Sorry for the scattered post. I was trying to get a lot done over the three-day weekend (Columbus Day/Canadian Thanksgiving/Whatever we call it this year), and my professional brain went skipping off to wherever as I fought with a book (and the vacuum cleaner, but that’s horror, not professional development).
The Amazon suit by the Federal Trade Commission seems to have eased off the front pages, since it is now the turn of the lawyers to go back and forth. I suspect it will be 2024 before we hear anything but speculation, unless something big changes on either side of the dispute.
Do young “Authors of Color” suffer because of their ethnicity and race? Or does age and genre play a role? The article is from Stanford University’s student newspaper, interviewing students who are also fiction authors (academic articles don’t count. Those are a Whole ‘Nother Mess.™*) Some of the accounts sound like bad agents, others seem more serious. Does age play a role? Or genre? The article says that in the past, books by women brought in less than half the revenue of books by men. Can you compare the royalties on thrillers, adventure, westerns, horror, and sci-fi, with romance (dominated by women for many years), sci-fi, literary-fiction (family sagas) and cozy mysteries? Cheap romance novels used to be really cheap, but so were cheap westerns’ and “men’s fiction.”
Whither print books? [waits for usual fight to simmer down]. According to Publishers’ Weekly, print sales declined earlier this year. I’d like to see what the numbers for e-books are, and for audiobooks. Based on my personal sales, I think a combination of Amazon shuffling categories and sales algorithms, the US and global economy, and on-going reader frustration are lowering sales numbers. General uncertainty about the future isn’t helping those of us who compete with video games, music, and other forms of entertainment. What caught my eye (bottom of article) was the relatively large drop in the percentage of mass-market paperbacks sold.
Where do characters come from? Some are composites, some just show up in the back seat of my pickup and scare the daylights out of me (I wish I was kidding. The title character in Blackbird did that. Thanks be my subconscious has never pulled that stunt on me since.) Do you watch people and decide that the obnoxious lady ahead of you with 19 things in her basket in the “10 or Fewer” line really needed to be immortalized as a deserving murder victim? Can you use your family background, if you’re careful about it? Yes? I’ve been known to dig out my set of gaming dice and a character creation sheet and see what happens. They’re usually not useful in the current work, but it helps generate ideas and possibilities.
The last article reminds me of something I heard at a professional writers’ weekend some years back. The lady got a frantic phone call from a friend in desperate need: a genre-romance book had to get written, the author had an emergency, and the publisher pleaded for this lady to step in. She managed it, 80K words in 36 hours. She was physically sick and in terrible pain after typing so much for so long, but she did it, and both the other author and the editor were deliriously happy with the results. Hey, if you can do it, why not? Now, there’s speech-to-text and a few other things.
*If you want to hear things that would make Stephen King shriek in terror, get someone from academia wound up about publishing craziness, add adult libations, and enjoy.
Mad Genius Club 
10 responses to “Bits and Pieces: Some Tidbits and Thoughts – Alma T. C. Boykin”
Characters… I once had a character step forward, fully formed. I knew her backstory and exactly who she was. It’s never happened since. (It helped that she needed to fill a specific role, the hero’s pal and confidante, but NOT the romantic interest.)
I hope someday to buy an academic some drinks and listen to him/her hold forth about publishing and academic infighting… I’m sure it would be worth the price of the drinks!
I do remember the descriptions of academic worlds from the Liaden books. And I rather got the feeling the authors were speaking more from experience than imagination there…
I very rarely have a character modeled after someone IRL, nor do they emerge fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus. I’ll usually get an image, or a scene and write that out, and as I progress he or she gets more fleshed out. Often times I’ll have to restart a story (the current book I scrapped and rewrote the first chapter at least four times) before my main character gets fully fleshed out.
For secondary characters they often appear on the page before I even know they exist! There are times when being a discovery writer sucks.
I skimmed TPV’s of the Stanford Daily article, and was left with an impression of whiny, entitled children. Then again, I live way too close to Stanford (:
I had been reading Samuel Delany’s work for 15 years before I found out that he was black or gay. Did I care? Not a bit. I had been reading Andre Norton’s work for years as a child before I found out she was female. Did I care? Not a bit.
Now, do I care about the attitude of Hugo voters who decided to give awards to authors who were black, female and had a foreign sounding name, because of those qualifications? Yes, quite a bit. Do I care about the Hogo voters who refused to vote for an author because he was a white male? Absolutely. Fandom has become very woke and has started handing out awards because of qualifications other than the quality of the writing. I really miss the older open minded community.
There are a few times when I learned something about an author later, and it changed how I saw his or her books. But that had nothing to do with the person’s biology or ancestry, and everything to do with his or her personal behavior.
When it becomes “read this book because the author and characters hit all the check boxes” then I don’t bother. I well recall one that had an interesting premise (alt-history) but even the far left Progressive reviewers said “there are too many check-the-box characters.” That’s pretty bad.
The one young author who’d been self-published and then moved to tradpub seemed more grounded than the other young authors interviewed, maybe because the selfpub adventure had given her a better sense of how it all worked.
A lot of my major characters are the result of me mentally arguing with other creatives about their characters: “No! That actor shouldn’t be playing his paranormal detective in the style of his smalltime hustlers! He should be playing them in the style of his sweet nerdy romantic leads…with a secret or two, of course.” Or “George Lucas has no idea what a female diplomat trying to be traditionally feminine would look like!” With a side order of extrapolation about their backstories and the people around them.
I’ve been working on a post on my blog about dictation, should be live Wednesday.
I’ll be glad to read how your experiments with dictation have gone. I know some writers find it an incredible boon, and make it work for them. I’ve not tried it enough to get a sense of it. My few attempts tend to lapse into radio-ese because of hearing medical dictations and then being in aviation.
Thank you! It is here: https://jaglionpress.com/2023/10/11/weird-wednesday-state-of-the-dictator/#more-3041
As far as radioese goes, dictation for me basically yields zeroth draft/unfocussed word splatter results, and I spend probably as much time on the keyboard cleaning up and expanding as I do thinking out loud with a voice recorder app going, so I think people using radioese (assuming they had a transcription setup which worked for them) would have similar results. For me, the advantage is in putting otherwise empty time (like the less stressful part of the commute) to work writing, and sometimes in getting past the “doan wanna” feeling.