Post 1405
Page 57
01-01-2011, 05:49 AM
Happy New Year and New Decade!
Now ... write your book!
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The Penmonkey's Paean.
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It's a new year....
Put a big full-year-at-a-glance calendar on your wall where you can see it from your writing desk.
Every day when you've written one page (just one!) of original prose fiction, before you go to bed take a red marker pen and put a big red X through that day.
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It isn't required to think much of the movie. All that's required is to answer it.
All art is in dialog with other art.
And it's all a starting point. You find within yourself a story to tell.
Adding constraints makes composition easier. If you have a blank white page, it's easy to get paralyzed. If you have a page with a large red spot on it, and your instruction is to avoid the red spot, it's easier to get moving. You have a direction.
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I normally do revisions before I send the MS out to proof readers, but I can't seem to go through the feedbacks nor get back to rewriting the story.
But you do revisions before you send them out to your readers?
What will you do if an editor asks you to revise a work?
Make some coffee. Sit down. Do it. One sentence at a time, one page at a time.
Did someone tell you that this job was easy and everything about it pleasant?
Or, you could be the sort of writer who just doesn't do beta-reader revisions.
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Visiting locations?
1) I have sailed the north and south Atlantic oceans. A
lot.
2) I have visited Portsmouth, and London, England.
3) I spent a great deal of time at Mystic Seaport, Mystic, CT, and know my way around a 19th century ship.
4) A close personal friend was assigned to Thule Air Force base.
5) I was assigned to, and traveled extensively in, Central America.
6) I spent a year at the Brooklyn Navy Yards.
7) My induction physical was at the old War Department building on Whitehall Street in NYC. (Yeah, I know it wasn't there during the Civil War. But there weren't magically-powered warships during the Civil War either.) I needed something that overlooked New York Harbor, and that was handy.
8) I have a pretty good memory, I use the library a lot, and (the secret weapon of the novelist) I make stuff up.
The origin of
Land of Mist and Snow: A dream involving a race between a 19th c. ship and a locomotive. Plus the question, What if the Union had had a Pegasus-class patrol hydrofoil during the Civil War?
The rest is basic science-fiction/fantasy what-if extrapolation in the Secret History sub-genre. (Other clues: There was no
USS Tisdale until WWII.)
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N
Uncle Jim, so do you usually revise chapter by chapter, or do you tackle the whole story ideas first? I know you covered revision before, but could you teach us your revision methods again?
I generally read the entire book, cover to cover, making changes as I go (in pencil), or at the very least putting a check mark in the margin meaning "Fix something here."
Then I read it cover to cover again.
I will add scenes, then read the whole thing again.
The book is a whole; it is organic. And I hold the entire thing in my head all at once.
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I talked a bit about foreshadowing starting here:
http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6710&page=272
But while Googling in an attempt to find that, look what else I came upon:
http://holmes.spontaneousderivation.com/2008/01/14/writing-holmes-retyping-speckled-band/
I am flattered, and it's good commentary.
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More on Foreshadowing from the Big Thread:
http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?p=82871#post82871
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Here's my good friend Ian Randall Strock and
Stupid Author Tricks (or, How To Keep Yourself From Getting Published).
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But being reminded of it so emphatically was really crushing.
No, no! You're taking away the wrong lesson.
The editors are looking for good stories. They want your story to be good. All you have to do is write a good story and send it to them in the form they requested and the rest follows.
This is a game of skill, not a game of chance. And the ones who send in stories printed in green ink on red paper with nude photos of themselves attached have just removed themselves entirely from the competition. Even if their story is brilliant.
Yes, they're getting 400 stories a week. But you're only competing against the top 10%. The rest have sabotaged themselves.
Be of good cheer. You followed the guidelines? You're good to go. Now send out your story, and, while you're waiting to hear back, write another one.
============
Elsewhere: Decadent Publishing is demonstrating why the Author's Big Mistake is such a Big Mistake.
http://theendisnotthefinalword.blogspot.com/2011/01/we-will-not-be-intimidated-we-will-not.html
http://dearauthor.com/wordpress/2011/01/13/thursday-midday-links-authors-publishers-behaving-badly/
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=decadent+publishing
http://karenknowsbest.com/2011/01/1...eat-reviews-or-well-publicise-your-real-name/
http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=198626&page=5
The Author's Big Mistake (ABM) is responding in any way whatever to a negative review.
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I believe MS Word is preset with 1" margins, but if it isn't (which should be easy to check) you can probably make that the default.
I write for myself, first, and next for a reader.
A reader. I imagine someone who I'm telling the story to (and make up little stories about her, her background, what she's doing that day).
Editors and agents and publishers ... no. The person I'm telling the story to is a reader. (And yes, I usually imagine a female reader.) But not always the same reader.
Whatever works for you....
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(And yes, I usually imagine a female reader.)
Incidentally--
My most common fan letters are from (in this order):
Teen-aged young ladies,
Priests and nuns, and
Retired intelligence professionals.
I believe this is because
A) The reader I imagine is usually a mid-twenties female in an entry-level professional job (my imagined audience sees herself in that same place),
B) I more often than not write on religious themes, and
C) as a retired intelligence professional myself, I make sure the details of Intel work are right. (What you generally see in thrillers ranges from bad to laughably bad.)
Oh, and when Ian talks about "some publisher might send you a check for three or four or five dollars," or he says, "Why should they bother to steal your story when they can have it by paying you five cents a word," he is being ... sarcastic.
If a publisher isn't offering thousands of dollars for your novel (or hundreds for your short story), you're talking to the wrong publishers.
Don't sell yourself short.
Start at the high end of the market. If you start at the low end you're never going to get to the high end.
Let me tell you a little about myself. (No more than you'd learn by reading my books, but ...)
I am a sincere and devout Roman Catholic.
I write for the greater glory of God.
I believe that the Lord desires that we have Fun.
--------------------------
Jim,
Amazon send me regular "recommendations" based on my previous purchases.
The last one included The Confessions of you-know-who.
Is Amazon back in your good books again?
No.
But they sell books. They can sell any books they like. I can't stop 'em.
If you want to buy the
Confessions, any number of other booksellers have it. Please buy from one of them.
----------------------------
We're at The Battle of Flamborough Head in 1779.
HMS Serapis (Richard Pearson, commanding) is locked in combat with
Bonhomme Richard (John Paul Jones, commanding).
The two vessels are lashed together. The cannon are muzzle-to-muzzle, the gunners' mates slashing at one another with swords or trying to grab each others' swab rods. Both ships are taking a terrible pounding;
Bonhomme Richard is in a sinking condition. A British shot carries away the American halyard and the US flag tumbles to the deck. Captain Pearson shouts across to the other vessel, "Sir! Have you struck your colors?"
