Chuck Wendig's Blog, page 180

The Terribleminds Holy Mother Of God Lordy Lordy Hallelujah Guide To Creating Super Ultra Awesomepants Supporting Characters

Oh, the poor supporting character.

The best friend. The lab assistant. The cab driver. The sex gimp.

How shitty they must feel, you know? “Hey, we’re all blocks of flesh in the storytelling pyramid, meant to uphold the protagonist. Hey, pass me another bucket of plot, willya? I’m getting dry. What’s that? The antagonist stole the bucket of plot and pissed in it? We don’t have to… wait, we have to drink it? We have to drink it. … Goddamnit.”

Somewhere in here I’m envisioning a human centipede thing, except in pyramid shape and…

No. Nope. Hunh-hunh. Not going there.

You might think, hey, that’s the ideal usage for a support character. To support the characters, the plot, and the story. Maybe to uphold theme, too, or contribute to mood. And all of that is technically reasonable and not entirely untrue, but looking at it that way runs the risk of coloring your view of all characters as being no more than mere pulleys, gears and flywheels whose only purpose is to mechanize the plot you’ve created. (You ever see the ingredient mechanically-separated meat? It’s something like that, where you envision all the characters as avatars of plot diced up and separated out.)

Characters aren’t architecture, though.

Characters are architects.

Your protagonist and antagonist tend to be grand architects — they’re the ones making the big plans. They’re building — or demolishing — whole buildings. They are the demigods of this place. Creators. Destroyers. Sometimes each a bit of both.

But supporting characters are architects, too. They’re just architects of lesser scale. They work on individual floor designs. They’re hanging art. Moving light switches. Picking paint colors.

They’re not merely ants in the hill. They aren’t automatons. They have wants and needs. Wishes and fears. They have good days and bad days. And all that affects the design. (The design is analogous to our plot, by the by.) Dave’s had a real fuckball of a day (wife left him, dog shit in the blender, his television came alive and tried to eat him) and so he’s distracted and angry. He’ll screw up the light switch so that it turns on the jacuzzi, instead. He’ll pick an angry paint color. By the end of the day he’s just kicking holes in drywall.

Dave is a supporting character.

Dave might be peripherally aware of his supporting nature in the sense he realizes that he’s not the Grand Architect, but just the same, Dave’s story is his own. He’s not really thinking about his role as being lesser in a narrative sense. Dave is the protagonist of his own story. Dave is the beleaguered hero of his own world’s mythology.

What that means is…

All Characters Think They’re The Protagonist

So when we ask ourselves, how do we conceive of and create great supporting characters, that’s our first lesson: supporting characters don’t necessarily know they’re supporting characters in the story going on around them. We are, as people, just slightly Narcissistic, just left of solipsistic, and so it is that we are the focal points of the world. We’re the pilots of our own existence and so it’s tempting to believe that all things revolve around us rather than us being just another celestial object caught in the orbit of something far larger, far weirder.

Look at it this way:

You go to run errands. You need to pick up the usual — milk, bread, broccoli, hamburgers, cigarettes, peyote buttons, the dry-cleaned giant rabbit costume, a birthday cake, 9mm ammo, a hang glider, nipple salve, orange juice. While out on your errands, you encounter dozens of other people, and its tempting to kind of expect and accept that they’re all in this world to do your bidding, but that’s the viewpoint of a psychopath — and so a moment’s additional thought allows you to realize, oh, hey, these are all people with lives as deep and complex as my own.

Each person you encounter is an iceberg — a peak seen above water, but so much submerged.

Or, rather:

Every Character Is A Rabbit Hole

We don’t always fall down each character’s rabbit hole, but in a good story we are afforded at least a glimpse. And it’s in these glimpses that many of our supporting characters exist — the audience should be granted a peek now and again into each character’s heart and mind to see the complexity that lurks there. It’s like peering into the mechanics of a pocketwatch — you don’t need to know how it works to see, quite plainly, that it’s all very complex. A fully-realized machine, not just artifice, and yes, good, fine, you can cover that up again and go take a nap.

With those things in mind –

It’s time to noodle on how to create a kick-ass supporting character.

First, a little homework. HA HA HA I’M MAKING YOU DO HOMEWORK. Ahem. Sorry.

Read this: the Zero-Fuckery Guide to Creating Kick-Ass Characters.

Then, I want you to take a supporting character through those steps. Logline → Problem → Solution → Conflict → Limitations → Complications and you can stop there, for now.

You can do this with one of your own characters, of course, but you might also want to take a supporting character from a beloved property and apply it — a property like, sayyy, hmm, oh, I dunno, DIE HARD? Why DIE HARD? Because DIE HARD. It is its own answer. So shut up.

Let’s take Sergeant Al Powell.

Reginald VelJohnson, baby.

He’s a nearly perfect supporting character because he supports the protagonist and plot and yetalso manages to be a rabbit hole — when we gaze into his hole (er, okay, that sounds weird, so let’s rewrite that as, when we look hard at his story), we see a fully-realized character.

You might say his logline is, “Desk jockey cop just wants to buy Twinkies and go home to his pregnant wife but is drawn into a hostage situation at Nakatomi Plaza.”

In that, you’ll find one problem: “Wants to go home, but can’t because of McClane / Gruber deathmatch,” and you’ll find that his solution is, “Stay and provide backup,” which generates a little conflict in that he’s now in mortal peril, thus casting some doubt on whether Powell will survive long enough to see the eventual birth of his child.

But that’s really a plot problem and you might find a more interesting character problem at the heart of Powell: he once shot and killed a kid and the solution appears to be to remain relegated to a desk. Which makes Powell’s conflict more interesting — it ties the problem to the overall plot conflict (his ability to be effective in crisis is in doubt), draws another nice line to his current situation (he once killed a kid but is now having his own child) and also ties perfectly to the second climax of the piece: where snarling hair model Karl emerges from the building looking like hamburger-in-a-wig and Al has to use his gun to save the day (VIOLENCE FIXES EVERYTHING).

In here we see his limitations: he’s a big man, probably out of shape, no time on the range, no time being “real police” lately. And complications mount, too: first he’s harangued by his superior (who doubts the entire John McClane narrative), then he’s gotta deal with an aggressive police department and an even more aggressive FBI.

