According To Hoyt

This is not a movie review, though it’s one of my very, very few posts inspired by watching a movie.

So, I went to see the Avengers (which is SO totally Human Wave.)  For those who don’t know me very well, this is under the heading of an anomaly.  I rarely go out to the movies.  Heck, I rarely watch movies at home.  Even those that are highly recommended by friends tend to get forgotten before their theater run ends.  But we were taking Friday off as a family, so we went to see the movie…

With much trepidation on my side on whether I’d be able to stand it, we went.  Full disclosure – I fell asleep during Star Wars.  Twice.  Why?  Because by that time I was reading science fiction and the plot struck me as “cliche one meets cliche two” and I’m not visual.  Also I’ve found in recent times that movies have gone MORE visual, with cut scene to cut scene and minimal dialogue.

Another source of concern is that I hadn’t seen the lead-up, though I keep meaning to watch Iron Man, which we have.  And also that I generally don’t watch super hero movies, because…

Well, because modern super heros seem to be like Superman in Five For Fighting’s “It’s not easy to be me” lyrics, you know “I can’t stand to fly/I’m not that naive/I’m just out to find/The better part of me” all the way the incredible touchy-feely wankiness of “men weren’t meant to ride/with clouds between their knees.”

And if you’re saying “But Sarah, it’s the vulnerable side that makes a super hero interesting” … Yeah.  It’s the vulnerable/flawed side that makes everyone interesting.  But what makes them worth reading about is what they accomplish DESPITE that, not the fact that they’re faster than a speeding bullet and yet whine about being a pretty face beside a train.

Oh, I know when this came in, and I even know why. I read enough pulp to know that one gets tired of the “big muscular hero does stuff” and that is why I like the uncut version of Puppet Masters, because we see why “Sam” runs, and what he does despite his big, sundering flaw.  Somewhere along the line the “I’m going to write something totally different” took over, and you end up doing well with it, because no one is doing it… And then suddenly it’s a trend, and then it’s “the way to do things.”

The reason I hate Super Hero stories in general is this ridiculous “his powers are a great burden” and “he just wants to be normal.”  Look, children – yeah, we all know people who are very smart or (worse) very beautiful, and we know there is a dark side to it.  It’s not all beer and skittles or prom queening and flowers.  Yes, their “powers” attract as much envy and hate as they attract admiration and love.  BUT ask them…  How many would give them up?  When they say they would what they mean is NOT “I want to be dumber/uglier” it’s “I want people to accept me and the stupid backbiting to end.”  Which again is different from being super man and wishing you were made of tissue paper.

Super heros who spend the movie chewing the scenery about how unfortunate they are and JUST wake up long enough to punch out the villain in the end, make me want to throw things.  Of course, this is the fashion in story telling, right now.  We seem to have – thank heavens – got over the anti-hero craze of the seventies – even our vampires are defanged before being made heros – but we are still stuck with pop psychology and angst over being heros.

I’m glad to report that Avengers doesn’t have that.  It has the required psychological plot (TM) under the idea of team building, but that didn’t bend me out of shape, because… well… it is hard to forge a team of exceptional people.  I’ve run enough workshops with extremely talented writers, and had other such professional occasions to know that making a team of gifted people is MUCH harder than making a team of newbies, beginners or people who aren’t special in any way.

What I really liked about the movie is that even though every character is profoundly flawed, the only one who is truly angsty about it is the Hulk and – arguably – he has more reason than any of the others since his shifted form is utterly mindless or close to it.  And even though every character is profoundly flawed, they’re not, any of them, (except Hulk) throwing fits over how terrible their fate is, in having these powers.  And, oh, by the way, Loki doesn’t turn out to be the good guy all along or even to be just a young man full of high spirits who went wrong TM.  Evil is real (if a little simplistic, but then it is a super hero movie, not War and Peace) and good is good, and you know where the line is.

Being myself, I confess that Tony Stark is my favorite character, because I do like characters who don’t take themselves seriously.  (“Doth mother know thou wearest her drapes?”) Though Captain America is my second favorite, because he’s a man who does what he has to do.  And can any movie be bad that contains the line “Hulk, smash,” as instructions?

Now, this concludes the movie portion of this blog post, and it brings us back around to what is a hero.  Not a “superhero” just a hero – a hero of the sort I like to find in books, even when they’re not about heroic actions.  And this is my view of it:

1 – A hero is larger than life.  What he does and what he can do puts us in awe of him.  (Not in “aw” of him.)  This despite the fact that

2- A true hero is or should be completely human.  Running up against a hail of bullets is yawn worthy, if you’re invulnerable to bullets.  Heroes know what can happen to them, face it and

3- Do what they have to do despite knowing how much it will cost them.

4- What they have to do MIGHT be run up against a hail of bullets.  Or it might be running into a burning building to save a child – or a cat.  Or it might be working three jobs so their kids get through school with no debt.  Whatever he does, though

5- He does this without complaining, whining and angsting that would shame a thirteen year old girl, particularly when a thirteen year old girl IS a hero.  (I think Hollywood directors caught on that we like the underdog, and think every character, including the hero needs to be the underdog.  Trust me, humanizing a character does NOT mean castrating him.)

6 – The hero doesn’t always win, but when he loses, he gets back on his feet and tries again.  He doesn’t spend time thinking of giving up his super powers, just so he doesn’t have to fight again.  AND he definitely does not wander around all angsty because no one said thank you.  The hero does what he has to do, he doesn’t do what he can so he gets thank yous.

7 – I’m not saying that all heros have no internal flaws driving them.  Most of them do.  Good examples are Black Widow and Hawkeye in this movie, who have oceans of blood to pay for, and know they’ll never clear the bill.  These flaws can and should be presented, they just shouldn’t be WHAT the story is about.  The story is about the exceptionally good things heroes do.  They don’t even have to be particularly good people, they just have to do good stuff.

8 – Heroes don’t have to love people.  They do need not to be idiots.  (I will admit here that if I hear one more pseudo-profound diatribe about how we’re a cancer/infection on the Earth, there’s going to be broken crockery.  This nonsense denotes as much deep thought as saying “We’re all naked under our clothes” another sixties favorite.)  By this I mean, they might not love people in general, but they’ll love SOMEONE, or else they might not really like people, but they feel they belong to them.  Or else, they might not love people but … as compared to what?  The point is, they should be on the side of good and not go looking in the weeds for reasons to hate humanity in order to sound like post-modern-scholars (TM).

9 – The hero needs only ONE outsize quality.  That is, your hero doesn’t need super strength or super powers, or x ray vision (which always seemed to me very weird.  I mean, who stands in front of a villain and goes “I’d have your kidneys checked.”) A hero needs ONE outsize quality, and it can be something all of us have, but he has more of it.  Think Inigo Montoya in Princess Bride and PERSISTENCE.  There’s a reason he’s one of sf/f’s favorite characters and totally steals that movie.  (And the lady or gentleman in the back who is giggling over “outsize quality,” stop it, or I shall throw a dead fish at you.)

10 – The hero needs to do the heroing.  This involves a certain moral quality. It is impossible for us, in this day and age of multiculturalism and “everyone has his reasons” to actually say that without cringing.  But heroes have moral certainty.  Look, you might or might not be for the death penalty, but Inigo’s certainty he should kill the six fingered man makes us follow him and cheer him.  It’s not our moral certainty.  It’s his.  And the fact that the six-fingered man grossly needs killing just makes it perfect.  You’re the writer.  You’re in control.  You can make villains who need to be destroyed and actions that must be stopped.  Like, how many of you will stop on the way to rescue a puppy from being put in a blender to go “well, everyone has his reasons.  I need the villain’s take on this?”

But Sarah, you say, I want my heroes and my villains to be done in middle-grades, in fifty shades of gray as it were.  I want to be realistic and life-like.

Oh, please, do go ahead.  You will probably win several prizes.  I just won’t read you.  And probably there are a few people who feel like me.  I have no objection to THAT market being served, I’m just jazzed to see storytelling come around to where there is some of the stuff I like and where a blockbuster movie unashamedly does the Human Wave.

When I was a new writer, writing my very first book, my husband was very impressed by a scene in which a slave says three lines and immediately has a personality and completely steals the chapter.

It was in a way an harbinger of things to come, but it still makes me wonder if he was right that it was a sign I’d be a great author.  I wonder, because knowing when to use cliches in the right place is incredibly useful in creating a novel and getting subtext to the reader without adding YET another subplot to your book.

This is particularly important as the age of Indie publishing dawns.  (It looks like a dawn to me.  Of course, it could be a raging forest fire in the horizon.)  Why, because we’ve determined – we being those of us who buy and observe ebooks and their marketing – that people will pay $4.99 for fifty thousand words.  They will also pay 4.99 for 100,000 words and 4.99 for 150,000 words.

Why this is, I don’t know, but there seems to be a hard set price at around $5 that people don’t like going over.  If you have a big name, or if it’s a sequel to a book with a lot of readers, they might go as high as $6.99, but at that point, as far as I can tell, you’re losing more in readers than the increased share of the price will bring in.  From 50k words on down to 20k words there are price breaks along the way, hitting at 20k (though you can get away with 11k to 15k if it’s really good) at 2.99, and 30 to 35k words at 3.99.   Of course, this all varies wildly with “book that’s part of a series” and “Popular characters” but this is the way to bet.

Oh, I have some idea as to why the different formats support different sizes.  If I remember the goatgaggers came about because paperbacks were going to be 8.99 anyway, even for small ones (having to do with requirements for half recycled paper in the books.  How do you know recycled paper is a bad idea?  Because recycling it costs more and causes more damage to the environment than just harvesting the trees that are grown for paper – no, boys and girls, no one is cutting down old growth forests for pulp.  Yes, of course you thought they did.  We all did.  Keep that mind.  It’s important later.  Politicians know that too, this is why they make the grand gestures that actually make things worse.  They are masters of the cliche) then why not charge a couple bucks extra, but make the book two and a half times as large.  VISIBLY larger, and therefore speaking to that back part of the human brain that says “more for the money.”

In ebooks, you don’t see that.  You see a description that either sounds interesting or not, and a price.  If the price is 7.99 or 8.99, that description had best be fantastic.  The bar to cross is much higher.  

Yes, if you buy a book and it turns out to be only 50 pages, you get upset.  I have, when romance writers charge 2.99 for their short stories.  BUT speaking as a reader, if it’s a hundred pages or more, I’m willing to go up to 3.99 or thereabouts.  And if it reads as substantial as Agatha Christie, well, 4.99 is about right.  (And I have to argue with myself a lot less to get it.  Treacherous is the human brain and all that.  Two books at 50k words a piece at 4.99 are the same as a 150k book at 9.99 – but that’s not what it FEELS like.)

