Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 33

NaNoWriMo is for wimps, apparently

Three Guidelines for a Three-Day Novel

To generate a 50K-word first draft in a month, your pace is 1667 words per day.

To do the same in three days instead of thirty? 16,667 words.

(Assuming you write 20 hours of each day for three days, which would be insane but also maximize your writing time, that’s 833 words per hour. Writing 17 hours a day leaves more time for sleep, but ups your hourly count to 980 words each hour. Good luck, y’all!)

Anybody else boggled by this idea?

Right, I see everyone has raised their hands. (image from pixabay)

Did you realize there is a three-day novel writing contest that actually exists?

From its modest beginnings as a barroom challenge, it grew to attract the interest and support of neophyte and seasoned writers alike, from Canada, the U.S. and beyond. Now, more than four decades later, it has become a unique contribution to world literary history and a put-your-keyboard-where-your-mouth-is rite of passage for hundreds of writers each year.

Wow, really? Hundreds of writers participate each year? I wonder how much coffee they go through.

If you thought, “Wow, what a great idea!”, sorry, it’s too late for this year, but you can mark it on your calendar for Labor Day weekend next year.

Spoiler: I didn’t think, “Wow, what I great idea!” I thought, “Wow, that’s insane.” Let me see. Let’s say you’re going to call 50,000 words a “novel,” as is the case for NaNoWriMo. I wrote MARAG in 18 days; it was 112,000 words in draft (it went to 125,000 in revision). At the exact same average rate of writing, that means I should in theory be able to write 50,000 words in eight days. That means doing this contest would mean writing nearly three times faster.

Wow, that’s insane.

However, should you feel like tackling this challenge, the linked post provides suggestions:

Set goals, but don’t obsess.

Generate without judgment, but don’t cheat.

Start early, but don’t start from scratch.

Those look like reasonable goals to me. “Don’t start from scratch” means you ought to know about the characters and the plot before you begin. I think that’s accurate. I couldn’t have written MARAG so fast except I knew both Sinowa and Marag, plus I had a lot of the plot in mind, including quite a few specific scenes.

Meanwhile!

My brother commented recently that this year, my goal should be to achieve “No No Wri Mo,” meaning I should take a complete break in November. He wasn’t wrong. A break would be nice. In some ways. Maybe I will at least manage a partial break in November. It would be great to whittle down the projects to the point that all I’m doing in November is proofreading SILVER CIRCLE, nothing else. I can hardly imagine what that would be like. Except it would be great to read other authors’ books for a while!

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This looks actionable to me

Here’s a US publisher selling the rights to use the books it publishes to “train” AI — with no way for authors published by this publisher to opt out.

Even worse,

… another academic publisher, Taylor& Francis, the parent company of Routledge, over an AI deal with Microsoft worth $10 million, claiming they were not given the opportunity to opt out and are receiving no extra payment for the use of their research by the tech company.

Bold is mine.

That looks like theft to me. Publishers do not buy books. They license the rights to publish books, in specific ways, with specific limitations. If they don’t buy audio rights, they can’t make audiobooks available — the author can do that if they want to, because the author retains any rights that have not specifically been licensed by the publisher. That’s how it works. That’s the deal.

These publishers are just begging for a big class-action lawsuit, especially the publisher that isn’t paying the authors any compensation, but it definitely looks to me like ANY publisher that doesn’t offer a prominent opt-out option is putting itself at significant legal hazard.

I hope they get sued. I don’t think there’s any way they could win. Not that I’m an IP lawyer, or a lawyer of any kind, but I know darn well that publishers do not have the right to do anything they want with a book; they only have the rights specified in the contract signed by the author. This can’t be in there.

As a side note, it’s also obviously ethically wrong to use an author’s work this way without offering a way to opt out, and worse not to pay extra compensation — but it’s obviously wrong either way. The publisher’s staff responsible for this should be ashamed.

Every single author planning to sign a contract with a traditional publisher should make sure there’s a clause in their contract that specifies the publisher can’t use their books this way without specific permission to do so.

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Update: THERE’S NO END

What I should actually lead with:

Sure, SILVER CIRCLE is coming along fine and Part II should be ready to send to the earliest readers very soon. Really. Tomorrow, maybe.

What I have been doing:

You know, when I whap into a bolded sentence at the top or bottom of a chapter that says, “Add a conversation about whatever” or “Refer to this thing” then I have to pause and do that. Argh.

Also, I got so confused trying to make sure I knew when each chapter was happening that I added bold-faced tags at the top of every chapter. These tags say Early Morning of the Seventeenth or Late Afternoon of the Eighteenth or whatever. This is SO HELPFUL, even though there are time cues worked into the beginning of most chapters. I doubt readers will really need tags like that, but when I’m trying to make sure everything happens in order, this has been just crucial.

Quick, guess how many minutes it took to work out all those tags? Right, quite a few. Aaargh.

The whole of Part I takes place during one day and part of another, by the way. Part II boldly breaks new ground by taking place in, get this, two and a half days. This is SUCH a fast-paced story. Though there are occasional restful chapters. Just not very many.

Also, I moved a chapter to Part III, thought YAY, LESS TO DO RIGHT NOW, then realized that wouldn’t work and moved it back into Part II — but earlier, so I had to re-do the timing of that chapter. Aaaaargh.

