According To Hoyt

 

Lately I’ve become a consumer of audio books. I’ve done this before, years ago, when I was working on getting a house ready for sale. Mind you, I’ve always read while cleaning or cooking, but it’s pretty hard to read while painting, hence the audio books.

The latest spree isn’t painting related (though it could be soon. I mean, all of this house needs painting, but I’m waiting for summer.) I’ve just taken up long walks, and audio books help.

It has also caused some strange shifts in my reading habits, as I’ve discovered that just like reading authors in Portuguese then in English isn’t the same. I don’t know if it’s extraordinary translators or simply ideas more suited to being expressed in one language than the other, but I loved some authors in Portuguese that I can’t read in English and vice-versa.

So, that’s the first:

1- not all my favorite authors translate well to audio books. Though so far I’ve found I’ve got a greater tolerance for books in audio than in reading. Some language issues that bother me in reading sound a lot more plausible in voice. I think that this is because hearing things spoken makes them somehow more real than reading them. Hearing is believing. (In this it might help to know I grew up with radio news, as opposed to TV news, so maybe I’m conditioned to consider spoken things “true” I guess.)

1a) I cannot listen to F. Paul Wilson’s Repairman Jack series, one of my absolutely favorite series, and one of the very few I buy in hardcover. Mind you, I can’t listen to horror, either, but I don’t read horror. Repairman Jack is a thriller with horrific elements. I can read it fine. In fact, when it comes out I usually read it in the evening/night. So why can’t I listen to it? I dream about it. In detail. Graphically.

There is a second find:

2 – I’m more likely to get subtexts in a book listening to it read.

Well, either that or I simply don’t function well while reading and washing dishes, and making sure the book doesn’t fall in the water. But Terry Pratchett, for instance, is infinitely “richer” in audio books.

Third:

3- I’m more likely to catch the voice of the book while listening to it audio. I mean, I’m more likely to start speaking and writing like that book. This means I CANNOT listen to Georgette Heyer while writing space opera. Otherwise, my space people will be going “Handsomely over the bricks, my dear. What can you possibly signify?” OTOH once I caught this mechanism, it makes it easier to stay on voice. I listen to the book with the closest “feel” to what I’m trying to write.

But the fourth and most awesome discovery is that I feel MUCH closer to the writer’s personality when I listen to books than when I read them. I can feel the person, there as it were. And the realization suddenly hits me:

4- I’m listening to the author tell a story. When these are the voices of a dead author – like Heinlein – or even an author who was much younger when he wrote something – like Pratchett’s early work – it feels like the narrator captured a moment in time and brought it to me, still alive an pulsing.

To my mind that’s a form of magic.

So, what are your experiences with audio books? (I don’t ask about movies, because we all know what they do.) Any fun anecdotes? (Oh, yeah, like the time the kids came in and I was – years ago. Got books from library, so had to go with what they had – painting and listening to a Nora Robert’s ahem scene. To this day they talk about me listening to porn.) HOW do you feel about audio books? Are they – to you – a legitimate translation of the story? Or do they feel somehow wrong, and like a completely different thing? And is it just me who reacts differently to the same book, read versus narrated?

*crossposted at Mad Genius Club*

When I was a very young author, knee high to a short story, I read something in a magazine that gave me a new perspective on the profession. I don’t even remember which magazine or who wrote it, whether an editor, a writer or what. But I do remember the sense of what I read.

It went something like this: We all yearn for recognition for our art. We long to be told we’ve done well when we think we’ve conquered a new challenge, surmounted a new peak of craft, we want that applause, that clap on the back, that “well done, you.”

Rid yourself of that hope now. It will hurt less. Most of the time the writing life resembles nothing so much as a series of kick in the teeth.

I read that and I believed it, and readied myself and put on my mouth guard. Which is a good thing, because for the last fifteen years, it’s got kicked a lot.

If you stay in this job, if you continue improving, it is despite and perhaps sometimes because of those kicks in the teeth – more than the crowd behind you, cheering. You pour out your heart and soul onto the paper, you study new techniques, and if you’re lucky you get back a standard rejection. If you’re not lucky you get back a rejection slip someone spent hours crafting in order to pick just the right wounding phrase. (You think I’m joking. One of these that I got ran to four pages and included the sentence “flipping voices like a cook flipping flap jacks at a greasy spoon.” Which a) is not a phrase that comes naturally to anyone and b) since the book had nothing to do with diners and wasn’t set in the present, was a bit of a stretch.) And after you’re published, the kicks don’t stop. People speculate on your motives when you created your characters, they make broad leaps of reasoning to attribute odd vices to you and – more importantly – if you succeed in hiding all your hard work and make your product smooth and clean, they dismiss you as a ‘light’ read and assume it’s easy to write like that.

Does it get easier to put up with that? No. But you do get used to it. Or you develop ways to cope with it. (Lately I’ve had to change mine, as ice-cream is off my diet.)