As a writer with limited time, the strategy for maximizing money is obvious – one should return to the techniques of the pulps and write shorter books.  It is a fact modern readers fail to appreciate that most of the Agatha Christie books, most of the Rex Stout books, the Heinlein books pre- 70s and a lot of others maxed out at about 60k words.  This was the novel in the times novels were wildly popular.  It was also something that could be consumed in about an hour, by a fast reader.  (I’m not sure if this had anything to do with their popularity, but I’m throwing it out there.)

The problem is that I came into the field when the novel had come to mean 100k or so words.  This length became hard and fast in my brain.  Impossible to dislodge even over the first five years in my career when the goatgagger of 220 to 250k words became all the rage.  The one goatgagger I tried to write suffered from subplots that had little to do with the main plot.  Of course so did a lot of the bestsellers, but that is no excuse.

The sad thing though is that of right now, I can see writing a goatgagger more easily than a 50k story.  A goatgagger could be a trilogy published as a single book.  A 50k story, however, requires learning a new way of writing.  And I’m trying to learn it in experiments you’ll probably never see.  (This is, right now my second job, trying to retool for the indie market.)

Yes, I could write it as an episodic novel but each of the episodes requires the same techniques as a shorter novel, to fully work.

Okay, Sarah, you’ve convinced us.  Small is the new massive and this has something to do with pulp.  BUT what does that have to do with cliches?

Go and read any Harlequin from the seventies and eighties when they held the length at around 50k.  It is almost exclusively cliches.  (There was a joke, for a while, around writers’ email lists that when you wrote your first romance you’d get a letter from the “dark haired virgin” – this was a woman who sent a letter to every new romance writer begging for a heroine who was a dark haired virgin.  I don’t know how much of that is apocryphal or if she still does it, I never wrote an official romance.)

The joke/story worked, because a dark haired virgin was hard to find.  The innocent virgin was usually a blond, while the experienced mistress/woman of bad repute was dark haired.  Why?  Well, for goodness sakes, because that cliche starts with the picture books.  (And Pratchett had delightful fun with it in I Shall Wear Midnight.) And the books were short. You had to get your bang as fast as possible.  You didn’t have time to fight pre-conceived notions.

When writing short, what I did in that very first book, making what should be a secondary character with a walk-on part become a full fledged individual is baaaaad.  Well, it’s bad for my pocket book and my writing speed.  Why?  Because if I make a character live and breathe in three sentences, the reader (see yesterday’s post on foreshadowing) expects him to be part of a major subplot, with his own growth line.  And that means the book SWELLS up, like one of those sponge dinosaurs thrown in a glass of water.

I’m happy to report I have mustered that much.  My walk-ons are now fully walk-ons and I let my brain pick up cliche-1 or cliche-2 out of the back regions.  In case you have not noticed – have you? – all my hostlers tend to be fat and jovial.  That’s because the name is attached to the (British) Robin Hood series which aired in Portugal in the late seventies.  Hostlers are fat, jovial and often red faced.   Going against that cliche in my own head means I’d give the so-and-so’s a chance to grow and become individuals and then you’d have the tale of the hostler with the unfaithful wife and the incurable disease.  And then at the end I’d need to tie his growth to the main story and next thing you know, people are sending me letters begging for a hostler series.

The devil is in the secondary characters, and in keeping them properly secondary.  If I’m going to spend a ton of time in someone else’s head, then by gum and golly, they’re going to be people.  I can’t help it.  It’s like a disease.  My subconscious starts spending a lot of time around a critter’s head, and next thing I know the critter has a mother, a wife, two sisters, a cat he loved in childhood and  OCCASIONALLY searing memories of something or other from childhood.  I can’t help it.  It just happens.

This is why Witchfinder which was planned to be 90k words or thereabouts, is now becoming something that will end at around 120 or 150k words.  It was supposed to be a mostly Seraphim book – I have the outline, I SWEAR – but not only has his half-brother/valet developed a plot line line of his own (bursting out of his “clever servant” cliche jacket) but now his little sister is developing her own too which will involve extraordinary gifts and a star crossed love, and his little brother though a late comer will, I swear, steal the show just to upset me.  And don’t get me started on his father who is supposed to be decently dead.  (Flash – Dukes don’t know their place.  Oh, wait.)

And please, don’t tell me to keep the books first person there.  Do you guys know how many letters I got after Darkship Thieves asking me for novels featuring Nat and – I swear I’m not making this up – Fuse?  FUSE!  And of course there will be novels featuring them, because the moment I read that, my subconscious goes “oooo” gets the jump on the conscious, clobbers it on the head and starts spinning stories.

So, how do I feel about this?  I don’t know.  Part of me resents the fact that I can’t write 50 thousand word novels when they sell as well or better than longer ones.  Look, this is the thing…  I know the gentleman who visited to defend non-fiction writers talked about my art.  (Rolls eyes.)  Which is a fundamental misunderstanding of what I’m trying to do.

Is my writing art?  Don’t know.  Don’t care.  To me art is that extra dimension, when breath from the gods blows upon the book and it lives.  It’s not something I can invoke at will, particularly when I MAKE MY LIVING FROM THIS and must finish books in time to pay tuition or get the car repaired even while sick, angry, worried, or other mind-impairing things.  What I CAN and try to do is write the best book I can in a way that it will sell the most.

But… but… but…  But writing 50 thousand word books involves working mostly in cliches.  And the problem with cliches is that they are so often wrong.  At best they’re a radical simplification.  At worst, they are an outright lie.  Take the “all virgins are blondes.”  I distinctly remember being a virgin, and I was dark haired.  Worse, I had streaks of red in my hair.  Which means I should have been the local slut.  Now, yes, anyone thinking they have to be sluts because they’re dark haired is insane, but that’s because it’s a cliche that ALL of us know it’s wrong, pretty much.  So the cliche is silly, but it doesn’t hurt anyone.

Other cliches do.  Though Ric was wrong to assume I was using the cliche of the “tortured homosexual” – (mostly because these two people are well… far from perfect people, and both are mostly victims of themselves regardless of their society and its issues and also because though ONE of them is at the center of the solution to the book, the solution has to do with his birth, not his orientation.) BUT oh, heavens, the cliche exists.  It exists to the point of calling up widespread prejudice that doesn’t exist in most places, anymore for the purpose of serving the plot, giving people the impression ALL gay people are beat up every other day and twice on Sunday, while walking to the convenience store for milk, in your average suburb.  (The same applies to “tortured person of color” and “tortured immigrant” and “tortured minority of some description” – the end result being that book my kids had to read in school about the pagan, handicapped, lesbian Latina who can never do anything, because everyone victimizes her .) Or the cliche about all evil in the world coming from truly bizarre sexual wishes suppressed (or expressed.)  There’s this television mystery series, which I’m actually enjoying around the edges, (I’m watching it free with Amazon prime, and I think it’s a British series) but my husband and I joke the solution to the mystery is always kinkier and kinkier sex.  We’ve taken to guessing how bizarre the sexual act at the bottom of it will be next time.  We’ve now had homosexuality between married people, middle aged transvestite, incest, swinging and more incest.  I understand the same thing applies to the “new” Miss Marple TV series, where they’ve defaulted to all sorts of sexual stuff as the reason for the murders, etc. as though people had NO OTHER impulses or reasons to do things.   It’s like their answer for everything is “Sex” which of course is cliche from the seventies.  

And this cliche brings my objection to “cliches” to the fore – no matter how useful they are.  Using “sex” as the answer for everything is not only wrong, it can be harmful.  It makes young people think sexual orientation or what anyone does in bed or even what they WANT to do in bed matters much more than it does and determines people’s moral character all along the line (which is bad for both sides of the debate).  It also propagates the idea there’s no escape.  If you have a truly depraved instinct — say an attraction to clown noses — you can give in to it and let it ruin your life, or not give in to it and go insane.

Of course, some sexual impulses, judged under the “this is bad for a lot of other people” or “this is causing suffering to innocent creatures for the sake of pleasure” are PLAIN wrong, (like crushing small cute animals.  ick.  Or pedophilia.)  And impulses that aren’t wrong (including good old heterosexual desire can be PLAIN wrong in CERTAIN circumstances and in certain places.)  And of course you can control yourself without going insane.  Most of us do.  EVERY DAY.  But since it’s not something people talk about that much, it’s easy to have the idea propagate that if you really HAVE to mate with cabbages and DON’T give in to it, and give in to it in a public and noisy manner, you’re going to start killing the neighbors and stuffing them into garbage bags.  (Yes, some people do.  Those people tend to have OTHER issues too. For the record, Splendor in The Grass is full of sh*t.  If she couldn’t handle NOT having sex without going insane, she was certainly not ready to HAVE sex.)  If your sexual bend runs towards live chickens, it’s probably better if you repress it.  Dead chickens?  Well, keep it to yourself buddy.  Keep it to yourself with the door locked and the windows down.  Your mind should still be in control of your body no matter how many modern novels say we have to give in or become mass murderers.  Or to allude to Rex Stout’s masterly summation, there’s more to being humans – and to caring, and to having adventures, and, yes, even to committing murder – than the appetites we share with dogs.

But the idea that sex is at the bottom of everything is a cliche – and one easy to default to, because so much of the “serious” TV and movies we see do.  Freud, though no longer taken seriously, has percolated through our entire society.  Cheap pop psychology makes you sound “deep”  (Fortunately I’m virtually immune to TV, unless I’m ironing, and I NEVER read “serious” literature. :-P I have an old college injury.  It only hurts when I read literature.  Of course, it is a problem too, because I don’t know what readers expect.  And yes, that is bad.)

Mostly what I tend to do, because the same thing happens to me with “niche cliches” as happens to secondary characters is take the cliche, start off with it, then spin it around and rearrange it so its own mother wouldn’t recognize it.

Take, for instance the cliche of the cruel father, so useful in fat fantasies of the seventies and eighties that featured a girl MC.  People starting Darkship Thieves would be excused for thinking I’m going that way and pounding on the patriarchal society, etc.  Only… that’s not *precisely* the point.  There are reasons for the cruel father, and he’d be (has been/and others are) just as cruel to a boy.  Because my mind can’t leave cliches alone.