What I will do next:

Finish primary revision of Part II, obviously. And then —

What? What should I prioritize after I send Part II to readers?

A) Secondary revision of Part I and make a proofing copy for my mother.

B) For crying out loud, read through the whole dratted Griffin Mage trilogy like I keep meaning to do and haven’t done yet. The first two book covers are finished! I have to get this done so I can make the individual book files and tell the artist how many pages per paperback!

C) Finish proofreading and loading the updated version of all the Black Dog books. (I’m on Shadow Twin.)

D) Oh, look, I totally lost track of the “Midwinter” novella I’ve started. Last newsletter didn’t have an installment of this story! Aargh! Would readers be okay with several more chapters of Silver Circle Part II or do I need to get the third piece of “Midwinter” written before the end of the month?

AND THIS IS WHY THE FANFIC POST IS DRIVING ME MAD. I literally do not have time to read a 76,000-word Vorkosigan fic with a strong loyalty theme and this is killing me!

Well, such is life, I suppose, but a LOT of those fics look really neat. I’m really happy I did that post because SOMEDAY IN THE DISTANT FUTURE I will enjoy reading those very much.

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Now Available: RIHASI Audiobook

So, the audio version of RIHASI went live last night:

I hope you love it, I think you will, I enjoyed it immensely as I listened to it chapter by chapter.

And! I had really good experiences with both RIHASI and with the audiobook of MARAG.

By “really good experiences,” I mean that I think the quality of the finished audiobook is great, with excellent narration, AND that these two narrators, Josie Paolini for RIHASI and Reif Anderson for MARAG, were also great to work with. Wholehearted recommendations for them both, should any of you happen to be authors and considering doing audio.

I’ve learned a lot about what pitfalls exist when it comes to audio narration; I’m sure there’s still heaps I don’t know, but if anyone happens to have any questions about what’s gone right and wrong for me so far, and what I pay attention to now that I didn’t know I should pay attention to at first, I’d be happy to lay all that out.

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FanFic worth reading

Okay, so first, obviously what you find worth reading depends on your personal tastes and on which fandoms you might like. This also depends on what you consider … just … worth reading, right? Because a story doesn’t have to be perfect to be enjoyable.

Personally, I prefer works that are novel-length, though shorter can be okay; and I prefer well-written, but I can be more forgiving than you might expect if I like things about the story; and I don’t have to be all that familiar with the original work to enjoy a well-done work of fan fiction.

Also, something to just be aware of, it’s not like I know all that much about fanfic and what’s available. I know about these because someone else drew my attention to them, thinking I might like them, which was true. I don’t poke around on Archive of Our Own looking for fanfiction for the same basic reason I don’t read a lot of any fiction at all right now: because I’m really busy and don’t have time.

But I’m always happy to get pointers to neat fanfic works, on AO3 or elsewhere, and I know some of you are too, so here are a few that I really liked, with comments. If any of you know of others, and from comments on prior posts you obviously do, so please share them in the comments.

It’s easier for me to put in clean-looking links from my end, so if you put in a link from your side, I can redo it in a cleaner format later. If you would like to try putting in a clean link, you can put YOUR TEXT YOU WANT TO BE VISIBLE and that should, I think, put your link into your sentence properly. If it doesn’t work, I can redo it from this end.

If you’re looking at something at Archive of Our Own, you can click at the top right to download the whole work. If you look at Devices at Amazon, you can send an epub or Word file to yourself at your Kindle’s address and boom! The file will appear on your Kindle or device.

From top to bottom:

1) A Bit Too Much Good Work by A_T_Rain

This is a LMB fanfic, and it is REALLY GREAT. Honestly, it is. If I were LMB, I would contact the author and ask if she wanted to publish this work with a forward from the author, because I would be happy to point my readers to this story. I would think of that because I was impressed with what Eric Flint did with the 1632 universe and I wish more authors would do something like that.

Byerly Vorrutyer is the primary protagonist. There was lots of room to do more with By, and A_T_Rain used that space to the fullest. The female lead is Rish. It’s nearly 100,000 words. The author has written other Bujold fanfic, those stories are shorter by also often good, and you can easily find them by clicking her name under the title.

2) Fictitious Persons by Debby G

This is a Supergirl fanfic. I enjoyed it very much. Clark’s and Lois’s little daughter gets kidnapped and taken to an alternate world where they exist only as comic book characters. There, Kara, who is about eight, develops super powers. This is an intimate story about the woman who fosters Kara, how she and her daughter handle this remarkable foster-daughter of hers, how Kara handles developing super powers, and how this little found-family copes with this. It’s a gentle story, mostly. It’s at least as much about being a good mom as anything else. The frame story is not all that persuasive, but so? That’s not the important part of the story.

At the end, Clark and Lois do get their daughter back and there’s a nice ending for everyone.

3) Martian Manhunter Mediancat

Look carefully toward the top and you will see a link that says “Whole Story.” You can download this story as an epub or whatever if you click on that.

This is one of the stories that went really, really long (250,000 words) and then the author got tired of it and wrapped it up with a section of story summary rather than story. I really enjoyed it despite that because (a) it’s really, really long before you hit that part, and (b) it actually resolved before you hit that part, and (c) it’s just really fun as a concept. In this story, Veronica Mars from the TV show gets dropped into the Buffy universe. Her mission: to make things come out better than they did in the canon TV show.

