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Sorry this is so terribly late, but today I’m feeding the robot-building team at my son’s school, so before I sat down to write, I had to put four massive loaves of Italian Semolina bread in the oven.  Then I had to come up with a one-paragraph pitch for Dead As A Doornail for the fourth Dyce mystery.  The fourth Dyce mystery, you say?  But I thought you were going indie with that.

Well, ’deed I was, but there’s this thing called an option clause, see.  And if they come up to my price, I might yet write DAAD for them.  I’m not doing it for 5k is all I have to say.  It’s not practical.  I could write a novel for Baen for 12k in the same time, so what’s the point?  I have to live to.  And I can do DAAD indie and have it out for xmas for all of you Daring Finds fans, only three months after A Fatal Stain.  BUT before I decide or do any of that, the paragraph had to be sent out.

Then I had to send a novel to a second round of first readers, to figure out if I’m going nuts.  (Long story.)  And now I’m going to go make meatballs (a huge batch.  It’s fifty kids! Teens.) So they’re ready to go in oven when bread comes out.  (They cook in sauce.)

Why am I the one doing this while trying to work?  Why doesn’t my husband do it?  Well, first because I volunteered.  And second because he has to work outside the house most of the time.  Third because he makes more money and not because of “sexism” but because he took a degree that’s more profitable.  (At least short term.  My work is the retirement plan.)  I can work in the house so I can fit in cooking for fifty.  ALSO because I cook better meatballs.  MUCH better meatballs.

Which brings us to… sexism in Heinlein. (You see what I did there?)

I am forever puzzled by the accusations of sexism swirling around Heinlein – and ONLY Heinlein of the authors of his era.  But the accusations I heard at Cosine managed to be either new to me or framed in a way that was new to me.

First apparently what’s wrong with Farnham’s Freehold is that it’s sexist.  (WHAT?  I could list several things wrong with it, starting with the rather bitter tone of the main character.  Okay, not wrong, but not my favorite book, ever.  I prefer Sixth Column which does have racist hints (though Heinlein softened that by having Asian-American characters on the GOOD side) because it has a buoyant can-do tone.  Again, I would not presume to criticize the master, but it will never be my favorite.)  This because you know, in the book “some women prefer to live in harems.”

That sound you hear is my head hitting the desk repeatedly.  Maybe if I get dizzy enough I can start thinking that way too.  Look, tell me straight, are American-born-and-raised women TRULY this self-centered and filled with penis envy, or did they have to work long and hard to become this way?  (Okay, update, I’ve simmered down and I apologize.  I don’t mean ALL American born-and-raised women.  I haven’t even MET them all.  I mean the substantial portion of college educated bien-pensants who believe this nonsense.)  My American born female friends aren’t this way, for which I SHOULD be grateful, I suppose.  Of course, I’m selective.  I try to pick people who think for themselves.

Let’s start from the top, okay?  Yeah.  Farnham’s Freehold, the civilizations that survived were those MOSTLY in Africa.  I.e. Islam influenced.  OF COURSE THEY HAD HAREMS.  DUH.  Double DUH with sprinkles.  And of course women “liked” to live in harems.  If you’re raised to believe that’s your rightful place, you believe it.  I guess people here have read one too many fantasies where women in a mysogynist society suddenly, out of nowhere are heros and sword fighters and everyone follows them.  Is that it?  Right…  The truth is Heinlein was more multi-cultural than the multi-culturalists.  He didn’t as a matter of fact “clean up” other cultures.  He just took them.  (The cannibalism I could see them objecting to.  The harems?  How vagina-centric do you have to be that THAT’s the objectionable part?  And the cannibalism, though I wouldn’t have put it in, is understandable/excusable in the context of a post-apocalyptic world.)  Humans are infinitely adaptable, and they can be raised to like practically anything.  That’s why sh*tty regimes subsist sometimes for centuries.  In this same society male slaves who are too tall/big are castrated.  BUT you don’t see any slave revolt so the males apparently have adapted/view it as a price of success.  Should you say it’s sexist because males like being castrated?  It’s as valid as saying it’s sexist because females like living in harems.

Yes, his ex-wife does love being the favorite of the local lord.  I have news for you, some women do.  I never understood it, perhaps because I’m put together wrong, but a lot of erotic romances and woman-porn concentrate on women in the submissive or owned role.  And these are FOR women.  Also, btw, I know several women who share a man and seem to think this is liberated.  (It’s always a lousy man, too.  Go figure.)  And his wife/ex-wife is ALWAYS portrayed as damaged goods from the beginning and a serious case of passive aggression.

Don’t tell me, we’re not allowed to write women unless they’re perfect.  Well!  That’s going to make reading interesting.  Not.

Then there was the critique that well, Heinlein was sexist because his women of the future wear aprons and enjoy being homemakers.

I have news for the generation before me.  SOME women – perhaps a sizeable number – ENJOY being homemakers, at least while their children are small.  In fact, this seems to be one of the major complaints of boomer females who decided that this means we’re “losing ground.”  Listen – female liberation is the freedom to be what you want to be, not to be ersatz men-manque.  I enjoyed being home with the kids.  I simply used it to get my career off the ground.  Would I have preferred it to be easier?  Sure.  But it was my choice to make.

As for “letting women down” or going back, again, listen, the gains made are technological and hinge heavily on the pill.  The ONLY way we’ll go back is if we court societal collapse.  And/or deny women alternatives so that some of them go running back into feudal servitude because it’s better than being forced to be what they’re not and don’t want to be.

And having intelligent women stay home and pursue non-traditional career paths is definitely better than the feral children raised in some of our bottom-rank child care facilities.  Live with it.  Besides, the same tech that gave us real liberation in the form of reliable contraceptives – well, its cousin, in electronic tech is going to have everyone working at home – if they choose – in the next ten years.  In fact, Heinlein has that in The Rolling Stones.  And that, IMHO is the best possible world.

Newsflash: Hormones matter.  Yes, women will go gooey over babies and want to spend time with them.  It has nothing to do with intelligence or capability.  It has to do with tens of thousands of years of evolution.  I am probably the least maternal of women except in my mama-bear form.  I never thought I’d marry or have children, see?  But having Robert was a revelation.  If he cried, I stopped being able to think until he stopped crying.  My husband?  He could shut it off.  I couldn’t.

Is true equality possible?  Of course.  First, change the hormones.  But then you TRULY have men with vaginas, and who the heck wants that.  I, for one, enjoy the living daylights out of being a female and not just in the horizontal planes.  The fact that I can put on make up and make male-brains gooey is my revenge for the baby thing, okay?  Yeah, as Heinlein said, the game is rigged, but it’s the only game in town.  Play to win.

Next up – aprons – and this is where I cry.  Listen the only reason women don’t wear aprons now has NOTHING to do with female liberation.  What the heck is the thing with aprons, anyway?  Is it that boomer women think the world started in the fifties and therefore when they think aprons they think heart shaped and laced edged?

For most of the history of the world men and women have worn something like aprons.  My grandmother lived in an apron, and btw I’d have paid to have someone tell her that meant she was enslaved.  (My grandmother was a lot like the grandmother in Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching series, except she didn’t smoke.)

Aprons are what people wear when engaging in dirty, clothes-damaging occupations.  And the only reason I don’t wear them that much – besides forgetting to put one on – is that clothes are cheap.  At least used clothes.

Even the amount of normal house-stuff I do on an average day (when not cooking for fifty) is heck on clothes.  Even light cooking.  Flour and water Eat some fabrics.

If you read Patternson’s bio, you’ll find that Heinlein wasn’t used to things being cheap/disposable.  Also, in his future there were a lot more people, and that meant scarcer resources.

I’m not saying Heinlein was NEVER wrong.  He was wrong on population.  And there are decisions he made in his future history I don’t like.  That’s just life.  But he wasn’t sexist.

Anyone who can decide Heinlein was sexist because future women wore aprons has one of two problems: Either they took one look down at age two and have ever since been screaming in mindless rage because they don’t have what their brothers have; or they have been sold a bill of goods and bought it cost.

If Heinlein is “sexist” what do we call other writers of the period.  Say, re-read Asimov’s Liar, where apparently professional women are always repressed and easy prey for males in the lab.  That’s NOT sexist?  But Heinlein is?

