by | February 23, 2012

Extreme Pantser’s Guide – What Editing is and is not

I seem to be suffering from premature conclusions again: I thought I was done with the Extreme Pantser’s Guide, then a discussion over at Sarah’s blog made it clear that there was one more installment, namely this one.

Here’s the problem – there are a lot of different functions that get called “editing”. Only one of them is what authors usually mean when they talk about editing without any qualifiers. This causes people to get confused about what editing actually is, leading someone who’s doing typo and grammar checks or manuscript preparation to think he, she, or in extreme cases it, is an editor.

Some definitions first:

Copyedit – this is your basic typo-hunt, grammar check, did you change your main character’s name somewhere and forget to fix it? It can also include adjusting spelling and grammar to house standards (including things like changing UK-standard spellings to US-standard). Mind you, a really good copyeditor is worth their weight in gold and then some, but it’s not the same thing as editing editing.

Continuity edit – a little more advanced than the copyedit, this is still a basic check but focusing more on things like whether you’ve just run your characters through a 48 hour day, or your main has his coat in one hand, a weapon in the other, and he’s scratching his head with the third hand he shouldn’t have. Also such things as a lunar cycle where it’s full for 3 weeks, new one day later, and spends the next six months stuck half-way. Oddly enough a little historical knowledge, science, and google-fu helps a lot here.

Page proof/layout – this is being called editing more often with the growth of self-publishing and micro presses. It’s actually not: it’s the preparation of a manuscript for publication. This is where manuscripts are formatted to house standards, stripped of extraneous internal coding for conversion to ebook formats, and actually converted.

Editing – without any kind of qualifications, this is the kind of plot tightening and focusing that’s what writers mean when they talk about editing – particularly when they talk wistfully about the absence of real editing.

So… someone who primarily finds grammar or spelling problems and maybe prepares your manuscript for publication electronic or otherwise is not an editor. Neither is the person who catches every last continuity glitch in the piece. These people are usually given titles like copyeditor, proof reader, or printer, and they’re valuable – especially if you stink on ice at any of those particular skills. Unfortunately a lot of them are calling themselves editors (there is a prize example in the comments on the post I linked to up above).

Here are some of the signs you have a real editor:

  • There’s a serious effort to keep your voice intact. Every author has one: it’s a combination of the way they use words, how they fit parts of a story together, all the way up to the kinds of books they write.
  • They don’t try to write the book they want: they try to make the book you wrote as good as it can be.
  • They look at how you’re cuing your characters – is the love interest introduced in a way that sets up the right expectations for readers? Are you giving your hero the kind of traits that tend to be associated with villains without any kind of balancing traits?
  • They suggest ways to tighten the pace of the piece so there aren’t any sections where a reader is likely to yawn and put the book down, without turning it into a breathless rush (unless of course it’s the kind of book that demands a breathless rush as its pace).
  • They look at character actions that don’t fit the overall impression of who that character is, and suggest ways to either correct the impression or make the actions fit.
  • They find places where the phrasing is awkward and smooth it over without altering either the meaning or the subtext of the prose. I personally experienced this from Dave Freer – when he was working with me on His Father’s Son, one of his suggestions was that one specific word gave the wrong impression. Changing that word had an immediate effect on the impact of the entire story (this usually only happens with short stories, although it can hit in a novel with a particularly critical section – especially the opening or the ending).
  • They make sure the opening of the piece sets the right tone and expectations for readers. You don’t want a historical novel or heroic fantasy reading like a modern thriller, and you don’t want hard science fiction reading like a regency romance. Well, not unless you’re writing satirically. This, incidentally, is why the tone of urban fantasy tends to sardonic with a strong overlay of kick-ass. The sardonic offsets the inherent oddness of having classic fantasy critters in modern-day settings, while the kick-ass cues readers to expect a whole lot of action.
  • They make sure the first page has enough information that readers are not going to feel like they’ve been on the wrong end of a bait-and-switch operation. What this translates to is that your piece needs to signal its genre and preferably subgenre early.
  • They do the kind of clean up changes that leave your piece infinitely better but still distinctly yours. A really good editor can take something that feels a bit awkward, and turn it into something you can’t put down – but you’ve got to do a line-by-line comparison of the text to work out what they did to make it that way.

This particular skill set is incredibly rare, and authors that do have it usually can’t put enough distance between themselves and their works to edit their own work. This is what authors mean when they say never to edit yourself. Anyone can typo check, although some are better than others. Ditto grammar (never, ever use software grammar checks. They’re designed to turn the tortured phrasing of non-writers into something readable. Good authors not only know what the rules are, they know when to break them.). Even continuity is something you can do for yourself, and as Amanda’s excellent publishing series has demonstrated, anyone can do that, too.

But actual honest-to-dog editing of the sort that the publishing houses have abandoned? That’s a much rarer beastie.

If you find a friend who can do this, bribe them with anything they ask for to edit your work. It’s worth it.

 

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by | February 22, 2012

But You Can’t Write THAT Fast

By Sarah Hoyt

*This is the third installment of a series on writing fast while as well as you can that I’m doing over at According To Hoyt.  I was going to do a different post for here, but for various family reasons, I’m running very late today (Kid in robotics had big DO yesterday, and I’m still tired, so I’ll just echo.  I promise to try not to echo so much*
Being afflicted with esprit d’escalier I now wish I’d called this “Inconceivable.”  Never mind.  In these blog posts, written day by day, I don’t have the luxury you have when writing a novel – that of going back.  And that’s something to which we’ll return in this post.

So, you’re looking at these posts and going “what do you mean write fast?  How fast can one write?”

I once knew a writer who thought that a book every five years was the normal and fair speed and that writing faster than that led to inferior product.  This writer, much as it will surprise you, did not have a career.

Most writers working in this field consider a book a year normal and two book a year fast.

Surely, you say, surely, if we write faster than that, then the product will suck.

Well, publishers – and agents – seem to think so.  It’s been a source of exasperation to me over the length of my career, to have people look at a book and go “maybe if you’d taken a little more time.”

Worse, as it becomes known that I’m a fast writer, I will get reviews that say “She should have taken more pains over these short stories, and then they would be better.”  That was for my first collection.  The stories collected in that one took on average three to four months to write.  One of the took a year.  I don’t know how many more pains they’d want me to take, (truly.)