4) Demonology and the Tri-Phasic Model by NNM

This is a really unusual story! Also, this time, I really don’t know anything about the original work this fanfic is based on, which is Good Omens, which I never read or watched.

Okay, so this story isn’t really meant to be a story, exactly. It’s meant to be a model of therapy, viewed through a fanfic lens. Here’s the author’s note at the end:

This is a story that could only ever work as a piece of fanfiction. It only worked because I could trust that everyone reading it was already familiar with Crowley and his back-story. It only worked because the character of Crowley was so beautifully fleshed out, made real, through others’ love and talent. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I never anticipated that people would care about Aubrey Thyme. I designed her personality with two thoughts in mind: 1) she needed to be a therapist who could work with someone like Crowley, and 2) I wanted her to be able to slip into the background and act like just a conduit for information about therapeutic processes and insight into Crowley. It was only when I saw reactions to her, as a character in her own right, that I felt like I could do more with this story than I had originally intended. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I didn’t expect that this would become a story that could be so meaningful for others. I cherish the comments that so many of you have left. I am left feeling something like grace, knowing that there are people out there who have found the strength to reach out to others for help, who have taken steps to make their lives better, who have done something meaningful to help themselves flourish, all because of something I have written. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

You can imagine Aubrey Thyme, down there, sitting in her office. You can imagine her, during her breaks, turning her eyes upwards and locating you. You can imagine her seeing you and seeing all of your strength and resilience and wisdom and insight. You can imagine her seeing you and seeing that you are good enough, that you are more than good enough, that you are good just precisely and exactly as you are. You can think of her offering you her encouragement, because she knows that you can flourish, she knows that you can do the hard work of taking care of yourself, she knows that you deserve to live a good life. You can imagine her, and you can know that one of the greatest gifts you can ever give to another is the opportunity to help you if and when you need it.

One must imagine Aubrey Thyme happy.

So, really, no fooling, this is story as a model of therapy. That’s what it is. It’s strangely compelling to read, even if you don’t actually know anything about the original work. Also, there’s evidently now a sequel, just finished this past June.

5) Forward Momentum by Bracketyjack

This one has writing that is adequate rather than good. And the pacing and plotting and all that is adequate rather than good. And yet … the point of this story is to pick up Miles Vorkosigan, picking up the story after “Winterfair Gifts.” Then many good things happen to all the characters, driving forward to good things happening for the entire Vorkosigan universe. This one is 175,000 words. There are sequels, none of which are anything like that long.

This is the sort of story I would want to read if I had the flu. It’s soothing, and you don’t have to think about it very much.

***

Okay! I wasn’t going for a Top Five list or anything; it just turns out that I happened to have five novel-length fanfic works on my Kindle app, so when I scrolled down to find them, there they were. As you see, it’s a diverse set — three out of five based on original works I’m familiar with, two based on works I barely know anything about.

What they have in common: They’re novel-length and I really enjoyed them.

If you have one or more fanfic works to suggest, please, by all means, drop them in the comments. Any fandom, based on anything, short is just fine, anything you think commenters here might enjoy.

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Poetry Thursday: Emily Dickinson

If I had to choose an actual favorite poet — which would be hard — but I might pick Emily Dickinson.

A handful of her poems are thoroughly familiar; they’re in all English Lit books everywhere as far as I know. Success is Counted Sweetest. There’s a Certain Slant of Light. Because I Could Not Stop for Death.

However, there are lots and lots more poems that aren’t in any English Lit book anywhere, as far as I know. Let’s look at some of those!

The director of the student services program I work for is an English guy. He made a joke about including poems in all our newsletter articles. Naturally, I’m happy to do that, no joke, and so here is a poem I found for a newsletter article about success not depending on luck. This is why I was thinking about Emily Dickinson this week. Then I realized I’d never seen this poem before and thought Hey! Let’s feature Emily Dickinson this week!

***

Luck is not chance

Luck is not chance—
It’s Toil—
Fortune’s expensive smile
Is earned—
The Father of the Mine
Is that old-fashioned Coin
We spurned—

***

***

Here’s a fun one, a very extended metaphor. Again, even though Dickinson may be my favorite poem, I’ve never seen this particular poem before.

One Need Not be a Chamber — to be Haunted

One need not be a chamber—to be haunted—
One need not be a House—
The Brain—has Corridors surpassing 
Material Place—

Far safer, of a Midnight—meeting 
External Ghost—
Than an Interior—confronting—
That cooler—Host—

Far safer, through an Abbey—gallop—
The Stones a’chase—
Than moonless—One’s A’self encounter—
In lonesome place—

Ourself—behind Ourself—Concealed—
Should startle—most—
Assassin—hid in Our Apartment—
Be Horror’s least—

The Prudent—carries a Revolver—
He bolts the Door, 
O’erlooking a Superior Spectre
More near—

***

***

I know I’ve mentioned this one before; it’s one of my personal favorites because, I mean, it just is. Also, it’s an easy poem to memorize in its entirity.

To make a prairie (1755)

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

Photo from Unsplash

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Bad writing advice

I happened across this post by Ann R Allen when looking stuff up for the previous post about “stop workshopping your novel and send it into the world.”

