Find Your Magic

The Good the Bad & the Ugly of NaNoWriMo

2011-10-29T14:10:00.001-06:00

Yep, it’s that time of year again. The time when turkeys cower in fear, leaves multiply on your lawn faster than rabbits, costume companies pretend there actually is a reason to take kids’ cartoon characters and make “sexy” versions of them, and last but not least, the time of year when hundreds of thousands of people decide to write a book in a month—I speak of course about National Novel Writing Month.

If you haven’t heard of NaNoWriMo, check out their website here. It’s a really cool idea and has picked up amazing steam since it started in 1999. The basic concept is that you and a bunch of other people all try to write a novel (or at least 50,000 words of a novel) in the month of November.

First of all, let me say that I think anything that gets people writing is awesome. So many times people tell me they’ve always wanted to write a book. And I say, “Well then start writing.” And whenever you do anything with a group of people who have the same goals, it makes it a little easier. So, yeah, NaNoWriMo=very cool.

If I stopped my blog right here, everything would be great. I said the right thing to the right people at the right time. Now is the part where I doff my hat and exit stage left.

Except that, while I think NaNoWriMo is very cool for a lot of people, I also think that there could be times when it is actually could be a bad thing.

Here’s why.

Imagine applying the book in a month concept to other activities. Compose a symphony in a month. Train for a marathon in a month. Build ten houses in a month. Perform 100 heart transplants in a month. Have six kids in . . . okay, maybe we will stop the analogy there.

The thing is, different people write at different paces and different books take more or less time. I have written an entire book in close to a month. I’ve also taken a year or more to write another book. Quantity does not always equal quality.

I was recently talking to an editor about an author. The editor thought the author was a great writer, but the author’s work often seemed rushed. The editor felt that the author was hurrying to finish one book after another without taking the time to get each of them right.

I know that NaNoWriMo isn’t about completing a final draft in a month. The idea is that you force yourself to crank out 50,000 words and then come back and edit them later. And that absolutely works for some authors. They do what we used to call in grade school a sloppy copy and then make it better and better as they rewrite.

If you are one of those kinds of people, NaNoWriMo may be a great fit for you. But not everyone can do that. You can’t always “force” creativity. Some stories just take a while to come together. And I worry especially for newer writers that if you start training yourself that writing is like mowing the lawn, you just get up start the mower and get to it, you might be training yourself to be a bad writer.

I think I’d be more comfortable with something where you had to spend x number of hours on your novel in a month. Maybe you create a character bible, maybe you outline, maybe you write that number of hours without worrying about how many words you complete. As an author I’d rather spend an hour writing a great page or even a great paragraph than an hour cranking out 2,000 words that will never be something I’d want to show the public.

I’m not saying don’t take part in NaNoWriMo. If nothing else you will learn whether you are able to write 2,000 words or more a day. I know lots of authors whose first published work came as a result of a NaNoWriMo project.

But if it doesn’t work, don’t feel like you are a failure. Writing is not brick laying. It’s not emptying trash cans. It’s a process that can come together all at once in a rush of inspired storytelling or sweat itself out word by painful word. Sometimes it involves outlining for weeks or months. Sometimes an entire story arrives in only a few minutes with a burst or fireworks and sounding trumpets.

Don’t worry about what other authors are doing around you. Don’t write YA because that’s what everyone is doing. Don’t write a novel in a month because it’s November are you are supposed to. Do what works for you and stick with it.

What’s the Deal With Farworld?

2011-10-08T11:21:00.003-06:00

At least ten times a week, I get e-mails similar to this one.

“Fire whoever is hindering the progress of farworld #3 & 4 Sent from my iPod”

Okay, that might be a little more vitriolic than some of the messages. But the sentiment is the same. I’ve read both of the Farworld books. I love them. I can’t find book 3.

Up until this point, I’ve hesitated to say much publicly since things seem to change almost daily. Even now, there are a still a few things that could change, but I feel I owe my readers some answers. So, here we go.

1) Why isn’t Air Keep out?

I don’t really know who to blame for the delay. The publisher? The economy? Other projects that have come up since then? Me? All of the above to one extent or another.

I can say that as anxious as many of my readers are, no one is more upset about this delay than I am. Right now, book four, Fire Keep should be out and I should be doing final edits on the last book in the series, Shadow Keep.

Problems started to come up shortly before book two came out. I had just finished spending a year promoting book 1, visiting over 400 schools and signing somewhere in the ballpark of 10,000 books, when my publisher told me there was a chance they might not do book 2. Needless to say that just about killed me. Fortunately, they did release book 2, but with no marketing $ at all.

Since then, book 3, Air Keep, has been on, off, on hold, maybe in paperback, and everything in between. At the same time, other projects have come up. As an author, you can only write what the publisher is willing to publish. However . . .

2) Is there going to be a book 3?

There is absolutely going to be a book 3. In fact, I promise in writing here and now that there will be three more books in the series and they will be written and published. They are, in order, Air Keep, Fire Keep, and Shadow Keep.

I am actively writing Air Keep. There are two other projects that I have to turn in first. But one will be turned in this week end, and the other will be turned in by the end of this month.

Once that is done, I will be working solely on Air Keep.

3) When will book 3 come out?

My goal is still to have it finished by the end of the year. I recently traded e-mails with the artist who did the artwork for the first 2 books. I would very much like to have him do the art for the final three books and he’s excited about it too. If I go through a traditional publisher, they set the release date. But if I self-publish it, which is very much a possibility, book three could be out as soon as the end of this year or early next year in e-book. And shortly after that in print.

4) Do you know what will happen in books 3-5?

Absolutely! I’ve always had the whole series planned out, and that has made waiting even harder. A couple of nights ago, I revealed the first chapter of Air Keep to my writing group and when I got done, there was total silence. Not what they expected at all.

I am so excited to let the rest of you experience what is in my head, that it is just about killing me. I recently discovered that there are no more copies of Water Keep in the warehouse. That means that over 30,000 copies have been shipped out. Along with library readers and people loaning books to other people, I estimate that over 50,000 people have read Water Keep. I think that means there a few people waiting for the rest of the series? Yes?

If I end up self-publishing, expect to start seeing chapters posted here starting in early November. I may do as many as ten before the book comes out. If I go with a traditional publisher, that could change.

5) Where will I be able to get Air Keep?

Regardless of how I publish the next three books, you will absolutely be able to buy both print and electronic versions online (Amazon, B&N, etc) as well as here on my website. I am also talking to a distributor who should be able to make them available in some stores as well (especially in Utah, and surrounding states.)

And since it’s been nearly three years since I did regular school visits, how fun would it be to schedule some more the first of next year?

If you have any other questions, post them in the comment section, and I will try and answer them.

Thanks,

Jeff

The Not So Great Divide

2011-09-24T19:13:00.003-06:00

Let me apologize in advance for this post. How’s that for a convincing way to start? I’m pretty sure this is going to be too long, and I’m almost positive it will offend some people. Any better? I do okay in front of a room full of people, and I think I can hold my own writing fiction. But when it comes to writing what’s in my heart, I stumble, stray and stutter with great regularity. There you go. Proceed at your risk.

The thing is, there’s an important issue that I experience almost every day lately, and yet I haven’t seen it addressed to the extent I think it should be. There is a huge divide in this country right now. And it seems to be getting bigger all the time. It separates friends, family, and strangers.

Nope it’s not politics. And it’s not religion. But it is becoming almost as divisive. It’s controversial enough that it’s not something you can bring up at a party without fear of starting a fight. The divide I’m talking about is between self-published and traditionally published authors. The very fact that already I’m going to have people tell me self-published should be indy and traditional should be legacy tells you how far this separation has already gone. It’s creating it’s own PC language.

First, let me give you a little background. Just over ten years ago, I published my first book. It was with what was than called an independent publisher. Small, Utah-based, they were lucky if they sold 10,000 copies of a book. At the time there were no e-books, no print on demand, and audio books were generally stored on cassettes, Self-publishing was almost unheard of because you had to put up $10,000 or more and live with a garage full of books. People like Richard Paul Evans pulled it off, but they were the huge exception.

I also entered a world full of people I never knew about before. People who liked to write as much as I did. It was great. We did signings together, brainstormed marketing plans together, blogged together. Learned together.I also met lots of aspiring authors. I didn’t know half as much as they thought I did and probably 20% of what I thought I did. But I was happy to give them advice and learn from them as well.

Fast forward ten years. I’ve written a little over a million words of prose since then. Probably closer to two million if you include blog posts, articles, etc. I’ve had two agents. I’ve published eight books and have another three coming out by various publishers. I’ve taught about 100 classes.

And man how the publishing world has changed. When was the last time you bought an audio book on cassette. And $10k to print a book? Try nothing at all. E-books, blogs, podcasts, MP3 audiobooks. All of these things have come about since I published my first book. Really one of the only things that hasn’t changed is writing a good story.

During that time, I’ve made hundreds of great new writer and reader friends. But in the last year or so, something changed. I don’t want to single anyone out, but this is the perfect example of what’s happening around us.

A couple of months ago, a woman who I’ve considered a friend for years wrote a blog post about a series of books she e-published. It was a great post. She explained how she decided to self-publish, how she had gone about it, and how much she was making. It was a great post. Although I had recently signed with a great agent and was about to announce my deal with Harper, I was still very interested in self-publishing and had a couple of titles I was considering releasing or rereleasing myself.

So I replied with a comment that was something like, “Fantastic post! Sounds like you’ve found a great fit!” That was all I said. It seemed like a straight forward comment. Except a couple of days later, I got an e-mail from her. She was furious with me, accusing me of being patronizing and rude. I was seriously so shocked, I wondered if someone had hacked my e-mail account.

It turns out that she had misinterpreted my comment in a way I could never have imagined. She thought I was putting her down for self-publishing—saying that was where she belonged. The good news is that I think we managed to patch fences. The bad news is that our relationship was not the only one to suffer from the self-publishing/traditional-publishing chasm. And from what I can see it’s only getting worse.

Hopefully without offending anyone too badly let me try and explain what I am seeing. Being an author and having author friends has always been a little dicey. Someone always has it a little or a lot better than you do. They get released in hardback while you get released in paperback. They have an agent and you don’t. They get a bigger advance or sell more books or make it on a list or get an award.

Many of you know that James Dashner and I have been good friends for many years. When he got a big name agent, signed a big contract, and ultimately hit the NYT list, it just about killed me. I used to joke that it was a good thing we were such close friends or I couldn’t stand hanging out with him. A close friend of mine worded it best when I told her about my Harper deal. “I couldn’t be happier about this . . . unless it was me.”

We’d get jealous of each other’s successes and console each other when we were down. And don’t get me wrong, there were divides even then. I remember doing a signing with a big-six published author who heard about what house I was with and asked in a totally innocent way, “But those authors aren’t very good are they?” Ouch!

The thing was though, we were all on the same path. If we were mad at someone, it wasn’t because we thought they were wrong, but because they’d gotten there before we had. We were all on the same path, we were all climbing up the same mountain.

Then along came easy, free, self-publishing. Within 24 months, we went from everyone wants an agent and a six-figure contract to who needs agents and publishers. In general, I’d have to say I’ve been thrilled with the idea of e-books. Who wouldn’t like a reader to be able to buy your book anywhere anytime with the click of a button? Who wouldn’t be thrilled with the idea of telling the agents and editors who have controlled your fate for years, “Hasta la vista, baby. I don’t need you anymore?”

I once told my children that the advances that have taken place in my lifetime: personal computers, the internet, cell phones, digital music and movies, GPS, etc. have changed our culture as much or more than cars, trains, and plains did previous generations. I think e-books are doing the same thing to publishing. Things could change in ways we can’t even imagine as authors right now.

Along with all the good news though, is something I never anticipated. Now there are two paths to publication. Instead of authors marching side-by-side, encouraging one another, we seem to be forming opposing forces. And the two forces aren’t getting along very well.

On the one hand, you have traditionally published authors. We worked our butts off to get agents. We went through dozens or even hundreds of rejections. We wrote and rewrote query letters. We studied our copies of Writer’s Market. we sent out so many partials and got so many not-right-for-me letters we dreaded going to the mailbox. And when we finally got that first offer, we usually cried from all the years of rejection and frustration. We were proud of the fact that after so many years of trying we finally succeeded in achieving our dreams.

On the other hand, you have the self-published authors. Most of them went through exactly the same thing. Queries, rejections, form letters. They got so sick of having to answer to a faceless entity that seemed totally arbitrary, that when the opportunity came, they happily said, “Screw you,” to the people who made their lives a living hell and published their own books. Maybe they’d sell a handful of books, maybe they’d sell millions. But either way, they wouldn’t have to rely on anyone but themselves to say what they could and couldn’t do.

They problem is that these groups speak a different language from each other. And both of them have chips on their shoulders.

The self-publishing group talks about changing price points, hiring cover designers and editors, and churning out two, three, or four books a year. They gloat over the fact that they can sell their books for less than a dollar if they want and still make money. They love the fact that they can publish whenever they are ready instead of waiting years for a release slot. They predict that very soon behemoth publishers and outdated agents will be as extinct as dinosaurs. They hate the stigma of self-published and assume all traditionally published authors look down on them. They hate that it’s almost impossible for them to get into most bookstores. They would like nothing better than to have a big six editor come begging them to publish their books and to tell them, “No thanks. You missed your chance.” They may not say it out loud, but they are afraid inside that they never got a book deal because they weren’t good enough.

The traditionally published authors talk about agents, contracts, and release dates. They get to see their books on bookstore shelves, in libraries, and advertising slicks. They have free editors, free artwork, and often have marketing budgets, They have an easier time getting reviewed by larger publications. They believe that because they have made it past the guards that protect the grounds of the traditionally published—agents, editors, proofreaders, and committees—that their books are generally better than self-published books.They hate how long it takes for their books to be released, but they love the support, advances, and royalty checks that they receive. They may not say it out loud, but the fact that they finally got a publisher helps erase their fears that they aren’t good enough, that they aren’t legit. And they are desperately afraid of that being taken away.

So there we are. Instead of two groups working together toward a common goal. We have two groups of people snarling at each other on blogs. Talking behind each other’s backs. Predicting doom and gloom for the other group. Even though the truth is that both of them have exactly the same goal. They want readers to approve of what they have written to tell them they are good enough. They want to be “real” authors.

A big part of the problem is that whether you are self-publishing or going the traditional route, the publishing world isn’t fair. How many people do you know who complain that they aren’t NBA basketball players? I don’t know any. The reason is that the people playing in the NBA are generally the best players in the world. If you dream of playing basketball, you can get tested from a pretty early age. By the time you have made it to college you know whether you have elite skills or not. And, for the most part, the NBA doesn’t judge you on anything more than how good you are at the game.

Imagine if the writing world was like that. Imagine if you could be judged solely on your talent. If you could know that your book didn’t succeed as well as the one above it because that book was written just a little better. Wouldn’t that make it a little easier? Wouldn’t that motivate you to strive to be better and work harder? Wouldn’t that seem more . . . fair?

But the writing world isn’t like that. regardless of which publishing path you choose, there are books that sell better than you even though your book is better. Publishers choose books for reasons that have nothing to do with quality. Great books get rejected by agents because they don’t like that genre, or don’t know any editor who would like it, or because they had a lousy lunch, or hurried through their query letters. Self-published books get lost in the crowd for no better reason than the author didn’t know how to self-promote well enough.

Where does that leave us? Do we all start wearing buttons that say, “Can’t we all just get along?” It would be nice if it was that easy. I don’t have a pat answer, but I do have a few ideas. I think there are some things we can all recognize.

1) No process guarantees a great book—however you define it. The concept of a perfect democracy where all books are all available online and the best naturally work their way to the top isn’t happening now and it’s unlikely to happen ever. Yes word of mouth helps sell a book. But starting that word-of-mouth snowball requires a ton of marketing or extraordinary luck. Even awards only represent the judgment of a fairly small group of people. The one thing we can take a little comfort in is that really crappy books don’t generally occupy top spots or win awards unless they have a celebrity’s name on them.

2) Price alone is not going to be the ultimate differentiator. I’m sorry, you can price crap at $0.99 and eventually people will stop buying it. And regardless of how good a book is, if you price it high enough most people won’t buy it. Yes, if two equally good books are priced at $1 and $20, more people will buy the $1. But I think that readers care more about how good a book is than if one is $5 more than the other. Low price may get you looked at if you are unknown, but it’s not going to keep people coming back the way a great story is.

3) Someone will always have a better deal than you. Either they will sell more books, get a higher advance, win an award you didn’t, get their name in a famous magazine, have their book turned into a movie. Whatever. If you judge your success on other people you will always end up unhappy. (Unless you make sure to always judge your success by people who are doing worse than you. Hmm. Something to think about.) It’s hard, but you have to find a way to enjoy your own journey. Because really, nothing sucks more than hating a really successful author.only to meet them and discover they are a super nice person.

4) Neither side is completely right. Yes, letting everyone and anyone publish whatever they want with no filter or control is going to generate a lot of garbage, just like YouTube generates a lot of really dumb videos. But there are some amazing authors who, through no fault of their own, never got published through the old methods. E-books have given them a chance to shine and despite having none of the benefits of traditionally-published authors, they have kicked butt. And publishers have kicked themselves and paid big advances for not recognizing that talent earlier.

And much as the indy crowd would like to see it, big publishers are not going away anytime soon. Yes, I know. They have made mistakes. They have been too slow to make changes at times. They publish lame books sometimes and they don’t always recognize great authors. But they are more than willing to change. They already have and they will continue to. They have great editors, awesome art departments, big budgets, and great connections. You can make it without them, but man it’s nice to have them in your corner as an author.

Lastly, we really do need to get along. (Sorry, it just forced its way out of me.) For all our differences, we have much more in common. We love a great read. We crave approval. We’re thrilled when we capture the worlds in our heads and describe them so well that everyone else can see them too. We’d all love to make a million dollars, but we can’t help beaming when even one reader tells us our story kept them up all night, or one parent tells us we hooked their kid on books.

We’re already seeing our worlds begin to blend. Traditionally published authors are self-publishing. Self-published authors are signing with traditional publishers. The big six are selling tons of e-books. Indy authors are selling print books. In another ten years the world may change in ways we can’t imagine yet. But hopefully we’ll all be right there trying to write an awesome story and catch lightning in a bottle.

Why Easiest is Almost Always Wrong

2011-09-20T10:43:00.001-06:00

It’s been over three years since I wrote about how and how not to begin your book, which certainly seems like enough time that I could get away with writing about it again. Unfortunately I reread my most from 2008 and realized and don’t have a lot to add. The things I wrote about back then still suck the life out of a story and will almost definitely get you thrown out of the slush pile quicker than getting the agent’s name wrong. So go back and read that post if you haven’t.

Instead I’m going to write today about why doing the things that lots of beginning authors tend to do is almost always wrong.

First, as thinking beings, we tend to take the path of least resistance. We take the quickest route to the grocery store, buy the easiest foods to prepare, and look for the shortest line at the check out.

There’s nothing wrong with this at all. It makes sense to do what is easiest, quickest, and well known . . . most of the time. But what if the easiest and quickest—the thing we are naturally drawn to—is not as good? Maybe the food that is quick and easy to prepare tastes bland. Or the shortest route to the store is unsafe or depressing to drive through. Then you have to weigh ease against result.

The problem with following your first instinct in writing is that there is almost always a better way to do it that is harder.Let’s take waking up for example. It’s really easy to start a story with your MC waking up. That’s when the day starts. It’s a natural beginning. As a result, it has become a cliché. Starting your book with a character waking up is nearly as bad as starting with “It was a dark and stormy night.” It’s been done so much and with so many variations that it’s impossible to sound fresh.

More than that, though, it’s just not as good as other options. The goal of the first page is to grab the reader’s interest and attention. It’s hard to do that by waking up. Waking up beginnings trend to lend themselves to backstory. MC wakes up, groans, thinks about what a terrible day today is going to be, flashes back to what happened the night before that makes this day so terrible.

Notice that none of this is gripping. It’s the internal narrator in our head saying, “Before I actually get to the story, let me fill you in on where we are.”

Anyone who knows me very well, knows I am not a big proponent of prologues. It’s not that prologues can’t be done well. I’ve read some wonderful prologues. But the vast majority of the time writers use prologues because they are lazy. First chapter starts off slowly? Add an exciting prologue. Need to give a bunch of backstory, but know that’s not the way to begin chapter 1? Prologue to the rescue.

Before you write a prologue ask yourself if your beginning is gripping without it. If not, fix that first. Next ask if you are providing backstory that could be included in the actual story instead. If so, do that. A prologue should be like that awesome filling they put inside cupcakes sometimes. The cupcake is great without it. But it adds a little something fun without taking away from the dessert itself.

Let’s take another example. Character looks in the mirror and describes what they look like.

Mike stared into the water-stained mirror and ran a hand across his stubbly cheek. He was a decent-looking guy. In his late forties. Hair starting to gray, but still full. Women tended to be attracted to his strong jaw—that could actually bench press more than most other men’s arms.

If you haven’t read at least one book with this kind of scene in the first few pages, you aren’t trying hard enough. It’s a cliché. Tons of authors have done it. Why? Because it’s an easy way to tell the reader what your MC looks like. That’s reason enough to avoid it.

But again, there is a better reason. It’s heavy-handed. It stops the story and says, “Let’s pause here for a moment while I describe what my character looks like.”

In programming they talk about “elegant” coding. You could write 200 lines of code that accomplish what you want. But a good programmer realizes that by working a little harder, he can cut the lines to 100 and maybe even create a subroutine that can be reused later in the program. He spends a little more time, and creates elegant code that will make the program run that much faster and more efficiently.

You can do the same thing with your writing. Instead of stopping the story to look in the mirror, have the MC pull on her queen-size panty hose or realize his double X shirt is straining at the buttons. Have her stand on her tippy toes to reach the cereal bowl cupboard or brush a strand of white hair from her wrinkled cheek. You can tell us what the MC looks like, how old they are, how tall, how much they weigh, without ever stopping the story. It’s cleaner, more elegant, writing.

I could go on and on with examples, but the key is to remember that in writing, nine time out of ten, the first option you think of or the easiest option is almost always not the best one. That doesn’t mean to always try to use big words or create complex sentences. Elegant writing can be very utilitarian. But don’t go with your first story idea. Play with it awhile. Don’t stick with a single storyline. Spice up your book with several stories interwoven. Instead of having your MC and her love interest fight because they just don’t get along. Come up with some background, some motives, some twists.

Hamburger Helper can work fine at home. My kids still love it. But in your writing, work from scratch.

Obligatory Contract Signing Picture

2011-09-09T12:45:00.001-06:00

You know that little part inside of every author that is sure even the best things will end up falling through?

No? Me neither. Which is why I wasn’t relived at all to get my Harper Collins contract in the mail. The Good Night Gorilla grin? I always smile like that when I sign book contracts. Really!

Voice

2011-09-07T10:34:00.003-06:00

Last Monday, over on the Wordplay podcast, Nathan, James, and I talked about YA and Middle Grade voice. I think we did a decent job of defining what voice is, but I’d like to take another stab at drilling down a little because voice is one of those things like “high concept” that you hear a lot about, but everyone has a slightly different answer for what it means.

Let’s start with what voice isn’t. Voice is not how your character talks. Or at least it’s not just how your character talks. It’s also not how the narrator talks, although that can be part of it. I almost think that personality would be a better word for it, because voice is a lot like the personality of your book.

Let’s play a game for a minute. I’ll take my turn here and you take your turn there. Think of three very different people you know or have known. When I say different, I don’t necessarily mean strange, but rather different from each other. In fact one of them can be very ordinary.

I’ll start with a boy named John I knew in elementary school, a girl I knew in high school and still know, and a guy I know now. Got your three? Great, let’s continue.

Think of three defining characteristics of each of these people. It could be something about their looks, how they interacted with other people, a driving motivation, someone or something they remind you of. Just think of three things and write them down.

John was the proverbial nerd before the word was even really popular. He couldn’t answer a question without sounding like he’d just run it by the periodical table of elements. He refused to do anything other than read at recess unless forced to, and he was socially awkward. He was extremely smart, but had the whole thick black glasses, weird clothes and slicked back hair thing going on.

The girl was one of my best friends in high school. Physically, she was cute but not drop dead gorgeous. She wasn’t fat, but she was built big. Those things don’t play into how I remember her though. Whenever I picture her, what I think of is the energizer bunny. She was always up. She had this kind of high-pitched voice that didn’t quite fit with how she looked, and she was always giggling, talking, cracking jokes. If you were around her, you couldn’t help but be in a good mood. My one word description for her would be on. Everybody liked her.

The third person reads this blog and will recognize himself right away. He is the kind of person that is usually described as a character. He has slightly longish black going on gray hair, a beard, and in the winter he likes to wear a long leather coat. He is usually driving either a beater car or a motorcycle. He is always telling stories that are very interesting because he has quite a storied background. But even though the stories would be good by themselves, he likes to embellish them. He always has twenty projects going on and another twenty in his head. If he were a TV character, he would be Kramer from Seinfeld.

Now, obviously there is a lot more to each of these people. In fact, you could even say they are stereotypes to one degree or another. I haven’t talked at all about what makes them act they way they do, what their backgrounds are, what they want out of life. But just in those little snapshots, you can probably imagine the people I am talking about. You have a feel for them and understand how they might fit into your life.

Now think of three different books. Let’s take To Kill a Mockingbird, Harry Potter, and Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Just like each of the people I described had a unique personality, each of these books does. The feeling of each book wasn’t random either. Of course, each of them were very different stories. But that doesn’t explain the differences. You could write a story about a goofy kid starting junior high and have it read like Mockingbird or HP. And it’s not that the authors could only write in one way. I firmly believe that JK Rowling could write a book in a Wimpy Kid voice or a Mockingbird voice.

So what does all this mean? Well for one thing it means you not only need to consider your plot and characters, but also the personality of your story. I’ve read some great stories that I believe never got published because they had no personality, no voice. There was nothing about the writing that was bad. But it didn’t grab you by the throat and make you want to read more.

Just like all three of the people I described are people you could drop into a book (and I have on more than one occasion), each of the three books I mentioned make you want to read more, but in very different ways. We are in a great place for writers now, with more opportunity than ever. But we are also in a world where there are more books competing against you for readers’ attention. If you want to stand out you have to understand voice and decide what will make your book’s voice unique.

Three quick examples from books I have written. Read the paragraphs and see how much of the book’s personality you can grasp from just a paragraph or two.

One:

Carter jumped to his feet, pressed one hand to his lower back, and shuffled across the room. “Come give your Granny Goulash a big wet smackerooni and I’ll let you have one of my stale oatmeal toffee bars. Or is this something I scooped out of Fluffy’s litter box? Can’t really seem to remember.”

Two:

Welcome to Hell, all ye damned and demented. Please keep moving. Welcome to Hell, all ye damned and demented. Please keep moving . . .

The repeating message begins moments after I reach the top of the red stone platform, hammering the morning air and making me jump even though I knew it was coming. The tips of my fingers tingle where sharp claws try to poke through and I taste blood in my mouth as my fangs momentarily slide over my teeth—the normal Dae’ Ungu reaction to surprise or anger.

Three:

“Bobby has been what?” Brooklyn’s voice sounded sleep-fuzzy and far away. I didn’t know if the static in my head was the phone line or the insistent buzzing I’d been hearing since the moment I found my best friend lying on the floor of my apartment in a puddle of his own blood.

In the first example example I am targeting a MG audience. I want lots of emotion: fright, laughter, tension. It’s all about bigger is better. I’d like this book to feel like watching ET.

The second example is from a paranormal YA. The story mostly takes place in Hell through the eyes of a female teenage demon. It needs to feel dark and a little edgy. I want you to feel like your hands are slightly grimy when you finish reading. It has a kind of graphic novel aura to it.

The third example is from an adult mystery written from the first person POV of a reporter in her mid twenties. As you can see, this book begins with her best friend/romantic interest in the hospital with a life threatening injury. That buzzing in her head is how I want the entire book to feel. She is constantly off balance in this story.

Not saying that any of these are great. Or that you need to emulate them. But hopefully this gives you a feel of what voice means in your story and it gives you a tool you can use when trying to make your book stand out from the crowd.

Now, go write!

Edits Are Not of the Devil

2011-09-02T11:29:00.001-06:00

I was talking with another author recently who was complaining about how much they hated edits. I just bit my lip and smiled. I totally get the rewrite hating. Who likes someone telling them their artistic endeavor is less than perfect? I think it hails back to our time in school. Remember when you turned in a paper, hoping for the vaunted gold star, and got back something that looked like the teacher had tapped an artery and bled all over it?

So, yeah, discovering your gold star story is actually more of a tin star story can be pretty depressing. So much so, that I would literally rather go in for major dental surgery than read a manuscript for someone other than my critique group or a really close personal friend. It’s just so hard to decide what they want back. Are they looking for a real here’s-everything-you-need-to-fix response? Or a hey-good-job-really-like-what-you’ve-got-going-there response?

The thing is, I love edits. I mean LOVE in all all caps, with bold text, and maybe even a heart instead of the O. I was beyond thrilled when my edit letter for Grimville came in the mail. It’s not that I’m a glutton for punishment, or even that I love the smell of red ink. (Okay, now I have to go test that at some point. Does red ink smell different from blue or black? I always imagined the pink ink in the Dr. Seuss book smelled kind of like peppermint.)

I crave praise every bit as much as the next author. I want people to tell me they adore my characters, that they stayed up all night, enthralled with my intricately woven plot, that they laughed so hard at my jokes they cried.

But . . . and this is a big but . . . I want all that praise after my book has hit store shelves. Before it goes out, I want the harshest feedback possible. I want to know every flaw, foible, and fix.

Back when I was in high school I had a friend who was restoring a 64 Mustang fastback. It was a really cool car. But it was completely hammered—rust holes, oil leaks, broken glass, torn upholstery. Every time I looked at that car, I wondered how he could possibly not just pour gasoline over it and send it up in a flaming pyre to car heaven.

And yet, every week there he was. Sanding away some rust. Pulling out a dent. Painting on primer. Little by little, I began to see what had been in his head the whole time. By our senior year, he had one of the baddest (which meant goodest back then) cars in school.

Now I’m not saying your story is in as bad a shape as my friend’s car. Hopefully you have something that reads pretty well before you start sending it out for feedback. But these days there is so much competition out there—whether you are self-pubbing or going through the agent-editor route—that you can’t afford to have anything other than your very best work going out the door. The days when an editor said, “I love the story and we can work on the lousy writing,” are almost completely a thing of the past. You absolutely must view your novel as a work in progress.

The reason I love edits so much is because in my mind every change is clearing away a little more rust, or pulling out a dent. Even better, some of the edits aren’t just fixing the bad things, they’re adding things to make the story badder (again meaning gooder.) I’m putting on a spoiler and installing heated leather seats.

By the time I sent Grimville to publishers, it had gone through multiple edits from my critique group, my agent, my beta readers, my friends. And no matter how personally invested I was with the story, I asked them to be brutal. That way, when my editor sent me his suggested changes most of them were high end audio upgrades and fewer of them were, “Um, didn’t you forget to put in the carburetor?”

So what can you do when you are looking to get feedback?

1) View your book as a fixer-upper on blocks, not a showroom demo. It’s much easier to use feedback if you are expecting lots of work than if you are looking for pats on the back for a job well done.

2) As much as possible, let your readers know what kind of feedback you want. Sometimes it’s tough for family members to say anything more than “I liked it,” or “I didn’t.” But if you put together a form they can fill out, that is much easier.

3) Consider things like having them describe characters to see if their view matches your intent. Ask them to list anything that was confusing. Tell them to list three things they didn’t like. Get feedback on both individual scenes and overall story. Ask them what they view as major themes.

4) This is going to sound really weird at first. But, go to sites like Goodreads and Amazon and read negative reviews of books that are similar to yours. This will do two things. One, it will help you recognize problems with your book. “Oh yeah, I did that too.” And, two, it will prepare you for negative feedback.