Is there a bit of pride in that?  Well, yes, but only in the same way I’ll tell you that I can’t sing – or rather, that I sing so badly I could clear packed buses at rush hour.  If you’re blessed with this sort of thing, you might as well take pride in it, because it ain’t going away.

BUT again, it will cause a problem with writing shorter.  A serious problem.  On the other hand, using cliches CAN – though it isn’t necessarily needed, not in all of them – become poisonous and lies that can – eventually – infect the whole society.  On the one hand I write to make money.  On the other hand, I have to wake up with myself and look in the mirror, because otherwise I’ll probably put my toothbrush in my eye.

The electronic drawing programs I use have “tips” that you can put on the “airbrush” – sky tips, and rose tips and…  So that if you’re drawing a bunch of fiddly stuff that’s not important in the big picture, you don’t have to slave over it.  Very useful.  In the same way I tend to think of cliches as a “cliche tip” – if you have a walk in character, why give him the complex back story and the searing experience with the cat and the three men dressed in clown suits?  On the other hand, if you have a cliche character in a more substantial position, you have to look t it very carefully and wonder whether you’re propagating a lie that does actually have consequences.  The thing is, you have to be fully aware deviating from the herd in that one will cost you time and money and it’s doubtful it will gain you that many more fans, at least for a while – so you should only do it if you ABSOLUTELY have to… like, if you can’t look at yourself in the morning if you don’t.

Lately I’ve found that those “Background tips” on the drawing brush are less convincing and more “fakey” than if I just use some quick techniques to do the background in a way that suggests it but doesn’t fully show it.  I’m not absolutely sure if that’s a metaphor for writing or not.  All I know is that this is going to require learning a lot of new techniques.

Note that I’m giving away stuff at Mad Genius Club.

Also, Mike Kabongo has a post tangentially related to this – in the sense of finding “new” stuff to read which is NOT a cliche.

For the daily dose of controversy, go here.  I’m talking about other stuff today.

This is a post about how to foreshadow in a book.  It is of course a post for writers, but also for readers.  Sometimes being aware of the foreshadowing is a delight.  I confess I don’t usually do it first read through, when I’m like “yay, story.”  BUT on second read, seeing how beautiful the structure is supporting the tent can help appreciate the work.

I will warn you I am no expert.  I only discovered foreshadowing after selling FOUR books.  Does this mean I was doing none of it?  Well, no, it doesn’t.  I’ve read so much – books and stories have always been part of my life, even if the earliest reading I remember is comic books.  What I mean is, I absorbed some of what to do through the skin, without thinking about it.

[CACS asked how I could have a degree in literature without learning about foreshadowing.  Very easily.  First you have to account for different cultures.  I don’t know HOW Portuguese novels are structured, but I know it’s different from Anglophonic novels.  For one, they read far more leisurely and unstructured to me.  Now, we studied English and German and French novels, too, but if a concept does not exist in your own literature, you’ll be blind to it in other literatures.  OTOH it’s entirely possible that foreshadowing is well known in Portugal and I never heard of it.  Honestly, having gone into highschool in 75 (highschool in Portugal starts with 7th grade) and graduating in 81, I got the first wave of what we’ll call ex-hippie (and sometimes not ex) teachers.  College was more mixed, because some of my literature professors were older, but they too were under the tyranny of the hip.  Just like art was about throwing us at a wall with paint and telling us to express ourselves, we were encouraged to analyze literature anyway we wanted to, with bonus points for Marxist.  Just like I now take arts courses to learn about stuff like perspective and shading, I had to unlearn almost anything I thought I knew about literature, in order to write readable books.]

Anyway, I thought – feel free to laugh here – that things were just supposed to happen in books.  In the same way I like surprise endings, I thought that ALL plot developments should be surprises, the more surprise the better.  This resulted in some reviews for my first published books, saying the books had no plot.  This is silly, because they do.  What happens HAS to happen, logically.  It’s just that I didn’t signal it enough in advance and from the readers’ perspective it just “happens.”  At that, my first published books have SOME structure that’s visible to readers, in the form of leaning on older fairytales.  The great Minoan saga suffers, most of all, from a complete lack of foreshadowing (yes, I DID think I was being clever) which means walls fal on the character.  From the reader’s perspective, this character is just cursed, and he can’t walk past a wall without it’s falling onto it.  (A quick note on plotting here – your character should suffer mostly from things he did himself.  While the eternal victim character – Jane Eyre, or the beginning of Harry Potter – grabs you, if the character doesn’t start having some control over his destiny and soon, you’ll either lose readers or win a Nobel Prize, depending on who your victim is.)  This is why the great Minoan saga MUST be rewritten, even IF I bring it out myself.

And then within the space of a month, both Dave Freer and Toni Weisskopft informed me when I said something like “I know, my plotting sucks” (which I’d told other professionals before and they never disabused me) “No, your plotting is fine, but you have no clue how to foreshadow.”  (Boy, were they right.  I’m looking at novellas I wrote before that, and OUCH.  Those too are being rewritten.  The short stories “swim” better because very short.)

They both then left me to sink or swim, (and in Dave’s case we ALL know there are sharks in the waters he swims in!) They both recommended I read Georgette Heyer as an example, though.  (This started my downfall into reading icky, icky romance.  Actually reading ANY romance doesn’t hurt, if you haven’t read it before.  Or any genre you don’t normally read.  You see the structure better if the idea is unfamiliar.)

The first time I foreshadowed I was convinced – CONVINCED – that people would tell me I’d ruined the book; that they knew all the plot in the first three pages, that they didn’t like it.

Instead, that book, Draw One In The Dark, though it had a horrible cover in hard cover, and therefore negligible numbers, was the beginning of my building my fandom.  (It’s available at Baen’s Webscriptions at a reasonable price, too AND with the not-horrible mmpb cover.)

Foreshadowing is one of those things you have to learn by trial and error, but from the height of my eight years of doing it, let me tell you what I’ve learned so far.

1- Tell the readers what the book IS in the first few pages.  By which I don’t mean your character should stop and say “Welcome to my world, this is a sf/adventure/with dragons.”  I mean that the major elements that shape genre or sub-genre should be there.  PARTICULARLY now that covers are often thumbnails and you decide to purchase on the first few pages.  If I think I’m reading quest fantasy and then they arrive at the spaceport I’m going to be jarred at least, and throw the book against the wall at worst.

But SARAH, you say – stop whining, kid – my book doesn’t start at a place that tells you what it is.  You see, my character is in this perfectly normal coffee shop, and then this magician comes in…  (Noted, coffee + magic equals AWESOME, but–) and the world is perfectly normal till then.  Yeah.  Okay fine.  BUT there are ways to give clues.  If your character knows magic exists, give him a thought about oh, fixing his own coffee maker with magic.  If he doesn’t, have him see something and go “Impossible.  There’s no such thing as magic.”  This can be very short and throw away, but it’s enough to let the reader know – even if at a subconscious level – that magic is part of this novel.

This is more important the more out of the ordinary your book is.  So if you’re writing a science fantasy or a techno romance, you need to signal more and earlier.  People tend to default to book-patterns they know.  If you don’t signal, they’ll assume your book is a standard whatever they read last.

2- For major plot points ahead, signal three times.

Say your character is going to suddenly and explosively turn into a dragon when cornered.  You should have this signaled ahead, in different ways – he remembers doing it at some point, and leveling the area (weak); he is afraid of doing it (stronger, but still weak); he goes halfway to changing and pulls back (stronger.)

It needs three times because your readers might not notice the first, and think the second is accidental.

3 – For minor plot points, you can foreshadow less, or just weakly.  Say by mentioning a few times, in passing, through different characters that red hats attract dragons.

4 – Take what you think is excessive signaling ahead, then amp it to double.  Remember, you know the book, so to you it feels like being beat over the head.  It doesn’t to a reader because they don’t KNOW what you’re trying to do.  (Which is rather the point.)  Objects in the writer’s mind are larger than they appear to the reader.  Remember that.

For those going traditional publishing, copy editors are the enemies of this process.  They don’t seem to GET that they’re doing this professionally and line by line, and the reader doesn’t read like that, so they’ll tell you things like “you already told us that!”  This is why G-d gave you a STET stamp (or if you’re me, you had it made at a local shop.)  Use it.  Try to make sure you didn’t repeat the words, though, particularly in different characters’ mouths, because readers DO get THAT.

5 – If you’re a pantser or an occasional pantser, or a pantser in details (which I am, sometimes) don’t go in with a heavy hand in revision and ASSUME you didn’t foreshadow.  I seem to be foreshadowing behind my own back.  Take the whole child prostitution thing in Witchfinder – which, ick, ick, ick, I wouldn’t consciously put in, but my subconscious THINKS must be in there – it surprised me as coming out of nowhere, but when I read back over it, it is foreshadowed.  This has happened to me A TON of times, with various books.  So, read first.  The foreshadowing might ALREADY be there.

6- OTOH when revising, make sure you remove accidental foreshadowing. I.e. Foreshadowing for things that aren’t in the book/won’t happen/are just plain weird. Take the beginning of Death Of The Musketeer.  I have – I think I’ve admitted this – a crush on Athos.  When writing that book, the first time I got to play with Athos in my own prose, I forgot I was in D’Artagnan’s mind, and described Athos… rather… lovingly.  This was the author having fun, but when I revised, it read like signage for guy on guy romance, if not guy on guy porn.  I deleted six pages, in utter horror at my slip-up.  (No.  You can’t have them.  Geesh.  You guys just want to laugh at me.)  A lost of accidental foreshadowing isn’t that in your face, and you might miss it.  Say you mention your character is an excellent rider, just because you want to give him ALL virtues.  If this is done early, the reader will expect… horsemanship to matter.  (If it’s later in the novel, they might get you’re just saying he’s “Wonnerful.”) Unless horsemanship matters, take it out.

Of course, the BEST way to test your learning of these techniques is beta readers you can trust.  If this IS what you’re testing, you might ask them to write on the margins (or make a note) at certain points in the book of what they think the book is about and where it’s going.

Another good way is to write fanfic.  At least at the Derbyshire Writers’ Guild, you get a lot of comments, and from the comments – where people ALWAYS speculate on what will happen next – you can judge how your signaling is.

Good luck, and may you learn to cast long shadows.

I apologize in advance to anyone this chapter might shock.  My only excuse is that I didn’t even know half of this.  (And no, don’t even bother to ask how I could not have known.  I just didn’t.)

 

*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  all in one big lump, which makes it easier to read 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. *

For previous chapters, look here:  https://accordingtohoyt.com/witchfinder/

 

The Coil Winds

“I helped find you,” Marlon Elfborn said.