How Characters Create Plot

Characters do things, and say stuff.

And that’s how they create plot.

Sounds stupid and, at that level, it is. Still — we like to imagine plot as this external thing (exoskeleton) when really it’s all internal to the characters (skeleton). Characters are why we come to the story in the first place, after all, otherwise we’re just reading an IKEA instruction manual. I mean, jeez, even textbooks use human beings in their examples.

Plot is just the result of characters being characters.

Example: imagine that Miranda wants to buy Monkey Chow for her pet monkey, Mister Jigglejugs, and so she goes to the store to buy Monkey Chow. Easy. A straight line. She’s created a plot — it’s a fucking boring plot, though, so let’s safely assume that she is not actually alone in this universewith her plucky helper monkey, and instead let’s imagine that as she’s heading to the store a car crashes into the store just before she gets there.

Crash.

This event isn’t random. The car isn’t flung there by the hand of the Plot Lords. Someone’s driving. A character with, you know, all the character traits intrinsic to the role. In this case the driver — who we’ll call Booboo — is a raging Cheetos addict and he’s all high as shit on Cheeto Dust and he’s frantically trying to pick a loose Cheeto out of his crotch area when he suddenly looks up and – wham — he crashes his Oldsmobile Eighty-Eight into the Monkey Chow store.

Booboo’s problem (crotch-Cheeto) collides quite literally with Miranda’s problem (no more Monkey Chow). Their solutions collide, too (pick Cheeto from crotch / go to fetch primate food).

If you wanna go back to Die Hard (AND WHY WOULD YOU NOT WANT THAT), it’s easy to see how the entirety of the plot isn’t some external event but is entirely orchestrated by the problems and solutions of a variety of characters. They have motivations and they act on them, but those actions and motivations are not necessarily in accord with one another. McClane is there for his wife, but that line of plot is broken by the actions of one Mister Hans Gruber. The actions taken by the protagonist (McClane) and the antagonist (Gruber) are shaped by the events of all the supportingcharacters — from Argyle and his limo to Powell and his Twinkies, all the way to the pair of lunatic FBI agents and to Rick Ducommun’s character turning off the power inside that manhole.

It’s like a series of magnets pushing and pulling on one another. A flock of birds — some pulling away from the flock, others pulling toward it. Gravity and antigravity, matter and anti-matter, a series of bouncy Superballs dropped from the top of a building, a pack of rabid orangutans given comically-large rubber mallets and loosed in a shopping mall –

Okay, I’ll stop.

To put this all a bit differently –

Parallel or Perpendicular?

The actions of a supporting character tend to be parallel to the plot (meaning, they support it, continue it, accelerate it) or perpendicular to it (meaning they block it, challenge it, or change its course). This can be clarified a bit by seeing how this relates to the motivations of a protagonist and antagonist. A character who tends to be parallel to the protagonist’s motivations will likely also run counter — meaning, perpendicular — to the antagonist’s scheme. (Characters don’t need to be one or the other, either; looking at a show like The Wire you’ll see characters who flip somewhat regularly.)

In Die Hard, Powell and Holly Genarro are roughly parallel to the plot.

The FBI fuckos and all the terrorists and even cokehead Ellis are perpendicular to it.

Not an exact science (none of this is meant to be), but compelling as a thought exercise.

Three Beats

Consider that every supporting character should appear for at least three beats in order to fulfill some kind of arc — even if it’s a subtle, small arc. A character that appears early on is best utilized again throughout the story, even if only in a minor way. These beats might be physical, tracking location and action. Or they might be intellectual and emotional, tracking that character’s change (growth/loss).

In Empire Strikes Back, Boba Fett gets three solid beats in the script:

a) the part where he shows up and Vader’s all like “NO DISINTEGRATIONS, BECAUSE JESUS WHAT IS IT WITH YOU AND ALL THE DISINTEGRATIONS”

b) he’s got his butt-plug-shaped spaceship and he’s flying around through space-trash

c) he takes the giant chocolate bar that is Han Solo, doing basically none of the actual hard work in terms of capturing the smuggler — actually that raises an interesting question because, it seems like Fett was working for Vader, but then we find out he’s also working for Jabba? Was he double-dipping? Paid twice for one job? BOBA FETT YOU CLEVER MOTHERFUCKER.

I mean, clever until the fourth beat in Return of the Jedi, where he’s basically reverse-pooped by a giant sand-encrused desert butthole. A sad ending, really.

Three Tiers

You might also suggest that the supporting character’s level of existence be measured across three potential tiers of engagement/support with the story:

Tier #1: Essential and present to the story (ex: Powell in Die Hard)

Tier #2: Speaking role, ~three beats, probably still essential but not all that present (ex: Argyle in Die Hard)

Tier #3: Barely a speaking role, useless as a donkey with an iPhone (ex: the wasted Al Leong)

To Sum Up:

Supporting characters are real characters, just partially seen.

They have their own wants, needs, problems, solutions.

Their actions and dialogue create plot –

– particularly when pushing against those of other characters.

Try to give them three beats.

Consider how present and essential their engagement with the story.

Do not have them be reverse-pooped by a sandy space butthole.

THE END OKAY BYE

*disappears in a puff of Twinkies and Monkey Chow*

 

* * *

Self-Publishing Truism Bingo

*slams back a shot of ink*

“I remember the Publishing Wars of 2014. Hard times, man. Rough times. I saw… *clears throat* I saw this… shit, I don’t know if he was an editor or an agent, but he got up in the town square on his rickety soapbox and he started saying these things about self-published authors, and I don’t even remember what he said, probably some bloviating clap-trap, and then next thing I know, this… this mob came out of nowhere. Grabbed him from his box. Tore his clothes off. Beat him with Createspace Bibles – their Bibles, not the Christian one but the one with all their proverbs and maxims — and then they ate him alive. Just bit the meat right off his damn bones, left his skeleton wriggling, flopping, screaming there in the square. Then they turned on each other, too. Little micro-cults broken off from the big religion. Someone said something about Kickstarter. Another one got outed as a ‘hybrid’ author — they called her a ‘race traitor’ and a ‘mutant’ — and from there the knives came out and I heard shots and I ducked back into the remains of an old Apple Store where the iOS AI (Glad-iOS) came up and gave me a place to hide. When I finally poked my head back out it was just corpses. A sea of corpses. And then came the Amazon Roomba, big as a couple M1 tanks stacked atop each other. Came up, scooping up the bodies into its metal maw, clang, clang, clang, tagging them with their Author Rank as they hit the belly. Of course now we know why they were doing that. Taking them bodies. Mining the brains for their stories. Selling them at a cut rate, cut royalty. You know, I hear the Big Three just nuked New York…”

Hello, Goodbye

This is going to be my last post about publishing for a while.