Jones, on the deck of
Bonhomme Richard replies, "I have not yet begun to fight!"
And down on the gun deck, one gunner turns to another and says, "Some people
never get the word."
Therefore, for the people who haven't gotten the word, Absolute Write is going to be moving to a new server. This may take some time and have a few unexpected bobbles.
Details here.
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gg, totally. Didn't start getting the fan letters until after the books were written.
And the first weren't written for a generic audience, but for a specific person.
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Hi Jim,
I downloaded Kindle for PC and The Confessions (from Amazon).
I read the first tale and found 3 places where (I suppose) reformatting has caused typos (leaving words hyphenated)
Spec-ial
any-one
imp-ressions
Not much I can do about those, and people who read e-books run into more and worse than that.
Also, at the end of one paragraph you said "...costing her a pretty."
Is this a typo? Maybe not.
That was intentional.
A variety of assault rifle.
I loved the last sentence!
Me too!
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The first line is fine as written.
For more, please go to Share Your Work, where the squirrels are waiting to read and comment on your story.
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Today is Server Move day.
The boards will be turned off today at approximately
3:30 pm, Pacific (USian) time/6:30 pm, East Coast time.
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I have committed prologue.
Same main character as the main novel. Near in time to the main novel. Connected to the main novel. But not essential to the main novel. (If it were essential, it would have been chapter one.)
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Why's it there? Beats hell out of me. I was young. I've learned better since. Prologues are unusual for me, and have grown rarer as I've gone along.
If I were doing it again today, I'd have started the book with Chapter One and sold the prologue to a magazine as a stand-alone short story.
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A lot of what you'll find me putting in this thread is stuff that I've learned the hard way.
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A good prologue is:
A) Brief
B) Entertaining
C) Does not confuse the reader
D) Still leaves a complete experience if it's skipped
Check the prologues in Romeo and Juliet, and in Doctor Faustus.
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A different complete experience, yes. But still complete.
In contrast, if someone skipped chapter one, or the last chapter, or any chapter, the experience would be incomplete.
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Uh, well I presume it would be, I've never read the novelisation if there is one.
Of course there was a novelization. Ballantine Books, 1981, by Campbell Black.
And movie novelizations are pretty good gigs for writers who can produce prose to order by deadline. Around a thousand bucks a day.
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Better Book Titles
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Sticking with movies: The voice-over prologue in
Dark City utterly ruins the movie. You'd be well-advised to turn off the sound until the camera pans upward and you get to the actual opening titles.
Many prologues, I feel, are bleed-over from movies and TV, where the show starts with an action teaser (e.g. the perfectly unnecessary chase scene that starts
Speed II: Cruise Control (an execrable movie for lots of
other reasons)). In movies they're there to give folks time to get in from the candy counter and still not miss anything essential. On TV they're there to get folks to sit down and watch the first set of commercials. Books don't have either of those needs.
Brief, interesting on its own, non-distracting from the main story (note that in
Raiders of the Lost Ark that the opening focuses on Dr. Jones, not on Some Random Guy), and dispensable. That's how I think of prologues.
But ... if you want to, and you're doing it well, and your editor goes along with it, there's no reason you shouldn't commit prologue. I've done it, I'll do it again, and you can too.
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Found on
AW's front page:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9fc-crEFDw
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Yes, our books are shelved under Doyle (my beloved bride and long-time writing partner).
We decided long ago to go that way, because it would get our books closer to the eye-level shelves.
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A question, Uncle Jim, reaching far back into the archives:
At some point you said to be careful about reading and writing fan fiction, because it would subconsciously start affecting your style when writing original fiction.
Could you link to the original post? I don't recall saying that.
The two biggest problems with fan fiction are that it's legally impossible to publish, no matter how good it is, and it comes with pre-fab characters so you may not get the practice you need in characterization.
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some very extensive use of this board's 'search' function shows no sign of it whatsoever.
This board's search function blows dead seagulls. Better would be to use Google with site=absolutewrite.com as one of the parameters, or to go the Uncle Jim Undiluted thread (only three pages) and use your browser's search function.
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Are you perhaps thinking of
this post:
I'm not in favor of going over as a group, or of organizing at one website to go visit a community at another website, to argue with them. Now if someone wanted to issue a polite invitation to come over here?
What's the exact URL?
Now I haven't seen the discussion there -- but in general, you write the way you practice writing, and it's possible for someone to get bad habits, for some definition of "bad," writing in a particular genre or style.
I emphasize care in your writing, in choosing your words and images carefully so that they all lead in one direction and support one theme. But that's just me.
<hr>
Speaking of jealousy, here are some more <a href="http://books.guardian.co.uk/posysimmonds/page/0,12694,1201995,00.html" target="_new">Writers' Deadly Sins</A>.
Which was in response to
this one:
Thank you for the url to Stephen King's speech. I found his book on writing a good read even though I can't read much of his fiction as horror gives me nightmares!
Whilst this site was down I spent my allowance of website time on the UK
www.bbc.co.uk writers site. One writer questioned if she would damage her ability to write literary stories if she also wrote fiction for women's mags to earn money. Go look at the pretentious answers about writing potboilers and how it would seriously damage your ability to write literary stories. It would be wonderful if you all could come up with a polite (this is the British broadcasting corporation and they have very strict rules about anything vaguely impolite) rebuff and post it there if you could spare a moment. It's about time some of those hoary old chestnuts were popped!
Happy Writing!
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Christopher Vogler's The Writer's Journey
Robert McKee's Story and, most recently,
Jack Bickham's Scene and Structure
I've never read any of them.
In general: If they help you get words onto the page then they are good.
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A bit of a personal announcement:
The German translation of The Price of the Stars is coming out (from Random House, Germany) on 21 June 2011.
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A smart thing
said elsewhere:
Nancy Pearl, in one of her presentations to librarians about reader's advisory (aka, how to answer "what should I read next") talks about there being four doorways into fiction - plot, character, setting, and language. She argues (and pretty persuasively) that all works have a door of some size for each of these four, but also that *people* have strong preferences for which ones they enter (and you'll therefore be most successful in figuring out someone's preferred doorways, and suggesting books that match.)
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What are some ideas of restarting the creative boiler again?
Write something. Anything.
How about this? A formal poem. A
sestina.
Write one.
Then submit is somewhere.
http://www.duotrope.com
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And today's news: A textbook is buying our short story,
Uncle Joshua and the Grooglemen.
Didn't go looking for this; it just fell in our laps. Not a lot of money, but hey, it's like picking up money on the sidewalk.
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It's a textbook on Science Fiction.