Nell had got coffee, because she knew – both because Antoine had told her, and because Seraphim had confirmed it – that coffee was good for restoring damaged magic.  Some people believed the only way magicians could survive on Earth was through vast infusions of coffee and coffee shops were always a good place to find magicians porting between dimmensions, stopping on Earth for a few hours or a few days.

Elfborn was holding his cup between both hands, with the sort of clenched-fist grip normally reserved for the proverbial straw and the drowning man.  He took it black, and he’d drained almost the whole cup, which was fine, since she’d brought the pot down.  What was interesting, as far as she was concerned, was that Gabriel Penn had gone to sit gingerly next to him, and was – as far as it was possible to tell from the outside – monitoring Elfborn’s magical power.  There was that odd, analytical look as he stared at Marlon’s magic through half closed eyes.

It seemed for a moment, staring at Penn, that Nell discerned something else in those eyes, but … In Avalon?  Besides, what she’d heard from Seraphim about Elfborn’s character…  It seemed hardly likely, though she’d come to believe that people did the most stupid and out of character things when it came to their private lives.

Gabriel Penn glared at her, as though he could read her thoughts, and she cleared her throat and looked back at Marlon, who was looking at her, with the sort of unfocused look of one not fully attuned to his surroundings.

“You… helped find me?  What does that mean?”

Marlon shifted the cup, so the fingers of his right hand curled around the handle.  The left went up and raked at his hair.  He darted a furtive look at Gabriel Penn, then looked at his coffee.  “When Gab– When Mr. Penn…  That is…  He should not have–” He paused and seemed to collect himself.  “When Mr. Penn discovered the reanimated corpse of my friend in my attic and… and was alarmed enough to… to… to let his– That is…  When he let his Grace know–”

Seraphim snorted.  He mumbled something that sounded like “if coming to my door in abject terror didn’t let me know, nothing would.”

But Gabriel put a hand out and grabbed Seraphim’s arm and Elfborn seemed to ignore the interruption and went on, “And his Grace laid information against me on two capital crimes, I had to disappear.  I had to disappear fast.  Contrary to popular belief, magic professors that Cambridge… No.  Magic professors whose whole background is a foundling home, aren’t paid princely salaries.  We are- I was given a place to live and fifty pounds a year.  It was not held against me if I tutored on the side to make ends meet, which I did.”

Again Seraphim snorted, and Nell had the impression that Gabriel glared at him and squeezed his arm harder, but she didn’t look at them.  Instead she was looking at Elfborn in near horror.  While house servants made considerably less than fifty pounds a year, they got not only a place to live, but also food and clothing and often used clothing or other side benefits that could be sold.  But a governess might make a hundred pounds a year, and she too got not just a place to live but food and at least some furnishings and other benefits including – as she had found in Avalon – the not inconsiderable one of – in most decent households – coal for heating.

To live on fifty pounds a year, even with lodgings paid for, support the state of a gentleman which would be expected of a professor, and buy the necessaries of his profession, including the extremely expensive tomes on magic research would have…  Been well nigh impossible, even with tutoring on the side.  She knew what tutoring paid – she’d known people who had done it.  It was near to nothing.  The thought that Cambridge, whose “regular” professors got paid quite decently, tood advantage of people whose tainted blood made them less than equal in society made her stomach clench.  “Yes?” she said, trying to keep her voice indifferent.  “I fail to see why you’d need money to escape.  Magic yes, but–”

“Oh, magic too,” Marlon said.  “The police are not completely stupid, you know, no matter what popular fiction shows, and they do have some very competent magicians on staff.  They would have found me if all I’d done was throw a veil over my magic.  I needed to… I needed to go between-times,” he said, as if braving himself.  “Between places.  The sort of thing you read about in fairytales, where the door is only there if you’re looking for it.  As for money,” he shrugged.  “A magician in hiding still has to eat.  I suppose if I’d grown up anywhere where one lays snares or hunts I could have done that, though I hear one can’t live on rabbit without starving.  Or I could maybe have kept chickens, or something.  But I grew up in a foundling home, in London.  And I never learned to hunt.  I needed large enough money that I could… buy food.  For years.  For however long… for as long as need.”

“But,” Nell said.  “Surely necromancy pays well?”  She’d heard rumors of fortunes paid for such illegal magic.  “If you’re a necromancer–”

“He is not.  It was accidental.  He raised Gypson Haiden through a resurrection spell applied too late.  Stop glaring Seraphim, I believe him.”

“Of course you do, you’re very eager to believe–”

“Shut up, both of you,” Nell said, reflecting only later that she’d ordered a duke around as though he were an unruly school boy.  And he hadn’t complained.  Oh, very well, then.  She might grow to like this princessing thing.  “Mr. Elfborne, I still don’t understand it.  Oh, I understand your needing money, but you say until as though it would have an end.”

He shrugged, “Oh, it would.  But it might be ten or twenty years in the future.  You see, they put an embargo on my leaving the world.  I couldn’t port out.  I had to wait–” He paused and his eyes almost crossed.  “I’m out of the world.  They can’t have removed the embargo.  The minimum time is ten years.  They can’t have done it.”

“No,” it was Gabriel, assuredly.

“So…  When we were ported out violently, it must be … someone with the keys…”

“That much has been obvious for a while,” Seraphim said.  “Now, if you would answer Her Royal Highness’s implied question about whom you found her for, perhaps we can find out who ported us here.”

Marlon’s hand went up and made a worse mess of his hair, and he took a sip of his cup, only to find it was empty.  Nell held his wrist to keep the cup in place, and poured coffee for him.  He took a sip, then sighed.  “It might be them.  I always thought it was them.  I don’t know how they found I was in distress, but of course, I suppose they keep track of those of us like Gabriel and myself in your world, and from one or the other of us, they must have picked up my bind.”  He looked up at their blank looks.  “Fairyland, of course.  They sent envoys to my house, in between the time Gabriel left and before …  And before the law arrived, while I was hoping…  While I was convincing myself Gabriel would come back and I could expl–”

“You set a compulsion on him, did you not, you filthy bastard?” Seraphim asked.  “It only activated now.  I should–”

“Enough, Duke, he–”

“Compulsion?”  Elfborn blinked at Seraphim as though he’d said a foreign word.  “No.  I just hoped he would come back.  I thought if he car– I thought he’d come to his senses and come back and I could explain.”

“An animated corpse in your closet, really?  You could explain?”

Elfborn gave a short, hollow crack that might have been an attempt at laugh.  “I could try.  But I never got the chance, as the next person at my door was your Grace, challenging me for a duel and informing me you’d set the law on me. But before you came, there were envoys from fairyland.  They offered me a place already turned in the magical way that made it hard to find and ten thousand pounds– As I said, I didn’t know how they found I needed help, but my need was desperate enough that I took it.”

“I went to my mother before I went to Seraphim,” Gabriel said, not looking at Elfborne.

“Penny!” from Seraphim echoed, in tones of great shock.  “Your mother?”

Strangely this made Elfborne smile at Gabriel and shake his head, his eyes amused.  “You really were past thinking, were you not?”

“Well–” Gabriel said.  “If you’d told me– If you’d explained– As it was I thought everything…  Everything I’d thought you to be was a lie, and possibly that you intended to kill me and keep me…  I thought…”  A red tide swept upwards through his skin giving him the appearance of glowing red from within.  “One reads of such things.  Of people who… of people who are only…  Interested when someone is… that is, reanimated.  It’s one of the reasons it’s illegal, and yet there are rings of them that they catch sometimes.”

“You thought I’d kill you and reanimate you for sexual purposes?” Elborne asked, and his voice sounded shocked but as though he were on the verge of laughing.

Which didn’t last long, as Seraphim grabbed him by the front of his shirt and half-lifted him from the sofa.  “You will not speak of such things in front of her Highness.  You will remember your company and you will–”

“Let him go,” Nell said, and was shocked to see herself obeyed instantly.  She could really grow to like this princessing.  Unfortunately, she was almost sure there were drawbacks.  She sighed and turned to Seraphim who managed to look both embarrassed and vaguely confused about why he should be embarrassed.  “Your Grace.  I grew up on Earth.  You have seen, and read enough of our entertainment since you’ve been here to know I will not swoon at the mention of sexual practices no matter how vile.  I hadn’t thought of it, but of course, in a world where necromancy is possible there will be a sex trade for reanimated corpses – and yes, I consider that absolutely vile.  But it won’t make me swoon.” Something had formed in her mind.  It wasn’t a suspicion, but more like a sudden falling of a jigsaw puzzle into place.  It was as though a hundred half-seen looks, a hundred glimpses of expressions, a hundred half seen gestures had come together in that moment.  She took a deep breath, aware she was going to poke her nose into a can of worms.  But it had to be done, she thought, or the three of them were going to continue talking around things, and Seraphim would keep erupting at the worst times, trying to protect her, and making it impossible for her to piece together what Elfborn knew.

“You said two capital crimes,” she said, and looked at Elfborn.  “I am not fully aware of your laws, but I know that in our time, when society was close to yours homosexuality was a capital crime, though rarely enforced and never for people of high birth.”

“I’m not of high birth,” Elfborn said.

“So you and…” she glanced at Gabriel Penn who was looking like he’d lost the power of speech.  Also, like he wold presently have a heart attack.  She hoped Elfborn would be quicker with a resurrection spell if that happened.  “And Mr. Penn were lovers?”

The room went wild.  She’d half expected it would.  The thing she didn’t expect is that it would be all caused by Seraphim, because the other two were completely speechless.  Elfborn managed something that might have been a nod; Gabriel Penn had covered his face.  BUT the duke made up for it in triplicate, by jumping up and yelling at her, at the two other men, at – possibly – the walls of the room.  She couldn’t make much sense of his yelling, but the gist of it, as far as she could tell, was that Gabriel didn’t know what he was doing; that at nineteen he’d been underage; that Elfborn had used compulsion and magical tricks; that he was a more powerful magician than anyone else on Avalon, just about, and that he had no morals, as he’d proven by reanimating his dead lover and keeping him around; and that Seraphim would put a bullet in his head and soon.  At which point Nell screamed for Seraphim to shut up.  And it was absolutely ineffective, showing that there were limits to the princessing powers.

And then Gabriel spoke, very quietly, and Seraphim stopped, suddenly, and looked at Gabriel as though he’d grown a second head.  “He didn’t use compulsion, Seraphim.  I know, because I did.”

There was a long silence, and the Duke of Darkwater swayed slightly on his feet.  “You what?”

