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Miles Between Chair And Keyboard

It is perhaps appropriate that the first post of a series on writing fast (without sacrificing quality) should go up late.

In my observation most people who are really slow at writing – including myself in my slow periods – owe their slowness to one main reason: they don’t actually sit down and put butt in chair.

I know – oh, trust me, I KNOW – how many miles there are between your real life and sitting butt in chair and putting fingers on keyboard.

Let me start by saying this is not how I imagined being a professional writer would be.  First of all, of course, I never imagined being a professional fiction writer.  I was going to be a journalist.  I read the bios of journalists, I interned in a newspaper.  I was going to go in, early morning shift, type furiously away, while news came in by phone.  Flunkies would run to get me coffee…

Sigh.

If I imagined writing fiction at all, I was – of course! – going to be a bestseller from book one.  After which, I’d have this wonderful office, with built in bookcases all around it, a secretary and a researcher and a flunky to get me coffee.

Sigh.

Of course now I know bestselling writers, and even they don’t have that.  But never mind.

Real life turned out much different.  I sold my first book while I had a three year old and a six year old.  Boys.  For those of you not similarly blessed, picture the stock exchange room during a buying frenzy.  It’s about like that, only not as peaceful.

Yet, over the next six years, through a house move and several illnesses (my body doesn’t like me) I wrote about ten books and seventeen proposals.  Also, about fifty short stories.  All of this trying to only minimally neglect the kids (Not really.  I just didn’t hover over them.)

So, how did I do it?  Well, there are tricks.  Some will work for you, and some won’t.  Today for instance, my schedule was shot to h*ll and back by a couple of friend-emergencies this morning and the fact the cats peed on the older boy’s bed.  That too is a lesson to use.

Tips and trips to get to the chair, with fingers on the keyboard:

1 – Set a time.  No.  REALLY set a time.  Say you decide your writing time is at 8 am every day.  Treat it like a job.  At 8 am be at the keyboard, hands ready to type.

2 – But the attic roof just caved in (remember I get these examples from life?)  Well, if you were at the office, would you know?  Make calls on your lunch break.  Right now, work.

3 – But my kid has a full diaper.  I can’t ignore him.
True.  Pretend you’re at the ofice, and a secretary wants to ask you a question. Change that kid’s diaper, then sit down again.

4 – Speaking of which what do I do with the kids/cats/screaming stock brokers?
Have a plan.  If the kid is awake and mobile, setup a play area for him next to you.  If he’s old enough and you’re a mean mommy (TM) give him work to do.  Actually kids react very well to this.  Give them a laptop with a learning program or a notebook to do his writing in.  Explain you’re working and the kid should too.  They’re grownup now.  You’ll see how much they do/learn.  Cats are a little more difficult.  My method is to have one draped across my lap and one on my shoulders.  Screaming stock brokers… I got nothing.  Why are you trying to write in the middle of the exchange, anyway?

5 – But what if I can’t sit down?  I need to clean house/paint walls/garden and there’s no one else to do it.  Dragon Naturally Speaking.  I hear you can work with one of the remote dictation recorders.  I keep meaning to try it, too.  I know several authors who’ve written entire (good) books while doing this.  (I really need to try it.)

6 – But the phone rang!
Unless it’s someone who is bleeding on the floor, ignore it.  And if they’re bleeding on the floor, ignore it too, unless you’re a registered MT.

7 – I’m HUNGRY
Every writer on first coming home gains a bazillion pounds.  This is because your brain learns to short circuit your chair time with “you are hungry.”  Take scheduled breaks.

8 – But I’m just sitting here and not writing.
Unless you’re ill (it happens) it’s probably a case of the block.  Hint, you’re never blocked on everything at once.  Blocked on your serious vamp novel?  Write a funny short story about nuns in space (I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours!)

9 – Give yourself license to fail
By which I don’t mean just to write crap.  Some days that happens also, but I mean more than that.  Give yourself license to have a truly horrible day, like mine today, where you get nibbled to death by ducks.  It doesn’t mean tomorrow won’t be wonderful, or that you shouldn’t continue trying to bring order out of chaos.

10 – Try and try again
Sit down every morning at eight (or whenever) and start afresh.  Today, it’s going to work.

Tomorrow: Running on empty.

I haven’t even had a close call like the other day when I was jogging under snow with my hood up and didn’t see the car which managed to stop inches from me.  Yeah, it was a total idiocy to jog with impaired visibility and headphones on.  Sometimes I’m stupid in more ways than one.  BUT if I had been — if I HAD been, then my counter was clean.  (This was my mom’s own particular obsession.  She never much cared about the state of my underwear, probably figuring if I got hit by a bus it WOULD be messy, but she told me never to leave the house with dishes on the counter, because if the police came to tell people I was dead, if there were dishes on the counter they would know I was a slob.

It’s more that I’ve been dealing with family things.  Robotics let the younger kid come home for a day, so I’m trying to remember what he looks like.  (Build season ends next week, so there might be more opportunities for this.)  Also doing laundry and dragged older kid for a walk (That way he can look out and make sure I’m not run over.)

Now I’m going to go over some stuff that needs to come out with Goldport.  Recently I put out two short stories that are out with my collection Crawling.  (So if you’ve read that, you don’t need these.)

Ariadne’s Skein which is in the Darkship Thieves sequence, before the turmoils (for those who have gleaned the future history, which I promise to put up in chunks really soon.  I’ve been collating it.)

and Thirst which was a an honorable mention in the  year’s best fantasy and horror for 1994, but which also, unfortunately, has given Mike Kabongo the idea I write “Legions of gay vampires”  which is silly, since the legions are barely mentioned in this story.  (Also, it’s a gross exaggeration, since I’ve written… 5 vampire stories and two vampire novels and only two of the short stories even involve gay characters — both historical, btw, so I didn’t have much choice.)