In part because I’d much rather get back to talking about writing and storytelling, which is — for me — the more important aspect of what we do, and certainly the more interesting aspect. Talking about publishing feels productive — and it is, in a way, because it’s important we know our options and we consider them with great care. But it’s also secondary to the work, because no matter how you choose to publish, you still gotta finish your shit. Which means taking that story that lives inside the Yoda Hut that is your heart and telling it so hard you can lift an X-Wing out of the mire with its power and beauty. Or something. It’s early and I require more coffee.

The other reason is because, I find it all very tiring and occasionally more than a little ugly. Ugly on both sides of the fence, to be clear, though from a personal standpoint it’s been a lot of ugliness from self-published side of things. Not just from the standard sources (kboards, the comment section at any blog advocating self-publishing, etc) but aimed at me directly. Normally I don’t get very many angry e-mails, but for some reason my most recent post — what I thought was a fairly even-keeled yay-for-everybody’s choices kind of post– generated some testy mails from folks. And I know that the truth is, haters gonna hate and all that but it really is a little tiring just the same. (Tiring and also surprisingly smug and self-superior. We continue on this trend, the persecuted will fast become the persecutors.)

A lot of the recent emails (and comments here at the blog) parroted what I feel are a lot of not-really-true-truisms within self-publishing. It’s getting to be like a game of bingo.

So, as my last effort before I go back to drinking and masturb… uhh, I mean, before I go back to talking about writing and storytelling again, I’m going to tackle some of these oft-parroted lines.

“Self-Publishing Is The Only Real Choice…”

This usually sounds something like “The only real choice is either self-publishing your work or submitting to the gatekeepers,” where the gist is, understandably, that self-publishing is like getting to jump right onto your flight and go wherever you want to go, and traditional publishing means submitting to an invasive colonic cavity search before you’re even allowed near the gate.

This is true-ish, in that I can literally write the word “fart” 100,000 times and slap a cover of baboon urinating into his own mouth, then upload that cool motherfucker right to Amazon. Nobody would stop me. Whereas, at the Kept Gates, a dozen editors and agents would slap my Baboon Fart Story to the ground like an errant badminton birdie.

(“Baboon Fart Story” is my favorite anime, by the way.)

What this shorthand misses, though, is that the actual goal of publishing in either format is not merely being published, but in fact, finding success (where success is most likely some variant of “getting paid and finding an audience”). And in this, neither publishing path offers an easy guarantee. I am fond of describing both of these ways to publishing as paths, and an author can choose to walk either path. One path is theoretically easier, whereas the other path has more obstacles built in — but sometimes, we choose paths with more obstacles for a variety of reasons (we like the challenge, we’re masochists, the end result feels more earned, better payoff, etc.).

We walk the paths as a choice. One path is not an inflatable slide into a big Moon Bounce full of money, and nor is the other path a cruel, merciless slog through lamprey-infested hell-swamps. It’s hard to make your way through both. Hell, think of it this way: choice of publishing is like any personal or business choice. When someone tells you what they’ve chosen, high-five them, wish them the best, and offer any positive and constructive advice you can offer that gets them in the direction they desire. In other words: be cool, and don’t be a dick.

“You’re Leaving Money On The Table!”

I don’t even know what this means, but it sounds like something someone would say to convince me to buy a timeshare, or a lottery ticket, or a bridge over bad water. It sounds like you’re a prognosticator of great fortune and that your psychic ability — which is to see the shimmering Possibility Threads of every universe — has shown you how the myriad permutations of publishing a book. It neglects the realities of this thing which is that it’s a crap-shoot either way, and that some genres would seem to do well in self-publishing (romance, erotica, thriller, some subgenres of SFF) while other genres and age ranges do not (YA, middle-grade, crime, literary, other SFF). It neglects to figure in print, foreign sales, film and TV. It fails to understand that every book has its own challenges to overcome and strengths to play to on each path.

It’s shorthand that says, again, “YOU CHOSE POORLY.” As if every moment my book sits unpublished or in the hands of an agent or editor it’s vacuuming dollars from my wallet, foooomp.

It also fails to realize that some books are better off unpublished. Both for writer and for reader.

Saying the above usually also leads to…

“You Should’ve Self-Published Your Book.”

Oh, man, this one really chafes my yam-bag. Saying this to me is like telling me I married the wrong woman or had the wrong child. This comes from a crass place of smug self-superiority (a miasmic cloud that those in traditional are not immune to spewing, either, I’ll note), and if you ever say this to me please gently ease your feet apart so that I may kick you very hard in your crotchal valley. Hard enough where I’ll be able to tickle your uvula with my toesy-woesies.

From the Author Earnings site, you’ll find phrases like: “Our data suggests that even stellar manuscripts are better off self-published.” Or “Genre writers are financially better off self-publishing, no matter the potential of their manuscripts.”

These conclusions are based on extrapolated half-data that is rife with limitations:

a) It’s data from Amazon, for Amazon, and by Amazon.

b) It’s a snapshot of a single day’s worth of Amazon Rankings.

c) Those Amazon Rankings are arbitrary and weird and while we chastise the Big Five publishers for not being open with data we should also chastise Amazon for offering us an occulted ranking system that is based on — shit, I dunno what, sales and clicks and likes and stars and the whims of some mad artificial intelligence living on a server farm in Sacramento. Again: extrapolated data, not actual data. It’s guesswork. Interesting, compelling, useful guesswork. But still guesswork.

d) The snapshot is predominantly e-books.

e) Recent attempts to look at print via Bookscan is flawed (Bookscan captures a notoriously inaccurate fraction of one’s accurate print sales).