5) Don’t let anything in your story become sacred. Again, this sounds counterintuitive, but things that you see as the very best of your work, are often the biggest weaknesses. Go into your editing with the resolution that anything in your book can be improved and nothing is untouchable.

So, yeah, that’s pretty much it. You should try and learn to love edits and if you can’t do that at least learn to accept them. Speaking of which, I better to back to work on Grimville. I’ve got these really bad mag rims to install.

Speaking of writing advice. If you haven’t checked out the new Wordplay podcast I am doing with James Dashner and Nathan Bransford, you definitely need to. It posts every Monday and the next two weeks we have Ally Condie, the incredible NYT bestselling author of Matched and Crossed, and my super agent Michael Bourret as guests.

You can go to the site, add it on iTunes, or listen to it right now by clicking on the player below.

New, Wordplay Podcast

2011-08-29T09:19:00.001-06:00

Hey, I’m just about done with my post on working with editors. But I wanted to let you all know about something I’ve been working on almost since I sold Grimville.

I’ve really enjoyed so many of the amazing podcasts out there and thought it would be fun to do my own if I could find the right combination of people and content.

We’ll I don’t think I could have asked for a better group of people and I hope content will be pretty unique. So, this morning, I’m excited to announce the Wordplay podcast.

I’m joined by good friend and NYT bestselling author, James Dashner, and super agent turned author and amazing writing blogger, Nathan Bransford, How’s that for an exciting couple of co-hosts?

This will be a weekly event, posted every Monday morning. It’s aimed at readers and writers of all ages. Every third Monday, we’ll have a “Kids Only” episode targeted at kids ages 8-12 and their teachers, librarians, and parents.

We’re still working out the kinks and getting to know each other in our first episode, but I want this to feel like sitting around the table with a bunch of writing friends after a conference or book event.

Anyhow, I hope you’ll drop by and let us know what you think. Also tell your friends about it. We’re in the process of lining up some really awesome guests as well.

Thanks!

The Day After

2011-08-23T21:34:00.001-06:00

I know, I know. He signs a big contract and then disappears from sight. Back when I was following author blogs, wondering what it would be like to sign a contract, I imagined the couple of weeks after getting a deal would be spent lying around on the beach and drinking piña coladas. Well let me be the first to say that, in my case at least, that’s definitely not true.

In fact, in a way, it’s kind of anticlimactic. You wait, and wait, and dream, and wish. Then, bam! It finally happens, and . . . nothing. Life goes on. You don’t get the advance check in the mail for months typically. You don’t get flown out to wine and dine with the publisher.

You wake up. You go to work, you check in with your agent, and you wait. It’s even kind of tough to write, because your mind is still focused on the book you finally sold.

Fortunately, things are starting to move again.

In the last week, I got an awesome bunch of books and a Harper Collins water bottle from my publisher, I got my edit letter for Grimville, and I had a chance to meet my amazing editor, Andrew Harwell in person. We had lunch, talked books and writing, hung out, and , well . . . This can probably say it better than me.

Yep, good times!

Tomorrow I’ll post about getting an edit letter!

Getting the Right Agent

2011-08-03T17:53:00.001-06:00

My senior year in high school, I asked a girl to Prom. I know, not exactly earth-shattering news. She said yes, which was slightly more earth shattering. Then I discovered she had said yes to at least two other guys—which was seriously earth-shattering. To me at least.

I’m not sure how the other two guys reacted when they discovered this news. Who knows? She was cute. We had been co-leads in Don’t Drink the Water, the school play the year before, so she was fairly popular. Maybe they figured they’d share their prize, or fight it out, or whatever.

For me—and for most people, I suspect—the response was really easy. I dumped her.

These days it seems like there is practically a new formal dance every month. But back in the day, Prom was it. Yeah, there was a Valentine's Day ~~Massacre~~ dance, and a Christmas dance, and the one where the girl asks you and you wear matching farmer clothes. But there was only one dance where you rented a tux, sometimes a limo, and made reservations at a fancy restaurant. Having already, rented the tux and all that stuff, it was a pretty big deal to be without a date that close to the dance. But I would rather have wasted the money than even considered going to a dance with the kind of girl who would do something like agreeing to go with three guys.

Finding an agent is kind of like asking a girl to prom. Or at least it would be if there were thousands of other people who all wanted to take the same girl to prom, and she was very picky, and you had to ask her out in writing with a self-addressed stamped envelope so she could send you a form rejection, or possibly even just assume the answer was no if you didn’t hear back by a certain date. Come to think of it, there probably were one or two girls like that in my high school.

Obviously this is an analogy done more for laughs than reality. True, agents are hard to get, and they are pretty picky, and most of the time—like the popular girl—they say no. But the difference is that if the girl agrees to go to prom with you, she isn’t committing to spend months and sometimes years on your behalf trying to advance your career with no guarantee of compensation unless she succeeds. And she isn’t putting her professional reputation (okay that sounds really bad in the prom date context!) on the line by agreeing to go out with you.

But one part of the analogy holds up surprisingly well. Most kids at my school wanted a date to the prom. And most writers want to get an agent. So much so, that just like a girl might say yes to a geeky guy like me just to have a date, many authors immediately accept the first offer of representation they get.

And a lot of times, that works out fine. Mostly because you generally ask someone you want to go out with on a date, and hopefully you are only querying agents you want to represent you. If that isn’t the case, (in either situation) you should be asking yourself why you are wasting both of your time.

But with all of that in mind, I can think of a half dozen authors off the top of my head whose first agent didn’t end up working out. Sometimes it was a real blow up—an agent that never submitted or didn’t return messages for weeks at a time, or was a complete scam. But most of the time, the differences were more subtle. Maybe the author started writing another genre or the agent stopped repping what the author wrote. Maybe they stopped seeing eye-to-eye on what the author was working on. Whatever the case, they reached a point where the relationship (because that’s what it is, no matter what the contract states) just quick working for one or both of them.

In my case, it was simply that I had started writing for MG/YA and at the time my agent wasn’t repping that age group. But having changed agents and seen other authors do the same, I’ve learned a few things I wish I had known when I first started out. And, being the all around nice guy that I am, I’m going to share them with you.

1) First and foremost do NOT query agents that don’t represent what you write. I remember being younger and dumber than I am now and reading that advice; then completely ignoring it. My thought process was, “Well the worst that can happen is they say no, right?”

Wrong. Yes it’s bad to waste your time and an agent’s time querying them with material they don’t represent. It’s rude—like going into a French restaurant and getting ticked off that they don’t serve Italian food. But, in my opinion, the worst thing that can happen is the agent loves your work so much that they agree to represent you.

Sounds crazy, I know. But if there is one thing I have learned about agents, it’s that a big part of their value is knowledge of the industry. Your agent could be the nicest person in the world, but if they don’t have their finger on the pulse of the genre and age group you are writing to, your chances for success go way, way down.

It’s not just knowing who to send what to. It’s understanding what is selling. It’s knowing who the best fit for your work is and how much is being paid for that kind of work. It’s the ability to tell you not only what house they are sending it to, but exactly which person and why. Trust me when I say that you are better off with no agent than one that doesn’t understand your space.

2) Without going into a lot of detail, my agent and I were having a conversation a couple of months ago. We weren’t disagreeing, but I was asking for clarification. He told me something that I have repeated multiple times since then. “I know you are focused on this one project. But I am focused on your career.”

It was just cool just to have an agent say refer to me and a “writing career” in the same sentence. Much more important than that, whether or not you ever become a full-time writer, you should be looking at your writing as a career. Do you want your life to be about hopping from one job to the next? Probably not. In the same way, your writing shouldn’t be about hopping from one book to the next. You need a direction, a plan. And who better than a great agent to help you focus on that plan?

I know, I know, the publishing world is changing almost daily. And there are plenty of people forecasting the fall of bookstores, publishers, and agents. Personally, I’m not buying it anymore than I bought the idea that all brick and mortar stores would be replaced by internet sites when I was the CEO of a an internet comparison shopping company.

Yes, things are changing. I won’t even pretend that I have the first clue how things will shake out as far as e-books vs. print books or book stores vs. shopping portals. I know that I will always go to book stores. I love them. I can never get out of a signing without buying several books.

But, personally, I’m not concerned about that. I believe a couple of things. Good stories will always have a home. People are going to be buying as many or more books than ever in whatever format. Publishers will adapt and succeed. Having a knowledgeable. industry savvy professional guiding you will continue to be invaluable. When you look for an agent, find one you want to guide your career. Not just sell your book.

3) If you are good enough to get one legitimate agent, you are good enough to get the right agent. Going back to the date analogy again, let’s say you have been waiting for a guy to ask you to prom. (I know that girls ask guys now, but stay with me) Instead of the guy you really want to go with, another guy asks you. He seems okay. He bathes more or less regularly. He either wears matching socks, no socks, or intentionally mismatched socks (‘cause that can be cool.)

What you have to ask yourself is are you the kind of person who is so desperate for a date that she will go with whoever asks? or are you going wait for Mr. Right? Ginger Clark over at Curtis Brown has a great blog post about what to do when you get an offer.

Notice that she says she expects you to ask questions and do research on her. Not she will suffer through it, or try not to be offended. E-X-P-E-C-T-S. Nowhere does she say she expects you to leap at the chance to have her. And she’s a great agent.

Why does she expect you to ask questions? For the same reason I got nervous when I interviewed a prospective employee and she didn’t ask me questions after I finished interviewing her. Do you really care that little about the person who will hold your career in his or her hands? Don’t you at least want to ask who they will send your work to? What they like about it? How they communicate with their authors? Maybe get a reference or two?

Let me repeat. If you are good enough to get one legitimate agent, you are good enough to get the right agent.

Before I ever pitched my YA novel, Demon Spawn (the novel I signed my agent with), I did a ton of research. I started by casting a wide net, then narrowed it down through blogs, interviews, a $20 Publisher Marketplace subscription, and Predators and Editors. I knew I wasn’t submitting to anyone I wouldn’t be willing to work with when I sent out my first query.

When I did get an offer, it was from an agent I would have been thrilled to death to work with. But before I signed with her, I did exactly what Ginger suggests. And guess what? I ended up having four awesome agents to choose from.

What finally sold me on Michael was that his authors love him. He knew right away who he would send to and how he would position my novel. And I loved his vision. I could absolutely have been happy with any of the four agents who offered to work with me. But the difference was that for me and my book, Michael was the right agent.

4) Lastly, let me say this. I completely understand the desire to self-publish. Obviously it has worked well for many authors. And if you choose to self-pub, I hope it works great for you. But even if you are wildly successful, there is still a very good chance that you will work with an agent at some point.

Is an agent a gatekeeper? I guess. In the same way that a prospective employer, or a future spouse, or a good friend, or a reader is. Like all of them, an agent has to choose who they will work with. But that is such a tiny part of what an agent is.

An agent is a counselor, helping you make good choices along your writing path. An agent is an editor telling you what works and what doesn’t when your best friends are afraid or unwilling to. An agent is an industry professional with access to other professionals in the field. An agent is a supporter, encouraging you when you think the whole world is out to get you. An agent helps you brainstorm the idea, write the book, make the initial sale, negotiate terms, make additional sales—of both additional books and movie rights, foreign rights, etc.And perhaps, most importantly, an agent is a visionary who will help you see the big picture when you are focused on the minutia of a single manuscript.

I know the publishing world (or not publishing world as is so often the case) is crazy. As writers we swing from high to low and back again in a matter minutes sometimes. Many of us have waited for an agent so long that as soon as one finally says yes, we want to snap them up before they can possibly change their mind.

Just remember that behind that scary title is a real person who wants you to succeed as much as you do. And the best way to make that happen is to be as sure as you can under the circumstances that you have made the best choice for both of you. Just like an agent can tell you that you are not the best fit for them, you can do your own homework and tell the agent they aren’t the best match for you.

And, in case you were wondering, yes, I did find another date to the prom.

I’m the goofy-looking guy with the long hair and mustache.

A Totally Random Story

2011-08-01T19:38:00.001-06:00

Okay, this really has nothing to do with anything, except that it made me smile (behind my hand), which probably says something bad about me.

A couple of weeks ago I was in church. (That’s not the bad part, so just stop right there.) Anyway, I was in church, and a little kid in front of me was playing with one of those board things that you lace a shoelace kind of string through. You know what I’m talking about, right? No?

Okay, it looks like this.

(Can I just say how hard it is to find a picture of a toy when you have no idea what it is called? You type in “board that you lace string through” and get a racy picture of some woman’s leg. GET BACK HERE YOU PERVS!)

(It appears the toy may or may not be called a “lacing board” for future reference)

Anyway, the kid, who looked about a year and a half old, was clearly confused on how to use his lacing boards. (See I can be taught.) He would lace his string through a couple of holes in one board. then start in on the holes of another board.

His mother kept unlacing the boards and showing him how to do it the way the toy was designed. But a couple of minutes later, he would pull the string out and start it his way again. Finally she gave up and let him do his thing.

I should have been listening to the speaker, but I kept finding myself distracted by what the kid was doing. After about fifteen minutes of studious work, he had managed to tie four boards and three laces into a device about three feet long.

Quietly, he dragged his creation out to the end of the bench, and, swinging like a pint-sized David about to slay Goliath, managed to hit a lady who looked a lot like this in the head.

Except that she wasn’t smiling like that after she got whapped in the noggin by a toddler with a lethal set of lacing board nunchucks.

Now I know you’re expecting some kind of writing-related message here. Surely I wouldn’t post a story like this simply for its deviant humor.

Okay, message for the day. Just because most of your friends or family think your story should go a certain way, doesn’t make it right. Stick to the vision in your head and maybe you’ll knock someone out. (Figuratively speaking.)

Does Anyone "Deserve" To Achive Their Dreams?

2011-07-30T19:37:00.006-06:00

It still feels like a dream. Hope it does for a long time.

It's been just over a week since I got the call, and, yeah, my head is still spinning. You dream of something for years. You come close more times than you want to count, and when it finally happens, it still comes as a total shock. Not that I believe for a second that the ride is anywhere close to over. The challenges are still ahead. This is one of those things where finally getting on the horse doesn't guarantee you anything but a chance to get out of the gate. Still lots of ways to fall off. But that discussion is for another day.

Today, I want to talk about the word "deserve." Since I posted about my book deal here, on Facebook, Twitter, and anywhere else I could call, text, or e-mail, I've received a ton of great responses. And trust me, each and every one of your comments has just made it that much better. The only thing better than getting great news is sharing that news with the friends who have encouraged you all along the way. I know for a fact that I would not have accomplished the things I have without such great friends.

One thing I've heard a lot from people is that they know how hard I've worked for this and that I deserve the success. I have worked hard. I won't deny that. My awesome wife, Jennifer, and I have done school assemblies too numerous to count, edited reams of paper, attended tons of conferences, classes, library events, and all that writelry jazz. And I have no doubt we'll be doing a lot more work to make Grimville Case Files a success. I am a firm believer if you want your dreams to come true, you have to be willing to put in the blood, sweat, and tears. The things we appreciate the most are the ones that we work the hardest to accomplish.

But the deserving part makes me a little bit nervous. I know what you mean. And I appreciate the thought. At the Whitney Awards this past spring, I saw several friends receive awards and thought, "Yay! That person really deserves that award." Not that the people who didn't win the awards were not deserving as well. But I really thought the books that won were some of the best I had read that year. They deserved to win because they were really well developed, the prose was excellent, and the editing was great.

But what does saying someone "deserves" to get a national deal mean? Is it saying you worked hard? Because lots of other people who have worked as hard or harder than I have haven't gotten a national book deal. Is it saying their writing is deserving? I've read lots of books that "deserved" to published and didn't. Is it like a kind of reward? Does that mean that people who haven't achieved that success yet are undeserving?

Here's my two cents.

First, I think it does take work to reach the point where you can achieve your dreams. I'm always amazed when someone whips out a first manuscript and sells it right away. I can tell you for a fact that I am a much better writer than I was ten years ago. The stuff I wrote back then did not deserve to get published. Sometimes even when it did get published. But I was determined to get better, and with lots of practice, classes, practice, books, practice, advice, and more practice, both my writing and plotting have improved. If you are willing to put in the effort to perfect your craft, you are more deserving than if you don't put in the effort.

Second, as most of you know, rejection sucks. No matter how much self confidence you have, how strong you think you are, having someone tell you that the art you worked so hard to create isn't good enough hurts like crazy. I've listened to or read a gazillion people talk about handling rejection, and it still sucks. But the people who succeed are the ones who somehow find a way to keep going. One of my favorite poems is The Race, about the kid who keeps falling and getting up. But I've played for years with a sequel called The Day After The Race. Because most of the falling and getting back up doesn't take place in front of the cheering crowds. It's just you, your closest friends, and maybe some family members. So if you've put in the work, and cried over the pain of rejection, maybe you do deserve to succeed.

Third, and this is the toughest part to swallow is that just because you deserve to succeed, doesn't mean you will right away. I can think of dozens of people just on this blog who deserve to live their dreams every bit as much or more than I do. If deserving was all that mattered most of my friends would be celebrating their own book deals right now. After you've perfected your craft, survived rejection after rejection, and persevered, it all comes down to a certain amount of pure dumb luck. Today, I happened to have an agent who recognized something I didn't and an editor with the same vision I had. Tomorrow it could be you.

Some of the best writing advice I ever received was from my first agent, Jacky Sach at Bookends Literary Agency. She told me that once you reach a certain point of writing and plotting skill, you become publishable. Then it's just a matter of continuing to write and submit until the right work gets in the hands of the right person at the right time. I think this advice applies whether you are seeking an agent, an editor, or self-publishing. The best don't always succeed first. But if they don't give up they will.

Since most of us here are storytellers or readers, let me give you a story example. Last week, my family and I went camping. As I walked around the lake, I saw lots of people fishing. Some of them had great gear and obvious experience. Others looked like it might have been their first time out. There were lots of people who appeared to have the right bait, the right equipment, and the right experience. They just happened to cast their lines into a spot where the fish weren't biting. Other people using exactly the same thing cast into a different spot and caught fish.

Do people deserve to live their dreams? Yeah, I think they do. But just because you haven't reached yours yet, doesn't mean you don't deserve to any less than someone who has. It just means you need to keep on casting. Sometime next week, I'll try to share my backstory with you, but suffice it for now to say that the book I just sold wasn't the first one my agent pitched. I started Zombie Kid first and it got a less than glowing review at an editor retreat. I took that to mean I should set it aside and work on something else.

The story I got my agent with was a YA title about a teenage demon who lives in Hell. I still love that story, and I think someday with rewriting it will get published. It would have been so easy to write off Zombie Kid. It would have been easy to decide I wasn't publishable when Demon Spawn didn't sell. But in reality, none of that was true. All I needed to do was cast different bait into a different spot in the lake.

Every time you sit down at the computer, every time you send off another query (or shudder, get another rejection) remind yourself that if you've put in the time and developed thick skin and polished your craft you do deserve to succeed. And you will. It's just a matter of time.

Yes, “That” Announcement

2011-07-28T16:12:00.001-06:00

I’m not going to be coy here. I’ve been waiting to make this announcement for nearly ten years. And yes it is the announcement almost every author dreams of making. If you’re a really bad person, (or have not read enough Curious George books to learn your lesson) you could skip to the bottom of this post. But humor me, and read this first. I promise I will keep it short.

Almost exactly ten years ago, I had a dream. The dream was that one day I would publish nationally. I have worked hard. I’ve learned so much. I’ve had two agents. I’ve come close more times than I can count. I’ve thought I had it made and seriously considered never writing again—and that was just in the last year alone.

I know you want to hear the news, but first, here’s what I’ve learned.

1) Never, ever, ever give up on your dream. There is always more you can learn, and when things feel the darkest is almost always when you are the closest to your destination.

2) Maybe somewhere, somehow, someone has done it without the help of friends, but I’ve never heard of them. I know that I absolutely could not have achieved my dream without the help of great friends including my family, my critique group, fellow authors, readers, many, many of you here on this blog, and my best friend in the world, my wife. When you are really depressed, friends make all the difference.

3) Patience is huge. No one likes to wait. I think it’s probably the biggest complaint of all authors. But one thing my agent told me recently is that it seems like the people who wait the longest end up getting success the quickest when it does happen. That was the case with me.

4) I totally respect people who decide to self-publish. It’s a different road that hopefully leads to the same place as taking the traditional route. But let me tell you, anyone who claims agents and editors are mean and looking to keep authors down is full of it. I love my agent, Michael Bourret, and I love every editor I’ve ever worked with. They have made me a better writer and maybe even a better person.

5) Finally, never underestimate the power of putting the next words on paper. The announcement I am about to make to you was not the first book my agent pitched. I’ll give you the full story in the weeks to come. But this happened because I was working on something entirely different while the book I thought would sell didn’t.

So here goes. Almost two years ago, I programmed my cell phone to play, “Back in Black” when my agent called me. Three cell phones and two books later, my cell phone finally rang. Of course when I answered, the annoyingly charming Michael spent ten minutes taking about my recent camping trip. Then he said, “Oh, by the way, I have some good news.” And yes it was the news I’ve been waiting all these years to hear.

My middle grade horror series, The Grimville Case Files had sold. Here’s the listing from Publishers Weekly.

Andrew Harwell at HarperCollins Children's Books has bought a new middle grade series, The Grimville Case Files. It stars three monster-obsessed boys who must solve "fiendishly funny" mysteries; the first in the series is scheduled for publication in spring 2013. Michael Bourret at Dystel and Goderich Literary Management brokered a three-book deal for North American rights.

My editor is the totally cool Andrew Harwell who you can follow on twiiter at @andrewasalways. My agent is the rocking Michael Bourret of Dystel and Goderich. The first book in the series comes out Winter of 2013. It’s called Zombie Kid, and it may be the funniest and scariest book I’ve ever written.

I promise to have more info on Farworld book three soon, but for right now, I am celebrating my head off. Thanks for hanging with me all this time. I couldn’t have done it without you.

This paragraph is for all you bad bad people who skipped straight to the end of the post. Go back and read from the top. Those of you who got here win my undying respect and a virtual pat on the back. That is all!

Who do you write for?

2011-07-15T13:15:00.002-06:00

(I’m going to be on vacation until next Thursday, so I am posting now before we leave. See you after a few days of tent and hot dog life.)

First, I won’t give away any spoilers, but let me just say that HP7P2 was fantastic! Everything I could have hoped for and more. Not only was it a great film adaptation, but it made me want to go back and read book 7 again, just to re-experience some things. I’m also curious if the movie actually didn’t a better job of clarifying a few points. This is one I will absolutely see in theaters again. And can I also say what a kick I get out of midnight showings? It reminds me of how we used to go out at midnight to buy the new HP book as a family and then spend the next four or five days reading together every spare minute. Good times!

Second, maybe it’s just me, but I laughed my head off at this article on the most awkward place editors and agents have received pitches. The hotel one would have completely freaked me out!

And now with appetizers and salad out of the way, let’s jump to the main course. (Can you tell it’s lunch time, and I have food on the brain?)

Today I thought I’d tackle a question that gets brought up at a lot of author panels. Who do you write for, yourself or your readers?

I’d love to be able to say that I lock myself in a dark office (but not too dark or I couldn’t see the keyboard) and write purely for myself. It sounds so cool. So noble. And I absolutely believe that lots of people do write for themselves. I’m just not one of them.

When I write, it’s all about the readers. If I write a funny scene, I’m thinking about how it will make them laugh. When I write action scenes, I’m intentionally trying to elicit an “Oh my gosh!” or two. When I reach the aha moment, it’s all about having the reader put down the book just before the big reveal and go, “Aha, I know who did it.”

As a kid, I used to tell stories. Have you ever seen the movie, “Stand by Me,” where a group of boys goes in search of a the body of a missing boy? Remember the scene where the main character tells the story about the pie eating contest while the boys are sitting around the campfire?

That was totally me. Except the stories I made up were usually action adventure—albeit often kind of silly adventures with titles like, “Captain Weenie and the Little Purple Man.”

The whole goal of my stories was to keep the audience amazed and glued to the story. When I got done, the best thing I could hear was, “Tell us another one!”

That’s still how I feel about writing. I could write without getting paid for it. I could write without getting published. I could write even if my sole readership was a half dozen friends. But I would have a really, really hard time writing if I was the only person who would ever read my story.

How about you? Who do you write for?

More Net, Less Work

2011-07-14T11:47:00.001-06:00

Right around the time when personal computers were busy becoming a reality in schools and homes, (shortly after the dinosaurs went extinct for my younger readers) I joined the cross country team at a community college in Saratoga, CA. I say joined, but as I recall, it was more like misled. It’s been a few years, but I recall thinking I was signing up for a cross country course to complete some P.E. requirement.

As it turns out, West Valley College had an incredibly good CC team. They had won the community college state championship something like twenty years straight. I liked running, and had actually done a couple of years of CC in high school. But never anything like this. I knew I was in a little over my head when one of the first practices was ten miles of five/sevens. One mile run at a five minute pace; the next at a seven minute pace to “rest.” And that was an easy workout.

Needless to say, I was seriously trashed in every practice, and meets were even worse. I remember buying a big gulp, a 64 oz Sprite, and a bottle of Gatorade after school every day and swigging the three drinks down in a bizarre icy, sweet, salty mixture. I also recall waking up night after night with terrible cramps in my calves.

I’m not in this picture. I would have been way down around the corner!

It was seriously trial by fire.

But what I also remember was running a 10k that Halloween at under a six minute pace. Something I had never done before. What I discovered was that hanging around people who were really good at what they did, forced me to become better. I not only raised my goals as I tried to keep up with them, it also made me see that real people I knew personally were accomplishing things I thought were out of reach.

This same concept applies to a lot of other things in life—including writing. You hear a lot about networking. Sometimes it refers to getting to know someone who knows someone. Like, “You should really go meet Tiffany. Her editor is here at the conference and maybe you will get a chance to mention your WIP.” Or, “Mike is going to tell his agent about me.” This is also know in certain circles as schmoozing. Some people are better at it than others.

There is also social networking. You know, the woman who has 72,000 Facebook friends, 5,000 blog followers, and twitters, podcasts, and newsletters her way into the homes (if possibly not the hearts) of anyone and everyone who might buy her books.

Those both have their places, (No, I won’t elaborate on where those places might be) and they have been written about quite a bit. But the networking I want to focus on has much more to do with building a net of friends and far less to do with working.

Ten years ago I joined a critique group. At the time, no one had really heard of any of us. Yesterday, I had dinner with that group at a fun little Thai restaurant in American Fork. Over the course of the dinner we discussed an upcoming national release, well known agents, submissions, acceptances, foreign rights, movie options—all from this small group of writers.

I forget the numbers, but together we’ve published something like fifty or sixty books, won multiple awards, have at least three literary agents that I know of, have written movie scripts, nonfiction, novels for all ages . . . you get the point. It’s fun to tell people about my group, because they usually say something like, “Wow! How did you manage to line up such a group of successful authors?”

The truth of the matter is that we weren’t successful when we met. We were just a bunch of writers, trying to get better with each other’s help. I guess you could credit luck or serendipity or something for the fact that all of us have published books since those early days. But I don’t buy it. I think it has much more to do with the net we have created.

Imagine a big rope net for a minute. It can be useful in a couple of ways. For one thing, it can catch you when you fall. For another thing, it gives you handholds to climb. I like to view friendships that way. The great thing about finding and keeping good friends is that when you are struggling, they are there to support you. More than once I’ve been cheered and buoyed up by my friends when I’ve had a writing setback.

In addition, spending time with people who are accomplishing what you hope to seems to make it that much more attainable. You know the old saying, “Success breeds success.” I firmly believe that is true when it comes to writing friends. It’s easy to see a stranger get a big book deal and think, “Oh, he must have known someone.” Or, “She’s so much better than I ever could be.”

But when it’s the person you’ve edited, critiqued, encouraged, given stupid little joke holiday gifts to, and just rubbed shoulders with, it lights a fire inside you. You realize that the success you are yearning for is maybe not out of reach. That person may be a rung or two higher than you at the moment, but they are on the exact same net. You only need to reach up and pull to get there too.

A couple of years after I joined my critique group, I met another friend. He and I had each published a couple of books at the time. But of us with with very small Utah publishers. His was slightly smaller than mine, so he was impressed with what I’d done. The truth of the matter though was that we both had a dream of being full time writers. I say a dream, but it was more than that. It was a belief. Over the years, we’ve taken turns pulling each other up that net. Not so much by introducing each other to agents and editors—although there has been some of that. But more by encouraging and challenging each other.

Most of you probably know the person I’m talking about is James Dashner. Just before he left for a trip to Georgia, he sent me a text about a manuscript I currently have on submission. It was short and to the point. “It’s gonna happen!!!” To me that note sums up what writing friends are all about. They are the ones who keep telling you, It’s gonna happen, until you believe it yourself.

You can spend all your time chasing after the newest rising star. I’ve spent plenty of time reading blogs of successful writers, trying to vicariously experience book deals, tours, foreign rights, and all the other glamorous aspects of being a writer. But there’s something special about seeing friends like James, Rob Wells, Ally Condie, Lisa Mangum and others succeed from the ground up.

If you are committed to becoming a successful writer, one of the best pieces of advice I can give you is to find other writers with the same goals and become friends with them. Start building your net now and see how much it helps you climb and pads your falls!

Finding Your Happy Place

2011-07-08T22:53:00.001-06:00

I know you are all like, “What? Two blog posts in less than one week? Who is this imposter and what has he done with Jeff Savage?” Rest assured, it really is me. The thing is, after my last post, everyone commented on how much I depressed them. And while that may be good for certain pharmaceutical manufacturers, I hate it. The last thing I want to do is have a depressing blog.

So here I am again. Not to do some kind of rah-rah post where I tell you how great you are and how you can do anything. (Although you probably can do just about anything if you want it enough.) That would just be too weird after my last post. I think I might come across as some sort of emo cheerleader. “Rah, rah, rah. You can do it! But you won’t make any money. Boo hoo!”

Instead what I want to do is discuss the ups and downs of being a writer and how you find your happy place.

I could have sworn there was a Disney movie that talked about finding your “Happy Place.” But either I am a really bad searcher or this is no such movie. Br’er Rabbit has his laughing place. Winnie the Pooh has his thoughtful spot. Disneyland is apparently, “The Happiest Place on Earth.” At least until your fourth day of waiting in long lines, being hot, and paying too much for food. Then it sort of becomes a cranky place. Which is why at that point I bring my laptop, grab a table in New Orleans Square near an electrical outlet, and eat pastries while I write all afternoon. Then I find my inner happy place again. But no happy place movie I could find.

So I’ll do do without the “Disney Movie Analogy” (DMA for those of you in the know.) Instead, I’m going to reference an awesome presentation I saw by a wonderful author and genuinely one of the nicest people I know, Aprilynne Pike.

How can you help but liking someone who sits on random stairways in a neon blue tutu asking passersby, “Hey, buddy, need any writing advice?” And if you haven’t read her YA romance series Wings, you are definitely missing out.

Okay now that I have offended Aprilynne, and hopefully made it up to her. (Did I mention what a great writer she is? And totally hot?) Let me try and get back to my point. At an ANWA conference (this one, not this one, and definitely not this one) a couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to attend tutu girl’s class.

She had about seven pieces of paper that she taped to the wall. I don’t have the exact notes but they ranged from something like, “I am the worst writer who ever existed, and I should never put pen to paper again,” to, “I am the greatest writer ever and I have nothing left to learn.”

Aprilynne talked about how over the course of her writing career, sometimes just days apart, she ranged from one emotion to the other.

I just signed with one of the most successful agents around. I am the greatest writer. Even she couldn’t sell my first book. I am the worst writer. I hit the New York Times bestseller list with my first published novel. I have nothing to learn. I just got hammered in my 13 page editorial letter. I should never put pen to paper.

Through the class she gave example after example of the ups and downs of being even a NYT bestselling author, and how both extremes are equally bad for you.

