would mean that after submitting it to over 20 publishers you would have over 60% of chance of getting published.

Hmmmm ... I guess I have way too much free time today ... I really should use it to finish my novel instead of this ... ;-)

Andreas

[alaskamatt17]

So handwritten notes really do mean something?

Four years ago I got a rejection slip with a handwritten note from an editor at Tor saying she'd love to see my next book. That really helped, but I think I was a little naive at the time, because instead of working on that "next book" I slacked off on my writing. I kept sending out that book to other publishers, until one day I actually read it. Then I decided I didn't want to burden anymore slush readers with it.

But my second book is finished now, I've been keeping it out in the mail. Just got another rejection slip two days ago. Anyways, I'm gonna go put in my 2,000 words for the day.

--Matt

[watcher]

John Lynch and those interested

For another good lesson on how to write backstory read "Holes." You'll be amazed! I'm thinking of getting a copy of that book and studying it page by page to see how he managed it.

Faye

[James D. Macdonald]

I mean, that should give a better idea of the odds of getting published than the rate between books that actually get published against the whole slush pile.


Looking at it as "odds" gives you a distorted worldview.

If you've written a good book the odds are good that it'll eventually get published. If you've written a bad one, the odds are terrible.

But ... the usual guess is that 1-2% of the slushpile is publishable.

So of those 4,000 books in the slush heap of the publisher that puts out 20 books/year, 40-80 are publishable.

But... they don't only print books by first timers from the slush pile. Perhaps there are only five slots out of those twenty that aren't already spoken for. 6.25-12.5% of the good, publishable, maybe award caliber books in the slush heap will get picked up by that house that year. But maybe there's only one truly open slot. Maybe there are none. Or maybe there are ten. There are too many variables to make any sort of determination.

There are many slush piles.

Editors don't buy books they don't like to keep up their percentages if enough ones they do like fail to arrive in the mail that month.

[Zane Curtis]

I take a perverse sort of pleasure in seeing books in a bookshop that I think are a bit iffy, as far as writing quality goes. It proves that the publishable standard isn't some kind of impossible holy grail, but something achievable.

[JohnLynch]

Uncle Jim, lately I've noticed some writers tend to repeat the same facts over and over again. Sometimes it's done to emphasize how much someone is thinking about something, other times it isnt' done for that reason. For example lets say I've got a sci-fi book and Trantor is the capital world of an empire. The writer will write something like "the capital world of the Hanseatic Empire, Trantor" or "Trantor, the capital world."

A fact is repeated throughout the chapters several times.

Is that a good or bad technique?

[James D. Macdonald]

It's a balancing act.

If you really, really need to get a fact across, the rule is you slide it in three times. You're trying to get things across so the deaf old lady in the back row can still follow the story, at the same time keeping from boring the clever buggers in the front row.

On the other hand, the examples you gave sound a lot like padding.

[Galoot]

Of course, if the Trantor you're reading about is in one of the books from the trilogy, you've got to cut the author some slack. The books are basically collected stories, each of which needed to lay out the same...uh...foundation as the one before it.

[James D. Macdonald]

The Best of HapiSofi:

This is a repost from upthread, with the links to posts on the Old Board. One of these days I'll find where these posts went on the new board. For right now, these posts contain some Good Writing and Good Advice.


Lee Shore Literary Agency (http://p197.ezboard.com/fabsolutewritefrm11.showMessage?topicID=301.topic)

Need Advice (http://p197.ezboard.com/fabsolutewritefrm11.showMessage?topicID=310.topic)

Agents Charging Fees (http://p197.ezboard.com/fabsolutewritefrm11.showMessageRange?topicID=222.t opic&start=28&stop=28)

Sex Scenes (...How?) (http://p197.ezboard.com/fabsolutewritefrm31.showMessage?topicID=205.topic) Sex Scenes, version II (http://p197.ezboard.com/fabsolutewritefrm3.showMessageRange?topicID=257.to pic&start=623&stop=623)

Typesetting (http://p197.ezboard.com/fabsolutewritefrm3.showMessageRange?topicID=257.to pic&start=788&stop=788)

1st Books was OK (http://p197.ezboard.com/fabsolutewritefrm11.showMessageRange?topicID=28.to pic&start=82&stop=82)

Prologues (http://p197.ezboard.com/fabsolutewritefrm3.showMessageRange?topicID=257.to pic&start=243&stop=243)

Midbooks (http://p197.ezboard.com/fabsolutewritefrm3.showMessageRange?topicID=257.to pic&start=546&stop=546)

Tone (http://p197.ezboard.com/fabsolutewritefrm3.showMessageRange?topicID=257.to pic&start=165&stop=165)

PA Authors (http://p197.ezboard.com/fabsolutewritefrm11.showMessageRange?topicID=209.t opic&start=361&stop=380)

ST Comments I Love It! (http://p197.ezboard.com/fabsolutewritefrm11.showMessageRange?topicID=210.t opic&start=61&stop=65)

All PublishAmerica Titles are in the Library of Congress (http://p197.ezboard.com/fabsolutewritefrm11.showMessageRange?topicID=190.t opic&start=141&stop=160)

Decent Typesetting (http://p197.ezboard.com/fabsolutewritefrm3.showMessageRange?topicID=267.to pic&start=1&stop=20)

[Kate Nepveu]

The Best of HapiSofi:

This is a repost from upthread, with the links to posts on the Old Board. One of these days I'll find where these posts went on the new board.



Ah . . . cat-vacuuming.

Lee Shore Literary Agency

http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?p=15560#post15560

Need Advice

http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?p=15184#post15184

Agents Charging Fees

http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?p=15435#post15435

Sex Scenes (...How?)

http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?p=65845#post65845

Sex Scenes, version II

http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?p=82911#post82911

Typesetting

http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?p=83076#post83076

1st Books was OK

http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?p=14844#post14844

Prologues

http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?p=82531#post82531

Midbooks

http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?p=82834#post82834

Tone

http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?p=82453#post82453

PA Authors

http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1860#post1860

ST Comments I Love It!

http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?p=9283#post9283

All PublishAmerica Titles are in the Library of Congress

http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?p=11316#post11316

Decent Typesetting

[edit: found it!]

http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?p=94054#post94054

[James D. Macdonald]

Here's the best I can do for Decent Typesetting archived over here:

http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-7121.html

[MacAllister]

by happy coincidence, I was chasing down the links for "Best of HapiSofi" on the Uncle Jim, Undiluted (http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7987) thread, the last couple of days. Uncle Jim's post gave me the push needed to finish.

Reposting, with updated links:



The Best of HapiSofi:

This is a repost from upthread...these posts contain some Good Writing and Good Advice.



Lee Shore Literary Agency (http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showpost.php?p=15560&postcount=2)

Need Advice (http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=956)

Agents Charging Fees (http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=978)

Sex Scenes (...How?) (http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showpost.php?p=65845&postcount=4) Sex Scenes, version II (http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showpost.php?p=82911&postcount=624)

Typesetting (http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showpost.php?p=83076&postcount=789)

1st Books was OK (http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showpost.php?p=14844&postcount=83)

Prologues (http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showpost.php?p=82531&postcount=244)

Midbooks (http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showpost.php?p=82834&postcount=547)

Tone (http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showpost.php?p=82453&postcount=166)

PA Authors (http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1860&postcount=367)

ST Comments I Love It! (http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showpost.php?p=9283&postcount=62)

All PublishAmerica Titles are in the Library of Congress (http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showpost.php?p=11316&postcount=142)

Decent Typesetting (http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showpost.php?p=94054&postcount=18)
__________________

[Kate Nepveu]

Ah, I didn't realize the thread had replies in August 2004. Found it and updated.

[paritoshuttam]

Hi,

In general, is it a good idea to query the same agent again, after some time? Around two years back, one agent did show interest in my work, saying she liked the premise of the novel, but my prose wasn't dazzling enough (it had horrible parts including dialogues like "As you know Bob" etc). Now, after considerable amount of learning the craft and re-writing, I think I have improved it a lot. Is it then advisable to write to the same agent again?

thanks,
Paritosh.

[Galoot]

In general, is it a good idea to query the same agent again, after some time? Around two years back, one agent did show interest in my work, saying she liked the premise of the novel, but my prose wasn't dazzling enough.
As a reader I know authors can improve markedly (or go ripe) in only a few years. I'm sure the agent, a professional reader, also knows this and wouldn't hold a marginal manuscript from two years ago against you. But I defer to the pros.

[James D. Macdonald]

No problem returning to that agent with a significantly revised manuscript.

[JohnLynch]

It's a balancing act

If you really, really need to get a fact across, the rule is you slide it in three times. You're trying to get things across so the deaf old lady in the back row can still follow the story, at the same time keeping from boring the clever buggers in the front row.

On the other hand, the examples you gave sound a lot like padding.Thanks, that helps a lot :D I'll try to avoid the padding problem, but I'll keep in mind to make sure the deaf old lady hears me as well ;)

one agent did show interest in my work, saying she liked the premise of the novel, but my prose wasn't dazzling enoughIs this virtually an invitation to resubmit the work after reworking it? From what I've read here, it's rare to have a "like the story except for...." in a rejection, and it's what every author wants, next to an acceptance letter?

[James D. Macdonald]

Is this virtually an invitation to resubmit the work after reworking it?

Either that, or submit your next.

The thing you have to decide is whether you like your work as it currently stands. If you like it, there's no reason to re-write it for the chance that the agent or editor will like it better next time around.

If you can make it better in your own eyes, and you'll make substantial changes doing so ... then you might re-write (rather than keep sending the first work to other people, while at the same time creating something new.)

The Bad Books that can be made into Good Books by editing alone are rare.

[Sailor Kenshin]

Okay, Uncle Jim---I have a question.

Is it easier to sell a first novel than a collection of short stories? Or is either one dependent on the writer's rep and pedigree?

Thanks.

[James D. Macdonald]

These are short stories that have already been published in respectable-to-prestigious venues?

If not, then the first novel would probably be the easier to sell.

[BlueTexas]

I have a question about publishers...not sure if this is the right place, but what the heck. After reading this thread, I don't think there's much that can't be answered here.

Is there a way to find out where a vanished publisher has gone? If they were purchased by another house, would there be some media site that lists it? Specifically, I'm talking about a small regional non-fiction press.

[James D. Macdonald]

Dunno. Publishers Weekly might have mentioned it if they were bought by another press, but more small and regional presses go out of business every year than you can shake a stick at. You know how there are supposed to be 56,000 publishers, or 78,000 publishers, or whatever? There are actually around 20,000. The rest are on long-term hiatus. I'm sure you've heard that 8,000-11,000 new publishers are founded every year. Less well known it that 8,000-11,000 go toes-up every year. (And that, my children, is why it's important to deal with publishers that have been in business for some years, and who have books in bookstores.)