Writers: Beware Over-Workshopping Your WIP

This isn’t a post about over-workshopping, really. It’s a fun post about bad writing advice. Of course I’ve hit that before (pretty often!) but this post is funny and I don’t think I’ve seen it before, so here it is.

What’s over-workshopping? It’s what happens when writers attend too many writing workshops or critique groups where they’re fed dogmatic, my-way-or-the-highway rules. Following rules too closely can slow down your story (and your career.) It can also eliminate what’s creative and original in your work. …

Here are some of the workshop criticisms we can often ignore, says Ann R Allen, and marches through the list, striking down all the rules I particularly hate, so that’s fun. But she starts with one I hadn’t thought of:

1.“Your character wouldn’t do that!”

This is my unfavorite thing to hear in a critique or editorial note. It’s almost always unhelpful because nobody knows your character the way you do.

It often means the critic wants to make your story about herself. What she means is “I wouldn’t do that,” or worse, “My mental stereotype of that kind of person wouldn’t do that.”

There’s more at the linked post,

I have to say, SOMETIMES the observation is not actually “I wouldn’t do that” or “my stereotype wouldn’t do that.” Sometimes the observation is made by someone far more self-aware, someone who does in fact mean, “I don’t believe your character would do that.”

That’s a critique to take seriously, not because your character wouldn’t do that, necessarily, but because you’re failing to persuade the reader that the character would do that. As far as I can tell, my early readers know what they heck they are talking about when they say something like that. When, on rare-ish occasions, one of my early readers points to a specific moment and says this, I either change what the character does or else I put thought into justifying the character’s actions more persuasively.

Also, as a relevant side note, at least once when I pointed at a moment and said to another author, “I don’t for a second believe he would do this,” she took that bit out and revised the flow of action through that scene. And I thought that was a big improvement, because honestly, he would never have done that.

So, this can be perfectly appropriate advice. On the other hand, I know exactly what Allen is talking about, because I do see reviews that say, “I don’t believe this character would do this,” and I think, Oh yes he would. He absolutely would, and I’m sorry you don’t like that, but this is indeed consistent with the character as written.

Most of the rest of Allen’s points are small-scale — she’s pointing at a lot of bad writing advice. She’s hit some items I’ve never thought about or haven’t thought about the same way, so that’s interesting. You should certainly click through and read the whole thing, but here:

2. Don’t repeat a word in the same paragraph

I thought: wait, I hate repetition. But hat’s not what she means, and she’s SO RIGHT, because this is ludicrously horrible advice if you actually try to follow it. Like so —

Would A Tale of Two Cities be improved if its first line read: “It was the best of times; it was the worst of historical eras.”

Or maybe Anna Karenina should have opened like this: “Happy families are all alike; every morose clan is despondent in its own way.”

Those are really funny examples, and also they’re examples that make the distinction between poetic repetition and pointless, accidental repetition crystal clear.

3. Never use multiple points of view. 

Does anybody actually give that advice? I’m not sure I’ve ever run across that. Here’s what I have seen: “Oh, don’t try multiple points of view — this is your first book and multiple points of view is too hard for novices!” This linked post is implying the same thing — A single “deep” POV is great for a simple, linear storyline, and it might be best for a first novel, says Allen.

I mean, sure, if that’s how you want to write your first novel. Otherwise, no.

I’m always startled by this idea that it’s harder to write with multiple points of view, because no, it isn’t. It just isn’t. I don’t mean it isn’t harder for me than a single point of view. I mean it literally isn’t harder, period. In fact, it’s easier. If you’re writing with just one point of view, you’re limited to showing the reader only what that viewpoint character sees and is aware of. That’s really restrictive! That’s why authors come up with magic mirrors and cloaks of invisibility and whatever: because they are forced to come up with magical ways to get the reader the necessary information. The advantages of multiple points of view balance out the disadvantages, such as they are.

It’s true that your two or more pov characters ought not all be clones of each other, but since your secondary characters ought not be clones of the protagonist, what difference does that make? Saying that you should make your pov protagonists different from each other is like saying “Hey, characterization is important.” It doesn’t need to be said at all. It’s always true and always obvious. Or if it’s not, then that’s the problem; multiple pov protagonist’s isn’t the problem.

HAVING SAID THAT, one problem truly can arise when you have multiple pov protagonists. One protagonist might be more interesting, more cool, more engaging, and then the reader will be irritated whenever they are pulled away from that pov and pushed into the other pov. That’s a real concern. The solution is: try your best to make both or all your pov protagonists compelling and engaging, so that even has a preference for one, they don’t mind reading the other. That’s good practice, so there’s no need to shy away from multiple points of view.

4. Eliminate “was,” “that,” and “just.”

I’m right there with Ann R Allen for this. She is completely wrong. That is stupid advice. She’s right about why it’s stupid advice, too. “I just got home, so I haven’t had dinner” makes sense. “I got home so I haven’t had dinner” makes no sense at all. Thank you, Ann! Well put!

5. Don’t use contractions.

Surely no one gives anybody this advice. Should someone say this, surely everyone would ignore them. No one can possibly think this is good advice.

WAIT! I guess if you have never read anything but textbooks, you might think this was good advice. No one who has EVER read ANY fiction can possibly think this is good advice.

Honestly, I think Ann R Allen just made this up. … She says she hears from writers who were told this in workshops. She says she hears this “all the time.” I guess she didn’t make it up? It’s hard to believe.