It always puzzles the living daylight out of me that people think they can tell how long it took me to write a book from how much they like it (or not) or how cohesive it feels or not.  And that they inevitable prescribe MORE time to make it better.

I’m here to tell you that some of us are “putter inners.”  If we rush a book to the finish, with no time to stop and think about the implications of various things, the book is tight and to the point.  But the minute we slow down and start thinking “Well, maybe I need to put in an incident that shows how she really doesn’t like beets…”  Even though the beets are a minor plot point.  Or “well, we never see him hugging his dog.”  Or…  Then on revision, we throw all these things in, we end up with pointers in the book that give the reader the impression that the plot was going to be about something it was never meant to be about.  “I started reading this book about a beet loving dog, but it was too weird to finish.”  While if you’d rushed the book, it would have been obvious it was about a couple who happens to hate beets and love dogs going to the stars.

How fast is fast when you’re rushing?

Well, my fastest-written book – Plain Jane – was written in three days.  Mostly because it was work for hire (yes, I know, other people write media tie ins, as work for hire, I write the biography of Tudor queens.  Deal) and not under my name.  I desperately needed the money, but my mind wasn’t in that space.  So I put it off and put it off and put it off until I HAD to do it, and then did it in three days.

I THINK I edited it twice, but by that time I was in a sort of daze, so I can’t promise.

Would I recommend people doing that?  Well, no.  It was three days of minimal breaks for bathroom and eating, and I think I slept a cumulative four hours.  By the end of it, I felt as though I was eighty and I couldn’t think.  I had to ask Dan to take me away to Denver for two nights.  We went to a hotel where I sat and embroidered, because TV shows were too hard to follow.

However, as an extreme example of my deciding on a plot (in this case a structure, which I made a Cinderella pattern) and running at it, the book did extremely well.  This despite a cover SO bad that it’s second only to the hard cover cover of Draw One In The Dark in the annals of sucky covers.  It still pays me royalties.  So…

Other books that worked well and were written fast, but not as fast, included Draw One In The Dark (two weeks) and Dipped Stripped And Dead (about two weeks.)

In fact, for my money, two weeks are my best writing speed.  It takes about ten days to lie down the tracks on the book at 10k words per day, but count in a couple of days when the cats or the kids keep me from working… two weeks.  Then I send it out to betas, usually get it back in a week or two, and will then spend three to four days in rewrite, unless it’s involved, when it takes two weeks.

THAT is ideal.  And now I hear you thinking “But Sarah… why don’t you write twelve books a year, then?”

Well, I write more than anyone knows about, let’s put it that way – there are pen names you’ll never get out of me, not even by breaking me at the wheel – but no, I’ve never written 12 – or even 8 – books in a year.   So, why not?

Because I allow myself long silences in between.  I lose track of that discipline and habit of sitting at my desk and working.  Because I’ll be in the middle of a book and will get an editorial letter, and then it all goes by the wayside because I have to shift gears into the PREVIOUS book again.  Because I too, to an extent, interiorized the myths of “slow is better” and I keep braking and going “What if I’m doing something horribly wrong.”

But the sad part about that is that, no, I can’t be.  There have always been writers – though Rex Stout is the only one I can think of right now – who wrote really fast.  As in, they locked themselves in a shed for five days and emerged with a book.  And most of the pulp writers wrote six, seven novels a year.

Right now you’re saying “Yeah, but look at the pulp novels.”

No.  Think about the general quality of writing in the field in those days.  How fast or how slow you wrote had nothing to do with anything.  It’s like my collection of my earliest stories.  You can think they’re the way they are (and I confess some of them are rather two-dimensional) because I didn’t take enough time over them.  In fact, they’re the way they are because I was learning my craft.

I think there are a lot more authors writing much faster today than they admit to, because of publisher prejudice against fast writing.  For instance, almost every author I know who writes only one book a year has a deep, unhealthy relationship with computer games.

At one time, when I was looking for a new agent, the A-lister I interviewed told me that if I wanted to be “big league” I should write only a book every two years. That this wasn’t because he thought my entire time should be occupied with that precious book was betrayed by the fact he advised me to get a college-teaching position.  (Which WOULD slow me down to a book every two years.  The papers.  The bureaucracy.  The boredom.)

But that model is passing from the world.  There is no reason for a writer not to write as much as he wishes to.  In fact, if he is still also working traditional and is afraid of being snubbed, he can (and should) use secret pen names.

So…  What holds you back?

In the spirit of confession, and knowing I’m not as fast as I could be, I’m going to give myself my own prescription for speeding up:

1 – Stop being afraid to.  Believe – truly believe – how fast you write has nothing to do with how good you are.  Sure, some people are faster than others, but how do you know what your fast-limit is if you don’t test it?

2 – Stop stopping in the middle of a short story or a book.  Once you lose it, it’s much harder to get back to it.

3 – Don’t go over a book more than twice for rewrite.  Three times if you REALLY think something is seriously wrong.  After that you’re adding static and losing the signal.

4 – Let yourself go.  It doesn’t have to be good, it has to be finished.  If you allow your internal critic to talk, it will be neither.

5 – Let the words look after the words.  Words are the easiest revision and it’s why G-d gave us copyeditors (instead of as a sick joke, as every author has suspected on occasion.)

Now, ready, set, write.

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by | February 21, 2012

Don’t be a butthead!

Amanda S. Green

Sigh. It seems like this time every year or so writers lose their minds. Not all of us. But those who do, do it very loudly and without caring who they tick off. They go off on facebook and twitter and in their blogs about things we were taught as kids not to discuss around the dinner table — religion and politics. All I can say is that there are times our mothers were right. . . and this is one of them.

Let this serve are your rant warning.

As writers, especially those of us who publish through small presses or who are self-published, we rely on sites like facebook and twitter to promote our books. These sites are easy ways to connect with our fans and give them an insight into us and our work. The problem comes when we don’t separate the private from the personal. With the latest rule changes from facebook, that is especially dangerous.