“I used compulsion, Seraphim.  It was a stupid thing to do but I was very young and I knew nothing of life outside Darkwater…  Not really, not as an adult.  But I knew THAT.  How do you think I survived after my mother kicked me out and our father found us?”

“You…”

“I found gentlemen of certain tastes were willing to pay for a comely half-elf child.  Yes, I know what is wrong with them.  Yes, I agree with you that those gentlemen deserve death – or at least …  No one should have to do that when they’re only a child and can’t understand any of it.  On the other hand, without it, I’d have died of starvation.  Crossing sweeping doesn’t pay that much.”

“But–” Seraphim dropped back onto the chair by the table, next to Nell’s.  “But… you never told me.”

“You were younger than I.  And besides, there are things one doesn’t talk about.  I was… just glad to be at Darkwater, and to have enough food, and not to have to… not to have to do that.”

“Oh.  Did father–”

“Of course.  When he found me he knew.  It was rumors that led him to me, and he knew how I’d been living.  He was shocked and… it overcame his reluctance to bring his half-elf child into the house.”

“Did he tell you not to speak of it?”

“No.  He…  He let me speak of it to him, for a while.  I had to.  You don’t understand, I think.  If it’s possible to have scars on one’s mind or perhaps one’s soul–” He shrugged.  “I had to talk to someone, but it was hard to.  It was easier to Father, because he already knew.  I think that’s when I came to love him as a father.  Before that, he was just…  A vague figure.  And of course my mother said horrible things of him.”

“But after that…”  Seraphim looked from Gabriel to Elfborn.  “How could you–”  

“For a long time, I thought I’d never want to do that – with anyone.  When I got old enough that the scullery maid tried to show–” He coughed.  “That is, when girls our age started showing an interest, despite my elf blood, I thought I’d been too wounded to ever feel that for anyone.  I didn’t even really like to be touched.  I tolerated it from you and Father, but I didn’t like it.  But then…” He cast a look from beneath lowered lashes towards Marlon Elfborne.  “We became friends.  Both of us had elf blood, and…”  He shrugged again.  “We had a similar sense of humor.  And around him I didn’t feel like he was cringing, afraid of what my magic might do at any minute.  I–” The blush came again, dark red, and Nell wondered if the duke also blushed like that.  She must find an occasion to test it.  “I fell in love.  But he was…  He didn’t seem to care.  So… I used a compulsion.”

“It wasn’t that,” Marlon said.  “It was just… Haiden was the one person I could trust.  After he died…”  He shrugged.  “And since I didn’t have the courage to destroy his corpse, I felt like I was too tainted to–” He paused as though something registered.  “You used compulsion?”

“Only the first time,” Gabriel put his hands up.  “Only the first time, I swear.”

“You DO know that’s legal rape, right?” Elfborn’s eyes danced with amusement.  “Three capital crimes.  Only one is yours, princeling.”

“He was underage!” Seraphim said, in the sulky tone of someone who has a feeling he’s losing an argument.

“Right,” Nell said.  “Now that this is out in the open, and that the duke of Darkwater doesn’t have to protect my ears from sullying–”

“You’re very jaded, Madame,” he said, disapprovingly.

“Rather,” she answered drily.  “But let me ask the important question – who came to your door?  And why did they want to find me?  You said people from fairyland?”

“The centaurs,” Elfborn said.  “And they wanted to bring you back to Avalon.  I didn’t see any harm in that.”

Any of you who has written anything they own outright — whether educational, travel, series of blog posts, epigrams, poems (You’ll see mine when you pry them from my cold dead hands) novels, short stories or end-time-prophecies — and who wishes to try his/her/its/dragon’s luck at self-publishing on Amazon (from my experience, HONESTLY what sells will shock you.  As will what doesn’t sell) but is sitting there going “But it’s a complex process.  I have no idea how…”  Amanda Green who often comments here and who is my co-blogger at Mad Genius as well as a member of my critique group, is doing a workshop.  She has done this for two years for Naked Reader Press for which I am now — poor them — art director.

I asked her to send me the info and she did.

Publishing is changing. We all know it. We’ve seen how traditional publishers have struggled, and are still struggling, to adapt to changes in technology and customer demand. Every aspect of the industry has been impacted. But those who have been impacted the most are writers. The question each of us face is whether we view these changes as a door closing on our careers or one opening. In my opinion, it is a door being thrown wide open and, for the first time ever, giving writers the chance to take full control of their careers. This workshop will deal with a number of the issues facing writers as they determine whether or not to take advantage of new opportunities to digitally publish their work.

Here is a brief overview of what we will be discussing during the workshop:

    Some business and legal considerations.
    Software.
    Digital formats.
    Preparing to digitize
    Editing, copy-editing and proofreading
    General formatting considerations
    Distribution possibilities
    Repackager v. doing it yourself
    Where can you do it yourself
    Pros and cons of each
    Specific manuscript formatting issues based on upload method (Smashwords, Lulu, Amazon, B&N, etc)
    Conversion
    ISBN, copyright, etc
    Covers
    Where to find artwork for cheap/free
    Text considerations
    Other considerations
    Pricing
    Price points
    Price control
    Promotional pricing
    Misc. topics including promotion, print on demand, etc.

The workshop is free, although donations are welcomed.

I’m taking it also, since the method I use I learned at Oregon Writers and though it works well, it can drive me bananas with some things — like Smashwords — and glitch majorly on longer works.  Amanda uses different methods/software and I figure if I know both I can pick and choose.

If you have Amanda’s email contact her and she’ll add you.  If not, leave your interest here, and make sure the email is active on your avatar, or leave an email you don’t mind leaving, in occluded format, and she’ll ping you.

Oh, and those of you who are waiting for Witchfinder, I’m working on it right now.  It’s … an ODD chapter.

Okay, cakes made and delivered.  If I can figure out what the kid did with the camera there will be pictures appended.  We got cake1 there without a problem, but because it was so tall I wasn’t sure we could, so I made a back up emergency cake.  (Because I’m insane.  Move along.)  The girls awed and said how cute it was, so… I guess it was worth spending a day on this and making my kitchen worthy of superfund cleanup.  (Which shall happen tomorrow morning.)

Frosting incidents — 2.  Showers — 3.  I think it’s a record, even for summer in Ohio.

The Gauntlet — I don’t think Ms. Ogle is going to take it, partly because, well, let’s face it — if she gets the kind of advances that fund one’s research for five years, I’m dust beneath her carriage wheels.  Eh.  Shrug.  Ain’t enlightened self-interest a b*tch?  When it’s OTHER PEOPLE’s of course. 

Soooooooo…………  I don’t know any other Defender of The Establishment ™ who wants to play, do you?  I guess I’m stuck running my mouth on my own again/still.  BUT… any questions y’all have?  Even if I’ve answered them before, it’s been a good two years.  (Yes, this is called Sarah is lazy and out of blog posts.  Give me some ideas.)  I’ve noted foreshadowing down and of course tomorrow is Witchfinder.  But I’m open to questions.

If you look in the comments to the post below, you’ll note that Maureen Ogle has commented.  Honestly, honestly guys – seriously – I don’t have it in for Ms. Ogle, even if her point of view is somewhat insular.

After what ALL OF US here and Mad Genius Club and at Passive Voice and at Kris Writes and at Dean Wesley Smith’s site have done for the last … three? years, she would like me to write something for the Atlantic, explaining what we do as fiction writers, and how new publishing affects us.

Yes, the suggestion annoyed me, MOSTLY because I have a congenital stiffness of the spine, and telling me that after ten years and twenty one novels (I admit to) I should go hat in hand and be a newby in another field JUST to please someone else gives me heartburn.  Particularly when I’ve explained ALL THAT’S RELEVANT in other venues.

However, let’s stipulate something: when I say that I WILL NOT spend my time trying to break into something with the Atlantic’s circulation, when I can, without effort, put blogs up at similar circulation, it’s not the money or the small readership I object to.  It’s the “breaking in” part.  When I do my blog tours, I do “no blog too small” meaning I blog for twenty people, some days.  BUT here’s the thing – the bloggers take what I give them, I don’t have to sign contracts.  I don’t have to bother with multiple rewrites.  It’s less time.  Besides… things on line have a way of propagating.

So, while I was taking a shower (we will not talk of the frosting incident.  No.  We WON’T.) I thought of a counter challenge.

Because I don’t have it in for Ms. Ogle, and because she probably represents my polar opposite in many ways, and because we can both use the publicity and things on line have a way of propagating…

I suggest we both sacrifice some time, for the chance of some publicity wider than we would otherwise get AND for the rather altruistic (eep) possibility of enlightening others.

I am throwing down the gauntlet for the Hoyt-Ogle dialogues.  (Or Ogle-Hoyt, though that seems like a weird command and I’m not even wearing lace stockings.)

Here are my proposed rules, though I’ll accept tweaking:

1- We start with our history in publishing – how we broke in, what contacts we had, how things went.  One post.

2 – We take questions from our respective, collective and individual readers about what we do, what it pays, and what we see happening around us in publishing AND how it affects us AND where it’s all going. (We will pick questions by the method of “if one of us wants to answer it, the other will.  We will take NO questions that insult one or both of us, of course.”

3- We will keep it civil and each one talk about what she sees and her experience, rather than engage in arguments (though “in my case” is allowed.)  And while I’m just a midlist writer, I shall bring in stunt brains by quoting for instance Kris Rusch and J.A. Konrath where applicable.        

4 – I can get it – probably – linked at very large sites, with a lot of readership (PJMedia Lifestyle comes to mind).  I’ll have to check, but I don’t see why not.  Some of them I have keys to.  You are free to do likewise.  I will however echo each of our “twin” posts in my blog, and you’re free to do so in yours.

If we do this right, we’ll both bring our worlds into collision and perhaps get some publicity.  More importantly, perhaps we’ll each understand each other’s point of view better.

Interested?

I’ll leave the gauntlet lying there.  I shall go frost (ARGH) a cake.

Today is one of those very weird days.  I woke up with the vague idea I’d do a post on foreshadowing, which seemed appropriate since today I’m building a robot out of cake, which is probably not something any of you would anticipate as one of my activities for any given day.  Not something I’d anticipate, either, for that matter.  Though I can bake, since we’ve been on low carb for… eternity give or take an eon, very little of it has happened.  And I was always more of the “make it tasty” school of culinary excellence.