The people who only want praise stay forever in their local writers’ groups, or only showing the work to their family and friends. They don’t experience this kind of pain. They can continue telling themselves that they are unsung geniuses. But they’ll never be read by most people.

The rest of us, the ones who want to grow and improve, and most of all, the ones who want to be read by the wider world where try as you might, you can’t avoid some people hating your work, forge on.

But it is not – it is never, unless you grow very old at a position of semi-prominence – a walk in the park. It is not chilled champagne and canapes.

Still sometimes – very rarely – like the sun breaking through clouds, you do get a pat on the back. This happened to me yesterday when I got notification I was a finalist for the Prometheus Award.

It happens to be one of those awards that I dreamed about when I was knee high to a short story.

Of course I’d love to win – though I don’t expect it, considering the competition – but hokey though it sounds, it is an honor just to be nominated.

And now I’ll go sit in that little ray of sunshine and finish Darkship Renegades, shall I?

Part of my issue when discussing writing or trying to teach people who are just breaking in is explaining to them things change when writing is your job.

At the conference last weekend, for instance, I ran into someone who said if she wasn’t passionate enough about the current book to stay on track, she just abandoned it, and that was okay with her.

Maybe it is. Though how passionate you are about your work, never seems to be a measure of how good it is. There are at least four books where I had my arm twisted into writing them which are, by the numbers, some of my more successful work. (One of them is the only one that paid four-figures of royalties.) It’s more that at the intersection of your writing and your emotional state, that stopped being what you want ot concentrate on.

However, for me, the most daunting issue is all the other stuff I have to do. I rarely go cold on a book – and not on the current ones, for sure, since they WANT to be written – but after the storm, I feel guilty I’m not doing clean up. And then there’s other stuff, like laundry. (There’s always laundry, of course, but let’s say one of the cats got nervous at the wind. On Robert’s bed.) And our yard needs to be rearranged and replanted.

So… how does any writing get done?

Well, I have to get myself (back into) the frame of mind where writing is work. If I had an outside the house job, I couldn’t stay home and not work because of the laundry and the yard. So I can’t stop working for those now.

Weirdly, it’s harder to get myself in the “this is a job” frame of mind because I AM enjoying the current novels. It’s sort of like being paid to hang out on the beach sipping martinis.

But, hey, it’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it. I er… suffer so you don’t have to. And you get to enjoy the fruits of my er… suffering.

Is Denver now waterfront property?  If not, does anyone care to explain the 80 to 90 mph winds around the house, shaking the two upper floors for about three hours in the middle of last night?  No?  No, I can’t either.

What I know is that I’ve lived through cyclones and hurricanes and this was one of the scariest wind events TM I lived thorugh — comparing pretty well to Hurricane Hugo in North Carolina.

Given that, we came through with incredible luck.  As far as we can tell no roof damage and no windows broken.  Branches fell off our trees but none of them on the three cars we had parked outside, or even on the neighbor’s car parked under our tree.  The total damage is a glass “screen” door beaten to pieces, (pieces removed from frame, glass to be replaced as soon as I can make it to store) a small-tree-sized-branch dropped from a tree (inches from neighbor’s car) and a four foot section of our fence.

Branch is cut, bits disposed of, driveway swept clean.  Fence and door to be repaired this week.

And now I’m going to go shower and try to write, feeling the luckiest woman alive.

Most of us who work by the word know there is a world inside your head and a world outside your head.

Other people might not be aware of this. I don’t know. In case they’re not aware, let me explain: You carry an image of the world inside your head. It might be pretty close to the real world, or it might be wildly different. It is never exactly the same.

The world inside your head is shaped not just by your individual experiences, but by everything you read or saw on tv. Humans are creatures of story. The world outside our eyes is often chaotic and meaningless, but inside our head we assign cause and effect that are – or at least try to be – coherent and causal. When we lose the plot, it’s called schizophrenia or various other kinds of mental illness.

But because the plot threads we pick are influenced by who we are, they’re never exactly the same as others. Needless to say those with inner worlds more closely related to the outer world do better in life, so there would seem to be evolutionary pressure that way.

A lot of what politicians and polemicists do is “sell a plot.”

This works for authors too, but first the author needs to find the outer world. Okay, it’s not every author. I’ve met a remarkable number, even in science fiction and fantasy who have very normal, not to say conventional world views. What doesn’t come directly from their eyes comes from mass media, almost unaltered.

It might surprise people to know that these people do better commercially. They might have tons of fallacies in their work (Dan Brown!) but their fallacies accord with the mass-media-culture and either echo it or extend it in a way most people are sure is plausible.

If I hear one more person say how creative J. K. Rowling is and how strange her idea for a magic school is, I’m going to do something everyone will regret. Harry Potter is an amalgam of ideas and stories that have been out for decades. No, not plagiarism. But school for magic is a cliche in my world. And of course her “setting” and even her plotting was just a new spin on Enid Blyton’s boarding school adventures.