Let’s look at it like this: if you have a “real” job, do you want your co-workers or your boss seeing those photos of you from your weekend away where you are obviously impaired and doing something you probably shouldn’t be doing? Or do you want them reading the rant about how your cubical mate is a slob who needs to learn how to use deodorant and your boss is a douche who couldn’t find his head with both hands, a map and a seeing eye dog? Do you want your priest knowing about your one-night stand?

No? Then ask yourself if your readers want to know these things? Do they want to know you get foaming at the mouth stupid — at least in their minds — over politics? I didn’t think so.

The solution is to think before you post. It’s okay to post how you are going to support a candidate. It’s okay to say why you aren’t supporting a candidate — if you give a well-reasoned response. Don’t froth at the mouth. Don’t call names. Don’t follow the herd mentality. (If you don’t know what I mean, just go to facebook and look around. You’ll soon see what I mean.)

But ask yourself this: do my fans really need to know all this?

My response is a simple “no”. Your fans want to know what you are working on. They want to discuss your previous work. They want amusing anecdotes about your life. They want to discuss things with you but not, necessarily, incendiary topics such as politics and religion. So, once again, repeat after me, “think before hitting enter.”

The same goes for blog posts. If you have done nothing but writer about your current work in progress, don’t suddenly ambush your readers with a rant on politics or the sermon your priest/pastor/minister/whoever gave last Sunday. If you just can’t hold it back, warn your readers that you are about to rant on something and it might be offensive to some and then put it behind a cut. That way, if they don’t want to read it, they don’t have to and it isn’t there for all the world to see without actually clicking on the link.

More troubling to me is the trend of writers, usually newbies or those who just know they are so much more qualified or intelligent or whatever than everyone else, to hijack a blog in the comments. This can happen in a number of different ways. It can be a thread drift away from the original point of the post or it can be a badgering of other commenters that is nothing short of hitting. Or it can be the continual hawking of your own book/blog/whatever on that other person’s blog without their permission.

Hitting another commenter is the quickest way to start a flame war. The only folks who enjoy flame wars are the trolls who started them. There really is a reason for the phrase, “don’t feed the troll.” The more you try to discuss the topic with them, the angrier you get, the happier they are. You see, that’s when they know they’ve done their jobs. They’ve not only steered the discussion away from the original topic of the post, but they have now made themselves the center of attention.

So, don’t feed the trolls.

The next worse, in my opinion, is continually using the comments section of someone else’s blog to promote your own work without permission. Saying, “I know what I’m talking about here and you can read more about it if you buy my book” and then link to the book is bad. Saying “I know what I’m talking about, but let me explain it to you” is good. Think about it like this: do you want your company in the middle of the championship game to suddenly start trying to sell you a life insurance policy or funeral plan or new electric service provider? No. You want to watch the game. It’s the same principle with blogs. You are a guest of the blogger and folks are there to carry on a conversation with the blogger, not hear your sales pitch.

Now, before anyone gets paranoid, I’m not talking about linking to your work in your signature line. Although, that will get you in trouble on the Kindle boards. Nor am I talking about those times when someone has touted their latest work in comments that are on topic to what our posts are about — Mad Genius Club is a blog about writing. We are pretty lax about the link policy because we know how hard it is to promote yourself. Besides, none of you have been drive-by promoters. Which is probably good since most of us love to have target practice. ;-)

So, as we get closer to the elections, as we stress more and more about sales numbers and how to increase them, remember this adage from Jim Baen: Don’t be a butthead.

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by | February 20, 2012

Bird Brain

Put it down to being a bird-brain. When I woke at 5 this morning I realised it was Tuesday, here, and I had let real life (TM) distract me from the reality of Monday and posting. Partly that’s down to the distraction of my cousins from Brittany (and you wondered why Manfred came from Brittany?) visiting, and partly it is the infamous problem of so many authors suffer from called ‘worrying about money’. It’s not a problem I ought to have, as I do my best to live so far out of the real economy as possible, but still some things need paying for. I’ve been paid on time by Smashwords, Amazon, Naked Reader, Baen (in December,for the six months ended in June – as almost all publishers do. Oddly most creditors find my paying 6 months later difficult). I’m still waiting on turn-in for another publisher – money I had relied on being not more than two months late. I gather there are other publishing houses who are being even slower, to the maybe they won’t pay at all stakes. Now, I appreciate the fact that Borders crashing has made things difficult, but really, that was one everyone saw coming. I also appreciate the fact that particularly the small publishers often get paid last by bookstores and chains. BUT as these companies all sell through Amazon (who pay on time), and have the potential to sell off their own websites (really this is quite elementary, not a challenge), which is something cheap and effective few have bothered to do. The trouble – for the likes of me – is that authors are the tail end of the ‘need to be paid’ list.

Which is all very well, but when you’re competing directly for authors and sales to readers with the companies who do pay timeously (and getting your money from them, on time) it makes it really difficult for your authors to have a lot of sympathy when you gripe about Amazon. The financial area is as much of a rub in publishing as it is in marriage. Don’t tell me that makes me a lit’ry hooker, ’cause I already know that. :-)

On other news Eric and I are going to benefit from a de facto situation, and change our e-books up there to Amazon select. Which means if you watch them… they’ll be free, from time to time.

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by | February 19, 2012

The Road to Digital Publication – Part 9

by Amanda S. Green

I’m late this morning and apologize. Usually write these posts on Saturdays, but yesterday was one of those days when I didn’t get to sit until it was time for bed. I’m not complaining. I was a long — but fun — day. But it has put me behind.

Over the last couple of months we’ve been talking about how to get your manuscript ready for digital publication. It can be daunting when you first start out and there is a learning curve. However, if I can do it, anyone can. Today, I’m going to wrap the series up and answer any questions you might have.

1. Don’t use your tab button. Remember, and e-book is based on HTML-like coding.  Instead set first line indent in your paragraph properties box (or page properties, depending on your word processing program).

  • There is no definitive amount to set it for, but most set for .3 -.33.
  • Remember when you have first line indent set, to remove it from chapter headings, scene break markings, basically anything that needs to be centered.

2. Fonts should be kept to few and those that will read well on an e-reader. Times New Roman or Georgia are two popular fonts and are included with almost all word processing programs.

  • Set your font size to 12.
  • Keep your use of italics and bold to a minimum. This is especially true for bold, which doesn’t show up well on some e-readers.