Or perhaps some movements that sell victimhood hate Heinlein’s message of individualism, individual responsibility and individual freedom.  And are trying to poison the well before you drink.  I don’t know… as far fetched as THAT hypothesis is – because who, making a living out of victimhood would hate for the victims to walk off the plantation, after all? – it just MIGHT be true.

“When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything — you can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.”  Robert A. Heinlein

“Let it be said that I believe in the quote above man means woman also, by the rules of anglo-saxon grammar.  And that in addition to governments and church, one should also consider any MOVEMENT who tries to restrict what you read as part of tyranny in the forming. Go you therefore and dare to read and think.”  Sarah A. Hoyt

If all I do is write, why am I so tired?  If all I do is write, why do I get so hungry?

This has been brought home to me as I’m recovering from a severe ear infection, and today, at the end of ten thousand words, I woke up, having fallen asleep in front of the computer.  And it wasn’t that I was bored with the story – on the contrary.  I kept writing way past the point where I felt a little tired and out of it because I was interested in the work.

What is so tiring about typing?  How can sitting in front of the computer waggling my fingers tire the living daylights out of me?

And yet it does.

I first came across this effect when I was writing the Minoan fantasy (yes, yes, I do get that eventually I will have to rewrite that thing just to satisfy all y’all’s morbid curiosity.)  After … many pages, bringing the thing to a close was a trial, particularly since my character had had so many walls dropped on him, he just sat in the middle of the pages like a passive-aggressive Job or perhaps an uncooked lump of dough, refusing to do much of anything.  So I made it a point of finishing it in a month.  For that month, I’d sit down after breakfast and write five thousand or so words.  At which point I realized I was starving.

It got so bad that I – who hate pizza and who can cook – would forego the extra trouble of cooking, because I couldn’t concentrate on cooking while starving.  For a month, I ordered a small pizza at noon every day and ate most of it before I could think again.

You see, those last few chapters (okay, fifteen or so) were the battle scenes. The worst day was after writing a scene where my heros (ten or so of them) cross a ravine by the force of their arms on a rope stretched across.

Since then, I’ve noted that effect many times.  Trying to push on writing (and editing, being detail work is worse) while I’m sick or just recovering, or otherwise depleted is impossible.  I know that I’ve sometimes had to rest or snack before I could write a big epic scene.

Now, I’ve done real work – hard work, under the sun, like planting potatoes with the aid only of an old fashioned hoe, or building decks, or even distance-hiking.  And I’ve done intensely physical, boring work, like ironing for twelve hours a day.  I can tell you right now that this writing stuff is easy, soft work, a gig done indoors and on a cushy chair.

And yet… and yet, the phsyical effects – the tiredness, the hunger, the occasional muscle pain are very real.  Are they only psychological (is there such a thing as only psychological?)  Or is there something more at work?  There have been studies that seem to prove that you can increase your muscles by thinking of exercising, provided you think intensely and in detail about exercising.

Of course, to write action scenes, we have to think each action intensely and in detail.  So it makes a certain amount of sense.

Does anyone else experience this?  Or am I alone?

I’m taking my tired self to bed.  Tomorrow I have more actions scenes to write.  I just wish I knew if I’m insane (beyond the normal run of writers, that is) or truly, truly a weakling that I can’t recover from whatever the heck this was and write at the same time.

(And no, it’s not just the fact that I’m posting and in the morning.  Shut up, wretches!  No comments from the peanut gallery.  WHO threw that orange?)

Back when we were doing a short story a week for my writers’ group, I used to outline the short stories extensively before hand.  What I found when I don’t do that is that I hit the deadline and stare in angst at the paper, wondering what this story is going to be.

So, if I want to do a short story a week, I plot it before hand.  (And no, I haven’t done a short story a week lately.  Though I might, once Witchfinder is done, should I decide it’s not worth it doing another novel in installments – and btw, I think I need to make the installments longer, because I get into it, start going full throttle and it’s hard to pull away and then get into it again.)

If I’m just hit with “Sarah can you do a short story on?” and they give me the theme, the sheer panic of having to write something in two hours usually keeps me running towards the goal.  (It is perhaps sad that most of my BEST short stories were written this way.)

As a random, tangentially related observation (I had too much caffeine and I haven’t slept enough so right now I’m sort of like a cat with ADHD.) about fifty percent of my short stories are not actually short stories, but first chapters.  I work up till the world build is clear, then chop.  For the record, I wasn’t aware of it when I was doing it and also in retrospect, it was the ticker in my head doing it.  I knew that anything over six thousand words would be hellish to sell, so I would have a ticker going tick, tick, tick, close to six thousand, CHOP.

Now the two stories I’ve written without length constraints both ended up around 11k words.  That might be my natural length and I’m thinking of redoing a lot of the older ones.  (Also that would allow me to make endings happier.)  Yeah, yeah, I could redo them so they ARE first chapters of novels, but in what time?  There’s only so much I can do, and if I can shove these ideas into short stories, most of them will then shut up.  As for you – shut up wretches – you’ll simply have to understand I CAN’T start a hundred series, or I’ll never get around to your favorite one.  (There, there.  Don’t cry.  I’ll change the free short story later today.)

Anyway, one thing was inevitable in those short stories, and seems to be inevitable in my novels too.  No matter how well and how detailedly I plot in advance, when I’m writing, the short story or novel will suddenly lurch sideways and backwards on me.

Right now, as I’m doing the final on Blood Royale, the second of the vampire musketeers, I just realized one rather aimless chapter needs Buckingham to arrive in England.  Unfortunately this means that I need to thread him through the entire novel and he must be relevant, and I’ve got no idea WHY he’s there, or why the chapter insists he must be in it.  I am sure he must, though.  Go figure.

In other words, stories throw surprises at me in all phases, from first thought to revision.  I’ve learned that if I refuse the “surprise” the novel or short fails a bit, and often I have to capitulate, occasionally (Darkship Renegade!) after delivery (Though Darkship Renegade was only one I did after editor had started READING it.  That has to be some sort of boneheaded record for me.)

I wonder what causes this.  Does my subconscious want me to live in interesting times?  Do I secretly hate myself and want to make life difficult for me?  Or is it simply that until vision is almost realized, I can’t see every corner of it?

Well, sort of.

Cosine is always a very odd con for me.  Cons are supposed to happen in other towns, and I can stay at the hotel and usually (okay, I confess, I’m compulsive) get in some writing in between panels.

They’re not supposed to be a few minutes from home, with the panels frantically fitted in amid what we call around here “the weekend firedrill.”  But because we ARE in town, it hardly seems justified to spend time or money at a hotel.  Besides, as Kevin J. Anderson told us, it gets tiring to pack clothes, and the away computer, and all, to go a few minutes.

So, we fitted panels in between editing copy for the back of A Fatal Stain (Yes, children, the third Elise Hyatt mystery WILL come out.) making sure dishes were done, putting loads or laundry in, taking younger kid to robotics club, making a grocery run, etc.

This always lends the Cosine weekends a surreal feeling.  It’s like the parts of my life where I’m an anonymous mom, and the parts of my life where people actually try to talk to me at cons hit each other at high-speed and fall into no particular pattern.

Anyway, the panels were generally good, though I could live a LONG time without the panel I moderated on Friday because I swear I’ve been on the same panel with roughly the same people a dozen times.  It’s the panel about trilogies and how they tend to run long, you know?  It seemed less relevant this year, as we’re more divorced of the “realities of publishing as it was.”  No that most of my colleagues seemed to be aware of that, and I was too low on energy to get into arguments or even disagreements.

In fact, I realized, at the end of Friday, that, while I am outwardly recovered from the massive ear infection, there are lingering effects, one of them being that I get tired very easily.  Unfortunately, as some of you who have had the misfortune of being around me when I’m tired, I have two modes: if I’m home and left to my own devices, I go frighteningly quiet and zombie like; however, if I’m away and feel the need to be “on” I keep talking for the sake of staying awake.

I HOPE I didn’t run over the other panelists too badly, and I don’t think I did, except for the panel I moderated, where I didn’t so much run over them as keep losing the thread of where I was and what I meant to ask.

My most puzzling panel was possibly the last one today about fans who turned pros and pros who were never fans.  Since it dealt with fandom it was a big giant puzzler to me.  I have nothing against fandom, mind you, so it was not like “I was never a fan.”  But fandom in other countries is not the same as here, and I didn’t even know conventions existed until I had sold my first book.  So I felt a little weird and… well… sideways to the panel topic.

