Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 149

So bad it’s good

Or at least, so bad it turns into a cult classic: One-star wonders: how to make a film that’s so bad it’s good

Anyone can make a bad movie. But … it takes something special to make a turkey that stands the test of time.

I’ve seen Attack of the Killer Tomatoes a couple of times. Also Plan Nine from Outer Space. That may be it for the so-bad-they’re-good movies I’ve seen.

Happy 30th birthday to cult favourite Troll 2, a film that famously features no trolls. Speaking of birthdays, 2020 also saw Showgirls turn 25. Once deemed so-bad-it’s-good, it has now been enthusiastically reclaimed as a work of misunderstood genius. Xanadu, the calamitous roller-disco extravaganza that paired Olivia Newton-John on skates with the Electric Light Orchestra, turns 40 this year, and has not yet been reclaimed as anything other than a nightmare. But there’s still time.

Ha ha ha! I don’t remember ever hearing about Troll 2. Did Troll 1 feature trolls? Let me see, Wikipedia says: Troll’s plot has no relation to the film Troll 2 or the two Troll 3 films, which are intended to be more horror than fantasy. Its first “sequel“, Troll 2, produced under the title Goblins, is considered one of the worst films of all time,[8] and was retitled Troll 2 to cash in on the success of the original. Over time, it has developed a cult following.

One of the worst movies of all time! Maybe I should rent it sometime.

Here’s what the linked post says about the new-ish Cats movie, which really, after reading this post, I am reminded I really did kind of want to see it:

There are many reasons Cats turned out the way that it did – most of them not wildly flattering to anyone involved – but you cannot accuse it of attempting to secure a kind of hollow cult status through a deliberate bid for badness. … This is a film that was attempting to secure Academy Awards; a film that was hoping Jennifer Hudson’s tremulous, ugly-crying version of Memory would potentially hit the same spot with Oscar voters as Anne Hathaway’s rendition of I Dreamed a Dream in Les Misérables.

Instead, from the moment that the first trailer dropped, audiences responded with shock. The whole thing shimmered with uncanny energy. The cats had fur, but were shaped like humans, with human hands, but cat ears and tails. There was a sense of dancers gliding past the floor rather than being located in an actual physical space, like the whole thing was taking place in a kind of DayGlo limbo, and quite clearly none of its extraordinary oddness was part of the plan. It was meant to be a festive treat for the family. The marketing insisted, with a dollop of impressive Stockholm syndrome energy: “This Christmas, you will believe.”

Has anyone seen this movie adaptation? What did you think? Sounds like it hit dead center in the uncanny valley.

Please Feel Free to Share:

Posting will be lightish

Merry Christmas!

Photo by Chris Maddon on Unsplash

I will say that again later, but for me, Christmas Break start tomorrow, so posting will be light for the next month. I have some posts scheduled and I will be checking in via my phone and perhaps doing some very short posts that way. But mainly, I will be a hermit, tucked away with many spaniels and possibly some hot chocolate, plus my laptop.

Lots to work on! And I guess there’s a holiday embedded in this break somewhere as well, which I will probably notice when it arrives.

Please Feel Free to Share:

Self-publishing survey

An interesting survey from Written Word Media, which is the organization that runs Freebooksy. This is the best book promotion site I have personally discovered so far, other than Book Bub. Promoting a book through Freebooksy is also the most expensive way to buy a promotion that I know of, other than Book Bub. Given the good results of the Halloween promotion of Black Dog, effects some of which lasted right through November, I will certainly use Freebooksy again. But at the moment I just want to pull out a detail from their survey.

Here is how we have defined our author stages.

Stage One: $0-$249 per month

Stage Two: $250-$999 per month

Stage Three: $1,000-$4,999 per month

Stage Four: $5,000-$9,999 per month

Stage Five: Over $10,000 per month

Yes, those seem like pretty reasonable categories. The survey does not give the number of authors in each category, unfortunately. I think all the authors participating in this survey have purchased a Freebooksy promotion, but I’m not actually sure whether they said that or whether it was something I just assumed.

Now, the survey offers various comments regarding the methods by which authors advertise their books — that’s their specific interest, after all — and average amounts spent on cover art and design and so on and so forth. Click through and read the whole thing if you’re interested. I just want to note a single detail: average number of books out for authors in each category.

Here is how we have defined our author stages.

Stage One: $0-$249 per month — average number of books out, six

Stage Two: $250-$999 per month — average number of books out, seventeen

Stage Three: $1,000-$4,999 per month — average number of books out, twenty-nine

Stage Four: $5,000-$9,999 per month — average number of books out, thirty-six

Stage Five: Over $10,000 per month — average number of books out, forty-two

So, that is one heck of a difference in numbers of books published, isn’t it?