The Association of American Publishers or Publishers Marketing Association might know what happened to your publisher, if the guys you're looking for were ever members.

[James D. Macdonald]

Writing isn't about you, and it isn't about the publishers, and it isn't about the bookstores.

Writing is about the readers.

The readers

a) Want/need to be informed.
b) Want/need to be entertained.

If you aren't fulfilling the readers wants and needs, dude, you ain't got diddly.

[BlueTexas]

Dunno. Publishers Weekly might have mentioned it if they were bought by another press, but more small and regional presses go out of business every year than you can shake a stick at. You know how there are supposed to be 56,000 publishers, or 78,000 publishers, or whatever? There are actually around 20,000. The rest are on long-term hiatus. I'm sure you've heard that 8,000-11,000 new publishers are founded every year. Less well known it that 8,000-11,000 go toes-up every year. (And that, my children, is why it's important to deal with publishers that have been in business for some years, and who have books in bookstores.)

The Association of American Publishers or Publishers Marketing Association might know what happened to your publisher, if the guys you're looking for were ever members.

Thanks for the ideas!

[James D. Macdonald]

From else (http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showpost.php?p=123293&postcount=11428)where (http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showpost.php?p=123351&postcount=11434) in these boards:


Say Bantam publishes a romance novel by Lovey Dovey. It's placed in bookstores across the US. Some don't sell. The covers are ripped off. (I don't understand that.) Then the books are sent back to who? Ingram or Bantam? I doubt it would be Bantam.




A better person to ask would be Hapi -- but Hapi hasn't been back much since we changed to the new board.

Anyway, this is how it works....

First, the ones that have their covers ripped off are the mass market paperbacks. The reason they have their covers ripped off is to prove that they didn't sell. This is because, for the purposes of distribution, mass market paperbacks are specialized magazines. Mass market piggybacks on the distribution system developed to get newspapers and magazines into bus stations and drugstores. You wouldn't send back last week's TV Guide (and expect to sell it somewhere else). The system of ripping off magazines' covers and newspapers' mastheads extends to the paperbacks.

Often times the books that have been on wire-rack spinners aren't in salable condition anyway, even if they are returned. And it is quite literally true that it's cheaper to print a new copy than it is to ship an old copy back, inspect it to see if it's still salable, and restock it into a warehouse somewhere.

The covers are torn off, and the physical books go into the Dumpster out back. (Sometimes, in major cities, you'll see guys on the sidewalks selling paperbacks arranged on blankets, all face-down. They're selling them for a quarter a copy or something -- current best sellers even. If you look at those books, they all have their covers torn off. Those are from someone Dumpster diving, looking for money for wine.

That's mass market. Those are the books you see in grocery stores in the wire-rack spinners. (You will, of course, also see them in bookstores -- but this system was developed when bookstores were still rare.)

Oftentimes these days, the merchant doesn't even physically send back the ripped-off covers. They just sign an affidavit swearing the books were destroyed.

Next come the trade books. Those are the trade paperbacks and the trace cloth (hardback) books. (They're called "trade" because they're designed for the "book trade" rather than the "mass market.")

Those are whole-copy returnable. The trade paperbacks are sturdier than the mass market books. They are, in effect, cheaply bound trade cloth.

Those books, when they don't sell, are put in boxes and sent back to the warehouse they came from. Which is either the publisher's warehouse or the distributor's warehouse. The printer isn't involved. The distributor or the publisher then uses those same books to fill other orders.

(Note: "Trade" paperbacks aren't determined by size or price. There exist "rack size trade paperbacks" which are visually identical to mass market paperbacks. The difference between trade and mass market is what happens to the copies that don't sell.)

And where is the money in all this? Except for the money that comes in at the cash register from sold books, there isn't any. All the returns and stripped books become credit for the bookstore's next order. In effect, a returned book magically becomes a different physcial book, a book that might sell where this one didn't.

Please notice that readers, and what they pick up and pay money for, drive this system.

============


Isn't it just a matter that the publisher would not get payment for unsold copies, and that Ingram or Lightning Source would take the loss on printing the book?




I missed this part of the question.

The distributor and the printer both get paid, by the publisher. Neither take a loss on an unsold book. The only people who are taking a risk are the publishers. Bookstores aren't taking a risk -- the books are returnable. Printers aren't taking a risk -- publishers pay them directly. Distributors aren't taking a risk -- publishers give them a percentage of the price of the book for each copy that moves through them. The authors aren't taking a risk -- they're paid in advance.

And that's the way it should be. Publishers take the risk because they selected the book, they edited it, they produced it, they marketed it. And the readers, seeing that book on the shelf know that the publisher is standing behind it. That somewhere there's an editor who's saying "I'm betting the company's money that you'll enjoy this book. If I'm wrong, I'll get fired."

Readers don't get that feeling with vanity books. There, they hear the author saying "My mom thinks this book is swell. Even if it sucks, she's still my mom."

==============

You keep hearing self-published authors tell one another that they have to believe in their books: That'll make the readers believe in their books too.

But where is the author who doesn't believe in his own book? The reader is looking for something that will tell him that someone else besides the author believes in this book.

When a reader enters a bookstore, he's the most selfish guy in the world. He isn't thinking "Today I'll give a new author a chance!" -- he's thinking "What would I enjoy?" It's all about the reader. The reader's motto might as well be, "Yeah, but what's in it for me?"

==============

A minor gripe:

Guys: "Sale" is a noun. "Sell" is a verb.

You don't say "I'm going to sale my books." You don't say "How many sells did you get?"

Nouns. Verbs. This is basic English. If you're shaky on grammar your local bookstore is full of review and study workbooks.

[Ivonia]

Thanks for that advice Uncle Jim! I always wondered why books said "If this book doesn't have a front cover..." in the first part of the book, but I never understood exactly why and how that worked till now.

I guess I'll be more cautious from now on when buying a book. Not that I've seen any books with the front covers ripped off before, but if I ever do, now I'll know how it got there.

[James D. Macdonald]

A while back I talked about fanfiction.net, and about fanfiction in general, as representative of the slush pile.

Other on-line fiction archives are worse -- because when a writer gets good enough to be professionally published, generally they are. The cream gets skimmed off.

But in fan fiction (and to some extent in erotica), the stories can have no legal existence. No matter how well written, they can't be published. They use trademarked/copyrighted characters without permission.

Here are two that would be publishable, if not for the legal problems:

Harry Potter and the Horrid Pain of the Artiste (http://www.geocities.com/school_idiot/hp.htm)
Agent Scully and the Dirty Story (http://prillalar.com/fic/stories/000026.php)

Notice too, these are both meta-fictions about writing. Ironic self-awareness. Y'know.

Take away such lessons as you can.

[Roger J Carlson]

OK, I just spent two marathon sessions reading Uncle Jim Undiluted. Anybody know how far back in THIS thread I have to go to finish catching up?

[Roger J Carlson]

OK, I just spent two marathon sessions reading Uncle Jim Undiluted. Anybody know how far back in THIS thread I have to go to finish catching up?

Er...Um...guess I answered my own question. It looks like it's page 109 post #2719. I wonder if someone could post that at the end of the "Undiluted" thread?

[MacAllister]

Roger--Uncle Jim Undiluted takes you to January first of this year. :) So if you start on page (http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6710&page=109&pp=25) 109 (http://absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6710&page=109&pp=25) of THIS thread, it brings you up to date.

I should be getting January and February up in the next day or two, and updating monthly after that...then everyone only has to read back to the first of the current month to be up-to-date with the conversation.

Cheers!

[James D. Macdonald]

I do have to comment that many people besides me have excellent things to say, and the entire context is good to have.

[MacAllister]

Definitely, Jim--and that is stated in no uncertain terms in the intro to the Undiluted thread, too.

[Roger J Carlson]

Ok, now that I'm up to date, I wanted to ask a question about POD that has been bugging me for some time.

Why don't the publishing houses maintain a POD facility for their back-list or out-of-print books? (Sorry if I'm using the wrong terms here.) It just seems to me that it would be a good thing for both the author and the publisher if a reader could order a brand new copy of an old book. It wouldn't require much overhead compared to warehousing books, and it might produce a little income. If enough of the books are ordered, they might want to consider printing it again.

Baen is doing something similar by offering older books in a downloadable format. http://www.webscription.net/

[Maryn]

I just discovered that although reading all 3500 messages, or from point X forward, might be more complete, lack of time and the size of this thread was so utterly daunting that I skipped it daily.

Today I just dived in at the last page--this one--and I'm not all that lost. It helps that many people quote what they're replying to, of course, and I don't know what every single message is talking about, but I get enough of it to find it worthwhile.

One thing the internet has taught me is that I'm never the only one who ______. It might be worth encouraging others who avoid this big ol' thread out of fear of being lost or missing out on something to just jump in. Perhaps in the undiluted thread, or a sticky?

Maryn, swimming with the big kids!

P.S. James D. McDonald, the naked pictures are on the way--you do know that I'm a mole rat, right? You kinky fella!

[James D. Macdonald]

Why don't the publishing houses maintain a POD facility for their back-list or out-of-print books?

Many regular publishing houses already use digital printing technology for their backlist titles.

For out of print books they can't -- because the rights have usually reverted to the author.

[Medievalist]

[QUOTE=James D. Macdonald]Many regular publishing houses already use digital printing technology for their backlist titles.

For out of print books they can't -- because the rights have usually reverted to the author.[/QUOTE

There are publishers who specialized in books where rights have reverted back to the author. I've typeset several, and helped to get such books back in print. I can think of a few publishers, print and e-books who specialize in such reprints, though I think it's probably more common in academic publishing than it is in fiction. Wildside press has republished a fair amount of SF / non-SF by SF authors.

[Jaws]

Many regular publishing houses already use digital printing technology for their backlist titles. For out of print books they can't — because the rights have usually reverted to the author.
I'll grant "sometimes", but not "usually." Particularly in trade and serious nonfiction, getting a publisher to admit that a book is out-of-print is about as easy as getting a fair and accurate vote count for governor in Washington State—in other words, there will be recounts, contested sales, and the whole ball of wax (which is a publishing aphorism).

Remember, guys, as exciting as fiction can be, the industry lives on nonfiction, and establishes its standard usages based on nonfiction. <SARCASM> Except, of course, for royalty statements, which are usually far more outlandish science fiction than anything ever written by E.E. Smith. </SARCASM>

[Jaws]

But in fan fiction (and to some extent in erotica), the stories can have no legal existence. No matter how well written, they can't be published. They use trademarked/copyrighted characters without permission.
For anybody who cares, I've been blawgging (that's "blogging on legal issues") on fan fiction for a while on Scrivener's Error (http://scrivenerserror.blogspot.com); just go to the main page and use the pull-down for Warped Weft. I've been covering the legal doctrines concerning fan fiction in enough detail that a nonlawyer can sound intelligent and well-informed to a lawyer whose practice doesn't concentrate in copyright and/or publishing law. I hope.