While on that — for those who read Witchfinder’s latest installment, no, it’s not about to turn into supernatural bdsm, much less gay supernatural bdsm.  While the characters might er… lean that way, a) it’s not where the story is GOING.  It remains primarily an adventure story.  b) it’s more an elf thing than an orientation thing.  Oh, also a chip on the shoulder thing.  And, yeah, one of the characters has made a bad, bad choice, and not the one you’d think. (Cue evil writer laugh.)

I don’t know why I — the woman who tends to hide all sex behind a pink veil of decency — should need to reassure you, but be reassured.  I told you at the beginning this book contained a gay villain (You’d complained of the lack of same) though I’ll warn you that like most of my villains he might (or might not) end up redeemed as well as punished.

Now, what else?  Oh, yeah —

Would anyone be interested in a series of posts on speeding up your writing?  (Yes, there are tricks and tips.)  And, if you’re interested, the free short story IS up.  Click on the tab at the top of the blog.

And now I go put another load of laundry in.  The glitz!  The glamor!  The mad whirlwind of a literary career!

As distressing as this is to everyone (myself included) having managed to put up the chapters of Witchfinder late yesterday, I don’t feel up to posting early today.  Instead, I shall go and work — you know… the stuff I get paid for.

There might be Austen fanfic tomorrow and meanwhile I’m considering starting another serial on writing or some aspect of writing.  Anyone have any suggestions?

*This is the Fantasy novel I’m posting here for free, one chapter every Friday.   If your conscience troubles you getting something for free, do hit the donate button on the right side.  Anyone donating more than $6 will get a non-drm electronic copy of Witchfinder in its final version, when it’s published.
There is a compilation of previous chapters here and I will compile each new chapter there, a week after I post.  When the novel is completed and about to be edited the compilation page will probably be deleted.

Oh, this is in pre-arc format, meaning you’ll find the occasional spelling mistake and sentence that makes no sense.  It’s not exactly first draft, but it’s not at the level I’d send to a publisher, yet.  I hope you enjoy the two chapters.  These fall under “in which things turn… odd”*