Am I disparaging her? Oh, heck no. The books are enjoyable and at least the first three very well written. She totally deserved her success. But wildly creative she’s not.

The wildly creative ones tend to have odd ball thoughts and beliefs that might be accurate but aren’t perceived as such by the population at large.

I’m talking here of people I mentor. Those who are most creative and most out there, often have no clue how to communicate with the people on the other side of their eyes.

And what you believe and think about a lot influences what interests you enough to write about it. Imagine two intersecting circles. A wanna-be writers inner circle of what he likes to write about might be cabbage growing, sex with penguins, and spaceships. Surely you see the only place this intersects the “normal reader” mind is cabbage growing… er… I mean spaceships.

Often there is no intersection. When I edited a small press magazine, i.e. when I was young and stupid, I often got exquisitely written stories about stuff even the author’s mom couldn’t care about. Worse, often this stuff was so bizarre as to make me want brain bleach.

Techniques for writing can be taught. Changing your mind so you can communicate to the public at large, otoh, is far more difficult. And it’s something a mentor can at best nudge not do.

Some people are so fractured it would take a mental health specialist to manage it.

OTOH there are authors who managed it beautifully. Read For Us The Living and then The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and you’ll see the process I’m talking about.

Myself, I’ve been working on it, though being myself it’s backward and sideways. It’s more like I have to give myself permission to write about what I really want to write. I only managed it in the last three books. (Daring Finds, to an extent. Think of it as my sillier self and Darkship Thieves.)

But since writing is communication, this is as important as the “right word.”

Yeah, I know.  I know you won’t believe me.  But … I just don’t have any more ideas to write.  I sit here and think and think and nothing new occurs to me.  I’ve sent untold self addressed stamped envelopes to Hayes Kansas and they all come back with blank pages inside.  And since I only write Men’s Adventure and YA (but not together) it’s very hard to come up with ideas.

Also, sad to say, but my career as a cat herder pays way better.  I heard that my friend Dave Freer is moving to NYC. In that spirit I’m leaving Dan, sending the kids to the  Wee Tykes orphanage and moving to the wilderness.  I’m thinking outer Mongolia (depends on where I can find a marxist free love lesbian commune that will take me, of course) where I’ll rough it by living in a yurt and subsisting on boiled grass.

I am off to herd cats (or at least heard cats.  Hard not to hear them when they’re rampaging through the house breaking things.)

One of the things that annoys the living daylights out of me are reviewers or even elder writers who think that humor is somehow a lesser form of the fiction writing art. They act as if any fool can write humor.

To an extent they are of course right. Any fool can write humor just like any fool can write tragedy. The thing comes down ultimately not to whether you can write something. Assuming you know how to form letters, have a crayon and some smoothed-out wrapping paper and can stop from drooling on your handy work, you can write anything you very well please. The question is, can one write it a way anyone else will enjoy it? And there, I submit, humor has a lower rate of success than practically any other mode of fiction writing.

I think that – or at least the fact I believe that – is why I came to humor late. In fact, years ago when Mike Resnick invited me to one of the This Is My Funniest collections, my choice was between mildly amusing and very silly, as I had exactly two published short stories that were sort of funny. (Elvis Died For Your Sins was eventually chosen.) I still don’t do much humor in short stories, or at least I haven’t so far. Of course, the Daring Finds mysteries are funny, and almost all my novels have humor in them – dosage varying.

If you’re a beginner go for horror – particularly graphic horror. Why? Because it’s easy. When I’m very tired, that’s where I go. And look, I don’t even read the stuff. I just write it. This is because, in the exact same way a novel is more forgiving than a short story, a horror story is always more forgiving than humor. If the mood gets a little wobbly, you just throw in another awful event, lovingly and detailedly described, and voila, you’re back on track. While in humor if the mood gets off track, you might have trouble getting a smile off your next funny bit – and you might shock the reader by trying to get it.

Also, every novel calls for serious stuff. The lightest and fluffiest of novelistic vol au vents requires some suspense, some anxiety, some struggle. How do you work that in with humor. (Carefully, that’s how!) Get the wrong mix in there and you either have a formless giggle-fest or you lost the funny in the serious.

Worse,  do humor the wrong way and you come across as a smug twit making in jokes that your readers don’t get.

I didn’t realize this until I was trapped (long story) in the reading of a self published author years ago. She was reading what she clearly thought was a very funny passage, and giggling to herself all the time. I honestly don’t know which was more infuriating: the fact that we didn’t know any of these characters so their lines were at best “meh” or that she would stop and explain “you see, that’s funny because she’s his wife.” I think one thing we can all agree on is that if you have to explain a joke, you already lost.