Given that my books do better in print than e-books, and given that my self-published releases do not stack up monetarily to my traditionally-published releases, it’s a little jerky to tell me that my books would have done better for me in the self-published environment. Uh, maybe? But I’m happy where I’m at, you dig? Happy and, by the way, well-paid for it.

“Isn’t A Little Money Better Than No Money?”

This is the new line of thought. It keeps popping up, the essence being that making enough money on your book to buy a dinner at Red Flobster or Crapplebee’s is better than not being published and earning nothing at all. If this works for you, then hey, it works for you. But it’s an odd suggestion, and one that wouldn’t fly in nearly any other discipline. It comes from a place of assuming that writing is cheap, that it has little value to the creator or the audience, that we should be so fortunate just to be allowed to create. Writing a book is a Herculean (or occasionally Sisphyean) effort. To be happy you got paid $43 instead of $4300 is… puzzling, at best.

And I don’t say this because I think self-publishing has no financial value. It can be lucrative, plainly, and for many authors it’s actually the best financial decision. But that’s not the same as being satisfied that it buys your bus fare. The time and effort and equipment it takes to write a book and then to publish it has to have some value, doesn’t it? To you? To readers? No?

“This is a Hobby.”

The natural follow-up to the former statement.

Writing can be a hobby.

Storytelling, also a hobby.

Both some combination of art and a craft.

But a hobbyist, by definition, is an amateur. And choosing to make money on your work — through publishing — means you’re a professional. An entrepreneur with a a small business.

That means it is no longer your hobby. Full stop.

“Readers Are Our Gatekeepers.”

Mmmyeah. Nope.

“Don’t Sell Direct.”

This is something I’ve heard not as a criticism or a line of defense but I’ve long held that selling your e-books direct to readers is a win/win, and it seems that some author-publishers are not on board. Hugh Howey said in a comment here the other day:

“Keep in mind that direct sales have no impact on a book’s ranking on bestseller lists, which can be crucial for fledgling writers. At our level, it’s a good service to our customers. Concentrating on direct sales early on could really harm a writer’s chances of working in his underwear one day.”

I’ll have him know that I work in my underwear often in part due to the direct sales.

That’s right, you’re all funding my General State of Pantslessness.

More to the point, he’s right that if you’re really trying to game the Amazon ecosystem, you probably want to stay there. But a not insignificant portion of readers would rather a) avoid giving $$ to Amazon and/or b) would prefer to give money direct to authors. And selling direct affords the author the choicest cut of “royalty” per sale, since you’re essentially donating a part only to Paypal and the delivery service. (I use Payhip, thanks to a tip from Matt Wallace — a powerfully good example of an author-publisher, whose next book, Slingers, is coming out soon.)

Diversity of distribution is a plus for writers and a plus for readers. Just as you might wanna consider publishing at B&N, or Kobo, or Smashwords, I also recommend publishing direct.

But you do as your own gods demand.

“All Publishers –”

I know, all publishers are bad and they do bad things but that’s not accurate. Some publishers offer terrible boilerplate contracts. Some publishers don’t wanna budge from those boilerplates. Others offer more equitable contracts and better royalties, and, and, and. Publishers are not a single-faced entity, though I understand the inclination to see them that way. (They certainly don’t help themselves sometimes in this.) Just the same, it’s important to realize that each publisher is different, and each is filled with people who really love books and writers. Further, their margins are often very thin — and a good publisher partners with the author to maximize the book’s potential. Painting them as some kind of soul-crushing Evil Empire is simplistic thinking at best. Which leads me to…

“It’s A Revolution!”

Self-publishing is not a revolution.

I know, calling it a “revolution” is exciting and speaks to our natural inclination as storytellers to create a kind of us-versus-them narrative, an overturning of corruption, and it’s nice to feel a part of that kind of passionate, anarchic narrative.

But it’s a little melodramatic.

It is, at best, a disruption. And disruptions are neither good, nor bad. They just are.

It has disrupted old models and has done so, in my mind, to the benefit of authors.

This is an excellent time to be an author precisely because we now have multiple ways of bringing our books to readers. Whether we do so ourselves or with the help of publishers big and small.

“Self-Publishers Make More Money!”

From Author Earnings, again: “Indie authors outnumber traditionally published authors in every earnings bracket but one, and the difference increases as you leave the highest-paid outliers.”

Again, weird data, extrapolated. A bold statement if true, but not only is it flawed by the limitations listed above, but it’s also predicated purely on royalties and seems to miss, entirely, the aspect of advances and other avenues of income available to most traditionally-published authors. If I had to predict how the data shakes out in reality, I’d suspect it’ll go like this:

Few authors make a lot of money.

Many authors make okay money.

A lot of authors make piss-poor money.

Oh, and to the cankerous ass-badger who over Facebook mail the other day parroted that quote above and thought he was throwing some kind of gotcha bullshit in my face: shut up. I looked at your books, sir, and they look like something that would disappoint the artistic sensibilities of an 11-year-old. Your Amazon ranking was somewhere between ‘Broken Robot Toilet’ and ‘Muskrat Balls Preserved In Cider Vinegar.’ I sincerely doubt that you’re making more money than me. I sincerely doubt you’re making more money than homeless people.

In Conclusion

The Publishing Wars bit was a joke.

We’re all on the same side, or, at least, we should be.

We should want as many options for as many authors.

We should be respectful toward the choices of all authors while simultaneously be critical of the systems and cultures surrounding all forms of publishing in order to aim for the betterment of all.

We should love our readers and want to give them the very best of us in the form of stories that are written with passion and published with wisdom.

We should demand the best and most beautiful of one another. Not encourage the worst and ugliest.

It doesn’t matter how you publish. It matters, though, that we’re all together in this, and not shitty toward each other, and not hunkering down into our little cults and camps, our factions and followings. It matters that we can all do better and that we strive for that, with every day, every word, every story, every iteration of publication that we choose to embrace.

And that is the last I’ll speak about publishing for a while.