For previous chapters, look here:  https://accordingtohoyt.com/witchfinder/
A World of Hurt
They were in deep trouble.  That much Seraphim knew, and he wished he didn’t feel as though he’d very much like to sleep for the next several months.
He felt weak and vaguely ill, not to mention nauseated as though he’d swallowed a good portion of this particular alternate of the Thames which might not have as many houses around it, but probably was none too wholesome to drink.  And they were going to be pursued.  There was not the slightest doubt about that.
As though cued by his thoughts, he sensed magic groping towards them, the feel and gentle probing of the magical police in this world – he didn’t know much about them, but he and Gabriel had once had a brush with them and – he seemed to remember they were called the Imperial Pures.  He allowed himself to mutter a word between his teeth, and was amused to see Miss Felix’s eyes open very wide and her cheeks tinge a dark pink color.  So, she was female and delicate enough to be shocked, was she?  And what kind of insanity had possessed him that made her look devilishly alluring in soaked night clothes and with her hair plastered to her face?
On the other hand, the soaked nightgown was terribly revealing of her curves, and he almost wanted to laugh at the thought that perhaps he was his father’s son after all: he couldn’t be ill or tired enough not to react.  But he tried to keep it from showing on his face, and instead he said, all propriety, “I beg your pardon, Miss Felix, but they are looking for us, and we must escape.  I’m not absolutely sure what we can do, but I can think of only one place I can take us.  Only one place they won’t dare follow us.  It’s terribly dangerous, as it is a world where magic is absolutely disbelieved and, in fact, where only a very strange kind of magic works.  I will be utterly helpless there, but the chances of anyone trying to find us there are close to none, and even if they try, there is a good chance they will not be able to find us, because the world is choked with iron and therefore it is hard to find anyone there.  In fact, it is dangerous to any magical pattern but the strongest.”
Her eyes looked into his, and a small frown was forming, making a vertical wrinkle between her dark, arched eyebrows.  “But–” she said.
“No,” he said.  “Do listen to me.  I don’t know how long I have, and I would have you understand what I’m trying to do.  If I transport us there, it will use the last of my magical strength.  If I should die–” He watched her opening her mouth and put his hand up, to stop her talking.  “No.  If I should die, which is possible, though not probable, or not merely from the spell, I wish you to keep track of how I transported us, and use those coordinates, in reverse fashion, to take you back to Avalon.  There you are to evade capture, and procure…”  He seemed to think for a moment.  “Gabriel Penn’s help, but if you fail at that – as I think the concerted effort to bring down my house might include him – then you are to procure my fiancé, Miss Blaine, and tell her what happened to me, and to seek redress before the king’s high justice.  Trust me, she will be anxious to do so, as she will not want her name to be linked to someone who has broken the law by willingly traveling to other worlds.  And then you are to convince the king to find who was at the back of the conspiracy and to do your utmost to recover my brother, Michael, from Fairyland.”  He recalled himself, and, this time, gave a startled laugh.  “Listen to me,” he said.  “Laying down the law to you, as though I had the power to compel your obedience in the case of my death.  I absolve you from all responsibility in following my wishes, of course, only beg you to consider that without me, or Michael, my house will devolve to a distant cousin, and the family will be left destitute.  But of course, my transporting us and saving you,” he added, urgently.  “Has absolutely no conditions.  If we are captured here, my family will just as surely be disgraced and thrown into poverty.”  He inclined his head to her.  “But I would appreciate–”
Something like a look of dismay crossed her features, and she protested, “Of course I’ll do what I can to save your family.  Only tell me why you think you might die, but not immediately?”
“In my weakened condition,” he said.  “Being in a world with so much cold iron and so hostile to magic will–”
At that moment, he felt the probe again, and this time, felt the end of it fasten on them.  Through the probe came a voice, unctuous and fullsome, as the voice of a functionary who has completed a difficult task, “I found them, oh, gracious one.  The witches are–”
Seraphim took a deep breath.  He called the last of his magical strength to him.  He could feel his power fighting, his instinct of self preservation attempting to keep him from doing such destructive magic, which could only result in his death or at least in serious damage to his magical power and his shields.  It didn’t matter.  If they stayed here, she would have to fight for him.  And that, he doubted she could do.  Then they would both die.  This world, one of them at least might survive.
He reached with the last of his strength for the coordinates of the world he and Gabriel had called the Madhouse, the world he and Gabriel had sworn never to visit again, not since the last time when the sheer amount of cold iron had almost killed them.
At the last minute, as he was reciting the transport spell, he heard Miss Felix say “Oh!” and reaching in, reaching right into his spell and… twisting.
It was still the madhouse, he thought, frantically, even as the spell activated.  But she had set different coordinates.  What could she be thinking?
The cold of the inbetweener hit him, and then he felt himself fall onto a hard surface, even as the sapping feel of cold iron leeched at his magic.
As consciousness ran away from him, he heard Miss Felix pound on something – sounded like a door – while screaming “Grandmother.  Grandmother.  Please, help me.”
Into The Lion’s Den
Marlon had been reclining on a rosewood sofa upholstered in blue velvet, with a book on his knees.
Gabriel’s first thought was that he’d changed not at all.  His second thought was that he’d changed completely.  And both were true.  Marlon’s hair remained that blond on the edge of red – the flame about to catch – and as unruly as it had been at Cambridge, whisps of it standing on end and forming a hallow around the oval face.  His body remained long and lean, and he wore – as he’d tended to do at Cambridge – blue pants of some serviceable material and a shirt that looked too large for him.
But at Gabriel’s arrival, he looked up.  And in that moment Gabriel sucked in air, remarking the difference in his erstwhile friend.  Marlon had grown almost gaunt, and his blue eyes looked haunted, as though he’d looked too closely at horrors he couldn’t forget.
*Good,* Gabriel thought. *He also didn’t escape unscathed.* And immediately despised himself for it.
After the first start, the shock that widened his blue eyes, Marlon controlled himself and looked as though Gabriel transported into his house every day and twice on Sunday, and not as though they were seeing each other for the first time in years – and after they’d parted in anger and bitterness.
He flowed from the sofa, with slow calculated movements, his fingers between the pages of the book, holding the page he’d been reading.  Standing he came to a little above Gabriel’s shoulder, but managed to give the impression of towering over him, and also of distant, cold dignity.  As though he were the offended one, and not the guilty part.
“You honor me with your visit, prince,” he said, in extremely polite tones.
Gabriel opened his mouth to protest the title, then bit his tongue.  When he spoke, he’d brought his own abominable temper under control, though nothing could stop his heart pounding, or the vague feeling of dread in the pit of his stomach.  All the furniture here, everything, was what had been in Marlon’s room at Cambridge, and it remained only the question: where was it?  Where was that which had once been Aiden Gipson?  Gabriel took light breaths, feeling as though, should he breathe deeply he would smell the faint scent of corruption in the air.
“I came to you,” Gabriel said, with as much dignity as he could muster.  “Because you told me I could always come to you if I ran out of places to go, and if I had no one else to help me.”
Marlon’s eyebrows went up.  They were the exact same color as his hair, and when they rose like that they gave the impression of twin flames, dancing above his eyes.  “No where to go, prince?  You astonish me.”
“Don’t call me that.  You know very well I am not a prince.  I gave up my dignity and my power long ago.”
“Oh, I don’t think you can give it up.”  A smile without myrth, an absolutely ghastly grin as unpleasant as a corpse’s bared teeth, contorted Marlon’s face.  “I think if you’re born to it, you will always be a prince.  Not like the rest of us, who are born to less exalted positions.”
“For the love of heaven, cut the tomfoolery,” Gabriel said, impatient.  “None of– None of what happened had anything to do with the fact that my mother was an elf princess or your mother a mere elf commoner.  As different as those are, we still have more in common than with– Than other people.”  Which had been more than half of what had thrown them together.  The other half…  Gabriel looked down, trying to discern any hint of the easy laughter that had once sprang between them, or that wordless understanding that had allowed them to communicate without the need for sound.  He found nothing.  All of that had shattered, years ago, when they’d last seen each other.  “You told me I could come to you, if I were out of all other resources.”
“Your high born brother abandoned you then?” Marlon asked.  His look was almost hungry.  “The Duke’s family has disowned you?”
In the face of that hunger, Gabriel hesitated.  How much could he trust Marlon?  If he told Marlon exactly the trouble he was in, would Marlon betray him?  Run to the authorities?
But at that moment, he caught sight of it: the mortal remains of Aiden Gipson.  In life, he’d been a tall man, and much of Gabriel’s build.  In death, his look remained the same, and he wore what Gabriel presumed were clean clothes – since the smell was not that obvious – in this case a serviceable brown suit.  Above it, Aiden’s face remained as it had been in life: the well formed features, the dark green eyes, the narrow, high nose.  Only the eyes looked lusterless, and the lips receded slightly to show the teeth.  It took more than that, though, and the yellowish wax-like pallor to know the man was dead and had been brought back to life with a resurrection spell.  You wouldn’t know that he couldn’t rest until the man who’d made that spell allowed it.
But if you were a mage you could see it and you could smell it: the not quite physical smell of the dead flesh that had not been allowed to decay and instead sparked and fizzed with unholy magic.  And if you were a mage, you could see that more horrible thing: Aiden’s spectre, just behind the body, attached to it by a thread of spell, faded and impossibly-tired looking.
How could Marlon live with that ghost?  How could he?  When he’d met Marlon at Cambridge he’d heard of Gipson and the odd, too-close relationship Marlon had had with Gipson until Gipson’s death.  But it had taken him more than a year to find Gipson, where Marlon had hid him, in the attic room of his lodgings.  And to realize what Marlon had done.
In sick waves of horror, Gabriel recalled how – in shock – he’d given the whole thing away and how the only reason Marlon hadn’t been arrested and Gipson destroyed was that the two had vanished.  Gabriel, himself, had been sent from Cambridge in disgrace, though nothing could ever be pinned on him.  And weeks later he’d gotten the unsigned letter with the coordinates of Marlon’s hideout and the line “when you run out of places to hide.”
Well, he’d run out of places to hide, but Marlon could not denounce him or call the authorities on him.  Or on Seraphim.  Necromancers were at as great a risk as those who traded with unauthorized worlds.
In a rush, one eye on Gipson who stood, knit with the shadows against the wall, half-immersed in shadow, he told Marlon a very brief version of the events.  What he and Seraphim had found of their father’s activities.  How they’d resumed them, helping rescue witches from the forbidden worlds.  And then the catastrophic cascade of events of the last few days.
Marlon showed surprise only once: when Gabriel mentioned the role that the elves appeared to have played in it.  And that in a way was a relief.  The thought of Marlon in league with the fairy realm was terrifying.  And though his mother had been a low-born elf, thrown out of fairyland for getting pregnant by a mortal, it didn’t mean that fairyland wouldn’t use her son, and willingly too.
When Gabriel came to the end, he was quiet a while, and Marlon said, crossing his arms on his chest, “And what do you want of me, prince?  Am I supposed to hide you?”
Gabriel shook his head.  “I could have hid myself,” he said.  “That is, I’m not so witless that I could not have contrived to.”
“Ah.” Marlon said.  “Then what am I to understand you to want?”
“Oh, curse you,” Gabriel said.  “Stop playing games.  This is not funny.  You know very well what I want.  I want you to find where Seraphim went.  I want you to find where Michael was taken.  I want you to help me recover them and discover who is at the back of this, and why, and what they intend for my– For the Duke’s family.”
Marlon was very close now, looking up and somehow contriving to give the impression of looking down.  “And what’s in it for me?” he asked.  His voice was harsh.
Gabriel felt a spasm of revulsion, but said, his voice controlled, “Whatever I need to do to convince you to save Seraphim and Michael and… and their mother and sister.”
Marlon laughed, a short bark.  “You couldn’t DO enough,” he said.  “It’s more what you need to give.”
“Give?” Gabriel asked, as his stomach lurched.  And, uncomprehending, “Give?”
“My price, sweet prince, is you.”
“Me?”
Marlon was now so close, that Gabriel felt a though he couldn’t look away, even as, by the corner of his eye, he followed Gipson’s movement as he emerged from the shadow driven by who knew what random impulse.
“You,” Marlon said.  “Body and soul and magic too.”
“You do have a penchant for trying to own people!” Gabriel said, before he could stop himself.
Marlon narrowed his eyes.  “It’s my price,” he said.  “Pay it or seek help elsewhere for your precious family.”
Gabriel felt as though his throat had gone very dry, his mind lurching into horror, his body hovering on the edge of nausea.  But Marlon was the only person he knew whose power was as strong as Gabriel’s own.  And Marlon was ten times as knowledgeable.  And there was nowhere else Gabriel could go.
“Which one is it going to be prince?  Yes or no?”
Feeling as though he had to force his body to obey him, Gabriel lowered his head and hissed through clenched teeth, “Yes.”