If anything, Jim is understating the legal problems with fan fiction. And that's before one gets into the ethical issues… not so much with writing it as with publicly displaying it (whether on the 'net or otherwise).

[James D. Macdonald]

As amusing as the world of non-fiction may be for the writers, this is the novels board.

[Jaws]

Jim, my point was that novelists can't assume that what they see in fiction publishing represents the industry's practice. In this instance, the outside-of-fiction practice is part of why fiction-oriented imprints aren't doing more "let's POD our own backlist."

[James D. Macdonald]

All of my comments here, unless explicitly marked as being about something else, should be assumed to be about novels.

-------------

So now I'll move on to an area away from novels.

Y'all know the movie The Incredibles? You know the character "Elastigirl"? She's called Elastigirl in the film -- but in the advertising, in the games, in the Happy Meals, in everywhere other than the film, she's referred to as "Mrs. Incredible."

-------------

Back to books.

Is there any fan fiction based on my own works? I don't know. I have quite deliberately never looked.

[alaskamatt17]

I've never really had any desire to write fan fiction. The closest I've ever come to it was writing a story about a kid who brought dinosaurs back to life as a science fair project after I read Jurassic Park in second grade.

For me, the best part of writing is creating my own setting. Characters are fun to create, too, and you can't really explore the world without them, but the world is the most enjoyable part, at least for me.

But I have heard of at least one published author who got her start writing fan fiction. I can't remember her name, but I read about her back when TopDeck magazine was still in print. She started writing original fiction after an editor who liked her fan fiction contacted her. That really sounds amazing to me. It must've been some good fan fiction to get an editor to actually contact her.

[James D. Macdonald]

But I have heard of at least one published author who got her start writing fan fiction. I can't remember her name, but I read about her back when TopDeck magazine was still in print. She started writing original fiction after an editor who liked her fan fiction contacted her. That really sounds amazing to me. It must've been some good fan fiction to get an editor to actually contact her.

That sounds entirely possible. Writing is writing, and good is good. And it's also true that some editors read fanfic (as their secret vice).

Way back upstream, I even said that there was nothing wrong with writing fanfic as a way of practicing your skills. The only problem comes when you publish it.

So I wouldn't recommend writing and publishing fanfic as a way to attract an editor's attention.

[James D. Macdonald]

Let's dip back to page 105 (http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6710&page=105&pp=25) of this thread:


He shouldn’t have taken the shortcut.

Bahzell Bahnakson realized that the instant he heard the sounds drifting down the inky-dark cross corridor. He’d had to keep to the back ways used only by the palace servants—and far more numerous slaves—if he wanted to visit Brandark without the Guard’s knowledge, for he was too visible to come and go openly without being seen. But he shouldn’t have risked the shortcut just to avoid the more treacherous passages of the old keep.

He stood in an ill-lit hall heavy with the stink of its sparse torches (the expensive oil lamps were saved for Churnazh and his “courtiers”), and his mobile, foxlike ears strained at the faint noises. Then they flattened in recognition, and he cursed. Such sounds were none of his business, he told himself, and keeping clear of trouble was. Besides, they were far from the first screams he’d heard in Navahk . . . and there’d been nothing a prince of rival Hurgrum could do about the others, either.

He squeezed his dagger hilt, and his jaw clenched with the anger he dared not show his “hosts.” Bahzell had never considered himself squeamish, even for a hradani, but that was before his father sent him here as an envoy. As a hostage, really, Bahzell admitted grimly. Prince Bahnak’s army had crushed Navahk and its allies, yet Hurgrum was only a single city-state. She lacked the manpower to occupy her enemies’ territories, though many a hradani chieftain would have let his own realm go to ruin by trying to add the others to it.

But Bahnak was no ordinary chieftain. He knew there could be no lasting peace while Churnazh lived, yet he was wise enough to know what would happen if he dispersed his strength in piecemeal garrisons, each too weak to stand alone. He could defeat Navahk and its allies in battle; to conquer them he needed time to bind the allies his present victories had attracted to him, and he’d bought that time by tying Churnazh and his cronies up in a tangle of treaty promises, mutual defense clauses, and contingencies a Purple Lord would have been hard put to unra-vel. Half a dozen mutually suspicious hradani warlords found the task all but impossible, and to make certain they kept trying rather than resorting to more direct (and traditional) means of resolution, Bahnak had insisted on an exchange of hostages. It was simply Bahzell’s ill fortune that Navahk, as the most powerful of Hurgrum’s opponents, was entitled to a hostage from Hurgrum’s royal family.

Bahzell understood, but he wished, just this once, that he could have avoided the consequences of being Bahnak’s son. Bad enough that he was a Horse Stealer, towering head and shoulders above the tallest of the Bloody Sword tribes and instantly identifiable as an outsider. Worse that Hurgrum’s crushing victories had humiliated Navahk, which made him an instantly hated outsider. Yet both of those things were only to be expected, and Bahzell could have lived with them, if only Navahk weren’t ruled by Prince Churnazh, who not only hated Prince Bahnak (and his son), but despised them as degenerate, over-civilized weaklings, as well. His cronies and hangers-on aped their prince’s attitude and, predictably, each vied with the other to prove his contempt was deeper than any of his fellows’.

So far, Bahzell’s hostage status had kept daggers out of his back and his own sword sheathed, but no hradani was truly suited to the role of diplomat, and Bahzell had come to suspect he was even less suited than most. It might have been different somewhere else, but holding himself in check when Bloody Swords tossed out insults that would have cost a fellow Horse Stealer blood had worn his temper thin. He wondered, sometimes, if Churnazh secretly wanted him to lose control, wanted to drive Bahzell into succumbing to the Rage in order to free himself from the humiliating treaties? Or was it possible Churnazh truly believed his sneer that the Rage had gone out of Hurgrum, leaving her warriors gutless as water? It was hard to be sure of anything where the Navahkan was concerned, but two things were certain as death. He hated and despised Prince Bahnak, and his contempt for the changes Bahnak had wrought in Hurgrum was boundless.

====================


Okay, guys, everyone read that excerpt? Let's take it apart.


He shouldn’t have taken the shortcut.

Places a male in a situation, with a hint of a problem.

Bahzell Bahnakson realized that the instant he heard the sounds drifting down the inky-dark cross corridor.

Not an English name. Good thing we know (from the first paragraph) that this is a male. We have sounds, bringing in another sense, and more setting -- the shortcut has dark cross corridors. We're probably in a fantasy novel. Bet his dad's name is Bahnak.

He’d had to keep to the back ways used only by the palace servants—and far more numerous slaves—if he wanted to visit Brandark without the Guard’s knowledge, for he was too visible to come and go openly without being seen.

Okay, we're in a palace, in the back ways. There are servants here. Brandark is either a person or a place (unclear), and the Guard is a problem. Probably using too many words that begin with B as proper nouns, and "he was too visible to come and go openly without being seen" wins a "Well, duh!" award. Gives motivation for our guy to be in that shortcut, presumably a passageway in the palace.

But he shouldn’t have risked the shortcut just to avoid the more treacherous passages of the old keep.

This reinforces that we're in a shortcut, and that if we're not in the old keep itself, the old keep is probably nearby and another possible route. But if the passages of the old keep are more treacherous, isn't avoiding them the right choice?


He stood in an ill-lit hall heavy with the stink of its sparse torches (the expensive oil lamps were saved for Churnazh and his “courtiers”), and his mobile, foxlike ears strained at the faint noises.

Bringing in yet another sense (smell, this time), and a bit of personal description. Whether the ears being fox-like is literal or metaphorical we can't tell. Another character is mentioned (Churnazh) and identified as to gender. "Courtiers" in quotes implies that they aren't really courtiers. A level of tech is implied -- oil lamps and torches for light -- and a bit about the economy (expensive oil lamps).

Then they flattened in recognition, and he cursed.

Okay, the ears are literally fox-like. Human ears don't flatten in recognition. "He cursed" gets around the problem of actually saying #$#%! in a book.

Such sounds were none of his business, he told himself, and keeping clear of trouble was.

Okay, the sounds aren't the sounds of pursuit. But we're given a hint that he'll be moved from his original plans. No one tells himself that something isn't any of his business unless it actually is.


Besides, they were far from the first screams he’d heard in Navahk . . . and there’d been nothing a prince of rival Hurgrum could do about the others, either.

We're told what the sounds are. And where we are. And who our boy is -- a prince of rival Hurgrum. A bit of politics and hints of another problem.

He squeezed his dagger hilt, and his jaw clenched with the anger he dared not show his “hosts.”

Quote marks mean they're not really hosts. A bit about what weapons are expected (and given the other tech levels, and the genre, not unexpected).


Bahzell had never considered himself squeamish, even for a hradani, but that was before his father sent him here as an envoy.

Are hradani well known for lack of squeamishness? A hint of nameless perversion here -- sort of like saying that something makes an experienced homicide detective feel ill.

As a hostage, really, Bahzell admitted grimly.

Our boy's status, and how he feels about it. The "grimly" is a bit of countersinking.

Prince Bahnak’s army had crushed Navahk and its allies, yet Hurgrum was only a single city-state.

"Prince Bahnak is likely our boy Bahzell's dad. Navahk is likely a country -- but this is pretty unclear. Hurgrum is identified as "a single city-state." That tells us the political geography a bit better. City-states, ruled by princes.

She lacked the manpower to occupy her enemies’ territories, though many a hradani chieftain would have let his own realm go to ruin by trying to add the others to it.

City-states get gendered pronouns. This sentence is also pretty incoherent. The hradani apparently have chieftains. It looks like the hradani are fox-people.

But Bahnak was no ordinary chieftain.

He's apparently a Prince. And it appears that he won't let his own realm go to ruin. All this is talking about our protagonist's father, while he's pausing in a darkened corridor, listening to screams. I'm not certain this is the right place for core-dump exposition.

He knew there could be no lasting peace while Churnazh lived, yet he was wise enough to know what would happen if he dispersed his strength in piecemeal garrisons, each too weak to stand alone.

Churnazh is the rival prince from another city-state. The guy with the "courtiers."

He could defeat Navahk and its allies in battle; to conquer them he needed time to bind the allies his present victories had attracted to him, and he’d bought that time by tying Churnazh and his cronies up in a tangle of treaty promises, mutual defense clauses, and contingencies a Purple Lord would have been hard put to unravel.

What exactly a Purple Lord might be isn't clear, other than that they're apparently experts in paperwork. A distinction is made between winning a battle and conquest. Churnazh is the bad guy -- only bad guys have cronies. Bahnak is a good guy -- good guys have allies.