When you get too down on yourself, you lose the confidence necessary to create your best work. You start to doubt your instincts and instead of going with what you feel, you start to write for someone else. Or, even worse, give up writing altogether.

On the other end of the spectrum, having so much confidence that you stop learning can be just as crippling. I overheard a moderately successful author once say that he no longer needed writing advice because he was too good for that. I cringed when I heard his words and I still cringe now. You might have so much experience and talent that it’s harder to find information which is helpful to you. Or you might have learned a lot of the basic information that is taught in many writing conferences. But the best authors I know are always learning and improving. They are always open to advice, whether they choose to take it or not.

Aprilynne’s point was that the best place for an author is probably somewhere around, “I am a really good author, and I deserve to get published. But I still have more I can learn.” That’s the happy place you need to reach.

So how does that apply to my earlier post about making enough money to write fulltime?

Let’s say you never read my royalty post. On the one hand, you’d still have the starry-eyed optimism that publishing a book would set you up financially for the rest of your life. Optimism is a good thing. It’s what keeps us all writing and striving for success. On the other hand, when you published your first book and discovered the truth, it might devastate you. You might quit your job as soon as you got an agent, or even before. When you realized what a bad financial mistake you had made, it might be too late to change your plans.

Now you know.

It’s okay if your initial response was, “Wow, that totally sucks! I thought it was much easier to make lots of money writing.” There’s nothing wrong at all with being bummed out that the world of publishing is a tough business. But the key is to get over the depression and take a look at the world with new eyes and additional knowledge.

Okay, royalties don’t work exactly the way I thought they did. I now have more information to plan my next move. Maybe you decide to focus less on money and more on writing a great story. After all, that’s something you can control. Maybe you decide that rather than quitting your day job after one book, you might need to wait until three or four. Maybe you come up with a different marketing strategy, a different publishing strategy, or a different timing strategy.

The key is to avoid extremes. Don’t let the steepness of the mountain keep you from climbing it. Instead, use the information about the geography to attempt the ascent better prepared. The fact of the matter is this. Not everyone who writes a book will become a fulltime writer. But everyone who doesn’t write a book will absolutely not. You know the rules. You understand the game. Thicken your skin, focus your energy, and resolve that you are going to be the best writer you can be. Let everything else work out however it will, while you control the things you can.

Okay, so maybe that was a little bit of cheering. So sue me. At least I don’t look like this guy.

Fulltime Writer—Reality or Myth?

2011-07-07T13:18:00.001-06:00

Along with, “Where do you get your ideas?”, “What are you working on these days?”, and “How do you get published?” the question I seem to get asked the most often when someone discovers I am a published author is, “Do you write fulltime?”

Those of you that have followed my blog for a while or who have studied up on the subject probably know how difficult it is to make a living writing novels. I have done it off and on. Sometime by choice, sometimes not. (Actually, it’s always by choice. Sometimes it’s mine, sometimes it’s my ex-boss’s.)

I’m not sure most people realize exactly how hard it is, though, and why. So today, boys and girls, break out your calculators, it’s math time!

Let’s start with the basics. Since not everyone knows how an author gets paid, we’ll do a couple of definitions.

Royalties—This is basically a fancy word for the money the publisher pays you. It is typically a percentage of sales. It can be based on retail (the price listed on the book) or net (what the publisher actually charges the bookstore.) Hardback rates are higher than trade paperback which are higher than mass market paperbacks. You can also get royalties from movie rights, foreign rights, etc. (See below)

Advance—This is what the publisher pays the author up front. The idea behind advances used to be that you would get about one year’s royalties (based on what the publisher thinks they can sell.) Some publishers have been lowering advances, and lots of smaller publishers don’t pay any advance at all. As an author, you don’t start getting royalties until you’ve “earned out” your advance. More on this later.

Foreign rights: When your publisher buys your books, they are actually buying rights to your work. This means they have the right to publish in certain formats and certain places. If you sell world rights, they have the right to sell and publish your book anywhere. If your sell US rights only, your agent can then sell additional foreign rights to publishers in different countries.

Movie rights: Same as above except instead of the rights to a certain country, this is the right to make a movie based on your book. Typically these are broken into options and actual rights. An option (often about 10% of the rights, but can be much more or less) gives the buyer the option to try and get the movie green lit. The option is usually for 12 or 18 months. If a company options your book and gets the funding to make the movie, then they exercise the option and pay you the rest of the money.

Agent Commission: This is the fee you pay your agent for selling various rights. usually it is 15% for US rights and 20% for foreign rights (split between the US agent and whoever they use for foreign rights.)

Taxes: I’ll bet you already know all about these. And if you are too young to have paid taxes yet, just wait!

Okay, with all the legal mumbo jumbo out of the way. let’s talk numbers. Let’s imagine you’ve just written a great vampire robot urban dystopian fantasy romance. You sent it out to only the very best agents, and, of course, all of them beg you for it. You sign with the top agent and twenty-four hours later, she sells a three book deal for six figures per book. (The aforementioned example may be a slight exaggeration, but we’re thinking big right?)

Yay!

You call your father-in-law and tell him, “In your face, Pops! I DO deserve your daughter!” Then you tweet, blog, facebook, and e-mail everyone you know with the message, “That’s right homey. I’m the real deal now,” and immediately begin pricing boats and lakefront cabins.

But hold the phone. Before you get ahead of yourself, maybe you should do just a little bit of math, to figure exactly how much money you are really making here.

Let’s start with the basic deal. Three books with a $100,000 advance each. Now, not to bring you down or anything. But this size of advance for a new author who isn’t already a household name is ultra rare. Not that it can’t happen because it does. But most advances look a lot more like this. The average advance, when there is an advance at all, is closer to $5,000 than $100,000. But again, let’s go with the big advance, because that’s what most authors dream about.

So great, 300k. That’s a lot of money. Before you get to spend it, though, we need to deduct a few things. Right off the top, your agent gets 15%. No problemo. She deserves it. She got you this great deal. And hey, what’s $45,000 between friends?

So we’re now down to $255k. Still a lot of money. But don’t forget Uncle Sam (If you don’t live in the US, it might be Aunt Coroline or whatever, but taxes are still taxes.) Ballpark of what you will pay in taxes is 30% of the $255,000 or $76,500. Ouch! That’s a pretty big bite.

But, hey, you still have $178,500, right? Maybe you get a slightly smaller boat and the cabin will have to be a trailer for now. But still, you can tell your family of Doubting Thomases that you are a full time writer.

Except the thing is that you don’t exactly get all that money up front. Best case, your contract looks something like this:

1/3 of your money on signing.

1/3 of your money on acceptance.

1/3 of your money on publication.

Because you are signing a contract for all three books, you get 1/3rd of all books right away (in publisher speaking this is probably 3 months.) So your first check will be for about $60,000 after agent commission and taxes. That’s going to have to last you until your book one manuscript is edited and officially accepted. Then you get the 1/3rd of book one only. That’s another $20,000.

So, yeah. This year, you are probably good to go, with $80,000 in your pocket after taxes.

How does next year look?

Part of that depends on when your book comes out. There’s a pretty good chance your book will be released more than a year after you sign your contract. So let’s say you sign your contract in November and your release date is a year from the following spring. That means you won’t get any more book one money for 18 months or so. The good news is that between now and then you will turn in book two. The bad news is you already got 1/3rd of your book 2 money.

So year two revenue looks something like this:

1/3 of book two money, or $19,833 after taxes.

Wait, really? Is that all? How am I supposed to live on less than $20,000? have you seen my boat payment? What if my father-in-law finds out?

Hopefully there is some foreign rights money coming in. But those often tend to look like $1,233.00 foreign rights Poland. And they take a long time to get. UK and Germany can be pretty big.And there is the possibility of movie rights. But it’s entirely possible that your first two years of income after taxes will be well under $130,000. And to make things even nastier, many book contracts are now spread over over four payments that can take as long as five years to pay out, with things like 25% on hardback release and 25% on paperback.

And that’s on a BIG deal. Let’s say you only sign a one book deal. Now your first two years look like this:

Year 1: $39, 600

Year 2: $19, 800

And if your advance is $20,000 instead of $100,000 . . . well you get the picture. And then there’s insurance, marketing, travel . . .

Is there any shred of good news here? Well yes there is. Remember that advance thing? Once you earn enough royalties to earn that out, you start getting more money. Let’s say your advance on book one is $25,000. And let’s further say that you earn about $2 per hardback. If your books takes off and you sell 50,000 books, you actually earn $75,000 (before taxes and commissions <grin>)

If you continue to write books and if those books keep selling well, eventually you can get a nice little income stream flowing in. Add movie rights, foreign rights, audio books, e-books, and it gets even better.

The fact of the matter is that most writers have a day job. There are a few fortunate authors who can make a full time living writing novels, but it’s not easy and it almost never happens overnight. Those rare instances you hear about where the author gets a seven figure advance do happen, but they are so rare as to fall into the winning the lottery type of odds.

So what do you do? Well first, write because you love to write not because you need to make a quick buck, lost your job, or dream of a cabin on a lake. Second, set your goals and work toward them. It may be true that only a few authors can write fulltime, but the very fact that some do means you have a chance. If that’s what you want, go for it.

And if your father-in-law gives you any crap about how little your writing pays, ask him how much he makes from his hobbies. “How’s that whole golf pro thing working out for you Dad?”

Writing may not be the best paying gig in the world. But the very fact that someone is willing to pay you is pretty dang cool. Though not quite as cool as a huge advance (in case any editors are out there reading this.)

Coloring Your World

2011-06-28T20:21:00.001-06:00

First of all, let me say how nice it has been to get back to blogging and to hear from so many of my good friends. It’s great to have your friendship and support.

Author and previously agent, Nathan Bransford, had a great post yesterday on choosing between first person and third person. His take was one I’ve never heard worded quite that way.

“The really compelling first person narrators are the ones where a unique character is giving you their take on something that is happening, and yet it's clear to the reader that it's not the whole story. You're getting a biased look at the world, which is central to the appeal of the first person narrative.”

A biased look. Great angle. You color your story by the bias through which it is viewed. This can be especially effective if your main character’s views will change over time.

My first thought was, “Man, that Bransford dude is one smart guy.” I really enjoy his blog. Followed closely by, “I wonder what other ways we color our worlds in the stories we write.”

By coloring, I’m referring to what sets apart the way I might present a story from the way you might. At first blush this sounds like I am talking about voice. And voice is one way you can color your story. But it’s more than that. Imagine that you and I come up with exactly the same story idea at exactly the same time. If the story was really unique, we might have a problem. But the truth is that what we would end up with would probably be so different that both books could be published and come across completely differently. You can’t copyright an idea, but you can absolutely copyright the end result.

So what colors the way you write your story and I write mine? One is how you use the language. I recently read two books: I Am Number Four and The Book Thief. The word choices each author makes, the sentence structure, the chapter length, are worlds apart. Consider these two samples.

From I am Number Four

“As is the case with most high schools, there are crowds of kids hanging around outside. They’re divided into their clicks, the jocks and the cheer leaders, the band kids carrying instruments, the brains in their glasses with their textbooks and Blackberries, the stoners off to one side, oblivious to everyone else.”

From The Book Thief

“Those first few months were definitely the hardest.

Every night Liesel would nightmare.

Her brother’s face.

Staring at the floor.

She would wake up screaming in her bed, screaming and drowning in the flood of sheets.” .

There are so many different things going on here. Literary vs. straight forward. Past tense vs. present. First person vs. a combination of first and third. A teen age narrator from another planet compared to the narrator being Death.

Look at how much slang the first section uses, and how much the author assumes we know about high school. You know a lot about the protagonist just from the assumptions he makes.

Then look at the second passage. Nightmare used as a verb. The sentence fragments. The metaphor. It’s almost like reading poetry.

Some of these choices are made because of the story. Book Thief wouldn’t have been the novel it was if it wasn’t written in a very literary, poetic voice. It creates a certain flavor. Number Four required a more contemporary style.

Another possibility is that the authors chose to write the kinds of books they did, because of the style they felt most comfortable writing in.

Before you start writing the story you want to tell, you need to ask yourself.lots of questions.

What will my setting be? Number Four takes place in a small Ohio town. Thief in Nazi Germany.

What time period? Present? The future? The past?

Who will my characters be and what role will they play? I recently helped a friend with his newest novel. One of the things I pointed out to him was that his characters sounded too much the same. Here are lines of text from my latest work, Zombie Kid. See how much you can tell about them just from the way they talk.

“It wouldn’t take me that long to put on my grandma’s underwear, and she’s got pantyhose you could park a Volkswagen inside.”

and

“It is your amulet. But it’s not a gris-gris. According to the author, the necklace you’re wearing is over a thousand years old. It was created for an African bokor.”

The kind of words your character chooses, the way they view the world and react to it all color your story.

What audience am I writing for? Younger readers will typically want shorter chapters, more action, more obvious humor, and less “dense” paragraphs.

What are the expectations of my genre? If you are writing a YA romance, you are going to spend much more time evaluating members of the opposite sex (Is he cute? Is he weird—in a good or bad way? Is he taken?) than you would in action adventure. The very fact that you comment on whether or not the guy is desirable colors your story in a different than if you don’t notice that.

Think of your story as a room. If you just start buying furniture and flinging it around, you might end up with a good room. But if you decide in advance what you want the room to look and feel like—its personality if you will—before you start shopping your odds of creating something wonderful are much better.

(This person said, “I want my living room to look like Supercuts!” Actually now that I look closer, maybe it is Supercuts.)

Before you write your story ask yourself lots of questions. Decide what kind of feelings you want your readers to experience. Then work on choosing the right POV, setting, pacing, voice, and writing style that will accomplish your goals.

And have fun!

Misc. Stuff

2011-06-21T12:37:00.001-06:00

It’s not raining, snowing, or under 60 degrees, which this year in Utah makes it a great day! It’s been awhile since I’ve given you all an update on things, so here goes:

A couple of weeks ago, Jen and I were invited up to have dinner with a truly awesome bunch of writers at Writing Snippets. Yummy food and great company. Afterward, I sat down (I guess I was actually sitting down already, but you know what I mean) and recorded three 30 minute podcasts with them. The first on writing thrillers and the second on self promotion can be heard here. On of my favorite questions they asked me was about networking. I told them I think it’s very important, but for a different reason than you might think. Go listen to it. The wonderful ladies were awesome!
Last fall I was able to have dinner with an amazing group of kids. Cassie Cox invited me to join what she called “the best high school in Utah.” These were a group of kids who have overcome so incredible obstacles to be where they are. They had to earn the right to meet with a group of authors by reading our books. It was a really wonderful night. You can read about it here.

What made it even more wonderful was that I received an e-mail a couple of months ago. This is from a follow up story this spring.
“After meeting Jeff Scott Savage at the first authors’ dinner, student Erik Silsby wrote an essay about him for a state essay contest. He was inspired to write about

Savage because he appreciated his genuineness.

Silsby’s essay won the contest and he’s now competing in a national field with thousands of other high school writers. He was thrilled to meet more authors this spring. “
That’s Erik talking to Sara Zarr.

People ask what the best part about writing for kids is. There’s your answer. Congratulations Erik!
On the writing front, I am just finishing the second Fourth Nephite novel (written as Jeffrey S Savage.) Hopefully shortly after I turn that in, I will know more about the next Farworld book. No news about Demon Spawn a this point, but I do have a new middle grade novel, Zombie Kid, going on submission this week.
Finally, if you are anywhere in the Utah County area, mark your calendars for Saturday Aug 13th. I will be doing an author event with the following authors at Pioneer Books in Orem. Don’t have all the details yet, but rumor is it will involve games, balloons, face painting, and Dutch oven cobbler.

Nichole Giles   www.nicholegiles.blogspot.com

          Author of “Sharp Edge of the Knife” and “Mormon Mishaps and Mischief”

Cindy Hogan   http://cindymhogan.blogspot.com

          Author of “Watched”

Heather Justesen
www.heatherjustesen.blogspot.com
          Author of “Blank Slate,” “Rebound,” and “The Ball’s in Her Court”

Tristi Pinkston   www.tristipinkston.com
Author of The Secret Sisters Mysteries, debuting her latest novel “Hang ‘em High,” book three in the series

One Piece of Advice

2011-06-17T19:51:00.001-06:00

The other night I was trying to add up all the events I’ve done. Well over 400 school visits, over two hundred book signings, probably about fifty writing classes or conferences. Lots of library visits. It’s been a really fun time.

I get asked lots of questions at these types of events: How do you get your ideas? How do you get published? Have you met other authors? How much money do you make? What’s your favorite book, color, ice-cream, football team?

I think the question I get asked the most though, is “What piece of advice would you give beginning authors?” I’m sure my answer to that question has changed over the years. But for at least the last five years, my answer has always been the same.

Are you ready?

Here it is.

Give yourself permission to make mistakes.

Not what you were expecting? It’s not the popular advice. People want to hear about query letters. They want to know the one secret to get an agent or a publisher. They want to know about character bibles and villains and dialog and plotting.

Don’t get me wrong. those are all important. Unbelievable dialog pulls your readers out of the story. A good character bible can be key in making sure your protagonist’s growth works for the reader. Understanding how to write a good query letter can mean the difference between getting an agent and not getting one. But before all of that, you have to give yourself permission to screw up.

Think back to when you were first learning to draw. Did you paint a land scape or the Mona Lisa the first time out? Nope. You did stick figures,. Then cows that looked like balloons with toothpicks sticking out of them. (Mine still do, by the way.) Then houses with curly-q smoke coming out of the chimneys.

Wring is a learned process, just like riding a bike or baking a great cake or playing a musical instrument. Of course when you pick up a guitar for the first time, you can barely press the strings against the frets. You don’t stop playing just because you don’t sound like Jimmy Hendrix the first time out. (I know all my readers under twenty are going Jimmy who? Look him up. It’s good for your education.)

But for some reason when you sit down to write, you expect your words to flow just like the last book you read by your favorite author. And when they don’t, you decide you must suck, and you quit writing. Instead, when you sit down to write, give yourself permission to stink. Give yourself permission not to be quite as good as Shakespeare, or Poe, or King, or Meyers, or Rowling, or Riordan, or whoever your favorite author is. Give yourself permission to finish a story even if it’s lame. Or to not finish it and to move on to something else. It’s all good, because the more you practice, the better you will get.

Here are five things to remember when you start to think you can’t write. Print these out and put them right above your desk.

Thing 1--Every single author I’ve ever met, at some point thinks that their current work in progress is crap. Everyone and every book. They just do. What makes them different from everyone else is that they keep writing. If you have a part of your story that isn’t working, stick in a note that says, “Something cool happens here.” Then move on to the part that works. Eventually you will decide what goes there. But do not stop just because it feels like your writing is bad. You can always come back and fix it later.

Thing 2—Did someone tell you they didn’t like what you wrote? Feel like that makes you a bad writer? As of this very moment, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone has 76 one star reviews on Amazon. Pride and Prejudice has over 10,000 one star reviews on Goodreads—and that poor lady is dead for heaven’s sake! Twilight? Over 50,000 people rated Stephanie Meyers first book worthy of only one star out of five. Here’s a quote from a reader review of the first Percy Jackson book. “Totally disliked it. To me one of the worst books I've ever read.”

So, someone didn’t like your book? Consider yourself in the company of some of the most successful writers in the business and keep writing.

Thing 3—You WILL get better. I promise. The more you write, the better you become. #1 NYT bestselling author, Brandon Sanderson, wrote eight complete—long—novels before trying to publish his first one. A great writer gets better with every book, story, or essay they write.So will you.

Thing 4—When you read a published book, it has typically gone through at very least five complete edits. A story is like a diamond. At first, it’s rough, and bumpy, and kind of ugly. But the more you polish, cut, and shape, the better it becomes. You should never compare your first draft to the final draft of a book you go out and buy. It’s like comparing apples to . . . taxicabs. (Okay, feel free to replace this with your own analogy. What do you want? It’s my first draft.)

Thing 5—And this may be the most inspiring of all. Jeff Savage writes books and gets them published. Trust me, if I can do it, you absolutely, positively can do it.

So right now, I want you to say this out loud. “I hereby, as of this second forward, give myself permission, authority, and complete and total clearance to write unmitigated, uncensored, unimpressive crap.”

Isn’t that nice? Isn’t it freeing to not have the pressure to create something perfect, poignant, and publishable the first time out? And the best thing of all is that once you give yourself that freedom, you’ll discover the most of the stuff you are writing is actually pretty good when you go back and read it.

Reality Vs. The Illusion of Reality

2011-06-12T11:09:00.001-06:00

Hey readers and writers, I know it’s been (quite!) a while since my last post. A combination of the day job flying me all over the country and me writing head-down to make some deadlines got me off track. But I’ve dropped a couple of other projects and hope to focus more exclusively on my own blog. So with that mea culpa out of the way, let’s talk about what makes books appear real to readers and how authors can try to achieve this reality in a way that may seem upside down at first.

Last week I was talking with an author who is writing her first mystery. She’s a good writer, but she was confused by a reader’s comment. The reader told her that having her heroine walk into a dangerous situation (abandoned building, spooky house, etc.) was unbelievable.

“I don’t get it,” the author said. “Isn’t that what always happens in scary movies or mystery novels? The protagonist always goes into the spooky house, even if it’s a bad idea. Why doesn’t my chapter work?”

Here’s where we run into an interesting dilemma I call the illusion of reality. As writers, we sometimes have a reader say, “I don’t believe that last scene. It just wasn’t realistic.” Often we become defensive and respond with, “Not only is it realistic, it actually happened to me/my mom/my best friend/the squirrel that keeps stealing my dogs food.” The problem is that what we are hearing and what the reader is really saying are two different things.

Let me try and illustrate this with an example from a different media. Dave Cebrowski, a friend of mine who actually makes a cameo appearance in a couple of my Shandra books, has a recording studio in the basement of his house. One day as we were carpooling to work, he was telling me about creating sound effects for a new video game. Part of the job included recording the sound of a gun being shot.

This would seem like a pretty basic job. get one of those cool water tanks you see in all the CSI TV shows, fire a gun into it, and collect the round for ballistics. Sorry, that was my inner David Caruso coming out. (Not a pretty sight!) What I meant to say was record the sound. Unfortunately that doesn’t work. because when most people hear the recorded sound of gun shot, it doesn’t sound real to them. In order to create a “believable” sound Dave combines things like breaking wood, a melon being smashed, etc. That is he creates a sound people believe is real.

It is true people do dumb stuff all the time. Just watch a few hundred stupid people YouTube clips. Or better yet, don’t and take my word for it. They try to jump over moving cars, they play with poisonous reptiles, and yes, they walk into abandoned warehouses late at night. So what your reader is really saying is not “this couldn’t happen,” but “You didn’t find a way to make me believe this would happen. Especially with a character you want me to like.”

Writers almost always find themselves in a situation where they must get one of their characters to do something that is a bad idea, or at least out of character. Our job is to create enough justification in the mind of the character to keep the reader from being pulled out of the story.

For example, in one of my recent works in progress I needed to get the main character—a eleven year old boy—to go into a swampy woods filled with alligators behind his great aunt’s house. Earlier in the book, he had a scare standing near the woods, and his parents made him promise not to go in. Now anyone who’s done much reading knows that an eleven year old and a creepy woods must come together at some point in the book. It’s like a law of nature or something. But how do we make the reader believe it?

There are lots of different tricks an author can use. Put something in the woods the character really needs. Have something else drive him, or lead him, into the woods, Have him go into the woods as a way or proving something, getting back at someone, etc. These are all motivations. Readers want to believe in the story. You just need to give them a way to. They want the character to go into the woods. What they don’t want is to feel like they are being manipulated by the author. They can’t be made to feel like the character is only going into the woods because you needed them to.

Another great tool is to have the character think exactly what the reader is. Just as the reader is thinking, “You better not go into those woods. It’s too dangerous,” you have your hero think, “I better not go into the woods. It’s too dangerous.” That is believable to the reader and true to your character, because it’s what most people would really do before trying something dangerous. If your character doesn’t at least consider the dangers, you must have a great reason why not.

In the case of the boy in the woods, I combined a note telling him to trust the cat, the cat leading him into the woods, and his anger about not being able to go trick-or-treating with his friends into motivating factors. I also had him hesitate and think better of it before going in and decide he’d back if heard anything at all.

Delayed gratification is another great tool. In real life, things often work right on the first try. In a book that can feel too convenient. In my first Farworld book, Kyja looks into the aptura discerna and sees Marcus for the first time. The key to using this tool is clearing your mind of any angry or unhappy thoughts. At the urging of one of my critique members, I had Kyja get close but fail on the first attempt. It was a great way to get some insight into the character and also made it that much more believable when the tool finally worked for my heroine.

Remember a tool is just a tool. Not every tool works in every situation. Sometimes things can work on the first try and sometimes characters do dumb things because they just aren’t thinking things through. But remember that as long as you are writing fiction your job isn’t to record a gunshot, it’s to produce a sound that everyone will believe is a gunshot.

Good luck and good writing!

Writing is Like Fixing the Toaster

2011-03-21T10:48:00.001-06:00

Last week I was asked to help update another blog I post to. We were trying to add a couple of new features to the sidebar and the person who set up the blog template has a really busy schedule and didn’t have time to update it. Unfortunately, the blog was not a standard out of the box template. It was written in straight HTML so I couldn’t just find the widget and add it.

The good news is that the code was done by a professional coder, so it was neatly laid out and well documented. The bad news is that I am not a programmer. So I did what I usually do when I’m trying to fix something. I dug around inside and started playing with stuff (being careful not to permanently change anything until I’d figured it out.)

First, I found what appeared to be a complete section of code for one of the existing sidebar boxes, and deleted it. Then I looked at a preview version to see what I had done. Turns out I hadn’t gotten all the code for that box. I tried it again, and appeared to have succeeded. Next I reset the code to its original form and pasted in the code I had deleted before—creating a second copy of that box. With a little more messing around, I was able to create a new box, add the spacing images above and below it, and eventually paste in the new code for the widget I was adding.

My wife likes that I can fix most things around the house. Again, I follow a pretty standard procedure. Poke around, being careful not to break anything, see if I can figure out how it works, then determine, whether or not it is something I should try to fix myself or hand off to a professional. I recently saved about $500 by replacing the circuit board in our furnace myself. (While being EXTREMELY careful to make sure I wasn’t doing anything that could explode, suffocate, burst into flames, etc.)

Partly I’m telling you this to brag a little. I mean seriously, when you find something that’s broken and fix it to like new (or better than new) status, you want to get all the applause you can. Am I right?

Mostly though, I’m telling you this because I think it relates to writing. The curse of many writers (especially those that are new to the craft) is that we want everything to come from our imagination to the paper perfectly the first time. We read a book we like, and in our minds we imagine our favorite author penning those words exactly the way we read them on the first try.

In reality, writing is a lot more like dabbling in programming code or fixing an appliance. Let’s divide writing into a couple of sections.

1) Before You Open the Hood—When fixing an appliance, the first thing you do is a little research. Any information available on-line? It’s much easier if you can find instructions (and warnings) from people who do this a lot and know what you are about to try. When I added my widgets, I Googled the issue I was looking at and got some good help.

In writing, this is the part where you play with the story in your head. Do you know what is going to happen? What if you did this? What if you tried that? Recently you read a great book where the author did a, b, and c. Any chance you could use that kind of set up in your story? Do a little freestyle internet research, where you start with one thing and follow various links to see what you can find. I can’t stress enough the value of thinking before writing.

2) Dig In—This is the part that scares most people off. Both in writing and fixing things. Do I really know what I’m doing"? What if I screw something up?

In fixing something, the first and foremost goal is not to screw it up any worse than it already is. So a little caution is a good thing.

In writing, you have no such worries. You started with a blank screen or piece of paper. At the end of the day, the worst thing you will have is a blank screen or paper. As long as you put down words, you have something to work with. To quote some editor, “You can’t edit nothing.” But you can always improve what you have written, Will it be perfect? Not if you’re like me and 99% of the rest of the writers out there. Will it even make it into the final version? Maybe not. Will it take you a step closer to the final version absolutely.

The beginning of a story can be one of the most daunting things for a writer. Until you put a word down on paper, the story can be perfect inside your head. As soon as you start writing, problems arise. What makes it even worse is that often you don’t know your characters, voice, or even exactly where the story is going until you’re well into it.

A good friend of mine, and fellow critique group member, Annette Lyon, doesn’t put chapter numbers on her first few chapters for this very reason. It lets her dive into the story without the anxiety of thinking, “This is the first word, sentence, page, that my reader will see.” Maybe it will. Maybe it won’t. You can figure that out later. The key is to get writing.

3) Figure Out How It Works—This is actually my favorite part of writing. You are not finalizing anything. You are not committed to any course of direction. You are just fiddling. The other day, the door that goes from our garage to our house stopped swinging closed by itself. My wife pointed this out to me, and after a week or two of complaining every time someone forgot and didn’t close the door all the way, I examined the mechanism. It turns out there are two spring-loaded hinges. So are they broken now and need to be replaced or can I fix them? Well first I have to figure out how they work. There has to be some way to loosen and tighten them or you would never be able to get them on an open door in the first place. Hmmm, a hex bolt. What’s this little pin do? Sproing! Ahh, it holds the spring in place.

Same deal with your writing. So often we stop because we are afraid of drawing our character wrong. But remember, there is nothing to break here. The worst that happens is that you erase and start over. Character boring? Try a new voice or angle or gender or age. Give her a twitch or a have him be starting a new diet. Play with your story until you figure out how it works and where it’s going. Stuck on a scene? I have the perfect fix for you. Add this note. “Something cool happens here.” Then continue writing the part you know. The magic is that later in the story you will discover precisely what should go there.

In a nutshell, give yourself permission to make mistakes.

4) Fix It—If you have made it to this point, hurray! You are well on your way to success. As long as you actually have written an entire story to fix. If you have written three pages and are now going back to edit those pages, stop it!!! Didn’t you read anything I just said? How can you fix your story when you haven’t put in the blood, sweat and tears to discover how it works?

Get as much of it done as you can before going back and fixing. One you do start fixing, the the key is to view your story like a house full of furniture. Move it around. Try a new look. Keep playing until it feels right to you. then move on to the next room. I tend to do a lot of this.

She peeked around the corner. Her feet kicked up a loose piece of carpet and a beetle scurried out from the dirt.

“Do you hear anything?” he asked.

What were they doing here anyway? If her mother knew what she’d been doing. She would be toast.

The ancient hotel creaked like a battleship in a rough sea.

“No.”

Hmm, what if I build up to the bug, but make it even creepier?

“Do you hear anything?” he asked.

The ancient hotel creaked like a battleship in a rough sea. “No.”

What were they doing here anyway? If her mother knew she’d returned to the abandoned building, she would be toast.

As she peeked around the corner, her foot kicked up a loose piece of carpet and a nest of tiny black spiders darted out of the darkness up the wall and across the floor. One climbed up her shoe and leaped onto her bare ankle.

Same basic story, but we move things around a little, fix some grammar, and add a nasty little detail to crank up the tension. You can do the same thing with entire chapters. What if the police chief doesn’t learn that his wife is missing until after he discovers the note?

Not everything I try to fix works out. Sometimes I have to give it up as a lost cause. That may happen to your stories on occasion too. But that’s okay. It’s part of the process. By getting rid of the junk it’s easier to discover the gems. The key is to not let the enormity of the project, your inexperience, or hiccups in the process stop you. The only book you don’t learn from is the one you never try to write.

And remember, it’s by giving yourself permission to fail that you allow yourself the opportunity to succeed.

A Shortcut or Another Path

2011-03-07T12:14:00.001-07:00

When I was about four, my family went camping. Shortly after setting up our tent, stove, obligatory giant thermos of Kool-Aid, etc, my Dad took my older sister and me down the road to the bathrooms. Camp ground bathrooms, shudder, but that’s another story. After we were done, he said, “You two take the road back to the campground and see if you can beat me.”