Again.  How sad.  Meh.  Fine, but I’m going for a walk before I proof and put up the WF chapters.  So, there.

Check back in a couple of hours.  I need to get out of the house now.

We all know what to do in manual professions if you injure the limb you work with, right?  You stop.  You take a break.  You – however reluctantly – step back and let the problem pass.

So, what do we do in intellectual professions?  Our colleagues in the non-creative – or differently creative – side of this often do the same that people in manual labor do.  They take a “I’m not feeling all right” day or sometimes even a “mental health” day.

But I know, from having been in a differently creative – multilingual translator, if you don’t get the “creative” part you’ve never done the job – job years ago that there’s always things you can do that don’t involve your brain.  I mean, when you’re hot on a project you push to the back the things that are the office equivalent of doing the litter boxes.  Memos about the company picnic, that probably should be answered.  A letter from someone asking if you can take on another duty.  A note you meant to send about the quality of the last fax, where you needed a magnifying glass to read it, let alone translate it.  Also, why were people writing German with brushes and characters that look like the western equivalent of Chinese?

Failing that, you pick up the next translation job, underline every word that jumps at you as outre, and go on down to reference (this was pre-internet) and borrow the appropriate set of dictionaries, for Scientific and Chemical terms, and then carefully write the translation above the difficult words.  That way tomorrow, when your brain comes back on line, you won’t have to interrupt the “flying” translation to look them up.

You can fill two/three days with that sort of busywork, and then hopefully it’s either the weekend or your mind comes back from wherever it was hiding.  At least, it never failed me.

But writing is different.  No, I’m not giving you an excuse to slack off or to write only when you are “inspired.”  I’ve spent a lot of time writing “by the numbers.”  If you know your craft, it works.  Weirdly, afterwards you often can’t tell which parts were written under inspiration and which driven by a pressing need.

And yet there is another state – a state in which just thinking of words, let alone of story, hurts in a way you can’t quite describe.  The closest approximation for those of you who read Misty Lackey’s Valdemar, is that all your “channels” are raw and bleeding.

For those who don’t, it’s like this – your writing comes from somewhere inside you.  Not that “divine inspiration” crap, which happens maybe once or twice a month, even for me, but the ability to BE there, to make yourself be there, or to think of the logical next step in the story and fake it.  It’s something some people can do and others, no matter how smart and how inspired, can’t.