Category one: 6 booksCategory two: 3x as many, by far the biggest jump.Category three: 1.7x as many againCategory four: 1.4x as many againCategory five: 1.2x as many again, and also, 7x as many as the average for category one.

Given that, does anything else matter?

It turns out that the answer there is yes. The difference in royalties per month per book is not as great, but larger than my initial impression, which was pretty much: Wow, forty-two books, no wonder they earn a lot more in royalties.

Let’s take the high end of each royalty category. If you have six books out and make $250 per month total, that is an average of $42 per month per book. If you have 42 books out and make $10,000 per month, that is $238 per book, five and a half times the income per book, so the other stuff you’re doing is probably making a difference. This could be cover art or advertising or a combination of these and other things, but part of it is probably that you may be writing pretty decent books, if you’ve been at it long enough to write forty-two of them.

Naturally I can’t help but immediately assess how this might apply to me.

I have eleven books out, depending on how you count. Some are not very important in generating income. Door Into Light is, of course, the second book in a duology, and since I don’t have the rights to the first book, it’s unlikely to ever generate a lot of income for me. I can’t run sales on House of Shadows, though certainly I can point out periodically that House of Shadows is $1.99 for the ebook on Amazon, which, by the way, it is. In fact, H of S is also $1.99 right now for the Nook version at Barnes and Noble. Hachette seems to be leaving my ebooks priced very low a lot of the time at major distributers, for which I’m quite grateful. I hope they keep that up, especially as the paper copy of the Griffin Mage omnibus is astronomically expensive, comparatively.

Beyond the Dreams We Know, is, as a collection, never going to sell a lot of copies. It just isn’t. I knew that perfectly well when I wrote those stories and brought out the collection.

The Black Dog collections aren’t ever going to do all that much either, though I like them (many of those stories, I like a lot). I’m glad I wrote all those stories and I’ll be bringing out a fourth collection next year, I expect. I have one novella written for that.

If you take out those books, then I have six (self-published) books available: four Black Dog novels and two Tuyo novels. Next year that number should jump to at least ten as I add the Tenai trilogy and the third Tuyo book. (Also the fourth Black Dog story collection, but I’m not really counting that because first, it’s a collection, and second, it’s not finished.)

There is a pretty good possibility I will have another novel, possibly even two, ready by fall of next year. That will not be the fifth Black Dog novel. That is not only not finished, it’s not started. I’m sure I’ll be working on it in 2021, but I am very (very) unlikely to have it ready by the end of the year. But there are a couple of other things that might be ready much sooner.

So … I’m pretty pleased, overall, with how fast I can bring up my number of self-published titles now that I have really decided to do that; and I’m cautiously optimistic about the income stream that may generate for me. I don’t really want to quit my day job. But I do want that to be a viable option by 2022. Among other things, I could take the dogs for long walks more often.

And, yes, I could also write more.

Please Feel Free to Share:

Convenient intuition

Here’s a post at Pub Rants: Instinct, intuition, and insight in fiction.

I wanted to chat this month about something that happens quite frequently in fiction (both published and unpublished), something I’ve dubbed “miraculous knowing.” This is when answers or solutions conveniently occur to a character at key plot moments. It tends to manifest thusly:

• They didn’t know how they knew. They just knew.
• She felt it in her bones. This was the place.
• He sensed it deep with his soul, so deep that he was certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that he knew exactly what had happened to the woman.
• I had a bad feeling. I knew I was being watched.

This is a really good post! I keep wanting to quote the whole thing. Here:

Humans are intuitive, instinctive, insightful beings. We’re animals. Our survival drive makes us reactive to vibes others are giving off, to that cold prickle at the backs of our necks, to hunches that danger lurks nearby. … it stands to reason that characters in fiction would also experience these types of intuitive moments, right?

Sure. However, in fiction, it’s not quite that simple. The human brain demands a different sort of logic from a story … than it does from reality. When a character “senses” or “just knows” more than one crucial piece of information (maaaaaby two) over the course of a novel, that often signals one of three things: incomplete character development, limp plotting, or false tension.

The post then expands on “incomplete character development, limp plotting, and false tension.”

Please Feel Free to Share:

Not quite finished, but I figured out the ending

So, last night I wrote the last scene I had in mind for TARASHANA. I instantly realized that this was not actually the last scene of the book. I don’t know why I didn’t realize that before I got there. I think I may have been too focused on the overall coolness of that scene and thus could not look at the broader picture until I had that scene written.

Anyway, I wrote this neat scene and then I looked at the computer screen for several minutes. Hmm, I said. This is not the end.

I thought about this for, I don’t know, thirty seconds. Then I said, Well, Pippa thinks it’s bedtime (It was seven thirty) (I know, yes), so I guess we’ll go downstairs and the dogs can go to sleep and I’ll read a bit more of the Touchstone trilogy. (I’m getting close to the end of the second book, but most of my time is devoted to other things right now, so I’m really only reading at bedtime.)