We ran like bats out of . . . a campground bathroom, only to discover our Dad waiting by the tent. He’d taken a shortcut. My sister, being the older and smarter of the two of us, quickly discovered the path that led directly from the facilities to our tent. I, being younger and dumber, watched enviously and when no one was looking, attempted to discover the great toilet trail myself.

Can you see this coming? If you close your eyes, can you see this kid wondering into the deep woods in search a shortcut to the potty?

Then can you imagine this mom going, “Wait, you told my baby there was a shortcut through the woods and then didn’t keep an eye on him?” Yeah, us dads are not always the sharpest tacks in the drawer.

Obviously I didn’t get eaten by a bear, washed away by a river, or stolen by a stranger of dubious intent. In fact when I was found a couple of hours later, my entire narrative of the harrowing events was, “I cried three time and I prayed four times.” Whew good thing it hadn’t gone the other way or I might have been blogging to the Heavenly Hosts.

Over the years, my storytelling has hopefully improved a little, but my love of shortcuts has only grown. I LOVE, I mean LOVE a good shortcut. It is so cool to know that you know a better way than most people. I’m always looking for an angle. I have learned to master the art of buying hotel rooms on Priceline, And you know what? William Shatner is right. It does feel great to check into the Atlanta Airport Westin knowing you only paid $40, when everyone else is paying $100 or more. A long time ago,I played World of Warcraft for about a year, until I realized how much time I was wasting on it. My favorite things were learning a trick that would let me earn a lot of gold more quickly than everyone else or an easy way to level up fast.

When I got into writing and publishing, I felt exactly the same. I figured there had to be a way to jump to the top of the list. Let me clarify. I wasn’t looking to avoid hard work. Quite the opposite. Often shortcuts require as much or more work than the normal path, they are just faster. I tried contests and blogs. I was one of the first people I’d ever heard of doing a blog tour and I did it with over 200 blogs. I soon became recognized as a guy to come to if you had marketing questions.

Along the way, I learned things. Again this is pretty normal in my opinion. In order to find a shortcut, you often have to try a number of paths that either dead end or turn out to be longer than the path most people take. The nice thing about the world of writing is that there are many, many people who have tried different paths and are willing to share their stories of success and failure. The bad thing is that what works perfectly for one person doesn’t necessarily work the same way for another. She met an agent at a conference, struck up a friendship and sold her her vampire trilogy. He self-published a Christmas book and parlayed into a multimillion dollar career. Just because you sold a gazillion books by e-publishing, doesn’t mean that will work for me. And just because I got an agent through the slush pile doesn’t mean that will work for you.

Which leads us (in a very non shortcutty fashion) to my topic today. Are e-books a shortcut to success? Have we reached an age where hundreds of queries, hundreds of rejections, negative editors, and over-budget publishers are no longer necessary?

Yes.

Wait, what? Not what you were expecting me to say? I know. Over the years I’ve kind of build up a reputation as being dubious about the whole “radical publishing paradigm shift” thing. I’m a huge proponent of e-books. Anything that lets people carry and read more books and buy them whenever they want and wherever they are is a great thing in my opinion. I’m just not sure that changing the medium automatically changes the process as much as most people think.

But Amanda Hocking and many other authors have clearly proved that you can be a successful author without an agent, editor, the marketing of big publishers, or even a tangible book. The words can pour directly from your brain, through a keyboard, to the internet, and into a readers e-book device without needing the approval of a single person other than you and your readers. So, yes, agents, editors, and publishers are no longer necessary. There is a path you can take that has led others to success which is much quicker and possibly less painful than the traditional one most authors have followed for over a hundred years.

The question in my mind is not so much can this process work as whether we are seeing a shortcut to success or an alternate route. Is that ambiguous enough for you? Let me try and clarify my question with part of an e-mail I recently received from my good friend Dave Cebrowski.

“Can a writer - one that is unpublished make a living selling e-books - think about it - if you could sell 100,000 books a year, couldn't you live on that? Sure you have other marketing costs to promote the book - so figure 20% so maybe you sell 200k books a year as ebooks and make the rest of your living from speaking engagements and consulting work to other up-and-coming authors.”

Obviously, as we just discussed, the answer is yes. It can and does happen. But does it happen enough that we could call it a shortcut? Imagine that you and your neighbor drive to work at the same time each day. You live next door to each other. You work in the same office building. You leave at exactly the same time. The only difference is that he takes the freeway and you take the side roads. If one of you always gets there faster that would be a shortcut. Even if the faster path was occasionally longer due to traffic, weather, or other conditions, it would still be a shortcut. But if one day route A was faster, and the next day route B was faster, and you couldn’t count on either way constantly saving you time, what you would have is not a shortcut, but an alternate route.

So let’s examine e-book publishing in that light. Is e-book publishing a faster route to publications? Yes, hands down no brainer. If you know your stuff, you can turn an unpublished manuscript into a work for sale in less than 24 hours. You could potentially sell your first book before you could get your first rejection going the traditional route. Is it easier? Once you learn the basics of layout, find someone to do your cover, etc, it is generally much easier to publish your own book than to convince someone to publish your book for you.

Is it more profitable? Here’s where things start to get a little less clear. First of all, profit may not mean anything to you. Very few of us started writing with the goal of making a living at it. And even fewer of us kept that dream once we realized how incredibly difficult it is to make a living. But for the purposes of this discussion, let’s assume that you do still have the dream, as I do, to make a living writing fulltime, and move on to how an author makes money.

In its most simple terms profit equals number of books sold x royalty earned. The great thing about self-publishing an e-book is that the royalty you earn is awesome. If you sell a book for even $2.99 on Amazon, you can earn $2 per book. Double the price and you get double the royalty and so on and so on. Theoretically, you could get to the point of the kid who has a lemonade stand selling one glass for a million dollars and thinking, “All I have to do is sell one glass.” But obviously price point has an impact.

Let’s stick with our lemonade stand analogy for a minute. Traditionally the problem with self publishing was the same problem you had with owning a lemonade stand. You make all the profit, but you also have all the overhead. E-books took away the overhead. You can now publish a book without paying a cent. The other problem you had was that you had limited distribution. Unless your lemonade stand was in a shopping mall or along the side of a busy road, you couldn’t get a lot of potential customers. Same with self-publishing. It was next to impossible to get into book stores. With e-books you can immediately get yourself into the largest bookstores.

You have now addressed two of the biggest problems with self-publishing: start-up costs and distribution. But there is still another big hurdle that even e-books can’t get you over. You have distribution, but how do you generate demand? Let’s imagine that now every kid who opens a lemonade stand can instantly sell virtual lemonade to anyone in the world. The good news is that anyone can buy a glass from you. And since you have no overhead at all, you can sell your lemonade pretty darn cheaply. But how do you separate your lemonade from everyone else’s? If you get there early you won’t have as much competition. And if your lemonade is already well known from selling lemonade traditionally, so much the better. And hopefully your lemonade is so good people will give it great on-line reviews.

Still there are more lemonade makers coming on-line every day. And some of them are owned by big companies who can do lots of marketing. Or people who are already well known from their other ventures. You start to despair until you read about another person just like you who opened a virtual lemonade stand last year and is now making money hand over fist. If she can do it anyone can. Perfect! Nothing can stand in your way.

But let’s leave our lemonade analogy and go back to our drive to work analogy. Amanda Hocking and others got to work much quicker. In fact they not only got there quicker, but their experience was better than the vast majority of even the authors who succeeded in the traditional route. The e-book route worked for them. Are they representative of most e-books authors though? Do more authors who publish e-books succeed more than authors who take the traditional route?

Defining success as selling enough books to make a living (which is what has gotten Hocking and others this sudden national exposure) the answer is definitely not. Most authors who are making a living writing fiction are doing it through traditional publishers. And the numbers aren’t even close. That’s what makes authors like Hocking and JA Konrath such big news. They are the huge exceptions. They are the lottery winners, and they know it. Using them as examples of why you should go straight to self-published e-book is like using JK Rowling and other hugely successful authors as examples of why you should quit your job and write books. they are what R&D departments call outliers.If you want to make a living as an author, your chances are much, much better if you are published with a traditional publisher than if you self-publish.

There’s one last thing we need to consider in this scenario though. How many people try to get published with traditional publishers but don’t make it? That definitely affects the odds. If a million people all go the traditional route and only a few thousand are accepted, the vast majority of people who write books never even have a chance at success. Whereas if those million people all publish e-books, most of them won’t make much money, but all of them will at least have a chance to. Is that a good thing? It is if you are one of those authors. So while your odds of success are much better if you get a national agent and a big publisher, your odds of at least being in the game are better if you self-publish.

This post is not to say you should or shouldn’t self-publish e-books. Just like the gold rush, this is an exciting time for authors. You write the best book you can, stick it out in the big world and hope to hit the mother load. And if your book is good enough, and you work hard enough, and the dice roll your way, you may be the next Amanda Hocking.

But knowing that most people selling enough books to make a living are doing with the backing of traditional publishers (either currently or before they started self-publishing) doesn’t it make sense to at least try the traditional route with your book before going straight to e-book?

Marion Jensen and I were having a discussion recently at the LTUE conference. He said something to the effect of if your options were going with a publisher that could only sell a thousand books or so, or self-publishing an e-book, which route would you choose? For me, that question is a no brainer. If I sell a thousand books with a small publisher, I make at most $1,000. And they keep the e-book rights to my title forever. If I self-publish, I may only sell a hundred books, but I have the potential to sell many, many more, and I keep getting the royalties forever. Therefore if my goal is to make more money, I go the e-book route. If my goal is to sell more books, I probably still go the e-book route.

That being said, for me personally, I could never convince myself to self-publish a book without at least trying to get it published nationally first. Even Amanda Hocking tried to get an agent and a national publisher publisher before going her own route. I think Brandon Mull said it best when we were at a conference together and he was asked if he preferred working with big publishers or small publishers.

He said, “Big publishers can ignore you and small publishers can ignore you. Big publisher can promote you and small publishers can promote you. The difference is that when a big publisher decides to promote you they can have a much bigger impact.”

I think self-pubbed e-books are a great way to go. They offer many benefits that the traditional route does not. But if your goal is to make make enough money to earn a living writing, self-publishing is simply another route. Not a shortcut.

What’s Your Favorite Romantic Movie Scene?

2011-02-14T22:13:00.003-07:00

A couple of years ago, my wife and I had friends over to the house and one of the wives asked what everyone’s favorite romantic scene from a movie was. For some reason my mind went totally blank. Ask me my favorite action scene, (The first five minutes of the first Indiana Jones movie), comedy scene (the Ned Ryerson (Bing) series in Ground Hog Day), bad guy (Hannibal Lechter), fight scene (the second Mr. T fight in Rocky 3), and I’m good to go. But romance. Hmmm.

You don’t exactly win brownie points for naming your favorite fight scene on Valentines Day, though. So, with many deep sighs and significant head scratching, here are my three favorite romantic movie scenes.

1) Pretty much the whole movie The Notebook. I don’t know why, but for some reason that movie just gets me. There are so many memorable romantic scenes. My favorite is probably not the one most people think of though. It’s where James Garner’s kids come to try and get him to leave the nursing home and come home with them, He says, “Look guys, that's my sweetheart in there. I'm not leaving her, this is my home now. Your mother is my home.”

Even reading that makes my chest tighten. I think it’s because even after all the years, he’d still rather be with his sweetheart who can’t remember him than anyone else in the world. That’s the way I feel about my Jennifer, and I have no doubt I always will. So, yeah, mush.

I tried to find the actual clip. But this is the best I could do. You can hear the quote in the first couple of seconds of this music video.

2) Pretty much any old Meg Ryan movies. She just had the best smile in the world. And she and Tom Hanks were one of my favorite movie couples of all time. I could pick half a dozen scenes. But I really like this one from the end of You’ve Got Mail.

This version is actually without the dialog, but I think I like it even better because you get to focus on what an incredible job she does of portraying, surprise, confusion, sorrow, and ultimately joy (starting at about 2:11) that he’s the one who’s been writing to her.

3) I think I’m going to get slapped down on this one from some of my female readers. “Wait, you’re putting Adam Sandler in your top three romantic movie scenes!?” But yeah, he and Drew Barrymore are another of the couple that just click so well for me. Every time I come across The Wedding Singer on cable, I get pulled into it all over again.

I could list any of a dozen scenes from their movies, but one of my favorites is from 50 First Dates, where he realizes she has been singing and that maybe, just maybe, she remembers him. You’re all excited for him. And when he asks, “Do you remember me?” you are so sure she does, that when she says no, you are as shocked and disappointed as he is. That makes the scene where she shows him her paintings even more powerful. My favorite part starts right at 2:00 on the clip below.

So yeah, I don’t have a heart of stone. Silly Putty maybe, but not stone. In fact, I’ll add one more of my favorites. Just because it has my favorite actor of all time, and also because some of my own most romantic memories aren’t about going to expensive restaurants and staying in amazing hotels, but having nothing more than the love of my life and not needing any more than that. The scene starts at about the five minute mark.

Happy Valentine’s Day all. I hope you are spending it with the love of your life. And if you aren’t, I hope that you have a great movie to remind you that it won’t be long before you are united or reunited with that amazing someone that still makes your heart go crazy after more than twenty years.

Farworld News!!

2011-02-11T12:40:00.001-07:00

To date, I believe that I have received somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,000 letters and messages asking roughly the same question. “When is the next Farworld book coming out?”

Air Keep, the third book in the five book Farworld series was originally scheduled to come out in the Fall of 2010. For various reasons that did not occur. I still don’t have a firm release date, but I have several publishers who have offered to continue the series. Hopefully it will be released by Shadow Mountain, but one way or another, I AM getting book three out this year.

I’ve been neck deep over the last few months in another project that is now nearly done. And since you have all been so patient, I have decided to begin posting a chapter a week of Air Keep here on my blog. I’m not sure whether it will be on a certain day of the week or maybe I’ll change it up a little. But it will be at least one chapter a week. here.

Just a couple of notes about this. I’m not sure exactly how many chapters I will post. At this point I’m thinking about ten, but it could be more. Also, this is early draft stuff. There could be typos and things might change a little between now and when the book comes out. In fact, I’ll actually be looking for comments. So if you think something isn’t working or you’d like something explained, you might help shape the book. But if you need your Farworld fix, this will be the place to get it.

If you are not currently a follower, click on the little box over there on the right and become one. That way you will be notified every time I post a new chapter. And definitely tell all of your other Farworld friends to come check this out. It should be a lot of fun! See you next week.

You Always Hurt the Words You Love

2011-02-07T20:10:00.001-07:00

Originally, I was going to title this post killing your babies. This being a writing site, I was of course referring to your literary babies. But when I googled “killing your babies,” I decided maybe I’d come up with a different term. So let’s go with, “You Need to Hurt the Words You Love.” This is in answer to David Glenn, who asked, “What does an author do if there’s something (like a character or a situation) that they really want to put into their book, but it doesn’t do anything to help with the plot?”

The answer is probably not what he—or many of us want to hear. Have you ever come up with a great character, scene, or turn of phrase that you are absolutely dying to use ion a story? Maybe you even wrote it out, planning to use it at a certain point in your book, only to discover that as you wrote the story, that character, scene, or phrase didn’t really fit anymore.

You try to make it fit, like Cinderella’s ugly stepsisters shoving and crunching their feet in a vain effort to slide into the glass slipper. But when your critique group, beta readers, or heaven forbid, your editor read it they nixed your baby. What to do? It’s a great scene. The character is so hilariously unpredictable. The sentence in a work of literary masterpiece.

I could beat around the bush here, but let’s be brutally honest. Cut it. Chop it. Kill it. Destroy it. Trying to keep a favorite scene that doesn’t fit into your story is like sticking an exotic orchid into a vase of daises. By itself it might be beautiful. Your character really might be as spectacular as you think she is (although she probably is not.) But it doesn’t matter. The orchid doesn’t fit among the daisies. Rather than adding to their beauty, it draws attention away from them in such a way that it actually harms the arrangement.

That’s what your “baby” does to your story. Even if you think you’ve camouflaged it well, the readers won’t be fooled. They’re reading an exciting beach thriller and unexpectedly come across a character that reads like something out of Lord of The Rings. Not only does the character seem out of place, but it pulls the reader out of the story that does fit.

More than one editor has suggested writers take their favorite line and cut it out of their books. That may seem extreme, but the reasoning is sound. If there is a particular scene or line which you love above the rest of your story, there’s a good chance it doesn’t fit with the rest of your writing.

Am I recommending that you cut out your favorite line? No. I’m not quite that heartless. But I do recommend that you look closely at anything that doesn’t quite fit in with the rest of the story, whether you hate it or love it. Keeping the reader “in” the story is much more important than the brilliance of any one piece.

On Getting Old, and Sounding Too Much Like Another Book

2011-01-31T21:55:00.002-07:00

First, thanks so much for all the birthday wishes! I still don’t get about half of what you can do on Facebook. But it is such a kick to find like fifty “Happy Birthdays,” from so many of my friends.

Trying not to feel too old here. And for the most part I succeeded. The only thing that broke the illusion briefly was that I was showing my boys different bands from my era on YouTube. I was okay as long as I stuck to Def Leopard, Supertramp, Asia, Jeff Beck, etc. But when I found myself listening to some of my favorite old Barry Manilow songs, I suddenly flashed back to being in the car with my parents and groaning when the pulled out the Time Life eight track tapes with singers like Johnny Horton.

So I just explained to my children that BM was music my “older” sister listened to and all was well again.

Anyway, great day and all your well wishes just made it that much better. I was going to blog about getting old, but you were saved that ~~enlightening~~ ~~unusual~~ stomach-churning experience, by another of my faithful minions who asked a great question.

David Glenn asks, “What can someone do when they’re trying to write a story, but people say it sounds too much like another story? What can they do to make it different?”

Great question! I’ll answer it in two parts.

Part one:

If I told you I recently read a story of a child whose parents were dead, who was being raised by mean relatives, who met a magical person, and who had an adventure, what story would you think I was talking about?

Harry Potter? Orphan. Raised by mean aunt and uncle. Meets Hagrid. Goes to Hogwarts. That would qualify right?

But there’s another orphan who also fits those exact qualifications.

James and the Giant Peach.

Switch the race, and swirl the circumstances a little, and you might have this well known pair.

And if we change the boy to a girl, we could have . . .

Sorry, my bad. I meant . . .

The lovely, charming, and rodent-speaking Cinderella.

In fact if you think about it long enough, I’ll bet you could come up with at least another dozen examples. That’s because this is a pretty common beginning. In order to isolate our protagonist, we kill off the parents. Then we use a magical figure to send him or her on a hero’s journey.

Now I know what you are thinking, those are just the beginnings of the story. Once you get past the start, they are nothing like one another. And that’s true.

But do you think Twilight was the first romantic vampire book? Was Harry Potter the first book where a kid gets sent to a school to learn magic? Was The Maze Runner the first book where kids are taken on an elevator to a strange place and run through tests? No, no, and no.

Start reading book reviews and you will quickly discover that people like to compare a new book to things they’ve read before. Thus you’ll get descriptions like “Lord of the Flies meets Secret Garden.” Or “Twilight with zombies.” Or “A mix of The Giver and Gulliver’s Travels.”

This is not a bad thing. people like to be able to put books and movies into context. It allows other readers to think, “Well I liked Twilight and I’ve always kind of thought zombies were cool, so maybe I should read it.”

It also helps stores and publishers to know how to position your book and where to place it on the shelves. Someone who loves regency romances will look for other regency romances. Someone who is a fan of Lisa Gardner might very well like Janet Evanovich. Someone who liked Hunger Games is probably going to read other dystopian or post-apocalyptic novels.

Where you run into trouble is when someone reads you whole book (not just a description) and complains “That was a total rip off of . . .”

This takes us to Part 2

It’s okay to have a story that kind of sounds like XYZ, or starts like ABC. But there are certain storylines that have become almost too prevalent. It’s very difficult to not sound like a rip off when you write a book about a girl who falls in love with a vampire and has to chose between him and a werewolf. Can you create a world where children go to a boarding school to learn spells? Yes. And both magic school books and vampire romances have been done since Twilight and Harry Potter came out. But it’s extremely difficult to sell to a publisher.

You not only have to write an amazing story, but you have to be so good that people will stop calling it a rip off of whatever novel it sounds just like. Again, it has been done. Before Harry Potter came out there were books with wizard children who went to a boarding school and played a game flying on brooms. Before Hunger Games came out there was a book about kids sent into an arena and forced to fight to the death. By Rowling and Collins created such strong stories that they succeeded despite the similarities.

So do you do what if you’ve come up with a great idea only to discover it’s been done before? Well you could try changing the setting. Move your laser-wielding hero into 16th century France. Turn your dragon-riding boy into a girl who tames animals that emerge from a sea of flames and soars over fiery infernos.

Or maybe it’s not your story, but your character. If everyone who reads your book says, “That girl is exactly like Katniss,” look at motivations, habits, voice, appearance. Are you inadvertently copying a character you loved from another book? It’s really not that hard to change enough to avoid the comparison.

Mostly though, I would just say, ignore the comparisons and write a great story. So what if your friend tells you your story sounds a lot like Uglies? Uglies is a great book. If you write an awesome story that reminds people a little of another book they loved, isn’t that a good thing? And if your voice, style, characters, and plot are ultimately different, people will soon forget about how it was kind of like Uglies and love it for what it is.

Hope that answers your question. Keep sending more. this is a lot of fun!

Also, if you are a teenager and like to write, sign up for the Teen Writer’s Bootcamp in April at UVU. Here’s a video about it.

Your Protagonist Compass

2011-01-24T16:47:00.004-07:00

What? No boat load of questions for today’s blog post? You mean I have to come up with something myself? So you’ll have to blame yourselves if you don’t like today’s post.

Last week I was asked to do a workshop at LTUE. For those of you who haven’t been, it is an amazing writer’s conference primarily based around SciFi and Fantasy writing, and it’s really inexpensive. More info here. One of my more popular classes lately has been on creating a Character Bible. I’m teaching that at Storymakers with my awesome sister and fellow author Deanne Blackhurst, as well as at the UVU Teen Writers Conference in April. So it seemed like overkill to teach it again at LTUE. Instead I’ve been toying with the idea of creating a much more specific tool, I call a Protagonist Compass.

Here’s the basic concept. One of the biggest complaints I hear about books is that the main character is unbelievable. Janette Rallison had a great post about unbelievable teen romances on her blog. I think the biggest issue is that, while real people may be all over the board on what they do and why, readers expect more from a book. Books are not like real life. Our lives don’t have a clear plot line. We do have a start and we do have an end, but the rest of it is often more of a jumble than a progression. Books require much more precision. You can’t have a chapter where nothing happens, even if you do feel like you need it to connect two plot points. Each chapter must stand on its own.

It’s the same with characters. Readers may not realize it, but they want a clear understanding of what makes your protagonist tick. What drives her? What motivates her? If her motivations change, there needs to be a clear reason why. In order to do that, you need to understand where your protagonist is coming from and track where they are headed. In Scouts and in the Army, we used to go on a compass course. There were different points you had to locate by starting at one and using your compass to site in on the next. I think you could do something similar with a protagonist.

Let’s start with history. When your book starts, your character is at a certain point. Let’s call it point C. As you know from math classes, a point has no direction. It is simply a coordinate floating in space. Until you connect it with another point floating in space. Let’s call this point A. If you draw a line between point A and point C, you can track where your character should go. All things being equal, any decision they make should generally lead them to a point D along that line. Still with me? Let me give you an example.

In Demon Spawn, Blaze has grown up her whole life assuming certain things. Hell is just. Humans are sent to Hell for being evil, and have therefore earned any punishment they get. Her primary goal in life is to be successful in Hell. (i.e. get a good demon job, and continue the status quo.)

In our compass course, point A would be her normal demon spawn upbringing. Point C would be her first day of demon training—specifically her first day of meeting damned humans and sending them to their fates. Now you might ask, what about B? Or you might just figure that, like most authors, I’m either 1) Somewhat less than attentive to specific details, or 2) leaving a spot open for rewrites down the road.

But no. There is a plan to my apparent lack of attention. Point B is left for a life altering experience that happened sometime in the protagonist’s life that changed its course significantly, but that occurred before the start of your story. For example:

Hopefully you’ve read Hunger Games. If not, go get a copy and read it. Some very good story-telling there. I won’t ruin too much of the story for you by saying that before the beginning of where the book starts, an event occurred in the life of Katniss—our protagonist. Let’s say that in Katniss’ life point A was being raised in a post-apocalyptic future where life was hard, children are sacrificed to a reality game every year, and her father teaches her how to hunt and gather wild plants and animals. Had life continued on its course, her biggest concerns would have been those of any teen in her town. Avoiding the games, making a living, meeting a guy, etc.

But when she was younger, a major event shook her life. Her father died. That would have been a traumatic event for any child. But to make matters worse, her mother had a total breakdown, leaving Katniss to feed the family or let them all starve. This event so scarred her that now the biggest motivating factor in her life is protecting her family—especially her little sister, Prim. This is point B.

If we look at our compass course, we can see that this single event altered the course of her life. Any decisions she makes after this point will be affected by this event. Should anything threaten this direction, it will immediately create conflict. The more it threatens to alter this course, the bigger the conflict will be. Now remember that point A has not gone away. She still does not want to be part of the games. And she is somewhat attracted to a guy. But even the guy she is attracted to comes more as a result of a desire to provide for her family than a physical attraction. And she has taken a greater risk of being chosen for the games purely to provide for her family. So it is clear that while point A still exists, point B overrides it.

One of the interesting things about Katniss’ life changing event is that we don’t learn about it until after point D, which I’ll get to in a moment. Many authors would be tempted to either begin the book with a prologue where we see what happened to her father and how her mother reacted. Or they would show a flashback prior to point C, so the reader would understand clearly why Katniss makes the decision she does. This is not necessary. You actually have two better options. One is implied history. For example, if an eighth grader’s first reaction to his new school is that he will fit inside the lockers, we can surmise that he has been stuck in a locker before. It is implied that not only has he been picked on, but that he expects to be at his new school as well.

Another method is through actions. Collins actually uses both methods. We learn that Katniss’ father made the bows she is using and that he is no longer in her life. We also see her out hunting to provide food for her family. We don’t know all the details yet, but we “get” that Katniss is about protecting her family in her father’s absence.

Knowing points A and B, it is pretty easy to surmise point D. (Spoiler alert) Point D must be a decision where points A and B come into direct conflict, and that once more changes the course of Katniss’ life. And sure enough it is. Katniss doesn’t want to be chosen for the games. She isn’t. But Prim is. Now, had Katniss’ father not died, we don’t know for sure what Katniss would have reacted to this event. But knowing that her desire to protect her younger sister is more important than anything, it is clear what she must do. Point B overrides point A, and she takes Prim’s place. This is perfectly consistent with Katniss’ prime motivation.

Once her decision is made, we get the back story. And along with it, another key point on our compass course. One that also took place before the story begins. Let’s call this point B2. When Katniss was near to dying—and failing her family, a boy tossed her a loaf of bread, causing himself suffering. Katniss hasn’t thought about this a lot over the years. B1 is clearly not as strong as B. But it suddenly becomes an issue when that very boy is chosen to go to the games as well. He may very well have saved her life. And she definitely owes him. But only one of them can survive the games, and her prime motivation is still providing for her family—which can only occur if she survives, meaning the boy who saved her life must die.

What the casual reader sees is that almost immediately Katniss and Peeta begin to argue. Like many romances, it seems impossible that they can ever get together. What they make not actively think about is that this back and forth arguing—occasionally broken up by moments of friendship or even actual tension—only work because the correct motivating factors were put in place first. If Peeta had not saved Katniss’ life we wouldn’t buy the romance, at least on her part. If he didn’t already love her, we wouldn’t buy the self-sacrificing behavior on his part. If Katniss’ prime motivation wasn’t saving her sister, we would hate her for being such a jerk to him.

Occasionally, Katniss can be pulled off track. She can start to fall for Peeta, or decide to help out another person in the game. But protecting her family must come first. Unless outside circumstances change. Sensing the romantic tension, we hope and expect that Katniss and Peeta will get together. (Even though this is not a traditional romance.) But no matter how much we might want it, we will not accept it unless there is a major event that is strong enough to alter the course set in place by point B. These outside influences must be strong enough to alter the protagonist’s course. They must be believable and to some extent the reader must be prepared to receive them.

Of course if you’ve read the book, what know what Peeta did in order to change things. Had that not occurred, readers would have been unhappy with the major decision Katniss makes near the end of the book. They might not have known why they were unhappy with it—especially since they wanted it to happen all along. They just would have said it was unbelievable.

Going briefly back to Demon Spawn, the life altering event doesn’t always happen before point C where the story starts. Blaze’s point B takes place shortly after the story begins, when she discovers a young human girl has been sent to Hell. This event doesn’t have an immediate impact on Blaze, but it opens her up to outside influences. In the story, she has two outside influencers tugging at her. Cinder, her roommate, is all about immediate gratification—mostly in the form of guys. Onyx, her best male friend, believes in change and questioning authority. These two outside influencers have various amounts of success, but ultimately which one wins out is the result of the events Blaze experiences herself.

Had she not seen the human child and questioned what the girl could possibly done to be sent to hell, she might not have been open to Onyx’s influences in the way she eventually is.

Hopefully you get the general idea here. Each major decision in your protagonist’s story must be checked against the compass of his past decisions. If you want the girl and the guy to get together, you must either give them back stories that lead to this, or create strong enough outside influences to swing the compass one way or another. If you know your main character will finish the story with a different view of life than they began it with, you must create believable events to shape that change, or your readers will not believe it when it finally happens.

For more detailed examples and some hands on class work, come to my workshop at LTUE.

From Idea to Story

2011-01-17T21:23:00.002-07:00

Okay, I know I live in Utah. It’s SUPPOSED to snow here. I get that. But it doesn’t have to mean I like it. What bugs me most is that I drive up I-15 and every other city has no snow left, while here we still look like a new polar bear exhibit. Oh well. At least it hasn’t snowed for almost a week and the warm weather is melting some of it.

One of the things I hate most about blogging is not knowing if anyone cares about what your are writing about. So I love it when someone asks a question. This is the second one from Julia “Jeuls” Wright. Which means the rest of you slackers are falling behind. So if you have questions about writing, publishing, strange airplane stories, or the mating habit of obscure Australian omnivores (wonder how many hits that last one will generate), e-mail me or just drop a note in the comments.

Here is the question from the lovely, charming, talented, and inquisitive Jeuls.

What do you do when you get stuck. When you have a great story beginning or start, but no idea what happens next or where a story is going? When you need answers and they're not coming? Is there a name for that (writer's block?) or a therapy that has worked for you (or your author friends)? Coming up with the whole skeleton of the story is something I'd like your ideas on. Just in case you had anything to share with your minions, thought I'd ask :-)

Great question! I especially like the minions part. I’ve always wanted minions. I asked for some for Christmas once, but all I got was Legos. Side note, Lego minions are pretty cool, but when they begin asking you questions, your parents take you to a special doctor.

This is one of my favorite questions to answer. And as a bonus we get to use examples and cool pictures. First of all, how many of you are in the same situation as Julia? How many of you have stories you’ve begun, but didn’t know where to go with them? Don’t be shy. Raise your hands. Okay, actually put your hands back down. I can’t really see them. Unless I can, in which case you should probably be wearing more than that while you sit at the computer. Yeah.

There are a couple of possibilities here, but let’s start with the most obvious, and common issue. The problem is that what you have is actually an idea, and not a story. Let me give you a for example. You’re standing in the shower one afternoon, eating a Milkyway Dark Chocolate (sorry, most of my stories involve food) and scratching your back with one of those loofa sponges on a stick, when suddenly a great idea for a middle grade book pops into your head.

What if this kid got on his school bus one morning, just like every morning? But this time, when he got on, he looked around and realized he didn’t recognize anyone except this girl he really hated. And then she gave him a really scared look and all the other kids on the bus turned into aliens.

The idea is so strong, you can actually see the aliens and the little girl. (Although in your mind, she’s giving the boy a kind of come hither look, so maybe there’s going to be some romance in this story.)