Mind you, I’m well aware that the author was reading from something like chapter 24 and it was the second book of a series. By the time you got there, it’s entirely possibly you’d find this sequence hilarious. Maybe. But the fact that the writer didn’t seem to realize it wouldn’t be funny out of context gave me pause. And it made me realize how difficult humor truly is. Fail to “plant the seeds”, to foreshadow the humor, and what you have are two guys talking to each other about something you don’t understand, and laughing. After a while – though you know it’s silly – you start feeling the joke is on you. That the writer is DELIBERATELY keeping you out of it. And before you know it, you’re mad at the writer and at the book.

I can’t teach you to write humor. You can learn, but it will take some study. Before I could write it, I could make people crack up at parties and dinner, and when I finally started writing it, I used some of the same techniques. I will now share some of these, and hopefully you’ll be able to analyze say Pratchett (who does humor tons better than I do) and figure it out the rest of the way.

So… a few rules.

1- Make either your premiss hilarious and your narration deadpan, or your premiss absolutely straightforward, but the narration or the way the character approaches the problem, totally zany. If you try to do both of them “funny” it won’t improve the effect. On the contrary, it will dilute it. If you write both of them seriously… well…

2 – Make sure the joke is not aimed at anyone. Jokes are like weapons. Even if you know the person doesn’t mean to kill you, you feel vaguely discomfitted as it sways your way. So, try to have your character either make fun of him/herself or have the joke be on the main character. (This is totally a personal preference, but I hate the humiliation humor that Hollywood engages in so often, you know, someone is tricked or cajoled into some premiss that will eventually embarrass him mortally when the big reveal comes. As the premiss piles deception on deception and the character makes more of a fool of himself, I start cringing. So, it is not what I mean by this. More that your character doesn’t take himself/herself TOO seriously. Take Dyce’s continuous assurance that organic food can kill you because it doesn’t have enough preservatives. Of course she knows better, as does the audience. But she’s broke, can’t afford organic, and, let’s face it, much of it tastes like cardboard. So she’s making fun of her situation and the fact she is not able to convince herself to eat the stuff. The same with her pretending the phone conspires against her. She’s mildly exasperated by the fact that she can never find the phone, so she pretends it’s sentient.)

3- Don’t have your characters laugh. This is the corollary of “don’t let your characters cry.” If you build up the emotional pressure and don’t let your characters cry, then the reader does, because someone has to. In the same way, if you build up the insanity and your characters don’t laugh, the reader has to. At the same time, if your characters laugh all the time and the jokes misfire… well… do you remember old sitcoms with laugh tracks? Remember when the jokes were utterly lame, but you still heard people laugh? Remember wanting to punch the tv? (Okay, maybe that was only me. But it still annoyed most people.)

4 – Build on it. Or in other words, foreshadow, foreshadow, foreshadow. I often plant a “thread” of humor in a short story. For instance, in the beginning of A Fatal Stain, it’s like every one can read Dyce’s thoughts. That’s not true, of course, but she starts thinking it, and then every time someone guesses what she was thinking (and which is usually pretty outlandish) it builds on the joke and it gets funnier and funnier. Pratchett is the master of this. For homework, read one of his books – which one doesn’t signify – and analyze every time a funny “thread” pops up and how it was built.

5- Try a little tenderness. Look, this humor thing has changed over the centuries. Dumas could have Porthos be dumb and encouraged his readers to feel superior to and laugh at him. These days, when reading is a more… selective amusement, people don’t want to read about dumb characters and there’s something icky about making fun of a man’s natural limitations. But if instead you make him have issues with words, though very smart in other ways, you can have fun showing his complex thoughts getting short-circuited on the way to the mouth. My best friend as a kid was SEVERELY dyslexic, as opposed to mildly dyslexic as I am, and I watched this process many times. You feel sorry for the person, but it’s still somewhat funny, because you know what they’re thinking and what comes out and how people will react to what comes out.  I don’t often use dyslexic characters, but I do use characters who are flustered, embarrassed or in love. So… try a little tenderness. Show the human side of your funny character. Nobby is Pratchett’s funniest – and most repulsive – character, but he’s not wholly despicable. Yeah, he’s a petty thief, etc, but when the chips are down, he comes through and helps save others. Also, as we learn of his background, we see how he got to be as he is and we feel sympathy towards him. The point is, if we’re going to laugh with someone, it’s easier if we like him.

6- Above all, don’t take yourself too seriously. No matter how funny you get, Pratchett will be funnier. (Kind of like in space opera, no matter how good you get, Heinlein did it better. Also, earlier.  At least for the type of space opera I aspire to doing.) So, figure out the mechanics and enjoy the ride. And then everyone will have fun.

So, you’re out there and you’re frowning at my blog – yeah, I can see you. You didn’t know that monitor was two way and powered with narrativium? – and going “okay, Sarah, what’s with all the different series and different names? I know that notorious criminals and people with multiple personality disorder use different names, but why you? And what’s with all the series? And, by the way, when are you going to update your website, so I don’t have to stumble around in the dark looking for your series in order?”