Sometimes – not often.  You’re reading the woman who was at the keyboard, in floods of tears, turning her grief into a story within minutes of hearing of her grandmother’s death – the writing just isn’t there.
Sometimes I know why.  For reasons known only to G-d and pharmacists, decongestants turn my writing-thing off.  One niquil flu and I’m off for two days, and no amount of wishing will bring it back.

Sometimes I suspect why – this is when I find myself browsing hotel sites when I’m supposed to be writing, or day-dreaming of a trip to the museum.

And sometimes – like today – I have no idea why.  Yeah, there’s been some daydreaming of vacations, but not serious day dreaming.  And we took a mental health day last Friday.  And I’m not sick – well, not really sick, even if I think I’ve worried myself to the edge of a headache.

And sometimes – like right now – it isn’t there at a level that writing this post feels much like I imagine it does for a dancer, dancing on an injury.  Or for an athlete (which I did in my day) running on an injury.  Or for Andersen’s mermaid “every step on sharpened knives.”

Why?  I don’t know.  There is the lurking suspicion that I’ve “stripped” the writing thing, but that makes no sense as all I’ve done very little writing for two weeks: mostly I’ve done edits.

There’s the possibility I’m exhausted, but again, I took Friday off and this week has been anything but productive.

I’ve been here before – where the space between breaks had to be shorter and shorter.  Weirdly I got over it by sidestepping and taking art classes.  BUT at that time there was a reason for it.  I had six books due, all of which was much like throwing a baby into a volcano when I finished them.    At the same time I was homeschooling a kid with special needs.

Right now I’m on a relatively sane schedule – shut up you – and there’s no reason to feel this way.  Except that I do.

Perhaps it hormones, and this adds the distinct possibility that there will be NO writing-thing on the other side of menopause (though heaven knows there was before adolescence.)

Or perhaps none of this is real and it’s just my mind making up excuses to be lazy.  If the writing-thing really is injured, then time off will help.  If I’m just being creatively lazy making up excuses will not.

The difference between a broken ankle and a broken-writing-thing is that other people can see the first (at least with x rays.)  With the second, there’s always the possibility you’re letting your crazy do its thing.

So what do I do?  Other than go and do the litter boxes and light vacuuming and hope the words come out from wherever they hid?

And for the shameless bit of self promotion “How To Write Interesting Books” which was written in posts here has been expanded and improved and is now available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Smashwords for the princely sum of 2.99.  Maybe money can bring me out of my slump!  (Yes, I’m joking.  Now for the kitty boxes!)

(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.

UNRELATED ANNOUNCEMENT:  For those who are interested, May You Write Interesting Books, edited and collated should be up at Amazon and Barnes And Noble within hours.  Smashwords is failing my file.  (I’m not amused.)

As we all know — or at least as R. A. Laferty did his best to warn us about — modern life is filled with a kind of gremlins.  For instance, paper clips reproduce and create excess hangers who, in turn, create bicycles, which–

You see what I mean, right?

Well, turns out writers suffer from this too.  I’m going over a manuscript that has rested for no more than a month, and already I’ve come across gremlin activity.

1 – Odd typos appear.  They’re not typos you’d ever make, not on your lifetime, so they’re evidence of the malevolent activity of typo gremlins who rearrange your electrons so the words are misspelled.

2- Sentences that you know were perfectly clear now seem to have twisted themselves so as to be as hard to understand as possible.  You know you did not write them that way, you’re not insane.  So, it was the sintax gremlins moving words around and random and adding an excess of “because” and “therefore”.

3 – Tension gremlins — those scenes you thought were nail biters have somehow been drained of all tension and ready “um… okay.”  Curse you, tension gremlins.

4- world building gremlins — you know you didn’t at any time contradict your worldbuilding within two pages.  No, it’s the world building gremlins, throwing random stuff in again.

Take heart.  They afflict me too.  I suspect they afflicted Shakespeare and Austen, too, possibly aided by the ink-blot gremlins.

But I shall go back to work.  And I shall win.  I just wish someone would create anti-gremlin software.

Yesterday – for the second time – my husband pleaded on face book for celebrities (though honestly, most people, unless they are known for politics, could benefit from taking his advice) to stop posting political stuff.

This is actually something I’ve found brought up in conversation a lot, with other professionals (and fans) in recent months.  Without exception everyone who talks about people posting politics or religion on their status says “I lost all respect for him/her.”  This, btw, often regardless of whether the person speaking agrees with them or not. And as you know I’ve got fans, acquaintances and friends of whom Stalin would say “Whoa, that’s too extreme” and others of whom Professor Bernardo de La Paz would say “Don’t you think we need just A LITTLE social organization.”  I’ve also never made any secret to which extreme I belong, though I only post it on FB if there’s a literary or funny tie-in.

(Needless to say you are excepted from this if you are a celebrity BECAUSE of politics, if your day job or a significant portion of your day job is pundrity and/or if most of your friends are “political friends.”  Then politics is part of your public image and not commenting on it would be rather like my not commenting on writing, science fiction or the slow collapse of publishing.)

So I echoed my husband’s status, with an added Heinlein quote.  You know the one.  The one about how if you want to vote but don’t know whom to vote against, ask a well-intentioned fool.

Needless to say it was two comments to the predictable defense that celebrities post this KNOWING they’re going to lose fans and that they do it “because they feel so strongly about the topic.”

To which I call Bull Hockey.  No.  Double reverse Bull Hockey with a cherry on top.

Most of the political statuses I see from the “famous” (a word for which, btw, there are many definitions when we come to my field) people in my field (and others) amount to “The other side are poopy faces.  Look what poopy faces they are.”

What they post – often echoes from “news” sites usually fit at least two of these characteristics and often all of them: They’re vapid with no substance behind them; they’re based on horribly distorted information, which doesn’t take very long to reveal as such; they’re so incredibly, out there partisan that they’re only going to convert the converted; they have ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with the poster, personally and are about people the poster would never consider voting for, never, ever, ever, not in a thousand years.