6. Remove all adjectives and adverbs. 

Right there with you, Ann. I totally believe writers are told this in workshops, by insane instructors who think Hemingway was too ornate and florid.

7. Never use the passive voice.

Oh, pu-leez. The passive voice exists for a reason.  A scene can still be “active” if the author uses the passive voice.

It’s better for your detective to say. “This woman was murdered!” than “A person or persons unknown murdered this woman!”

Thanks for a fantastic example, and I will use that myself when this comes up.

8. Eliminate all clichés.

Good one, and good justification if you’d like to click through and read that. Basically: normal people sometimes use normal expressions when talking to other normal people.

I’m trying to remember a really strained metaphor I saw … not that long ago … in an example of what was supposed to be great writing … Oh! Got it! It was this:

His close-cropped skull was indented on one side as by the corner of a two-by-four. In the crevice formed by his brow and cheekbones, his eyes glinted like dimes lost between sofa cushions.

I thought: His eyes like what, now? I also thought: Maybe there’s something to be said for describing somebody in ordinary terms. This is really over the top. It’s the kind of language that just makes me think the author is trying too hard.

9. Punctuation is so last century.

Do people actually give this advice in writing workshops? Are they out of their minds? In this era when punctuation is hardly taught in schools and people throw apostrophes everywhere and scatter commas through their prose at random, maybe we don’t need to encourage the idea that punctuation is unimportant. People are already right there, being sloppy and incorrect and incidentally producing prose that’s hard to parse because of that problem.

10. Always Show, Don’t Tell.

I bet you saw this coming. That’s the single most overused piece of advise, period.

If you spend ten pages describing the shabby apartment of the murder witness, and we hear the screaming children and the blaring TV and smell the unemptied cat litter box and overflowing garbage can, your story is not going forward.

I’m a big fan of description, but there’s a lot to be said for also knowing when to move on with the story.

Thank you, Ann R Allen. Good post! This post also goes with the previous post about over-workshopping a novel, because Allen finishes this way:

Start another project to avoid over-workshopping.

I know authors who have spent years taking their WIP to writers’ conferences and workshops, obsessed with creating a book that will be universally approved of. But that kind of book doesn’t exist. You can’t please all of the people all of the time. … If you fear you’ve been over-workshopping your book, try putting it in a drawer and ignoring it for a month or two. Spend that time starting another one, or writing a short story or a poem or two. Something short you can actually finish is best. Don’t show the new stuff to anybody until it’s done and you love it. Then take it to your critique group or workshop when you have more confidence in your work and can ignore advice that doesn’t resonate with you.

***

Not bored yet with posts about bad writing advice? Another post from Ann R Allen:

10 Dangerous Critiques: Beware Misguided Writing Advice

My favorite misguided advice from this post:

5)      Dr. Phil Meets the Middle Ages

“There are more appropriate ways to establish boundaries,” one critiquer said of a writer’s lady-in-waiting character in her Tudor-era historical novel. The character had just pulled a knife on a particularly handsy duke. The advice was, “She should assert her rights and report his sexual harassment to the queen. Relationship problems should never be solved with violence.”

I don’t know how I would respond if someone gave me advice like that. I think I might actually be rendered speechless.

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Should you abandon that novel you’ve been working on?

A post at Kill Zone Blog, again by James Scott Bell — I know I linked to another of his posts recently, but this one also caught my eye: Should You Abandon Your Novel?

There’s a longish lead-in, and then this:

[H]ow long should you labor over a book before saying, “This isn’t getting me any further. Maybe I should start another one.”

That’s the fundamental question the rest of the post is trying to answer. Here is the first guideline that Bell offers:

Spending a year on one book is long enough. … A page a day is a book a year. A Ficus tree can write a page a day. Don’t be shown up by a Ficus tree.

I laughed and decided sure, this is a post worth sharing. That’s true even though I actually know a writer who just barely manages a page a day. She has young children. For those who have a life, frequently a page a day is a dandy goal, and not always achievable. But the line about the Ficus tree still made me laugh. Bell also says

Don’t workshop it over and over.

I agree, and that reminds me of some post or other about the way over-workshopped novels can loose their individuality and turn to bland mush. What post is that? I know I’m thinking of a specific post. Oh, it’s this one.

Workshop-trained writers are often, not always, but often, intrinsically defensive. This single fact explains almost all defining features of contemporary literature. What you’re looking at on the shelf are not so much books as battlements. … Oh, the prose is always well-polished, with the occasional pleasing turn of phrase, but never distinctive, never flowery nor reaching. This defensiveness extends even to the ontology of their fictional worlds. A lot of today’s literary fiction could be set on some twin earth where everything about history, science, philosophy, the universe, even what humans evolved to look like, could all be totally different. Yet the novel is so situated in the writer’s low-attack-surface manifest image of the world that the reader would never know. 

The above is Erik Hoel, and he’s specifically addressing modern literary novels, not all fiction. I don’t know much and care less about most literary fiction; nevertheless, the above indictment has stuck with me ever since I read the linked post.

The broader idea, that workshopping a novel can lead to a defensive posture that attempts to hide everything important about the novel, is not quite the same thing Bell is getting at. Bell is saying: Stop endlessly polishing! It’s good! Stop workshopping and get it out there! Hoel is saying: Stop trying to defend your novel against imagined attack! Stop being so defensive! Write the novel you want and then get it out there!