Comments closed, this time, if you don’t mind. If you wanna engage on this subject, I might turn you toward social media or the various forums and posting receptacles of the Weird Wide Internet.

Flash Fiction Challenge: Twisted Love

Last week’s challenge: Voicemails From The Future!

Quick administrative –

Tami Valdura, you were the random pick for the Cocktail Fiction challenge.

Ping me at terribleminds at gmail, won’t you?

For this week’s challenge:

Hey! It’s Valentine’s Day.

So, you’ve got 1500 words to write about:

Twisted Love.

Any genre will do.

Post at your online space.

Link back here.

Due by Friday the 21st at noon.

Awooga, Awooga, Alert, Alert: Doylestown Bookshop Signing Moved

Given that we have been positively dumped upon in terms of snow (we’ve got about 30″ on the ground right now and more coming tomorrow), it has been deemed a fine idea to shuttle tomorrow’s book signing / talk / Q&A to next Saturday at 2pm.

So:

Saturday the 22nd. 2pm.

Doylestown Bookshop.

Be there or be icicled in the face.

True story.

Check The Box: Do You Want To Be Your Own Publisher, Yes Or No?

I feel like the Publishing Wars went from cold to hot recently — culminating in the recent Author Earnings site championed by one Mister Hugh Howey, who deserves credit at the very least for shining a light on the various nooks and crannies of both sides of publishing (seriously, the resultant conversation growing out of this is many-headed and more robust than I’m used to — far less us versus them and far more here are my thoughts and actually they’re kinda smart). Whether you consider the data helpful or horseshit is up to you (my inexpert opinion is that the truth, like with nearly all things, hovers neatly toward the middle).

That said, if you’re an author, you might be revisiting the question:

Should I self-publish?

You’ve got a whole barnload of metrics by which you might measure the question and find an answer. Do you want your book out fast? Do you want money now as opposed to money later? Do you want the guarantee of an advance, or the risk of acting as your own publisher? Do you love Amazon, or hate Amazon? Do you want to retain your rights and your control? Do you want on bookstore shelves? Or are you comfortable existing predominantly on e-readers? Do you care at all about film rights? TV rights? Foreign? Reviews in major outlets?

And so on, and so forth.

Lots of reasons big and small.

Money. Time. Rights. Independence. Access. Discoverability.

Lots of fulcrum points on which the argument wibbles and wobbles.

And just to get ahead of any of that us versus them-ism lest it rear its braying donkey head: at this exact moment in time authors have plenty of good reasons to choose either path.

All these fulcrum points are meaningful. And nobody should tell you any different.

But, first, there’s one question worth asking.

One question that may precede all others.

That question:

Do I want to be a publisher?

If YES, then act as your own author-publisher.

If NO, then do not do that.

If OH SHIT I DUNNO, then take something small — a short story, a novella, a riskier story that won’t find a market — and then publish that on your own as kind of a… test case.

That’s it. That’s the first — and maybe, really, the only — question.

Because if you want to be a publisher — meaning, you have the inclination and interest to worry about directly handling or delegating your own book design, cover design, editing, marketing, and boozy publishing cocktail lunches — then you should jolly well up and fucking do that, stat.

But if you don’t — and oh, guess what, many authors do not want to do this or absorb these responsibilities — then you really, seriously, honestly, truly, fucking shouldn’t.

Because I don’t want to read books put out by publishers who don’t want to do that job or don’t know how to do it in the first goddamn place. Readers don’t, either, just as we don’t want to look at books written by writers who don’t care about or know about writing.

This is true in all careers, by the way.

You might want to work in advertising. Or you might want to start your own ad agency. You might want to learn to ride a horse or run a whole goddamn stable. Maybe you’re a lawyer. Maybe you’re best suited to become the head of a whole firm. Maybe you’re a entrepreneur, or a venture capitalist, or an inventor. Maybe you like freelance. Maybe you like being kept by a company with all the benefits a company affords. The trade-off is nearly always the same, in general terms: do I want to set aside some risk for stability and potentially smaller gains, or do I want to accept and absorb more risk to handle my own work and go for potentially larger (but again, riskier!) gains?

That’s it.

You’re either into that.

Or you’re not.

No shame in either path.

Nor is there shame in using data to determine which side to walk. But, again, for me, before you start worrying about all those other things, before you read the latest round of conversation and start thinking, I might need to do this, I might want to see if there’s gold in them thar hills, the round of questioning always has to start with that one fundamental question.

You either want to be an author. Just an author.

Or you want to be an author-publisher.

Or you wanna do a little of both.

End of story.

Choose.

Enjoy.

And whatever you do, do it well.

So well, in fact, that nobody can see or care about or criticize the choice you made.

S.E. Gilchrist: Five Things I Learned Writing Star Pirate’s Justice

Carly has one focus in her life: to return home to her terminally ill younger sister. When she learns that a Darkon traitor possesses gateway maps to Earth, she uses all her skills to track him down. But capturing the charming star pirate turns out to be trickier than she anticipated…

Volkar is determined to prove his innocence to those who drove him to a life lived on the Outer Rim, and he will overcome anyone who gets in his way. But his surprisingly sweet captor has some skills that will come in handy, so he strikes a deal: the maps for her help. Neither expect their partnership to turn into more, but as dark secrets are revealed, their lives become forfeit — and the relationship blossoming between them nothing but a starburst of happiness in the deep shadow of the sky…  

DON’T ALWAYS GO WITH YOUR FIRST IDEA

You know that wonderful sparkling moment when an idea pops into your head and you go, OMG that would make a great story! It’s quite possible it will, but I’ve found if I brainstorm my initial idea, really throw a bunch of ideas into my hat (and some are way out of the box) and mix it all up, I can come up with a stronger storyline.

Once I have my initial premise and my major characters, I like to list down 25 things that I want to happen in my story (note this doesn’t mean I’ll go with every single one of these ideas). Then, I’ll list down as many ideas I can think of that MIGHT happen using 10 as a minimum number. I’ll brainstorm all the major characters’ worst fears and their secrets and decide how I can use one or both as the major climax or turning points. For example; in this book, Carly’s worst fear is she’ll never find her way back to her ill sister. So I had the gateway maps snatched from her fingers and now out of her reach.