But I must be getting to be an old pro, because the point of the cons has long since stopped being panels — either those I’m on, or those I watch.  I enjoyed hanging out with the Lickissi — Rebecca and Alan Lickiss — and with Kevin Anderson and his lovely wife Rebecca Moesta.  (They have a middle reader about space exploration that sounds wonderful, at least from the first two chapters, and which I’ll review here as soon as I get the time/space.)

I also need to review Ric Locke’s book,  Temporary Duty, though the short review is “buy it, you’ll probably like it.”  Of course I have more to say about that.  Have you ever known me to be tongue tied?  And Rebecca Lickiss has sent me her soon-to-be-published space opera to review as well.  So, there’s that in store.  I read it when she wrote it first years ago (like Darkship Thieves it got backburnered because ladies weren’t supposed to write science fiction and besides, space opera NEVER sells.)

You’ll also get — I promise — two chapters of Witchfinder this week, and eventually a nice, long stretch of fanfic.

Meanwhile thank you for not holding it against me (you don’t, right?) that I took an unscheduled break.  Apparently I was more run-down by the illness than I thought and I could barely handle weekend-chores plus con.

My brain is still absent (I suspect on a tropical beach, sipping drinks with umbrellas and looking at tanned young men.  My brain is like that, and it NEVER takes me along on these vacations.)  But it has sent a postcard and said it will be me soon, so there’s hope.

Tomorrow I’m hoping to go to officeish, and then I’ll post something (maybe even coherent) early evening.

[BTW, turns out that the way to this writer’s heart does have weird pathways.  I am in NO WAY requesting gifts of food, because that would be weird, but I was charmed and touched at receiving a dozen of freshly laid eggs from Michelle Ossiander. Thanks, Michelle.  It’s not every fan who brings eggs to an author, but then I’m not every author. :)  We’re looking forward to having them tomorrow.]

First a note: I like to keep my commitments, and I committed to give you guys a chapter of a novel and a bit of fanfic every week.  Lately it’s been falling through the cracks, and I don’t like it.  Yeah, I’ve been sick, and the younger boy had what we call “the plague” which seemed to be somewhere between pneumonia and bronchitis.

The good news is that we’re getting better.  The bad news is that, having been sick for a while, I’m “beat” and have a ton of things to catch up on.

I hate not keeping my commitments, even if they only slip by a day or a couple of days…  BUT–

There’s a con in town, and we had two panels (one each) and tomorrow I have three plus a reading and a signing.  And I think there’s a couple on Sunday.  Witchfinder and (hopefully) fanfic will happen sometime in the middle of that.  Check back or subscribe to the feed.  It will come.  But right now, I’m beat and I’m going to bed.

 

From stupid cold.  Spent day trying to fix various things re: Goldport Press.  You’ll get Witchfinder, but not in morning.  Yeah, I know, it’s starting to seem like an habit.  I promise it’s just till I’m on my feet again.

*As I prepared the series for publication, I realized I had never given you the final installment.  Sorry.  Between the holidays and coming down with the ear infection — it SEEMS to be better at last — I completely dropped it on the floor.*

So, here it is:

First, Open a Vein

One reason that can make your entire book feel “blah” is that the reader never engages with the characters at an emotional “gut” level.

This is a truth that was hard-earned for me and took me a long time to learn – or even think about.  In fact, I only fully came to terms with it in the last five years or so, after I had been published for over five years.

My only excuse for this is that I was in deep denial, and to understand why I was in deep denial, you have to understand that I was raised in a family that disapproved of “giving way to emotion” and of “making a fuss” or – heaven forbid – “making a scene” so strongly that my paternal grandfather’s last words were, reputedly “Don’t make a fuss.”  (He was in his death throes and my grandmother called for help.)

My family disapproves of crying when injured; of being upset when breaking up a long term relationship; of “making a drama” out of anything from losing a pet to losing a beloved relative.  Not that they are unfeeling, mind.  We seem to throw out three poets per generation because the emotion has to come out somewhere.  We also run to a higher than statistically likely number of complaints originating in stress.

Given that background, it is perhaps obvious I wouldn’t know I was supposed to play with people’s emotions.  Books affected me emotionally – of course! – but I treated that as a slightly shameful affliction and often told myself I liked books for other, completely different reasons such as “he does such great descriptions” and/or “his plot is so interesting.”

To the extent that I played with emotions, the ones safe to play with were fright and horror, which is why so many of my short stories have a horrific undertone.

I started suspecting that emotion needed to be there and trying to put some in maybe ten years ago, but I didn’t admit till five years ago that emotion is the main purpose of fiction – you live someone else’s experiences and go through their emotions so you don’t need to experience the events yourself.  More than that, humans crave emotional stimulus, particularly when administered in a “safe” position.  (You don’t have to lose your best friend in war, you can just read about someone who does.)

I think I first realized I needed to make the readers FEEL something when reading Laurell K. Hamilton’s first three books.  I suppose that they’re now better edited, in whatever edition they have, but as they first came out, those books had logic and consistency holes you could drive a mac truck through (This is not a criticism of Hamilton.  As an author, those slips are quite normal, the books were just HORRIBLY edited.)  And yet, I read them one after the other, unable to put them down.  Only part of this was plot which was to an extent predictable.  Part of it was pacing, of course – the woman is the mistress of pacing – BUT most of it was emotion.  The particularly emotions she engaged were fear and horror, but she engaged them very well, and the emotions pulled you through the pacing, whether you wanted it or not.

It wasn’t something I wanted to emulate, though.  I CAN write horror, and I can write fear, but I don’t like it, or rather I don’t like it sustained.  I read very little in which those are the main and carrying emotions.  (I stopped reading Hamilton sometime after 9/11 because I COULDN’T, and I haven’t gone back.  I do read F. Paul Wilson, but his character is engaging beyond fear and horror.)

Since then I have been working on emotions and how to work emotions.  I think I’m getting better, though it is perhaps for my readers to judge and not myself.

I know though that I still flinch from emotional displays by my characters and find myself trying to hide my own emotions as I write.  And, of course, if my emotions aren’t engaged, neither are yours as a reader.

Honestly, I think graphic porno would be easier for me to write than emotions.  However, I’m stubborn and I’ve invested enough in this game that I’m determined to get very good at it.  I’ve been studying the masters again, seeing how they do it.

You know the old saying “Writing is easy, just sit at the keyboard and open a vein” – but of course there is a great resistance to opening your own vein.  I hear that suicides make “practice cuts” before the final one.  In fact, the absence of those often tips the police to the fact that it’s not really a suicide.

Nerving yourself to open the vein of your emotions onto the page can be as daunting, and take as much effort to overcome your reluctance, even if your background culture is not as reserved as mine is.

I don’t know what your peculiar challenges are to letting your emotions show on the page.  I know that most of us have more ingrained resistence to that than to dancing naked down the street.  HOWEVER I do know some tips and craft tricks to at least ease you into “safe” ways to have your characters feel/show emotion, and to play with your characters’ feelings and, therefore with your readers.

I will share those.  After that, you’re on your own.  Only you can tell how sharp the knife must be and how much resistence your emotional skin will offer.

First, find out what your character dreads or fears the most, then make it happen.  Then put yourself in the character’s place and write his or her reactions.  NOT TO DO: Don’t let your character become so crushed he just sits there.  Let the grief and despondence show, but infuse it with anger or a will for revenge or to set things right.  Otherwise, you end up with the Minoan fantasy, where I eventually ran out of walls to drop on my mush of a character.  Sitting there for a few minutes is fine, but eventually he must recover his breath and come out swinging.  HINT: it is a good way to make your character do something stupid that would otherwise be unforgivable, like rush into danger unprepared.  If you carry the reader with the character on a tear of insanity, the reader will forgive it.