Both are saying: When your novel is ready, stop dithering and throw it into the world.

But Bell is also saying: Or else decide it’s never going to be ready and move on to some other novel. His post is really about that, about deciding whether it’s good and should fly, or not-good and you should quit trying to make it good enough because it’s not going to get there.

Bell asks: So what about a “seasoned” writer? Should they ever abandon a book? I’ve got the answer: It depends.

Actually, he doesn’t really have an answer, except that sometimes you should quit with a specific book and sometimes you shouldn’t. He’s also noting that abandonment is pretty common at about 30,000 words in, which is about 100 pages if you think in pages. That’s probably true. The early middle is often difficult for me; if I re-write a chapter from scratch, more often than not, it’s going to be chapter 5, and guess where that is? Yep, it’s usually about 30,000 words in. Regardless, Bell really doesn’t have an answer.

So, let’s try to come up with an answer!

When should you abandon a novel? Also, what do you mean by “abandon?”

A) When you outline it and get stuck on some plot element. This isn’t relevant if you don’t outline. But if you do, then you probably haven’t invested much time in the project when you’re out the outlining stage, so ditch it if it’s not working. The intuitive writer version is writing one chapter and then getting stuck. You haven’t invested much yet, so dropping the project has a low cost.

B) When you have the novel less than, say, 80% finished, and you get stuck or lose interest and can’t get interested again. There’s a high cost to abandoning a novel when you’re more than halfway into it, but if you’re really stuck, it may help to set the project aside for a year or two. Or ten. You can go on to something else while you wait. Maybe the abandoned project will sort itself out if you wait a while. It’s not like you have a deadline.

B part ii) UNLESS YOU DO HAVE A DEADLINE, and that can be either a deadline from a publisher OR a deadline that exists in the unspoken contract between authors and readers.

What I mean is, when an author is writing a series, then when the first book comes out and that book ends with a cliffhanger, they have implicitly promised their readers that they will finish the story.

If there is an interim resolution and the book is self-contained, that’s one thing, but if there isn’t a interim resolution, if there is some kind of cliffhanger, then the author owes it to the readers to finish the series, and the only really acceptable excuse for failing to do so is the death of the author. I’ve read a furious diatribe about that somewhere. Oh, it’s here, and the weird thing is, Correia is saying there’s no such thing as a contract between authors and readers and then he does this long, furious post.

While he’s right that readers refusing to buy unfinished epic fantasy series destroys the ability of authors to write epic fantasy, I’m here to say: Yes, there is too an unwritten contract between author and readers. Yes. There is. The author who starts a series and does not wind up each book at a decent resolution DOES TOO have an obligation to finish that series and reach the resolution. Not to write a resolution that makes every reader, or most readers, happy. But to write a resolution OF SOME KIND, a conclusion that does the job of concluding the series, and bonus points if the resolution DOES make most readers happy.

I do think so. Yes, I do. You do not get to say, Well, I got bored with the series, or Oh, I have writer’s block, and then leave your readers with a permanent cliffhanger and no resolution at all. It’s up to you to find a way to deal with your issues and write the ending of the project you started. Taking an extra year or so to finish something is fine. Just never finishing it is much, much less fine. Here is the best post I know of about finishing a story when the author got very stuck, but felt strongly that she owed the book to their readers. This is an author dealing with the problem and moving ahead to finish the novel. This is KJ Charles, and she was dealing with ordinary writer’s block at the time, not clinical depression. But if writer’s block arises from depression, then yes, that can happen, and why not get treated for that so you can finish the project and incidentally also improve your life immeasurably because you have treated the depression.

Well, that was a digression. What was the topic? Oh, right: When should you abandon a novel?

C) When you have decided the novel is unsalvageably bad. Your judgment may not be correct, but the decision of whether a novel is good enough to send into the world is, in the end, the author’s decision. Nobody else can really make that call. If you’ve decided the novel just cannot be made good, then it makes sense to drop it in a drawer.

Don’t delete it. In ten years, maybe you’ll suddenly realize how you can totally revise it and make it great.

Also, I do know of aspiring authors who just can’t believe the novel is fine when it is in fact fine. That’s why I said “your judgment may not be correct.” If people with good critical judgment are all telling you your novel is great and you should pursue publication / self-publish, then they’re probably right and you should probably take a stab at nudging your novel toward the edge of the nest and the wide sky beyond.

So … I guess my conclusion here is: You should abandon a novel under three conditions:

You’re barely started and get stuck, so abandoning the project has a low cost, or

You’re well into the novel, but you’re stuck and can’t get unstuck, and also there’s no deadline, and also being stuck isn’t a sign there’s actually something wrong, or

You’ve finished the project, but you decide the book is just unpublishably bad and you’re going to drop it in a drawer and forget about it for a few years.

I guess those are just about the only three reasons I can think of abandoning a novel partway through. How about you all, have I missed something? Where do you stand on the idea that an unresolved ending constitutes an obligation?