I’ll start with the last question first: renovations are ongoing. Only I’ve come to the conclusion I need a complete redesign. So, I’m building another site, from scratch, in the “invisible pages” of the site, and keeping it there until I can bring it all on line with a bang. Also, hopefully with a forum, which hopefully will have chat but no bangs, unless it’s New Years or something.

Now the series. Well… I didn’t set out to write multiple series. Heck, I didn’t set out to write multiple genres. I started out to write science fiction. To be exact, I was going to write space opera and maybe some historical, high brow, incredibly involuted fantasy. People were going to swoon at my brilliance for the fantasy and push cash at me for the space opera. I was going to have someone to do the cleaning and laundry for me and I could spend all my free time with the kids and Dan. And we’d have time and money to travel. Oh, yeah, and for purely morale purposes, I would have a cute male secretary who made a killer cup of tea. (Yes, I DO love my husband dearly, but I’m allowed eye candy.)

As you can probably guess… things went weird. First of all, I still don’t have household help. Or a cute male secretary. It also took me decades to publish. And on the way there I wrote eight books, two of which are now published in rewritten versions, and one of which I now know how to rewrite (it’s actually a trilogy). It is patiently waiting its turn. The other five are just in a world that’s not workable.

Anyway, in those thirteen or so years I was writing mostly for myself, I had to keep myself amused. So the Space Opera morphed into odd fantasy. And the odd fantasy begat other odd fantasy. And then I wrote historical and mystery and… I actually have a YA space opera with telepathic cats outlined somewhere.

And then I sold. And then when that series didn’t do so well, I sold the Musketeers. And then there was the historical. And, oh, yeah, the shifter’s fantasy. And then a proposal for an historic fantasy series sent out years before, sold. And then another mystery. And then I got attacked by a vampire series on the way from my art class.

If this sounds chaotic to you, it is. Yeah part of it is “market driven” to the extent that I tend to finish series that sell. But the other part is internal. You see, I trained myself to have ideas, and now I can’t stop having them. (Yes, it totally is a matter of training. I’ll write about it tomorrow, probably.) I’m now at the point that I believe – as Leonardo de Quirm, Terry Pratchett’s character – that the ideas rain from the sky all the time. I have tried to fashion a tinfoil hat to keep them out, but my agent says it will overheat my brain, and besides she likes it that I have ideas. (She’s a cruel woman. Love her to pieces, but.. Really. She’s leaving me at the mercy of the ideas!)

As for why the multiple names – no, I’m not embarrassed by what I write. I do however have two types of names: open and closed. Two closed, so far, (one published, one yet unpublished.) for good and sufficient reason either on my part or that of the publishers. Mostly marketing reasons. No, I’m not embarrassed. Nor am I doing anything immoral or illegal. It’s just that sometimes it’s easier to market things that way.

In the open, I have four currently, and frankly if I had started out today, they would have a slightly different distribution. Why? Because I think on the net, it is very important to brand your name. More important than it used to be when it was all paperbooks. Why do I think that? Well… because the covers might be harder to see or read for genre signs. I have plenty of readers of mystery who would be upset if they bought an SF by accident, and readers of SF who will not read historical and… So, I’m trying to establish branding. BUT because of the timing of my realization, some series are already started/done under a name that would not be different. That’s life.

As for a list, here they are in order:

Sarah A. Hoyt

The Magical Shakespeare Biography (somewhat literary fantasy, with tons of Shakespeare quotes and allusions, it reimagines the early life of the bard and his experiences with the elves of nearby Arden woods.)

Ill Met By Moonlight; All Night Awake; Any Man So Daring

Status: out of print. No authorized e-versions. I’m working on getting those out.

Sarah A. Hoyt

Shifters Series (Urban Fantasy Sarah Style. ALMOST science fiction. Shape shifters, but no vampires, no general magic even if some stuff is a bit mystical, not too much dark stuff. Mysteries and diners, though. Set in Goldport, Colorado.)

Draw One In The Dark; Gentleman Takes A Chance; Upcoming: Noah’s Boy

Status: last I heard hard to obtain in paper, but both are available in ebooks from baen.com. Reasonably priced at that. I have heard rumors publisher plans to bring them out again at time of third which is started but not yet finished.

Sarah D’Almeida

Musketeer’s Mysteries and should the need arise, other historical mysteries. (Murder Mysteries solved by the three musketeers plus one.)

Death of A Musketeer; Musketeer’s Seamstress; Musketeer’s Apprentice; A Death In Gascony; Dying By The Sword and (possibly) upcoming Musketeer’s Confessor.

Status: Death of a Musketeer is being re-released by Naked Reader Press. For now it is available as an ebook. It will also soon be available POD. As for the others, their status is unclear. By the terms of my contract the rights should have reverted, however he house is being difficult. Proceed with care. If DOAM does well enough, I will write Musketeer’s Confessor for publication early next year.  The trailer for Death of a Musketeer is here.