This is going to be the best story ever. So without even turning off the shower (the muse has no time for things like conserving water) you jump out of the shower, run to your computer, and begin typing.

It’s possible this story—and your story—might have a happy ending. Sometimes an idea just clicks. You see the whole thing from beginning to end and all you have to do is capture it the best you can, complete from your imagination.

For some authors, this is the only way to write. Stephen King claims he just chucks some characters into an odd situation and watches them to see what happens. But for most of us, this doesn’t work. Why? Because we are heading out on what will probably be a long hike without the first clue of where we want to end up.

A story generally has a least four elements. They are:

1) A likeable hero that your readers will care about and hopefully root for. This hero can be anything from a blade of grass to a wooly mammoth. But it’s important that you have a hero or protagonist of your story. As readers, we want a main character we can root for. We may not agree with her at first. We may dislike parts of her. But we need to care about her and root for her.

Okay, take a moment to channel your inner Robin Hood, enjoy the Retro Friday music I didn’t post on Friday and think about the hero of your story. And while you’re at it, put something on and finish your candy bar. We’ll wait.

I’m holding out for you to come up with a likeable hero

Great. Now back to our story. In the case of The Boy and the Bus (catchy title , eh?) we do have a hero. Is he likeable? That’s going to be up to you. Are we rooting for him? Well that’s another question completely. You see, in order to root for your hero, I, the reader, need your hero to have a goal. What is he trying to accomplish?

2) That’s the second element of a story. The goal. What your hero’s goal will be depends totally on the type of story you are writing. And the goal can change. Don’t go for the obvious here. In a romance, don’t decide the woman’s main goal is to find a man. That’s okay, I guess. I mean, I don’t want your poor lonely heroine to die alone and sad. But is it noble? Will I stand up and root for her? “Get a man! Get a man!” Probably not. Unless the man is a really cool, handsome super-powerful vampire. And then . . . Nope not even then. I want something better, bigger.

I want Meg Ryan trying to save her independent bookstore. I want Katniss shooting an apple out of the judges’ pig’s mouth. I want Superman going back in time. (But please for the love of all that is holy, don’t have him die of a broken heart clutching a penny.)

Does our bus story have a goal? Not really. We could probably come up with one, and that’s part of turning an idea into a story. Let’s say that Bob (the boy) and Sadie (the girl) are snatched away to a faraway planet because it turns out that they are the only ones who can save the likeable, but slightly smelly Fergrulians from a terrible plague. Now we have a hero and a plot. The next thing we need is . . .

3) Obstacles

The idea that you need obstacles seems kind of obvious. I mean imagine that in our story Bob and Sadie get to Fegrulia, stop the plague, and leave. Not much of story. Most authors get that they need obstacles. What they don’t get is how important it is that the obstacles, are hard, big, impossible even. Think about The Fellowship of the Ring.

Here we have this happy little hobbit. The only thing he has to worry about is what kind of fireworks they are having at his Uncle’s party. Until a wizard tells him he has to take the ring, he gets chased by Nazguls, discovers the wizard isn’t at the inn, gets taken by a cloaked stranger, gets stabbed, almost dies,gets recued by a hot elf chick, is nearly caught, makes it to the elves only to realize he must take the ring, tries to go over the mountains, gets hit by an avalanche, tries to go under, gets attacked by a giant freshwater squid, hopes for help from the dwarves, discovers they are all dead, is stabbed by a cave troll, gets attacked by things that can crawl on walls and ceilings, get’s chased by a huge fiery demon, loses the wizard . . . and that’s just in, like, the first third of the first movie.

Whether you are writing a thriller, a romance, a mystery, or a story about an alien school bus, you must put your character in situations where the reader feels empathy for him, fears for him, and wonders how he will possibly manage to succeed.

4) Which leads us to the fourth element. Consequences. We almost have the four parts of our bus story now. We have the heroes. They have a goal. We are going to give them big hard obstacles standing between success and failure. Now all we need is to set the clock ticking. What happens if they succeed? What happens if they fail?

In Demon Spawn, I knew my main character and her friends were going to try and help Visala, the seraph. cross the outer circles of Hell to get to Judgment. But I needed a really god reason. The carrot part is that if they do this, Visala can clear their names in an attack on the Trans. And Onyx—Blaze’s friend—demands they also get angel-fire. That’s the positive. But if they fail, the seraph dies, they will be thrown in prison for life or worse, and they might get killed by the denizens of outer Hell along the way.

And to increase the tension, there is something odd about Hell and Judgment, they only have a limited time before the seraph dies, and our hero doesn’t trust anyone’s motives.

In our bus story, we must have some pretty drastic consequences. Obstacles and consequences help the reader root for your hero. Especially if the consequences are not just to them, but to someone they love. I would root for our heroes in the bus story just because the Fergrulians are likeable, if slightly smelly. But what if the plague’s next victim will be Earth? What if Sadle’s little sister will be the first to die? What if the plague will hit Earth in less than five days? Get the picture?

So the first thing you do when you get an idea is wait. Let the idea muddle in your brain for a while. Give it time to germinate into a full story. Who is the hero? What’s she trying to accomplish? What stands in her way? What if she fails?

Once you have all four of those elements, You can give yourself the beginning (how it all starts) the middle (what they are trying to do and what stands in their way) and the end (success or failure, or something in between.)

Another thing that helps is letting the first idea meet, date, and hopefully mate with a second idea. Take the story of Shrek, you know the big green Ogre. The first idea is that an ogre has to recue a princess to save his swamp. Fun idea, but not all that unique. However, when you combine the second idea—that the princess is actually an ogre at night due to a curse that can only be broken by love’s kiss—lots of new baby ideas are born.

Way back at the top of this post, Julia asked if what she was facing was writers block. I don’t think so. Writers block can and does happen. But it is generally when your story has hit a snag and your subconscious needs time to work it out. In our trail analogy, you know where you came from, you know where you are going, but you’ve temporarily lost your way.

What I think Julia is facing trying to force a story that isn’t quite ready to be born yet. It’s only an idea, waiting to turn into a full blown plot. Give it time. Imagine the characters. Explore the setting in your head. Start to hear dialogue. Don’t tell anyone yet. Just wait. And when it finally demands to be set free put it on paper as fast as you can.

Of course there are a whole slew of ways to ways to do what I’ve described above. if you’re an outliner, outline away. If you’re a researcher, start looking things up. If you’re visual, draw pictures. I like to start a character bible. What about the rest of you? What is your tried and true process for turning an idea into a story?

What’s In a Genre?

2011-01-11T21:13:00.005-07:00

Sorry about not posting here Monday. Crazy day to be flying. However let me say here and now for the record, that I have the Best. Wife. In. The. World.

We were running late for my flight and I left my cell phone in the car. The Amazing Jennifer not only realized I left my phone. She zipped back into the parking garage, tried to page me, realized I was on the plane already, ran down to the ticket counter, got a security pass, ran all the way to my gate (which was far, far, far), and convinced them to open the boarding door and bring me my phone. I am not worthy!

Hard to top that, so I won’t even try. But I do want to talk about something that came up on another blog I post to. Rob Wells, who has an amazing YA novel called Variant coming out this fall, posted about why teens love dystopian novels.

He made a lot of great points. His general reasoning was that teens generally feel oppressed about things. There is always someone telling them what they can and can’t do.Therefore dystopian novels are a way of breaking free from controls.

I gave him kind of a hard time about it. But the truth is, he might very well be right. It’s as good a reason as any. Teens often do feel oppressed and that has spawned many things, not the least of which was rock and roll.

I’m not going to debate here whether or not he is right. But what I do want to consider is whether a huge uptick in certain genre sales have a reflection on how teens feel, or the status of the world we live in. Paranormal romance is big right now. Does that mean something? Magic and fantasy were big a couple of years ago. Did that mean something?

I was recently on a fantasy panel where the question was why teens read so much fantasy and whether it was a good thing or a bad thing. I didn’t say it at the time, but I kind of wonder if it neither good nor bad, but just a thing.

I guess I’m kind of skeptic when it comes to reading a lot into the trends of what any group is reading or listening to. When I was in high school punk was big. Nose rings, pins in your ears and cheeks (not mine, that looked way painful), colored and spiked hair. Music that was mostly a lot of yelling and smashing things.

Hmm . . . come to think of it a lot of that sounds like today. But at the time it was cool. It was rebellious. Only the parents we were rebelling against were the same people who not so many years before had rebelled against their parents by listening to this guy by the name of Elvis. So maybe we weren’t so original after all.

Which brings me back to books. Again, going way back to the stone age when I was a teen, horror was huge. Stephen King had rocked the world with novels like Carrie, The Shining, and Salem’s Lot. The movies were filled with Dawn of the Dead, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, etc.

And the big question was, “Why are today’s youth so attracted to scary movies and books?” There were all kinds of theories—most of which sound a lot like the same theories we hear about dystopian novels today.

My question for you is, do you believe that you can track how teens are feeling and what they feel the world is like by what they read? Is Hunger Games a sign that teens feel the world is failing around them and want to fight back? Or is it just that Hunger Games was a great series and teens are looking for more books like it? Or even more skeptical, is it that publishers saw Hunger Games selling like hotcakes and pushed a whole bunch more out the chute?

If you can read something into what is hot with teens, what did Twilight say about teens? What did fantasy? Zombies? What will it mean if the next big thing is historical romances?

What genres do you like? And what do you think that says about you? I’d especially love to hear from young readers themselves.

Oh, and by the way, speaking of teen readers, got this in my e-mail today from Alaina. I love it!! Thanks.

Retro Writing Myths Friday

2011-01-07T16:36:00.001-07:00

(Every Friday, that I remember, I post a song from a classic rock band of my youth. Sometimes I include thoughts. Sometimes I’m lucky to remember to even post.)

Yeah, I know, it’s been a couple of weeks since I did a Retro Friday. And with all the cool games suggestions, it may be another month before I do it again.

I thought we’d go with some Doobie Brothers today. If you are old enough to know who the band is, you are old enough to know what the name means. And if not, you probably shouldn’t know anyway. So we won’t go into that. But they have been one of my favorite bands since I started listening to Rock. The band got together in the late 1960’s and first built up their popularity by regularly playing for the Hells Angels. You have to be either really cool or really tough to reach fame by starting out playing for biker gangs.

Doobie Brothers—What a Fool Believes

In honor of their song, “What a Fool Believes,” I thought I’d clear up six myths about writing.

1) Probably the biggest myth about writing is that all authors are rich. Actually only a tiny percentage of authors make a fulltime living writing. I heard that there are more people in the US making a living playing baseball than writing novels. I was at a conference with Fablehaven author, Brandon Mull, and he was asked what a writer should tell her family when they told her to get a job. His answer was, “Well, first, get a job.” Not that you can’t make a living writing, but it’s a pretty good idea to have a backup plan until that happens.

2) I get lots of e-mails asking how much it costs to get published. Unless you are self-publishing or using a vanity publisher, you don’t pay to get published. They pay you. Same with agents. If an agent or a publisher asks you to pay them upfront, run away fast.

3) Writing is 99% talent. Like anything, talent is important. Some people have great imaginations and a good ear for character voices. That does help a lot. And I won’t lie; there are probably a lot of people who, no matter how hard they practice will never be able to write a really good book. But most people who like reading and writing can become proficient writers by doing what you have to do with any talent—studying and practicing.

4) Tied to number three, for some reason most people think that their first attempt at writing a book is going to be a bestseller. While there are a few writers who published the first thing they wrote, most authors have to work long and hard before their books are good enough to sell. Be patient.

5) You have to write what is “hot.” Wouldn’t it be great if you knew exactly what the next big thing would be? You could write a vampire book just as Twilight was taking off. A middle grade fantasy when someone named Rowling was taking over the world. A dystopian two years ago. Sometimes you hit the right book at the right time. Maze Runner was fortunate to be coming to press when Hunger Games was going crazy. But the key is that I read the first draft of Maze Runner long before Hunger Games came out. The process of writing, selling, and publishing, can easily be three years or more. So what was hot when you started may be old news by the time you go to sell it. Instead focus on a cool, unique concept that you love, and then write it well.

6) The last myth I’m going to bust is that you have to know someone to get published. Ultimately you will want an agent. And you will get assigned an editor. But you can get both of those by just writing a great story. Does it help to know agents and editors? Some. But mostly it just speeds up the process. If your writing stinks, it doesn’t matter who you know. And if your story is amazing, it will get picked out of the slush pile.

Have a great weekend and keep writing!

Google and Games

2011-01-03T19:13:00.002-07:00

T’was the week after Christmas and all through the house,
You could make out the footsteps of even a mouse.

Why is it so quiet in the Savage household? Everyone has come down with a bad case of Android fever. Son #2 is listening to MP3s and Facebooking. Son #3 is playing something on his gameboy emulator. And Mom is downloading Disney wallpaper, adding ringtones, and updating contacts. Yep, New cell phones for Christmas.

This post isn’t actually about cell phones, but just as a side note, I think back to how Microsoft became a a powerhouse by controlling the operating systems of computers, with Apple a distant—but still powerful—second. I think we are seeing the same thing with Google.

Microsoft’s power came in the form of controlling what people created: documents, spreadsheets, presentations, e-mails, etc. If you made it, you almost had to use their products.

Google has done the same thing, but with the world of consuming. Think about it. You voice search for restaurants, read reviews on your phone, watch a youtube video of someone who went there, call to make a reservation, use Google Maps to guide you to the location, and actually see a picture of what the place looks like as you arrive at your destination. All without ever leaving Google. All with the chance to offer you ever more customized ads, coupons, etc, throughout the process.

We’ve gone from a point where technology was all about making something to where we spend most of our time using technology to consume: read, watch, find, research, and listen. And with their massive digital library of books and documents, Google stands to get even more powerful. Amazon and Apple are big players in the digital consumption age, but I suspect they will end up playing second fiddle to Google.

Sorry, I got sidetracked. What I actually wanted to blog about was what I got for Christmas. Every year when people ask me what I want for Christmas, the answer is almost always, “Games!” I really love cool games. And Santa was good this year. I’m going to tell you about three games. Two that have been out for a couple of years, and one that’s been around for a long time, but is making a big comeback.I thought The Game of Things was new this year, but looks like it may have been out since about 2008. Still, from what I can see, it’s really become popular in the last year or so.

The idea is so simple, you wonder why no one came up with it before. Basically, one player draws a card and reads it to the group. The card will say something like, “Things you should never do with chocolate.” Then everyone writes down their own answer. Answers in our admittedly off-the-wall group would be anything from put it in your ears, or store it in your underwear, to put it in the toilet and pretend . . . well you get the idea. Then you take turns guessing who wrote what. The best thing about the game is that everyone plays every turn, and I’ve never heard so much laughter during any game.

This is a game that is best played with at least five players. We actually played with about ten of us at one point. It was fun, but just took too long to give everyone a turn. On the other hand, if you have fewer than five players it doesn’t work very well. I wouldn’t recommend it for kids much younger than ten, unless there are several of them playing, as part of the game is guessing who wrote what.

When we first took this Pandemic out of the box, it looked like another Risk type of board game. You have the usual world map, different colored markers, cards, etc. The big difference here, is that instead of trying to kill each other, all of the players cooperate to save the world from a world wide . . . you guessed it, pandemic.

I like this game for several reason. First, it’s cool to play a game where all of you are cooperating against a single opponent. Kind of fun to help each other instead of trying to trash each other. Either you all succeed in finding cures for four rampant diseases, or you all fail together.

The second fun thing is that it’s really kind of educational to see how a disease can spread, and quickly get out of control. (Okay, maybe I just have a sick idea of fun, but it is educational, while not being boring.)

The only drawback is that you can’t have any more than four players unless you have the expansion. The good news is that you can have an enjoyable game with as few as two players. It took us about thirty-five minutes to play. (Yeah, we , uh, actually did not manage to save the world. Sorry about that.) I would guess that with experienced players most games would take under an hour to complete.

Of all the games we played over the last week, I think Acquire may be my favorite. This game is actually older than me. It kind of fell off the radar for a while, and had a few changes. But now it’s back to it original form, and, from what I heard at the game store, bigger than ever.

When you first look at the board, it seems incredibly boring.

It’s essentially just a big grid of numbers and letters. Even when we began reading the rules, it didn’t seem all that cool. Basically you build hotel chains, buy and sell stock, and watch as one hotel gobbles up another.

But once you start playing, it become so engrossing I couldn’t tear myself away. The idea is that you start with a certain amount of money. You draw tiles that match the grids on the board. Once two adjoining tile are laid down, you can place a hotel on them. Every time a tile is added to the hotel, it become worth more. Eventually one hotel connects with another hotel, and as long as the smaller hotel is less than 11 tiles big, it gets acquired.

Where the real strategy (and fun) comes in is buying and selling stock. If you are a majority (most shares) or minority (second most shares) shareholder in a hotel that is acquired, you get cash. You can then sell your stock in that hotel, trade it for stock in the bigger hotel, or keep it in hopes that the hotel chain will be placed back on the board again. You use your cash to buy additional stock in other hotels.

The challenge is that you need cash flow to keep buying more hotel stock, but there is a limited number of shares in any given hotel. And ultimately the players with the most stock in the hotels that survive cash out big. As soon as you finish a game, you start to think of other strategies and want to play again. Really fun game with lots of different ways to approach it.

You can have from three to six players and games take anywhere from one to two hours. Because so much of this game involves strategic thinking, I think players younger than twelve or so would have a hard time competing or enjoying the game.

So that’s what we’ve been playing here. How about you?

What Does the Future Hold?

2010-12-27T16:40:00.002-07:00

Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas, Chanukah, or whatever you and yours celebrate at this time of year. The Savage household has been busy visiting, sharing gifts, playing new games, watching movies, and eating the amazing food prepared by the gorgeous and talented Mrs. Savage.

The trend among author blogs this last few months seems to be writing blogs posts about what advice you would give your younger self if you could. I always find the line between hindsight and foresight so interesting. I want to tell things to my younger self, and I also want to ask things of my future self.

For a long time, my wife and kids and I used to go camping at the same place every summer. Every time we unpacked and set up the tent, we would discover things we had accidently left in its many inside pockets. Flashlights, change, receipts, paperbacks. Each year, I would think that I should write my predictions of what I thought we would be doing the next summer and slip them into the tent like a mini time capsule. Because invariably, my guesses at where I would be in a year would have been wrong. Even cooler would have been if I could open the tent and find messages from my future self.

Many people wonder if they would have been willing to take advice from their future selves. On the one hand, we have plenty of people with experience who we don’t listen to now. Would we really listen to our older and “wiser” selves?

I wonder if my current self should even be giving advice to my previous self. I imagine one of the first things I would have told my former self is to focus more on grades and get a degree. Not having a degree has been a major barrier in my life at times. And I’m definitely encouraging my children to finish college.

But would it have been the best thing for me? If I had gone to college, earned a degree, and landed a solid job with a big company, I certainly wouldn’t have spent a year cleaning out toilet drains. Our family might not have experienced the financial ups and downs that seem to mark many of my holiday memories.But would I have started writing books? What a terrible tradeoff it would be to gain financial security, only to lose something that has brought so much joy to the lives of my family and me.

A couple of years ago, I was laid off from the company I’d worked at for about four years. I made a huge decision, not to look for work in 2009 and instead to pursue the dream of writing fulltime. At the time, if I could have asked my former self one question, it would have been something like, “Will this decision work out financially?” The answer? A resounding no. It was an incredibly stressful year, constantly on the brink of financial disaster. Always trying to book the next school event, and sell a few more books. It put us in a hole we are still climbing out of.

Had I known then, what the results of my efforts would be, I would have taken the first job I could find. And the result would have been that the Farworld series would have almost certainly died. I’ve received over 3,000 e-mails from readers asking when the next Farworld book is coming out. That date is still a little up in the air, but there wouldn’t be a next Farworld book, or most of those e-mails, had I known then what I know now.

If I could give advice to my former self, what would I say? Would I tell me to get another job? Would I have explained how hard that year would be and about the financial ramifications? Or would I have said, “Suffer through the trials, for the sake of the future?” I don’t know. If I had told myself everything that was going to happen, I might not have been able to promote the series with the same energy and excitement that I needed to put in those kinds of hours. In retrospect it was probably better that I did what I did without knowing how the future would turn out.

Our family likes to go see movies together. We are also part of the weird group that stays all the way through the end of the credits (to the total annoyance the employees waiting to come in a start cleaning.) Mostly we like to stay because we believe that it is kind of an homage to all the people who made the movie possible. But sometimes we also get rewarded with an Easter egg—a little scene that doesn’t play until the very end when almost everyone has left. It’s a little thing.

The people who left before seeing it don’t feel like they missed anything. It’s not a key part of the movie. But sometimes it can be one of the most enjoyable parts for us. When I look back at the year of doing school visits, a lot of what I remember is being sick all the time and watching every penny. At times the difficulties seemed almost unbearable. And if I had known that at the end of the year I would be back searching for a job, I might very well have given up.

Then I think back about the amazing friends I made. The fun my wife and I had traveling to schools as small as twenty students. How much time we spent laughing. The fun of bringing our kids with us when we could. Eating in tiny little restaurants in cities many Utahans have never even heard of. The overall experience was incredibly trying, and certainly not what I thought it would be. But like the Easter Eggs at the end of movies, the little things made it so wonderful.

I have no idea where I’ll be next year. When will the next Farworld book come out? How will The Fourth Nephite series turn out? Will Demon Spawn sell? Will writing become a bigger part of my life, or will it take a smaller role? I’d love to ask my future self these questions. But it’s entirely possible that even if I could, my future self would refuse to answer. You’ve probably heard the saying that the journey is more important than the destination. I would add that sometimes what makes the journey so enjoyable is not knowing exactly where or what the destination is.

As you finish up the year past and head into the dark and unknowable future that lies before you, I hope you can keep from being overwhelmed by the big picture and enjoy the little things along the path you follow. Best wishes and happy New Year.

Critique Groups

2010-12-20T21:42:00.003-07:00

Okay, this video has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with today’s post, but It makes me laugh every time I watch it. So, yeah, that probably makes me weird. But consider it my white-elephant gift to you.

Once again, I find myself in a position to do a meaningful holiday post, full of seasonal wishes and good cheer. And once again, I am thinking, “I'm not as funny as blogger x, as inspired as blogger y, as smart as blogers I and Q." Instead, I’ll leave the holiday stuff to my fellow bloggers, and write about, well, writing.

Yeah, I know not all that exciting. But wait, I have an excuse. Recently Julia (Not Julie) Wright e-mailed me and asked if I would post something about critique groups. Being the hero that I am . . .

. . . I was like, “You know I have a really good piece I did on marketing a couple of years ago. Or I could repost something of Rob’s.

And she was like, “No. You’re the best writer I’ve ever me. And the coolest. Please write something about critique groups.” (I may have taken a few small liberties with her exact words.)

How could I argue with that?

So, here goes.

When I first started writing, I had no ide what a critique group was. I wrote a book, had a few family members read it, sent it to a publisher, and six months later got a phone call that they had accepted it. Way too easy right? It was and is. But at that time I had no clue publishing was supposed to be hard. The good news was, my book got published. It just so happened the first book I ever wrote was a high-tech thriller. And the first publisher I sent it to was looking to add “guy books” to their line.

The bad news was, my book could have been much better. The first two chapters had pretty much every mistake you can make. Shortly after my first book came out, as I was finishing writing my second book, I moved from California to Utah. A whole bunch of great neighbors helped us move all of our stuff into our new house. I told one of them that I had just published a book. She immediately said, “Oh, you should join my critique group.” Again let me say that although I had published a book, I didn’t know the first thing about writing. I seriously thought she was trying to get me involved in a multi-level marketing scheme or something.

Once I figured out it was a kind of writing group, I agreed to come. It was right across the street and I didn’t know very many other writers. As if that wasn’t enough, it turned out that it was a group composed entirely of intelligent, attractive women, and I was the only guy.

I felt a lot like Snoopy in the above picture. At least I did until one of the women told me she didn’t think my first book was very good. Ouch! Then I discovered that the way things worked was that each person read aloud from their latest work in progress for six minutes. In those six minutes, you were supposed to read along on your own copy, and not only keep up but actually jot down useful comments that made sense.

And let me tell you, these women were brutal. There was the Grammar Queen. When you got your pages back from her it looked like James Bond had killed a room-full of nuns and blotted up the blood with your writing. Black white and red was everywhere.

There was the Inquisitor. “I don’t think he could fire a rifle while holding onto the back of a horse with one hand and hugging the hot blonde with the other. And you can’t laugh a sentence.”

The informer. “Ghosts don’t actually touch human skin. If they are going to choke your hero, he will have to be wearing a sweater with a high neck.”

And they were all good writers. One women was writing a romance set in Scotland in the 1400s or thereabout. I was afraid to make any comments about her work for fear I just didn’t understand the dialect. Another was writing a mystery that she made up as she went along. We’d ask something like, “So are you foreshadowing the death of the grandmother?” And she’d say say. “I’m not sure. I guess if the grandmother dies, I probably am.”

It wasn’t all stressful though. Every once in a while we’d discover a line that was so unintentionally funny that we couldn’t stop giggling. Like the woman who discovered her mother’s smelly chest. Or the investigator who urinated in the bushes while wondering if there was a leak. Or the rape victim who couldn’t decide because she felt torn. (Yeah, I know. That last one is really bad. But honestly, if you came across that line in a room filled with writers, could you keep a straight face?)

I had no idea at the time, that although a few of the members would come and go over time, nine years later, I would still be part of the group. By now, I think we have something like twenty books published between the six of us. We’ve added another guy, although he’s kind of a sissy, so I don’t know if that counts. More than anything though, we’ve all become much better writers. With nine years of critique experience, here are a few of the things I’ve learned.

1) It’s not as important as you might think to have everyone writing the same genre. It’s actually quite useful to have a romance writer, a historical novelist, a non-fiction writer, and so forth. Each of them can give you feedback that helps your work. Rob told me that my Hell in Demon Spawn needed to be “helled up” more. Several of the women told me what worked in my kissing scenes and what didn’t. Most books have a decent spicing of all genres combined.

2) It’s not even that important to have everyone writing at the same level. Admittedly it’s tough to combine a writer who’s still learning the basics together with more advanced writers. But the fact is that the newer writers either catch up quickly, or decide the group isn’t right for them. And while one writer may not know the difference between an em-dash and a hyphen, they might be an expert on the old west. The more important thing is that each writer is willing to listen and learn. Becoming better writers is what it’s really all about.

3) Location is a pretty big deal. When we first started our group, we all lived fairly close to one another, with several of us in the same town. Since then, we’ve spread out so that now, there’s a good forty-five minutes between those in the south and those in the north. That definitely makes it harder to get everyone together.

4) You learn as much from editing the work of others as you do from having your own work edited. One of the hardest things about being in a critique group is learning to give good feedback. One of our members is a great detail person. She really finds all the little punctuation flaws that I would totally miss. I’m more of a big-picture person. I’m kind of known for saying, “Okay. I just have a couple of things,” and then destroying a chapter. Personally, I have found that reading other member’s work critically has helped me find flaws in my own work. I tell someone what I think is missing in their writing, only to realize I’ve done the exact same thing in mine.

5) You have to be friends first. It can be hard to find a group that is both helpful professionally and good friends. I was really lucky that the people I joined were exactly the kind of people I would like to hang out with anyway. Sometimes you may join a group only to discover that you don’t get along with them. If that is the case, I’d suggest finding a new group. The reason I say this is because the actually feedback can be pretty grueling. There’s nothing like having a chapter you knew might need a “little” work, get dissected until you realize you have to write it completely over. That’s the hard part. The good part is being able to laugh at a really bad chapter, and encouraged to go back and make it better. Knowing that the members of the group are your friends first and last, makes the hard parts not as hard and the good parts even better.

6) Make sure you share more than just the critiques. This kind of goes back to the friendship thing again, but it’s about more than telling each other what works and what doesn’t in their manuscript. It’s about sharing joys and pains. About commiserating and celebrating together. Of course writing is what first brought us together, but sometimes we’ll spend the first hour just talking about what’s going on in our lives. We all have time when we don’t even have anything to bring that night, but show up just to enjoy the company of other writers. Writing can be a lonely business and you need good friends to share it with—friends who understand the ups and downs of writing and publishing.

7) Do what works for you. Our routine is pretty basic. We try to meet once a week. Each person brings enough copies of their manuscript to hand out one copy to everyone there. The first person to arrive goes first, the person who is hosting goes last. We hand out our pages, read for about six to ten minutes, and then get feedback in clockwise order. We write our notes on the pages we have been given and hand them back after giving our feedback.

Other groups work differently. Some do everything on-line. Some do an entire manuscript at a time. Some focus on just one genre. Some have a different person than the author reading. Mostly, you need to find what works for your group and then feel free to modify that as members and abilities change.

8) Find your niche. I will never be the king of grammar. I don’t do motivations as well as some. What I am good at is taking a chapter as a whole, and spotting what doesn’t work. Big picture stuff. I’m also pretty good at query letters. Don’t worry about not being able to do all things. The point of a critique group is to give enough quality feedback that the author can see for themselves what is working and what isn’t. If you are really good at creating realistic dialogue, use that. If you know romance inside and out, use that. It’s important that every member gives as well as receiving, so find what you are good at giving and focus on that.

I know critique groups are not for everyone. Some writers start with a group and outgrow it. Others feel like they don’t want feedback until a book is done. All I can say is that my group has and still does make me a better writer and a better person. At this time of year especially, I am so grateful for their talent. But even more I am grateful for their friendship. I can’t imagine any level of success, or lack thereof, that would make me leave this group of wonderful friends and writers. I truly hope that if you are looking to find a group of your own, you are even half as lucky as I’ve been.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to shout them out. I’ll answer what I can, and I know this really awesome group of writers who are happy to answer what I can’t.

Here's a shout out to the members of my group.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to ask. I’ll answer what I can, and I know this really awesome group of writers who are happy to answer what I can’t.

Retro You-Are-Not-Alone Friday

2010-12-17T11:17:00.001-07:00

(Every Friday, that I remember, I post a song from a classic rock band of my youth. Sometimes I include thoughts. Sometimes I’m luck to remember to even post.)

Sunday I was in an airport. Along with Monday, Wednesday, and an hour of Thursday. (I wonder how many blog posts I start with a story that happened in an airport. Way too many would be my guess.) Anyway, I was on a layover in Denver, when I found my gate filled with military personnel. Okay, fine, soldiers.

They were all dressed in their camouflage, and obviously waiting to ship out. Most of you probably don’t know that I did a short stint in the Army Reserves. I didn’t fight in any wars, and the farthest away from home I ever got was basic training in Fort Jackson, SC. But I can still remember the training as clearly as if it happened yesterday.

Seeing that huge group of active military, my first instinct was to move down to sit at a different gate. Not because I don’t like soldiers. Some of the most awesome people I’ve ever met have been in the military. It’s just that it felt like entering a club I wasn’t a part of anymore.

My memories of basic training and skills training after, are so vivid, that I still have dreams about it. Only in my dreams, I find myself back in the military, but I clearly don’t fit in. I am older than the other recruits, I can’t find half of my uniform, I’ve missed my briefing. You know the kind of dream I’m talking about. Whether you’re dreaming about a play where you can’t remember your lines, or a class where you haven’t studied for the big test, you are there, but you aren’t “there.”

My hair is cut short enough that it could be military. I know most of the military speak. I know they are good people. But I wasn’t wearing BDUs and no matter what experiences I’d had, I’d never sat in an airport waiting to be deployed to hostile territory. I didn’t fit in.

I’ve talked to a lot of other writers who feel that way about the author crowd. You attend the same events, you know their names, you’ve read a lot of their books. You’re pretty sure you both turn on the computer the same way and have to go back and delete extra adverbs the same way. But when you are around a lot of them, you don’t know if you really fit in.

