Author Archive
Having a perfect ass, versus being one.
The great thing about self-publishing is you get to talk about yourself a lot. The bad thing is you have to talk about yourself a lot. Actually it’s a little worse than that. When you’re writing you want to get out of yourself and get into your characters, but when you’re promoting your own work you spend way too much time thinking about yourself and you start to feel like an insecure teenager, constantly looking in the mirror wondering if your blooming self-absorption is showing.
On the other hand, a swollen head probably makes my butt look smaller. So, you know; silver linings.
Inked Magazine
Inked rocks. They totally got the whole transformation theme and the idea of becoming.
Indigo: Ink to Blood
Announcing the release of my new fantasy novel, Indigo: Ink to Blood
Indigo is out at Amazon and Smashwords, and should be on the Apple Store, Kobo and the Barnes & Noble store in the next day or so.
I have so many people to thank I can hardly list them, but I will try to in just a bit. I am both grateful and absolutely in awe of my cover designer, Cheryl Taylor and cover artist Ken Taylor. And now, I need to pour some coffee, shovel some snow off the walk, and get moving on the second book in the series. If you like Indigo or have any comments at all, please let me know, or leave a review if you’re feeling generous! I’d love to hear from you.
Publish and Perish
Great article from back in December on NPR about self-publishing.
They’re a little late to the party if they just discovered that self-publishing is not vanity publishing, but then they go ahead and promote a vanity publication house — Archway, the You-Pay-We-Publish arm of Simon & Schuster.
The comments section is interesting. One poster claims that traditional publishing houses will keep your book in print by printing a copy or two every year via print-on-demand, just to hold their claim on the copyright. Is there any evidence that’s true, or is this just the latest ranting of the conspiracy theorist mob? No idea.
TerrorLand!!!
Pakistan is apparently planning to put up an amusement park at the site of Osama bin Laden’s former hideout.
Jihadworld? Deathtothegreatsatanland? With rides like ZeroDarkThirtyMountain.
There are many paths up crazy mountain, but they all reach the same, shrill, defensive, paranoid, inexplicable peak, and one way to tamp it down is to put a waterpark on top of it.
Apparently the Pakistani park “will include a zoo, water sports, a mini-golf course, rock climbing and paragliding”. Living in up-state New York I can tell you this plan makes way more sense than fracking, so you go, Pakistanis. I honor the space where your mini-golf meets America’s insane Creationism.
It’s a small world after all.
Winter is Coming
We’re walking in the woods beside the Little Beaverkill and I ask my daughter why moving water won’t freeze. She thinks about it and says, “It’s too busy.” Which is an awful answer, so I send a note to her science tutor asking for our money back. But she responds that it’s not a bad description at all: Still water freezes at 32F, but moving water wants to freeze and can’t, because the movement stops the water molecules from organizing into crystals. So in a way you could say it is busy. Which is also a bad answer. What’s this about water wanting?
So we come across another section of very still, unfrozen water at the base of a beaver dam and I ask my daughter why that water isn’t frozen. “Too lazy,” she says. Which makes perfect sense. Busy water. Lazy water. And water that just wants to get somewhere.
eBook, pBook & meBook
Even though I’m putting out my first novel as an eBook I definitely have a foot in the paper-based book world as well. Sure, the iPad’s a beautifully conceived and engineered thing, and when you hold one in your hand, you’re holding a piece of sci-fi gear our primitive ancestors from the 1980s never conceived of — a book reader, phone, movie camera, video display, global mapping service, all in one? Jimmy Carter’s science advisers would have taken a break from picking the lice out of each others’ back hair to snicker in derision; Heh. Man from future claims humans will, one day, tweet. Heh..
But don’t hate on the Book Classic either. The Book on Paper. The pBook. Here on my desk I have a hardcover copy of Garret Oliver’s The Oxford Companion to Beer. I have a nice, 2002 hardcover copy of the Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai and a paperback copy of the way creepy People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo–and the Evil That Swallowed Her Up. In the Hagakure I learn that focus, intention and readiness is everything. In Oliver’s beer encyclopedia I learn that it is proper to crash a Japanese barbeque with a shout of toriaezu biiru! (“I will start with a beer!”). Cheers, Mr. Oliver, you beer samurai; knowing the right term for crashing a Japanese barbeque shows great focus, intention and readiness.
It would have been impossible to write the above paragraph with only an iPad on my desk. Electronics resist random connections. Random connections assist lateral thinking. Therefore electronic readers can make you narrow. QED (which is Latin for Quaff Every Day, which I didn’t have to look up because I remember it from college).
A paper-based book is even more that just an aid to casual browsing: It’s a memory-retention device that requires no energy to hold information once the ink is loaded onto the paper, and the only energy required for information retrieval is easily supplied by a bag of M&Ms. A book is a link to history. Cloth binding itself is history. Marginalia is history, patina and, sometimes, solid gold information all its own. When you own a book, you know it’s a first or second edition and that it contains various errors, peculiarities and perfections that might have been smoothed out in later editions (think James Joyce and the pathetic attempt by the Joyce estate and Random House to replace the accepted text of Ulysses with a “corrected” text that would, just by chance, also extend their copyright). With an eBook, you can keep improving and re-uploading with no particular need to inform readers that there’s a better or, sometimes, newly en-fucked-up, edition available. Those who don’t own a copy of history are condemned to accepting the scrubbed version. Your paper copy of “Catcher in the Rye” says it’s a second edition and it will match every other second edition out there. In the virtual world, history is what the guys with access to the digital master say it is (I’m looking at you George Lucas; some of us remember when Star Wars was just Star Wars without all this Stalinist Episode IV: A New Hope revisionism in the opening crawl. Here’s a new hope for you: In a galaxy far, far away, in an alternate universe, there is no fucking Jar Jar Binks.)
So much for focus and intention. I started out meaning to write about Joe Simpson’s decision to walk away from his Random House deal to go it alone with eBooks. This must be a tough thing for writers with long-standing publisher relationships. You put out a hardcover book for $19.99 and it sells well enough to go to softcover after a year or so, and the softcover edition sells for $10.99, and the writer’s making $2.00 to $4.00 per copy, depending on the sales channel and the timing and where you are in the life cycle of the book. And you don’t pay any attention to the eBook part of the contract because who cares about a $1.99 sale to a few geeky college kids, of which you get something like $.30 per sale?
And that’s a fine way of thinking, right up until you realize that the sale of paper copies has trailed off to the point you’re barely making coffee change on paper-based book sales but that if you owned the better portion of your Smashwords<>/a> or BookBaby sales you wouldn’t have to keep getting up at night to move the Porsche you haven’t made a payment on in three months to a new secret location so the guys from We Never Sleep Collections can’t find it.
Welcome to Cadillac Records, new writer, this is what it feels like to not anticipate success.
Sounds like I’m down on paper publishers, but I’m not. I would purely love a traditional book deal, and to prove it, I just spent the past 8 months trying to woo a top agent at Writers House Literary Agency. And it wasn’t all for nothing because said agent’s assistant gave me no end of fantastic notes on my manuscript before I changed course toward e-publishing.
But if you’re going with a traditional publisher in this day and age, why not own your own electronic sales outside their purview? At some level this doesn’t work, because agents and editors do a huge amount of work to shape your manuscript, to market your book, and to position you in the public sphere. After all the work of shaping your baggy monster of a space-age-love-story-mystery-horror-noir-coming-of-age-tone-poem into a coherent story that might actually appeal to an audience of readers, they’ve earned their money and you and they are partners in the deepest sense of the term. But you can take a different tack if you’re willing and able to be your own best editor, and that is to go electronic first.
Always bargain from a position of strength. Get your material out there. Take the lousy reviews like a grown-up and learn from your mistakes. Evolve. That’s where I’m heading anyway.
Biiru no naka ni makoto ari.
Those who can, do; those who can’t, blog.
He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
–G.B. Shaw, “Maxims for Revolutionists” in
Man and Superman (1)
and those who have finished their books and are twiddling their thumbs waiting for the cover art to arrive (all hail, my very cool cover artist, Ken Taylor) can do little but turn to the interwebs to let off excess steam. So it’s time to dust off the blog.
I created an inkan for my hero: Just what every sword-wielding Japanese warrior girl needs; a signature she can carve into the bodies of her slain foes, like Zorro, except with a brush-like flourish and a Buddhist respect for the teachings of her calligraphy sensei.
Namaste, Indigo, wear your new gago-in with pride:
Prime Cut
So this guy, Michael Erard, wrote a column for the series Draft in the New York Times. What worries me is, I’m pretty sure Erard burrowed into my mind and stole my thoughts. He then used them to write a terrific article on the problem of structural priming. Structural Priming is the theory that you’ll tend to reproduce patterns you’ve most recently experienced — so as a writer, you’ll reproduce the pattern of sentences you’ve most recently read, because you’re primed to do it; a pretty serious problem for anyone trying to break into writing while holding down a day job that involves words (ask any Hollywood script reader when was the last time they tried to write anything of their own and you’ll generally elicit a gag reflex at the thought of dealing with more words). The Evidence of Erard’s thought-stealing is clear: he says he’s written short stories, news articles, essays, reviews and a couple of nonfiction books, whereas I’ve written screenplays, stage plays, software reviews and a children’s book. See? All he did was change everything except the part where I was worried about my own poor sentence structure, and then put it into a really well crafted article. But now I’m afraid to say anything bad about this guy because he’s got a grip on my brainstem like one of those L. Ron Hubbard engram-thetan-brain-control critters and he might do something evil like put the squeeze on my corpus callosum and turn me into a streaker or a flat-earther or a Red Sox fan.