I did also, initially, have everyone achieve their HEA then I threw that idea out the window too.

I’ll leave it up to the readers to decide whether that was a good decision or not.

I’M A RESEARCH JUNKIE

Writing spec fiction gives you the perfect excuse to spend literally days researching (in other words procrastination) if you’re not careful. There is so much fascinating material out there and all available at the press of a key. Then there are all those DVD documentaries to purchase. And did I mention the books? See-I’m addicted to research.

Speaking of which, did you know scientists are working on the feasibility of making a space elevator? Recent theories are the use of carbon nanotubes and laser technology. We could hop on the elevator and get off on a space station then board a ship to….?

PHYSICS MAKES MY BRAIN IMPLODE

Don’t get me wrong, science fiction is king. What I hate is me burbling excitedly about a new idea (well, new to me) of say, space travel only to be shot down in flames with a physics lecture by my youngest son. “That isn’t possible, mum….” And he goes on to explain why and I go, “Damit, I thought I was onto a good thing.”

It’s hard keeping up to date with recent discoveries, especially if you’re like me starting off on the hind foot with basic knowledge and with limited writing time in the first place. But what happens if you write something into your story and THEN find out it’s not feasible?

I used space stealth technology in my book, Star Pirate’s Justice. And apparently it’s technically impossible. The radiation the heat of a space ship gives off can be detected. So to make my idea more plausible I’ll spin it a little further in my next book which I’m currently writing. I’ll give my alien race the know-how to funnel this heat radiation into another dimension. And when someone points out it’s too far-fetched? Chocolate and wine sound like a good fall-back position.

LOVE WHAT YOU WRITE

I love reading an action adventure book and I’m totally addicted to sci fi TV series. Often though, I’d wonder why the writer or producer didn’t spice the story up with more romantic interests and hefty doses of spicy sex. The first story I wrote was a 50k word contemporary romance which basically had girl meets boy, falls in love, argues then has a HEA. This story had no fire, no depth and no voice. Plus it interested me about as much as shopping for groceries. (And I’m certain would have sent the world into a coma.)

I had my light bulb moment – I’d write what I love to read and watch: a sci fi romance where I could have fun, make up my own rules and make my protagonists face confronting issues. And that story, Legend Beyond the Stars, became the first in my sci fi series and my first published single title. This current release, Star Pirate’s Justice, is definitely more action orientated with slightly less emphasis on the romance. So I’m finding that with each new story I write, I’m morphing more towards an action romance type of genre. And I love it!

DEVELOP A THICK SKIN & DON’T BUY A GUN

Not everyone is going to love your book, the baby of your heart, the story you poured over almost twenty-four hours a day and wrestled with in the sleepless stretches of the cold nights.

You’re kidding me right? How dare they criticise my characters, my story, my writing style? Don’t they realise I’m the writing guru of the world?

Okay, back to planet Earth. People are going to say, I don’t like it and sometimes not in a very nice way. My first bad review depressed me for days; I felt like a failure, that my writing sucked, that no one else would ever buy my book. I felt as if the entire world pointed its collective finger at me. I never wanted to write again. Then came the anger…what do they know anyway?

Please…time to grow a thick skin and suck down a healthy dose of reality.

Focus on the readers who do like your book and your writing style. (And yes, I do receive great reviews too.) I know some writers never read their reviews but I do; I like to see what resonated with readers, what worked and what didn’t. I read the reviews because I want to learn and improve my craft.

Because in the end, the reason I write is to entertain and whisk a reader away from everyday mundane life, if only for an hour or two.

And don’t buy a gun.

***

S. E. Gilchrist can’t remember a time when she didn’t have a book in her hand. Now she writes stories where her favourite words are …’what if’ and ‘where’? She lives in urban Australia and writes in the genres of futuristic/sci-fi, fantasy, pre-medieval, post-apocalyptic all with a ‘hot’ flavour and sweet, contemporary rural romances.

S. E. Gilchrist is published by Momentum Books and Escape Publishing and is an indie author.

S. E. Gilchrist: Website | Twitter

Star Pirate’s Justice: Amazon | Amazon Australia | Amazon UK |  iBooks | Barnes and Noble | Kobo

Holly West: Five Things I Learned Writing Mistress of Fortune

Isabel, Lady Wilde, a mistress to King Charles II, has a secret: she makes her living disguised as Mistress Ruby, a fortune-teller who caters to London’s elite. It’s a dangerous life among the charlatans, rogues and swindlers who lurk in the city’s dark corners, but to Isabel, the risk is worth the reward.

Until magistrate Sir Edmund Godfrey seeks Mistress Ruby’s counsel and reveals his unwitting involvement in a plot to kill the king. When Isabel’s diary containing dangerous details of his confession is stolen, she knows she must find it before anyone connects her to Mistress Ruby. Especially after Sir Edmund’s corpse is discovered a few days later…

Isabel is sure that whoever stole her diary is Sir Edmund’s killer—and could be part of a conspiracy that leads all the way to the throne. But as she delves deeper into the mystery, not even the king himself may be able to save her.

RUNNING A MARATHON CONVINCED ME THAT I COULD WRITE A NOVEL

For thirty years, writing a novel was something I dreamed of doing, but could never imagine myself actually doing it. Somehow, I thought that if it were really something I could accomplish, it would be–I don’t know–easier. Not so much work. That the words would magically flow out of me, all brilliant and shiny, that the muse would take over and voila, I’d have a novel. Over the years, the idea took on a sort of mystical, unattainable quality, like winning an Oscar or becoming a racecar driver. Other people did it, but not me.

For a long time, running a marathon was also on my list of impossible goals. Only in this case I knew training for one would be work, it wouldn’t be easy, and that the only thing that would flow out of me was sweat and bile as I dry-heaved at the 2-mile mark. Then, the summer I turned 38, I decided I wanted to get in shape. I started running regularly, lost some weight, and found myself with a good base to actually give running a marathon serious consideration. I told myself I could do it or not, my only caveat being that if I did to commit to it, there would be no turning back. That marathon would get run no matter what it took.