Sarah A. Hoyt

Magical British Empire. (At the time of Charlemagne, in a magical parallel world, someone stole the eye of the goddess, which must be recovered. Victorian England. Dragons. Magic. Flying carpets. Trains and factories run on magic. Steam power and gas lights, too. Oh, yeah, romance. Africa. India. China.)

Heart of Light; Soul of Fire; Heart and Soul

Status: in print. No more planned – at least for now.

Elise Hyatt

Daring Finds Mysteries (A young woman struggles to survive and feed herself and her toddler, by refinishing furniture that, somehow, often has clues to crimes new and old. Sassy. Funny. Odd. Set in Goldport, Colorado.)

Dipped, Stripped and Dead; A French Polished Murder and upcoming A Fatal Stain.

Status: in print.

Sarah A. Hoyt

Space Opera (set along a future history populated with such things as artificial islands, wars between bioengineered and natural humans, biological solar collectors, feisty women and men who are not exactly slouches.)

Darkship Thieves and upcoming Darkship Renegades and POSSIBLY (not bought yet) A Few Good Men (in the same world/interacting, but not with characters from Darkships)

Status: in print and furiously underway. (Given my health giving me a break soon, should be done in a matter of days. At least DSR)

Sarah Marques

Blood Worlds (this is the first trilogy, but actually there is a contemporary series set in the same world. A world almost entirely taken over by vampires, in which humans must fight, gallantly, against overwhelming odds. And which vampire domination is often legalistic and undermines human societies from within. The first trilogy, just sold to Prime books, revisits the world of the three musketeers, where Richelieu is a vampire and with his guards rules the night, while the king rules the day. A noir feel and the sort of black humor where one laughs in the teeth of hell.)

Sword And Blood; Blood Royale; Rising Blood

Status: All are upcoming. The first one is delivered.

Any questions about the books or their content, or why some have a certain name? I’ll be glad to oblige with answers, if I can.

*Crossposted at Mad Genius Club*

Again, when I go to a place where I meet a lot of young writers I’m reminded of some of my past challenges and, heck, some of my present challenges.

I spent the weekend at Anomaly Con in Denver. Yes, that’s why you didn’t have posts over the weekend, though truly I left them keyed and ready to go. But they didn’t go and at this point it’s useless to put them up, because they were about how I was going to Anomaly, a steampunk con in Denver, and how it was my first steampunk con, etc. For the record it was lots of fun and possibly the first time in recorded history that the Hoyt Four were all in costume. Might not be the last. The boys seem to have a acquired a taste for cosplay, at least the younger one.

So I spoke on a panel on overcoming the block. First I want to apologize to all my co-panelists. I normally TRY not to walk all over other people. It’s just that sometimes a combination of topic and my mood make it impossible. In this case, it was the topic. I was on that panel with some wonderful writers, but I think I’ve been writing for twice as long as even the “oldest” of them. (Yes, of course, this means I started trying to write for publication in the cradle.) And I’m made of utter dumb. Or at least utter stubborn. Which means I made EVERY possible mistake before I got hit hard enough by the clue by four – the one with nails in it – to stop. So I know every possible pitfall, including some impossible ones I bent reality in order to fall into.

Anyway, on this panel on the block, I realized suddenly when people say “I’ve been blocked” it can mean several things. First, there is the classical block. You sit for hours and hours in front of the computer and can’t do more than type one sentence or so. Maybe edit that sentence a few hundred times.

This, if you’re anywhere but at the very beginning of a novel (sometimes the search for the voice resembles this) means something has gone seriously wrong with the novel and your choices are to a) put it down, work on something else for a while and come back to it afterwards or b) go back to the beginning and analyze it and/or ask someone you trust to do so for you, then fix what’s wrong and power forward past the block.

But there’s something else people call block… or sometimes call “being too busy to write” which I’d define as “being insufficiently attached to the work.” The symptoms of this are that you find yourself cleaning the house, “rotating the cat” or starting other stories.

Depending on what you’re doing to avoid working on the book, the level of “insufficiently attached” needs to be qualified. It also must be qualified for how BUSY you really are. For instance, for me every minute I’m sitting down at the keyboard I should be doing something else, ranging from house cleaning/repairs, to shopping, to checking on appointments for the kids, to a hundred other things. I do manage to write most of the time, and projects get postponed seemingly ad-infinitum, like… my bathroom painting (which was really needed. I mean the people who lived here before appear to have attached the wall paper to the wall with paper glue. it was peeling off in strips) got postponed three years, until I couldn’t CLEAN the bathroom without dealing with the wallpaper mess.

There are pants that need one button that my sons have probably outgrown (or in case of Robert got too small for) years ago.

You see what I mean, if every minute in front of the computer is stolen from elsewhere, you start feeling guilty and when the going gets tough – it does in every novel in the middle. Just like the last quarter of a novel is always wonderful and almost addiction-inducing – it’s easy for guilt to overwhelm you.