Anyway, Mr. Erard’s got my writing problems nailed down like scrap of cheap carpet in a doghouse. Alan’s day, thy name is fracture: Programming, texting, posting, wiki-writing, blogging, more programming and more programming. And then, somewhere in the late night hours, some actual writing. Most of the time I’m at the keyboard; little of the time I’m at my manuscript. This is a sure formula for writing a novel that sounds like an extended warranty disclaimer for a bottom-of-the-line toaster oven. Wiki description of record class exceptions leech into my story of young love, thwarted by condition code 7: invalid input to third parm.
Sigh.
Erard suggests a few solutions: work in a different location for your night writing than the one that might prime you for your day writing; don’t let the web or email intrude on creative writing time; re-prime yourself by typing out some sentences from a writer you admire. Good ideas all.
The thing that works for me, which he doesn’t mention, is getting out there and getting your heart pumping. I do this by walking the dog in the morning, then going for a mid-day run or a bike ride. But my routine is beginning to strike me as a little tame, and un-priming, so I’ve been looking into what other writers do to break up the day and send some blood to the frontal lobes. Other writers have gone further than I have in their aerobic approaches to clearing their heads and un-priming their sentence structure. Hemingway never said they were writing techniques, but he favored deep-sea fishing, running with the bulls, chasing women and shooting machine guns — good choices if you have a big boat, live in Pamplona, can handle rejection and know how to aim. Lord Byron reduced this to just skirt-chasing, but maintained an apparently energetic enough level that his writing was never in danger of sounding like it had been primed by all the threatening letters he got from cuckolded husbands. Hunter S. Thompson likes guns, but added hallucinogenic drugs in combination with rum, which can get the heart racing at epic levels while minimizing the danger of skin cancer by keeping you safely under your furniture.
Some writers go further, running marathons or doing yoga in steam baths. But at some level you’re moving away from un-priming exercises and getting into serious work-avoidance. The diminishing returns of having your un-priming exercise take up more of your day than your writing might be a good indicator that you’re actually meant to be runner, a professional dog walker or an experimental heart surgery patient.
There are heaps of other great articles in the Draft series, including one on how Miles Davis’ mid-century playing inspired the writer to simplify his own style. Check it out at the NY Times.
Go Sox!
This is The End
Typed The End last night. Such a great, apocalyptic feeling that I have to cue up the late, lamented Jim Moorison and listen to the black helicopter thwacking of my PTSD dreams:
(For the record, I have never been in a war: My PTSD stems from an overly-aggressive hall monitor at Churchill High School, in Livonia, Michigan, who wore freakish amounts of eye shadow, color-coded to the marker she was using that day to check hall pass validity.)
I have, on occasion, in the middle of an uncooperative manuscript, just typed, The End. “Take that, manuscript; I’ve ended you. Now, do you want to come back to life and get some fresh adjectives? Well, do you?” This hasn’t generally gotten me much beyond that look my daughter gives me when I talk out loud to my laptop. Still, it feels good. Feels like victory. Charlie don’t web surf.
My Facebook friend Claire Lambe posted a reference this morning to a book review on “Structured Procrastination”, which is the technique I’ve always used to get things done, but didn’t know somebody had beat me to naming it (I’ve always called it The Alan Method, and I encourage you to do the same). Boiling the theory down to its essence, you lie to yourself about what you need to do and what you’re going to do, and you make a long list of crap that you claim is really important, and then you do something lower down your list because you’ve fooled yourself into thinking that merely finishing a book is so much easier than all the other stuff at the top of the list, like learning Finnish, cross-breeding a better roasting duck or sweeping all the highways in the state of New York.
My preference is to avoid writing by doing other writing, so if I get stuck on a screenplay I turn to a novel. If I’m stuck on the novel I turn to a play. If I’m stuck on the play, that’s what the blog is for. While writing this YA novel — and this is serious — I finished a screenplay, three one-act plays, and am 140 pages into converting an old Sci-Fi screenplay into a novel. That’s some pretty industrial-quality work-avoidance, with the slight down-side that stories written for one media tend to leak into others in a Cowboys & Aliens sort of way.
Like every other writer I just claim the reader is detecting the subtle, over-arching themes of my fiction — my broody and writerly concerns. Minor writers have tics and fall back on tedious patterns of over-used tropes. Big, important writers have themes and overarching concerns. I know which of these categories I’m heading toward, which is why you’ll see echos of of my early symbolism (the Frogs in my 1999 treatise on individual freedom and counting from 1 to 12), illustrated by Steven Kellogg, even in the edgy and transformative genre literature flowing from my pen today.
Namaste