And you know what? That marathon got run. It took sixteen weeks of training, followed by five hours, seven minutes, and thirty-four seconds of actual race time. I walked, off and on, about five miles of it and I burst into tears at the end. They were not tears of pride, they were tears of utter and complete exhaustion.

I figured that after all that, I could probably commit to writing a novel. I used the same approach: do it or not, but if you commit to it, finish it. The summer I turned 40, I did just that, and three years later I had the completed novel (including re-writes and revisions), that would eventually become Mistress of Fortune.

Now, when people tell me they want to write a novel someday, I say, if that’s really and truly the case, then why aren’t you writing it already? It’s a hell of a lot easier than running a damned marathon.

A LITTLE NAIVETE GOES A LONG WAY

I’ll be honest. If I’d have known when I began writing Mistress of Fortune that it was going to take nearly five years to write, re-write, revise, and publish, I might not have had the chutzpah to start writing it in the first place.

Oh, I knew how much time it took most other writers to get their work published. I was aware that many authors have one or more novels in their desk drawers that never see the light of day. I even knew the odds were that I’d never get published at all (unless I published myself, which is another topic entirely that I’ll not address here).

But here’s the deal: I’d somehow convinced myself that none of that applied to me. I was certain that once I finally finished it, my novel would get an agent straight out of the gate, that I’d get a great publishing contract with one of the big six publishers, and that my career as an author would flourish.

HAHAHAHAHAHA

Of course it didn’t happen that way at all. I saved every rejection, only one of which was on paper (which my dog, Stella, subsequently chewed a hole in. Good girl). All the rest are emails that reside safely on my backed up hard drive.

Sure, I’d set myself up for disappointment, but being unrealistic kept me going. I’m not sure when I realized that my publishing story was more or less the same as everybody else’s. But by that time I had too much skin in the game and there was no way I was going to quit.

DON’T TAKE THE ADAGE “WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW” AT FACE VALUE

Mistress of Fortune is set in 17th century London and features a mistress to King Charles II who moonlights as a fortuneteller. Being female is pretty much the only thing I have in common with my protagonist.

The thing is, my existence has been pretty uneventful. While I personally enjoy the life I lead very much, there is nothing particularly interesting about it to use as fodder for fiction. In getting started, I found the advice “write the book you want to read” and “write the book only you can write” much more useful. Mistress of Fortune is, in all ways, the book I wanted to read and if there is such a thing, it’s the book I was born to write.

That said, it seemed ambitious to take on a setting and situation so far from my own reality as a first project. The novel is based on a real life, unsolved murder that spurred a complicated political crisis in England and as a novice who’d never plotted a book before, I often felt overwhelmed and frustrated during the writing of it. I asked myself many times whether I should put it aside and write something less demanding.

Ultimately, however, I learned that I actually did know everything I needed to in order to write this book. I could study the historical details. I could visit London and trace my protagonist’s footsteps from one end of the city to the other (which I did). And hell, I could even make shit up if I had to (which I definitely did). But the essential thing—what it means to be human—I already knew that. The painful burn of being rejected by a lover. The bitter anger of being betrayed by someone I trust. The useless torment of envy and the exquisite pull of lust. These are the elements that make a book worth reading and I knew how they felt. All I had to do was bring them to life in my characters.

Easy-peasy, right?

MARKET YOURSELF EARLY, AND OFTEN

I like to joke that I started selling Mistress of Fortune as soon as I started writing it. I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing at the time, but that’s the beauty of social media when it’s done well. It doesn’t matter if you have a book to sell or not. The idea is to slowly build relationships, giving and taking as appropriate, and when the time comes for you to overtly promote yourself, people will accept it (and even help you) because you’ve earned it. Just don’t over do it, ‘kay?

While high self-esteem is not generally my strong suit, I do pride myself on my strong social media presence. While I’m not as popular as say, Mr. Wendig here, I have amassed a solid following of friends and contacts that have helped me immensely throughout the process of writing and publishing of Mistress of Fortune.

If that sounds cold and calculated, let me assure you that the key to social media success is actually sincerity. Talk about what interests you. Promote projects you love, whether or not they directly benefit you. Support others. Have real conversations. And when the opportunity arises, take it off line. Many of my online friends have become very good friends in “real life.” To say that social media has made my life richer is an understatement. I wouldn’t be where I am now without these people, and more importantly, I’m not sure I’d want to be.

Which brings me to my next lesson:

I FINALLY FOUND WHERE I BELONG

I was about thirty when I realized I have no real marketable skills. Fortunately, I have a husband who does and for ten years this enabled me to drift from hobby to hobby, searching for my bliss. Most notably, I was a jewelry maker and a pet portrait artist, both of which gave me some joy but ultimately, not enough satisfaction to wholeheartedly pursue them as careers. The desire to write kept rearing its ugly head and kept me hungry for something more.

In writing and getting Mistress of Fortune published, I’ve never worked harder for less financial gain. I’m the first to say that I’m in this business to get paid, but the reality is, I’ve made exactly $10 from my fiction writing thus far. So what is it, Holly West? Are you in this to make money or are you in it for love of the craft?

The answer is that I’m in it because I can’t not be in it. I hate writing, but I hate not writing more. It’s like this damned itch I can only scratch by, well, scratching it. Writing a novel didn’t satisfy the urge and neither did writing a second novel. I’m now plotting my third and that prickly rash is more powerful than ever.

If I make it sound like misery, well, it kind of is for me, yet I love it more than anything I’ve ever loved before. And so I say, with resignation and relief, that I’ve finally found my place in life—if not my bliss, exactly.

Holly West: Website | Twitter

Mistress of Fortune: Amazon

I Saw This On Facebook Today

Saw some toolbag “horror author” this morning on my FB feed post this thing about how some WOMEN IN HORROR group is advertising itself using an image of a vampire woman (replete with fangs) licking blood from her lips.

And said toolbag whipped up an image that put this banner image next to the anatomical image of a woman’s vagina and from there proceeded to explain how it was silly for this feminist group to advertise their efforts using what was effectively a woman’s ladyparts. He also explained that women paint their lips red in order to simulate flushed labia. Translation: he sees every woman’s mouth as a place for him to, erm, stick it.