The cure for this, of course, is to think of it as a job or (if not published yet) apprenticeship for a job. Set hours and for those hours work on the book and nothing else. After those hours, try to catch up with your other duties. Think of it this way, if you were going to school and/or had a full time job, you’d have to make time for it. This is no different, and you’re not being irresponsible. This needs doing too. And like most jobs, it can pay a living wage. But unlike most jobs it also can make you suddenly very rich. It’s worth investing in.

The other level of insufficiently attached manifests as your “discovering” things that need to be done or simply deciding you don’t like the book and starting another.

Though these two come from different points – the discovering things to do might just mean you are busy, you just don’t feel overwhelming guilt about ignoring them, but still, they’re there, and they need doing and maybe this book isn’t interesting enough to hold you; starting new books is just usually “the book has got difficult” – the cure is the same.

You must stick to it.

Every book dies halfway through. EVERY book. This is because all of a sudden your subconscious realizes it can’t do what it set out to do. The idea for a novel is always multi-dimensional and much bigger than what even the most gifted writer can pin on the paper. When your subconscious figures it out, it gets upset (okay, yes, I do personify my subconscious. I call him Bob. He wears glasses and looks peevish.) And then you feel you need to start something else, which also dies halfway through.

Stick with it. Push on for another quarter of your projected word count, and my guess is you’ll find the writing is easy again and that in the end the book will not show a mark of where you bogged down.

Another problem could be that you’ve hit a point that scares you. You’re coming to close to something that’s intensely personal or that you never meant to put in a novel. In that case, in addition to gluing your butt on the chair with writing superglue (TM) you must ALSO make sure you don’t run away from the topic/plot/intensity while you do so. Because I know in similar situations I’m perfectly capable of going, “No, strangely they’re not going to rape her. They’re going to give her a lollipop and send her on her way.” Usually you know you’re “running away” because the “deviated plot” is just that silly and often funny or you think it’s funny. (More on writing humor in another post.)

So, that’s basically it. Actually now I think about it, the cure is pretty much the same, though in some cases you might need to do some analysis first: acquire some superglue, glue butt to chair, and work through the block.

I was reminded yesterday, while talking to a lot of young would-be writers, on the verge of starting their careers, of the whole concept of mixed blessings.

Inevitably, in the twenty-to-thirty crowd (but even among older folks, who didn’t start writing until they were much older and are just starting out) there is the “How do you break in?” question, which these days is followed closely by the “Should I self publish on Amazon?” question.

It’s fine how life changes. Five years ago I’d have slammed my foot down and said “Do not – absolutely DO NOT – self publish. It will only lead to your being considered damaged goods with the big publishers.

In the age of Amanda Hocking, this is not a given. And for a moment, I felt just a little jealous of these “kids” (Yes, even the ones older than I.)

I’d just given them a list of resources on line for figuring out how to research, someone else gave them market place resources, and you know… It beat the heck out of pre-history, 20 years ago, when I was sending stuff out to the publishing address, wrongly formatted because I’d got hold of an out of date advice book, and in two cases completely wrong for the publication. And to top it all off, they wouldn’t be held in the outer darkness even after they’d become competent. They wouldn’t have to wait for a publishing slot to open up on the diminishing big house schedule. They could take it to the public and while most of them would flounder or at best make a small income (but then that’s what we midlisters do!) a significant minority would find gold in them there hills.

And then I went to my hotel room and slept on it. And in the morning I woke up grateful that I wasn’t able to self publish when I started out.

Why? Oh, I like to think I started out at “competent.” Maybe I did. Rationally I doubt it. Look, my first novel is completely lost. The one printed copy was handed out to a friend twenty three years ago and when last heard of – sixteen years ago – he’d lent it to a friend who lent it to a friend. But it’s under another name and I was never there, and besides I was led astray by evil companions. The original electronic version died with my first computer, Joaquim, the one that took real floppies, and whose carcass is still in the attic, for sentimental reasons. But the information in there won’t come out.

And all this is a good thing.

Yes, I wrote that novel and five sequels to it. No, I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t selling. But now I do, even at the “commercial” level, for concept and idea and plot – much less for the level of writing which I, fortunately, haven’t been able to evaluate in twenty some years. I suspect if I could I’d cringe and realize what a raw beginner I’d been, and how awful the stuff is.

Look, I’m not saying there isn’t the rare genius whose first novel leaves his/her fingers perfectly polished and brilliant. Of course there are. Or at least so I’m told. Fact is, I never met one of these, or even heard of one from verifiable sources.

Yeah, you know, my parents told me, when I was little, that Mozart sat down the first time he saw a piano and started playing. It took me a few decades to realize it was a load of hooey and that the poor kid had been the victim of a stage father who made d*mn sure he knew how to play. It’s sort of the same thing. A lot of writers will tell you “oh, golly gee, I just sat down one day and wrote this novel, which a house was excited to buy, and which rocketed to the bestseller list.” Um… right. What they’re not telling you about is their years of novel beginnings that are stashed somewhere under the bed, the short stories they were penning since the age of three or even the essays they’ve been publishing weekly in their local newspaper. It’s possible this is the first novel they finished – the first they attempted… I’m not saying it doesn’t happen. I just never heard of a case I could verify.