Second, to make your reader buy into the emotion, have imagery that evokes the good times.  So, your character’s best friend just died.  I see.  Well, early on in the book seed a memory of how happy they were playing with bottle caps under bar tables as kiddies.  After he gets news the giant alien chickens ate his friend, have him find a bottle cap, which evokes and stands for their whole friendship.  Have him squeeze the bottle cap in his hand so hard his skin gets cut, while trying not to think of those wonderful days, and while the tears sting his eyes.  Then have him go out to make himself a fried alien chicken bucket.  DO NOT: Don’t give us the whole scene over again, and don’t let this be the first time we hear of the bottle caps.  Have it early on, then just give us an evoking image.  His friend’s fingers flicking the bottle cap.  The fact he always lost but never cared.  Stuff like that.  HINT: the scene I gave above is good – unless you grew up where I did, in which case it’s a cliche.  Not the bar, but playing with bottle caps.  every little boy did it, and yeah I did too.  (tomboy, remember?)  TRY not to have a cliched scene.  “We ran to each other along the beach and fell into each other’s arms” doesn’t have the same force as “She always carried an umbrella, even when it wasn’t expected to rain.  And this one time, we stood under a fountain, with the umbrella open, so I could tell her about my true love for her…” etc.  (Yeah, we’ve left the friend and the bottle caps behind.  WHY do you ask?)

Third, emotion, like humor (they’re actually very similar) can be a running thread through the book, whose effect increases with each use.  You know, you start with alien chickens, in a funny book, and by the end, the mere mention of breading will send the reader into whoops.  Same thing.  Say in the whole bottle cap above, at the end you don’t have to do much.  Just have the character spin the bottle cap on the table, while the alien ship burns and thinking “This one is for you, Jim” then flick the cap which flies just as awkwardly as when Jim did it.  DO NOT: lard it on too thickly.  Yes, I know what I said.  But after you establish the real strong emotion, a very little does it.  Just a word or a reference.  HINT: Lard the first mention of the thing you mean to evoke emotion with little touch stones you can return to.

Fourth, do not TELL us what the character feels.  Instead, remember when you felt it and go for the basic physical reactions.  The clenching of muscles, the rapid heart beat or, for grief, the feeling that everything has gone very far away and that there’s a muffling wall between yourself and the world.  Etc.  DO NOT: be afraid of the gross stuff.  Yes, people do sweat when scared, and it smells acid and more unpleasant than normal sweat.  Yes, people do piss themselves when scared or startled.  Don’t dwell lovingly on it, but feel free to mention it.  Yes, people do throw up when grossed out or shocked, or in extreme pain.  Again, don’t dwell on the description of the chunks, but mentioning it might be the way your reader knows what the character feels.  HINT: emotions on the page appear more subdued than in real life.  No matter how explicit you are, your reader gets them second hand.  You need to heighten them a notch for the reader to FEEL it.  Don’t be afraid that the reader will think your characters are hysterical.  They won’t.

And now, go forth and open a vein

Lately I’ve come to see the need for professional killing.

No, put the phone down.  There are no corpses in my back yard (would be difficult since I don’t have a backyard) or in my crawl space (the cats run there periodically and it would be so unhygienic) and I haven’t been dumping them into construction sites.

I’m, however, perfectly willing to admit that this realization might owe a lot to the fact that I’m a woman nearing fifty.  I mean, hormones are destiny.  And it could get dangerous, if I didn’t have this professional sideline.

A professional sideline as a writer, of course.  Because you see, the people I kill mostly live in my head.  (Mostly because some lived, long ago in other lands.  And I bring them to life on the page, for the purpose of killing them.)

Joking aside, when I started writing, I was in mortal fear of hurting my characters.  When I hurt them, it not only hurt me, but it made me wonder if people would think I’m cruel.  Nearing fifty, I wonder why I cared what people thought.  (This is probably a bad sign.)

The needed killing – there was always some needed killing, even if just the villain – was handled behind the curtain and often reported at two removes.  “He killed himself.  His second cousin told my friend who told–”

In my last book I killed hundreds of people, two major characters and a continuing one (who had never been seen, only referred to, but who came on stage to die a horrible death.)

What makes the difference, other than hormones?  (I am mostly joking about that, though I’ll note, not as hormonal changes, but as an effect of aging that I DO seem to be becoming more myself and less afraid of “what will people think?”)

Two things changed: First, I realized reading fiction was not an intellectual exercise but an emotional experience.  What?  How could I not have known?  Don’t ask.  Perhaps it was the fact that my early fiction reading were stories set in other lands.  I was learning, as well as feeling, and I thought the learning was more important.  Perhaps it was the fact that I was taught not to display emotion, so as I writer I tended to emphasize thought over feeling.
Second: I realized death is part of life.  As much as we hate it, as much as we dread the idea, as much as losing others hurts us, life would be very odd if you eliminated life.  Books feel more real if people die.  (Okay, your fluffy romance is excused, and your fluffy mystery and fantasy, other than for the needed murder in mystery.)  If you track consciously, you’ll realize that not a week goes by without your hearing of a death, either close or far, important or not.  And I think that heightens our interest in life.  (Or I could be insane.)

So, once I realized that some people simply needed to die – in my books – how did I go about killing them?
There are many, many ways to kill people, but below is a brief and incomplete list of ways to make their deaths professional.  (And not just leave them to bleed out, unnoticed, on the hearth rug.)

1- Make it count.
We can’t all kill our main character.  In fact, most of us can’t kill our main character.  Given my penchant for writing first person, it would be odd.  I grant you it can be done.  Connie Willis killed the POV character in Passage – well, the main POV character – halfway through, and the book still works.  BUT not all of us want to go that far.  Many of us, who write series, can’t even kill all important secondary characters with abandon.  Oh, sure, the occasional one fine, but if you make it an habit, you’re going to run out.
So, how do you make the death count?
Have the character matter to your main character or your secondary character.  Have it be someone near and dear.  Or have it be someone the character just met but who matters.
Clifford Simak spends half a page describing a doggy, happy with the world, crossing the street to lie in a patch of sun.  Then he kills him horribly.  I cried.  And I don’t think it was just because I’m an animal lover.

2 – Make the death interesting.
By this I don’t mean you should go to my friend Kate Paulk and ask how to kill people interestingly.  (No, trust me, you don’t want to do that.  She writes Dracula, people!)  While that’s appropriate sometimes for historicals, I don’t mean elaborate or outre means of death are needed.  Most of my people die at blade’s end or shot through the heart (sometimes with lasers.) A few linger on only to die (though I just realized I’m reluctant to do that in future societies.  If you survive the initial hit, you’re likely to live.
No, what I mean is that your death shouldn’t take place in a line and never be referred to again.  Sometimes a line is important, for the “death knell” effect, but your character should feel something, as a reaction.

3 – Kill The Best
This is a variation on #1.  And while it’s always good to remember “Only the good die young” or early in the page count, it also helps to remember “good” can just be a way of saying “important to the main character.”  Kill the person, whether the main character loves them or not, who will twist the main character’s emotions into a pretzel, make them feel guilty, make them get in more trouble.  Remember, the name of the game is to make your main character’s life difficult.

4 – Kill the influential.
Make it matter for the plot.  “If only Georgiana had been here, we wouldn’t have lost that battle, but the dang author killed her on page one,” type of mattering.  That allows you to get the most bang for the death.

5 – This one I’m passing on for the price I’ve got it.  I’ve never tried it.  I think my youngest victim was fourteen.  However, I’m told that you should never, ever, ever, kill a baby or an animal, and that for the US market animals are even worse than babies.  I don’t know.  The only time I minded an animal dying was Pixel in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, and that’s because Heinlein kills him at the end, and that’s not good.

6 – Numbers count – for a sense of realism, kill more than one character and in differing circumstances.

7 – Don’t overdo it
Like anything you learn to do well, killing can be addictive.  Remember if you kill too much, it dulls the impact of each death.  And if you kill everyone in the end, as many seventies novels did, I shall come to your house and beat you to death with a sock full of butter.  You have been warned.

8- Remember some people just need to die.  It is our job to kill them right.  We’re not murderers, not even virtually.  We’re just easers out of life, or literary mortality facilitators.

Now, happy killing.

Some things were drummed into me in childhood.  One of the them is that you don’t talk about money.  You just don’t.   If you mention how well you’re doing, you’re bragging.  If you, instead, mention how poor you are, you’re whining.  There is no winning with money.