3. Also on fonts, follow the KISS rule. Keep it simple.

  • Don’t use a number of different fonts within the body of your work.
  • Don’t use the special, fancy first letter drop caps at the beginning of a chapter like you see with so many novels.
  • Again, it might look good on a printed page but it doesn’t translate well to most e-book readers, especially those based on the e-ink technology.
  • Also, the underlying html coding of the page often burps on special characters, another reason to follow the KISS rule. You don’t want oddities showing up in the middle of a word.

4. Single space or 1.5 space between lines. Do not double space.

5. Whether you hand code the html or use one of conversion programs the convert your e-book through one of the conversion programs, always checked your work in native e-reader programs. The Kindle, Nook, Kobo and Sony readers all have PC apps. iBooks/iTunes can be previewed through the iBook reader on you iPad or iPod by simply pulling it into the program.

  • Check it in every format you plan on selling it in.
  • The main formats are MOBI and EPUB.

6. Remember to include the active table of contents.

  • While not all outlets require this, readers are coming to. The active table of contents is the TOC that shows up when you click the “Go To” option on e-readers. Usually, it will bring up “Cover”, “First Page”, “Table of Contents”, “Location”.
  • This is easily accomplished for all outlets except Smashwords, which has its own rules. By using the heading function in your word processing program for you chapter titles, you can not only build the internal table of contents, but also the active table of contents. A quick word here: if you use a program such as Sigil to convert from your base html file to EPUB, your active table of contents will be generated during your conversion process and you can check it in program to make sure it is fully functional.
  • For Smashwords, you can build the active table of contents either by including the word “Chapter” in each chapter title or by doing bookmarks withing the document. Explanations and examples of how to do it can be found in their style guide.

7. Don’t rely on the previewers in programs like Calibre to give you a true picture of what your converted manuscript looks like. Remember to preview in the native reader.

8. Be sure to set your meta tags during the conversion process. These are the search terms that will make your e-book easier to find.

9. Cover images — review Sarah’s post on them from two weeks ago.

10. Don’t obsess over your sales numbers — or sales ranking, for that matter.

  • Amazon’s KDP program, in my opinion, offers the best information (most complete, easiest to read and import into any accounting program you might use) of the retailers open to small press and self-published authors. Their end of month reports are by title and you can cross-check it against their prior six weeks sales figures. Another upside is that Amazon’s figures are updated on a regular basis each day, so you can basically see your sales in real time.BUT DO NOT OBSESS AND KEEP CHECKING YOUR SALES.
  • Barnes & Noble’s PubIt lets you download a spreadsheet that shows sales by day. Which is also good because you can see if your promo push had any effect there. The downside is that it does require another step for those of us who are number challenged and have more than one or two titles out with them to see totals per title. Also, PubIt is slower in reporting sales than Amazon, often lagging a day or more behind.
  • Smashwords is real-time in their reporting for their in-house sales, but reports coming in from their expanded catalog sales can take a quarter or more to show up. That throws a real wrench in the works when you are trying to track how promotions are working for you, not to mention how it slows the money coming in.

11. Amazon and B&N pay on a monthly basis. Smashwords is quarterly.

12. Smashwords allows you to generate coupons and offer your titles for free.

  • The caveat here is that your agreement with both Amazon and B&N states that you will not offer your titles for less that what you are selling them through that store.

13. Amazon KDP Select Program

  • The jury is still out on this but, for the moment, I am cautiously optimistic. Taking part in the program means your titles can’t be available through any other outlet for a period of 90 days. At the end of that time, your enrollment in the program will continue unless you remove it.
  • Amazon will check to determine that your title isn’t offered elsewhere. NRP found out the hard way that Smashwords had not taken one of our titles down when instructed to and Amazon found out. What happens is Amazon will send an e-mail describing the problem and giving you 30 days to correct the situation or your title will be removed from the Select program. We acted quickly and the problem was dealt with in 2 days. But the lesson here is don’t try to pull a fast one on Amazon. They might not catch the first time, but they will eventually.
  • The Select Program allows you to offer your title for free for a total of 5 days every 90 days. You also get a percentage of the Lending Program fund. So that is two pluses.  The downside is, you are losing potential sales from other outlets. So you have to ask yourself if the potential bump in sales from taking your titles free on Amazon for a few days is worth it.

14. If you use a DBA to make it appear that your e-book was published by a “publisher”, use common sense in naming it. Don’t call it “My Press” or “Buymybook.com” or anything that screams “Rookie!”. Readers are savvy and will and do google a publisher.

15. When writing your blurb, think about what you’d put on the back cover if you were printing the book. Don’t say, “This is the best book I’ve ever written.” Don’t say, “I wrote this book and no publisher would accept it so I’m publishing it myself.” And yes, I have seen variations on this. Don’t talk about how your mother, brother, sister or best friend loved it and say it’s the best thing they’ve ever read. Don’t use the blurb area to talk mainly about yourself. This is the short synopsis of the novel or short story that will convince a reader to buy it. Tease them. Interest them. It’s about the book.

  • PubIt has an “About the Author” area you will fill in when putting your book up for sale. This is where you put your bio.
  • Amazon has “Author Pages”. This is where you have your bio, link your blog or web page, twitter, facebook, etc. If you haven’t set up your Author Page yet, do so. And be sure all your titles are linked to it.

16. Once you’ve uploaded your e-book, review it. Review it all the way through. Review it on every site you upload it to. Make sure there are no issues with it.

  • This is especially important to do with regard to Smashwords. Its meatgrinder program can do nasty things to your manuscript. I’ve gone back months later to look at NRP’s titles and found half of a book is now all in small caps. No reason why they should be. We don’t use small caps for anything. But the conversion process did it. There have been other formatting anomalies that can occur as well.

17. Finally — and most important — before converting and uploading your e-book for sale, make sure you have edited it. Most of us have a very difficult time editing our own work. So find someone to do the editing for you. You may need to hire and editor. If you do, get references and check them. Then, after you have reviewed and implemented the edits, have it copy edited and proofread. Remember, it needs to be professional quality OR BETTER. Yes, or better because self-published and small press published authors are fighting the stigma in some readers’ eyes. (And don’t get me started on how there are still authors and editors out there who think we are a step or two down the publishing evolutionary ladder.)