So? — So.  It’s the final party for the robotics kids, and they’re SUCH good kids, and the parents are bringing stuff in for them, and I lost my mind.  THREE TIMES.  First, I volunteered to bring a cake.  Second, I decided not to order it (our favorite bakery has gone out, I don’t know the others, and if I’m paying it best be VERY good.  And third when I decided this would be a tri-d robot.  IF I can assemble it without all of it falling apart, I shall post pictures.

Anyway, I was going to do a post about foreshadowing, except my mind is full of devil’s food (as opposed to being the devil’s playground!) and frosting, so I was very glad to find that my friend Kate Paulk at Mad Genius Club did a post that SHOULD be echoed.

Kate’s post is important because it captures HOW NEW this all is.  Metaphorically speaking, this is not the seventh day and the Earth shiny and new and not quite dried in places.  No — hard as this is to believe with how many pioneers there are who’ve been doing the indie thing for years — this is the third day.  We just got plants, we’re not sure what the animals will be or if there will be animals, and those lights in the sky might be stars or oncoming meteors.  Half of our posts are to figure out what in heck is going on FOR OURSELVES.  I’m not sure readers get that.  And I’m fairly sure that the writers who are like a c-section trying to crawl back into their mother’s womb DON’T get that.  They think we’re “gloating” or “dancing” or being “ingrate” to the publishing establishment.  (But that’s a bad thought, and I have a robot to build.  You guys who read Asterix, Asterix and the Cauldron to be exact, should recognize the allusion: FUNDAMENTALLY I have a robot cake to build.)

Without further ado, I give you Kate Paulk, aka da Mad Aussie, aka, the Winch Wench.  (And if you haven’t read ConVent, you should.)

Talking to the other side

by Kate Paulk

And no, I don’t mean dead people. I mean non-writers and writers whose usual fields aren’t the ones we frequent.

Why? Well, between the furor that seems to have finally died over Sarah’s analysis (and anger) over a non-fiction author’s assumption that fiction is easy – just making things up (and therefore more amenable to self-publishing and not getting destroyed by changing times), and the non-fiction author’s response (and challenge) I realized that yeah, we do tend to get wound up in our own universe and frame of reference and forget that there are other people out there with other points of view.

For those who choose to read the comments, especially on Sarah’s blog (things got rather… ahem… animated – I had fun playing with the guy who was either criminally dense or deliberately obfuscating, and may have crossed a few lines there, but that’s me for you. I like playing whackatroll, and seeing how much it takes before the brains splatter everywhere or they start flapping and frothing and contradicting themselves… What? I never said I was nice). Um. Anyway, I realized that between the Mad Genius Club and Sarah’s blog, there’s been quite the evolution of views and development of a new paradigm.

So here’s where I see it. Apologies if this is way too obvious for anyone: I’m trying to look at where we are here from the perspective of someone outside.

Essential vocabulary:

• Heinleining: fitting the salient details seamlessly into the narrative and action, without overloading the reader with details
• Good research: in the fiction world, especially genre, this is research that’s mostly or entirely invisible but makes the whole piece feel solid and ‘real’. Even if it’s about cyborg zombies.
• Time: a mysterious entity no author has enough of.
• Money: see ‘Time’.

Where we stand: in the middle of an ever-widening chasm, trying to keep enough appendages (virtual or otherwise) attached to something so we don’t plummet to our metaphorical deaths-as-writers in the gaping pit that used to be traditional publishing. Traditional publishing is the corpse kind of sort of straddling the gap. I know it’s still twitching: ignore that. Some kind of parasitic outgrowth could still find roots in there and produce something, but for all bar the uber-bestsellers and the industry daaaaahlings (they’re the ones who got gifted with the numbers that should have been credited to the midlisters – visit The Business Rusch for details – that thing is deader than dead, the serious kind of dead that doesn’t get up and start lurching around. There may be a bridge somewhere off in the distance but most of us are right here near that corpse, since it used to be what fed/kept/chained us. Us in this case not including me personally. I’m generalizing here, okay?

Where we’re going: sod if we know, but we’re trying anything that looks good in case it works. Most of us figure that the more different tactics we can get into the mix, the more likely we’ll find one that lets us survive as writers, and maybe even thrive. We’re all banking on the long tail concept – our potential audience is now everyone in the world who can read English (say about a billion people), so we can do well with a really tiny proportion of those people as fans – and cumulative volume – twenty books or more at $5 apiece, which nets an independent $3.50 a sale from Amazon (I’ll use them as the example), each selling 100 copies a month is $350 x 20 – $7000 a month. And since the independent is the one controlling what’s there, those books never go out of print. The first one starts earning a few sales a month when it’s put up, and it’s still earning five years later when the author’s entire trunk list has gone up and there’s now a good, solid income stream. Length doesn’t matter – independents can put up short pieces (short stories, or for the non-fiction minded, monographs) that take a lot less time to write, and have a fat-looking list, all of it selling for not too much, but continuing to sell for as long as there’s an internet.

The catch – and there’s always a catch – is that it takes time for all of this to build. A young writer doesn’t have as much to publish as a more established writer, and none of us have enough money or time. It takes time to properly format anything for ebook reading, and money to get a cover that won’t scream “stock art” or “amateur” (Ask Amanda if you want info on her epublishing online course – she’ll let you in and give you the website. Or just scroll back through the history here until you find it.). Unless you’re one of those fortunate individuals who are good artists as well, in which case you’re going to need more time. So it’s slow. Most of us are holding two or more jobs. Some of us the “day job” is writing for traditional publishing houses, for others it’s a salaried thing. It’s still a time sink.

The key thing – and probably the only thing keeping all of us going – is that there’s hope where there wasn’t before. Within the last couple of years, self-publishing has become both possible and a viable way to enter the market as a writer. We’re not limited to the stale old “just like the last big hit, only different” that’s all mainstream’s managed for years. We’re not having our books – and careers – killed by editors who think we’re not “sexy” or “interesting” enough to justify selling. We’re not being nixed by glorified accountants who reward meeting the sales prediction even if it’s bad and penalize not meeting it when it’s good. (You outside the field, you’ve wondered why there’s so little that interests you in the bookstores now? That’s why. You’re not jaded. Fiction’s been murdered by glorified accountants who think one book is just like any other book. Sarah’s posted about that, too.)

So, give us time. Give us patience. We’re figuring this out as we go, and many of us are escaping an abusive relationship (with the publishing houses) as well, so the process is going to be a little (okay, a lot) messy. But we’ll get there in the end. We might even figure out where ‘there’ is.

I used to be able to pass.  Long ago, before I became a writer and stood out on the ledge of eccentricity doing my own things.

Pass, you say?  Pass as what?  If you’re looking at me and wondering if I’m part of a racial minority – well, both the kids tend to be identified as Latin on sight, which is odd, because I’m not (identified as such.  According to Los Federales I AM Latin), but that’s not even racial, it’s cultural.  Not that a few choice idiots won’t hold it against the boys, the same way I’ve had a few people tell me to go back to Mexico.  (Fortunately my habit of spending most of the day inside and the fact my hair went white at twenty eight and I can dye it any color I want make me rather blandly Mediterranean.  Not that my original color of mahogany-brown was particularly ethnic.  Actually it just looked dyed.)  But that’s neither here nor there.  My husband who was born in New England and, if he spends enough time in the sun, looks merely “white” has been told to go back to Russia.  (This still puzzles me.  I mean, do they think the name was originally Hoytinski?)  And I’m sure if I were a blond, blue-eyed woman named Mary Jones some idiot would discriminate against me because he hates blonds.  Which in a way is part of our discussion, and in a way it totally is not.

No, racial discrimination is more or less verboten in the States these days and though voluntary segregation (more on this later, as again, it’s germane and not) is probably worse than never, people just don’t seem to care about race or different subrace as much as they once did.  In fact, racism has become such a taboo for most normal human beings in the US (the asses you shall always have with you) that an accusation of racism has now become a weapon under which to hide repulsive habits, bizarre beliefs and oddly destructive attitudes.  “You don’t like my habit of burning babies alive because you hate my Carthagenian ancestry, you racist” would totally work in modern day America.  (More on this later, too, as it just gave me an idea for a modest proposal.)  I don’t vouch for other countries, though I will say that those where I’m privileged to mingle with common people and listen to their conversations are about twenty and sometimes fifty years behind us in removing that racist thing from their culture.  Yes, even the ones who point fingers and tell us how racist the US is (what you expected different?)  I suspect Canada and Oz and other anglophonic-colonist cultures are about where we are.  For the others there is a reason they’re not as integrated that goes to the heart of the argument.

So, first, what do I mean by passing?  How can I not pass?

I can’t quite explain it, and I can’t quite put my finger on it.  It’s just that I belong to a minority, and I have the stigmata.  Many people belief we’re a minority by choice and think we should just get over it.  No, it’s not a sexual orientation minority (would that it were that easy to explain.) though we have an unusually high number of people with same-sex attraction in our number.  Also, an unusual number of people with attraction to squids.  And people who, to put it bluntly, might decide to marry their pillow in a small ceremony, attended only by their closest friends.

It’s not an IQ thing, though we often also score exceptionally well on that – which oddly does not translate to success in life, mostly (I think) because we tend to think sideways and backwards to normal human thought patterns.  (Yes, I do know a number of Phds who work nights at convenience stores.  Why do you ask?)

We’re not all of us science fiction fans, though that’s the way to bet.  Some of us have managed to become just as geeky as the most pointy-eared Trekker by fixating on other things: mystery, regency romance featuring one-legged dwarves (you think!) or molecular cell bio.  (I still remember when the World Fantasy Convention took place in the same hotel as a convention of neuro-researchers.  They crashed all our parties.  We fit.  We were family.

You can identify us even in kindergarten.  More importantly, so can the normals.  Recently I’ve started to suspect the unusually high number of Aspergers diagnosis, particularly among kindergartners is not EXACTLY accurate.  Again, we also have a high number of Aspergers spectrum people, but we’re not ALL Aspergers spectrum.

An editor I respect – as an editor – recently had his kid diagnosed as Aspergers and I didn’t try to argue with him, but the characteristics he was giving made me think “they’re medicalizing being one of us.”  Among others it was that the other kids just instinctively didn’t like him.  (Waves hand in the air.)  That the kid couldn’t ride a bike (I managed it at eighteen.  And then I forgot it.  To this day, btw, I can’t jump rope.  NO ONE IN MY PATERNAL LINE CAN.  My mom thinks we’re all insane.  She spent hours trying to teach me.  Hours. [It was a great part of socialization for a girl in Portugal in my generation.  So was the elastic game, in which two girls held the elastic, and another jumped in the middle, touching it or not, in increasingly elaborate patterns.  If I worked VERY hard, I could do the simplest beginning patterns.]) That his handwriting is atrocious.  That his coloring between the lines is bad for his age and, oh, yeah, that he tends to give mini-lectures.