And yet, yesterday Francis brought up the fact that one SHOULD discuss money if one is a writer, and he’s probably right.  Lines like, in Sliding Doors “You’ll finish your novel and we’ll be rich” lead the general public to believe this is true.  I have a friend who got five thousand a piece for her first two novels, and when her husband lost his job had to take work with a mega store as a night stocker.  And every time she told someone she’d published a book, she got told “So you’re just working here for research, right?  Because you have that money socked away somewhere.”  Right…

So, let’s start at the beginning.  When I was a wee little writer, knee high to a grasshopper, or at least only 22 and green as grass, I didn’t expect one book to make me rich.  But I’d read autobiographical writings from Heinlein, Simak and other golden age writers (before Heinlein made it big) and I expected book writing to pay roughly a living wage.  The way I saw it, writing a competent book took a year, and so you should at least get entry money, right.  Say 20 thousand or so.

Needless to say, I was wrong.  It is true that when Heinlein was a midlist writer, he got paid per novel about what the average secretary or office worker got, about 5 thousand a year or so.  But, oh, man, have times changed.

In this year of our Lord most writers – at least beginners – are making less than five thousand for a first book.  And a lot of us, established midlisters are making… about the same.  NOT adjusted for inflation.  (This has consequences, like most writers being people who have someone else to support them, which means that most writers have a certain view of life.  But never mind that.)

And until recently we never talked about it.  EVER.  Why?  Because it might influence your next advance.  Though of course, all the insiders of the industry knew so if your advances were pegged at “sucky” that was all you were ever going to get.

Now?  Ask me if I care.  If no one buys the books, they go Indie.  If they lowball me (and anything under ten thousand is lowball) the books go indie.  Over ten years, which is the minimum amount of time before I get the rights back (and nowadays the time seems to be never) there’s at least a very good CHANCE that the books will earn more than ten thousand.  I’m willing to bite it for a decent offer, but less than that?  No.  I’ve found I have trouble writing books that pay less than that.  Worse, I have trouble respecting myself for doing it.

And what, you’ll say, if no one gives you that money and your books don’t sell indie?  Well, before the indie option opened up, I was ready to go take a community college course in cabinet making, or open a Daring Finds style operation doing what my older son calls “flipping furniture” – which I did in my younger days when strapped.  Because, guess what, it pays very little.  About what writing pays.  BUT I sleep at night.

First, let me point out that the myth that a book sells or doesn’t sell because of what’s within the covers is just that, a myth.  Or at least it was, back in the days when you had to depend on your publisher to get you on the shelves.  And you had to depend on your publisher to tell the bookstore to stock you because you were “important talent” or something of the sort.  I’m not going to reprise that.  If you haven’t read it, read my post “He beats me but he’s my publisher.”  If no one knows the book exists you can’t sell it.  End of story.

The important thing – the most important thing – determining how your book would sell was the amount of advance you got.  Because that determined how much effort the publisher put into recouping that money.  And that, in turn had more to do with how “sexy” a “package” you were, which had to do with how well… how you looked, how the publisher perceived you, whether your story was “different” (and by story I mean your bio, not your book.)  Of course, you could also get a great advance by having an agent who really believed in you.  Or… a fluke.  But in most cases it had nothing to do with your book.

For my very first book, I had a C level agent, and I took the first offer – five thousand dollars.  Next two books I had an A level agent (at least he considers himself that) and he told me to take the first offer, at 10 thousand per book because “we could get more money, but I think we’ll sell them more books this way.”

Was he right?  Well, in a way, but I hate to think what he meant by that “we’ll sell them more books.”  If you believe the statements for my first three books, they were all terrible failures. Or at least the house told me they were failures.  And yet, the first book – taken out of print on the anniversary of the MMPB release – sold enough to earn back the advance and pay me royalties of about 1 thousand.  Which by definition means it sold more than they expected it to.  So what sense does it make?  It doesn’t.  Never mind.

For the next two, they supposedly lost money because they never made up the advance.  Thing is the advance is a small part of this.  I’m sure they lost money on paper, yes.  But I’m also sure they’re not a charitable organization and I did sell them more books. (The writer for the movie Liar Liar, talking at the Nebs told us how his statements showed he’d lost the companies millions of dollars with that movie and all others, so that he was afraid his next movie would collapse all of Hollywood.  One wonders if I was at risk of doing that to publishing.)

I don’t remember the exact numbers, but I think each book sold about 6k combined hard cover and MM – according to the statements.  Again, I have no clue how realistic this was, but possibly not too far off, as both were taken out of print to the day a year after they came out.  So, you couldn’t get a hardcover if you liked the mass market.  And if you first found the second in hardcover and wanted to buy the first, your only bet was used, and not many of those.  After I gave away my share of books, I had to buy copies at a considerable markup and often those advertised as “like new” were old library copies.

But here’s the thing.  I’m not going to bother you with numbers and calculations.  Dave Freer has done them several times, and if you want the numbers go to him.  I’m a walking math disaster anyway.  What I’m going to tell you is this: I got about 8% royalty on the hardcover, six on mass market.  If the publisher truly lost money on my books… why did they buy the next one?  Because they liked me?  Pull the other one.  It plays jingle bells.  THAT might hold for one book, but … ten more?  Right…

Right.  They didn’t buy the next FANTASY.  No, the demand was that I write historic mystery under another name.  It turned out to be my maiden name Sarah D’Almeida (well, archaic spelling. But no one would know how to shelve de Almeida.)

So I wrote the musketeer mysteries.  Those sold for seven and a half thousand a piece because “mysteries pay less, and honestly we have more submissions for mysteries than for romance.”  Maybe mysteries do pay less.  I do know that they sell considerably more than science fiction, something my indie short publishing is proving.  But never mind that.  The first book had a laydown of seventeen thousand.  It supposedly got half the printrun returned.  (Yes, I’m putting supposedly before all that.  Most of the statements make no internal sense and it’s hard to tell.  It’s not so much a matter of doubting them as a matter of “huh?”) However, it also sold to book club as an alternate selection.  I don’t remember getting royalties for it, so if I did, it was insignificant.  None of the others paid royalties.  The first one was taken out of print, the subsequent ones should have gone out of print through lack of sales years ago, but they refuse to take them out of print.  They also refuse to REPRINT them (at this point the “in print” is academic) and, oh, yeah, I don’t have the rights back.  At my last enquiry I was told my agent would have to request the reversion, even though I’m no longer agented.  Yes, this is something I have to deal with, I just have had neither time nor patience to go digging out all documentation.  The sales on those are 20 e-copies or so per year, if you believe the statements.  (They might be, who knows?  At this point e-sales are free money.  Do that to 200 books and you’re talking more than chicken feed. So, of course they’d hold on to as many as possible.)

BTW, those books were contracted at four and then three per year.  Yep.  Four and then three.  This on top of work for other houses.  But Sarah, why did you work so much?  Because if I couldn’t make from this what I would make as instructor at the local community college (the most recent work I’ve done) I’d have owed it to myself to get a real job.  And I had hope I could make more from writing.  And my husband believed in me.  So I bit the bullet.

Anyway, look up on Amazon the cover for the original paper copy of Death of A Musketeer and the one for The Musketeer’s Apprentice.  I don’t know how alike they look online, but in paper they are virtually indistinguishable, particularly spine out.  SHOCKINGLY the third didn’t sell very well.  So they offered me six and a half thousand for each of the next three.

For these some marketing genius decided the problem was NOT that they were bringing them out four months apart with no push whatsoever or even that they were making the covers too similar.  No, the problem is that the covers said “the musketeer” – so for fourth and fifth I had to change the title completely.  The style of cover changed too.  I got panicked emails asking me if I had dropped the musketeer series.  Some of them from book sellers which tells you how well these books were signaled in the catalogs.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention, when the third book came out, the first was listed as in print, but the house wouldn’t ship it.  I got phone calls from book sellers.  And emails, through my website.  Because they’d reorder the first book and it never came.  For six months.  Then it came.

I could be paranoid about this, but it’s actually a fairly normal snafu for publishing houses and midlist books.  However, it MIGHT just marginally have something to do with the fact that by book three the series was in trouble.

Meanwhile, in the middle of all this, I wrote Plain Jane under a house name.  Strangely, Plain Jane, supposedly, outsold all my “under my own name” books.  I still get royalties.  This despite the suckiest cover in the universe.  (Trust me.  Go look up Plain Jane by Laurien Gardner if you don’t believe me.)  Why?  Again I could come up with conspiracy theories, but who knows?  Maybe it’s the fact I wrote it in three days?