Hope this has helped. If you have any questions or comments, post them and I’ll do my best to answer.

And check back in next Sunday for the start of a new series by another of the MGCers.

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by | February 17, 2012

The Power of the Familiar

by Chris McMahon

Last week I found myself downstairs in the dark, alone, watching a horror DVD (Insidious). What really creeped me out about this movie was that the setting – a family home – was so familiar. So much of the usual experience of living in a house was captured. Those moments of strange quiet, the more ominous moments when you are sure someone is beside you.

There was another low-budget horror flick that really creeped me out – that was Session 9. 

During one early part of my career I used to do environmental assessments – mainly land-based. I sampled just about everything, assessing a wide range of properties from former rural (cattle dips were fun) to deserted industrial buildings. Now those darkened industrial buildings – with the lights off (often the power has been disconnected) and all the bustle of people and industry gone – are downright creepy. Session 9 was set in an abandoned hospital. I won’t give away too much of the plot, but the central characters were there for asbestos removal from the deserted buildings. So much of this was so familiar – including the eerie atmosphere of those deserted buildings - that it really hit close to home. One of the best horror films I have seen in ages.

All this got me thinking of the power of the familiar in fiction. It is this which often serves to give a link to the reader and can be used in different ways. In the more straightforward way, those familiar elements – particularly personality quirks or things that evoke “Hey that happened to me” are fantastic for creating an emotional link to the character. 

In the case of suspense, things have a lot more impact to scare you if on some level you see yourself in the scene – either through familiar settings or situations (or are dragged there against your will!).

Do you consciously use the familiar in your fiction to engage the reader?

Oh – and I ended up finishing Insidious the next morning – in the light of day:)

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by | February 16, 2012

The Extreme Pantser’s Guide: Meet the internal editor

You’ve finished your first draft, you’ve given it a decent amount of time to sit (trust me, for pantsers this is essential), and now it’s time to edit. As with all things pantser, particularly extreme pantser, it’s not that simple. Editor time is when you need to take this thing that’s lived inside your head for months, and put it through the shredder – and most of the pantsers I know (yes, including me) have major problems letting go enough to do this.

Probably the first and simplest tool in the kit for turning on your editor-mind is to phase-shift: to look at the piece in a different format than the one you wrote it in. Print-outs work for this. So does making a copy of the file and getting the copy onto your ebook reader or smartphone (preferably one with annotation or editing capability) and reading it there. The different format is usually enough to keep you out of writer mindset (or worse, “this is my baby” mindset).

Editing somewhere you don’t write is another tool that, while simple, works. The goal of moving is to put yourself somewhere your subconscious doesn’t recognize as writing-space. If you wrote the novel on your laptop while taking the train to and from work, don’t edit it there – or at the very least, don’t mark it up there. It doesn’t matter whether you mark up in approved editorese or not: you’re the only person who’s going to see this stuff, so you’re the only person who needs to worry about it. Highlights on a kindle with a one or two word note to say what it needs are just as effective as handwritten comments on paper, or comments embedded in a word processor file.

A word of warning here: if your word processing application uses any form of auto-formatting turn it off. There are multiple versions of Word in the wild, Word Perfect still happens, and then you’ve got Open Office and its clones, as well as any number of other applications that will create something more or less like RTF (aka “Rich Text Format” – which is text with fonts, bold, underlines and some other formatting, but not the fancy stuff). They don’t all use the same internal codes for anything that is not an obvious keystroke. What that means is that the beautiful file on your Mac ends up looking like someone threw confetti all over it with all manner of weird characters involving tildes and accents where you thought you had a quote mark.

Actually, that’s two words of warning. Do not use your word processor’s embedded comments feature. Not everything you’re likely to be playing with is going to be able to support that. My preference for this is to use something that won’t appear anywhere else in the manuscript as a flag character. So I’ll be writing along and there’ll be something like [add more description] in the middle of the text. That tells me what I’ve got to do and where I’ve got to do it. Sometimes it’s a plot note, sometimes flagging a really crappy sentence, and sometimes a note to remind me that a character’s name needs to change.

For stuff I need to research but don’t want to lose I use the same trick – a sudden burst of [research this] will get added to the story as I write. When I’m done the markup pass-through, I can search for [ and do what needs to be done. The benefit of this is that you can do it with anything, even Notepad (well, if the book isn’t too big – Notepad can’t read very large files. Although if the file is that big, you have other problems).

Okay, so you have your internal editor. Guess what? The editor popped over from Evil Bastard Central, and will cheerfully tell you what you’re doing sucks rocks, while leaning back in a recliner drinking your virtual booze. This is quite normal. I know it sounds like split personality, but heck, we pantsers already host a ridiculous number of personalities anyway. What’s one more?

Quite a few authors externalize the editor-mind, even going so far as to give it a name. Julie Czerneda calls hers the “Great Editor Voice” aka GEV, and posts interesting conversations between her and her GEV on her sff.net newsgroup.

You don’t need to go that far. If it helps to do something like this, go for it. Otherwise, don’t worry. So long as you can flip to editor-mind when you need to, that’s enough.

Of course, the other side of this is getting back to author-mind when you’re done with the editor-mind. That’s… interesting. It’s also crucial – you don’t want to be in editor-mind when you’re writing, any more than writer-mind is good when you’re editing. While the toolset is much the same, they’re used in different ways. The writer-mind is applying the paint, building the picture and framing it, while the editor-mind applies a scalpel to clean up the bits that got smudged, and takes the sander to the frame to smooth off all the rough places and hide the marks where the hammer didn’t quite go where you meant it to, and so forth. Not all writers are good at editing, and not all editors are good at writing.

Depending on how clean your drafts are (in the sense of dangling plot threads, odd byways you forgot to come back to, ideas that hit halfway through that you need to go back and seed and other such pantser oddities), you might not need much in your edit passes. Mine are typically pretty light: there’s a pass for plot/character issues where I’ll usually pick up most of the typo and grammar as well, and a second pass that takes a closer look at phrasing and tightening. After that will depend on what Amanda and Sarah, my long-suffering beta readers and in Amanda’s case editor as well, have to say. You might need dozens of passes to clean things up.