Yes, I know a lot of that fits the Aspergers spectrum.  But it’s also “us.”  So medicalizing that, while that, is the same as medicalizing homosexuality.

Of course, “we” are a harder minority to defend, because we’re not easy to define.  We know each other, mind, and tend to gravitate to each other like a buttered surface gravitates towards expensive, white silk carpet.

The closest we come to assembling in a group, though, is science fiction conventions and/or some mystery conventions.  “Does not play well with others” is a good beginning identification point, but that’s not even true if you look at us in a group of our peers.  Our families are often unusually warm and connected, in fact, partly because we’re all odd people clinging together.

Whatever it is, it doesn’t seem to be – as such – a function of the environment.  I pity those of us who are adopted and raised by normal people, though now I think about it, an unusual number of us are adopted.  The thing is we tend to breed true, and given how we navigate social relationships (like a transatlantic going through the kiddie pool. Why do you ask?) perhaps that’s not all that surprising, either.

At some point – possibly soon – some researcher will isolate a gene we all share, which makes our brains work funny and accounts for our social presentation (which works fine with others of us, I hasten to add) and the way some of our abilities (like coloring between the lines or rope-jumping) lag WAY behind normal.  Some day.  I’m not sure if that will be better or worse.  Maybe people will decide to make us protected (which is bad and good) or maybe someone will come up with a way to “cure” us. (Shudders, because despite everything, she likes being herself.)

Until then, people will accuse us of thinking too much, tell us we are weird because we want to be weird, or accuse us not trying hard enough on the simple stuff.  (Like skipping rope.)  And though we will never be able to put a name to it, we’ll continue to identify each other on sight, and, if we find enough of us, gather in vast groups and have more fun than all the normals combined.

And we’ll continue to wish we were normal.  Or rather, because we really like who we are, dirt and grit and all, we’ll continue wishing normals were us, and that we were, therefore accepted.

In a way my gay friends have it easy – if you throw things at me, I’ll never talk to you again, boys and girls.  Besides, it’s true – in that they can at least name the way in which they’re odd.  And they can tell themselves the reason they’re not accepted is religious/cultural prejudice, not an instinctive and inexplicable recoil that goes all the way before kindergarten, before you could guess there was anything “wrong” with us.  Of course, a vast number of my gay friends are “of us” too.

Anyone of us who has kids and who has seen the kid enter a class, and find out the other kids hate him in a way toddlers can’t begin to explain, and find himself excluded out of all the games and ridiculed for the oddest things, wishes the normals were more like us.  Or that they accepted us.  Or at least that we knew why they don’t.

We might be pink monkeys amid brown monkeys, but we’re a race of monkeys that is not supposed to see in color, and we can’t figure out why we’re rejected.

I was relatively fortunate too, because I could pass.  Sort of.  Half the time, my way of “passing” was to paint myself hot pink and convince the brown monkeys I should be their ruler.  No, seriously.  I couldn’t jump rope, or do the stupid elastic thing, so I simply convinced my classmates those games were boring and for babies.  Instead, I invented RPGs based on my particular obsessions, and played out full throttle: the Musketeers, Robin Hood, Cowboys and Indians and, after I discovered mystery, police and criminals.

And then when I was sixteen, I discovered dressing up, which I approached rather in the way I approach everything else.  Hence the elaborate lace silk stockings and the short skirts.  Once I hit puberty, if I dressed up, people would leave me alone because “us” don’t dress like that, period.

Nowadays I’ve gone back to not fitting too well.  Part of it is the job.  My husband works in the tech field, and yet half the people think I’m weird because I write science fiction.  They somehow also think this makes me “racy” and “risque” and I’m at a loss to explain THAT one.  No, really.

And part of it is that I have the internet.  You see, it is the terrible curse of humanity to be social animals.  Yes, as Laura put in the comments, it is a good thing too.  But here’s the problem – social is fun and of course, rubbing together is what makes us humans (and what makes humans.  What?  Oh, come on, it’s just the tiniest of dirty jokes.  Just once?  Remember I’m one of those dangerous SF writers.  RACY.)  But the downside of being social is that it also makes us tribal.  We want to belong to a group.  We want the group to belong to us.  We want to all be “alike” inside the group, though all being sufficiently different also works for us.

Most of “us” as far as I can tell, grew up being the only pink monkey in miles around.  I suspect like other accidental, non-directly-hereditary minorities (sexual or professional or…) we used to either gravitate to large cities where we could find more of us, or live out in the middle of nowhere, and pretend normal people didn’t exist.

Now?  Most of us are in touch with a vast network of us.  And no, not all of us are late night convenience store clerks or fertilizer factory fork lift operators.  Only about half of us.  The other half are usually at the top of their fields.  (Possibly driven by not-fitting-in.)  And sometimes the ones in dead end jobs are working on time-travel in their basement.  Most of them won’t succeed, of course, but if anyone can succeed, it’s one of us.

You see, even though our condition has its problems – not fitting in is HARD particularly in childhood – it has advantages, too.  We can think at right angles to other people.  We don’t think in the box.  We can’t find the box.

A lot of us are – like other minorities – enamored of totalitarian regimes.  At the back of our heads is the idea that a sufficiently powerful government can make THEM accept US.  Unfortunately totalitarian regimes try to create uniform societies, and we’re more likely to find ourselves up against the wall.  I think as far as a society that accepts us, the anglosphere and particularly the colonial societies, which are already used to discounting body shape and color, and even a little bit of odd behavior, are as good as it gets.

And the internet is a mixed blessing, because it allows our Odds children to meet the Odds children of others like us and …  I’m not going to speculate.  I think the reason that we are disliked from kindergarten is an instinctive response to signs of mutation – signs we might eventually speciate.  In other words, we hit normal people’s uncanny valley.  And maybe their instincts are right.

However speculation on HOW we would speciate, what it would mean, and if a species that much at weird with itself could survive shall be saved for a (much) later point.

Meanwhile we’re back to us not fitting in and being unable to explain to people why.  Well, we can’t form a race.  I mean, we can, but the fact that our colors range from “so pale, it looks blue in certain lights” to “my ancestors have spent the last hundred generations working on our tan” it wouldn’t fly.  We can’t call ourselves a sexual orientation, though brainophile or geekosexual have their own appeal.

Not being able to name ourselves and group together, metaphorically, for defense, is hurting us, because they SURELY can tell who WE are.

So, I suggest we form a religion.  Or, given the nature of our people, several religions, under one umbrella faith.  It has to be – of course, since a number of us are religious – one of those umbrella faiths that allows us to believe the ‘real’ religion on the side.  I.e. our faith allows us to have other faiths, has no opinion on the existence of G-d or your fate after death.

We could call ourselves Odds.  It would have denominations.  Probably impressive and made up on the spot, so that each family – heck, each of us – could come up with a specific denomination.  “I’m an Odkin Trekker, of the first Firefly diaspora.  You?  Oh.  I see, the Buffy heresy.  My parents followed that cult for a while.”

Think about it.  If we call ourselves a religion, we can even accuse people of being racist when they pick on us.  No, it’s not right, and of course, that will bother us, but it’s common usage, and it will make us seem even MORE normal.  “What do you mean I can’t have the week off to drive to Dragon con?  It’s part of my religion.  Are you some kind of racist?”

Soon enough we’ll have them on the run, and those nasty normal kiddies who refuse to play with our sons and daughters in kindergarten will have to take sensitivity training.  AND THEN they will be made to feel abnormal.

I say it’s worth a try.  Do it for the children.

Yesterday I said I did not mean to pick on the person’s fears for her job.  I meant that.  I realize that I sounded ever so slightly cranky (there are tons of reasons for the crankiness but “because I’m me” should suffice most of the time) but that was a reaction more to her tone than to her meaning.  

Oh, her meaning was stupid beyond belief and amounted to little more than a long sustained whine.  BUT that doesn’t mean SHE is stupid, or even that WHINING is stupid as such.  A long sustained whine with no rationality behind it is how humans react to hitting a wall or feeling they’re about to.  It was probably how our ancestors reacted to a tiger springing out of the undergrowth in front of them.  “Ah, ARRRRRGH!”

The difference is what comes after.  Some got sharp sticks and played the Maasai lion trick on the leaping tiger.  And some went “glurb” and died.

I’m not going to rehash it, but what ticked me off about her post was the implication that a) fiction writers have it easy, they just make up cr*p and b)self-publishers don’t even understand what books are – the ignorant newbies.  (This was not helped by her follow up post, in which she first failed to grasp that not only do I have 21 novels traditionally published – at this point I don’t really have any novel non-traditionally published, except perhaps A Touch Of Night and the reissue of Death Of A Musketeer, each a special case. – and then, once this point was brought home to her, that she considers me “tainted” by self publishing…  Even though 99% of what I have out – all but three short stories – were published in magazines an anthologies before.  And the whole idea that self publishing “taints” is probably blow by the fact that those three are my biggest cash cows every month.)  It’s entirely too bad of me to react to “tone” but as my grandmother would have said, “if you don’t have feelings, you weren’t born of humans.”

But in a way it was to bad I got sidetracked by the tone, because what I actually wanted to go into was the panic reaction, what it means, and how to counter.

Every writer I know has hit that panic reaction at one time or another in recent months.  The exceptions are, perhaps, those who haven’t realized what is happening to publishing yet.  (Oh, you’d think there are none.  Or at least none who aren’t cognitively impaired.  But there are, I guarantee.  H*ll, in honest truth, but for my agency going odd and a couple of other things, I might have been one of them.  And I’ll explain why.)  When we hit the panic, we all run around for a week or two or a month, or a year, as if our hair were on fire, screaming “the world is ending.”  And then…  And then we find paths out.  Which is what I want to talk about.