In fact, you’re not even sure if you should call yourself a writer at all. Doesn’t calling yourself that imply certain things? Like that you’re a “good” writer, or a “published” writer or a writer any of them might ever have heard of. You can get yourself so worked up about not being a part of the group, that you actually convince yourself they are probably all snobs who look down on you, and that you really don’t belong.

But here’s a secret that I suspect you already know deep down inside. Almost no one looks down on newbies, because we’ve all been there. And nearly every writer finds himself or herself intimidated at one time or another. Think about any group you’ve been a part of for a long time and you’ll realize I am right. The regulars know each other. They have inside jokes. They’ve been through a lot of the same ups and downs. They know what a newcomer still has to go through. But except for the people who are jerks no matter what situation they are in, the group usually welcomes new members with open arms.

I was part of a recent library event where Scott Westerfeld was the keynote speaker. You know the bestselling Scott Westerfeld who wrote Uglies, Midnighters, Leviathan, and a ton of other great series? Yeah, I was intimidated. If that wasn’t bad enough, I was on a fantasy panel with the other two authors being NYT bestsellers. See how comfortable you are speaking up in that situation.

But you know what? Every one of them was as nice as could be. And it turned out I actually did have some things I could add to the conversation without looking like a total dweeb. So here’s a little advice for the next time you start to feel like you don’t fit in.

Any specialized group tends to use a lot of terms ordinary people might find unfamiliar. In the military it might be MRI, MRE, BDU, or SOP. With writers it might be infodump, head-hopping, POV, or character arc. These aren’t designed to keep you in the dark, they are just terms that we use so much we forget other people might not understand them. If you hear something you don’t know either ask someone or Google it. Stick around long enough and you’ll be using them too.

If you spend enough time doing any one thing, you start to know people in the industry. It’s not that we are all part of a secret society you aren’t a part of. We’ve just been to a lot of the same events, met a lot of the same people, and are members of a lot of the same e-mail lists, or users groups, or whatever. My dad knows a ton of people I’ve never met that all do Geocaching like he does. Are some writers snobs? I think you know the answer to that. The same way as if I asked you whether some people in your neighborhood or church or school are snobs. The best way to get to know everyone and start learning the inside jokes, and cool gossip, is to go meet people. If someone is a jerk to you, just ignore them and move on. You’ll probably discover down the road that everyone knows that person is a jerk and doesn’t really like him anyway.

There is no official definition of a writer. Any more than there is an official definition of a soldier. If you are in your first day of boot camp, you can call yourself a soldier. If you write, you can call yourself a writer. There will always be someone who knows more than you do, has sold more books than you have, and uses bigger words than you. Don’t fall into the trap of comparing yourself to anyone else.

That being said, it’s probably not a great idea for a brand new private to start telling a four star general how to do his job. As a new writer at a new event, you should probably spend less time talking and more time listening. That doesn’t mean don’t socialize. And it definitely doesn’t mean not to ask questions. Spend lots of time talking to other writers. Ask for all the advice you can get. But before you start spouting off about what a terrible writer you think so-and-so is, it might be wise to discover so-and-so’s wife is sitting next to you. But be a sponge as much as you can and you’ll be surprised how much you pick up.

Lastly, understand that unless you are the best schmoozer in the world, it will take a little while to fit into any new group. Don’t be scared off by the inside jokes, or the new phrases. Just like when you moved to a new school in third grade, be friendly and play nice, and pretty soon you’ll feel like you’ve been doing this all your life.

And if you discover after sitting with a bunch of soldiers for about fifteen minutes that you are actually at the wrong gate. Just stand up casually, stretch, and stroll toward the right gate like you really do know what you’re doing.

In honor of not fitting in, here’s one of my favorite 70’s/80’s bands singing the ultimate “I don’t fit in” song.

The Logical Song by Supertramp

Reetroe Frydae (Mispelled Verzion)

2010-12-10T22:59:00.002-07:00

Recently Jen and I introduced our two youngest children to the joys of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adveture.

Bill: I'm Bill S. Preston, Esquire!
Ted: And I'm Ted Theo-
[realizes *he's* holding the camera]
Ted: Hold on. Bill, here. You take it.
Bill: Okay.
Ted: And I'm Ted "Theodore" Logan!
[Bill puts the camera on the table]
Bill, Ted: And we're... WYLD STALLYNS!

As part of watching the movie, we got into discussing whether Bill & Ted intentionally misspelled their band’s name, or if they just weren’t all that smart. So in honor of Wyld Stallyns, I thought I’d share songs from three classic rock bands who intentionally misspelled their names.

Let’s start with a classic. According to legend this band got it’s name, led Zeppelin, when Keith Moon and John Entwistle, of The Who, said that a band made up up themselves, Jimmy Page, and Jeff Beck would go down like a lead zeppelin. The ironic thing is that they dropped the 'a' in Lead at the suggestion of their manager, Peter Grant, to prevent "thick Americans" from pronouncing it "leed".

Probably their best known song is “Stairway to Heaven.” But I really like this one too.

Next is a group, that that was named after a band Joe Elliott made up while writing reviews of imaginary bands in his English class. Gotta like that English teacher. (I’m sure it was an actual assignment right?) Interestingly, Jeff was a big Led Zepplin fan. The original name was Deaf Leopard. But they changed the spelling to Def Leopard, because . . . well because they could I guess.

Last of all is a band that named themselves Leonard Skinnerd after a PE teacher at Robert E. Lee High School, Leonard Skinner who was known for strictly enforcing the school's policy against boys having long hair. They changed the spelling to Lynyrd Skynyrd, and later invited the teacher to introduce them at a concert.

Free Bird was another classic at dances back in the day. And any kid with a guitar and a dream of being a rock star had to learn Stairway to Heaven and the Free Bird guitar solo.

There you go! Who says you have to be a good speller to be successful?

It’s Hip to be Square?

2010-12-06T16:35:00.003-07:00

No this is not one of my Retro Friday blogs posted early. I actually want to talk a little more about e-readers. But first some author news. Good friend Ally Condie’s book, Matched, came out November 30th. I had a chance to read an early ARC, and let me just say that if you liked The Giver, you will love Matched. It had that same Utopian/Dystopian feel, that same enchanting writing, and a nice dash of romance. No vampires or arenas of deadly teens, but a great read! Good write-up in Entertainment Weekly.

Also, if you didn’t see this article, looks like the Maze Runner movie is moving forward quickly with a well known director. My understanding is that the part about James doing the screen play adaptation is not accurate. But still totally cool.

Now where were we before I started drooling over the success of my friends? Oh, right e-readers. Interesting feedback on my last e-reader post. My post actually goes to two different blogs, Goodreads, Amazon, and Facebook. So I get quite a bit of feedback.

I would have expected my younger readers to be on the cutting edge of e-books. After all, they were the ones raised reading newspapers, magazines, articles, etc, on-line. Instead, it looks like the people buying most of the e-books are in their thirties or older. Maybe because they are the ones who have the $? But nearly everyone wants an e-reader.

What this got me wondering is whether e-books could possibly make reading cool again. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always loved reading. And I know a lot of you have too. But even in books, the kids who read a lot are usually positioned as the nerds. I mean think about it. Hermione Granger. Big reader. Big nerd. In Stephen King’s novel, IT, the kid who spends all of his time in the library is the fat kid no one likes. Of course they also tend to be the smart kids—but nerdy none-the-less. The nerdy kids stay at home and read books while the cool kids have adventures.

Yeah, okay, I didn’t look that nerdy (I hope) when I was in school. But I was one of those kids who spent a lot of time in the library. For one thing, it is VERY tough to get beat up in the library. The librarians were pretty strict about screwing around. And I’m not sure the bullies even knew it was there. As a side benefit, I discovered that the library was the prefect place to cut class. No one ever came up to a kid reading a book and asked him why he wasn’t in biology.

Over the last few years, several things have happened to make reading a little cooler. Harry Potter was so huge that even the kids who thought reading was lame got sucked in. Then Twilight did the same thing. Girls that wouldn’t be caught dead with a book had to be a part of the “cool” crowd who debated Edward and Jacob. Shoot, even Hermione—the ultimate bookworm—ended up looking like this.

If that wasn’t enough, books have now gone high-tech. Think about it. Cool kids have MP3 players right? Cool kids have smart phones, and skateboards, and videogames. Could it be that cool kids are going to be buying e-readers? And if so, could reading take its place alongside snowboarding, mountain biking, and fighting Voldemort?

I’m not sure if it will really happen. And if it does, will it last? Do we lifelong readers even want it to? As an author, I’d love reading to become as popular as going to movies. I’d love the release of the next big novel to get as much exposure as, say, the Super Bowl.

But as a reader, I don’t know how I feel about that. I have to admit there’s something a little smug about knowing so many people have no idea how good Hunger Games is, or that “LES MISÉRABLES” was a book before it was a musical. I mean, come on, isn’t there a part of you that gloats just a little when you say, “It wasn’t as good as the book.”

Maybe we should just keep the secret between you and me that:

Retro (On Submission) Friday

2010-12-03T17:10:00.001-07:00

If you are an unpublished (or even a published) writer, or hope to be a writer someday, you absolutely MUST read this post by author Natalie Whipple. Then you MUST read this follow-up post, also by Natalie.

Read the first to give yourself a true reality check. When I signed on with my first agent about six years ago, I was positive I had achieved the pinnacle of success. Finally, I didn’t have to be the one selling my book. My agent would take care of everything. And the book WOULD sell. It was being submitted by a great agent at a great agency. Yeah, well, that doesn’t guarantee anything. In fact, in a way, it’s even worse. You think, “If she can’t my book, I must be a total loser.”

Of course that’s not the case at all. While I still might be a total loser, agents obviously can’t sell everything they take on. Not because they are bad agents, or because the book is bad, but because there just isn’t always the perfect fit. If an agent could sell everything they took on, they wouldn’t have to work nearly as hard as they do, trying to find perfect matches.

Reading Natalie’s post back then (had it been written) would have given me a least a sense that I wasn’t quite over the hump. We all need to learn these things our own way and at our own pace. But it would have been nice to have at least a dose of reality splashed on my head.

Read the second, because it will remind you that no matter how many trials you go through, no matter how difficult life seems at times, you are the one who can choose how you will respond. Will you quit or will you fight on. I’m so dang impressed with Natalie, and have no doubt she will succeed.

I’m “On Submission” myself right now. And just like she says, it is a stressful time. Every time the phone rings, your first thought is, “Could that be my agent?” In fact I’ve given him his own ring tone, so I stop freaking out. “Back in Black” by AC/DC. Even though I’ve published books, the stress is just as real. So I try to enjoy the ride, and hope it will make for great stories down the road.

In honor of Natalie, today’s retro Friday song is by one of my favorite 70’s bands. Whether it’s The Worst of Times or The Best of Times is totally in how you respond to setbacks.

All I want for Christmas is . . . an e-reader?

2010-11-29T19:08:00.002-07:00

We have a rule at our house. No Christmas music until after Thanksgiving. It’s not that we don’t like Christmas music. It’s just the whole one holiday at a time thing. If you’re going to start playing Christmas music halfway through November, why not have your Turkey dinner before Halloween or shoot off fireworks in June?

Next thing you know, you’ll be buying your wife gifts and taking her out to dinner before Valentines Day. I mean . . um . . . okay, never mind.

However, now that the dinner has been served—along with numerous follow-up sandwiches, we can discuss the big holiday. With that in mind, I want to to talk about something near to my heart. Something that fills our spirits with joy, reminds us of the real meaning of the holidays, and warms us inside and out.Of course I’m speaking of e-readers.

Without giving away my age, I remember when the big things to get were MP3 players, CD players, cell phones, computers, DVDs, CD players, Sony Walkman (men?), VCRs (both Beta and VHS), eight track players. Yeah, I think that’s far enough back.

Each of these had a perceived and a real impact. Eight track players made it easier to put more music on one tape and access it more quickly. VCRs were going to kill free TV by letting people skip commercials. MP3 players were going to kill record companies. And to some extent all of these did happen. But at the same time none of them completely did.

As I talk to people about e-readers and e-books, I get the impression that this is Christmas/Chanukah/gift-giving holiday of your choice of the e-reader. Lots of people buying, receiving, or hoping for e-readers of one kind or another.

While I’m convinced e-readers are going to become as commonplace as MP3 players, I’m not completely convinced physical books are going away. Obviously that’s just my opinion. Spend a few minutes browsing the internet and you’ll find plenty of people predicting the demise of everything from bookstores, to publishers and agents, to hardbacks/paperbacks, to libraries.

As an author, I’m excited about e-books. I love the idea of presenting at a conference, school, class, or other event, and having people be able to start reading my latest book before I’m done presenting. I like the idea of people reading about my book on a blog and downloading it within seconds. I like the idea of people buying more books because they cost less. If they like one of my books, they can buy more without paying shipping, tax, or waiting for days. It’s the ultimate impulse buy.

As a reader, I can’t see myself giving up physical books anytime soon. I love physical books. But I also love the idea of carrying lots of books in one little device. I imagine I’ll get an e-reader, but still buy my favorite authors in hardback and paperback. I’ll still prowl used bookstores and visit the library. I think there are enough people like me that bookstores might change, but won’t go away completely.

So my question to you is, are you planning on getting an e-reader in the next 12 months? If so, will you give up buying paper books completely? Do you anticipate buying more books? Will having an e-reader change the way you buy books? Do you think you’ll download many free books by authors you haven’t heard of? Will you choose a $2.99 book over a $12.99 book, or will you focus mainly on authors you already know and love? If you aren’t getting an e-reader, is it a stance against them, the money, not a priority, or something else?

Tell all. I promise it will stay between you, me, and everyone else who reads this blog!

Black Retro Friday

2010-11-26T17:42:00.001-07:00

Hope you all had an awesome Thanksgiving including lots of great food, family, football, and my favorite, naps!

Wow, so many possibilities for today’s Retro Friday. Paint It Black by the Stones. Um, the one about Turkeys, or um football, or gratitude, or naps.

Okay, so maybe there aren’t as many Black Friday rock songs as I thought. I personally stayed home today and recovered from a great day with family and friends, only going outside long enough to have lunch with a couple of friends. But in honor of all you who braved the wilds and crowds to go shopping, here’s one of my old favorites, “Run Through the Jungle” by Creedence Clearwater Revival.

This song came out in 1970, when many of you weren’t even born yet, and I looked something like this.

Stylish, no?

Although many people thought this song was about the Vietnam War, it was actually about violence at home in the US. It has been featured in several movies, including:

Rude Awakening (1989)
Air America (1990)
Rudy (1993)
The Big Lebowski (1998)
Radiofreccia (1998)
Tropic Thunder (2008)

And it is the song Jack and his best friend, Richard listen to as they cross the country in a wolf-chauffeured Cadillac at the end of The Talisman, written by Stephen King and Peter Straub.

Enjoy!

The Black Box

2010-11-23T13:32:00.002-07:00

I know it’s just around the corner from Thanksgiving, and I should be doing a post on all the things I’m thankful for. I might even do that in a couple of days. But I hate doing those for two reasons. First, they always sound like you just accepted a major award. I’m thankful for my parents, my family, my agent, my cleaning lady (no, I don’t actually have a cleaning lady.) Second, it always feels a little weird to make a list of everything you are grateful for because, really, can you put your family, your health, and double-stuff mint Oreos on the same list without sounding a little whacked?

So instead of telling you everything I’m grateful for, I’m going to write about something that is near and dear to my heart at the moment. Acquisitions. I’m not going to talk about where things stand with my latest book. It doesn’t make sense until things solidify, and besides, my agent would shoot me and delete the post anyway.

But I can talk about the acquisitions process. A lot of people (including me) wonder about the mysterious magical method of deciding which books are accepted and which are not. It’s this kind of supernatural black box. You put in a novel or work of nonfiction, stir, wait what always seems like far too long, and—tada!—out pops either a sale or a rejection. But how does it really work? Who decides? How do they decide? Today, I will do my best to open the black box and take you for a tour inside.

Before we delve into its mysterious depths, let me warn you that I am more of a guide than an expert. I have sold books and talked to editors and publishers about the process. But not being an agent or an editor myself, I have never been there in person. Also, different publishers do things differently, but I’ll point out some basics. Okay, put on your hardhat turn on your flashlight and let’s head in.

There are two different ways your book ends up in the hand of an editor. Either you send it directly if the publisher takes unsolicited manuscripts, or it is sent by your agent. Either way, the process is pretty much the same. Your manuscript is typically sent out to a number of different agents. The great thing about having an agent is that a good agent not only knows which editors represent what, but they also often know these editors’ personal tastes, what they have purchased recently, and what they are looking for. Bigger publishers have many acquiring editors, smaller publishers usually have a single person known as the acquisition editor.

Once the editor receives your manuscript, they read through it. I used to think this sounded like the best job in the world. Just sit around all day reading books. Unfortunately that is not the case. The same editor who reads new manuscripts also spends their day editing existing manuscripts. In fact, often, the only chance they have to read new manuscripts from authors who aren’t already publishing with them is on the train, at night, at home, during lunch, etc. (No, I don’t know if they read while on the toilet or not, and I’m surprised you would even ask.)

In the past, if an editor loved your work, they could take it directly to the big cheese of the imprint, usually called the publisher, for approval. These days it’s mostly done through committee. If the editor likes your work, they can either request changes, or put together something called an Acquisition Proposal, depending on how strong they feel your work is. I know it seems odd that an editor might ask for changes before agreeing to publish your book. But this actually works in your favor, because the editor alone won’t be making the decision. It still has to go through the committee who can kill a deal even if the editor loves it. So having your work be as strong as possible gives you a better chance for success.

Author, Harold Underdown, has created an awesome sample proposal here. It’s a good thing to look at either before you begin writing your book or before you start editing, because it’s probably the closest thing to a blueprint you will ever see of what makes a strong proposal. One of the things you might notice is that it’s not all about story. Things like competitive titles, profit and loss, and target audience are every bit as important as how well the story is written.

Starting to feel like your story is a product on a conveyor belt? It’s probably good to see it at least a little bit that way. You don’t want to think like this when you are writing the book. Don’t create your character’s attributes based on what you think will sell, or your story will stink. And even a story that hits the marketing bullseye will not do well if the writing is poor. But once you’ve written “the end” you need to start thinking about things like marketing, positioning, etc. Because to a large extent, you, your book, and your editor, will be judged based on how well your book sells.

So back to the process. Your editor sends the AP to the other departments and editors—marketing, sales, accounting, art, publicity, other imprints, etc. Depending on the length of the manuscript, they may also get an entire copy of the manuscript or a partial. Your editor is looking to get other people’s input and to get their backing. From what I’ve heard some of these meetings can get pretty heated. Your editor obviously wants to publish your book. But sales may not think it is unique enough to get attention. Marketing may not be clear on what genre it actually is. Accounting may think it doesn’t have a big enough audience to be profitable. The process of selling a book can take anywhere from a few days to a year or more. Typically an agent is going to hear back quicker than you will if you submit yourself.

At the end of the day, only some of the books taken to committee will be accepted. If yours is lucky enough to be one of them, the next step is putting together an offer. This is where things like royalties, rights, amount and payout of advance, hardback or paperback, marketing, territory, etc, are all negotiated. And again, this is where an agent can come in really handy. Very small publishers may not have a lot to offer as far as marketing or big advances. But even then, it helps to have someone on your side who knows what is normal and what is not. With a larger deal you may keep foreign rights and movie rights, get a $50,000 advance per book on a three book deal, paid out in four parts, be published in trade paperback, and have x amount of marketing dollars committed. With a smaller publisher, there may be little or no advance, and pretty basic rights.

If more than one publisher makes an offer, your book can go to auction. Generally this is a good thing because publishers who really like your work may make better offers. Of course it can also scare off a publisher who was still on the fence about the project. Deciding what offer to take is not always about just the upfront money. One publisher may offer a larger advance, while another lets you keep foreign rights and agrees to make your title a major release with more marketing.

One local publisher here in Utah, Covenant Communications, has a similar process, but after the Acquisitions Editor approves it, they send it out to Beta Readers and decide whether to proceed or not based the feedback forms they fill out. I’m sure there are other smaller publishers who do the same thing. Once you’ve agreed to a specific deal, your editor will begin going over your manuscript again in more detail to put together an editorial letter.

And there you go. Maybe not perfectly clear, but better than that black void, right? The thing to keep in mind is that once your manuscript is sent out, there’s not much you can do other than move on to your next project. It’s agonizing to wait—especially when you don’t even know if anyone is reading your manuscript or what they think of it if they have. But you have to find a way to take your mind off of it, and writing something else is a great way to do that.

On the other hand, when writing (and editing) your work, hopefully, remembering what lies ahead for your baby will make you think a little bit more about creating a story that is both well written and unique. Maybe you’ll take a little more time checking out the market, reading comparable books, checking reviews to see what readers liked and disliked about a particular title. And most of all, every time you read a book, think about the acquisition process and ask yourself what it was about this title that got it through the door. If you do all of that, your chances of getting your own book through should increase dramatically.

Here are some other helpful links about the acquisition process.

http://www.underdown.org/acquisition-process.htm

http://bloomabilities.blogspot.com/2006/06/do-you-remember-your-first.html

http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2009/08/how-book-gets-published.html

http://bookendslitagency.blogspot.com/2006/08/perspective-from-publishing-house.html

http://bluerosegirls.blogspot.com/2007/08/how-do-book-auctions-work.html

Retro Friday (on Saturday)

2010-11-20T10:50:00.002-07:00

Have I told you that I’ve got more weird plane stories than anyone I’ve ever met? The time a flight attendant got caught in the cart elevator and they had to reroute to Japan? The time I got stuck in the last window seat next to a guy who needed two seatbelt extenders, and a lady got knocked out by a metal briefcase halfway through the deboarding? The guy who forgot to take his meds and starting preaching about Jesus until he was removed? The list goes on and on.

Yeah, well, last Friday wasn’t exactly a plane story. It was actually more of a rental car on the way to the plane story. I was driving back to the Westchester, NY.airport with my boss, but we were running late and his flight was first. So I dropped him off and went for gas. So far so good (except for the price of gas in Greenwich, CT. They must have tiny bits of diamond in the gas there to justify $3.39 for regular unleaded!)

The problem came when I decided to put a few things in my suitcase before driving the five minutes back to the airport. I opened the trunk. put the things in, closed the trunk, and got back in the car. But when I went to start the cars, my keys were gone. Oh, shoot, I must have left them in the trunk! But no worries. I’m in the car. All I have to do is push the open trunk button.

I push the button and nothing happens. Weird. I open the door and immediately the horn starts going off. Whaaaa? Apparently—and no one can explain exactly how this happened—the alarm somehow got pushed on the keys. How that happened while the keys were in the trunk, I don’t know. Maybe it’s a new feature. Lock your keys in the trunk? No problem. We’ll automatically set the alarm so you can’t get them out. Anyone who has a new Nissan Sentra, I’d love to know if you can figure this out.

Anyway, I still had an hour and a half, and the airport was only five minutes away. Here’s where things get crazy. It seems that Budget car rental is named budget for a reason. As in, “I’m sorry our budget is too small to send anyone to help you from five minutes away.” I spent, no lie, forty minutes explaining what happened and asking this crazy woman, to send someone to get me so I wouldn’t miss my flight, which was the last Delta flight of the day. I had to fly to Sacramento to attend a library event the next day.

So yeah, that was too much to ask for. Every single item was like pulling teeth with her. She must have asked me ten times how to spell Greenwich, Connecticut. She couldn’t find the Westchester airport. She didn’t believe that the gas station I was at was only listed as Merritt Pkwy North, and didn’t have a street address, even when I had the gas station attendant tell her. At one point she suggested I call the police to get a ride. Five minutes after I hung up with her, another employee calls back to see why I told her I was going to call 9-1-1. “I didn’t tell her that. She told me!” “Oh, yeah, she’s an idiot. Never mind.”

They finally told me to leave my car there and call a taxi. Except the only taxi company in town had a guy who knew only one word of English. Taxi. I have no problem with people for whom English is a second language. Some of my most entertaining conversations have been with taxi drivers from foreign countries. But the guy whose job it is to get a taxi to you? Really?

“ghg kkjjuyhs kkhkm,;c taxi”

“Yes, I need a taxi. I am at the Mobile gas station on the Merritt Pkwy North and I have to get to the airport in time to catch a flight by 4:30.”

“lljjkjk nkndkjdd jiggtysn taxi”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t understand that.”

“hhgftml jskkjky nijidi buzz buzz taxi.”

“I’m having difficulty understanding you. Are you sending a taxi? I’m in a big hurry here. My flight leaves in forty-five minutes.”

“ghgghgr gyggd piggly wiggly taxi.”

“Did you hear me? Are you sending a taxi?”

“vermin chow, tingle broom, taxi.”

(I’m not sure if he actually starting saying real words or if I was just piecing them together to form words in my head. But it still didn’t make any sense.)

“Is there someone else I can talk to? I really need a taxi.”

Click

I guess he couldn’t understand me any more than I could understand him, because a taxi never arrived. And when I called back, the phone just rang and rang. Just when I was sure I had missed my flight—it was exactly 4:00, and my flight left in thirty minutes—an amazing, awesome, incredible tow truck driver showed up. I’m serious, one day this guy is going to show up in a book up mine and he’ll be the totally awesome hero, who tows cars and kills vampires with a silver crowbar.

I’m still not entirely sure how he did it, but using some kind of slick oily spray, a state of the art tow bar that could actually turn sideways, and amazing driving, he slid my front wheel drive car away from the curb, hooked, it up, and drove me to the airport in amazing time. And this was after trying about a dozen ways to open the trunk.

I got to the counter at twenty after and somehow made it past them, through security, and onto my plane in ten minutes flat. Only then did I call my wife who had spent the day driving the boys to California on her own, and say, “Well, I had an interesting day.”

Of course, on my last leg of the trip we had a woman go into labor—yeah really. But that’s another plane story.

So in honor of my mishaps, I’m posting a song about when the band was scheduled to recorded at a casino in Montreux, using the Rolling Stones Mobile studio. Before they could get there the Casino burned to the ground when a guy shot a flare gun into the the ceiling at a Frank Zappa concert. (I know how you feel guys.)

This classic song, is one of the few tunes that you know just from the beginning guitar riff. Bum, bum, bum. Bum bum, ba dum. If you ever looked like this, you heard it at pretty much every dance you went to.

(Yeah, that really is me in the blinding yellow track suit, with the long hair and mustache. I especially like the “Families are Forever” pillow behind me.)

The Right Fit

2010-11-15T17:41:00.002-07:00

(Friday, when I should have been posting my latest Retro-Friday, I had a rather annoying incident involving a rental car, a taxi dispatcher, inadvertently placed keys, and the last flight of the day. Never fear though. This week we'll do Retro-Tuesday and Retro-Friday. Bonus!)

Back in what feels like an entirely different lifetime, I opened a couple of computer stores in Northern California. For a variety of reasons I won’t go into here, I failed pretty miserably inside of a year. Suffice it to say that I was a great salesperson, an inexperienced manager, and a terrible accountant. When the dust had cleared, I found myself in a position where I would be forced to close both stores and lay off all of my employees in only a few days.

At the very last moment, a possible miracle arrived in the person of two men who offered to take over the stores. A meeting was set up where we were to discuss various options over lunch. My first clue that something was not entirely kosher should have been the restaurant. It was a dimly-lit, rather shabby, Chinese food place (and no this is not a kosher restaurant joke) where the men seemed to be very well known. Clearly this was not a real top-notch place, and just as clearly, they were regulars here. Imagine one of those Italian places mob leaders meet in all the movies, but change the ethnicity of the food.

At first they said all the right things. We want to keep the stores open. We don’t want to lay off any employees. We have lots of experience doing this. You didn’t do anything wrong.

But the longer we talked, the more uncomfortable I began to feel. They seemed . . . slimy. They didn’t answer my questions openly. They avoided specifics. They didn’t have any references I was comfortable with. Under ordinary circumstances, I would have walked away immediately. Except these weren’t ordinary circumstances. If I didn’t work with these men, my stores would close and my employees would be out of work. I had to decide if this solution was better than no solution at all.

I recently read this article http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/69474/ about an author who reminds me a lot of these men. He appealed to authors who felt desperate. They had no money, no prospects of getting published, lots of debt. He seemed like a way out. And not only that, but he was a smooth talker. He knew people. He offered “connections.” The only catch was that essentially you had to give him all recognition, all control, and your complete trust. The students he spoke to had to decide whether signing a contract to write for him was a better choice than signing no contract at all.

A lot of times the publishing world feels this way. Do I sign the first agent to offer me a deal—even if I don’t have a good feeling about her? Do I publish my book with a publisher who has a terrible contract and a bad record? Do I go with the publisher that maybe even charges me to publish my book? Do I give up on publishers entirely and create an e-book on my own?

What makes these decisions so difficult is that often there doesn’t seem to be any alternative. If you don’t go with the agent who doesn’t seem like a very good fit, you may not get an agent at all. If you don’t publish with the publisher who wants a $3,000 deposit, maybe no one will publish your book. At least if you create an e-book it will have a “chance” of someone buying it.

The thing is, you have to step back and look at the big picture. If your book really is good enough that a legitimate publisher will accept it, there’s a good chance another publisher will be interested too. If not this book, then maybe the next one. If one agent thinks your writing is good enough to sell, isn’t it likely others will too?

On the other hand, if the publisher isn’t legit, or the agent isn’t very good, are you really better off signing your baby into their hands than not signing at all? Once you’ve published your book with a publisher who may sell only a handful of copies—if that—or who doesn’t do any marketing, or who may never pay you a cent, you’ve lost the chance to sell it to anyone else. Once you’ve had a bad agent get rejections from all the major houses, it’s difficult or even impossible to resubmit to them. Not to mention the time and energy you’ve wasted.

Going back to my original story, the men at the meeting pushed me to sign a contract then and there. When I told them I wanted to think it over, they began threatening to cancel the whole deal. That was enough for me. I got up and left the meeting. Of course, once they realized I was really going, they made me take the contract with me. Looking it over later that day, I realized I was giving them all of my inventory and assets, while they were guaranteeing absolutely nothing. They didn’t guarantee to keep the stores open. They didn’t assume any leases or debts.

As I talked to other people, I discovered these men had pulled this same scam many times. As soon as I signed the contract, they would have taken all of my assets and disappeared. Signing a deal with them was actually worse than not signing anything at all. Any time a publisher or agent asks you for money up front, I guarantee that you are better off with no deal at all.

I’m not saying all bad fits are scams. There are lots of smaller publishers who just don’t have much in the way of resources. There are agents who are simply not the best fit for your work, or don’t have the types of connections other more successful agents do. And maybe they will work out just fine. You might do perfectly well in either of those situations. Sometimes an imperfect fit is better than no fit at all.

But if you decide to sign a less than ideal deal, make sure you are doing it because it’s the right solution for you, and not because you feel it is the only solution. A good agent once told me that when you reach a certain point of writing, you are publishable. Then it’s just a matter of finding the right fit at the right time. Don’t be wooed by someone telling you how incredible you are, or how you have to sign right away. Of that this is your only chance at success.

If this opportunity you are considering isn’t the right one, have the confidence in yourself and your work to walk away—knowing that down the road you will find the right fit, and that by saying no now, you are getting that much closer to the yes you are looking for.

So how do you feel? If you had the chance to sign with an agent, even of that agent wasn’t very good and didn’t have the best contacts, would you do it anyway, figuring, “Hey, at least it’s an agent.” If you got an offer to publish your book by a publisher most authors were unhappy with, would you go ahead anyway? Or would you wait for the best match for you and your work?

Not Me!

2010-11-08T18:25:00.001-07:00

When I was in school (you know back before computers, DVDs, whiteboards, felt tip pens, cars, fire. Okay maybe not that long ago, but you get the idea) I was often accused of thinking that the rules everyone else had to follow didn’t apply to me. I talked in class without being called on. I stared out the window and daydreamed. I had swordfights with dull scissors. I left school grounds to look for fossils during recess. I wrote on my desk. I taped up a sign that said class had been canceled due to a heating failure.

This didn’t help my grades (or my mother’s health) most of the time. My teachers constantly told me how much better I would be doing if I just paid attention and followed the rules. Interestingly enough, many of the things that got me in trouble in class have helped me in my writing. Having a vivid imagination, envisioning epic battles, having way too much to say, and a desire to explore unknown territory are great ways to come up with creative story ideas.

Not coloring inside the lines can be great for an author. But just as it was a detriment in school, believing that the rules don’t apply to you as an author can have disastrous results.

It might sound like I’m speaking out of both sides of my mouth (an expression I’ve never completely understood since speaking out of only one side of your mouth makes you seem odd at the least, and highly suspicious of some nefarious activity at the worst.) How can not following the rules be both good and bad?

Thinking differently is a good way to find a new perspective. When I was imaging Demon Spawn, I started with the basic assumption most people have that angels are good and demons are bad—with humans falling somewhere in between. But what if you saw the world through the eyes of the demons? Might angels be bad? How would demons view Hell—their home—and the humans damned to spend eternity there? Not sticking with the usual rules helped me see things if a different light.

But one thing I see a lot as I teach writing classes and attend conferences is people who believe the things they are being taught don’t apply to them. Prologues don’t usually work? Mine does. Beginning your story with a dream sequence is a bad idea? Mine doesn’t count. Head-hopping within the same chapter or section is generally a bad idea? But look at this great author or that one who got away with it.

We agree with the rules that we followed in our books, but the ones we broke are really more like suggestions. It’s okay for us to break them, because they don’t apply to us.

Here’s the thing. Every rule has been broken by a good author who knows what they are doing. I recently read, “You,” which is written in present tense, second person. “You see this. You do that.” See what your creative writing teacher thinks of that idea. I’ve read books by famous authors that start with flashbacks, dreams, flowery descriptions. I’ve read books where absolutely nothing happens for the first hundred pages. If you want to disagree with a writing rule, you can find an example of pretty much anything.

Sports are the same way. There are amazing basketball shooters who launch the ball off balance, from one side of their body, while falling away. There are batters who stick their elbow out, or bounce their arm up and down while the pitcher is throwing the ball. There are quarterbacks that throw sidearm. Superstars break all the rules and get away with it. Does that mean coaches should teach young athletes to imitate those styles?

Those athletes get away with these flaws because they are so incredible. They succeed despite the fact that they are “doing it wrong.” They’ve managed to teach themselves to hit the ball or make the shot, while compensating for the errors that you or I could not get away with. If we tried to imitate them, we’d fail miserably.

Can you break a rule and still write a great book? Of course. Does that mean you should ignore the rules? Definitely not. If you fill a chapter with back story and infodumps, 99.9 times out of a hundred you are wrong. Can you make it work? Maybe, but the odds are hugely stacked against you. The rules are there for a reason. Before you break them, ask yourself if there is any way you can avoid it. Do you really need that flashback on page two? Even if it will probably get your novel rejected? Is your story really strong enough to survive a protagonist that doesn’t learn and grow during the story?

Breaking rules is inevitable, and sometimes it is the right thing to do. But the rules are there because the vast majority of the time, breaking them will make your story worse, not better. Every time you are tempted to break the rules, do three things.

1) Make sure you understand what the rule is and why it is there in the first place.

2) Examine your story and see if there is a way to accomplish what you want without breaking the rule.

3) Try writing your prose while keeping the rule and see which version your beta readers like better.

If after all that, you still want to break the rule, go ahead and swing away. Just make sure you hit the ball.

Retro Friday

2010-11-05T18:45:00.000-06:00

Last week I started a new feature called retro Friday, where I introduce readers younger than me to some of what I consider the classic rock music of my teen years. I always liked rock. But I don’t think I really started paying attention to the bands themselves until I was maybe in seventh or eighth grade. I think maybe my interest at that time came from how much you were identified by your music. You were either a metal head, and listened to Metallica, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Kiss, Led Zeppelin, etc. A punker—the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, The Clash. A discoer which required you to be a better dancer than I ever was. Or you listened to Barry Manilow and got beat up a lot.

Mostly I leaned toward heavy metal. (Okay, I might have had a Carpenters album or two, and I thought Billy Joel was pretty cool.) But I had a lot of friends who had the whole spiked hair, safety pin through the cheek thing going on. I honestly was not a huge fan of most of the music they listened to. It sounded like a bunch of screaming for the most part. But every once in a while, I’d hear a song that I really liked.

About the time I started high school, a new phrase was becoming more popular. New Wave. A lot of time it still referred to punk bands. But over time New Wave bands started to separate themselves. The cool thing about New Wave was that it didn’t sound like anything else out there. It wasn’t metal. It wasn’t punk. It wasn’t the slick rock of bands like Styx, Queen, and Boston. It had its own sound. Bands like the Knack and Talking Heads had a combination of interesting lyrics, a cool new sound, and an attitude that was still punk anti-establishment, but with less of a head banger mentality.

Right about then, a friend of mine whose dad owned what seemed to be a million real estate offices in Northern California introduced me to a band called The Cars. I loved them as soon as I heard them. There are a few bands whose sound is so unique you know a song is by them as soon as you hear it. The Cars were one of those bands.

Here’s one of my favorite songs off that first album he played for me that day.

This video was made by a fan, but I love it because it captures exactly who amazed I felt when I first heard the song. Here's the URL, in case the actual video doesn't come through on all of my links.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1sO6CH2bwM

What Makes an Author?

2010-10-31T19:42:00.002-06:00

Had a ball Saturday. Spent the afternoon at the Provo Library Teen Book Fest. Really well done event with lots of readers, authors, and tons of cool events. Sat on a fantasy panel with Brandon Sanderson and Brandon Mull. They suggested maybe I should change my name to Brandon Scott Savage. I’m totally considering it. I think my favorite part of the panel was when I mentioned (regarding B&N creating a separate section for Teen Paranormal Romance) that even Mull put romance in his Fablehaven series. His response, “Even thirteen-year-olds want to get it on,” drew audible gasps and a suggestion that we put a mute on his mike. Very funny stuff. Scott Westerfeld gave a great presentation. I think the Provo library is posting a video in case you missed it.

That evening, Jen and I got to make up our youngest two sons as The Grim Reaper and a zombie for Halloween. (I know Halloween was actually on Sunday, but here in Utah, most of the kids go out Saturday night when the holiday falls on Sunday) I think the coolest part was using latex to create bloody peeling sores on Jake’s face. Man why didn’t I know about latex when I was a kid? So yeah, good times. I also discovered the band I plan on posting about this Friday, for retro Friday, is reuniting for their first new album in twenty three years. I won’t say who the band is, but the announcement was made less than two weeks ago, and I can’t wait to hear the new album.

Staying mum on Demon Spawn except to say that it should be out to publishers by the time you read this. More news soon on Farworld, The Fourth Nephite, and Dark Memories.

I had several ideas for today’s blog. But a question I was asked Saturday made up my mind. The question sounds pretty straightforward. What does it take to be an author? I guess the answer could depend to some extent to how you define an author. Do you have to publish something? Do you have to complete a book, story, article? Is it what you believe or what others believe about you?

I’d love to get your opinions, but to me being an author is all about belief.

Writing is good, but alone it doesn’t make you an author. Anyone with a pencil and a piece of paper can string words together. Getting published is a wonderful feeling. But there are plenty of people whose words have shown up in publications, who are not—in my opinion—anywhere close to being authors. And I know some incredible authors who haven’t published a single word.

I also don’t believe it matters what anyone else thinks about you. I published my first three books with a Utah publisher probably no one outside of Utah, Idaho, and maybe a few other western states had ever heard of. I often write when I am on planes. Occasionally people would see what I was doing and ask, “Are you an author?” I hated answering yes, because the next question was ALWAYS, “Have I heard of any of your books?” The truthful answer was something like, “Not unless you’ve ever heard of Deseret or Seagull book stores.”

When I answered no, they probably hadn’t heard of my books, they always gave me this kind of pitying look. So I started saying, “Oh yeah. I’m sure you’ve heard of Cutting Edge and House of Secrets.” Of course they would nod. “Yes, that does sound familiar.” It was win/win. I felt good about myself and they could tell all their friends they sat on the plane next to a famous author.

The thing is, it didn’t matter whether they thought I was an author or not. It didn’t change my accomplishments, my talent, my desire, or my belief in myself. It wasn’t until years later that I discovered there are people I never might have imagined who had actually heard of and read my books, and people who hadn’t heard of authors I knew were New York Times bestsellers.

I didn’t become an author when I got an agent. I didn’t become an author when Shadow Mountain agreed to publish Farworld. It didn’t make me an author when I had a book sell over 20,000 copies, and I won’t be any more of an author if I sell a million copies.

What made me an author was the day I decided I was going to take my writing seriously. When I decided I was going to study other authors and see how they did what they did. When I committed to improving my craft to the very best of my ability, learning every marketing tip and trick I could, and working as hard as I could to accomplish my goals.

I know it sounds like a cliché, but being an author comes down almost completely to state of mind. Writing can be a great hobby. It can be a way to relieve stress. There’s nothing wrong with starting a story and not finishing it; any more than there’s anything wrong with not finishing a drawing or guitar lessons or making a batch of chocolate chip cookies. (Okay, that may be going a bit too far. There is something morally wrong about not finishing chocolate chip cookies. Unless, you let me eat the cookie dough, in which case I’m down with that.)

There’s nothing wrong with dabbling in any of the arts.

But if you want to cross the line to being an author, the first step is inside your head. I’ve met lots of people who after receiving constructive criticism on their books, decided that editing was too much work, and found someone who would publish what they had written. Maybe they consider themselves authors. They wrote a complete book. And if you are willing to spend the money, you can get a copy. But to me a real author is the person who wants to make their book the very best it can be. The day you decide that writing is a craft that requires study, practice, and lots and lots of works—and then start putting in the time and effort that requires—you can rightfully begin calling yourself an author in my book.

Retro Friday

2010-10-29T14:58:00.002-06:00

Looking around the blogosphere, I’ve found that everyone seems to have certain topics for certain days of the week. Myopic Monday (Where authors ignore the whole story by focusing on when and when not to use “the”), Terrible Tuesday (where you get to blog about the people who were really mean to you as a kid and how you are going to make them the villain who gets painfully killed in your next novel). Flatulent Friday. Anyhow, you get the idea.

I’m definitely not the punctuation king. In fact I occasionally throw in a few extra commas, in case I haven't used enough. And I try to make sure I have at least one semicolon every few pages. (For those of you as punctuation illiterate as me, a semicolon is NOT what you are left with after intestinal surgery.) And I don’t have enough friends to do Make a Friend Monday.

What I am pretty familiar with is awesome rock songs of the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s. Interestingly enough, a lot of those songs are showing up on commercials these days. My two youngest kids occasionally hear one of them, look at me in amazement, and go, “You mean that’s a real song, Dad? You didn’t just make it up?”

Heh, heh. Punks!

Anyway, as a writer of novels that are often read by younger generation than my own, I often get introduced to cool new bands. So I thought it might be fun every Friday, to introduce you to what I consider to be some of the coolest songs of my generation.

Therefore, every Friday until I get tired of doing it, (or enough of you throw virtual tomatoes) will be Retro Friday. Where I introduce my younger readers to some songs I think they need to add to their music vocabulary.

Today’s song “Stray Cat Strut” is not nearly as old as say, classic CCR, or the Doobies, but it is just so dang cool. You can’t listen to this without wanting to put on your shades and walk slowly (and suavely) down Main Street.

Stray Cat Strut

This came out in the early 80’s. And no I didn’t have hair like that, ever!

I couldn’t embed the link to the original music video, but you can find it here. Until, next Friday, enjoy..

Four Things

2010-10-26T19:02:00.005-06:00

First thing: A big shout out to my friends at Two Rivers High School. Thanks so much for an awesome night. I had a great time. Cassie Cox and the folks at Olive Garden deserve a huge thanks for putting on a great event and introducing several of us YA authors to some truly amazing kids. It was a wonderful time and awesome company!

Second thing: If you have some free time this Saturday, and live anywhere in the Utah County area, I'd love to have you drop by the Teen Book Fest at the Provo library. Scott Westerfeld--one of my all time fav YA authors will be there along my buddies Brandon Mull, Brandon Sanderson, Ally Condie, and with a ton of author awesome teen authors from here in Utah. I may actually even wear a costume. More info here.

Third thing: The charming and lovely author, Krista Lynne Jensen, gave me this spiff blogger award, if I promised to quit stalking her.

Along with the aforementioned stipulation, I think I am also supposed to list five of my favorite words and pass this award on to two other deserving people.

1) Miasma--A noxious atmosphere or influence. I think I learned this word when I was about twelve and reading a Peter Straub book. I love it.

2) Meander-- To move aimlessly and idly without fixed direction. I may have learned this word at about the same time. It showed up regularly on my elementary school report cards, along with daydreamer. I like it because it sounds like exactly what it is.

3) "Dicked in the nob."--A regency phrase meaning silly or crazed. Okay, I know this is actually a phrase, not a word. But I learned it from one of my critique group members, and it has become a staple of conversation since then.

4) Truculent--Disposed to fight. Pugnacious. Don't you just love a word whose definition is another cool word? My son isn't bad, he's just truculent. You know, pugnacious. It almost sounds cute. (And for the record my sons are much more inclined to ducking and running than truculence. It comes from their dad, who joined the Army and went, "Wait, why did I do this again?")

5) Nominal--Along with several other definitions, insignificantly small; trifling. Don't you get a kick out of when people use this kind of word in contracts or ads when talking about fees? Because if it's really such a nominal fee, why don't we just waive it altogether? Eh?

And finally, I will pass this award on to Annette Lyon and Lu Ann Staheli, two of the most literate people I know.

Finally, the fourth thing: My favorite Halloween joke. What did the skeleton order at the bar? A mop and a broom. Yeah, I know, not exactly scintillating humor. But it always cracks me up. My ten year old son, who says he wants to be a sit-down comedian when he grows up, tells me I need to work on my routine.

Have a great Halloween, and come by the library if you get a chance.

Knowing Your Audience

2010-10-25T09:55:00.001-06:00

Several recent posts got me thinking. In this post on agent, Nathan Bransford’s blog, Livia Blackburne talks about a test in which men and women had different reactions to seeing others in pain. Here, agent Sarah LaPolla talks about what a strong female character is to her, along with links to what a strong female character means to a YA author, and an editor. Finally, my own agent, Michael Bourret, talked about B&N rearranging their teen book section to focus on popular genres.

What do all of these have in common? Audience. You know, the people you actually write your books for.

As a reader you may not think about audience a lot until you discover someone else hated a book you really loved. Or the other way around. Maybe you have a discussion over lunch where your best friend gushes on and on about a book that totally didn’t work for you. Or maybe you see a Goodreads review where a fellow reader lambastes a book you adored. You ask yourself how it’s possible for someone else to have such a completely opposite reading experience as you did.

If you’ve been an author for very long, you know exactly what I’m talking about. The same day someone tells you how they raced through your book in one day and immediately started to read it again, you get a review from someone else who says your plot was full of holes, you characters weren’t even deep enough to be called two dimensional, and your ending was weaker than your mom’s cherry Kool-Aid (the kind where she tried to get by on half the sugar and only one envelope of mix to stretch it out.)

Obviously the story didn’t change from one reader to another. So why the difference? Part of it can be chalked up to expectations. Maybe Reader A went into the book expecting nothing more than a quick, fun, romp. While Reader B, was looking for something packed full of meaning and deep insights. I’ve been surprised more than once by people telling me how much they loved a book that technically at least, I knew wasn’t very well written.

More often, though, it has to do with what we call tastes. What you like, want, or expect in a book is affected by your background, previous books you’ve read, your mood, the genres you lean toward, your age, your gender, and dozens of other things. You don’t give it much thought when you are reading a book though. You either like it or you don’t.

For example, I started reading Twilight when the buzz was just beginning to really build. I knew it was a vampire book. I’d heard it was a “chick book.” And I knew that it was selling like crazy. That was about all I went in knowing. I soon discovered there were two groups of vampires. The good guys and the bad guys. As an action adventure, fantasy loving, paranormal reading, testosterone pumped guy, I immediately began anticipating the big battle. Good vampires + bad vampires = climatic battle near the end of book. I won’t tell you the words I blurted out when I discovered the entire battle takes place while Bella is knocked out and we don’t see any of it. But they weren’t, “Gosh, let’s get back to the smooching.”

Now that doesn’t mean I didn’t like Twilight. I thought it was a cool romance. For all the back and forth about whether the series was good or not, Myers nailed her characters and obviously appealed to the target audience. But it wasn’t the right story for me. I wasn’t that audience. In my version of the story, the battle would be great. Bella would kick butt, and drive at least one stake through the heart of the bad guys. After which I would have been fine with more sparkling and smooching. With the same expectations, Hunger Games was the perfect book for me. It worked on all levels as I devoured it.

As a reader, it’s pretty easy to adapt to the books that interest you. Generally you discover certain authors and certain genres. You read the kinds of books you like. You learn which of your friends and which blogs share your tastes and you pay closer attention to their recommendations than say, The New York Times book review. Hopefully you occasionally dip your toe in unknown waters, but when you do, it’s with the understanding that the water there might not be what you normally like.

As an author, it’s a little trickier. You have to understand your audience and write, if not specifically for them, at least toward them. You have to know what other books your audience has read. What kinds of characters they like. How big of twists they expect. What types of endings they are willing to put up with. And on and on. Yes, you can write for yourself. But if you do, either make sure you only expect you to buy your books, or that there are plenty of readers like you buying books.

So how to you write for your audience?

First of all, remember that all book reading audiences are readers first and foremost. The biggest complaints I see from readers involve slow moving plots, flat characters, and disappointing endings. Before you even consider what kind of story your readers will enjoy, you need to nail those three things. Yes, big name authors have gotten away with slow beginnings. You can’t. You have to grab your readers early with a gripping plot, and keep them hanging on every chapter. Your characters MUST have depth. They must be proactive. They must have a goal. They must have flaws. They must learn and grow. I teach a two hour hands-on class that barely touches on all the things your main characters must have. And finally the payoff has to be big. Your readers have hung with you for hours at least, and possibly days or weeks. Don’t wrap up the story in a couple of paragraphs unless you want your readers screaming for your instant tarring and feathering.

Once you’ve got that down, make sure you understand exactly the age and genre you are focusing on. Read books for the same target audience. The Chosen One and Uglies are both books about teenage girls, but they are very different genres. Can the same people enjoy both? Absolutely, but neither book would have worked if it had been written in the style of the other. If you don’t know what books are written to a similar audience or haven’t read them, stop writing and spend a little time reading what has worked in the past.

I’m not saying to copy another author’s voice or style. What I am saying is to study why certain books worked. What was it about Twilight that hit such a nerve with romance readers—especially younger ones? What made Scott Westerfeld’s world so compelling? Use that knowledge to make your unique story stronger.

As an author, I know exactly the reader I am targeting with each book I write. I hope that my story is universal enough to be popular with a wide range of readers, but if I can’t hit my target group dead on, I’m already starting with one huge strike against me. With Demon Spawn, I targeted teens, both male and female—especially those who liked dystopian urban fantasies like Uglies, Hunger Games, The Forest of Hands and Teeth, and others. I had strong romantic elements with both angels and demons for those who enjoy paranormal romances like Fallen, Hush Hush, etc, combined plenty of action and adventure. I had a strong female character, who takes chances, but who is naïve when it comes to guys and believing everything she’s been taught. I gave her plenty of room to grow as the story unfolds.

As you plan and write your novel, remember who will be reading it, and make sure that you give them a story and characters that will resonate with them. Make your story your own. Make it something that stands out from the crowd. But also make it something that will be loved by readers in general and especially by “your” readers.

Outside Looking In

2010-10-11T22:13:00.004-06:00

Tonight, as I stood outside my hotel room for nearly an hour, waiting for the maintenance man to figure why my key wouldn’t open the door (he finally had to bring a huge jack-like tool and pry off the outside of the lock, causing me to have to change rooms), I pondered what I should blog about. Then it occurred to me. Why not blog about being kept out of where you want to be?

It was either that or trying to come up with an analogy about the bathtub that doesn’t drain, and leaks—plink, plink, plink—all night long into two inches of standing water, but you don’t want to call the maintenance guy again, so you just live with it. And bathtub analogies are so overdone these days. You know, bathtubs are like e-book readers. It took a while for them to catch on, but eventually everyone started using them—except people who stink. And because of bathtubs, big publishers and agents became extinct, and the individual could finally decide what was really good without interfering editors.

Like that.

So back to being kept out of your figurative hotel room. Which in this case represents being published. As you stand outside the door—which represents the barriers to getting published (see the bathtub analogy above)—you think about all the good things you are missing. In fact if you press your ear to the door, you can almost hear everyone inside having a good time without you. Of course it could just be episodes of Family Guy and King of the Hill, which you can only watch while you’re on the road, because your wife hates both shows (and yeah, she's probably right.) But either way, you feel like you’re missing out.

And the more you wait in the hallway, clutching your chicken salad sandwich (which you ended up with because you went to some crazy Ohio fast food place that doesn’t actually sell burgers, chicken, or any other unhealthy thing, and has muffins instead of fries for a side dish), the more you start to think you’ll never get past that door. Maybe you’re not good enough to get inside the room. Maybe you should go to the little place down the street that has metal keys—which always work. And a vibrating bed—which only eats your quarters.

You wonder if there’s some trick to getting in the door. Maybe you have to know someone who has connections to the maintenance man. Maybe you have to do something different with your key. Hold the door while you slide it in and out? Slide it fast? Slide it slow? Slide two times quickly?

Every time those little lights flash yellow and red, instead of green and red, you become more depressed, and start eating your chocolate chip muffin, even though it’s supposed to be dessert. You know it’s only the key that’s being rejected. Not you. But you still feel like the door not opening is a direct reflection on you, personally.

But here’s the thing. Yes, knowing the maintenance man can help. But lots of people open the door without knowing the maintenance man. And there really is no trick. And whether or not the door opens for you says nothing about who you are. You just have to have the right key for the right door at the right time. As a very smart agent said to me once, once you reach a certain point, your writing is publishable. After that, it’s just a matter of finding the right person, for the right project, at the right time.

The thing is not to let that big heavy door psych you out. Doors can keep you out, but with the right key they swing open so easily you wonder why it took you so long to get in. But you have to be persistent, and eat the occasional chocolate chip brownie. And once you get inside, you’ll discover that the people in the room are no different than you. Except for Stewie, who really is different from everyone, and not just because his head is shaped like a football. They just happened to get through the door a little before you. But it’s a big room, and there is always room for more people. Especially if they bring more muffins and like strange and occasionally inappropriate humor.

Don’t like the analogy? Just wait till you see what I do next week with airline food!

The Worth of a Book

2010-10-05T07:41:00.002-06:00

It’s getting very close to a time that is both exciting and nerve-wracking for an author. You’ve written your story. You’ve acquired the agent of your dreams. You’ve gone back and forth, changing, improving, polishing and editing. Finally your agent says, “Wow, this story really stinks!” Okay, that’s not really what your agent says—except in those reoccurring dreams that wake you up weeping on your giant pillow. (Ten points for the movie reference.)

What your agents does say is, “I think we’re ready to send this out.” Which translates roughly as, “You know that book you’ve been eating, breathing, and sweating over for the last nine months? Well you’re about to find out if it has any value in the real world.”

Of course that really isn’t true. Because whether or not the book sells, and even the size of the advance, does not really place an accurate value on a book. If it did, J. K. Rowling wouldn’t have gotten a single rejection. And books that completely bombed wouldn’t have gotten seven figure advances. It’s amazing how many times one publisher turns a book down, and another snaps it up, or the wide variance in offers from one publisher to another. You can’t set a price on a book, the way you can on a say a hot pastrami sandwich with brown mustard on marble rye, with a homemade dill pickle that . . . yummm . . . Sorry, moving on.

But it feels true.

You start having these discussions where your kids suddenly say things like, “Hey, Dad, if your book sells for a lot of money, can we go on a Disney Cruise?” You find your wife pricing a new tile floor and granite counter tops. Your oldest son asks what kind of car you’re buying him when he gets home. And you remind them over and over that you’ll be thrilled if the book sells at all.

But deep inside, you’re asking yourself the same question. Will it sell? Will it be a multi-book deal? Will it sell? Who would be my ideal publisher? Will it sell? Will we retain foreign rights? Will it sell? You tell yourself not to dream, but really you can’t help it. You go from researching all the deals you can find on Publishers Marketplace to bracing yourself on how you’ll handle things if you don’t get any offers. Because even the best book, repped by the best agent, may not sell.

What makes it even worse is a part of you is saying how crazy the whole thing is anyway. “You know what I don’t understand?” says a voice that sounds exactly like Andy Rooney at the end of Sixty Minutes. “Why anyone would pay anything for a story you made up? You can’t eat it. You can’t wear it. You can’t drive it to work. You can’t even touch it unless you spend a few bucks for a ream of paper and the ink to print it on.”

And you know the voice is right. Roughly a year ago you were about to fall asleep when you imagined a teenage demon waiting for a train full of humans who had been cast into Hell. Who would pay good money for a story you dreamed up?

But then you start thinking about all the books you’ve read and loved. You look around your office and realize that between you, your wife, and your kids, you own well over 2,000 books. Even if a good chunk of them are paperbacks (and probably 1/3rd of them are not) that’s still over $15,000 worth of stories. All of them made up in someone’s head. All of them nothing more than words on paper. And even if someone offered you twice that much to take away all of the joy you had reading them, you wouldn’t even consider the offer.

And there are certain books you wouldn’t give up for any amount of money. The first time you read The Outsiders, or Lord of the Flies, and were just blown away. All the times you’ve read Where the Red Fern Grows to your kids, and they never knew you suddenly had to take lots of drinks of water toward the end of the book not because you were thirsty, but because you were trying to keep them from seeing you cry. Lord of the Rings, Ender’s Game, To Kill a Mocking Bird, Something Wicked This Way Comes. All stories that you wouldn’t give up for any amount of money.

And maybe you aren’t Tolkien or Bradbury. But you must be doing something right when you get e-mails that say things like, “You deserve an award winning medal. I have never read books for fun until my teacher, Mrs. Cox, requested this extrodinary book to my achknowledgement. I thought it was some other book. I took a look at the cover and it sparked something inside me. I got two pages into the Water Keep, and it caused a downpour of gasaline on my desire to read.. I read your book for hours upon hours fuiling the fire lit inside me. “

And you realize that regardless of what happens (or doesn’t happen) over the next few weeks, the value of a good book is . . . priceless.

So what books would you never give up, no matter the price, and why?

A Good Agent is Worth his Weight in Cheese Steak

2010-09-13T20:38:00.003-06:00

Crazy day, left SLC this morning and just got into Philly, (actually Cherry Hill, NJ, but close enough.) So no long post today. But I do want to give you a quick update on Demon Spawn, and make a comment.

Talked to my agent for the first time after he’d read the complete manuscript. The good news is he LOVED everything except two chapters. The even better news is that the more I think about what he said about those two chapters, the more excited I get to rewrite them. They are going to give the story so much more kick at a very key point. Even though it’s late, I really want to get started on the changes.

I often hear authors complain about their agents or editors. We see things a certain way, and it’s hard for us to change what we love. I haven’t agreed with everything my editors or agents have told me, but I think long and hard before I disagree. And the main thing I think about is how their suggestions can make my story stronger. It’s not always obvious (although this time it was.) But you really have to step out of your author shoes, put on your reader shoes, and try to look at your story through the eyes of someone who doesn’t have the story in his or her head.

Open your mind and try to imagine how the editor or agent is viewing the story. Then ask yourself how making their suggested changes (even if you don’t completely agree) could make a stronger story than you have now. If you can see any chance of how that might happen, they are probably right. If you can’t see how you can make the changes without weakening the story, then go back and discuss what the problem is and how else you might address it.

The agent or editor isn’t always right, but 9 times out of 10 when they spot a problem, they are correct. As the builder of worlds, it’s up to you to see the flaw they have recognized and turn it into a strength. The final copy we'll take to publishers is getting so close I can taste it. Or maybe it's just the cheese steak!

Three (Good) Emotions You Will Experience as an Author

2010-09-06T22:04:00.001-06:00

Last week, I posted about some of the negative emotions you are likely to experience as an author. I got lots of comments from other authors, saying, “Yes, that’s exactly how it is.” I also got a few e-mails from aspiring authors, or non-authors saying, “Why do you do it? Isn’t it kind of like hitting your thumb over and over with a hammer? Why do something that causes you to feel that way?”

It’s a good question. Of course it’s not like any of these emotions are unique to authors. You can feel depressed, envious, or impatient plenty just living your life. But by becoming an author, you’re almost painting a target on your back saying, “Have at me, World!”

A lot of people give up writing because it’s too much. Which I totally understand. More than once I’ve stood on the very brink of quitting. It’s an attractive thought. Never have to worry about deadlines. Doing whatever I want with my spare time. Taking vacations without my laptop or at least a notebook. Not stressing about word counts.

So why do I keep doing it? Well for every negative there is a positive. Just after becoming depressed because your local bookstore barely displays your books, you read a review like this. After what can be years, finally seeing your book in print can make all the impatience seem worthwhile. Getting an e-mail from someone who loved your story can make the envy go away as you remember that it’s not about who sells the most books, but the joy you can bring even one reader.

Today though, I want to focus not on what happens after you get published. In fact, as Charlie pointed out, many of the bad emotional clouds that swirl around writers’ heads have nothing to do with the act of writing itself, but with what comes after. The whole trying to get an agent/editor/publisher/good review/medium review/any review thing is what can be so frustrating. While so much of the joy comes from the creative process itself. So here are three positive emotions you can expect while writing your story.

1) Surprise

Want to get a bunch of weird looks from your non-writer friends? Tell them about how hard you laughed at something one of your characters said. Or how you cried when a character died. Or how a sacrifice your character made left you in awe. I promise it won’t take long before your pal scratches his or her head and says something like, “You do know you’re making it all up right? Your characters aren’t real. The funny thing? You said it. The death. You killed her.”

It’s only when you talk to your author friends that they nod their heads. You can spend an entire lunch just talking about all the things your characters have done to surprise you over the years. Because it doesn’t matter whether you’re an avid outliner or whether you plot by the seat of your pants. If you get to know your characters well enough, they will do things that seem to come completely out of left field.

In Demon Spawn, I have a sidekick character named Cinder. She’s funny. She has attitude. She’s selfish. Suddenly about halfway through the book, she started doing things I didn’t expect. Not only did her actions surprise me, they also surprised my protagonist. We were both going, “What is with her?” This was the first book I’d outlined, and nowhere in the outline did Cinder act this way. But I went with it—because it felt right. It wasn’t until three or four chapters later that everything came clear.

I’ve written from the perspective of a disillusioned male homicide cop, a twenty year old female newspaper reporter with really weird taste in food, a sixteen year old female demon, a thirteen year old boy in a wheelchair, and many others. Yes, it can get confusing at times. But the one thing I’ve learned is to let my characters show me the way. Being surprised by your characters is awesome.

2) Gratification.

Stephen King compares writing to uncovering fossils. You can envision a scene in your head, and words are the tools you use to unearth for the reader what you are seeing. Sometimes it’s much harder than you thought it would be. That can be frustrating. But we’re talking about positive emotions here. So we’ll focus on the feeling you get when you manage to capture a scene as well or better than you hoped.

In my last Shandra book, the first few chapters are pretty dark. Shandra’s best friend is on life support from a gunshot would he received in her apartment. Bobby’s fiancé doesn’t want Shandra anywhere near his hospital bed. She can’t go back to her apartment. She blames herself. Finally she gets in to see him. I knew we needed a scene that would both lighten the mood and let us get a glimpse into our characters’ pasts. Like I mentioned above, I didn’t know exactly what the scene was, but as I started writing Shandra begins to remind an unconscious Bobby about a time when they raced each other eating giant bowls of ice-cream.