In the comments, which were a delightful circus act of dipshittery, he went on to explain that OH IT’S OKAY because he took a writing class taught by a lesbian once (why is it that lesbians are the token “black friends” of misogynists everywhere?) and he was the only man in that class and it was cool to have to defend the male gender from all their misinformation.

I don’t have much to say here except, goddamn. What the fuck is wrong with people?

I want to excise all this toxic stuff out of genre. Because most genre authors are awesome.

And this was decidedly not awesome.

And we wonder why women don’t feel welcome at the table.

Very Very (Very!) Early Thoughts On (New) Author Earnings Report

Indie-pub wunderkind and author advocate Hugh Howey released this:

Author Earnings dot com.

It aims to provide (admittedly self-selecting) data about author earnings — a subject that has made a lot of hay in the last month or two — and further seems to want to shine a stronger, more data-driven light on the earnings of self-published authors in particular.

I am all for more data, and in this, I respect the effort mightily.

Every piece of data an author has is better than having no data at all.

That said, it’s also important to have some scrutiny of that data.

Data — er, “data” — after all, is easy to come by on the Internet.

Less easy is data that is true, and meaningful, and supports conclusions.

So: is this data all that?

Answer unclear, ask again later.

I’ll note a few things here, and then turn it over to you to let you folks (translation: someone smarter than me please take a look at it and offer your thoughts, willya?).

a) This data is entirely about Amazon, which remains the apparent leader in e-books, is by no means the entire picture in terms of bookselling in general. That skews this as being useful data regarding e-books and e-publishing (and author-publishing in particular), but maybe less so as a big picture than hoped? Point is: Amazon is a big fish, but not the only fish.

b) This data is extrapolated — meaning, no actual numbers, right? It’s taking data from (do I have this right?) a single day’s worth of rankings and from that deducing sales numbers for that day and then, by proxy, a whole year? (Graph here. Text: “The next thing we wanted to do was estimate yearly e-book earnings for all of these authors based on their daily Amazon sales.”) In my experience, those websites that attempt to extrapolate sales data using Amazon ranking numbers have been faulty. Hell, even Bookscan numbers are kinda fucked up (which is, itself, fucked up, BUT HEY WELCOME TO PUBLISHING WHERE NOBODY HAS VITAL INFORMATION).

c) It’s only pulling from bestseller lists on Amazon. This means we don’t have data on everything that isn’t… bestselling, right? Still useful to know and see what it means for those books up there at the top in terms of how many are indie and how many are not — it’s more indie than you think.

d) Because of limited scope, fails to capture ways that authors can make other money with a single book — foreign rights, film/TV rights, etc. That’s true on both sides of publishing, though likely moreso in traditional. If you looked at a book like my own Blackbirds and used a single day’s worth of sales at Amazon, you’d have almost none of the picture of a) how it really sells and b) the money I’ve made from the book beyond just the book.

This is interesting, so far. Be curious to see where it goes from here, and if it starts to include more robust data. At present it seems like an interesting start, though one offering a limited timespan of data (a single day) that captures not so much actual data as it does an extrapolation of data. (Though again, maybe I’m misreading, here. Smart people: jump in.) Either way, good for Howey for getting this out there. One assumes over time the data here will start to sharpen and present something cutting. In the meantime, worth poking through this with a few sticks and seeing if we can get other folks to verify the data and conclusions from the data.

Your thoughts?

Chat it up, folks.

The Days When You Don’t Feel Like Writing

Those are the days you have to write.

Even if it’s nothing, even if it’s crap, you’ve got to carve the words onto the page. Even if it’s only a hundred words, even if you only get to move the mountain by a half-an-inch, you’re still nudging the needle, still keeping that story-heart beating, still proving to yourself and to the world that this is who you are and what you do.

They say you can’t get blood from a stone but squeeze a stone hard enough, you’ll get blood.

Blood wets the gears. Blood makes the grass grow.

Effort. Work. Movement. Motion.

The days you don’t want to run, you have to run.

The days you don’t want to get out of bed are the days you must get out of bed.

The days you don’t think you can fly are the ones you gotta jump off the cliff.

Writer means writing. Even if it’s just a moment in the narrative, even if it’s just one thought orchestrated and set gently on the page. An avalanche is snowflakes. An ocean is all droplets. Our life is measured in seconds, our work measured in words, and so you have to put the words down.

The act creates momentum. Writing begets writing begets writing.

The lack of act has its own momentum, too — don’t write today, and tomorrow you wonder if this is really who you are, if this is what you’re meant to do, and so the next day you think it’s just not happening, the Muse isn’t there, the inspiration hasn’t lit a fire under your ass yet, the rats don’t feel like they’re gnawing at you and oh, hey, other writers — well, they’re all talented and driven and they’d never think of sitting down and not writing and maybe that’s who you are, not a writer but rather, Not A Writer, and so the gap in your effort cracks and pops and widens like a broken jaw, a yawning mouth, and soon all you see is the broken teeth of your efforts, broken dreams there in the dark of the mind and the back of the throat, and what you Want to do is lost beneath the illusion of what you Didn’t — or what you Can’t — do.

We fight that inertia, we fight the fear and the doubt by writing.

The words you write right now are words you can fix later.

The words you don’t write today are a curse, a hex, a black hole painted white.

You think that forcing it is counterproductive, that it means nothing, that you’ll just spit mud and blood onto the paper — and you might be right, but you might be wrong. Might be gold in them thar hills, might be a cure for what ails you in those droplets of blood. You don’t know. You can’t know. You’re you — your own worst judge, your own enemy, your greatest hater.

If you’re dying in the snow, no matter how much it hurts, you’ve gotta get up and walk.

If you’re drowning in the deep, no matter how hard it is, you’ve gotta hold the air in your lungs until your chest feels like it’s on fire and you’ve gotta swim hard for the surface.

Writing is the act of doing. Surviving. Living. Being.

From nothing into something. The word of the gods spoken aloud and made real, signal in noise, order in chaos, Let There Be Words and then there were Words.

On the days it’s hard to write are the days it’s most important to write.

That’s how you know who you really are.

That’s how you know this is what you’re meant to do.

Wake up.

Get up.

Write.