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Update: Plus Ongoing Sale

Okay, so, first, if you subscribe to my newsletter (and open it), then you will be aware of this, but —

The Invictus duology is on sale right now and for a couple days yet. There’s no particular reason. I am just taking a stab at boosting this duology in KU, so I’m running a sale with the first book free and the second set to a low price. It would be nice if direct sales paid for the promotion, but with only one book that’s not free, probably it won’t. That’s a guess, but that’s what I expect. Therefore, I really am looking almost entirely at a KU boost as a potential benefit. Well, and perhaps slightly higher direct sales for a month or so as well.

Meanwhile!

I hope you’re enjoying your Labor Day weekend if you’re in the US!

We’re dying for lack of rain here, which means I don’t really get to enjoy the nice summer weather, though it’s cooled off a bit so the weather is in fact pretty nice. The problem with being aware of trees and shrubs and having a lot of young trees and shrubs is that their silent screams of anguish during a drought are so apparent. Usually our late summer drought breaks sometime in September, sometimes in October, sometimes not till November. It helps to get a hurricane somewhere that sends us rain, which sets up a peculiar feeling that goes, “Well, I’m sorry Florida is getting pounded, but yay! A hurricane!”

However, for me, the Labor Day weekend involves labor, as you probably guessed. I’m in the midst of revision for Part II of Silver Circle, and you know what I hit on Sunday? That one chapter — it’s chapter eight — where I changed my mind about something and gutted the chapter, tearing out the entire middle, leaving only the beginning and ending of the chapter intact. Then I went on because I didn’t want to bother taking time right then to splice the chapter back together.

Well, there it was. Took all of Sunday morning to put that chapter back together, properly this time. Thankfully, I think it’s the only chapter in such rough shape (in Part II, there’s at least one chapter like that in Part III as well). Anyway, I should move much more quickly now.

My mother is asking whether I can’t hand her a proofing copy of Part I.

I was going to put off the revision of Part I until I had revised part III, but you know what, I guess that was a stupid notion. I think as soon as I send Part II to early readers, I’ll do the revision for Part I and make a proofing copy for my mother. Maybe proofread it myself too. Then send it to the next round of early readers. Get it moving along well enough and maybe I can aim to release at least that part in October. (No promises!)

Meanwhile!

I’ve finished correcting all the formatting for the Griffin Mage trilogy, plus … here’s something funny … this really was kind of funny … but one of the formatting things I removed was a capital X, which was part of the page number weirdness. Only I forgot to say “Replace X with nothing, case sensitive.” I swear I thought I had. Instead, I said, “Replace X with nothing, not case sensitive,” and it’s wonderful to discover how many words have an x in them.

Exultant, example, explain, fix, fox, relax, coax, oxen, text, expel, experience, express, excellence; the list, it turns out, goes on and on.

Each time, you can say, “Replace eample with example” and fix whatever the heck it is. Every now and then, this produces some new oddity, such as rexclaim appearing half a dozen times throughout the manuscript. This is why you should put spaces around words when you do a global find and replace, and no doubt you immediately realize that if the word is followed by a comma, period, semicolon, or colon, that particular word will not be replaced, and it is all quite tedious. But in a funny way, so that’s something.

It turns out my personal taste in colon use has changed over the past 14 years, so I actually put in a few hours to do a Find for colons and removed, maybe, about, I don’t know, two hundred. Three hundred. Some remarkably large number. Though the whole trilogy is 354,000 words, so one does expect a good number of whatever in that many words. I may well take out some ellipses too. Probably not any semicolons. In fact, the number of semicolons will go up slightly, as some colons are turning into semicolons. Oh, by the way, it turns out I had put a bookmark in my own physical paper copy of the omnibus version of the trilogy, and on that bookmark I had noted down half a dozen typos. It’s satisfying that those can FINALLY be fixed.

Anyway, though I think the whole thing is now perfect from front to back, this is one more reason to re-read the entire trilogy again from the top. Which I intended to do anyway, so whatever, it’s fine.

ANYWAY, that’s moving along, and as soon as I’ve re-read the whole thing, I will create individual ebook and paperback files and by then I bet two of the three covers will be finished. That’s a guess, but I’ve seen a sketch for the first, so I know the artist is moving ahead with these covers.

So that was my weekend! Hopefully no later than this time next week, I will be sending Part II to the earliest readers — hopefully earlier.

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Publishing Company or Scammer?

Someone recently asked me a question about a specific publishing company: was the company legitimate?

This so-called publishing company probably is not a traditional publisher, because generally there’s not a lot of doubt about whether a publisher is an actual traditional publisher or something else: if the former, they don’t charge fees for anything; if the latter, they do.

There IS still a question about whether a small traditional publisher is being run into the ground by people who have artistic judgment but no business sense. That happens, it produces real problems for any authors in that publisher’s pipeline, it’s not good, but that’s a separate concern. A publisher that isn’t charging fees is definitely a traditional publisher.

If you want to pursue traditional publication, one useful way to begin is to read some of the archives at Janet Reid’s website. She was a great loss to all aspiring authors when she passed away this year, but her site is up and her archives are intact. If you are at the stage of writing query letters, google “query shark” and go look at Janet Reid’s other website, because that may be useful.

Meanwhile, in case anybody finds this helpful, here are the basic categories of publishers and pretend-publishers who aren’t Big Five publishers and a few strategies that may help aspiring authors evaluate them.