Or not. Pantsers have a horrible tendency to over-edit until there’s no life left. We really can’t edit our work until we’ve had a chance to forget it, and we’ve got to be careful about who we listen to. If you try to fix everything everyone says, you’ll end up with flat, rolled out tofu. Very dead tofu, at that. Instead, look for the possible problem that sits under what they’re saying, and work out how to address that.

And that, fellow pantsers, is that. Go thou forth and explore the pants.

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by | February 15, 2012

Whither Conventions?

- Sarah Hoyt

(Oooh.  How well that sounds.  I confess I always wanted to title something “Whither something or other” because it makes one seem so important, grown up and particularly well informed.)

Lately science fiction conventions have become a topic of discussion in my circles.  In fact, I haven’t discussed cons and which cons are worth while so much since I was, myself, a raw beginner.

To begin with let me point out that I didn’t grow up with con-culture.  While I was a fan, I was a fan in Portugal, which meant the only contact I had with other fans were while waiting in line to buy that month’s release from Argonauta which was (except for certain fly by night, appallingly proof-read and probably pirated editions) the only science fiction imprint in Portugal.

Since I had no clue science fiction conventions happened, I managed to live in the South Eastern US for eight years and never even know there were about a dozen every summer within easy driving distance.  (Remember, children, this was before internet.)  I first found out about conventions my very last year in the South (at the time in Columbia, SC) and it was academic for me at that point, because we had a small infant, I was very ill and we were beyond broke.  Oh, yeah, and I found out they existed only because I discovered Locus magazine on a magazine rack in Columbia (and then subscribed.)  I was so disconnected from US fandom I didn’t even know of Locus and/or SF Age.

I think I first saw science fiction cons in some sitcom, which made fun of them, of course, and pictured everyone there as rabid gamers and/or media fans.  Now, I have nothing against Star Trek, (DO NOT ask me about Star Wars) but my love of science fiction existed before Star Trek, and continued after it, and also I have the sort of mind that has trouble remembering world details, (even my own.  If Gentleman Takes A Chance EVER has another edition, there are things to clean up) so I can’t get into those fascinating “in episode 25, the ten seconds that show the Romulan base” conversations.  So I thought that while these were science fiction cons, they had nothing to say to me.

And then I sold my first book, fired my first agent, and needed to find a second.  Kris Rusch suggested I go to World Fantasy on a shopping expedition.  And that’s when I discovered conventions weren’t necessarily all media or all fan.

Oh, sure, fans attend conventions – though there are fewer fans at World Fantasy than the other major cons.  Or rather, there’s a higher ratio of writer to fan than anywhere else except the Nebulas – and most of the stuff is directed at them.  But if you are a pro you attend for completely different reasons.

Because I started so late, the only con I ever attended strictly as a fan was Discworld Con, and it was a blast.  The rest of the time, cons for me are working time.

Oh, sure, they’re fun too, but in a different way.  Working in a field where my colleagues can live all over the world (let alone all over the country), I’ve formed alliances and even close friendships with people I’ll never see in the normal course of life.  However, there are cons at which we all gather by accident or design.

You can usually tell pro writers at cons, because they’re a little better dressed, they rarely attend panels, though they often come in near the end and wait for the panelists to finish speaking then go up and greet them.  That’s another way you can tell pros: someone a little too well dressed and a little too old to be squeeing “I haven’t seen you in ages!” and hugging a friend.

Our first two years of attending cons, Dan happened to be in a very well paying job (now referred to as “when we were rich”) which was a victim of the mini-slump after 9/11 (mini compared to now.)  So we attended all the major cons: Nebs, World Con and World Fantasy.

Of the three, as I said, the Nebs had the highest rate of pros to fans, with world fantasy second and world con third.  However, when it came to cutting our traveling for economic reasons, and we tallied the cons where we “did business” we found that World Fantasy paid for itself every year, while the Nebula Awards didn’t.  (This is possibly because the Nebs had MUCH bigger names than I.)  In Worldcon we did no business whatsoever, though it was a lots and lots of fun.  Also, being a minimum five day con it was too “expensive” in time, particularly for a couple with young kids.  So, we decided to do only world fantasy.

This calculus has changed somewhat.  The last two world fantasies I attended I did no business at all.  Part of this might be the pivot in my career (as what I’m becoming known for is MOSTLY science fiction or fantasy with Baen – and Baen doesn’t really have a presence at WFC) and part of it I think are the changes we’re seeing.  On the other hand, Worldcon is coming online as “a good place to make contact with fans who aren’t local” and money permitting I’m going to try to attend at least every other year.

The last time I attended the Nebulas four? Five? Years ago, it was more sparsely attended than I remember, the attendees were more from the Prestige side of the field, and there were only a couple of editors in attendance.  So unless I or someone in whose work I’m interested is nominated, I will probably not bother.  Or unless I hear reports that they are changed again.

And that brings us to the topic of this – yes, WHITHER cons? – and the fact that we pros (and wanna bes) have been talking behind y’all’s backs again.

The topic, quite specifically is “cons to do business in” and there don’t seem to be any.  I mean, none like World Fantasy where an editor was likely to come up to you and go “Sarah” well, if your name is Sarah, natch.  “We’re starting a new imprint and we really liked your Shakespeare books.  Do you think you can….”   These days editors are just as likely to poke you via LinkedIn or to send you a Face Book email.  Ditto for most of your interaction with colleagues.

So, in terms of cons, which ones are still worth it if you’re an established pro?  The ones where you commune with your fans and can meet most of your far-flung circle.  To me that’s boiling down to World Con, though I understand Dragoncon is bigger and better (and I mean to try it, if ever I’m not QUITE so pinched.)

But what if you’re a wanna-be?  Well, it didn’t hit me that things had changed for you guys (since I was never a wanna be at cons) till a friend said “I used to come as a wanna be and hear the names in the field, and the recently published people, to figure out how to do it.  But now it’s 90% self published people on panels, and who wants to see that?”

He has a point, unless, of course, the panel is on self-publishing.  The other reason for a wanna-be or new pro to come to a con was to meet editors.  With the state the publishing field is in, this hardly seems worth it.  Also, according to my friends in the East, where you got more editors at the local cons, there are fewer and fewer of these personages attending cons and the ones that are there mingle less.  I know this is true for world fantasy and world con.  They have meals with their writers, and they make nice, but they’re not as available as they once were and it’s harder for a newby to just bump into them.