When these two books didn’t increase in laydown, the marketing decision was that this was SOMEHOW due to my writing – of course – or perhaps my name.  I was told to submit a contemporary mystery and that my name should not have Sarah in it and should be “something white bread.” (because Hoyt is wild and exotic!)  (Note how this presupposes by then I had enough distro that people associated my name with books that didn’t sell.  Or something.  For these books I was offered 6.5 thousand a book.)  I wrote two and a year after the second came out, I was offered a contract on the third.  This was five thousand.  “Pressures of the market” and all that.  That book was delivered eight or ten months ago.  I’m told it’s scheduled for October.

At the same time THIS house was saying I had to change my name because no one would buy a book with Sarah Hoyt on it, Jim Baen offered me ten thousand for a fantasy under Sarah Hoyt.  I took it.  I asked him under what name he wanted it.  He didn’t ask me if I was daft but said “your name is fine.”  So I did that.  Yeah, that cover was horrible (if you haven’t seen the hard cover you haven’t lived.)  Yeah, that affected sales.  The cover got changed for the mass market.  They bought Gentleman Takes A Chance, I THINK at 10.5 thousand.  And Darkship Thieves for the same, at the same time.

Bantam bought the British Empire trilogy for ten thousand a piece.

I also sold No Will But His (the Story of Kathryn Howard) for 12.5 thousand.

Then there was this year hiatus which might have been due to my being exhausted.  If you’re saying, “but Sarah, you can and have written forty thousand words, corrected, over a weekend.  Six books a year?  No problem.”

Well, in an ideal world (there I go sounding like the rejections for Science Fiction Age again,) no, not a problem.  Except this is not an ideal world.  My writing happens around other things.  And by other things I don’t mean JUST illness or the year I had to homeschool the younger child.  No, I mean that writing is not just putting words on paper and getting them published.  There’s negotiations, there’s the occasional short story, more and more there are promotions and (at least) blog tours and conventions to attend.  There’s also research, particularly for my historic works.  Then there’s editing and tweaking to suit the editor and figuring HOW to do it without killing the book, when the editor’s “vision” had very little to do with what you wrote, much less what you want to write.  There’s page proofs.  There’s concordances to keep up to date.  I can work an eight hour day and do cold nothing on WRITING.  And if I give THAT the time it deserves and you include things like reading friend’s books for an opinion, mentoring, and some (light) editing, it ends up being a good half of my work time.  Could I cut it down?  Oh, hell yes, but I’d need an assistant, and I simply don’t make enough money for that.  (Though I’ve had contract ones now and then, but I either have to underpay them or give them up.)

In case you’re wondering, I also can’t afford household help.  And I’ve told you what the vacations are.  We think we’re in paradise if we get four days in Denver.  The best vacations I’ve had in recent memory (other than over Christmas which was all points on airline and hotel this year) were the two days at Left Coast Crime in Denver, in ’08, when we got an upgraded room through a fluke, and my husband and I hung out in it and wrote, when I wasn’t at panels; and the wonderful time that Liberty con gave me and my husband when we were special guests (and we got to take the boys too.)

Anyway, there I go whining again.  Never mind.  Again, it’s my choice to write.  I could, instead, have undertaken honest work.  Housecleaning for instance.

So, after oh, five six years of this, I was exhausted, and I simply couldn’t come up with a proposal for more books.  Also Dan put his foot down and told me I WAS taking a break.  When I finally sent a proposal in, they took a while to be bought anyway.

And then I sold the aforementioned third daring finds for 5 thousand, and two books to Baen (Darkship Renegade and Noah’s Boy – which is overdue) for 11.5, (I think) a piece.

I just got my tax form from my former agency.  For 2011 my total income (three books sold for 3k a piece, one delivery payment on the mystery, Japanese rights) from my novels was 7.8 thousand.  If you count non-fiction work, shorts and – THANK G-d – my indie work, I probably made ten thousand.

The good news?  Well, I probably won’t owe taxes.

Because here’s the thing, the years I’ve made “real money” – defined at about a secretarial salary for someone with my age and experience – say between 30 and 50 thousand, (though I was so mad at PG’s blog I think I said I made fifty thousand, I never really got to that number – I just confused what I sold some years with the actual payments.  Not the same thing) – between my self employment taxes (the equivalent of medicare and social security taxes, of which I have to pay both ends), and my agent’s fees and … well… on average I keep thirty percent of what I make.  Which means most years I worked nights, weekends, bought expensive books and had to behave like a professional for around ten thousand a year.

Was it worth it?  Well, I could work in my pajamas.

(If you’re wondering about the 3 thousand a piece novels, that was the price of selling them under a pen name and having no track record in vampire fiction.  I was told the only house that would take them was a medium size press and at the time I viewed it as either selling to them or leaving the books in the drawer forever.  So I sold.  Do I regret it?  I don’t know.  Depends on what I see from them in terms of due diligence and royalties.  They’ve treated me nicely and they’ve done the best they can.  In principle now I resent having gone traditional with them, but that’s not the publisher’s fault, and I have a contract.  Again, they’ve been decent to me, and I’m not even writing off working with them in the future, if they treat me well now.  Just as I’ll continue working for Baen, unless things change drastically – at least for some of my science fiction and fantasy.  Loyalty and gratitude are not suicide [or starvation] pacts, so if I find I can make a lot more indie, I can’t guarantee I won’t take some of the non-directly Thena verse books indie.  Though I suspect most of my indie stuff will be fantasy, mostly urban fantasy, and light mystery.  I have even – heavens – planned some romance. [Don’t worry, it will have fantastic elements])

And if you’re trying to add the money above, what you have to remember is that writers don’t get their advances in a lump sum.  No, we get “signing money” usually a third or half (For Baen it’s half) then delivery and acceptance money (I just got that for Darkship Renegades) and then, if it’s three payments, you get publication payment.  And yes, the mystery money, all of five thousand is three payments.)

So you can see why the young lady over at PG said “no one can make a living from writing” – you can also see why I’m furious.  Yeah, I’ve barely made a living from writing all these years. (To be honest, if I were single and not taxed at my husband’s rate, I probably could have scraped by and it could be defined as “a living”.)  BUT that’s not the point.  The point is that we should aim to, and demand to make a living.  Even I wouldn’t have persisted if I hadn’t had the HOPE of eventually making a living.  And now with indie, I do have that hope.

“So, Sarah, how much does indie pay?”  Well, right now not terribly much.  My indie press, started out making $30 a month with ten short stories out.  Now depending on outlets, I have between twenty and thirty stories/collections out, and this month so far I’ve made about 80 on Amazon.  Other outlets report slower, so I expect I made somewhere between 100 and 200, and I can’t quantify it for probably another three months, when I hope to have other stuff out.

I’m told novels – at least some novels, and no one is ever sure why or which – make a lot more.  I haven’t had a chance to try.

Meanwhile, at Naked Reader I get 50% of raw receipts and for the last quarter I got a couple hundred dollars.  Again, the only novel I have there is A Touch of Night, which might or might not be representative, since it’s Jane Austen Fanfic.  Oh, I have Death Of A Musketeer too, but I haven’t been pushing it at all, since we don’t have the rights back to the other books.  So I think sales on it are almost incidental.  I would like to push it, I’m just trying to clear the other books first.  For one I’d like to rewrite the last one.

And this brings me to where I am.  I THINK I can make a living from indie, better than I’ve ever done from traditional and I think I can do it without killing myself.  But I find myself blocking on my traditional work, because at this point I resent it.  There is, if nothing else, a strong flavor of throwing babies into the volcano.  Because once they’re out of my hands, I have nothing to do with the fate of the traditionally published books.  Maybe, as with Darkship Thieves, gentle breezes will waft them onto verdant slopes.  And maybe they’ll crash straight down and burn.  There’s nothing I can do, and the quality of the writing or even the amount of promotion I do does very little.  (BTW, I almost wrote that as throwing the babies into the Vulcan, but I’ll note there’s a lack of RATIONALITY to the process.)

Right now it’s come down to what I call “playing mind games with myself.”  I can either completely block on both my overdue books AND the indie stuff and write nothing all year OR I can write for contract during the day and for myself weekends and evenings.  I hate to do that, because I owe those books and I’d like them out of the way.  But my mental processes too are not always extremely rational.

Oh, and if you say “perhaps your distinct lack of breakout books comes from being a lousy writer, Sarah” – I’ll concede that’s entirely possible.  But I’d like to point out there’s any number of non-lousy writers stuck where I am/was, and a whole lot of lousy writers gracing the bestseller lists, all through the magic of “publisher push” or lack thereof…  Something that no longer seems to matter with indie publishing, which is why I’m filled with hope.