Then I woke up at three thirty, which is pretty much morning for me because my alarm is set for four (I KNOW, all right? My schedule is totally offset from the schedule of any normal person right now, but I really like having a long morning in which to write before it’s time to go to work. I’ll adjust back to a more normal schedule during Christmas Break.) I lay there thinking about TARASHANA, which is how I like to spend those minutes before the alarm clock goes off — I almost never sleep all the way to the alarm — and almost at once it occurred to me that I should absolutely do (A) and (B) and ooh, (C), and then I would have a great ending for this story.

So I’m not quite finished, but it’s fine! My subconscious did its job, thankfully, so I will be ready to write The End for TARASHANA in another couple of days.

No one will see it before Christmas, sorry, but you are all probably too busy anyway, right? I already see some things I need to do:

a) I believe I will replace one minor character with a different minor character. What a pity I did not realize the other minor character would be a more appropriate choice at the beginning, but there it is.

b) I will remove a scene that gives too much away too early. I may remove all or nearly all of that chapter, which would be fine because this is going to be a super long draft.

c) I will smooth out some continuity details in the last part of the book, basically from the climax on to nearly the end, and at this point let me add that there are exactly two reasons I ever, ever put anything in boldface in a novel draft: (a) I want to switch that word or phrase to a different language, but don’t want to take time for that now; or (b) I know perfectly well there is a continuity issue that I need to address involving whatever that is.

100% of Copper Mountain readers pointed to a specific boldfaced thing in the final draft and said, Are you sure you want this to be bolded? Thank you all for catching that and no, I never, ever want anything to be bolded in the final draft. That was supposed to be in Spanish or unbolded, whichever I decided on.

d) I will do some trimming. It’s fine with me if the book winds up long, but seriously, this is REALLY long right now. At least one person is going to get a quite long version with a specific request to say “Bored now” whenever she starts skimming.

After that, I will send the real actual first draft to a couple more of you and ask you to tear it apart, although by the way positive comments are highly welcome and quite motivating. After THAT I will do final revisions and ask for proofreaders to scour the manuscript for however many ridiculously obvious typos may be left at that point.

I’m thinking I will aim for roughly early summer 2021 as the release date. Earlier would be fine, but I don’t want to stress myself out by imposing an unnecessarily tight deadline.

Please Feel Free to Share:

The Beat Goes On

From Writer Unboxed:

It’s confusing.  As if there aren’t enough hero’s journeys and snowflakes to follow in putting together your novel, there is also the matter of beats.  Commonly used in screenwriting, the concept of beats sometimes creeps into thinking about fiction writing.  What exactly are beats, and do they have any utility in fiction?

Sometimes = always in some sorts of formulaic fiction; eg, romance and cozy mystery — most mystery — and quest novels of various kinds.

[Beats are] moments in a story that are plot pivots or emotional shifts.  Palpably and perhaps invisibly, the story takes a step.  Things change: outside, inside or between people.  The story marches forward in a marked cadence.  The felt impact of each step is a beat.

This post doesn’t say this, but romance beats are surely the most standardized. The plot of a romance almost always follows a pattern close to this:

a) Set up

b) Meet cute (or whatever kind of meeting; sometimes not cute)

c) We can never make it work

d) Maybe we could make it work

e) Revelation of some obstacle

f) Dark night of the soul: giving up on love

g) One or both protagonist yields something to the other person and the happy ending ensues

So those are romance beats. This post at Writer Unboxed goes on:

What was supposed to be true might turn out to be false.  Right could veer wrong.  Bad might become good.  When doubt arises, hope is dashed, a silver lining is discovered…when there is any emotional shift at all in the minds or hearts of readers, that too is a beat. … Above all, a beat is something that we experience in a moment.  It’s a stab of fear, a twinge of shame, a shout of encouragement, a shot at prediction, a tremor of doubt, a punishing verdict, a roar of rage, a tear of grief, a nod of satisfaction, or anything that causes us to feel a way that we didn’t a moment before.

The rest of the post is about the importance of emotional shifts that arise from character (and reader) reactions, not from the plot (or not only from the plot). A pretty decent post, if you’ve got a minute and would like to click through.

Please Feel Free to Share:

The series bible

Here’s a good post about how (and why) to create a series bible, if you happen to be writing a long series, especially with considerable time between one book and the next. Time for you, I mean, not time in the series. I can definitely confirm that it’s entirely possible to forget a character’s eye color, so a place to look that sort of thing up is handy.