Most first novels are bad enough to make Jane Austen turn in her grave (yes, even her juvenalia.)

I had confirmation of this when I read For Us The Living. But I was surprised when I found out far from realizing how bad it was in a timely manner, Heinlein continued trying to publish the thing for ten? Fifteen years? Long after he WAS writing publishable material at any rate.

This emphasizes how hard it is to evaluate your work – your first novel in particular. (It also emphasizes that if either of my kids, grandkids or great grandkids should get hold of a copy of Glass Pedestal and sell it, I will come back and give a whole new meaning to the term “haunting.”)

There are reasons for this. It’s kind of like what I do every other morning, when I take my glasses off en route to the shower and don’t pay attention where I put them. I come out of the shower and take half an hour to find them because… I don’t have my glasses on.

Your first novel looks wonderful and perfect to you or at least much better than it looks to others because: you don’t have the skills needed to make it better, which means you also don’t have the skills needed to evaluate it better.

Yeah, I know you’re saying “But I evaluated other people’s novels just fine, as a reader, for decades before I started writing.” So you did. It’s not the same. When you’re reading with an eye to being entertained, your demands are different. It’s physically impossible for you to read these other novels like you read yours. Why? Oh, you’re perfectly objective, are you? Yeah, you might be, but unless you got a massive blow to the head and forgot the last few years, you can’t read your novel with an eye to being entertained. A year or two distance from it might help. But even so, short of a blow to the head, you’ll remember a lot about the characters, the world and the situation that is not actually on the page, but which you’ll subconsciously add. Or, if you’re of a nervous disposition, you’ll be driven to add EVERYTHING in your head and swamp the poor reader in uneeded detail. (That was my failing.)

So most first – and second, and occasionally third – novels are wretched things. Mine was.

The problem is nothing is wretched enough not to sell a FEW copies. If I had had it published – given a time machine to where I was writing it and publishing it today – it might have sold a couple hundred copies.

I’d probably have continued trying, in the same way I did, and improving and struggling to get more commercial and better and acquire my readers, and I might have ended up roughly where I am today.

So… what is the problem? Well… Heinlein didn’t have to live down For Us The Living throughout his long and prolific career and I’m forever grateful that no one can come up to me at a signing with a dog-eared (or scribbled) copy of Glass Pedestal and point out that the world is impossible and internally inconsistent and I have infodumps that could sink a medium-sized ocean liner. I rather like it that way.

I suppose the people breaking in today will get used to this, and that eventually it will seem weird not to have an author’s wretched beginnings to marvel at when you discover him/her in his/her polished and professional phase. But I am glad I didn’t publish THAT.

My advice to any first-time-novelist contemplating it would be tripartite:

First – make sure someone who knows about writing and publishing reads it. No, not your dear mama. And if it’s a friend, make sure this friend can both be merciless and has read a lot of fiction in that genre. (A caveat is NOT to pay book doctor’s fees unless you’re swimming in dough. I’m going to guess it’s not difficult to find laid-off editors at various levels who will probably read/do a good job with your book in the low four figures. Okay, not executive editors, unless they’re your friends. But stay away from book doctors unless they’re multi-professionally-published themselves or unless they were editors for a professional house once.)

Second – find a copy editor. For this your dear old mama is doable, if dear old mama used to free-lance hunting typos for the local paper or is an Advanced Grammar Teacher AND understands that dialogue is not always excruciatingly grammatically correct.

Third – Make sure in your heart of hearts this is something you want out there. Contemplate the fact that while you might be in your late twenties and unmarried and never going to marry and live the life of an independent and Bohemian artist, life throws you curve balls, and that the entire point of the unforeseen is that it CAN’T be foreseen. And then ask yourself if, say, your urban fantasy which is a thinly disguised episode of your sexual experimentation in college is suitable reading for the teenage children you might eventually have. Or for your dear old mama. You might not care, though I personally have a file called “only if my parents and all descendants are dead or illiterate”. If you don’t care, go right ahead and publish. If you think there is a slight chance you’ll be mortally embarrassed, hold back.

Other than that, go for it. Make your own day…

* Your mommy, perhaps. Mine doesn’t read much fiction (like my younger son, she prefers to read “real” stuff.) And if she did, and even if she thought it was good, she’d tell me I could do better. This is the woman who upon my graduating with honors from elementary school informed me I could do better. “You could have graduated with honors and distinction.” “But mom, that doesn’t exist.” “If you were good enough, they’d create it for you.” (And no, I’m not complaining. Heck, I’ve grown up to be just like her, though it’s me I hold to that standard, and not my kids. Yeah, okay, it’s neurotic-making. But what the heck, it’s high-achieving neurotic.)