Now, all I have to do is give up sleeping, and I can put things up (I have a backlog of about 225 stories written, but prep, cover and putting them up DOES take time), write new novels and fulfill my contracts.  Best of all, no fifteen percent percentage out of anything indie or anything I sell now.  So, even though I still pay 55% in taxes, I got a 50% raise!  Even if I never sell more than I did.  More importantly, the indie novels will never go out of print.  Even if they earn very little, they’ll earn SOMETHING.  AND half the bs is cut out of the process – no rewrites that have no purpose or make me grit my teeth.  (Oh, I’ll still have them edited.  I’m fortunate to be friends with the world’s best editor and some excellent copyeditors.  But the “vision” will be mine.)

And that, my friends, is the subject ladies never talk about.

If you’re scratching your head and wondering why I didn’t give up along the way…  Well – see, there was always the hope.  (Curse Pandora’s gift.)  Even though I knew the game was rigged, there was the hope if I made the next book REALLY good I’d sell a decent amount and then I’d get a bigger advance.  And then…  Well… at that it happened in a way.  Darkship Thieves seems to have done slightly better than the rest, and well…  The hope is still there.  Also, when I tried to quit (every other month and three times in the last five years VERY seriously) my husband told me to try just a little longer.  He’d endure the hardships, because he believed in me.  It’s hard to give up when someone thinks you can walk on water.  So I continued.  (Some days I think I used up all my luck in finding my husband and in having our kids.)

And now, you see, unless I’m reading the signs wrong, he just might be right, and I might be able to make not only a living but a good living.

Let us hope so.  And now, I will take my ear infection to bed (In case you wonder why I sound so tired as well as angry.  Yeah, I have antibiotics.)  I’m office-ish-ing tomorrow.  Catch you late afternoon my time.

I confess that, not having come up through fandom in the US, I was a many-years published writer when I first got called a “dirty old pro.”  Interestingly it was the same year that it seemed to be fashionable to accuse me of selling out and of writing for money… even by other people who wrote for money.

I haven’t thought about it in a long, long time.  But lately there have been a series of events that contributed to rub me the wrong way like a stone in my shoe.  Nothing that would get me to the “argh” level, but a bunch of little things that just annoyed me.  People calling other people “hacks” because they write for a living, say.  Or people claiming that those who write this or that “aren’t real writers.”  And then yesterday, in the Passive Guy’s excellent blog, as they were discussing a writer’s disgust with the current traditional field and prospects of making it (in other words someone who is where I was) some young lady (Oh, I hope to heaven she’s young) opined that we writers would write anyway and that in any case “no one can hope to make a living from writing.”  And I blew up, which is something I REALLY don’t like to do in other people’s blogs.

Kris Rusch has talked about writers “liking” to work for free.  I don’t completely agree with her post, simply because well… yeah, I give things away free here and on Amazon.  I do it for a reason.  Kris is better known than I am.  I figure the short story a week (tab at the top) and Witchfinder might bring in people to read my other books and stories, particularly the indie published ones (Goldport Press) which pay me a lot more than the traditional stuff right now.  And some of you have been kind enough to donate for Witchfinder, which, of course, keeps it going.  Also, I’ve discovered that giving away some things on Amazon increases sales not only of that item but of all others vaguely related.

But these are not so much “giveaways” as loss leaders.  And mark my words, should I find that Witchfinder, when it goes up (probably end of April at the rate the writing is going) sells no better than my other “indie” properties, I won’t give away another novel.  And same for short stories, should they not promote my other short work.  (Which means shouldn’t the sales on that increase.)  (OTOH if Witchfinder sells massively better than the other stuff, I will do a novel chapter a week as long as it works.)

I hear you saying “But don’t you like to write this stuff and see our reaction?”

Well, yes and no.  Yes, I love writing and having instant feedback.  That is why I did the Austen fanfic during one of the darkest times in my career, when I thought I’d NEVER ever ever get published.  But note – I did Austen fanfic, not original stuff.  I did it when I felt like – and wrote maybe 1k words a week, if I was in the mood – I barely proofread (my early stories have so many contradictions, they’re pretzels) and I didn’t ANGST over them.  I posted, I got comments, I painted walls and fixed the house (we were living in a house that we’d bought in need of a lot of fixing) I walked with the kids, I took weekends off.  It was a hobby.  Some people do crochet or embroider (okay, I do both of those too), some people take up ceramic painting.  I satisfied my need to write with minimum effort.  And for no money.

But that lasted maybe six months.  Mind you, I needed those six months (for one I was also recovering from severe illness.)  After that, I decided not to give up and started trying to write for publication again.  That’s a completely different endeavor: I started studying books, again, not just reading them for fun – figuring out techniques and how people did what.  I started working nine to five again… and occasionally till five in the morning, while my family sleeps.  I started having writers/critique meetings again.  I held myself to a production schedule.  And I worked towards being paid, which meant proofreading, consistency reading, professional presentation, etc.

In a year after that, I sold my first short story to see print (I’d sold one before.  Eight times.  Long story.)  And in another year after that I sold my first novel.

Since then, writing has been my job.  And like anyone with a job, I expect to be paid.

Mind you, my expectation is based on the idea that I’m better than the average Joe-schmo, off the street; that the work, study and application I put into this make a difference.

This is not to say, btw, that some of the fan writers, notably on the Austen board aren’t very good.  Sofie Skapski who wrote A Touch Of Night with me, is one such.  BUT the essence of fan writing is that stories will stay unfinished if life intervenes, that you write only when you feel like, and that ultimately you need another job to survive.  (Sofie is a very talented artist.  Any of you who decide to friend her on FB, she often posts pictures of her art.  And I’m very lucky, because she sends me lovely little paintings for xmas.)

Also, as a note, it took me thirteen years of steady application to break into the field.  I will grant you a lot of this was less studying the craft – or at least the reason it took me so long was not so much that I didn’t know the craft (How do I know that?  Because I’ve now sold two of the novels that I wrote in that time, and countless of the shorts, to pro markets, and some are considered my finest work.) but because the field as it was required networking and some effort at proving to the editors that you were a real human being and at worst only mildly eccentric.  But that, like going to a college you have to take courses that have no bearing on your future career, was part of the coming up process, and often much harder on me than (just) writing.

Am I complaining about this?  Complaining about working regular (actually very irregular.  I think if you assemble all my days off, I take maybe ten a year, including holidays.  I’ve been trying to take more recently, simply because it seems to keep me healthy longer.) hours?  Complaining about having to network?  Complaining about studying my craft?

No.  I really am not.  I’m just saying that if I’m not going to get paid for it, I’m going to treat writing as a hobby.

Think about it, your average multipublished author is a highly skilled craftsman/woman.  There are several of these around in other fields too.  I used to live in a mountain town that had tons of potters.  Were they all better than the non-pro potters?

Probably not.  There is such a thing as inspired genius.  In my lifetime I’ve known three or four unpublished people who wrote at pro level.  (One of those my older son at twelve.  He later went on to be a pro. ) But – and I presume the same happens with amateur potters – their production was irregular, and, to be blunt, they wrote what they wanted to and didn’t overthink it.  That meant one book might be brilliant and the next “OMG, what were you thinking?” weird.
Meanwhile the professional potters were constant.  They worked at their craft, they improved, they made enough for the local stores to carry.  After a while, living in town, if you wanted a particularly nice platter to give as a gift, you knew whom to talk to or what store to go to.

And I never, in my whole time in Manitou, heard someone say “Hey, you just got to make pottery.  You don’t expect to make a living at it.”  Or “I’m sorry I charge $120 for a saucer.  I would have made it anyway, even without pay.  You want to give me $5 for it?  Cool!”

Now, like most writers, most of these potters probably made a precarious living.  That still didn’t make them apologize or think their work should be free.

Besides, let’s take that reasoning to other professions where people just feel like they have to do it.  Let’s say, programmers.  Most of the ones I know fool around with computers in their off time.  A lot of them, particularly young ones, are lousily paid.  Do people ever say “Hey, programming is just something you have to do.  You don’t expect to make a living”?  Teaching – I KNOW, I love teaching, which is why I fall into doing it on this blog.  Once upon a time I tried to make teaching my profession and writing my hobby, instead of the way it worked out – do you ever hear anyone say “I just got to teach.  I don’t expect to make a living at it.”  Doctoring… don’t let’s go there, because some people THINK that would be lovely.