Half a dozen mutually suspicious hradani warlords found the task all but impossible, and to make certain they kept trying rather than resorting to more direct (and traditional) means of resolution, Bahnak had insisted on an exchange of hostages.

Back to why our hero is here. That was certainly the long way around the barn.


It was simply Bahzell’s ill fortune that Navahk, as the most powerful of Hurgrum’s opponents, was entitled to a hostage from Hurgrum’s royal family.

I'm confused. Apparently we've just been told that Churnazh is the Prince of Navahk and that Bahzell, son of the Prince of Hurgrum, is Churnazh's hostage during a pause in hostilities. Throwing an awful lot of names in the air here.


Bahzell understood, but he wished, just this once, that he could have avoided the consequences of being Bahnak’s son.

Just this once? He's Bahnak's son. I get it. I'm not certain that this entire expository lump couldn't have been deleted without leaving a hole.

Bad enough that he was a Horse Stealer, towering head and shoulders above the tallest of the Bloody Sword tribes and instantly identifiable as an outsider.

Horse Stealer appears to be a tribal name, rather than a job description. We have varying sub-races in these fox-people. We have a bit of description of our hero.



Worse that Hurgrum’s crushing victories had humiliated Navahk, which made him an instantly hated outsider.

So, he's a hostage, and the locals don't like him. But ... what's this with victories? I thought we were between battles, and we have an exchange of hostages ... this isn't making much sense.

Yet both of those things were only to be expected, and Bahzell could have lived with them, if only Navahk weren’t ruled by Prince Churnazh, who not only hated Prince Bahnak (and his son), but despised them as degenerate, over-civilized weaklings, as well.

Exposition.

His cronies and hangers-on aped their prince’s attitude and, predictably, each vied with the other to prove his contempt was deeper than any of his fellows’.

Cronies ... hangers-on ... aped. Slanted words. Those are some bad bad guys. Any chance Churnazh is just misunderstood?

So far, Bahzell’s hostage status had kept daggers out of his back and his own sword sheathed, but no hradani was truly suited to the role of diplomat, and Bahzell had come to suspect he was even less suited than most.

Are Hradani a social class, a race, or a political unit? Taller, less squeamish, and less suited to diplomatic service than others of his kind.

It might have been different somewhere else, but holding himself in check when Bloody Swords tossed out insults that would have cost a fellow Horse Stealer blood had worn his temper thin.

We have a couple of tribes, apparently.

He wondered, sometimes, if Churnazh secretly wanted him to lose control, wanted to drive Bahzell into succumbing to the Rage in order to free himself from the humiliating treaties?

The Rage? A new term. And we fall into the unfortunate fantasy novel Curse of Promiscuous Capitalization.

Or was it possible Churnazh truly believed his sneer that the Rage had gone out of Hurgrum, leaving her warriors gutless as water?

Bet not.

It was hard to be sure of anything where the Navahkan was concerned, but two things were certain as death.

All this while paused at a cross corridor stinking of torches, while listening to faint screams, while sneaking off to see Brandark (whoever he or she might be).


He hated and despised Prince Bahnak, and his contempt for the changes Bahnak had wrought in Hurgrum was boundless.

He is Churnazh. Is Hurgrum the entire region, with various city-states in it? The entire expository lump could probably have been condensed to this one sentence, and let Bahzell continue sneaking around.

Betcha a nickle that our boy Bahzell will turn aside from his original plan in order to see who's screaming, will meet a new character, and the plot will continue from there.

==========================

So, do we want to turn the page?

[HConn]

So, do we want to turn the page?

I might turn the page. Maybe not. Truth is, I would have skimmed a lot of that info dump trying to get to something fun. If I'm near other books, I might toss this on the "finished" shelf. But I probably wouldn't drop it into my bag if the movie hasn't started yet.

[maestrowork]

If it were the first chapter, I probably wouldn't have turned the page. I'd be bored by the expo and the B names and all those words. And why do we stop in the middle of a scene to go over all that history?

Now, if it's somewhere in the middle of the book, I might continue, given I already know the characters and all the previous scenes and why he's there. I might not mind some backstory and exposition.

[BlueTexas]

I kept having to go back to the B-names to figure out who was where. This lost me at the first paragraph.

[Georgiana]

But in fan fiction (and to some extent in erotica), the stories can have no legal existence. No matter how well written, they can't be published. They use trademarked/copyrighted characters without permission.



Hi there Uncle Jim. Pleased to meet you.

Would you please explain what you mean about to some extent in erotica? The fanfic is pretty obvious but I'm baffled over this one.

And on another note in the long PA thread you talked about how Ellora's Cave gets good reviews from its published authors yet I see that they offer no advances which would normally be a warning sign to me. Could you elaborate on why that is not a problem?

I have never posted anywhere where you had to stay on topic before so if my question is in the wrong place I am sorry. I'm not sure my easily digressed mind is suited to this style of board but I am hoping I can be trained.

Thanks very much for all of your useful information and the time that you spend with everyone.

[James D. Macdonald]

Would you please explain what you mean about to some extent in erotica? The fanfic is pretty obvious but I'm baffled over this one.


If you want to be able to publish erotica in the US, oddly enough, it has to meet Canadian regulations if they're planning to export to Canada. That includes strictures against incest, and "incest" for Canadian legal purposes includes people who are only related through marriage. Your big publishers don't want their shipments of books confiscated at the Canadian border.

Also, in erotica, you can't show sexual relations between people under the age of 18. (Oddly, you can show 'em in, for example, serious YA novels, but not in erotica.)

Some other practices, or descriptions of them, may be illegal in certain jurisdictions. Publishers who regularly sell in those areas ... won't publish those stories, no matter how well they're written.

Seriously, you can do things in "literature" that you can't do in "pornography." Weird, but that's the way it works.



And on another note in the long PA thread you talked about how Ellora's Cave gets good reviews from its published authors yet I see that they offer no advances which would normally be a warning sign to me. Could you elaborate on why that is not a problem?


This isn't a problem because they manage to sell pretty well and pay decent royalties, on time.

The big cut off is between charging the author/not charging the author.

A good number of perfectly respectable small presses don't pay advances. The ones that charge money of an author, no matter how good the publisher's explanation might be, are on the other side of the line.

Ellora's Cave has proved that they do pay, and they sell to someone other than the author and the author's posse.

[Georgiana]

Thanks very much. That's quite interesting. I've read a little about Canadian censorship at Neil Gaiman's blog. I hadn't realized it carried through to American publishers also but then I only recently started thinking about writing an erotic novel.

That is probably not even strictly true. I started a novel called Bare Minimum about a girl who decides she's had it living in a world with double standards and she going to go out and act like this guy friend of hers and have a one night stand. She gives up all her normal criteria and sticks with bare minimum standards, ie, he has to not have a mustache and he has to agree to use a condom.

Over the course of the book she realizes with each attempt that she really does have much more stringent requirements and she adds more and more to her bare minimum standards until she is right back where she started.

Meanwhile there is this guy who likes her but thinks she is behaving like a perfect little idiot and by the end she is very attracted to him. It's meant to be a romantic comedy. (I write screenplays and I have no idea if that is a proper term for novels but I think you will know what I mean.)

That's my very basic outline. I started it for NaNoWriMo and quit when this terribly annoying neurological condition I have suddenly got worse and I lost the ability to sit and write 2000 words a day. Plus I landed a weekly entertainment column that is taking all my time and energy.

I have been thinking about working on this book again but I find I want the scenes to be much spicer than I originally meant them to be. Maybe my character really does want to sleep with these guys before deciding they are no good.

So I got to thinking maybe it would be nice if I found a publisher who would like something much stronger than the romance publisher I originally had in mind and started looking into erotic markets.

The more I think about it though the more I suspect it is just another form of cat vacuuming. If I am researching and reading great big whacking long threads about writing and publishing I'm not writing am I? At least not fiction, I am doing very well with my weekly column.

I suspect what I should do is just write the first draft and let it be as erotic as it wants to be and then decide later whether or not to cut a bunch of it out.

[James D. Macdonald]

I suspect what I should do is just write the first draft and let it be as erotic as it wants to be and then decide later whether or not to cut a bunch of it out.

You suspect right.

Write the book, then see which publishers would be a fit for the book.

If you're doing underage-girls-n-goats, with throbbing descriptions of bodily fluids splashing about, well, finding a publisher might be a bit tough. But what you describe sounds perfectly publishable.

[Georgiana]

And the only goat so far is one that escapes and is found wandering by the side of road. I would call him a plot point, not a character, thank goodness.

I wrote 500 words today. It's nowhere near your suggested output but it's good enough to make me happy. Thank you for the advice. It was quite useful.

[Galoot]

So, do we want to turn the page?
No.

I had trouble just getting through the short excerpt. Way too much exposition in too short a space for me. It feels like the author is trying to inject the backstory directly into the reader's brain as fast as possible, and that doesn't mix well with the action opening.

If I'm creeping through the dimly lit back passages, hoping not to be spotted, what's going to be running through my head is "Bahzell creep... Bahzell creep... Bahzell creep..." (sorry). I'm not going to be reliving the high points of my entire life up until that moment.

As a reader I want to know why he's lurking around down there, but I don't want a history lesson right in the middle of the action. Give it to me in dribbles throughout the book. Show it to me in dialogue. Stick it in a prologue, where I will read it without wishing Bahzell would just get on with it already and get to the end of the hallway.

If you must dump all that history in my lap at once, write a chapter that begins with the line "Bahzell remembered the day he'd learned..." instead of interrupting what should be a hooky beginning.

No. I wouldn't turn the page. In fact, I'd probably take note of the author's name and the copyright date. If the author was lucky, I'd learn the book was published in 1995 or earlier and look for something more recent. If I was in a foul mood, I'd just remember the name as one not to bother with on my next trip to the store.

Harsh? Yeah. I didn't like it.

[James D. Macdonald]

So, delete everything from "He squeezed his dagger hilt..." through "...wrought in Hurgrum was boundless"?

Yeah, I could go with that. That was one heck of an expository lump filling the first two pages -- and it wasn't very gracefully written, either.

That one would be a "back on the shelf" for me. Or I might try the Page 147 Test. That's where you turn to page 147 to see if it's gotten any better.

[maestrowork]

(Quickly, Ray flips to page 147 of his own book to see if it would ever pass the test... to his relief, it's the page where the giant pig eats its own liver. That will do. That will do.)

[Galoot]

Damn! My 147th page reads "Part II."

Crap.

[Julian Black]

(Quickly, Ray flips to page 147 of his own book to see if it would ever pass the test... to his relief, it's the page where the giant pig eats its own liver. That will do. That will do.)

"That'll do, Pig. That'll do."