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Department of Just Because I Have Massive Talent Doesn't Mean I Can't Be Petty And Vindictive:
Posterity will ne'er survey
A nobler grave than this:
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:
Stop, traveller, and piss.
-- Lord Byron
(See also: The New
Adventures of Ada Lovelace (Byron's only legitimate child) as she and Charles Babbage Fight Crime. Yes, I've recommended this before. I still do.)
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The history of science fiction in pictorial form. (via
Making Light)
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We spent the rest of the evening in lock down. It was worth it.
You realize the only reason he said that was to provoke a reaction that would give him a reason for him to put y'all on lockdown on your last night, don't you?
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Hey, come to Viable Paradise. The day starts at 0500 with a three-mile fun run. Then locker inspection, PT, disassembling and cleaning semiotic weapons, classroom instruction on field-expedient metaphors, more PT, ambushing the reader (table-top exercise), detecting and disarming rhetorical devices, camouflaging the theme, and yet more PT.
Writers' Boot Camp. You'd love it.
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That's okay, Beth. You can do the fun run right now. It's okay.
And, for everyone:
For reasons I won't go into here, I've been re-reading the Grimm fairy tales. Here's an idea, free! Take it, you're welcome:
At novel length, write
The Stepsister's Tale, being the story of Cinderella from the POV of one of the wicked stepsisters. Only with the stepsister as the heroine of the story, and that smarmy, simpering, psychotic Cinderella as the villain. Think of what
Wicked did for the Wicked Witch of the West. Go thou and do likewise.
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Can you give us more details about your procedure? How do you go about doing it? What's the end result like?
I sit down and write.
The end result is very much like a story, only the parts may be out of order, and it'll have notes like [Look this up later] and [they do something exciting here]. The characters will have names like Bestfriend and Deadmeat and Perky. Some of my favorite parts are [Doyle does this bit].
Things are sketched rather than written out full.
And silly stuff my happen, like suddenly, in the middle of a scene, Houdini escaping from a milk-can full of maple syrup.
Think of storyboard art compared with the finished film. That's what I mean by the outline.
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Graz:
No.
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Thanks Uncle Jim. You want to go bowling?
No thanks. I have a book to write.
And so do you.
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The good news:
We've been
listed beside Heinlein and Asimov.
The bad news:
What could be bad about that?
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You can read the short story
Uncle Joshua and the Grooglemen complete, free, on my webpage.
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The
E-publishing Bingo Card, from John Scalzi (hat tip to
Making Light).
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Thanks, AlwaysJuly. You've just made this author very happy.
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The Hero With a Thousand Faces is a good and useful work on folklore, and it contains signposts for what's worked in the past for storytelling, but use of it as a Procrustean Bed, or as a stamping-mill for STORY, is to use it badly.
It's perfectly okay to have a hero with normal, every-day parents and a run-of-the-mill birth.
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I've seen entirely too many books where the heroes run around collecting plot coupons as if they were on a scavenger hunt until, having collected enough, they can turn them in for a climax.
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Reckon so.
Okay, Red Riding Hood from the POV of the Wolf. Jack and the Beanstalk from the POV of the giant.
On the importance of giving and getting feedback from your beta readers:
Agent Scully and the Dirty Story.
Re-imaginings go back a long way:
The Death of the Seven Dwarfs (1856)
A rather more modern re-imagining:
Rammstein's Sonne (music video)
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Fairy tales are great. Distilled crystallized story. As I keep saying, the oldest engines pull the heaviest freight.
Speaking of fairy stories and children's fantasy, here's a look inside bookselling. This is a place that most authors never see:
A Lament for Diana Wynne Jones by Joe Monti: Now a star agent, once an outstanding editor, but before that a buyer for a book chain. Here he explains how he sold 7,000 copies each of three books that, combined, were selling only 1,300 copies a year. Purely because he loved those books.
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Picked this up in one of the
other threads here at AW, and thought it needed wider dissemination:
The Kindle Swindle
Hat tip to TheBigEasy
--------------------------
This sort of thing might end up opening them up to some expensive litigation,
They're pretty safe. Authors in general don't have a lot of money, and lawsuits are expensive.
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Posted elsewhere:
Some of your academic theorists have minor subdivisions of third person to describe the difference between thoughts in italics, thoughts in roman set off by "he thought," and thoughts in roman that aren't set off at all.
Ignore all of those distinctions.
The rules are these:
Don't confuse the readers.
Choose the one that sounds right to you.
Be consistent.
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What is your writing process for the first draft, and I mean from handwritten notes, onwards?
If you write longhand, how and when do you transfer to the PC. Does it still remain Draft 1?
I write long-hand when I can't get to a computer, for example in the back of a moving vehicle.
When I transcribe stuff, I don't re-type it exactly.
My first-first draft? Often enough it's a flowchart on the back of a cheap paper placemat, made while discussing the book with Doyle. After that, I just write scenes, which may or may not be in order. Doyle arranges them into order (in a process she calls "stringing beads"), while I keep writing scenes that seem to me belong in the book. Meanwhile, Doyle writes other scenes that might be missing. Then I take the thing, and re-write it. Then Doyle takes the thing and re-writes it. Then I take the thing and re-writes it.
And so on.
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How d'you know when it's finished?
The deadline arrives, and the editor gets cranky if you don't send
something.
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I'm not certain that I write longhand often enough to make buying a piece of electronics worthwhile.
And the chance to re-write while re-typing isn't a bad thing.
I know of some writers who, despite working on a computer, re-type their entire novels from draft to draft, just to force each word to justify its existence. If a paragraph isn't worth retyping, it probably isn't worth keeping in the book. (And you can add stuff too.)
-------------------------
I see the headline,
E-book sales top paperbacks for first time
That's interesting, but what does it mean to us, as writers?
Not a blessed thing.
Our talent lies in telling stories that people want to read. We've been doing it since papyrus and river reeds; we'll be doing it in the age of direct neural implants.
Means of distribution? That's someone else's problem; what we have is rare enough that the distributors will pay us to get it.
I've started to put up my backlist of short stories on Smashwords, mostly because it's easier than finding reprint markets, but doesn't compete with reprint markets. The most recent reprint sale I made was of a story that's been available for free on my web page for years.
Our big problem still remains: Obscurity.
The solution is still the same: Gatekeepers. Sources that will place their imprimatur on our works so the reading public will be assured, "This story is worth my time." Even a free story still costs the reader time and imagination.
-----------------------
That's a real problem. How is "browsing the bookstore" going to work?
The "people who bought this also bought that" displays that some on-line stores use are an attempt at a solution, but not a really good one.
The "here's thirty feet of mystery novels," the new releases beside the classics, that you find over at a physical bookstore (or even an entire story-full of mystery novels, the specialty bookstore) is a climax technology grown over the past 150 years.