If, to be blunt, these posts were made by middle school girls about other middle school girls, they would qualify the poster as a “mean girl.”  Actually most of them sound like they do.

And that’s your clue for what these posts REALLY are.

Look, it might seem like I’m not qualified to write about people desperately wanting to belong to a group because frankly I don’t care.  There are maybe two dozen persons in the entire world for whose good opinion I care, and some I only care about their good opinion in specific areas.  I live my life as I wish to – dress and dine wherever I enjoy, from the top to the bottom – and care nothing for what “group” this fits me into.  I belong to no group and I pay no dues of membership.  (Well, except to SFWA, but… that gives me a handy directory.)

HOWEVER let me assure you this doesn’t mean that the wish to belong was left out of my makeup.  Like all humans, I was born to be a social animal and to belong to a group.  It’s built in, right, it’s how our species survived.

Being hades’s own outlier, I was never too good at making like I belonged.  At best, I could strive to belong to multiple groups (or at least I tend to be claimed by several groups at once, each of them convinced I’m just humoring the others.)  Beyond that – the hades’s outlier thing – that tendency which seems to be normal to become more and more yourself as you age has now taken over.

I’m not going to say I don’t care what anyone thinks.  Harsh words over my craft will bring me to my knees, even if totally unfounded.  An accusation of disloyalty from a friend I care about (only one of those recently, and she was right, though it was more an effect of my being sleep deprived and acting without thinking) will upset me.  Consciousness of having hurt someone I love will make me miserable.

BUT I don’t care what any group thinks of my membership in another group or of my being insufficiently loyal to them.  Given the political opinions I’m blessed with; given my musical tastes; given even my taste in attire and fun activities, if you think I belong to a group, you’re probably wrong.  And any attempts at making me fall in line (the great “sisterhood” are the only ones who’ve tried, by using middle-school tactics.  Oddly – don’t you think? – they fail to work and make me more p*ssy than ever.  Go figure) will bring about retaliation often in a humorous form.

I’ve paid for this professionally, but let me tell you, it’s worth the price.  It gives me the right to sit outside the glass palaces waving both middle fingers in the air.  And it gives me the right to tell you: Stop it, just stop it.

Lately Face Book has become a hideous experience, made more so by their helpful decision to start tagging the posts with what they’re “about” and putting them first on the summary page when I log on.  Thank you so much.  That means that when I log on, I’m assailed by inane opinions, half of them offensive to me and almost all of them superficial and silly.

And what I hear is “twit, twit, twit.”  Why do I hear that?  Because that’s what these noises are.  Having determined that all the “intelligent” and “good” and particularly all the people who can advance their careers are on one side of the political divide (an impression fostered by way too much reliance on the media’s attempt to create an impression of consensus over the last… oh, fifty years and an impression that’s wrong, except possibly for the career advancing bit if you are the appropriate political color) these people are posting these things to say “I belong, I belong.”
Interestingly my FB friends who are political pundits (at least part time) post less of these ridiculous screeds.  Usually the most political things they post is a leading tag and a link to their article or post.  And that’s just proof of what I’m saying: they already belong to a group, so they have no need to flap wings and scream.

In the end, as Terry Pratchett says, the noises that birds make are all about territory and sex.  Turns out the noises writers make are not much different.  “I belong here, I belong here.”  And “I’m cool and enlightened, sleep with me” are at the back of this spate of annoying vitriol.

Only consensus is NOT what you think it is.  In fact, if you look at both UNBIASED polls and at voting results (less at those, since most of our population doesn’t vote) we are a very closely divided country.  So by definition, your attack posts are offending fifty percent of your reading/watching/listening public.

I’m a political animal.  I understand having strongly held opinions.  But NOTE that I blog about politics elsewhere and NOT in the blog that’s devoted to my writing.  I might despise someone’s political opinions, but if they love, say, Daring Finds, I want them to keep reading it.  Heck, I want them to keep enjoying it too.

No, I don’t keep politics out of my writing.  Impossible to, though I tried to for years.  If I do, my work reads bland and blah.  BUT I also treat politics in my writing at a deeper level: at the level of living decisions and choices.  And guess what, I read authors I disagree with who treat politics at that level in their writing – this does not include taking a break to tell me what you think of a politician currently in power.  Besides dating the book, that amounts to the same as FB status vitriol – and I ENJOY them.  And if you really care about politics that much – so much that they’re a part of how you live – and you’re a fiction writer, I’m FAR more likely to be converted to your opinion (or at least admit you have a point) if you treat politics like that than if you scream at me “That side” (and by extension you, if you agree with them) “are poopy faces.”

So, if you’re known for something other than political punditry, stop the “identification posts”.  You’re not making any friends, and you’re not helping your cause in any way.  If you really want to make with the group markers, just post “I am in the same group with x y and z and I think they’re the coolest.”  You’ll sound like a middle school girl, of course, but at least you won’t sound like a MEAN and borderline psychotic middle school girl.  I might for the rest of your life imagine you in a pink sweater, a plaid skirt and little socks with ponpons, but at least I’ll go on reading you.  And if your books make a cogent cause, who knows, you might bring me to agree with your opinions, at least those that are more than identifying signals.

Or in this case, the story.  (If you really have a baby to name, there are several sites on line where you can get info on names.  And several sites on line where you can get info on names NOT to use.  There are also some excellent books and I owe a copy of every one of them.  My kids used to get freaked out by finding me reading baby name books.  Now they know it’s not [more’s the pity] the expectation of a blessed event, but merely a sign of character in the offing.)