I think the movie Babe has now been ruined for me, forever...

[reph]

Page 147

Bahzell pricked up his ears. The mysterious sounds that reached him from dank, unseen rooms had changed, almost imperceptibly. Muffled voices spoke in slightly less familiar accents, accents difficult to interpret for one accustomed to the easy speech of one's fellow hradani back home in Hurgrum. The echoes sounded a bit different: the chambers here must have been constructed of a different kind of stone, perhaps quarried locally but no doubt hauled by unwilling captives to their current site, under the Guard's cruel lash. The very air, foul as it was, carried a changed scent to Bahzell's sensitive nostrils.

Slowly it dawned on him. I must be nearing the end of the corridor.

I'm so glad I took the shortcut.

[astonwest]

That one would be a "back on the shelf" for me. Or I might try the Page 147 Test. That's where you turn to page 147 to see if it's gotten any better.

My first book didn't even have a page 147...
:ROFL:

[E.G. Gammon]

Hmm, the Page 147 Test. That's interesting. I've never heard of it. I wonder if there is a way to estimate where in your manuscript page 147 will be, so that you can make sure something incredible happens then and around there.

[MacAllister]

I wonder if there is a way to estimate where in your manuscript page 147 will be, so that you can make sure something incredible happens then and around there. I expect the thing to do is make sure something incredible happens on just about EVERY page...

[Andrew Jameson]

Hmm, the Page 147 Test. That's interesting. I've never heard of it. I wonder if there is a way to estimate where in your manuscript page 147 will be, so that you can make sure something incredible happens then and around there.
Seriously, I do the "page 147 test" all the time. When I pick up a novel in the bookstore that looks promising, I don't read the first page, because I figure the author's put on his best Sunday-go-to-meetin' clothes there at the beginning. I flip to a random page somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 the way through (which would be just... about... page 147) and start reading. I figure that's far enough along that the author has changed into his everyday clothes, but not so far along that it spoils the plot for me.

And I read a couple paragraphs. If it's boring or confusing, I'll riffle a few pages one way or another and continue reading. If that's boring or confusing, the book goes back on the shelf. If it hooks me, the book travels back home in my hands.

I have no idea how many other people actually do this. But it goes to show: that beautifully crafted opening scene in your novel? Won't hook me. But a beautifully crafted page 147 will.

[E.G. Gammon]

Yeah, that's true. Somehow, I want something big to happen around that page, but there's also a part of me that doesn't. I wonder how many people have ruined a book for themselves by looking ahead. In the first novel of my novel series, there are a couple major character deaths, and revelations throughout the whole book. As much as I hope page 147 is good, I also hope it isn't so good that it spoils something, like a murder scene for instance. I know that if I already know what's going to happen in a book, I don't read it. I'm going a little off topic here, but something that turns me away from a book is the opening chapter starting in media res (in the middle of the action) and then at the end of that chapter it says "20 years earlier" or something. That is a book I won't finish. I hate knowing what's going to happen.

[Richard]

If I ever do a murder mystery, I'm going to have the murderer confess on Page 147, and have the detective spend the next hundred pages humming.

[maestrowork]

I think most people have a "stop" mechanism when they read something they shouldn't... I mean, I do -- when I flip to the middle of a book and read something remotely "spoiler" material, I'll stop and flip to another page. By then, hopefully, I'll either be hooked already or bored to tears. I usually don't need to read the whole chapter or more than 3 pages to decide.

I also don't like to decide on a book based on the first chapter or so. I think most books (except some genres) start relatively slow anyway. They have to develop characters and build things up. And I don't mind a book that starts slow (but not TOO slow that puts me to sleep) -- some of the most emotionally intense books I've read started slow... the authors take time to make me care about the characters and the situations, instead of whacking me in the head with events and blood or whatever.

[James D. Macdonald]

I'd go for re-readablity. I mean, people re-read books, right? And the book is totally "spoiled" for them, right?

If all that your book has going for it is a surprise twist ending, that's not much to hang your shingle on.

[Inspired]

I'd go for re-readablity. I mean, people re-read books, right? And the book is totally "spoiled" for them, right?

If all that your book has going for it is a surprise twist ending, that's not much to hang your shingle on.

That's true - I don't re-read books that have a big twist at the ending. But, I do recommend them to my friends. If it's got a killer ending, I'll be spouting off about it for awhile.

[johnnycannuk]

I'd go for re-readablity. I mean, people re-read books, right? And the book is totally "spoiled" for them, right?

If all that your book has going for it is a surprise twist ending, that's not much to hang your shingle on.

Actually, I do re-read books with twist endings, at least once. Much like watching The 6th Sense or The Usual Suspects - I try to see the clues that were there that I missed and get "But of course!" feeling when I see it for the second time. Kind of one of those ideas that the story is about something the first time through (and is a good story) and that it about something else the second time through (and is still a good story).

Mike

[James D. Macdonald]

Yeah, in the world of movies, Sixth Sense and The Usual Suspects would be re-watchable because the twist ending isn't all they have going for them.

On the other hand ... The Village. The twist ending is all that movie has. It's not a watch-again.

[James D. Macdonald]

As some of you may know, I'll be at Writer's Weekend (http://www.writersweekend.com/) in Seattle, 9-12 June '05.

Well, they now have a message board (http://writersweekend.noderunner.net/) set up, in case you aren't subscribed to enough message boards yet.

[alaskamatt17]

I liked The Village and have watched it more than once. The twist ending isn't all it has going for it. It's not a heavy plot-driven movie, but some of the scenes are really well-crafted, and the cinemetography is amazing.

If it were a book, it would be one that you re-read for the prose, not for the story. Which means, I probably wouldn't re-read it. But since it's a movie, and it's only an hour-and-half long, I can justify watching it more than once.

[Galoot]

By the way, congratulations on your third ball, Jim.

[Roger J Carlson]

Jim,

I wanted to thank you for your advice upthread about "and then". It makes so much sense. In my novel, I originally had many sentences of this type: "She did this, then that." Microsoft Word always wanted me to change it to "and then" with no comma. Now, I don't usually pay much attention to Word's grammar checker. It's wrong more often than right, but I had no basis for disputing it. I thought maybe is was something I've done wrong all these years. So I followed it's advice.

Well, today as a result of your advice, I went back and changed nearly every instance of "and then" to ", then" and where that wasn't appropriate, I decided the "then" was superfluous.

Thanks again for the tip.

[Mistook]

Yeah, in the world of movies, Sixth Sense and The Usual Suspects would be re-watchable because the twist ending isn't all they have going for them.

On the other hand ... The Village. The twist ending is all that movie has. It's not a watch-again.


Oops, I just made a post to the re-read thread about this kind of thing. I'd say, it's not always the big, whiplash inducing plot twists that work for me, but the stories with the subtle twists and turns that gradually reinforce one another until at the end I ask myself, "I can't believe where that took story took me."

[Savannah Blue]

I have a question. How do you go from one time period to the next without telling the reader you are moving ahead? As in: 'this and this and this happened. A few weeks later, this and this... .' Saying 'a few weeks later' or 'one afternoon a couple of weeks later' just sounds lame. The story I'm working on now moves quickly within a specific amount of time.

Thanks.

[James D. Macdonald]

Really, there's nothing wrong with saying "What with this and that, some five years passed."

Look at books you know and like. How do those authors show the passage of time?

[Savannah Blue]

I will do that.
Thanks!

[reph]

In my novel, I originally had many sentences of this type: "She did this, then that."
If you've read the whole discussion in that part of the thread, you know that not everyone who's knowledgeable about such questions thinks "She [verb], then [verb]" is correct. I don't want to start that fight again, but I still don't like such sentences.

[brinkett]

By the way, congratulations on your third ball, Jim.
Am I the only "12-year old" who giggles every time I read this post?

On Topic: The "and then" thing. Since reading the posts about it, I consider my use of "and then" more seriously than I did before, but I still use it when it feels right. Sometimes the sentence just doesn't feel right to me if I use just "and" or just "then", but don't ask me to explain why.

[oswann]

Am I the only "12-year old" who giggles every time I read this post?

On Topic: The "and then" thing. Since reading the posts about it, I consider my use of "and then" more seriously than I did before, but I still use it when it feels right. Sometimes the sentence just doesn't feel right to me if I use just "and" or just "then", but don't ask me to explain why.


Prepare yourself for danger. Oh no! 'And then' is back. :Jaw:


Os.

[Christine N.]

Ok, I missed the "and then" discussion, and I can't find it. Someone summarize, please? I find myself using this, well, not often, but enough.

"She brought the soup tureen to the table, then ran back off to the kitchen." for example.

[Andrew Jameson]

Ok, I missed the "and then" discussion, and I can't find it. Someone summarize, please? I find myself using this, well, not often, but enough.

"She brought the soup tureen to the table, then ran back off to the kitchen." for example.
It starts up here (http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?p=82589#post82589) with a comment by Uncle Jim: I have lots of little idiosyncracies; for example, I dislike the word cluster "and then." "And" means two events happened at the same time, "then" means they happened sequentially. "And then" means ... what? I'll change that group to "and" or "then."
Then, reph made a comment (http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?p=82593#post82593) on "and then," and UJ replied (http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?p=82594#post82594) and the subject was off and running. It looked like it had petered out for a bit, but reph (http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?p=82603#post82603) and UJ (http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?p=82604#post82604) got into a bit of an entanglement. And then (ha! joke! don't kill me!) multiple (http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?p=82616#post82616) other (http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?p=82623#post82623) people (http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?p=82628#post82628) weighed in, and there was some intelligent discussion and a few hurt feelings, and UJ wrote some more (http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?p=82632#post82632) and the discussion gradually turned to grammar in general (although the occasional "and then" reference pops up over the next couple pages) and the whole thing finally does peter out.

[NicoleJLeBoeuf]

If you've read the whole discussion in that part of the thread, you know that not everyone who's knowledgeable about such questions thinks "She [verb], then [verb]" is correct. I don't want to start that fight again, but I still don't like such sentences.One of these days I'm going to start a multiple choice Learn Writing with Uncle Jim poll. It'll have "writer personality test" questions on it like this:

1. "and then"?
a) Yes
b) No

2. A novel is like a crate. A short story is like...
a) a key lime pie
b) a very small crate

3. Prologues?
a) Cut 'em out
b) You mispelled "chapter one"
c) You mispelled "prolog"

...and so forth. It'll be fun!

[Christine N.]

Ok, I'm confused. A comma has more than one function, does it not? Sometimes it signifies a pause, but sometimes it stands in place of the word "and", like in a list.


I know my grammar checker has a fit every time I use the ",then", but I'm not sure what else to use if I want to say that someone did something then did something else. If I take the comma out, it looks and sounds funny to me.