At one time, back when you bought the book block, then took it over to a bindery to put a cover on it (when the phrase "you can't tell a book by its cover" came from), the printers would hang the broadsheets in their windows, so people could look and read the first few pages. (That's also where the elaborate engraved frontispieces came from--attracting the eyes of strollers.)
Something will develop, I know this. What it will be? That I can't tell you.
Back in the early days of movies, before directors' names were put on movies, you'd find rampant piracy. (The movie industry developed in California because California was a long way from New Jersey, and they were abusing Thomas Edison's patents.) Folks would take movies, strip out the title cards, add their own title cards, and distribute it as their own.
One studio, to combat this, put the "Biograph B" in every shot of the film, somewhere in the background. Folks started to notice that movies with those B's in them were lots of fun to watch, and started to look for them. What biograph had, was a secret weapon: They had D. W. Griffith and Billy Bitzer.
E-publishers will develop. Some already have.
The mainstream publishers will dominate the market. They have the money, they have the backlist, they have the authors, they have the marketing experience.
But how will readers find new authors? That's the puzzle. I expect that the Book of the Month Club will re-emerge. If I were going to play this game, I'd set up a subscription-based distributorship, that every month/week/day/whatever sent a New Book to folks.
Maybe I'd call my thing "Jim Likes It," and people who shared my taste would get books that I liked. That would be a mix of mystery, science fiction, horror, true crime, and history.
Maybe it would work. Who knows?
--------------------------
Charles Scribner started out printing collected volumes of sermons, a genre of the early 19th century. The firm became Charles Scribner and Sons, then Charles Scribner's Sons ... and so on.
The subscription model of publishing is old, and is still going on. People were put up money for the printing; when enough came in, the author would write the book and print it, and everyone who was subscribed got a copy. Upton Sinclair used this model too (leading to rumors that he self-published--he didn't) in the early years of the 20th century. In the later years of the 20th century, some fanzines were based on the subscription model. The best-known recent author to use this particular method, I believe, is Lawrence Watt-Evans.
In the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem, Mass, there's a display of 19th century whaling artifacts. One of them is a paperback book, a whaling romance. If you walk around the back of the display, you can see that the back cover is missing, and, if you squat down and squint, you can read that last page. It ends with a plea from the author saying, in effect, "If you liked this book, please write to the publisher and ask them to hire me to write another one."
At least one 19th century American publishing house based its origin in the fact that under American copyright law at the time, any European book was in the public domain in America, so he printed and sold European books without needing to pay the authors.
-----------------------------
If you want my opinion, which is probably worth what you paid for it, this year about 35% of the income for the Big Six will be from e-book sales. I base this on publicly available data; I have no way of knowing what any publisher's internal financials look like.
----------------------------
Good, energetic promotion (by e-networking) and then word of mouth. I'll be trying this soon, maybe by the end of the year.
Faustus: Come, I think hell's a fable.
Mephistopheles: Aye, think so still, 'til experience change thy mind.
Euclid, you didn't invent that idea. It's worked...remarkably poorly...for the ones who have gone before.
-------------------------------
A Self-Published Authors Guide to Self-Publishing
-------------------------------
Obscurity is a far greater enemy for writers than piracy will ever be.
-------------------------------
No. There isn't a rule.
The master rules still apply:
If it works, it's right, and
Don't confuse the readers.
Anything else is a matter of style. Sentence rhythm, the pace of the scene, the amount of dialog, how distinctive your characters are; all these will influence your use of dialog tags.
Find a favorite author. Take one of his or her books and go through with a hi-liter, marking all the dialog tags. Make up your own mind.
This is an art. You are the artist. Be bold, be bold, but not too bold....
--------------------------------
Yog's Law and Self-Publishing.
Yog's Law is very simple: Money flows toward the author.
For commercial publishing, this is absolutely true. Once you've moved away from it, you're out of the realm of commercial publishing.
The next stop is vanity publishing. Here you find the so-called "self-publishing services" along with the true vanities. In this area, the publishers run the gamut from A Very Bad Idea right the way down to An Out-And-Out Scam, with a vast morass of well-intentioned-but-undercapitalized and well-intentioned-but-incompetent in between. From an author's point of view, there's no practical difference between a scammer and an incompetent: both are time-and-money sinks; neither will get your book into the hands of readers.
Yog's Law will keep you safe from this part of the publishing landscape. Use it as your compass and your guide.
Last is true self-publishing. Yog's Law is true here, too. Self-publishing is the part of the map where the author hires the editor, hires the cover artist, the typesetter, the proofreader, contracts the printer, buys the ISBN, arranges distribution, promotion, marketing, and carries out every other aspect of publishing. What you need to recall is that while the author is the publisher, "publisher" and "author" are separate roles. One of the classic mistakes I see with self-published authors is that they don't put "paying the author" in their business plan as an expense. The money still needs to move from one pocket to another. Those pockets may be in the same pair of pants, but that movement must be in the business plan, and it has to happen. Here too, Yog's Law is completely true, and will help the self-publisher run his/her business as a business.
Avoid unhappy surprises. Live by Yog's Law.
------------------------------
Where does Mephistopheles live in all this?
Faust. Where are you damn’d?
Meph. In hell.
Faust. How comes it then that thou art out of hell?
Meph. Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
==================
If self-publishers can't see their way clear to putting 10-15% of the cover price of every volume sold into a savings account, they're not ready to self-publish.
--------------------------------
Just a reminder: Only two more weeks to
contribute to the Atlanta Nights movie. It would be fun if this actually happened.
Also, speaking of piracy, here's a
pirate tower defense game. It has a really cheerful theme song.
But that isn't what I'm going to mention this morning. My latest cat-waxing has been putting our short-story back list into e-book format. Covers are by my son, Brendan.
Ten stories up so far. (One of the e-books is a collection of three stories.)
We'll see how this goes. But for the moment, like I said, it's cat-waxing. Only writing is writing. Putting old stories on line isn't writing.
-----------------------------
Today, in our latest installment of The Unspeakable Horrors of the Literary Life, I bring you [FONT=times, times new roman]
The Seething Resentment Reading Series.
------------------------------------
[/FONT]
I have a question. How important is 'deep meaning' in a fantasy/action adventure (or horror) novel?
It's important enough that I stress it when I'm teaching writing. It's the difference between the top 1% that
will sell and the next 2% that
might sell.
It's the difference between a good book and a mediocre book.
For example: My own Mageworlds series. The first three books were not only slam-bang space opera adventure, they were a refutation of the Manichean heresy.
You always want Something More. You need the surface plot for the deaf old lady in the back row, but you want the multiple levels of meaning for the clever buggers in the front row.