Titles are hard.  Particularly for your own stories.  And going Indie has, I think, made it harder for most of us, because in the old days you knew the title was not ultimately in your hands.  Yes, you may have a wonderful story title, but then the publisher will change it, according to some unfathomable marketing ticker.  These were not always an improvement from the artistic pov – my Down the Rushy Glen because Ill Met By Moonlight – and given my experience I wouldn’t bet that it was an improvement in the marketing pov, either, but at least IMBM sounded like Shakespeare while Down The Rushy Glen did not.  Though then one wonders why in the name of little children they kept the other two titles, also taken, like Down the Rushy Glen, from William Allingham’s The Fairies.  (And the answer children is that publishers move in mysterious way that most of the time not even they understand.  Give your sacrifice goat to the high priest and pray that the publishers will be inclined to mercy, or at least rationality.)

But now you’re faced with going it alone.  And, oh, my, is it hard.  – Says she who woke up this morning thinking that the short story Liberty – a mystery of the Early French Revolution – she put up last night really should have been called Death by Liberty, because right now neither name nor cover signals murder mystery.  (Sigh.)

So, let’s look at what a title is and what it must do.

First, remember that like your cover, your title is your marketing tool, NOT your term paper cover.  We’ve all been trained in dysfunctional ways by our schooling, and one of the ways we’ve been trained is to think of titles and cover pages (or covers) as miniatures of what’s within.  I recently had a cover artist contact me, because he’s suffered the wrath of writers in past for putting a character with the wrong hair color on the cover.  Look, unless it’s a long-running, beloved series with crazy fans, that really doesn’t matter.  The wrong race can be a problem (like, if your character looks Asian on the cover of a fantasy, people expect Asian magic) because it can “signal” the wrong type of book for the reader.  BUT a blond instead of a brunette?  Pah.  It’s more important that the cover send off the right “buy” signals.  What do I mean by that?

Well…  If you’re looking for a murder mystery, you expect a knife or a gun or something on the cover.  Unless it’s a refinishing mystery, and then you expect a piece of furniture.  EVEN if that particular murder has NO deaths (happens.  Victim survives) or the murder weapon was a belt.  You still expect blood, a gun or a knife.

Titles are like that too.  Take someone like me who is new to a genre – regencies which have become my “I’m too fried to read” genre on the principle that I’m unlikely to ever write one.  I am starting to know half a dozen names, but I don’t know enough to sustain “popcorn reading” levels.  So, it’s late at night and how do I pick a book for the kindle, if I’ve never heard of half the writers and the houses are mostly indie?  Easy.  I search for one of the “word marks” Rogue or Rake (though the latter also gets you gardening manuals) various nobility titles, etc.  Even if I don’t get one of the books with that in the title, it will show me “people who looked at this also looked at/bought” and I can find something that sparkles my curiosity (more on that later.)

Look at the following titles, and tell me where they go genre wise: Call To Arms in Alpha Centauri; Glitter, Glitz and Murder; A Death At the Abbey; To Love a Rogue.

The first is, of course, mil sf.  You have arms in the title, then the name of somewhere else in space.  (Yes, these are prototypical and don’t exist.  More on that later.  For now, I wanted to show how we pick up clues.)  The second is either a craft mystery involving a seriously malfunctioning glitter gun (unlikely, but I’ve cleaned up after one of those.  Glitter gun explosions, not murders.  I think.) or a murder mystery set in Hollywood or in the fashion industry.  The third one is either an historic mystery or a non fiction – reading the description will solve that, but if I’m looking for either, I’d check the description.  The fourth is unabashed regency or it’s signaling seriously wrong.

So, now you know how to create a – yawn – bog standard title.  What next?

Next you have to do that sparking of curiosity.  You get… interesting.

This is one of the things I had practice in from submitting to magazines.  The reason I ended up with names like Super Lamb Banana and Sugarbush Soul was that one of the ways to jump out of the slush pile was to have a title that just made you read the story.  That’s not so different from what you have to do now, except for one thing: at magazines you usually didn’t have to signal genre, since they only published one.  Adding genre in throws another complication in the way.

I suppose I could have called it Time For Superbanana Lamb and Sugarbush Soul and Stars, but…  Eh.  When in need, I’ll go for the flashy and let the signaling go by.  But that’s just me.  I’m old school.

However I can tell you that instead of To Love A Rogue, you put in a title like The Rogue’s Twisted Heart I’ll be interested.  (Of course, I’d also buy What the Rogue Saw though it sounds like mystery, because I read mystery too.)

The short answer is titling is an art and I’d advise you to go over a lot of titles in your field and genre and THEN to sit down and consider the elements of your book and see what you can call it that will sell it to the right public.  It doesn’t need to show the details of what’s inside only the vague outlines.

For instance, the title A Touch of Night came from a Tennyson poem (more on that later.)  Is there anything in Pride, Prejudice and Dragons (which was too flip a title, also sounded derivative by the time we came to publish it, because of zombies – yes, we did ours before, but…) that is either touch or night?  Well, not really.  But A Touch of Night has the right FEEL and well, shifters change at night and romance implies touch, right?

Darkship Thieves was much, much, much harder.  It was harder because I was dealing with Athena, front and center as a main character and the pivot of the plot.  BUT titles like Athena Rising and The Athena Principle (yes, I tried both) failed to “fit.”  Then there were titles with Eden.  Let’s not go there.  And then, while I was talking to a friend online, I was describing the plot and said “And then she meets the darkship thieves” and my friend said “That’s what you should use for the title “Darkship Thieves.”  It’s intriguing and it’s either naval or science fiction.”  So, even though Darkship Thieves is what Earth calls the Edenites, and even though the darkships are a small part of the plot, I titled the book that.  Seems to have worked. (Grin.)

Then there are the titles that obtrude on you from the first line of the story.  Say, A Few Good Men.  I fought that title tooth and nail.  It doesn’t SAY SF.  OTOH you know given the rulers of Earth are called Good Men… well, it fits.  And the association with the movie, and the slogan for that matter means “war in the world of Darkship Thieves” which is what the book is, with the added flip that the revolution centers around a few Good Men.