Call me thick on this subject, but I just don't see what the deal is? I am familiar with most of the rules of grammar, but I'm drawing a blank on this one.

[James D. Macdonald]

Disable the grammar-checker in your wordprocessor. You'll be better off.

[reph]

Ok, I'm confused. A comma has more than one function, does it not? Sometimes it signifies a pause, but sometimes it stands in place of the word "and", like in a list.
In one sense, a comma has only one function: to separate things, to make a visual pause. There are many reasons to want to do that, however, and there are correspondingly many uses of commas. Any basic grammar book should list the uses.

The comma in a list does signify a pause. It shows where one item ends and the next begins. In speech, we do that with a combination of brief silences and intonation.

With commas: sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll
Without commas: sex drugs and rock 'n' roll

[Fresie]

One of these days I'm going to start a multiple choice Learn Writing with Uncle Jim poll. It'll have "writer personality test" questions on it

Great idea, Nicole. Everybody who wants to participate in this thread will have to pass the test first... :Trophy:

[Christine N.]

Disable the grammar-checker in your wordprocessor. You'll be better off.

Yes, this is probably true. LOL

And I was always under the impression from my grade school English teacher (and my mother, who taught HS English, so she kind of made it mandatory to use good grammar 'round my house) that it was:

Sex, drugs and rock 'n roll and NOT Sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll. Because commas signify the word "and", so having a comma before "and" was redundant.

But it's been a while since I went to school - have the rules changed that much?

[NicoleJLeBoeuf]

Great idea, Nicole. Everybody who wants to participate in this thread will have to pass the test first... :Trophy:No no no no no. Not test, not something you have to pass--just a poll. Personality quiz sorta thing. One might even create some sort of .sig geek code based on it, only I never completely figured out how those worked in the first place.

[NicoleJLeBoeuf]

Yes, this is probably true. LOL

And I was always under the impression from my grade school English teacher (and my mother, who taught HS English, so she kind of made it mandatory to use good grammar 'round my house) that it was:

Sex, drugs and rock 'n roll and NOT Sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll. Because commas signify the word "and", so having a comma before "and" was redundant.

But it's been a while since I went to school - have the rules changed that much?How does that pro-serial-comma propaganda go? "I would like to thank my parents, Ayn Rand and God." Sometimes it's useful to put a comma before "and".

[Inspired]

The current English grammar books for 5/6 grade say to use the comma before the and. I just taught that section to my class. I also just corrected their English homework yesterday - that's the least of their problems!

[alaskamatt17]

The only place you need look to settle this argument is page 2 of The Elements of Style. In business names, it's okay to omit the last comma in a series; everywhere else, it's not. Or it's not supposed to be. I see it happening more and more frequently, and I have to say it annoys me. A comma does not mean "and," it's only a signal to pause. Most people, when speaking, would pause before the last phrase in a series, so the comma should stay.

[Christine N.]

Well, alrighty then! I guess the rules have changed since I went to school. Wish someone would make an announcement or something when that happens.

[reph]

The series comma isn't right or wrong; the choice depends on level of formality. Academic publishers use that comma and newspapers don't.

[Medievalist]

Warning: The Serial Comma Question is an editorial religous issue. Do not enter the fray.

If your editor likes the serial comma, why then, you are a loyal adherent; if your editor doesn't like the serial comma, then you shall cast it from your manuscript as heresy

Never come between two editors "discussing" the serial comma.

Never take them to a bar to lubricate their argument.

You can't afford the tab. None of us can.

[Alphabeter]

But as long as we refer them to this thread and say "Uncle Jim said it was [not] okay" we should be fine.

Right?!

[Christine N.]

Yeah, I guess things like that really are up to the editor. But I remember clearly being in grade school (or was is Jr. High) and being told that a comma could take the place of the word "and". If you were writing a list, instead of writing "Bananas and cheese and milk and eggs" you write "Bananas, cheese, milk, eggs." I also remember that if there was a doubt about a comma, to read it out loud and substitute the word "and" for the comma to see if it still read correctly.

And commas, of course, signify pauses when not used in a list.

But, then again, I'm old. Once you hit the mid-30's, it's all downhill. Most of the things I know are probably different now.

I'll leave it alone - I just want someone to tell me I'm not losing my mind :)

[TashaGoddard]

I am an editor and am in general against the serial comma. However, if I'm working for a publisher which uses the serial comma as house style (e.g. Oxford University Press), then I will use it. It is not a definite grammatical yay or nay, but a matter for house style. (There are situations where you do need to use, though, regardless of house style and I will quite happily break the 'rules' in these cases.)

As Medievalist says, it is an editorial religious issue. We can get quite het up in our arguments about it (like Mac users vs. PC users in the computing world); but at the end of the day it's the publishing house (or specific list) that sets down the rules.

[Lenora Rose]

There are also times the serial comma is in for clarity, as when some item in the list also includes an "and".

"We invited Rochelle, Gary, Teresa and her new beau, and Edgar."

The pot luck spread included chips with guacamole and salsa, meatballs, macaroni and cheese, greek salad, and home-baked buns."

[book_maven]

I am a relative newcomer who writes nonfiction, primarily essays and book reviews. But I have had this novel rolling around in the back of my mind for several years. I guess I'd describe it as a thriller given that it is a fictional "explanation" (the "real" story behind the real story) for an international incident that took place in the 20th century.

My question is this: Is there any problem using real politicians and military personnel along with fictional additions as I tell this "story"?

P.S. I think this is the right place to post this. I did check out the index to this thread as well as the other discussions to try and determine that.

[James D. Macdonald]

I guess I'd describe it as a thriller given that it is a fictional "explanation" (the "real" story behind the real story) for an international incident that took place in the 20th century.

I've seen that genre called "secret history."

My question is this: Is there any problem using real politicians and military personnel along with fictional additions as I tell this "story"?

The more public a person, the less protection that person has. Remember Forrest Gump meeting Lyndon Johnson? But that won't stop a real person from suing you, if that's what you're asking.

Do you have them doing bad things? Are they acting out of character?

The best I can tell you is -- write the story the best way you can, then let the publisher's legal department worry about it. Tell a strong story. Without a strong story, the question will never come up, since the story won't get published.

[book_maven]

I have begun it, Jim, and I believe it is a strong story. I don't have them doing bad things. Rather I am writing what I believe they might have done if this had been real. Thank you!

[Dawno]

There are also times the serial comma is in for clarity, as when some item in the list also includes an "and".

"We invited Rochelle, Gary, Teresa and her new beau, and Edgar."

The pot luck spread included chips with guacamole and salsa, meatballs, macaroni and cheese, greek salad, and home-baked buns."

I love it that this topic has come up as I am presently reading Eats, Shoots and Leaves. I know it has been out awhile but I just got my hands on it and can't put it down.

[katiemac]

That's funny you bring the book up, Dawn. I just heard about it the other day (it caught my eye because I know the joke which has the punchline for the title) and I couldn't resist to play the punctuation game (http://eatsshootsandleaves.com/)online.

I passed! Woohoo.

[James D. Macdonald]

Congratulations to Viable Paradise graduate David Moles on being a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award (http://locusmag.com/2005/News/03_HugoNominations.html) for Best New Writer.

Congratulations to Viable Paradise graduate Greg van Eekhout on his nomination for a Nebula Award (http://www.sfwa.org/awards/2005/nebfinal2004.html).

[Galoot]

Totally way cool!

[Fresie]

Fabulous -- congratulations!! Both to the students and to the teacher!

[JohnLynch]

Wow, congrats to both of them.

Uncle Jim, I have a question on endings. From memory, you've said three things about them (that I've read anyway):
1) Don't abandon your characters (e.g. everyone dies), because it comes across as just abandoning them. It's like you just bored of writing so you decided to end the story. The good guy nearly always wins. Readers want that.
2) Have the story end at the climax. Anything after the exciting bit is just boring. Write the story, and then delete the last page if it doesn't add anything.
3) Have the story end when everyone is going to go for pizza.

I'm writing a short story (I should probably write this in the short story forum) and for the story #1, #2 and #3 seem to conflict with each other. When this happens, is this a sign of a bad story?

Here's an attempt at a brief synopsis of the story:
Millenia ago society was quite advanced, a bit more then our own. Something happened and anarchy ruled. Over the millenia people forgot about the olden times and a medieval society formed once more. Old ruins were discovered and the King created a secret society to research the ruins and try to learn from their technology and recover any working stuff.

The main character Theron, a woodsman and part-time tax collector for a small town is forced to escort a strange man from the King to a place in the woods that no beast or plant enters. He has to do it if he wants to keep his job as tax-collector. He does so and the "sorcerer" pulls out some old technology and tells Theron a little about his true identity. He steps into the clearing and promptly dissapears. After several hours Theron enters the clearing and falls to the ground, when he lands on it he is "transported" to some old building with no windows. He walks through it and finds several animals that have been experimented on, and are now part animal-part machine. He finds the sorcerer who has began to be mutilated himself.

The sorcerer explains that metal-men have began to steal animals all over the kingdom, and that this is the first time they dared to enter their lair.

Now I'm a bit uncertain as to how to end it. My first thought was to have the sorcerer be attacked because he attempted to free one of the villagers who had been stolen in the night (I had a fair bit of foreshadowing for that) and to get Theron to leave, have the sorcerer tell him that the roof in the first room is only an illusion (which is why nothing grows in there, everything falls to the ground). And to go to his saddle-bags and pull out an explosive and throw it into the entrance to block the entry/exit. Tell Theron the metal-men will ignore him if he doesn't try to destroy anything and if he makes it out before night (the metal-men are robots so their hunting program doesn't kick in until nightfall). I was going to have Theron escape, constantly being worried about the time, and block the entry-way and ride back to town to tell the mayor what happened so the mayor can tell the King.

The problem with that ending is that isn't really the ending. The mayor is likely to insist that Theron go with him to the King to tell the King what happened, and then the King is likely to send some more "sorcerers" to destroy the other entrances in the woods (there's quite a few), and the metal-men are then likely to retaliate, etc, etc, etc. The story continues to grow quite a bit longer. He isn't really going out for pizza at the ending I suggested. A war is likely to occur.

So I thought of a new ending. The metal-men attacked the sorcerer before the sorcerer did anything because they're designed to do this if any beasts enter their lair. Theron tries to escape, but if the sorcerer, whose well trained couldn't escape, neither can a simple woodsman, so he's attacked and dies/mutilated.

But that's an "everyone dies" ending, which is no good.

In books I tend to ask "what next?", which is what I've done with this short story. I keep asking "what next?", "what next?", "what next?" so the story never ends. And I really only wanted to write a short-story in the first place (I've been avoiding writing the story because I don't think it's that great, but I do remind myself that yes, I can write crap. As long as I write). So how do you suggest I work out how to end it? Or how do you suggest I end it?