------------------------------
Yet more horrors of the literary life:
The Printer's Error.
On layers of meaning: As a medievalist, I use the quadriga. For those interested in what that is (other than the chariot on top of the Brandenberg Gate):
The Quadriga. The Quadriga was a method of interpretation that developed in the early church and survived up to medieval times. It stated that a text had four layers of meaning: the literal, the moral, the allegorical and the anagogical. The literal is the plain obvious meaning. The moral was what it meant for human behavior. The allegorical meaning is what it means for our faith, beliefs or doctrines. The anagogical meaning is what it tells us about the future (heaven). For example take a reference to the city of Jerusalem. In the literal sense this meant the physical city of Jerusalem. Morally it could represent the human soul. Allegorically it could be used to represent the Church of Christ. Finally, anagogically, it could be referring the new heavenly Jerusalem. Unfortunately, this method led to many wild speculations about the meaning of certain passages. Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation changed that. Now we focus on the literal interpretation.
By focusing on the literal interpretation the protestants fell into error. But leave that aside. It's a useful way to see the depth of your own story, and a useful way to make those deeper layers coherent.
See also, the
Gesta Romanorum, with the deeper layers in the stories explained.
--------------------------------
Even if readers don't consciously recognize the deeper levels in your work, they'll know that there
are deeper levels. And unification at a deeper level will ensure that your surface plot is unified... that the chimney isn't
directly behind the window.
-----------------------------------
I think that in most cases, hiring a professional editor is a waste of time and money.
If your book isn't publishable, no amount of editing will make it publishable. If it is publishable, the publisher will assign an editor at no cost to you.
Suppose you do hire an editor. And suppose your book sells. When the revision letter comes what are you going to do? Re-hire the editor?
The words "this manuscript has been professionally edited" in a cover letter will make any agent's heart sink. And editors have a name for edited slush. They call it "slush."
If you hire an editor as a sort of intensive one-on-one workshop, in order to improve your
next work, I could see it. But as a routine step before submitting your work? No, bad idea.
----------------------------
On artists, and the making of art.
(And we are artists, my friends.)
((Hat tip to
Mark.)
-----------------------------
R. A. Lafferty being dead, it's kind of hard to ask him.
Have the stories with Dr. Vonk gone into the public domain? If not, I'd be very careful. Some might consider that to be creating a derivative work.
I suspect that Lafferty was himself referring to Immanuel Velikovsky. You might try a variant on the name.
-------------------------
Unless you're planning to self-publish, in which case, an editor is indispensible.
Indeed. Unless you are planning to self-publish.
As a self-publisher, you take on all the roles of the commercial publisher.
And if you self-publish, please don't forget to put the line-item
"Pay the author" into your business plan.
Imagine, for a moment, that some guy in Norton Mills, Vermont, wanted to be a publisher who would publish only the works of James D. Macdonald. "Great!" I'd say. "What are you paying?"
Same way if I were to publish the works of James D. Macdonald. "Great!" I'd say to myself. "What are you paying?"
If 15% of the cover price of each one sold isn't going into your savings account, you're doing it wrong.
----------------------------
Recall also that "zonk" or "zonked" is American slang for "intoxicated with (perhaps illegal) drugs."
--------------------------
Bonk (sometimes spelled "boink") is US slang for "to have sexual intercourse with."
As in "I wanted to bonk Mary Sue, but I was too zonked to do it."
How about Manuel "Super Skier" Velikov.
-----------------------------
I've just learned that there's a theoretical reason that vanity-published authors tend to max out at 150 sales: By a weird coincidence, 150 is Dunbar's number, the theoretical number of close social relationships that a person will have.
-----------------------------
Smashwords feeds into B&N, iBookstore, and several others. It's more a distributor. But still, getting your story noticed when they're posting 'em over there at the rate of 3,000/day is going to be a challenge.
I'm experimenting myself, but so far all I'm doing is short stories. We'll see, eventually, what becomes of it.
(Anyone who wants to read 'em, review 'em, and so on, is invited to do so:
The list so far. If you want to read 'em for free, let me know and I'll give you a coupon code.)
------------------------------
Allen, when you're talking about fiction, "platform" is meaningless.
================
Department of
All Art Is Related:
Quotes from Julia Child. Substitute "writing" for "cooking" and learn.
================
Guerrilla Marketing 101: Why
look pathetic when you can actually
be pathetic?
---------------------------------
Keep writing to the fill line, and perhaps a bit over. If you have too much plot, your editor will tell you.
Removing plot in revision is much easier than adding plot afterward.
----------------------------------
Plot: This happened, then that happened
because.
---------------------------------
That won't get me into (legal) trouble will it?
1) Anyone can sue anyone for anything.
2) I'm not a lawyer, I can't give legal advice.
3) Probably not.
---------------------------------
If anyone's looking for a publishing-related job in the Boston area, here you go:
Publishing Technologies Specialist
---------------------------------
Euclid: What?!
Don't worry about that. I'm not the only James Macdonald publishing. I'm not even the only James D. Macdonald publishing. It's okay to use your real name.
If your name was J. K. Rowling, that might be a problem. But it isn't. Don't worry about it.
---------------------------
Life may imitate art, and art may imitate life, but life != art.
---------------------------
That other guy with my name had his book published by AuthorHouse. Is this one of the big publishing houses? I never heard of it.
AuthorHouse is a vanity press.
That means that no one will have even heard of his book, far less read it.
-------------------------------
"Up the Airy Mountain," yet another backlist title.
-----------------------------
I have a friend who submitted his book for publishing in November 2010. They still haven't published his book! It's a non-fiction account of his spiritual journey toward salvation and it's actually a very moving piece. Does it normally take this long to publish via vanity press?
Did his check clear?
-----------------------------
Then they're probably backlogged. Even PublishAmerica only undertakes to publish a given book within a year.
----------------------------
On a certain kind of bad (mostly mainstream) writing:
Fond Memories of Vagina
What I'm reading right now: Ted Dekker's
The Bride Collector. An FBI agent seeks the help of an inmate in psychiatric institution to find a particularly bizarre serial killer.
There are no new plots.....
-------------------------
No, I don't have any set length for quiet bits between the explosions. But I do try to keep them interesting, every page, because I don't want the reader to skim.
The piano parts make the fortissimo seem more-so. Still, they do all thing things that every other passage does: Support the theme, reveal character, and advance the plot.
If the dialog in the chapter goes like this:
"Why are we doing this, Charlie?" Ralph asked. He wrapped his hands around the thick manila rope and pulled down with all his strength. The sofa barely moved.
"Because we have to set up the surprise in Chapter Twelve," Charlie replied, hauling on his end of the rope....