First of all, if you’re a writer, or a journalist, or one of the other professions where, looking ahead, you see the conveyor belt disappearing into a furnace – take a deep breath and realize you’re not alone.  This is being masked – somewhat – by the recession.  But, without going into politics, the recession is – IMO – a creature of unspeakable economic stupidity imposed from above.  (Partly from the hopeful and amiable belief that hobbling the US improves the lot of other people.  This is the sort of stupidity it takes years of education [and a willingness to ignore the real world] to achieve, which means … nothing.  If I ever get a time machine, I’m throttling Karl Marx in his swaddling blanket.)  That means sooner or later the idiocy from above quits (or we’ll all be more worried about whether we can get a leg of squirrel for telling a good story around the camp fire of what remains of human civilization) and when it does, if anything the pace of tech change is going to accelerate as we recover.  Part of it, of course, will be to cut out the severely dysfunctional parts of the economy without sinking more money into them.  And part of it will be because new tech HAS come on line but no one has invested in propagating it through society.  When they have money, they will, and the effect will be…  As though some evil villain just pushed the “fast” button on that furnace-headed conveyor belt.

(No, I’m not going to unpack the previous paragraph, not only because it’s unavoidably political, but also because it is, ultimately, fodder for several essays.  Just nod and say “Okay, Sarah, whatever, let’s assume what you said is true.”)

So, just trust me, that when economy recovers, we writers are going to be joined on the line of people going “argh” as the tiger springs out at them, by: in some order – journalists, teachers, photographers, artists, software engineers (trust me.  They’ve been in crisis since 2000 mostly because their skill is becoming less needed with machines that are more friendly to programing) and eventually real engineers (printable pieces will make a lot of difference.)  Worse, I can’t even imagine all the people who will be hit by the change – literally – and though I’d laugh if you said something like “chefs” or “car mechanics” I could think of a way – and not far off – that their professions AS EXERTED RIGHT NOW will be obsolete in no time.  I don’t even need to mention the two professions my kids are training for, right?  Doctor and aerospace engineer will FOR SURE change shortly after they start working.  Which feels many ways of wrong, but probably no “wronger” than where most writers find themselves.

You see most of my friends are between 30 and 50 or a little either way.  These were the ages at which you used to know what you were doing in your profession, and just take off.  Peak earning years and all that.  Oh, brother.

Part of the long sustained whine is because we writers, perhaps more than other humans – but we humans in general too – believe in stories.  We’re raised with stories.  Oh, sure, little Red Riding Hood, but also “don’t cross the street in front of a semi, or you’ll be a pancake on the pavement.”  It’s a story.  A just so story.  

All of us absorbed such stories growing up, as well as stories about uncle Hubert who worked hard and made good and uncle Eggbert (oh, him!) who went down to Rio where he lives in a compound peopled entirely by hookers and fueled solely by cocaine.

Okay, fine, my family has several uncle Eggberts, and it’s entirely possible that some boring families out there have none.  The point is that all of us absorbed, at some point, the idea of what it takes to make good at several points in life – what’s expected of us, as we were.  We are after all social monkeys, and monkey does what he sees, and, in this case, what he hears.

At my time of life – and a lot of the people panicking are somewhere between 40 and 50 – we expect our profession to be clear and the path ahead to make sense and be… well… expected.  And now, you know, instead of “rising acclaim, secure retirement” there’s the furnace.  Worse, because of the way things have gone in the most recent years – and no, not just in writing.  As tech change came in every field turned odd and sometimes evil (read Dilbert!)  – we are, most of us, nowhere near the acclaim and security we thought we’d attain.  And this might be “as good as it gets.”

Amazing thing is not that we’re indulging in long, sustained whining.  What IS amazing is that none of us has yet gone postal somewhere conspicuous.  My people must be better balanced than I thought.  (Or more confused.  Some psychology researcher should count the massacres in books recently.  We’ve always had trouble with that reality thing.)

The thing is, after the whine, for everyone so far, there is the moment of shaking yourself up and looking at the way of life that is dying.  Because in most cases it was SO dysfunctional these last ten or twenty years that constitute our entire working life, there is usually a time of looking at the field (whatever field) and seeing everything that was screwing us over and holding us down, and going “oh.” in relief.  Sometimes for those of us full of piss and vinegar there is – to quote a writer who is FAR more established than I – “If this new model works, I’m going to be very rude to a lot of people.”  And then… and then there is a time of thinking, a time of rebuilding.  And, at this point friends and I have been on THAT phase long enough that we have checked back with each other and compared notes.  I’m going to pass the notes along for those of you, writers and non writers alike, who are staring the furnace in the face.  Remember those are the notes NOW – for me about a year after the whine – and that the operative part of that catastrophic change thing is the “change.”  Things are changing all the time.  Retailers, tech, etc. change minutely almost daily.  We’re not at the end of the wave of change.  We’re barely at the first swell.  So, don’t take what I say and go, this is the plan for the next fifty years.  Go, rather “Um… good thing for a year or so, if I’m lucky.”  And note how much of it is the same you’d tell someone walking through a jungle full of hungry tigers – “be alert” – that’s what most of these translate to.

So, here’s the distilled wisdom from staring into the furnace (and by the way, the furnace, in most cases, is only a temporary fire, and it’s possible that you’ll emerge from it stronger than you went in, like steel.)

1 – You have to change.
Yes, I know, you’re settled into your routine, and one of the things I’ve learned through the last year of various physical ailments, is that ANYTHING can become routine.  You get used to doing six books a year, under pressure, upside down, in a sewer pipe.  (Okay, I’m exaggerating a little.)  And you like what it means: you’re still publishing.  You’re making money.  And you convince yourself things will get better.  But you don’t expect them to get better suddenly, and you don’t really, ever expect them to get better, worse and yes suddenly.  And you expect it will happen TO YOU not that you’ll have to make it happen.  So when you realize that the money or the publication is diminishing your first instinct is to panic, because it means you’ll have to change how you do things, and it’s going to be uncomfortable.  The bad news?  Yep, you have to change.  (The good news is that almost for sure things will get better – in the long run.)

2- It’s going to be a lot of work up front
Oh, G-d, is it a lot of work up front.  Part of this is because for a good long while, for many of us perhaps forever, you’ll have to work in both worlds.  Or you’ll have to work at what is bringing money in right then, and what will bring money in in the future, both of which will change as things change.  For me, right now, this means keeping up deadlines, helping NRP with covers AND trying to figure out how in heaven’s name to get my backlist up in a modicum of time.

3 – Take a deep breath and give yourself time
This will be different for each of you/each field.  Right now I have 25 (I think) short stories out, and I’m netting $100 a month from Amazon (other places take longer to report.)  I have about 250 in total stories I could put up, and I haven’t put any up in two months.  If you’re going “Are you crazy woman?  MONEY!  If the ratio holds – and so far it has – you could be making 1k a month.  Why aren’t you?”  Oh, G-d.  In this house we have a trinity of excuses we invoke for the “I just can’t” – it’s not logical, but it’s what we’ve heard someone use at some time – “Cheese, lasers, wife!”  Or in this case: “Health, kids, work.”  Or perhaps just a manifestation of Kris’ post about things bringing you to your knees.  Life has been VERY complicated, and emotionally I think I’m healing, as much has I’m (hopefully) healing physically.
I hate being late.  I’m compulsive.  But pushing seems to tie me up more.  So I’m taking deep breaths and going “I’m giving myself time.”  It will happen, once the kid graduates; once I know what is causing the endocrine disturbances, once a couple of other dominos fall in place, once life establishes itself again.
3a A caution – make sure you keep trying to fit the stuff into the routine.  Like, I’m trying to tell myself Saturday is publishing day.  So when normalcy comes back, that’s not squeezed out.
3b – you’ll make mistakes.  You’ll take the wrong projects indie and sell the wrong projects.  You’ll put awful covers on your stories (guaranteed); you’ll put up at least a story with ten typos (the others will have more, no matter how you hunt them.)  You’ll glorp a few formats.  You’ll forget the legal notice on a story.  You’ll make mistakes.  Don’t worry.  It’s more work, not the end of the world.  You’re only human. The goal is ALWAYS survive to fight another day.  If you’re alive, you’re learning.  Tomorrow YOU’ll be better.

4- Don’t Put ALL Your Eggs In the Same Henhouse.

Don’t put all your faith on one stream of income.  

Don’t go “traditional publishing is dying, so I’ll now make all my money from indie publishing.  CERTAINLY don’t go “I’ll now make all my money from writing epic novels about gay warriors” (What?  I’m sure there’s some people are!  I don’t have time to google it.  You’ll have to be pervie on your own time.)  

In the end doing that puts you in the same boat as if you’d stayed in traditional publishing.  Remember the thing about we’re only in the first swells of a tsunami of change?  If all you do is sell space nuns (what?) on Amazon, you’re setting yourself up to go under on the next wave.

For one at least at first, your stream of income from indie will be small – much less from one type of indie.  So you want to keep all your legs going.  Think of yourself as a multilegged mechanical, self-balancing spider (really?  I think of myself as that sort of thing ALL the time.)  In my case, say one leg is traditional.  One is indie.  One is art – and I need to put some of that up and on merchandise to sell.  From yesterday’s kerfuffle I realized another can be non-fiction.  As soon as I have time, I’ll resume the journalism one (two dying fields are better than none.)  And, who knows, as things stabilize health wise, there might even be stuffed dragons and fairy princess porcelain dolls to sell at cons.  (Maybe.  If I can find the time.)

5- Network
I come from a culture in which nepotism is viewed as a virtue.  A basic proverb is “He who has no godfather dies in jail.”  Being me, I rebelled against it.  And I still think that nepotism qua nepotism is a bad idea and makes a society sclerotic and not nimble at all.

BUT

We are social animals.  One thing I had to learn is that people reject you MUCH more easily if they’ve never met you – beyond the quality of your story.  Now it’s a little different, but networking is more important.  Networking and having a large group of friends is how you hear what is working and what isn’t, because the knowledge is so new there are no manuals yet – and no manuals that aren’t superannuated in five minutes.  Have as many friends as possible everywhere, particularly friends who are also trying to figure out the change.

6- Brainstorm
Every so often get together with your friends and brainstorm – not ideas.  Not stories.  Brainstorm how to make money.  Shoot wild ideas out.  Make crazy suggestions.  Look, until the kerfuffle yesterday, it never occurred to me I could sell my research as non-fiction BEFORE selling it as fiction/integrating it into stories.  But of course it should be possible (though the time thing might delay it.)  And I AM trying to be aware of new opportunities.  It’s just that the new model is so different we have to make tiny incremental changes.  So every so often, get your friends together, break out the alcohol (or whatever) and just talk.  “Hey, can you think of any other way to make money?  What if–”

And that’s all I know so far.  Like a traveler on the move in strange, mutable terrain, stay alert, move fast, be ready to see things in a completely different way (Sometimes a schmerp ISN’T a rabbit, even if he looks like one) and keep all your several legs on the run.

There’s gold in them there hills.  You just have to survive to get there.