[James D. Macdonald]

In books I tend to ask "what next?", which is what I've done with this short story. I keep asking "what next?", "what next?", "what next?" so the story never ends. And I really only wanted to write a short-story in the first place (I've been avoiding writing the story because I don't think it's that great, but I do remind myself that yes, I can write crap. As long as I write). So how do you suggest I work out how to end it? Or how do you suggest I end it?

I suggest that you don't end it, because I don't see an ending there. At least, not yet. You've just gotten your characters into trouble.

(With our first novel, we were still calling it "the short story" when we hit 200 pages.)

Don't worry. When you come to the climax, you'll know. How will you know? Because suddenly the characters who had been acting purposefuly start wandering around and one of them says, "Hey, why don't we order out for pizza?"

As I see things, none of the characters have changed in any fundamental way, nor have you reached a natural stopping point.

Face it -- you've just finished the setup for a longer story than you had in mind. You've left too many "why"s lying around on the ground.

You aren't in a rush. Keep writing. See what happens.

(You want to learn how to write a novel? There's no substitute for writng one.)

[JohnLynch]

As I see things, none of the characters have changed in any fundamental way

Face it -- you've just finished the setup for a longer story than you had in mind. You've left too many "why"s lying around on the ground.Alright, I'll give it a go. Nothing like a published author suggesting you keep writing to encourage you ;) And I have two goals for the story to progress towards. Have at least one character change in a fundamental way. Answer more of the "why's" I've created, probably by working more of the backstory into the novel. Thinking about it, Most of the stories I like include those two things. Are there any other suggestions you have on elements I should include in the story?

Oh, and one other thing I have to do with this story is NOT re-write ;) That was my first reaction when I saw you suggest I keep writing. I was thinking "well I'll have to re-write the beginning to introduce more characters. I'll need to introduce a student/friend of the sorcerer because Theron just isn't going to be able to carry a longer story by himself." But no, instead I'll just continue on from where I'm at now, and either include flash-backs or back story if it's necessary, or just write the extra scenes out of when I come to the point where I think it's really necessary, so the story is out of order at first, and re-order the scenes upon completing it.


You aren't in a rush. Keep writing. See what happens.

(You want to learn how to write a novel? There's no substitute for writng one.)I was going to attempt a novel once I finished this "short story" and had some of the story already written in my head. Instead I'll just make some notes and shelve it for now :)

Thanks for the advice.

[James D. Macdonald]

Some of the Whys: Why's the king sending the sorceror?

Why's the sorceror obeying the king's orders?

Why are the machines interested in creating animal/machine pairings?

-----------

More characters? About time for our wandering pair to run into someone who's been living like a rat between the walls at this strange place.

Don't do flashbacks or backstory unless absolutety necessary.

[NicoleJLeBoeuf]

Congratulations to Viable Paradise graduate David Moles on being a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award (http://locusmag.com/2005/News/03_HugoNominations.html) for Best New Writer.

Congratulations to Viable Paradise graduate Greg van Eekhout on his nomination for a [url="http://www.sfwa.org/awards/2005/nebfinal2004.html"]Nebula AwardWhoo-hoo! Congrats to them--and to the VP teachers too! Must be lovely to see former students go on to greatness!

Speakin-a-which: UJ, are there dates for the 2006 VP workshop yet? Since I emailed you asking after the 2005 dates, I realized that they overlap with one of the few immovable items in my schedule. So, with a heavy heart, I didn't apply this year. If I know the dates of VP2006 I'll stand a better chance not making that mistake again...

[black winged fighter]

Well...it's official. I've started yet another WIP. Difference is, this time I know for certain where I want to go with it.

I suffer, however, from fear of writing trash. I know many writers say they don't expect to write very beautifully on the first go, at least all the time. It's what I've always tried to do, and pushing ahead so quickly with this WIP is leaving some rough patches I don't like. I know it can be fixed in a rewrite, but I feel that sometimes I lose the 'mood' of that section when I go back....

Any thoughts on that, from the writing gods?

[James D. Macdonald]

black wing -- just write. Figuring out which parts are lovely and which parts are trash is hard to do close-up.

Nichole -- we don't have dates for Viable Paradise 10 yet (except autumn, 2006). It will have a ten-year alumni reunion with an extra mini-workshop over the final weekend, though.

[black winged fighter]

Actually, after posting that and getting it out in the open, it was easier just to type. And I think it was - if not good - then at least type-worthy.

Letting it flow is much more enjoyable than analysing and dissecting every turn of phrase - though I'm sure that is to come.

[NicoleJLeBoeuf]

Nichole -- we don't have dates for Viable Paradise 10 yet (except autumn, 2006).I'll try to remember to ask again by October, before my husband and I jump on a reservation for the 2006 sailing of The Rock Boat (http://www.therockboat.com/main.html). TRB05 is the culprit, y'see. Darn that Columbus Day Weekend. Magnet for all the Labor Day Weekend overflow or something.

It will have a ten-year alumni reunion with an extra mini-workshop over the final weekend, though.Sounds like a blast!

[alaskamatt17]

Black winged fighter, that's cool that you started a new project. I started one recently, too. It's the second in my dinosaur adventure series, and I'm in love with this story. I've always heard people say that their characters and their stories take on lives of their own, and I've always thought it was hogwash. That never happened in any of my other stories over the past six years, but this one really is coming to life. even when I look back over it, the writing doesn't seem lackluster as my writing usually does by the time I get to the second draft. All signs indicate that it will turn out much better than the first (which I need to send out again since I got a rejection today).

I feel like I'm starting to be a success even though I'm still not published. I have five short stories out in the mail, I've finished my first REAL novel (well, not finished, but seven drafts are behind me, and the book feels ready to publish. I'm sure if I find any editors who want it they'll tell me what still needs to be revised). I'm so excited over just starting the work; I can't imagine what it'll feel like when I actually get something accepted.

[Galoot]

It feels great to be in the flow, doesn't it?

I wonder if it feels even better to be in the flow after the first 50 pages. -sigh-

[zornhau]

It feels great to be in the flow, doesn't it?

I wonder if it feels even better to be in the flow after the first 50 pages. -sigh-

Yes. :tongue

[Galoot]

Today I hate you. http://absolutewrite.com/forums/images/icons/icon8.gif

Tomorrow...who knows?

[zornhau]

Today I hate you. http://absolutewrite.com/forums/images/icons/icon8.gif

Tomorrow...who knows?

Tomorrow? You will post

That's my 1st chapter revised. It feels great. Wonder what it feels like to have revised the entire novel? :Headbang:


To which I'll reply

It feels fantastic.

And you will still hate me :Cheers:

[Alphabeter]

Is this what they call a theme? :idea:

[James D. Macdonald]

It is, indeed, a theme.

[jdparadise]

Page 147

...

Slowly it dawned on him. I must be nearing the end of the corridor.

I'm so glad I took the shortcut.

Wait.

Page 1, he's taking a shortcut.

Page 147, he's -still- taking the shortcut?

That, my friends, is one hell of a shortcut. And some awful good-burning kindling, once the cover's stripped.

[reph]

Wait.

Page 1, he's taking a shortcut.

Page 147, he's -still- taking the shortcut?

That, my friends, is one hell of a shortcut. And some awful good-burning kindling, once the cover's stripped.
Well, you see, it's Volume 1 in a trilogy.

[HConn]

A seven-book trilogy.

[jdparadise]

I suffer, however, from fear of writing trash. I know many writers say they don't expect to write very beautifully on the first go, at least all the time. It's what I've always tried to do, and pushing ahead so quickly with this WIP is leaving some rough patches I don't like.

Any thoughts on that, from the writing gods?


Not hardly a writing god (I may just be the God of Furry Goldfishes, but that comes with not so many perks as one might assume), but I'll offer a thought.

I like to outline. Well, no, I hate to outline, but I do it anyway. That lets me get the whole story out in the open--spying and getting rid of plot holes ahead of time, figuring out motivations, etc. I outline not by chapter, but by scene--and, in preliminary outlines, I sometimes outline by timeline-event, which is not necessarily the order the scenes will be presented in.

My current method of scene-outlining I'm really fond of--I start by stating the setting, characters present, the scene's relation to the story-goal, the viewpoint character's primary goal going into the scene... I've already done extensive character-figuring-out, so I usually know how my people will react.



...and then I break it down even further, to minigoals and the attempts to resolve them, e.g.:Minigoal:

Get the princess to talk to him.

Implementation:
First, try to make eye contact. That fails, miserably. She is Not Interested in talking--she's depressed over loss of her stuffed monkey. He clowns, to try to get her to at least look his way. She does, but only to spit on the ground near his feet. He wonders why he's bothering. Grows silent, withdrawn, angry. After a time, she looks up, apologizes. Alas, he screws it up--he's still angry (I'm just trying to be friends, and you're going to make me work for it? Over something as dumb as a stuffed monkey? (Our Hero doesn't get the mystical attachment of princesses to stuffed monkeys, no sir))--and he snaps at her.

Now she thinks he's a weasel-turd.

Ultimately he realizes his mistake.

Minigoal: get her to accept his apology for rejecting her apology.

First, he ...

Etc.


This format is so detailed, it serves as a compact version of the story--it lets me get into the characters and their motivations; effectively saving me time on rewrites. Then, when I go into the for-real version, since I've figured everything out ahead of time, it's just a matter of determining how to present it (not that that's easy, but it's easier, anyway).

For what that's worth. :)

[alaskamatt17]

It feels great to be in the flow, doesn't it?

I wonder if it feels even better to be in the flow after the first 50 pages. -sigh-
Galoot, it feels even better. I knew I was "in the flow" on my last book when I finished the sixty page climactic battle in two days. There was significant revision required, but the foundation was there, and it felt great to have just finished the longest thing I'd ever written.

But if you're getting stuck in the first fifty pages, don't worry. Just write yourself out of it. Even if you don't like what you write, it's better than a blank page.

[Christine N.]

Don't worry. When you come to the climax, you'll know. How will you know? Because suddenly the characters who had been acting purposefuly start wandering around and one of them says, "Hey, why don't we order out for pizza?"


Hey, that's kinda funny. My current WIP, I had no idea that the end was coming. I was going along, wrapping everything up, and just all of a sudden it was time to leave the room and go to breakfast. The end. there was nothing left to say. Totally snuck up on me.

Of course this was the first draft, and I'll probably change it. But it's a good variation of the pizza thing. Maybe I'll leave it.

[Christine N.]

Well...it's official. I've started yet another WIP. Difference is, this time I know for certain where I want to go with it.