So, what advice do I want for the pilgrim looking for title advice?

Titling is more an art than a science.  Here’s what I suggest:

First, read a lot of titles in the genre you’re working in.  Go to the bookstore and walk up and down the isle reading titles, or browse the titles on the right section of Amazon.  Steep yourself in those titles.  Then think of your book and try to come up with a title that both signals right and is catchy.

Second, if you’re still coming up blank, read poetry.  Yeah, I know, but this is why I pick up poetry books at garage sales and thrift stores.  It doesn’t need to be GOOD poetry, either. But poets, by nature, encapsulate things in a few words, which is what your title needs to do.  Read it until something catches in your mind and you go “oooh” – also, if you write shorts or try to, it helps to write down other lines of poetry that seem catchy, then write short stories to go with them.  For some reason this is something I have to read on paper to work for titling.  Kindle won’t cut it.

Third, Remember that titles aren’t copyrighted.  You can ABSOLUTELY use a title that hasn’t been used.  Beware though that you should avoid: Classics (if you write The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, you’d best make sure you’re the second coming of Heinlein, Asimov and Pol Anderson, all rolled into one.) Particularly if the classics are in the same genre (so Ill Met By Moonlight was okay because the big classic of the title is a non-fic about WWII.  I still got hate mail, but meh.) Recent books in the same genre.  This is a courtesy to your readers who will otherwise get confused and hate you.  Recent movies in the same genre – because people will assume your book is a novelization and either avoid it or be furious it isn’t.  (Signaling, remember?)  So, if a title strikes you and it’s NOT in the same field you write in, go ahead, make free of it.  For instance, I have two non-fic titles filed away to write as genre fiction books: The Damned Die Hard and The Slicing Edge of Death.
Fourth: in despair make a list of elements and unusual words in your book, then pair them in odd ways and see how it strikes you. Or put your terms in old movie titles and twist.  (Yes, yes, I have considered Dimatough Is A Girl’s Best Friend – but who would want to read that?  Or Gentlemen Prefer Bios or…  Some Like It Dragon… or…)

Fifth: bounce your proposed titles off friends.  Try not to have so many they scream and threaten to kill you.  But pick two or three favorite ones and see how they strike your friends.  This avoids blindspots.

Sixth: Go with the blind spots.  What?  Well…  Take the diner/shifters series.  It might have been a mistake to name the books from old diner lingo.  Draw One In The Dark doesn’t exactly scream “I’m light fantasy” – and the artists clearly didn’t think so, hence the DARK covers.  But oh, heck, it’s picking up fans slowly and besides, it’s what it WANTED.  (In my defense, for the second I saw a woman in a mini skirt in silhouette, leaning against a lamp post with a dragon rearing behind.  But that might have been even worse.)

Seventh: If you have a song for the book, look carefully at the lines.  Of course, if you’re like me this might not work too well, since I suffer from “song for the book” dysfunction.  Had Darkship Thieves been titled this way, I’d have ended up with I’m Gonna Tell You How It’s Gonna Be, because that was done to Buddy Holly.  And while it fits Kit’s (and Thena’s) personality, it’s certainly not SF.  And if I shortened it to How It’s Gonna Be, it sounds beyond dorky.  A Few Good Men would be “Forgive Me” which sounds like a confession of some sort.  And The Brave And The Free would be called Tell Me That You Want Me Then, which is romance.  So, apply this method judiciously.

Eighth: when all else fails practice Bibliomancy.  I have about ten versions on my shelves, including a crappy annotated version of the Torah, and a French and a German version, but King James is the go to for titles, probably because of the elegant language.  I mean, where do you think we got Stranger In A Strange Land?  There’s something to old words that have gotten into the subconscious through centuries of use that will imbue your book title with extra meanings, not there and yet there.  Don’t be afraid of those.

Ninth: Surrender to the inevitable.  Just like when your character wants a stupid name, your book often wants a stupid title.  Go with it.  Write it.  You can always change it later. Just don’t let your subconscious know that.

Tenth: Don’t overstress the title.  Look, children, let’s be blunt here, Ric Locke’s book, Temporary Duty could be a military exploit book, it could be a deep insightful main stream about a woman who undertakes to raise her brother’s children (what?  It could!), or it could be kick ass science fiction (Did I mention you SHOULD buy it?)  It still found an audience.  Look at the classics: Gone with the Wind – where is the reference to the civil war? – or Lolita (incest and pedophilia, really?  Sounds like a bilingual book on the order of Dora The Explorer to me.  Oh, wait.  Lolita WAS Delores.  Um… never mind.  No, it is not one of my favorite books.  Next?) Or Catcher In The Rye.  Or The Sun Also Rises.  Or …   Or, of course, The Bridges of Madison County or … TWILIGHT?  Yeah, those benefitted from publisher push (at least the last few ones) but yours can benefit from proper tagging and description.  So if the best title for your book is intriguing but doesn’t “signal” just make sure your description signals right.

So, stop stressing and start writing.  If the book lets you write it without a title, slap a working one up there (of course, for years Rebecca Lickiss’s program put the “working title” of “A Pretty Bitch” on ALL her stories.  This was a software and retunning it thing, but we lived in fear she’d send in a novel with that in the header without noticing.  What?  Oh.  It was a sort story about sentient dogs, but…  You know how that goes.) and write.  Darkship Thieves didn’t have its proper title till eight years after the FIRST version was written.  If it insists on the title, look through the methods above till one clicks.  And if the title is generic or stupid, live with it, and make sure your cover and description signal genre and sub genre.

And that’s all there is to it.  Sorry, but there is no magic bullet.  I’m still slogging in these trenches, right alongside you.  Forward, TYPE!