So, I’d say if you’re a wanna be and if – like me – you hate most cons (my exception is Liberty con, which is very relaxed and laid back.  It’s not that I hate the cons, actually.  I just hate being out in public.) don’t go.  Stay home and write and work on getting your work out and getting well known.

Does this mean that I think cons will vanish?  No.  At least not most of them.  Some MIGHT vanish, what I call “prestige cons” attended mostly by pros, but even that is doubtful.  There still needs to be a Nebulas Award ceremony, at least as long as the award exists.  So the con might shrink, but it won’t vanish.  Ditto for World Fantasy where, at any rate, a lot of pros meet just to see their friends.  (And I might go now and then just for that, money permitting.)

But cons will CHANGE.  In these pinched times, I expect – if I’m right about what I’m seeing – that smaller local cons will actually grow, particularly if they have a genuinely popular guest of honor.  This is because they allow fans to see their local authors.  They allow authors to socialize with their local friends.  They allow local self-published authors to promote.  They allow local fans to discover local self-published authors.  Honestly, I think these cons, or most of them, would benefit greatly from having an “Indie track” where they put authors who are mostly or exclusively indie.  Not because they should be segregated in a ghetto, but because they’ll attract their own audience, more interested in what they’re saying than in what the traditionals have to say, and also because we avoid those panels where half the panelists sound like they come from a different world from the other half, with yours truly caught in the middle.

Local cons will grow and flourish if they cultivate the sort of atmosphere Liberty con cultivates, where it’s all relaxed and laid back, everyone knows everyone else, and fans and pros are very permeable groups.  (And yes, I’m still trying to figure out how to go to Liberty con.  If I can get a few more indie properties up, and if the front end of my car doesn’t cost me in the many many thousands, there’s a chance I can make it.)  Liberty con is particularly good at providing a place for the younger ones in sf/f to socialize, and if you think your kids don’t desperately need a place where they’re not considered odd, think again.  However, those local cons who insist on being “Too good for the likes of you” will run into some issues.
The bigger cons might shrink, at least if what I’m hearing about gas/flight prices is true, but it depends on how BIG they are.  They might be big enough they’re worth the price to meet THAT many of your fans and to see THAT many of your friends at once.

The hard-hit ones will be the medium ones, particularly in a region that has small cons also.  Those cons have charged a little more and been a little more upscale, but they also bring in bigger guests, and sometimes editors.  This has been failing for some time, and they’ll lose attendants, as the brought in guests are diluted by a flood of indies and as the prices make people balk.  On the other hand, there are tons of things they can do, like… establish an indie track.  Get one or two of the self-published or even the editors of small presses (or the tech people of small presses) to do workshops on how to put your book on line and the pros and cons of various outlets. Take a page from RWA Nationals and open your doors to the local public for a soiree or books give away (particularly good for small presses and traditionals) – ie. Have local people pay a small ticket price and come in to get books signed by the visiting authors and to get books the houses sent to give away (I don’t suggest one does this on the scale of RWA, but perhaps a raffle.)  In other words – get creative.

Also, try not to have the same authors in the same panels every year.  If I’m put on another Heinlein panel where I’m the ONLY one who comes to praise Heinlein, not to bury him, for instance, and where I KNOW what every panelist is going to say ahead of time, there’s going to be blood.  And while that might attract the audience, it’s not fun for the local CSI, mmkay?  Seriously – even the panels I DO enjoy I get tired of saying the same things every year.  I suspect so does the audience particularly at small local cons get tired of listening to us.

While I HATE some of the experiments, like “Speed date an author” that Mile Hi has engaged in, a lot of experiments NEED to be tried, to keep the mid size cons (and some of the smaller ones) worthwhile.

Again, make sure you don’t have “too good for the likes of you” issues.  As a midlister, I’ve often run into cons that had no idea I was “still” publishing after my first series or where the program person didn’t read my bio and assumed I was ONLY writing historical/literary fantasy.  Look, I don’t mind Shakespeare panels, but while I studied him in college and am interested in him, I’ve spent the last nine years writing non-related things.  The research I did for those books is NOT foremost in my mind.  And when what I have coming out that year is an urban fantasy and a Space Opera, offering me a forum to promote my – out of print – series not only is not useful, it doesn’t exactly make me feel like you give a flying fig for my presence.  So when I become pinched, or am on deadline (when am I not?) OR even if the kids want to go to some event that day, I’m likely to send regrets and not go.

Now, I realize most of the time (There are the odd con where my fans all gather) I am not a great loss.  But when you lose ten of fifteen people like me, you’re losing serious pull.  Get your mind out of the “one big blockbuster guest.”  The future is indie and local, and even blockbusters (unless you’re booking Rawling or Meyers) are not what they used to be.  Think “small local divinities” instead of the great pantheon.  By all means, have the guest of honor, but look, you really have no excuse not to KNOW what local midlisters are doing – not in the age of Internet you don’t – there’s wikipedia and, failing that, there’s Amazon.  Five minutes per midlister will have them feeling cherished and important.  We don’t require much.  We’re used to being second-class-citizens.  But when you don’t even bother, we feel like you think you’re too good for us.  And why would you want to do that?  To attract a higher-grade of attendee?  Good luck with that in the era of the long-tail and divided marketing trends.  You’re not in the seventies or eighties.  Not everyone agrees on what prestige is.  Cultivate loyalty, instead.

Given a minimum effort, the future of cons is better than their past.  Whither cons?  Wherever they very well please.  As with publishing houses, things are changing, but it’s not the end of the world.  You get to choose whether that glow over the horizon is Ragnarok or the bright dawn of a new day.

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by | February 14, 2012

On publishing lemmings, second books in a series and other random thoughts

As you can tell from the title of this post, my brain is populated by idea bunnies hopped up on too much caffeine. Worse, they are being selfish and not sharing the caffeine. That would usually result in some bunny sacrifices — after all, it is very dangerous to get between me and coffee in the morning. Ask the poor maid at the hotel in San Francisco a few years ago who made the supreme mistake of bringing decaf…DECAF…to the room when we called for more coffee for the coffeemaker — but the bunnies today resemble the Killer Rabbit of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and scare me. So, I’m going to share them with you, hoping as I do that they take pity on me and share some of the caffeine.