I suffer, however, from fear of writing trash. I know many writers say they don't expect to write very beautifully on the first go, at least all the time. It's what I've always tried to do, and pushing ahead so quickly with this WIP is leaving some rough patches I don't like. I know it can be fixed in a rewrite, but I feel that sometimes I lose the 'mood' of that section when I go back....

Any thoughts on that, from the writing gods?

Someone said this to me, although I might be paraphrasing.

- Give yourself permission to write trash.
- If you recognize what you are writing is trash, you're ahead of the game. Some people never do.
- Realize that everyone, at some point, writes trash. That's why pencils have erasers.

My first book, I handwrote and transcribed. I crossed out, rewrote and agonized before putting stuff on the computer. Still had to fix stuff.

This book, I just wrote. I didn't like parts of it when I finished, and I had notes for the rewrite by the time I got to the end of the first draft. I'm rewriting. I'll rewrite again. And one more time to clean up all the pencil lines, before anyone reads it. then I'll change more stuff once I hear crits from beta readers and/or my publisher. Then my editor will get a hold of it, and more stuff will get changed.

The point? Fuggetaboutit, and just write it all out.

I write like I draw - with a light outline, then darker outline, then fill in the detail, then color and shade. The picture doesn't really come into focus after the rough stuff is done!

[maestrowork]

Uncle Jim, post #666. That explains a lot. :ROFL:

[black winged fighter]

Great tips, all.

With this new project, I did actually outline before setting fingers to keyboard, and now when I lose heart, I just have to look at a big box at the end of the rough time line that says THE END. That fixes me right up and gets the words flowing.

I know change is inevitable, so I'll guess I'll just follow your advice, Christine, and "Fuggetaboutit, and just write it all out." *Grins*

[alaskamatt17]

I outline a little bit differently from the way Uncle Jim does.

I just think up cool scenes, come up with a catchy title for each scene. For example: "The King of Glass and Sands," "Haven at Skimmer-port," "Shardwinds." Each of the names is short, could be used as a chapter name, and has some cue that gives me an idea of what the chapter's overall mood and content is going to be. Then I arrange all of the titles in order and write how many pages I think each scene should be (this has little bearing on what they actually end up being, it's just an approximation). Then I assign POV characters to each scene, and just start writing from the beginning.

[Julian Black]

I like to outline. Well, no, I hate to outline, but I do it anyway.Interesting post, JD!

Ithe past, I never used outlines--which is probably why it took me decades to actually finish a novel after a lot of false starts.

My problem has been that I'm very good at writing individual scenes or episodes, but I wasn't able to link them into a larger story. What finally tuned me around was going back to school, majoring in history, and figuring out how to write 20-35 page research papers for the first time in my life.

I kept ending up with unruly stacks of paper I couldn't keep track of, and long, meandering first drafts that took forever to wrestle into shape. Finally, in frustration, I took a pair of scissors and cut apart the first draft of a 25-page paper that had been giving me nightmares. I cut it into paragraphs, and then laid the resulting slips of paper out on a table, shuffling them around until I had an order that made sense. I had to re-write a few of those paragraphs, and break some of them in two; I also realized what I was missing and thus needed to write from scratch so I could fill in the holes.

A paper that had taken me six weeks of agony just to get to an ugly, crippled monster of a first draft ended up going together very quickly after I hacked it up--I was finally able to see how the pieces would go together. I had the second draft done in a week.

So the next time I had to write a big paper, I decided to work with it as separate pieces, rather than one big monster, from the very beginning. I wrote rough paragraphs on blank index cards, getting down the general idea I was trying to convey in each paragraph, and a few supporting notes (with references). Since the cats kept knocking the cards off the dining-room table, I made a big (4x8') bulletin board, and began sticking cards up on it, trying to find the best order for them. It took me three weeks of fiddling with it, adding more cards, making more elaborate notes on others, and then standing back and staring at the whole thing before I sat down and started typing it out. I had a decent first draft done in five days, with much less pain. (The footnotes were, as always, the biggest headache. One of the things that made me happiest about quitting academia to write fiction is that I no longer have to cite references.)

I'm taking the same approach with a novel right now. I'm doing research for a historical fantasy, but at the same time I have a contemporary urban fantasy in mind and I'm using the note card method to try and figure it out. Every time I think of a scene, I write the bare bones of it on a 3x5 card, in very direct "this is what happens" language. Sometimes there will be a line of dialogue or two, if I think of a joke or something clever that really works, but most of it is pure Joe-Friday-just-the-facts-m'am.

I keep sticking cards with different scenes up on the bulletin board. This story is missing a major plot component right now because as much as I know about the villain, I still don't really know what he's trying to dominate or why (all of my options so far have just seemed cheesy and cliched). But I keep writing scenes and adding cards, and as I do so I keep having those "aha!" moments when I realize that a minor character ought to be a major one, or two characters who weren't going to meet really should, or that I've had another insight about magic and its limitations that spurs another idea for another notecard (or two, or three, or a half-dozen...). Eventually, the villain's goals will make themselves known.

I know I'm not the only one by far who plots with notecards like this, but it's already been incredibly helpful. Being able to see the way scenes relate to each other and move them around at will, or add new cards, or toss some of them out is taking a lot of the pain out of plotting. I did it with a (not very good) novel I wrote last summer, and as I did it, breaking the book down into sections and chapters was easy. If there were plot holes or if a scene didn't seem to fit, it was obvious. If I was leaning too heavily on one character and not giving enough space to others, that showed up, too.

When I sat down and typed out the contents of all the cards, in order, I had my plot outline. From there, it was just a matter of sitting down every day and making it into a novel. It isn't a good one--it was a leftover attempt at writing "literary" fiction that I had started five or six years ago--and halfway through I realized I was writing about a bunch of well-meaning but ultimately self-centered middle-class white people who annoyed me. I could have turned it into satire, but by the time I thought to do so, I didn't care. The book lacks heart, but I finished the bloody thing. Since then, I've decided to rescue the one character I really liked, turn him into a wizard, and stick him in the urban fantasy (where he already seems to be thriving). The rest of it shall remain desk ballast forevermore.

[Mistook]

Interesting post, JD!

Ithe past, I never used outlines--which is probably why it took me decades to actually finish a novel after a lot of false starts.

My problem has been that I'm very good at writing individual scenes or episodes, but I wasn't able to link them into a larger story. What finally tuned me around was going back to school, majoring in history, and figuring out how to write 20-35 page research papers for the first time in my life.

I kept ending up with unruly stacks of paper I couldn't keep track of, and long, meandering first drafts that took forever to wrestle into shape. Finally, in frustration, I took a pair of scissors and cut apart the first draft of a 25-page paper that had been giving me nightmares. I cut it into paragraphs, and then laid the resulting slips of paper out on a table, shuffling them around until I had an order that made sense. I had to re-write a few of those paragraphs, and break some of them in two; I also realized what I was missing and thus needed to write from scratch so I could fill in the holes.

A paper that had taken me six weeks of agony just to get to an ugly, crippled monster of a first draft ended up going together very quickly after I hacked it up--I was finally able to see how the pieces would go together. I had the second draft done in a week.

So the next time I had to write a big paper, I decided to work with it as separate pieces, rather than one big monster, from the very beginning. I wrote rough paragraphs on blank index cards, getting down the general idea I was trying to convey in each paragraph, and a few supporting notes (with references). Since the cats kept knocking the cards off the dining-room table, I made a big (4x8') bulletin board, and began sticking cards up on it, trying to find the best order for them. It took me three weeks of fiddling with it, adding more cards, making more elaborate notes on others, and then standing back and staring at the whole thing before I sat down and started typing it out. I had a decent first draft done in five days, with much less pain. (The footnotes were, as always, the biggest headache. One of the things that made me happiest about quitting academia to write fiction is that I no longer have to cite references.)

I'm taking the same approach with a novel right now. I'm doing research for a historical fantasy, but at the same time I have a contemporary urban fantasy in mind and I'm using the note card method to try and figure it out. Every time I think of a scene, I write the bare bones of it on a 3x5 card, in very direct "this is what happens" language. Sometimes there will be a line of dialogue or two, if I think of a joke or something clever that really works, but most of it is pure Joe-Friday-just-the-facts-m'am.

I keep sticking cards with different scenes up on the bulletin board. This story is missing a major plot component right now because as much as I know about the villain, I still don't really know what he's trying to dominate or why (all of my options so far have just seemed cheesy and cliched). But I keep writing scenes and adding cards, and as I do so I keep having those "aha!" moments when I realize that a minor character ought to be a major one, or two characters who weren't going to meet really should, or that I've had another insight about magic and its limitations that spurs another idea for another notecard (or two, or three, or a half-dozen...). Eventually, the villain's goals will make themselves known.

I know I'm not the only one by far who plots with notecards like this, but it's already been incredibly helpful. Being able to see the way scenes relate to each other and move them around at will, or add new cards, or toss some of them out is taking a lot of the pain out of plotting. I did it with a (not very good) novel I wrote last summer, and as I did it, breaking the book down into sections and chapters was easy. If there were plot holes or if a scene didn't seem to fit, it was obvious. If I was leaning too heavily on one character and not giving enough space to others, that showed up, too.

When I sat down and typed out the contents of all the cards, in order, I had my plot outline. From there, it was just a matter of sitting down every day and making it into a novel. It isn't a good one--it was a leftover attempt at writing "literary" fiction that I had started five or six years ago--and halfway through I realized I was writing about a bunch of well-meaning but ultimately self-centered middle-class white people who annoyed me. I could have turned it into satire, but by the time I thought to do so, I didn't care. The book lacks heart, but I finished the bloody thing. Since then, I've decided to rescue the one character I really liked, turn him into a wizard, and stick him in the urban fantasy (where he already seems to be thriving). The rest of it shall remain desk ballast forevermore.


Juilian,

More or less, you've described exactly what happens in my brain while I'm at work. I don't write on physical note-cards, but the process is exactly the same. There's a giant bulletin board in my head with all these notes for the story, pinned-up.

[Galoot]

A 932-word quoteOh my god. reph's gonna kill you.

[Julian Black]

Juilian,

More or less, you've described exactly what happens in my brain while I'm at work. I don't write on physical note-cards, but the process is exactly the same. There's a giant bulletin board in my head with all these notes for the story, pinned-up.I'm very good at visualization, but when I start dealing with too many elements that have to be in a specific order it all falls apart. I'm also an artist, and I'm very visually-oriented, so it's perhaps not surprising that I really do need to "see" everything in front of me.

Lucky you, to be able to keep it all straight! I wish I could.

[Julian Black]

Originally Posted by Mistook
A 932-word quote
Oh my god. reph's gonna kill you.
Of course, I'm the logorrheic loonball who insists on writing 932-word posts. As I glanced back over it just now I kept thinking, "For God's sake, Julian! Shut up already!"

Let's just say getting in 2,000 words a day is rarely a problem...