As I realized where the scene was going, I started to get that fragile fossil feeling. Sometimes scenes come so quickly it’s all I can do to keep up with what’s going on in my head. My wife—who is also my first line editor—recognizes these scenes right away because any semblance of spelling or grammar shoots out the window. Wrong words appear. Periods, quotations marks, and commas are completely optional. It’s all about getting the story down while it’s happening, and fixing the typos later.

Then there are times like the ice-cream parlor scene when I know I’m treading on thin ice. First of all, we’re going for the laugh. For me, comedy is much harder than drama. Overdo it and it feels forced. Approach the scene too lightly and the reader may not get it. Not to mention the fact that we are standing at the bedside of a best friend who is at death’s door. Will humor turn the reader off?

This is when I slow way down, setting aside the pick axe and using a soft-bristled brush. I write, check, change, edit, rewrite. When I’m finally done, I first read the whole thing to myself. Does it work for me? Usually I feel like I got maybe fifty percent of the scene uncovered. Back to work again. Finally, I print it out for my wife. Then I go into the other room and listen. Wait. Was that a chuckle? Giggles, I’m sure a heard giggles. A laugh. I earned a full out laugh!

For me, that’s gratification. When I nail a scene well enough that it works for the reader exactly the way I hoped it would. I may not be able to stick a gymnastics flip. But I can stick a scene and it feels great when I do.

3) Accomplishment

When my (now married) daughter was in kindergarten, I ran the St. George Marathon with my dad. As soon as the memories disappear completely, I plan on running another one. I’d like to say I trained properly, ran well, and finished with a great time. But since there is the distinct possibility that my dad, or another member of my family who was present, might read this, I will just say that I finished.

It was not pretty. People with walkers on their way back from therapy passed me in the street. The rescue vans circled ominously around me like flies eyeing a piece of rotting meat on a hot day. I moved so slowly at points that small children asked their parents, “Is that man dead?”

By the time I turned onto the last street, I had less than a quarter mile to go. Even though I was toward the back of the racers, there were still lots of people cheering. Hearing the encouragement, I broke into a painful trot. Although every muscle in my body ached, I couldn’t walk that last stretch. About two hundred yards from the finish, a huge knot popped up on the back of my left calf. Imagine a flaming tennis ball being placed just under your skin and you’ll have some idea how it felt. Somehow, despite the agony, I managed to keep running (in the broadest sense of the word.) Then, a hundred yards from the finish, the same thing happened on the back of my right calf.

I honestly don’t know how I finished the race. I refused to let myself walk, but everything else was pretty much a blur. Later my dad would ask me how I liked the mist spray after the finish line. I had no idea what he was talking about. As soon as they took my number, I collapsed onto the first spot of shady grass I could find. Immediately my wife showed up and asked me how I felt. I begged her to rub my calves. She touched one, pulled back her hand, and in the nicest way possible said something like, “Eew, gross!”

Finishing a book is not usually that bad. In fact, the last few chapters can be some of the most fun to write. You can see the finish line. You know where you are going. Hopefully it’s one of the most exciting parts of your book. I especially love writing epilogues. All the heavy lifting is done, and you’re just putting on the last finishing touches.

But the gratification is the same—whether it’s your first book of your fifteenth. You did it. You finished. Maybe it will need some serious editing. Maybe you limped through parts. There were almost definitely times when you could feel the buzzards circling over your head, waiting for you to give up. But you didn’t quit. You pushed through to the end. When other people say, “I’m going to write a book someday,” you can say, “I already have.” It’s one of the greatest feelings in the world to print out a complete manuscript and think I wrote that. I created it. If it wasn’t for me this story would never have seen the light of day.

So, yeah. There are some rough things about being an author. Things that at very least will put you in a funk and might very well bring you to tears, questioning if you really have what it takes. You know those are coming. So enjoy the good emotions when you can. Instead of being in such a rush to get to the tough parts, savor the good parts. Don’t be afraid to pat yourself on the back. When someone starts to give you crap about your messy house or the weeds in your lawn regale them with a charming story about how your protagonist’s old boyfriend slipped and fell in a patch of mud right before his big date with the really annoying character that keeps saying the most hilariously stupid things.

Keep at it until their eyes glaze over and they begin making excuses about having so much to do. Then say casually, “But I’m sure you know the feeling. After all, you’ve written a book, right? Right?”

Three (Bad) Emotions You Will Experience as an Author

2010-08-30T12:51:00.003-06:00

One of the nice things about spending time with authors who are at different stages of their careers is being able to share experiences. Some things (like movies, books, and even meals to some extent) are even better when it’s a surprise. But as a writer, it can be downright annoying to expect things to be one way and discover that you have no clue how things really are. I remember years ago when I first met Sariah over the phone. As we talked about sales numbers, I told her that I wished I’d known coming in what realistic sales numbers were. I’m not sure how completely she bought into what I was telling her at the time. She had some pretty lofty goals. I think having big goals is great. But you also need to have someone tell you what the rest of the market is doing, or your goals are nothing more than wishes.

New writers seem to ask this same question more than any other. What can I expect? So today, I thought I’d share three negative emotions you WILL experience and how to deal with them. Next week I’ll share four positive emotions.

1) Impatience.

I sat on a panel last weekend with a bunch of other published children’s authors. When we were asked what we dislike most about the industry, almost universally people said how long everything takes. For example, let’s say you come up with an amazing book idea today. If you’re a really fast writer, you might have a first draft done in three months. Then take another three months to rewrite. Next comes submitting. Let’s say eight weeks to get a request for a partial. Another eight to twelve weeks for a full. And at least another three months for an offer of representation. So far it’s been let’s say fourteen months—if everything works like a charm—just to get an agent.

Next the agent is probably going to give you edits. Another two months. The agent starts submitting. Another two months. Maybe more, maybe less. You get a deal. Now there is a very good chance that you will wait at least 1½ to 2 years for your book to come out. More if it’s a picture book.

From idea to book on shelf—three years. If everything works like a charm. And all during that time, you are waiting on pins and needles for the next step. Will she like my query letter? Will he like my full? Will they make an offer? When will I get my edits? When will I hear back? What if they hate my changes? What if the editor moves to a new publisher?

Now you understand why published authors can’t help smiling a little when a new writer comes up and says, “I’m writing a book because my husband lost his job, or we want to buy a new car or I’m sick of working in a shoe store.” There’s nothing wrong with these reasons at all. In fact most authors who are honest will tell you that we all dream of writing for a living. But we’re talking about three years. That’s a long time. And don’t get started on how little most published authors earn.

Now let me be the first to say things CAN happen quicker. But for most authors they happen even slower. It might not be until your third book that you get an agent. Your fifth that you find a publisher. And remember that panel of published authors? They have books out and they’re still impatient. You WILL experience impatience. How do you deal with it?

In my experience there are three ways of dealing with impatience. The first way is by cutting out the middle man. Tired of waiting for an agent? Self-publish. Tired of waiting for the time a traditional publisher takes to get out a new book? Create an e-book. This is certainly an option. As we discussed last week, more and more people are taking this route. I will say that unless you already have an audience though, this is not a shorter or quicker route to publishing success. You are still going to need to put in years of work to build up enough of a following to make the effort pay off. If you’ve already got a following or just want to see your work available to the public. Go for it.

The second response is to give up. Three years is a long time to wait, so why try? The thing is, three years from now you will still be three years older. You can either be three years closer to your dream, or you can be right where you are today. Which leads me to the solution I recommend.

Stay busy. Work on the next project. You know that whole thing about the watched pot never boiling? That’s true with publishing as well. You never know what’s going to work. It may be the book you wrote a year ago finding a publisher. It may be the book you’ll write a year from now. The agent you get may not sell this book, but she may sell the next one. The horror novel I have coming out next year was actually written and agented more than six years ago.

If you sit watching the mailbox or waiting for the phone to ring, you are killing yourself one day at a time. Remember the three year’s older thing? If it’s going to take you that long, why not have four novels ready and waiting by the time your first one makes it? You’re still going to be impatient, but at least you can be productive.

2) Envy

Travel and food writer, Kim Wright, wrote a great post on authors and envy here. I won’t repeat what she says, because she does it so well. But two things in particular caught my eye. One was that it feels as uncomfortable to be envied as it does to envy someone else. There’s nothing harder than telling people you know are as talented or more than you are about a success they deserve every bit as much as you do. Unless it’s having someone you’re close to succeed while you’re still waiting to. Neither of these feels good. But if you write long enough you will experience both sides.

The second thing is her point about how we envy the most those who are closest to our talent level. You don’t envy the huge national best-selling author. You envy the person in your critique group, or your writing league, or your friends.

I had serious envy just in the last couple of days while reading the ARC of Ally Condie’s soon to be released “Matched.” Her writing is so elegant, so beautiful, that I seriously would have given almost anything for that talent.

So how do you deal with envy? Exactly the way Kim says. Use it to motivate you. Remind yourself that if they can do it so can you. I tell people that I inspire other writers all the time. They say, if he can publish a book anyone can. And it’s true. I didn’t start writing my first novel until I was thirty seven. I didn’t sell the first novel I got an agent with. I’ve never won an award or hit a best-sellers list. But what I do have going for me is persistence and a string desire to improve. If you have those two things, you will succeed.

3) Depression

I’m not talking about the clinical illness—although that can come along for the ride as well. I’m talking about the moment where you just want to throw it all away. It’s when you just feel like you don’t have what it takes, and you’re sure quitting is the only way to go. Interestingly enough this moment almost always comes along from someone on the outside. An agent, and editor, another writer, a bad review. Someone tells us we aren’t good, and we believe them. It doesn’t matter how many times we’ve heard we ARE good. The one negative is what breaks the camel’s back.

If you are a writer, you are going to have to deal with depression. It could be tied to envy. Maybe you are bummed out because another writer had some great success. Maybe you just realized your great idea had been used somewhere else. Maybe you just got your hundredth rejection. It’s perfectly okay to feel depressed. Just remember that like Kim says about feeling envy, you’re in good company. Anyone who strives to succeed in the arts will experience depression.

The key is to not let it last too long, and to come up with a course of action. Someone said your writing sucks? Find out if it does. If so, improve it. Take a class. Read a book on writing. Fix what’s broken. If this project is hopeless, set it aside and start on something new. If your writing doesn’t suck, then remind yourself as Rob pointed out in a recent e-mail that Pride and Prejudice has one star reviews on Goodreads, and something called Everybody Poops 410 Pounds a Year got a five star review.

Either a book with interesting facts about bowel movements is better than P&P, or different people have different tastes. My good friend Ally may have an amazing book, but does it have demons who strip naked and camouflage themselves to slip past a circle of hell hounds? I think not. The best cure for depression is to remind yourself that things are not as bad as you think they are at the moment, and that absolutely nothing is stopping you from starting on something amazing today.

So, yeah, you still want to be an author? Even though I promise you that you will experience all of the above emotions, and many just as bad? Excellent. Because we need authors who are willing to fight through adversity, and your prose will be that much stronger for having made it through the fire. Next week, the good parts about being an author.

(And BTW, Christy, I owe you something special for becoming my 100th follower!)

Is the Bookstore Extinct?

2010-08-23T10:54:00.003-06:00

Last week, I was asked by a reader (writer?) to comment on a recent Wall Street Journal article titled, “Get ready for the bookstore massacre.” Sounds pretty scary, huh? I can just imagine floors running with ink, pages fluttering in the wind blowing through broken windows, dismembered novels crying for help.

Before I respond, let me start by saying that I have a little personal experience with the internet taking over traditional, brick and mortar stores. A little over ten years ago, I was the CEO of a two-hundred person internet company. The technology we created allowed internet users to compare features for a product (say a TV) by all kinds of cool metrics, price shop, and order, all on-line. Not that revolutionary now, but at the time it was pretty cutting edge.

One afternoon, I met with the CEO of a company called eToys. It was an interesting experience. There was a six foot tall Etch-a-Sketch in the lobby, employees rode scooters around the halls, and a puppet show was taking place in a conference room. I later used some of these elements in my first published novel, Cutting Edge. eToys was a giant at the time. They had recently gone public and were valued in the billions. They were poised to blow the doors off of every other toy store in the US. In fact Toys-R-Us, was so frightened of them that they offered eToys the chance to be the on-line site for Toys-R-Us. And eToys turned them down. (So they had to settle for some upstart book reseller called Amazon.)

Have you heard of eToys? Have you bought a toy from eToys lately? If you did, you bought a product from the company that bought the domain for dirt cheap, because the original eToys didn’t stay in business long enough to let any of its employees even cash out their stocks. It was going to drive Toys-R-Us into the ground because we were all going to buy our toys on-line. Why wouldn’t we? They are cheaper. There is no sales tax. They can carry a bigger inventory. Very smart, very savvy investors—including the kind of people that write for publications like WSJ—were sure your local toy store was going out of business. To state the obvious, they were wrong.

I mention this story to make a point. Just because a lot of smart people say something is true, doesn’t make it true. In the past twenty years, I’ve seen more scary headline than I can list. We were all heading into another ice age back when I got married (the world, not my wife and I personally!) When my now married daughter was a baby, Meryl Streep came on 60 Minutes and urged to me to pour all my apple juice down the sink because I was poisoning my baby with a pesticide called Alar. You can’t watch a promo for the nightly news with hearing at least one “dire” warning a week.

I’m not saying that there aren’t environmental concerns. I’m not saying that I want a ton of pesticides on my food, or that Alar was 100% scare. What I am saying is that while journalists are paid to make informed decisions, they are also paid to get readers/viewers. Unfortunately headlines like, “Bookstores likely to sell fewer books,” don’t draw the same kind of attention as, “Get ready for the bookstore massacre.”

If the past has proven anything, it’s that trying to forecast—even five or ten years in advance—is a crap shoot at best. You can look at trends. You can make informed decisions (or uninformed decisions.) You can do polls. You can make graphs. But you cannot say with any degree of certainty that X is going to lead to Y. So let’s look at some of the things being forecast and see what’s likely, what’s possible, and what’s out and out hyperbole.

1) In the next five years everyone will be buying their books electronically. Imagine a world in which your book is smaller, lighter, and more portable than a traditional hardback. You’d snap it right up, wouldn’t you? You’d never buy another hardback again. Um, yeah, it’s called the paperback, and it’s been out long enough for the Beatles to make a song about it. In fact isn’t that basically what the penny dreadfuls were shooting for?

The point people seem to miss when they talk about paper books disappearing, is that hardbacks are collected. People like them. While it’s true that many more people would buy paperbacks if they came out at the same time as the hardback, it’s also true that hardbacks would have disappeared a long time if no one bought them. Publishers make hardbacks because they can make more money on them and people buy them. Reality is that the world is changing. Twenty years ago, nearly everyone subscribed to a newspaper and about a dozen magazines. Now most people read their news on-line. Especially with younger generations, the idea of reading a hard copy of something that is available on-line is far less appealing.

E-book sales are skyrocketing, and with the dropping price of readers, it’s unlikely that trend will slow for quite some time. However, just because e-book reader sales keep going up, it doesn’t mean books are going away. Don’t believe me? Electronic documentation has been available to office workers for over a decade, and yet paper usage is higher than ever. I think it’s very likely that e-books could take a huge bite out of paperback sales. But, as long as people still like hardbacks, I don’t see them going away any time soon.

2) Bookstores are going the way of the way of the dinosaur. If I am wrong about point 1, then I think point 2, could happen. One thing the internet did prove analysts right about is that if you can create something that can only be done (or can be done exponentially better) on the internet, it can succeed. Think about E-Bay. It’s essentially a world-wide garage sale, a model that only works on the internet. Think Amazon, no single store could carry that kind of inventory at that kind of discount. But . . . other models that looked just as promising failed miserably. How many of you order your groceries on-line and have them delivered to your door? It was available, and actually cheaper, and much more convenient, than having to go to the store. But people didn’t use it.

The thing is, just because something is cheaper or even more convenient, does not mean everyone will use it, as long as there is another option. Predicting the demise of brick and mortar doesn’t take into account the people shop for a variety of reasons. The fun of browsing. Stopping for a book after going out to lunch. Getting a gift. Getting out of the freaking house and seeing something other than a computer screen. Lots of people like to go to stores and shop. If it wasn’t for the interaction—the fun—of shopping, Indie bookstores would have gone out of business a long time ago. It’s not all about price and size.

The other thing being left out of this equation is that many books don’t easily fit into the e-book model. Picture books, coffee table books, kids books. Yeah, I know you can out all of these on e-books, but I don’t believe for an instant that families are going to buy e-book readers for every kid in the family. Or that flipping through the pages of Hungry Green Monster will be the same, even on an I-Pad. Yes, I know, e-readers can add even more stuff. Videos, music, animation. All of that has been available on computers for years. I have a really cute Little Critter book on the computer that I’ve had since my big kids were little. But I still didn’t replace their picture books with a laptop.

It’s entirely possible that the look of bookstores may change. You may download an electronic book while you browse paper books. At the BYU bookstore I recently saw a print on demand machine. Want a paper book we don’t stock? Great we’ll print it for you. But I don’t see bookstores disappearing the way some people are forecasting.

3) E-books will make publishers and agents obsolete. Of all the predictions, this is the one that proves to me prognosticators don’t have a clue. Who knew that all we needed was mass distribution to make publishers obsolete? It actually makes perfect sense if all your publisher does is distribute your book. But if you really believe that a publisher and a distributor are the same thing, you don’t know the industry at all. What does a publisher do?

Well, let’s start with quality. Go to Amazon. Download their free reader app. Then randomly pick a few of the free, or even 99 cent self-published books. I’m not talking about the stuff that has gone out of copyright. That actually had an editor. I’m talking about Jimbob Farklecker, who tried to publish his book, failed, and self-published it in e-book format. Or even better, just browse the internet for novels people are publishing on their blogs, or web-sites, or forums. I’m not saying Bob’s book is bad—although it is. What I’m saying is that even if Jimbob’s story is great, it still needs a professional editor. It still needs direction. And, yes, it still needs a net to weed out all the crap, and take what’s good.

Now, I know all you self-published authors are screaming at me. Your book is good. You either don’t need a professional editor or hired one before you published your books. You’ll also remind me of all the great authors who started out self-publishing, or even moved from traditional publishing to e-books. Richard Paul Evans, Christopher Paolini, JA Konrath. And those are the norm right? Or even a majority? A decent-sized minority? No, using these examples to say that publishers are going to be obsolete is like saying that every traditionally published author will make millions of dollars because just look at Meyer, King, Grisham, etc.

The fact of the matter is that the huge majority of self-published books are not up to the quality of traditionally published books. Even when the authors are good, they don’t get the necessary feedback and editing required to make a really good read. And this is a shame because all the crap out there puts such a stain on the group as a whole that the good books become hit with the same paint brush. I know that a traditionally published book had to make it through probably an agent, an editor, and a committee, before hitting the streets. That doesn’t guarantee a good book, but would you take your car to be fixed by a guy that had no certifications or professional training? And it’s only going to get worse as more people realize how easily they can “publish” their book. If anything, I think there is going to be so much garbage spewed into e-book stores that people are going to be scared of downloading anything self-published, unless it’s gotten great reviews from people they trust or they know the author already.

And that’s just quality. There is so much more a publisher does. For a really good read, check out this article.

There are many more things being suggested. Oh, no, all your e-books are going to be filled with ads! Read this for a reality check of what is happening, what might happen, and what is unlikely to happen. Soon authors won’t be able to make any money because books will be copied freely back and forth! Yep, look at all those poor rock stars begging on the streets now because of MP3s. Agents are going away! Publishers are gone! Bookstores will be empty by Christmas! We’ll all be driving flying cars by 2010! Oh , wait looks like we missed that one.

I’m not saying things won’t change. Sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse. What I am saying is that ten years from now, things will have changed in a way that almost no one predicted. And many of the things people did predict will be wrong. In the mean time, I’m writing the best book I can. Getting the best agent. Hoping for a big publisher with a great editor. And looking forward to heading down to the bookstore this weekend to see what’s new. But hey, that’s just me.

Demon Spawn Part 2

2010-08-16T16:58:00.002-06:00

Last week I wrote about how I came up with the idea for Demon Spawn, my latest YA WIP (Young Adult Work in Progress for the acronym impaired). I won’t recap, since if you are reading this and haven’t read that, it’s easy enough to scroll down. The plan was to submit the finished product to my agent last week. Unfortunately life stepped in the way, and I was called on a week-long business trip to the east coast. That slowed me down a little. The good news is that I’m >< this close to being done. One more chapter and an epilogue. There were so many parts I was worried about, and every one of them has ended up even better than I hoped. That is definitely not always the case. In fact, many times I have to make significant changes to parts I planned well in advance because they just don’t fly.

So the current plan is to have everything submitted by Wednesday afternoon. Good news since I’ve got a fun but crazy weekend.

Thursday night, my sister and author, Deanne Blackhurst and I will be speaking to the Tooele, UT chapter of the League of Utah Writers. It’s at the Purple Cow. You can call the store for more information or directions. It’s free too! Free, I say!

Friday, I will be signing books in the BYU bookstore from 11-1.

Saturday, I will be at Writing for Charity in Sandy, Utah. It’s a great event. You get a free critique from a children’s book author, an author panel, genre Q&A, lunch with authors, auctions, raffles, and all kinds of other really cool stuff. Plus all the money goes to buy books for underprivileged Utah kids. See more about the event here.

I left off last week with having signed a contract with Michael Bourret of Dystel and Godrich. I to have such an amazing agent, but wondered if I should have finished the whole manuscript first. Normally the answer to that would be a resounding, “Yes!” Even with eight books under my belt, there were still agents who wouldn’t sign me until they saw the whole ms.

Michael assured me that I’d made the right move. He felt the story idea was very strong, but was concerned about how I would execute on it. Not the writing—he’d read enough of my stuff before to know I could write—but the plotting. He asked me to send him the entire book, outlined chapter by chapter. I’m actually not a big outliner, but I felt like I knew the story well enough to pull it off.

In my mind, I envisioned Demon Spawn as kind of a mix between Uglies and Hunger Games. I know neither of those takes place in Hell, or even has paranormal characters. But it wasn’t those things so much as the plots. DS was an action-oriented love story in my mind, that focused on issues like how we judge others and discrimination. The seraphs look down on the demons who look down on the damned humes, just the way pretties look down on uglies or the capital looks down on its colonies. Like Hunger Games, I envisioned much of the story to be focused on the traveling between Heaven and Hell. Instead of fighting which each other, the group must fight the dangers in the outer circles. That’s where much of the action took place. That’s where the love triangle really built up. And that’s what I was in a rush to get to.

This is where a wise agent comes in. His first advice was, slow down. Unlike Uglies or Hunger Games, this story takes place in a world the reader is unfamiliar with. Both of the previous two YA novels take place in a dystopian future, but their worlds are not so different from ours. But Hell. What is Hell like? What do the Demons think of it? What do they do? Where do they go? How does it look, smell, feel, taste? Michael convinced me that before we could enjoy a story about humans, demons, and angels escaping from Hell, the world of Hell had to be strongly established.

That meant taking the fifty pages I’d written and turning it into almost three times that many. We don’t actually even leave Hell until halfway through the book. At first I admit I didn’t like the idea. It seemed to slow things way too much down. But when I was forced to beef up the beginning, it magically did other things. It filled out the characters. It built up the suspense. It established the world. Basically it did everything you need to make a book not just a story, but an event. (I know that sounds like bragging, but when I compare what I have now to what I had then, it’s like going from a short story to a novel.)

The good news was that it made my novel MUCH better. The bad news was that I didn’t even have the outlined approved until nearly March. I’d taken on a new job. I’d written another novel (The Fourth Nephite, which is on store shelves—at least in Utah) and I’d finished a second one. (A Time to Die) In fact, by the time I got done going back and forth on the outline, I felt like I’d lost at least a little of my previous energy for the story. For about a month I told myself I needed to write, but all I could do was dabble.

I had to re-immerse myself in the story. One thing I’ve learned (for me at least) is that if you “tell” your story too much, writing it is not as fun. I felt like in going over and over the outline, I’d “told” my story a little too often. One thing that really helped me get my energy back was to get a couple of BETA readers who knew nothing about DS to read what I’d written so far. Hearing their excitement helped get the flame burning again. Once I got back into the story, it clipped right along.

I also allowed myself the freedom of letting the charters really pull things where they wanted. Cinder, who had basically been a sidekick at first, became a teenage demon spawn who is probably too smart and sexy for her own good. She understands guys and can get them to do whatever she wants. But inside there’s a lot of insecurity that comes out when things are on the line. It’s not until she nearly loses her life that she realizes how selfish she is. When she puts her brains, insight, and maybe still looks a little, toward something positive she surprises even herself. She still makes me laugh more than any other character in the book. But I really care about her now. I worry for her, and cheer when she succeeds.

So here we are. The book will be done tomorrow or Wednesday at the latest. It’s coming in at just over 100,000 words which means I need to trim a couple thousand. YA editors don’t like breaking 100,000k if your initials aren’t JKR or SM. That’s okay. Tightening isn’t too bad and it usually makes the story better anyway. I’ve gotten wonderful feedback from my BETA readers. I’ll send it to my agent this week, wait for changes, and hopefully start shopping it next month.
I’ll take a week or two off and then start working on the 3rd Farworld book and the second 4th Nephite book. I’d expected to have more time for 4th, but DB likes the early reviews on book one enough that they’d like to release book 2 in May, which means an end of November deadline. Yikes. Back to writing.

Demon Spawn

2010-08-08T23:27:00.001-06:00

First of all, thanks so much for the great feedback on what makes you drool for a next book. I agree that characters are so key. I really want to relate to them and care about what they will do and what will happen to them. As I promised, my next few posts will be about how my current WIP came to be. The first two weeks, I’ll focus on coming up with the idea and submitting. After that, what I learned as I crafted the story.

Sometime this week I am sending my newest project, Demon Spawn, to my agent for final edits before we shop it (in September?) This has actually been quite a ride—going from an idea that appeared almost full blown in my head one night, to a concept, an outline, a manuscript, and hopefully a novel. I thought some of you might interested in how the process works.

Last summer was a frustrating time for me. Farworld had been put on hold (it’s off hold now), I was struggling with The Fourth Nephite an Mormon time travel I had promised to write for Deseret Book, and I was years past deadline on my next Shandra Covington mystery, A Time to Die (which is now on store shelves.)

I had recently had lunch with my friend James Dashner, and he mentioned a term I was not familiar with, “high concept.” I have seen a few definitions for high concept, but the one I like best is from Carol Benedict at “The Writing Place.”

“An idea that is so compelling that it will appeal to a large group of people based solely on a pitch of a few words or a couple of sentences.

The appeal of a “high concept” story is in its premise. It should be something people can relate to, but must feel like a new idea. Often it is a story line that’s been told before, but has a twist or hook that gives it a strong commercial appeal. Simply being unique doesn’t qualify; some things are unique but wouldn’t interest a large audience.”

This got me thinking about stories with a new twist that would appeal to a large group. I’d recently read several YA novels that I felt fit that mold including Uglies, The Forest of Hands and Teeth, and Hunger Games. I’d always been interested in a book that took place in Hell. My original idea had been a Dresden File type book about a hit man who is killed and sent to Hell, but given a chance to come back to life. In my mind, I pictured him riding this train to Hell, which looked like a rundown urban city.

That was a fun idea, and one I still like, but not a YA series. While lying in bed last summer, I again pictured the train arriving at a station in Hell. A message rings out, Welcome to Hell, all ye damned and demented. Please keep moving. Welcome to Hell, all ye damned and demented. Please keep moving . . .

But this time I found myself viewing the scene through the eyes of the demons waiting to meet the damned humans. What were they like? What did they think of humans sent to Hell? What did they think of Hell? What if they wanted to escape? Soon I had an angel trapped in Hell, an old scarred human with his tongue cut out, his translator—a tough woman (possibly leading a group of underground humans?), and three teenage demon spawns.

In a matter of minutes, the plot fell into place with a twist that blew me away. And talk about high concept. All kinds of issues. Judgment. Prejudice. Loyalty. Trust. An awesome love triangle. Adventure, mystery, everything from imps to hell hounds. Devils, efreets, incubi, succubi. And it had to be told female first person from the view of a teenage female demon.

Over the next couple of months, I wrote fifty pages, and a synopsis. I sent this package out to several agents. Here was the basic pitch.

Blaze, a sixteen year old demon spawn, thinks her biggest worries this year will be fitting in at academy and getting used to guarding the humes damned to a lifetime of servitude in Hell. That’s before her close friend, Jazz, a third year, is involved in an attempted hijacking of the J-trans that brings new humes from Judgment every month, and an injured seraph shows up in the dorm room of Blaze and her best friend, Cinder, asking for help. In order to clear Jazz’s name, the three friends agree to help the Seraph return to his home before the atmosphere of Hell kills him. They are joined by a mute hume who seems to have memories of the outer circles of Hell and what dangers lie on the way to the mountains of Judgment, and the woman who translates for him.

On the journey, Blaze and the Seraph become attracted to each other—to the point that he lowers his blinding aura enough that they can touch and even kiss. When they finally manage to reach the city Blaze must decide whether to stay in Hell with her friends or live a life of hiding with the man she thinks she loves. But all of that is about to be turned on its head when she learns the real truth about Judgment, Hell, and the identity of the Seraphs.

(The story has changed since then, but much of it has stayed the same)

I first started sending out queries in mid October. Over the next month I received several rejections, but I also got more than one request for the full fifty pages. Finally, in mid November, I received my first offer of representation. Let me stop for a minute here, and say that receiving an OOR from an agent you admire is one of the most thrilling experiences in the world. You’ve dreamed about it forever, and when a great agent says they like your work enough to take you on as a client, it’s incredible. But . . . .

This is still a business. You have to find the best agent for you and your work. After receiving my first offer, I contacted all of the agents who had requested partials and let them know I would be making a decision within a week. This was a key time for me. What I really wanted was to shop what I had and get a deal in place by the first of the year. But I’d learned from past experiences that you need an agent who a) loves your work, b) represents the kind of story you are selling, and c) knows the industry inside and out. There are lots of agents who can do the job, but you have to find the one who can do the best job.

What made this decision the hardest was that I would have LOVED to work with any of the four agents that offered to take me on. Ultimately, though, one stood out. Michael Bourret at Dystel and Godrich seemed really in touch with what was going on. He knew what publishers were looking for, how things were selling (or not selling), and he felt very strongly about working with me to make sure my story was something that would appeal to a lot of editors. I signed with him the end of November. My goal was to have Demon Spawn written and out by January.

Next week, why that didn’t happen and why I am so glad that it didn’t.

(I’m really hoping this will be useful to other authors out there. Over the next couple of months, I’ll keep you updated on how things go. So if you have questions, shout out!)

What Makes You Drool?

2010-08-02T23:11:00.001-06:00

I am on a family vacation and trying to finish the last five chapters of a novel. Not quite the great combination it seems like it would be. “Sorry kids, Sorcerer’s Apprentice is out, while I finish this romance scene.”

Actually it’s much more like, “Well, I guess I can always write tomorrow.”

Anyway, neither leaves much time for a blog post. But I am not going to flake out here. Instead I want to ask you a question I’ve been giving a lot of thought to. My hope is that Demon Spawn is the kind of novel people will really want to read the second book of. No huge cliff hanger here, but a lot of story left to be told. One of those, “Wow so now that X has happened, what will characters A, B, and C do? And what’s going to happen to E & F?”

That’s how I feel about the next Hunger Games book (which actually has no ARCs. Sorry, Sariah.) I’m both excited and nervous. Excited because there seems to be a lot of story left to tell, and nervous because I hope it will live up to my expectations. Unlike, a lot of readers, I felt like book two was less than I hoped. It felt to me like both a placeholder for book 3 and a retread of book 1. Not that I didn’t like it. I just had higher hopes.

So, boys and girls, my question for the day is: What about a book/series makes you just salivate for the next book? Examples are highly encouraged.