This ties in with another discussion going around, which is about copyright.  I’ve stated here that I’m perfectly fine with copyright being, say, life plus 25 years.  I know I have friends – some puzzlingly childless – who want it to be forever and ever.  And then last night in a blog I came across the other side of this, the people who think that it should be granted at most for 15 years, and then the work should be free.  (And it should only be granted if the work “benefits mankind” – which is one of those shave the barber questions.  Who decides?  In one of the worst days of my life, reading Good Omens kept me sane and possibly alive.  Does that mean it benefitted mankind?)

One of the commenters on that blog didn’t get pulverized because I was out of laser-vision-powers.  He said something like “Why do I have to work everyday and a guy writes a song and expects to be paid the rest of his life?”

Do I have to explain that to you people?  Why I expect to be paid for a story ‘for the rest of my life’?  Well, it’s a lot like pharmaceutical companies.

Look, you get paid everyday because someone else is buying your time.  NO ONE BUYS MY TIME.  What that means is that I don’t get rewarded for sitting at the computer and writing.  Instead, I have to sell what I write.  The ratio of sales/non sales has increased.  Well, obviously.  Say, 1998.  I labored all year, and I sold a short story for $60.  Now my income is about 10k per novel (sometimes 12, but the mysteries pay worse.)  What it will be for the indie stuff I don’t know.  With somewhere between 20 and 30 short stories/collections out with Goldport Press (the number varies per outlet) I’m making about $100 or $150 a month.  This is not bad, for drawer-stories and stories I was already paid for, but it’s not, of course, a living.  I’m told novels pay much better than shorts, though, so… as soon as I have time I’m gonna try.  At any rate, the point is that I don’t get paid for everything I write.  At this point in time, I get paid what could be considered sort of “professionalish” rates for 50% of it.  And I don’t know if I’ll ever see another dime from the things that went traditional after the advance (experience suggests no) and who knows how long it will take for the indie stuff to pay off?

Complaining again?  Oh, heck no.  Just explaining it’s not a straightforward exchange of time for money.  Like something that takes a lot of time and money and might or might not pay off – medicine or for that matter pharmaceutical research – writing professional novels could suddenly pay off spectacularly.  I could write a novel that sells so massively that I never need to work again.  (Yes, of course, I still would.)  And of course then my entire backlist, including potboilers would sell and pay off.  And the chances of that happening increase the longer things are in copyright and the more I write.  And the chance of that happening keeps me writing, and kept me writing even when the compensation sucked and the psychological atmosphere in the field was somewhere between a bridge clustered with suicides and a madhouse.

To the extent that my fans appreciate my work (I hope they do) they should be grateful that copyright gives me hope of hitting the big time, sometime.

Why the twenty five years after death then?  Surely by that time I’m no longer producing?

Well, no.  But that doesn’t mean no one is alive who deserves compensation for what I produced.  First, though I’ve said more than once that my kids can make their own money, I don’t know if I’ll predecease my husband.  We’re of an age, and I suppose I could drop dead tomorrow, just short of fifty, and he could live as his family tends to, into his nineties.  He can easily outlive me by 25 years or more.

Look, let’s not get sappy here, but I wouldn’t be writing at all if he hadn’t encouraged me.  I wouldn’t ever have got published if he hadn’t pushed.  When I lost heart, he was my mobile, portable self-confidence unit.  Three years ago he told me “Keep trying.  Give it at least another five years” when I wanted to walk away from it all.  And yeah, he endured years with a wife who didn’t “work”, or at least not get paid for work, while at the same time having to pitch in with house and kids because his wife worked constant “overtime”; years of a lifestyle below what our peers had, because I was pursuing this thing.  We’ve never taken European vacations.  Heck, we’ve never really taken vacations.  Our idea of a rip-roaring good time is two nights at embassy suites in Denver with the boys on the pull-out-sofa and hitting museums and eating one meal a day at a diner.  Real luxury there. (We go to Embassy Suites because if we get up late, we can make do without lunch.)  Give us three nights, and we think we’re in heaven.  (That’s happened twice in the last twenty years.)  For the last twenty years, we’ve bought our clothes in thrift stores, eat 99% of our meals at home, and I cook from scratch because it’s cheaper.  We’ve bought our furniture used and refinished/repurposed it. With the exception of my kindle, we buy our tech downmarket and used.  We buy used cars and drive them until they stop.  All so I could pursue the possibility that my writing would pay off big sometime.  I’m not complaining.  It was my choice.  And Dan’s choice.  BUT we did make sacrifices in pursuit of this chance.  And he made as many as I did.

Should writing pay off the year after I’m dead, he deserves the pay off.  Should it pay off to any extent, even if not big, if it can help his retirement, he earned it.

Life plus twenty five years gives me the chance to do what everyone wants to do, I think – work and provide for my family.  After that, the kids and grandkids can get off their duffs and make their own money.

Now, the other side of this is stuff like when Kevin Anderson put a donate button on his blog, and people told him “I’m not donating because you have more money than I do.”

Do I have more money than you do?  Well, I suppose, than a lot of you.  Not that we’re even close to rolling (or to what people consider a prudent rate of savings) but given the economy I think a lot of you are into negative numbers.  Mind you, part of this is that we scrimp and save madly.  And twice in the last twenty years, the cupboard has been bare (and once Jim Baen came through with a check one month before we would be out of a house.  Which I hope has been taken in account if there’s some sort of judgement in the ever-after).

But while Dan has a job, he will make more than at least some of you.  That’s not the point.  The point is that my work, too, deserves pay.  Yes,  a few of you get my stuff for free when I finish it, but that’s because we’re friends and I know you can’t afford it.

The thing is, when I ask for donations, I’m not asking because I’m poorer than you.  It is not a charity thing (even if a lot goes to the perpetually hard-case cats.)  I’m not asking for money because I make less than you (though in aggregate, if you count the years of flat nothing and the five or so years of less than 1k a year, I probably do make/have made less than a lot of you.  Certainly less than minimum wage.)  I want to get paid because I work for it, and I provide value-added.

Does this mean you should pay me whether you like my stuff or not?  Whether you read it or not?  Oh, please.  No.  I don’t believe things are worth the work you put into them.  That’s Marxist nonsense, not applicable to the real world.

I believe things are worth what an informed purchaser is willing to pay.  So, you should pay me if you read my stuff regularly and derive value/pleasure/instruction from it.  And because writing is my job.  And if I do it well, you’ll want to pay me.  And if I don’t do it well enough to be paid, I’ll have to find another job and give this up.

And why should you pay me?  Because then I keep doing it.  And because you like what I do.  It’s kind of like buying a chicken at the supermarket.  Do you do it because the farmer is poor and needs support?  Or do you fail to do it because the farmer would raise chickens, anyway?

No, you buy the chicken because you need it – or want to have nice lemon chicken for dinner (okay, I make lemon chicken a lot.) – and the farmer produces it because he gets paid.  This works wonderfully because then the farmer will produce more chickens.  And you’ll have a chicken right there when you need it.

Is this a threat to stop blogging if you don’t hit that donate button (on the right side, to the bottom of the blog [grin])?  No.  Well, not while I have time and disposition to blog.  So far I enjoy blogging, and I’m going on the assumption it’s a loss leader, getting my name out there.

Does it mean I’ll do it forever if I never get donations and my book sales bear no relation to blog hits?  Um…  Bluntly, no.  Like creatures who don’t spend their days in front of the keyboard, I need to live.  And if this will not pay, I’ll write another story a week which might pay when it goes up on Amazon or I might even (shudder) get honest work.  Because I have two kids in college and, well, you know what the economy is…

For now, I can afford to blog for free, for your amusement (and hopefully my increased name recognition.)  BUT don’t say “she’d write anyway.  She shouldn’t expect to be paid.”

I’m a writer.  Writing is my job.  I get paid for it.  I work to support my family and provide for my kids’ future and my and my spouse’s old age.  If I also enjoy what I’m doing, that’s a plus, but it’s not a reason to stop paying me.  Or to stop expecting to be paid.

The laborer is worthy of his pay.  Even if all he makes are stories, and even if all he does is lighten your spirits for an hour or so.