Let’s start with the publishing lemmings. In case you haven’t heard yet, Penguin has decided that it will no longer offer e-books to libraries through OverDrive. This is, in fact, the second time Penguin has pulled e-books from libraries. There are all sorts of reasons being bandied about. They range from Penguin’s paranoia that lending e-books will cause a decline in sales (gee, wonder how long it will be before they realize that this same argument can be applied to the lending of “real” books), that it will cause an increase in piracy because library patrons will crack the drm and them put the e-books up on torrent sites, etc. (after all, we know only the riffraff use libraries), that Penguin isn’t being paid enough for e-book lending, that Penguin is upset that it can’t tell OverDrive to limit how e-books are delivered to e-book readers, that Penguin can’t limit the number of times an e-book is loaned out to a number so ridiculously low as to be criminal, to the paranoia legacy publishers have about Amazon.

In other words, Penguin is following its fellow lemmings in the publishing world as they run off the edge of the cliff of continued viability.

My take on it is that all of the above reasons have played a part in the decision and it is a decision that flies in the face of reason. How many times have any of us borrowed a book from the library, liked it so much we either went out and bought that book or we bought other books by that author? The same thing applies to e-books. People will buy based on finding a book or author they like, no matter what the medium. So, sales lost not only because Penguin isn’t putting the titles in the digital hands of readers but because of the loss of good will as well.

Increasing the stupidity, Penguin will also be withdrawing audiobooks from OverDrive. Yep, you read that right. Audiobooks will also no longer be offered for download. If this doesn’t show a serious lack of judgment, I don’t know what does. It also shows that Penguin is only interested in its traditional publishing side. The audio and digital sides are the poor step-children, relegated to the cellar in the hopes that everyone will soon forget they ever existed.

Penguin and other legacy publishers who share this hope, I have one thing to say: that ain’t gonna happen.

This whole thing boils down to the fact that Penguin is terrified that people will sit at home and download wirelessly to their kindles a library book. That’s too easy. It will keep people from going to the library. It will keep people from going to the bookstores. It will kill traditional publishing. It is EVIL.

Sorry, no. You can log onto overdrive from any computer or tablet or smartphone. You don’t have to go to the library to do so. No matter what your e-book reader, you can then download the e-book. Yes, you can do so directly to your Kindle as opposed to some of the other e-book readers. But most folks aren’t browsing the Overdrive catalog — or even the Amazon catalog — on their kindles. They do it on their computers and then either download to the computer and side load to their kindle, or tell the download to go to the kindle. The only difference is whether you actually add the usb cable step of side loading or not.

This is simply another piece of evidence showing just how out of touch Penguin and other legacy publishers are when it comes to e-books. These publishers are willing to remove an income stream — something exceedingly stupid for an industry struggling to survive — as well as being willing to remove a potential income stream. Then they wonder why, as we look at such foolish decisions, authors are not only beginning to question why they should stay with legacy publishers but are fleeing the sinking ship. So, instead of bringing in new corporate blood that understands the changing market and is willing to embrace that change, the old guard stands on the bow of the ship, watching those with a clue racing for the lifeboat of self-publishing and small press publishing. By the time legacy publishers finally implement a workable new business plan, it very well may be too late — for them.

For more on this, check out these links:

Okay, the bunnies have finally given me a cup of coffee, so I’ll move on.

The second book in my Nocturnal Lives series, Nocturnal Serenade has been out for a couple of weeks now.  In some ways, this book was a lot harder to write than the first book of the series, Nocturnal Origins. For one thing, some of the threads I’d started weaving in the first book had to be dealt with in the second. I also had to figure out how to continue the character development, all the while not changing the characters too much or too unexpectedly. What wound up happening was that some characters took turns I didn’t expect. Specifically, one I’d planned on being a very minor character wound up becoming a major player — and will be back in subsequent books — while another turned out not to be what I expected.

Now these characters, who had been playing havoc with my trying to write anything else by demanding I write Serenade, have gone silent. No, that’s not quite right. Now they have decided it’s fun to play with my brain. I have a short story set in that world that is seriously overdue. It shouldn’t be difficult to write, not when I know these characters so well. Unfortunately, they aren’t playing fair. I sit down to write the story and the voice isn’t right. Then it decides the POV character isn’t right. Then it decides it wants to be written in first person — FIRST PERSON! — then it’s back to wanting to be in third person. And that’s when my head explodes — again. When I protest, they laugh.

Before you say to punish them by working on something else, well, tried that. Didn’t work. Why? Because they were right there, laughing and pointing fingers and telling me I was a wuss for running away. No, really, I haven’t lost my mind. Well, at least no more than usual. I am a writer, after all.

So, today I’m going to take away their kibble, threaten them with the killer bunnies and try to pound out the story. Keep your fingers crossed. With my luck, they’ll make friends with the bunnies and then make common cause against me. Guess I’ll keep the rolled up newspaper close by to swat their noses if it comes to that. Sigh.

Finally, it’s Valentine’s Day. I hope everyone has a great day. Consider giving your favorite author a Valentine’s gift by supporting him or her either by buying one of their books or e-books or simply by posting a review on Amazon/B&N or by recommending or gifting one of their books to someone you know.

 

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by | February 13, 2012

The writer has left the building

I’ve suddenly realized – with about 5 hours sleep before I rush off to meet the ferry, that I hadn’t posted. And I wondered who would notice? We’re in interesting times, and at one end the writers are saying ‘hooray the gatekeeper that took most of the money we earned is dead.’ At the other the editors at a number of publishers are saying ‘they’ll all come running back with their tails between their legs soon. It can’t work. Some authors are saying ‘well, e-books paid my mortgage. Others are saying ‘I just got my royalty statement and sales of e-books are still less than 10%’

So what is it to be, chaps? will we each end up with an audience of 15? Will big media SOPA/PIPA governmental protect their monopoly on distribution? Is Amazon going to suddenly cut royalties to an industry standard 15% of gross (or less?)

And will there be any writers left standing?

Your call :-)

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