Then perhaps the scene needs to be re-thought.
---------------------
I do indeed read music. If this analogy is useful -- use it.
All the arts are related.
Moonlight Sonata Movement 1
Moonlight Sonata Movement 2
Moonlight Sonata Movement 3
----------------------
Yet is it not entertaining, and didn't you watch it all the way to the end, and remember it long after?
----------------------
I am very close to throwing
The Bride Collector across the room.
As Twain put in
Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses:
10. [The rules of fiction] require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the "Deerslayer" tale dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.
Would that Dekker had followed Twain's advice.
----------------------
Speaking of Jane Austen,
as if the zombies weren't bad enough....
-----------------------
One of our Viable Paradise students has just sold her first story. It's the lead story (“Your Cities” by Anaea Lay) in the current issue of Apex magazine,
here.
----------------------
Surely it's bad form for one writer to rubbish another in public, isn't it?
It's done all the time, Euclid. One of the hazards of the course.
------------------------
Get a
free e-book from the University of Chicago Press.
------------------------
DRM is a tool of the devil.
Pity that they don't know that.
--------------------------
How To Have A Writing Career Like Mine from John Scalzi. He points out that you can't. Nor can you have a writing career like any other author's. You have a career like
yours, because time, place, personality, and preceding events shape every step of the path.
He points out:
If you feel you must look at other writers’ careers, a suggestion: Look at more than one, and see what they have in common. What did Neil do that Ursula also did that Robert did too that Cherie is now doing? Look at the things that consistently appear in the careers of multiple authors, and you’ll find the things that might be worth incorporating into your own. As a warning, they are likely to be boring things like “write regularly,” or “minimize distractions” or some such, which are the “eat less, exercise more” of the writing career world. But that’s life for you.
--------------------
I've finished putting my backlist short fiction up at Smashwords:
These will eventually filter over to B&N, iBooks, and wherever else.
-----------------------
Cool. I've bought a couple already, I'll have to take a look at the new ones.
If you don't like 'em, you can tell me.
If you do like 'em, tell all your friends.
------------------------
My shortest-ever cover letter read:
Roses are red
Violets are blue
Here is a story
I'm sending to you.
The story was picked up (by the first market I sent it to). You can read it yourself, for free,
here.
---------------------------
Here's some advice on
author-readings at conventions and conferences.
Although it's written for the self-published, it's good advice for everyone.
-------------------------
Cliches, my dear friends, are fertile sources of inspiration. The line between cliche and archetype is very thin. Nothing is new, and the way cliches became cliches is by being tried-and-true. The oldest engines pull the heaviest freight.
How do you make something original out of a cliche?
Two ways: Stand the cliche on its head, or put two or three cliches in a blender, switch it to 'puree', and pour out a tasty new trope.
So, having said that, here is a handy list of Horror cliches:
http://www.wmsimmons.com/horror.htm
Layer 'em thinly over your favorite plot, and there you are.
---------------------------
Yet another take on
How To Get Published.
---------------------------
Thanks, Laura.
If you hate my stories, tell me. If you love them, tell all your friends....
---------------------------
For all the loyal readers of
Learn Writing with Uncle Jim, here's a coupon for
Witch Garden and Other Stories, a collection of some of our works in electronic form. The code is: UE28S
The code will be good for a month. Get the book for free.
It's okay to tell your friends and pass along the code.
------------------------
Prologues? Hell yes!
I've committed prologue.
Here is the prologue from
Starpilot's Grave:
Prologue
Pleyver: Flatlands
Darkness had fallen over the city. Light from the streetlamps lay in stark white circles against the warehouse walls, with pools of blackness falling in between. Overhead, the fixed star of High Station--Pleyver's giant orbiting spaceport--burned down through the skyglow. No one saw Owen Rosselin-Metadi pass by like an unheeded thought, skirting the edges of the lamplight and pausing to catch his breath in the safety of the dark.
He wasn't sure how long he'd been running. Hours, it felt like--ever since leaving his sister back at Florrie's Place, in an upper room where the acrid stink of blaster fire mingled with the heavier smell of blood. He didn't think anybody had followed him out of there; he'd put most of his remaining energy into staying unseen, and Beka had taken care of the rest.
Owen didn't like the favor he'd asked from her, that she take on the risk of drawing away the armed pursuit, and he didn't particularly like himself for asking it. But Bee was a survivor, the kind who could fight her way from Florrie's to the port quarter and blast off leaving a legend behind her. He'd seen that much clearly; far more clearly, in fact, than the outcome of his own business on Pleyver.
Nevertheless, he had lied to her.
Well, not exactly lied. But he had let her think that the datachip he'd given her, packed with information from the locked comp-files of Flatlands Investment, Ltd., was unique. He'd never mentioned the other datachip, the one that he'd come to Pleyver to obtain. The information on the second chip belonged to Errec Ransome, Master of the Adepts' Guild--or it would if Owen lived long enough to deliver it.
Maybe I should have given it to Bee.
Owen shook his head. He'd briefly considered asking her, but the presence of her copilot had killed that idea. The slight, grey-haired man she called the Professor gave Beka an unquestioning loyalty--that much Owen had perceived without any difficulty--but it was a loyalty that would put Beka first and the Adepts' Guild a far-distant second.
No, it was better to let the two of them go their own way. From the look of things, Beka had kept her promise to distract the ordinary hired help, the ones who did their fighting with blasters and energy lances. Dodging the others should have been easy, if only he hadn't been so stupid as to get caught once already tonight....
#
Owen had shown up outside the portside branch office of Flatlands Investment, Ltd., just before dusk. He'd hoped to get there earlier, but intercepting Beka at the spaceport and convincing her to abandon her own designs on the company's data banks had taken longer than he'd anticipated.
Beka wanted revenge, plain and simple: revenge on whoever had planned their mother's assassination and revenge on whoever had paid for it. She'd get it, too; Bee in pursuit of a goal had a straightforward single-mindedness that made a starship's jump-run to hyperspace look like a sightseeing trip. But that same trait could make her dangerous to be around if your purposes and hers happened to diverge. Owen didn't think that the Guild's interest in FIL was going to put him in Beka's way, but he didn't want to chance it.
Besides, he reflected as he approached the grey, slab-sided FIL Building, it was easier for one person to work unnoticed than for two. He could slip in, get enough from the files to satisfy Master Ransome and his sister both, and slip out again before Bee was through eating dinner.
The front door of the building was secured by an electronic ID-scan. Owen palmed the lockplate like any authorized visitor. Inside the mechanism, the electric current flowed through its appointed paths and channels as the door made ready to reject the identification. Then, without changing his expression or his physical posture, Owen reached out, using the skills that for more than ten years had made him Errec Ransome's most valued--and most valuable--apprentice.
The flow of electrons altered its course. The lock clicked quietly and the door slid open.
A stranger waited in the unlit lobby, a thin, hunched man in the plain garb of a low-level office worker. Owen tensed, but the man didn't make any threatening moves.
"I've got the password," the worker said.
Owen paused. He hadn't expected anyone to be here at all. But he hadn't sensed any wrongness as he approached the office building, and the man himself didn't project any great amount of menace either.
He must be one of Bee's contacts, Owen decided. He's certainly the type--his coverall might as well have a tag on it saying "Disaffected Employee."
"Well?" he said aloud.
The man licked his lips. "We need to talk about the money first."
Money . . . Owen knew he shouldn't feel surprised. His sister was a merchant-captain, and dealt in the purchase and sale of whatever goods might find a market. But when Owen worked, as now, in the persona of a down-at-the-heels drifter, he carried as little cash as possible. A spaceport bum with money was a contradiction in terms.
"I'm just the messenger boy," Owen said. "You can pick up your fee at the General Delivery office." In addition to handling electronic and hardcopy messages, local branches of the giant communications firm made convenient, no-questions-asked cash drops for all sorts of legal and semilegal business exchanges. "I'm not authorized to carry cash."
He braced himself for an objection, and made ready to counter it in much the same way as he had dealt with the door. He was mildly surprised when the man only nodded, said, "Right," and began fishing in the pockets of his coat.
After a few seconds, the man came up with a thin slice of plastic. "The password's on here."
He held out the keycard. Owen reached out a hand to take the card, and felt the first undefined stirrings of premonition as their fingers touched.
Something's wrong. He ought to have made a fuss about the money.
Owen looked at the man again, this time using the physical contact to enhance his perceptions.
Under that deeper scrutiny, the patterns of the office worker's consciousness showed up like a dark and knotted skein, with fear and duplicity and greed tangled into an unlovely network.
Now I see it. He doesn't mind that he might not get Bee's money. Somebody else has already paid him more.
Owen smiled inwardly, though the face he presented to the office worker never changed. Sister mine, it's a good thing I came to this party instead of you. You were about to walk into a trap.
He tucked the keycard into the breast pocket of his coverall. Then, in a continuation of the same movement, his right arm snapped forward, and he smashed the edge of his hand against the bridge of the other man's nose. Cartilage and bone crushed inward, and a fine spray of blood misted out.
Owen caught the man as he fell and eased him silently to the floor. On his knees beside the unconscious man, he searched quickly and methodically through the other's pockets, but found nothing of interest except a second keycard, a twin to the first, equally unmarked. He pocketed it and stood up again.
He looked down for a moment at the sprawled form of the office worker. Perhaps the man would drown in the blood draining from his crushed sinuses, or perhaps not. Owen left the worker there for those who had hired him, and went about his own business.
He took the emergency stairs, not the lift, to the top floor, and paused briefly before the lockplate of the office at the end of the hall. The security system here presented no more challenge than the lock on the outside door. In a moment he was in, with the door closed and secured behind him. He'd probably taken care of any problems by silencing the man below; if he hadn't, whoever had set this trap for his sister would find more in it than they'd expected.
The desk comp had a slot for the keycard. Owen paused for a moment, considering.
Without a physical card in place to complete the circuits, not even an Adept's tricks could shunt the electron flow to perform the task he needed. But which card to use? Owen weighed them in his hand, assessing them as he had the office worker below. One of the cards, the one that he'd been given, felt limited, probably crippled on purpose. He discarded it without any more thought and switched to the card he'd taken from the office worker's pocket.
The password worked. He had Bee's datachip full within minutes; her need for information was narrow and specific, and easily supplied. Errec Ransome's chip took longer. The Master of the Guild cast his nets wide, and in strange waters, for the welfare of the galaxy's Adepts.
Errec Ransome had been a junior Adept in the Guildhouse on Ilarna when the Magewar broke out. Those days had seen slaughter done all across the galaxy, but few places had suffered worse than Ransome's home planet. Only Sapne and Entibor had experienced more destruction than Ilarna. Sapne, depopulated by plagues and reduced to barbarism, had no inhabitants left alive who could remember its ruined cities in their prime; and Entibor was an orbiting slag heap with nothing living on its surface at all.
Seeing all his friends dead and the Ilarna Guildhouse smashed into rubble, Errec Ransome had left the Adepts for a time. He had joined the privateers of Innish-Kyl in their hit-and-run war against the Magelords, fighting other men's battles for his own purposes. The Mageworlders had been crushed now for twenty years and more, and Master Ransome had long since returned to the Guild; but his vigilance never ceased.
Owen completed his second download and withdrew the keycard. And then--
Danger!
The premonition slammed into him full force. His senses clamored with the awareness of enemies nearby, and he clutched the edge of the desk with both hands.
Danger! Too close--
He lifted his head to looked around the office, and cursed under his breath at his own arrogance and stupidity.
What had seemed to be alternate exits--windows and an inner door--he saw now were only illusions, holographic projections with their reality enhanced by his own willingness to believe. The trap had closed on him in a room with no escape except by the door through which he had entered. He would have to fight his way out.
He crossed over to the door and put his hand against it, still expecting little more than blaster bravos and hired thugs, the sort of vermin who were his sister's enemies. Instead...
Worse and worse. His enemies waited for him on the other side. His enemies, and not Beka's at all.
#
Owen paused again in the deeper shadows beside a trash bin and looked around. Still no visible pursuit. Closing his eyes and drawing a deep breath, he centered himself and cleared his senses as best he could.
Nobody near. I've lost them. I hope.
He couldn't be certain; he didn't have enough energy left to make certain and still keep himself hidden. The fight at the Flatlands Investment Building had taken too much out of him--single-handed and unarmed against too many opponents, while most of his inner resources were diverted into hiding the datachips in his coverall pocket.
He'd lost the hand-to-hand fight, but he'd won the other struggle: he still had both datachips concealed when his enemies dragged him off to Florrie's Place. There was somebody at Florrie's, they gave him to understand, who was slated for the honor of finishing him off.
He'd never expected to find his sister Beka waiting for him at the other end of a blaster. Once he saw her face, he thought for a few seconds that she was going to kill him after all. But she shot the guard instead, and cut another man's throat, and then surprised Owen even further by agreeing to draw away the inevitable pursuit.
If Master Ransome's datachip ever made it back home to Galcen, Owen reflected, it would be mostly Beka's work. For his own part, he'd been half-blind from the moment he came here.
The blindness wasn't entirely his fault, he supposed. The enemy must have been clouding his vision ever since he showed up on Pleyver--the old enemy, the ones who had laid siege to the planet of Entibor for three years, and not abandoned it until Entibor was dead; who had broken every fleet the civilized worlds had sent against them except the last; who had massacred the Adepts of Ilarna and half a hundred other planets besides.
There were Mages on Pleyver, and not mere apprentices or self-taught dabblers in the ways of power. The great Magelords had returned.
What is this prologue?
It is brief. It is, I hope, interesting on its own. It serves as "Our Story So Far" for those who missed volume one. It introduces the main characters (not the distant ancestors of the main characters, or a minor character who is never heard from again).
And it is completely dispensable. You don't need to have read it to follow the book.
(Also, note the italics to indicate thoughts.)
Knowing all the theoretical reasons for not using prologues (and in general, if you can possible drop them, do so), why did I choose to use a prologue here?
Because it seemed like a good idea at the time. And, I think I was right.
-----------------------------
Astoundingly,
The Apocalypse Door has
its own page at TV Tropes and Idioms.
------------------------------
Alas, everything posted from the fifth through today seems to be ... gone.
Let's see what I remember.
Plot Device.
I'm sure there was more. Did I remember to tell you that one way to increase the apparent speed of your endings was to write shorter chapters/shorter scenes there?
-------------------------
Recovering more stuff from Google Cache (alas, I'm way too good at doing this):
OMG!
Now, thanks to the power of the Internet and the miracle of Print On Demand publishing, you too can read the book that up 'til now only a select few slush readers at the largest publishers in America have been able to sample and enjoy!
http://www.booksonboard.com/index.ph...k&BOOK=1065970
------------------------
Neat Trick #159: As you get into your action/adventure climax, make the chapters progressively shorter and shorter. This has the effect of making the pace seem faster.
Do I do this?
You betcha.
-----------------------------
The Plot Device
-------------------------------
Y'all need a writing challenge? Here's one: Take one of these tired, unworkable plots, and make it fresh, new, and interesting:
http://www.strangehorizons.com/guidelines/fiction-common.shtml
(Remember Feist's Corollary to Watt-Evans' Law: There is no idea so stupid that a sufficiently talented writer can't make a readable story out of it. These ideas are stupid, you're talented, start writing!)
-----------------------------
Heck, Jake, they pulled the same stunt in
Sucker Punch, which only works if the protag is insane; and even if you assume she's insane (in a surprising twist!) it still doesn't work.
Meanwhile, I've just seen a copy of the book that reprints our "Uncle Joshua and the Grooglemen,"
Sense of Wonder. The book also includes an essay by me on Military Science Fiction, and an essay by my long-time collaborator Doyle on Writers' Workshops.
Buy one! Better still, buy a dozen! They make excellent gifts!
(Oh, and in our never-ending quest to make our backlist available,
Bad Blood.)
---------------------------
Someday let me tell you how parasitologists take live samples across international boundaries without being stopped by Customs.
A principal for y'all: "But it really happened that way!" isn't an excuse in fiction.
Also: That isn't necessarily a list of Bad Story ideas, it's a list of Stories They've Seen Too Often. Your challenge is to make 'em fresh and new.
(Writers have been making old, overworked stories Fresh and New for centuries if not millennia: Here's how. Take two stories. Turn one of 'em on its head. Smash 'em together. There you go! New story.)
----------------------------
Thanks also because I attribute my first commercial sale at least partly to what I learned here (even though the thread is about novels, and the sale was a short story - though the forms are different, writing is writing, after all).
That is the best news and the greatest thanks that any teacher could ask for.
But you're being much too shy:
Elf Love. Buy one. Better still, buy a dozen. They make excellent gifts.
Uncle Jim, when you're writing a short story (say targeted at around 5k words) do you use as detailed an outline as when you're working on a novel? If not, do you just wing it with an idea in your head or what?
In my case, the outline is essentially the first draft. I have an idea of where I'm going with it, but it's all in my head and I write from start to finish.
----------------------
And now for something completely different: Web-based storytelling (that wouldn't work anywhere except the web):
The Planetarium
-----------------
Rapunzel's Daughters: And Other Tales
"Readers who enjoy discovering new writers or fans of imaginative approaches to familiar themes should relish this small press offering." -- Library Journal
"...any fairy tale fan will find something to enjoy in this collection." -- Publishers Weekly
Not bad at all.
And
a favorable mention of "Snowvhit" at Goodreads, too.
-----------------------------
Oh, and the Unworkable Story story challenge?
When you're done, and when you've passed your story by your beta readers, and it's all polished and nice ... send it out 'til Hell won't have it.
That is the secret to being a professional writer.
-----------------------------
Where are the folks who read
Learn Writing with Uncle Jim coming from?
--------------------------------
Yo, Bartholomew.
I have several different methods of outlining. Let me see... I suppose I should give you some.
From
Uncle Jim Undiluted, we find this bit:
My outlines aren't submission-quality prose (though some bits do make it all the way through without change).
They most closely resemble a guy telling his buddy about a neat movie he saw the night before -- bits of memorable dialog, descriptions, but most important the order of the scenes.
Often at this stage I have nonce-names for characters (sometimes they're named for their function in the story: "Bestpal" or "Cannonfodder"). Sometimes the author is a character: The author looked up from couch where he sat taking notes. "Just keep talking, guys," he said. "I'll fix it in the rewrite."
I see novels as having shape. There has to be a pleasing, balanced shape, with all the parts connected, the corners neat, and overall easy to look at.
Try drawing a picture of your book, showing the flow of scenes and chapters. In a bit I might go into my theory of the novel as architecture.
Typing a hundred fifty page outline runs me about two or three weeks.
After that, bashing it around to make it into something worth playing with, then writing from the outline into a finished novel -- that can take some time.
If you're really hard against it, here's a trick:
Write a ten-page single-spaced, present tense outline. That's roughly 500 lines. You want a 300 page manuscript. You want to do it in 30 chapters, each chapter having ten pages.
Great. Take those 500 lines. Divide by 30. Every 16 lines, draw a red line across the page with your red pencil. Those are the chapters.
The first 16 lines become ten pages. You can't go on until you have 'em. The second 16 lines become ten pages labeled "Chapter Two." And so on. You can do one chapter a day, and have a novel in a month.
It'll be rougher'n forty-grit sandpaper, but you'll have the raw material to work with. Revise from that.
Other methods of outlining exist. Find one that works for you.
---------------------------------
If anyone's interested in a job in publishing,
Angry Robot is recruiting.
(UK only.)
---------------------------
Finally have all of the
Bad Blood books up, with the e-and-POD publication of
Hunters' Moon.
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07-30-2011 10:02 PM
Post #1709