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Mid-sized to small traditional publishers: Probably pays a small advance or no advance; does not charge fees; does a good job with the books they take on; does not accept just any book; may accept submissions only from agents or may accept submissions direct from authors — maybe only established authors. This category includes Fairwood Press and Severn House. The former has published recent books by Naomi Kritzer and Sharon Shinn. The latter has been publishing titles by Barbara Hambly for years.

Hybrid publishers: Charges fees that are in the general neighborhood of reasonable. Does a good job producing books. Expects to make money from sales of books as well as from fees paid by authors. Therefore, does not accept just any random book. There’s an application process of some kind because they only take on books they think will sell. This kind of publisher is useful for authors with more money than time: the author is paying the publisher to do some things so they don’t have to learn how to do it all themselves. Jane Friedman has a series of posts about hybrid publishers here, here, and here. The last of the linked posts is about red flags, because hybrid publishers grade into —

Vanity presses: Pretends to be selective and pretends that books go through a vetting process before being accepted. This is basically a fake process because they really accept all or nearly all books submitted to them. Charges high fees for inferior products. Does not expect to make money from book sales. All the money made by a vanity publisher comes from fees paid by the author. Grades into —

Scammers: Charges moderate to exorbitant fees for services that may or may not be provided at all. In many cases, charge fees for services that are literally impossible to provide, such as “worldwide distribution of your physical book in 40,000 book stores” for $500. How anybody can imagine that’s possible is beyond me, but people really do fall for it; that’s why these scammers exist.

***

How do you evaluate a publisher that charges fees?

Step One: Always begin by googling “publisher name writer beware.” What people are going to do when Victoria Strauss finally retires from pointing spotlights at scammers, I really do not know. Regardless, if you find a long, detailed post at Writer Beware analyzing a terrible contract or explaining that there’s no such thing as “insurance against returns” or whatever, you’re done. Tell the scammer to get lost and block their attempts to contact you until they give up and go away.

If there’s nothing at Writer Beware, go to Step Two.

Step Two: Examine the publisher’s website. Locate some books they claim to have published.

Go to Amazon and look at those books. I would actually not click on a link provided by the putative publisher. I would go directly to Amazon and search for the book there and then look, because cheap knockoff copies of real books are sometimes offered for sale and just to be sure I would want to find the book myself by title and author. Do those books exist? Is the presentation professional? Actually look at the details and the publisher’s name that is listed. Download samples and look at those. Do these look like real books on the inside? Is the formatting good? Is the quality of the writing adequate or better?

What is the sales rank? No sales rank probably means the book has never sold a copy, but I hear it can also mean it hasn’t sold a copy in a few years. A sales rank in five figures is good. A sales rank of three million is awful. The Publisher’s Rocket sales calculator says that a sales rank of 100,000 translates to the sale of about one book per day. That is definitely not always true, but it lets you estimate roughly (very roughly) whether a book is selling kind of okay or not at all.

Look at the author page for the author. Is there one? Is this someone who has published multiple books through this same publisher? Obviously a single person is not likely to be stung by a scammer over and over.

Step Three: Examine what the publisher is offering.

Look at how much the putative publisher charges for what services. Compare this to a hybrid publisher you know is real.

Look at what the putative publisher promises. Compare this to a hybrid publisher you know is real.

Read promises, assurances, and services as critically as possible. If you’ve never heard of a service such as returnability insurance, google “returnability insurance writer beware.”

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If you decide to self-publish, great, that’s fine, but everyone needs to be aware that lots and lots and lots of scammers pretend to be “Amazon Publishing” or “Kindle Publishing” or a thousand iterations on that theme.

Amazon shuts look-alike scammers down, but there are always more. How can you be absolutely sure you are looking at the REAL KDP and not some scammer’s website?

Do you buy stuff from Amazon? You know you’re looking at the real Amazon when you go to the Amazon website, right? Then go to Amazon, immediately scroll right down to the bottom, and look through the links down there. There are a bunch. One is the real KDP. Click on that link. Now you are at the real KDP site for sure. You’re safe to proceed.

The other website to use for self-publishing is Draft to Digital. As far as I know, there aren’t millions of scammers trying to pretend they’re Draft to Digital. D to D distributes to almost every platform, including Amazon if you want (if you’re using KDP, you select everything except Amazon at D to D). Last I heard, D to D did not distribute to Google Play. That’s because Google Play is insanely annoying to work with. You can publish your books via Google Play by listing them there yourself, after which you will understand why no one wants to bother and everybody hates working with their author portal. Insanely annoying is putting it mildly. I’d suggest KDP and D to D and call it good.

If you want to pursue self publishing, it really isn’t hard, though time invested in reading about self-publishing is a good idea before you jump in with both feet. Topics to consider: cover art and design; book description; metadata, keyword, and category best practices; formatting the interior; formatting the actual novel; promotion and marketing.

One way to begin is to go to Amazon and look at the 100 bestselling titles in your genre — look at the covers, read the book descriptions, look at the sample and consciously notice the formatting, look at the details and the categories.

The most important thing to remember when self-publishing is that you don’t have to do everything right from the beginning; that most mistakes are fixable; that lots of people are happy to offer advice and pointers about where to find reliable information; and that you shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

In my opinion, it’s just like writing a novel: You learn to write novels by writing novels. You learn to self-publish effectively by self-publishing. There will always be lots more to learn about writing novels and about self-publishing. That’s fine. If you want to self-publish, you have to start somewhere, so … start somewhere.

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