Here’s a partial list of suggested items to include:

Description of main charactersDescription of secondary charactersDescription of villainsThemesSettingBackstoryTimelinesFuture scene ideas

Etc, etc. I left a lot out. I’ll add one more, though: evocative details and obvious plot hooks you absolutely intended to bring into a later book and might forget about if you didn’t have notes about them. I mean, what’s under the cement floor in that house where Miguel and Natividad found that creepy skull? And, by the way, who was the poor child to whom that skull belonged?

I have more notes about that sort of detail than anything else. BUT, I do have a quick note of everyone’s eye color in black dog form, because that is hard to remember for everyone except Ezekiel.

Notes about villains aren’t so important for me, since I tend to kill them before the end of the book and they don’t tend to come back afterward. (I do have at least one hanging thread of that kind. Anybody happen to remember who that is?)

Villainy, now, I do need details about that. What exactly is the paraphernalia used for witchcraft? That, I would forget if I didn’t have notes.

Please Feel Free to Share:

Best … kitchen tools … for Star Wars fans

This was a category I didn’t know existed.

But here it is: The Best Gifts for Foodies Who Love Star Wars

If you’re still looking for stocking stuffers, then how about, let me see …

Wow. Okay, this is not in the “stocking stuffer” category, but if you were planning to get a pressure cooker anyway, well:

This item apparently functions as a pressure cooker, slow cooker, rice cooker, steamer, sauté pan, yogurt maker and warmer.

A sauté pan, really? But that’s what it says! You can buy it here.

I have to admit, this is a pretty neat pressure cooker.

Most of the items on the list are cheaper than that. By all means click through if you’re still shopping.

Please Feel Free to Share:

Statistics in world-destroying catastrophes

Here’s an interesting post by James Davis Nicoll: More Planets, More Problems: The Pessimist’s Guide to Galactic Expansion

This is pessimism based on statistics:

[The statistical unlikelihood of being hit by a giant meteor is g]ood news for any particular world, because the odds are pretty good that civilization will collapse from other causes in the time between successive 1 km object impacts, with excellent odds that the species will vanish from other causes before another dinosaur-killer arrives. Unfortunately, our grand galactic polity has three hundred million independent planetary collision experiments running simultaneously. Thus, absent intervention, in any given year, about six hundred worlds will be struck by a 1 km object, and about fifteen will be struck by a massive dinosaur-killer.

That paragraph made me laugh for a couple of different reasons. Good news! Your civilization will fall and your species will become extinct before you have to worry about being destroyed by a giant meteor — well, MOST of you.

Of course, in a properly run galactic federation, we wouldn’t say “absent intervention.” We’d expect nearly all of those worlds to nudge the giant meteor out of the way before disaster struck. Except that Nicoll is in a REALLY pessimistic mood this morning, as he adds,  Well, unless the funding bodies decide that because there have been no impacts in recent memory thanks to the anti-impactor program, the program was clearly overfunded and could be cut.

Nicoll then goes on to discuss other planetary catastrophes, including my favorite, the kind of extreme volcanic period that formed — for Earth — the Siberian basalts and would — if it happened again — kill us all. Nicoll comments, with the extreme pessimism that pervades this particular post, I guess the good news is “an area the size of India is permanently on fire” is the sort of thing people notice from orbit, so at least it won’t come as a surprise to whoever makes the mistake of settling there. Unless, of course, the flood-basalt event is in a quiescent phase during the survey…

These sorts of things are not as fun in space opera as a good old-fashioned war, but I suppose if you’re writing a long series and the war doesn’t seem exciting enough, you could probably spice it up by adding a nice planetary catastrophe on top.

Please Feel Free to Share:

The Hands of the Emperor

In the comments to yesterday’s post, Mary Anderson pointed to in which — according to at least one review — nothing terrible happens. (She hasn’t finished it and does not guarantee that this is actually the case.)

Here’s the description:

An impulsive word can start a war.
A timely word can stop one.
A simple act of friendship can change the course of history.

Cliopher Mdang is the personal secretary of the Last Emperor of Astandalas, the Lord of Rising Stars, the Lord Magus of Zunidh, the Sun-on-Earth, the god.
He has spent more time with the Emperor of Astandalas than any other person.
He has never once touched his lord.
He has never called him by name.
He has never initiated a conversation.

One day Cliopher invites the Sun-on-Earth home to the proverbially remote Vangavaye-ve for a holiday.

The mere invitation could have seen Cliopher executed for blasphemy.
The acceptance upends the world.

This is a GREAT description. It is brief. It is intriguing. It suggests a story centered around a potentially wonderful relationship. It checks off just a few boxes for me, but it checks them off very thoroughly. This is not a little oh, friendship, how nice checkmark. It is a great, huge WHOA, LOOK AT THIS checkmark.

I am absolutely going to try this book. Probably really soon, right after I have finished my (really slow) re-read of the Touchstone trilogy.

Please Feel Free to Share: