Max Barry's Blog, page 15

Idea Me

I’m almost finished the final round of major rewrites on the new
book. That’s what I’ve been doing, if you’re wondering. It has been
more fun and less like pulling my brain out through my nostrils than
usual, so that’s good. I am feeling productive.

In a few weeks, I’ll be ready to start my next book! That’s exciting.
Except I have no ideas. None. I don’t even know which genre it’ll be.
By now it seems like I should have some sense of my own
place in the literary marketplace, but I don’t. Apparently
I do a kind of comedy-sci-fi-thriller-satire-romance thing.
But I don’t know where you shelve that.

I mention this because it occurred to me that I have this
web site, and you read it, so I should data-mine you for ideas.
There is possibly a less exploitative way for me to say that. But I mean,
if you’re on this site, I bet we have all kinds of things in common. Like
favorite authors. And being interested in what kind of book I’m writing
next. You’re basically me, with more perspective.

I don’t want story ideas, because those are personal.
You could have the best story idea in the world and
I wouldn’t like it because it wasn’t my idea. I’m very small
like that. Also, imagine the legal ramifications. Nightmare. But
I would like to know the very broad reasons you might pick up a book with
my name on it. Is it for yucks, is it for a page-turner, is it to snip out
the author photo for identity theft? You know. Broad strokes.
Then the next time I think, “Hey,
how awesome would it be to write a comedy about a sentient
toaster,” I might remember your comments and think, “Mmmm,
not that awesome.” This would be more efficient than
my usual process, which is going ahead and writing the book
and nine months later having my agent explain why it’s unpublishable.

In other news, I have been playing a computer game,
Diablo III.
This is one of the few games I’ve put significant time into
since my first child was born seven years ago, just as an FYI for
anyone thinking of having kids. The game is pretty fun, but what’s
fascinating to me is how much video games have changed.
When I was a kid, they were coin-munching sadists
designed to ruthlessly punish anything less than autism-grade
concentration. But now they are colorful piñatas for the
easily bored who will rage on Twitter if anything is too hard.
If I finish this rewrite and don’t have an idea for my next book,
I’ll post a review.

Irony Certification Agency

SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA: Mr. Jeremy Frost, proprietor of the area’s newly-formed Irony
Certification Agency, wears blue overalls. “People expect someone in a nice suit,”
he says. “But I want them to see that irony is just a facilities problem. Like
a leaky pipe.”

Mr. Frost’s business has been operating for eight months. In that time, he
claims to have rendered services to some of the state’s largest employers,
including a tech giant and two major insurers. But he’s unable to name
names.

“People don’t like to admit they had an irony guy in,” he says. “They see
the results. But they don’t like to talk about it.”

That’s something Mr. Frost aims to change. “Getting that first meeting,
convincing them I can help them, it’s tough,” he admits. “But once I’m
in, I’ve never left a customer disappointed. I figure if I keep doing
what I’m doing, people will eventually get comfortable enough to share
their irony problems.”

“Irony problems,” according to Mr. Frost, occur when places or objects
build up irony over time, and then trigger ironic situations.
He explains: “Say there’s a grocery store and they give
me a call. I might find a guy to take in—Mike Slipper, for example, or
Amanda Fall. I’ll have them walk up and down the aisles. Now, if
Mike Slipper slips, or Amanda falls, that’s a pretty good sign we’ve
got a source of irony somewhere nearby.”

It’s not always that simple. “I ask myself: what’s
the most ironic thing that could happen? Because even a little
irony nearby can be enough to set something off, if it’s potentially
very ironic. One time an insurer had me visit this guy—he was
a little accident-prone, and on a big, big policy. At first, everything
checks out, but I’m just not comfortable with his car. It’s more
likely to lock with the keys inside when you’re running late, the battery
went flat when I tried to drive it to the store to buy batteries…
nothing outside normal tolerances, but still, on the high side. Well, then I find out the
guy has been writing letters to the paper saying we don’t need seat-belt
laws. I can’t tell you the details of how that turned out, but let me
just say that insurer saved a ton of money.”

Once Mr. Frost identifies a source of irony, what does he do?
“Well, bear in mind, I do Irony Certification, not Irony Disposal.
If you’ve got a restaurant on Ebola Avenue, I can check the premises
over and tell you whether you’ve got a problem,
but I can’t relocate your business.”

This is particularly the case when the source of irony turns out to be
a person. “It is awkward, yeah,” he admits. “You have someone who’s been
a long-time model employee, she owns a dog named Buster, and suddenly you’re telling
her she can’t work in the accounting department any more. It’s not her
fault. We still don’t know how the build-up of irony happens. We just
know it’s there.”

Mr. Frost is straightforward about the skepticism he receives on the
job. “Everyone has an opinion about irony,” he says, a touch wearily.
“I do get people coming up to me, saying this isn’t really ironic, or that other thing is.
Sometimes, a guy comes up, and three words in, I can
tell from his accent where we’re going.” He shrugs. “But it
doesn’t bother me. When you’re an Irony Certification Officer working
on an irony-laden site, people telling you you’ve got the definition
of irony wrong is just part of the job.”

Why It Takes So Long

Why does it take a year for a book to go from a draft
to bookstore shelves? Is it to build anticipation?
Because publishers are modern-day Neanderthals, trying to
make e-books by rubbing sticks together? Because authors
are so precious?

The correct answer is: yes! In more detail, it’s because this*:

MONTH 1

The editor and the author kick things off
by exchanging emails about how happy they are to be
working with one another. The editor prepares an EDIT LETTER,
which is a document describing how fantastic the
book is, and how even more fantasticer it would be if
the following thirty or so issues were addressed.
I put EDIT LETTER in caps because it’s very important.
The author considers this. There is some back and forth
over any parts of the EDIT LETTER that the author requires
more clarification on to fully understand what
kind of universe the editor must be living in to say such
a thing.

MONTHS 2-4

The author rewrites. How long this takes
depends on how much rewriting is required, and how depressed
the author gets. All books have been through
at least a couple author-driven drafts before they’re picked up by
a publisher, but obviously another pass is needed,
because why else editors. An editor who says, “Fine as is!”
might as well go panhandle.

Also, books at this stage really do need rewriting.

In my case, I did a lot of rewriting for my editor on
Company, and the publication process took 22 months.
I didn’t do much on Syrup, and it took nine.
So there is possibly a causal link there.

The art department begins fooling around with cover ideas,
under strict instructions to not share them with anybody,
especially authors.

MONTHS 5-6

The editor approves the rewritten draft and
shares it internally with salespeople, the art department,
and unrelated editors’ assistants. I’m not sure why assistants; I
just know every editorial assistant I’ve ever met has
read all my books.

The editor and author begin seeking people to provide a
blurb/cover quote. The first edition can’t
have actual reviews on the cover, because those
will be received too late. But you need someone
to say “MAGNIFICENT… STUNNING,” so you have to hit up a
fellow author.

The copyeditor prints out the new draft
and scrawls arcane markings on it by the light of tallow
candles using quills.
This ensures the book can no longer be shared electronically, and
all subsequent changes must be done by hand. This five-hundred-page
monstrosity is photocopied and e-mailed to the author.
Sorry, that was a typo. I mean mailed. You know. Mailed. When
they physically transport something. The author
reads this by light of a virgin moon, which is the only time the
unicorn ink becomes visible, and accepts some changes while giving
others a jolly good
stet. This can be a difficult
time for the author, who must defend grammatical errors
as stylistic choices in order to not look stupid.

The editor emails the author a scan of the finished cover art, saying,
“Everyone here loves this!” The author may object to aspects of
it, if he is an ungrateful asshole who thinks he knows how to
publish books better than a, you know, publisher.

The book’s layouts are developed: the internal artwork, including the
fonts, spacing, and style of chapter headings.

Publicity plans are developed, and final-ish decisions made on things
like price and publication dates.

MONTHS 7-8

The manuscript is transformed into a galley, which is the
final, copyedited version embedded in the layouts. When I say
“transformed,” I mean someone sits down with the five-hundred-page
copyedited manuscript, which by now has
been scrawled on by at least two and probably four different people,
with additional pages inserted here and there, and some of the changes
stetted and then destetted and maybe redesteted again,
some of which are impossible to read because I had to use a green pencil to
signify which changes were mine and I couldn’t find a sharpener and I was trying to squeeze
between the printed lines and thought I had enough room but didn’t.
This person types all that out. I have never met them,
because, I assume, they are kept in a basement and fed raw fish.

The author is sent galleys of forthcoming books by authors who agreed
to consider giving a blurb, in case he wishes to reciprocate,
while maintaining artistic integrity.

The Advanced Reader Copies are produced, which are like galleys,
but one step closer to the finished version. They’re for
reviewers and various promotions (a lot of Machine Man
ARCs were given out at Comic Con last year), and are essentially the finished
book, minus any late editorial changes, printed on cheap paper,
and possibly with different cover art.

The author reads the latest galley/ARC and notices several horrendous
errors that somehow escaped previous notice. He writes in with
corrections.

The audio version is developed.

The author corresponds with translators attached to various foreign
publishers, who want explanations for odd word choices. These will
probably be published many months or even years later, and look
super exotic.

MONTHS 9-10

The publisher pitches its quarterly list to large bookstore chains
and buyers. I believe they actually sit down in a room, and the editor or
marketing manager or whoever says, “Now THIS is a title we’re very
excited about, it’s OH GOD PLEASE BUY ME by Max Barry,” and they
have a little discussion about the author’s sales record and whether
people are really interested in that kind of book any more, so
that the bookstore chain/buyer can decide how many copies to stock.
If they choose a low number, the book is essentially dead, because
no-one will see it, and the publisher will scale back its marketing
plans, because why spend money promoting a book no-one knows
about. But if it’s a high number, there will
be renewed excitement and high-fives and a little extra marketing
budget for things like co-op (payment to bookstores for
favorable shelf placement). The author can tell which it is because
if it is a low number, the publisher won’t tell him.

Thanks to the
amazing new website
Random House has for its authors, I know they call this process
“working with the accounts on an ongoing basis to estimate initial
purchase quantities.”

The ARCs go out to newspapers, blogs, magazines, and anyone else who
wants a copy and has an audience of more than three people.
Interview and feature requests begin to come in and are scheduled
by the publicity department. Early reviews come in and are
forwarded to the author, unless they’re bad.

An e-book version is developed via a process involving priests and goats’
blood. Not really. It’s really done by re-typing the entire
book from the finished, typeset manuscript. Nah, I’m still kidding.
They take the last electronic document and just try to reimplement
all the manual changes made since then by hand. You can decide which of those
it is.

Due to piracy concerns, the e-book is closely guarded, so often cannot
be reviewed by the author. Instead it is
distributed to anyone with a blog and a
netgalley.com account.

MONTHS 11-13

More reviews come in, and early interviews/profiles
are conducted. The author, who has spent the last two years alone with a keyboard,
begins spending large parts of each day talking or writing about himself,
sowing the seeds for future personality disorders.

The publisher does whatever it is that needs to be done to ensure
that tens of thousands of physical copies end up in the right place at the
right time. I assume that’s something.

The book is published! The author catches the bus to the nearest bookstore
to discover they’re not stocking it. Calls to agent ensue.
The author may go on tour, which could involve dozens of cities over
many weeks, or just popping into local bookstore and
plaintively offering to sign copies, if they have some, like
out the back or whatever.

During a book reading, the author notices a horrendous error that
somehow escaped the editorial process.

The author wakes three-hourly to check his Amazon.com sales ranking.

And that’s about it.

* Note: Blog may represent one-sided author’s view
of a process he actually knows little about, with gaps in knowledge
filled with speculation and lies.

I Have a New Book

My fifth novel will be out in mid-2013. If you’re wondering
how I manage this breakneck pace, with Machine Man
gracing the shelves only last year, it’s because I
haven’t been updating my web site or going on Twitter or
Facebook. It’s amazing how much time that leaves. Also, I broke
my usual pattern of following good novels with
unpublishable ones. It’s a bold new strategy but I’m optimistic
that it might just work out.

The new book is Lexicon. If you’re the kind of
person who doesn’t want to know anything more, because you
have already decided to read it and want your experience to be
untainted by any hint of a spoiler, then (a) thank
you, (b) I am right there with you, and (c) you may skip
ahead to the next paragraph. For everyone else, it is about
a secret persuasion society that builds and deploys words as
weapons. The people who wield these words are known as poets;
the story centers around a young woman who is recruited
into their ranks, and the man she falls in love with. Which
you are not allowed to do, as a poet. I could explain why,
but I’m not going to. Just trust me.

I began writing this book about five years ago, although it has changed so radically
from my early sketches that I may just go back and write a second,
completely different book from the same original idea. Usually, I
start a novel with a particular situation in mind, but this time
I had a concept, and unfortunately a concept is not a story. A concept is
somewhere for a story to live. So I ended up writing a lot of words,
looking for the story inside this concept. I always take a
kind of sick pride in the number of words that don’t
make it into my final drafts; the notes, doodles, experiments,
deleted scenes, et cetera. I usually have at least as many of
these as published words. This time, I have far more: 197,788.
Actually, that is a little appalling. I hadn’t totaled that
up before. But I’m still proud, because those words led to good ones.

Lexicon will be published by The Penguin Press in
mid-2013 in the US and Canada. Details to come on other countries.

This Sentence is Already Too Long

Blogs are dying. Not this blog. I mean in general. This blog's
just fine. Okay, yes, it has been a little while since the last post,
but that's just because I was busy writing. Well. Rewriting. It's like
writing, only with less visible progress. With writing, you can
feel reasonably assured that what you put on the page is
better than what was there before. Not always! But mostly.
Rewriting, though, you can spend a good six hours on a scene,
sit back, and think, "Yep… that's worse."

Anyway. Blogs are OUT. They're too long. That's the problem. No-one
has the time for them. The middle is hollowing out.
Everything is polarizing. We want
things to be very. It doesn't matter what. Whatever it is, only very.
There's no place for mid-length writing any more. There never was,
of course. But blogs used to be short. Then Twitter. Now blogs
are like One Day Cricket.*

But here we are! And it's already been more than 140 characters. So
let's continue. This blog will summarize what I've been thinking
about over the last few months, while I was busy making my new
book not worse.

Sneaker riots.
The first one or two were kind of shocking to
me, like a thought come to life. The next few were
disappointing, like repeated plot points.
But now
we're at, what, the seventh Nike sneaker riot? When
does it become less likely that they're continually being surprised
by this kind of thing happening and more likely that they're deliberately engineering it?
That's just a question. I'm just wondering.

Syrup movie.
Now in post-production.
I have been shown a teaser-trailer thing and it is
heartbreakingly beautiful. I've watched it three hundred times.
I'm not joking. The only thing that sucks about the Syrup
movie is I'm not allowed to tell you anything. But soon. Soon…

Privacy.
This interests me because privacy is obviously very
important for reasons nobody understands.
Generally, there's a much stronger incentive for companies
and governments to want to know things about you than for you
to keep your data private. That leads to an interesting place.

Persuasion.
This is the most valuable skill in the world,
right? People who are good at persuading others
become rich and successful; people who are easily persuaded
by others do not. But nobody really thinks about this. Very few
people actually go out and learn how to be better at persuasion,
or more aware of its forms. Why is that?

Also, the US as a culture is very advanced at soft persuasion (i.e.
the forms of persuasion that don't involve threats of bodily harm).
It is great at selling stuff. We have the Internet and free access
to vast stores of information but we're still buying products with
the cleverest ads, and electing politicians with the most reassuring
voices. I wonder what happens if a culture becomes so good
at persuasion that there is no longer an incentive to produce
products that are just objectively good, as opposed to well-sold.

Privacy + Persuasion.
It's easier to persuade people if you
know more about them. And if you can persuade them, you can
get more information from them. That's an interesting dynamic, too.

Piracy.
But this is too depressing for now so I'll blog about it later.

That's a lot of Ps, for some reason.

(* This analogy works because even if you don't know cricket, you
know it is stupid and anachronistic.)

Video: Machine Man Book Reading

A
long video of a Machine Man book reading
at
Embiggen Books in Melbourne, Australia (October 2011).

Stating the Obvious: Actors

Lately I've been feeling sympathy for actors. I never used to feel that. I
used to think actors deserved NOTHING, because they're already
beautiful and adored. And people are swoon over how clever
and cool they must be in real life, because apparently they improvised
their best lines and YOU KNOW WHAT NO THEY DID NOT. They played
the damn character that was written for them, that's what they did.
The alternative only gets play because people believe in their hearts that
movies are real.*

Essentially, I viewed actors as mindless automatons waiting to be
filled with words. Attractive automatons, to be sure. They're a fine
looking bunch. And they're good at pretending. But that's not a
particularly impressive skill. I mean, kids do it. So I've never
really rated actors as more deserving of respect than, say,
jugglers. Especially jugglers who can balance on things while they
juggle. That shit is not easy.

But this was before I actually spent time on a film set. I found that
educational in a few ways. For one thing, I had to act.
Only a little. I'm kind of abusing the term here. I mostly had to
stand in one place and not sneeze. But there was a time when I had
to move parts of my body in a coherent way while fifty people and
a very expensive camera stared at me, and that turned out to be
harder than I expected. There is a pressure element. So I concede
that acting, or doing anything, really, is more challenging
when a lot of people's time and money is riding on you not screwing it up.

But the real eye-opener was how actors have to do what they're told.
Not always. Sometimes actors can say, "I'm not really feeling that line,"
and the director will say, "Let's try it both ways," and the actor can
perform a take differently while knowing in their soul that it will never
be seen again. Actors are also free to perform minor on-the-fly
sentence surgery, so long as they get the essence right. In some cases,
they really can propose something different, and if the director
agrees, they get to do it. But mostly they have to say the lines.

So if I write, "6 looks surprised," then Amber Heard has to go ahead and look
surprised. I want you to take a moment to think about how much you
would enjoy it if you were world famous and had to look surprised just
because I wanted you to. Because I would hate it. I would be all, "I tell
you what, how about you go fuck yourself?" Now, okay, this probably just
means I would make a crappy actor. I already knew that. And I knew
actors had to say the lines. That is the most fundamental part
of their job. If they weren't prepared to do it,
they would find something else to do, like juggle while balancing on things.

But still. I realize more and more how spoiled I am to own the entire
process of creating a novel. I don't need anyone's permission to start
writing. I don't need to convince people
to sign off on doing a part of the story a particular way. I just do it. You might argue
that this isn't a good thing. And I might argue, why don't you get off my
site, if you hate me so much. But for better or worse, I enjoy the ability to determine how I do
my job.

Actors don't have that. They have to give themselves to a role no matter how
shitty. They're totally dependent on being offered good scripts, and if
they're not, they have to perform bad ones. When they perform bad roles,
even when they do a good job, people think they're bad actors, because
people think movies are real.* An actor might never once get the chance to
perform a role at their best. Which is kind of horrifying.

Of course, they can console themselves with their immense beauty.

(* They are real. All stories are real.)

Subtextual

Now there's this app,
Subtext,
that lets you read books and share your comments about them
in real-time with other people reading the same book. Little speech bubbles
in the margins pop up: you tap them, you get to read what other people are
saying about a particular plot twist, or character death, or whatever.

In some cases, the author has gone through and made a bunch of those
comments him or herself, and these read a little like a DVD commentary track.

I mention this because I'm one of those authors: Machine Man
is one of their launch titles. So, if, you know, you feel I've been
too secretive about the creative process behind
Machine Man so far, now is your chance for some insight.

At first I thought you would have to turn those comments off when
reading a Subtext book, at least the first time through, because otherwise
that would be really distracting. But I have found that this is impossible. You know
the comments are lurking there, and it's too much to resist turning them
back on when you're wondering, "Does anyone else think
this story just completely went off the rails?"

So that's pretty cool. Not from an author's perspective. From an author's
perspective, it's horrible. I want you to sit there and read what I've
damn well written for you. But as another example of
users seizing control over their own entertainment experiences, it seems
significant.

Movie news! I just changed the subject. That's what happened there.
Mark Heyman,
the scriptwriter of Black Swan, who's been busy working on
what I have to say is a freaking fantastic Machine Man script,
I know I'm not allowed to tell anyone, Mandalay, BUT IT IS AWESOME,
has sold
his
"Facebook thriller" script XOXO, with Darren Aronofsky producing.
So it's all going pretty nicely in Heyman-land. Syrup is deep
in post-production and I still haven't seen it, not that I'm thinking about
it every ten minutes or anything. And the leads are busy:
Amber
Heard is doing interviews for The Rum Diary, and
Shiloh Fernandez is becoming
an eco-terrorist.

Nuts and Bolts

I'm a little nervous about this, but here is the nerdiest thing I have ever done.
You realize that bar is already pretty high. I have programmed web games.
I have
considered domain name availability before naming my offspring.
But this is the first time I have publicly released a version control system history
of a book.

I just lost you. I realize that. Unless you are some kind of freako super-geek, in which
case, welcome to the tiny minority of the human race that may appreciate this.
The rest of you: a revision control system is usually used for writing software,
and tracking the changes you make. I used one of these for the
Machine Man serial, since I was uploading a page per day, and it
needed to be processed for sending out to people's email inboxes and cell phones,
and I lost you again, didn't I? Okay.

The point is I have the entire edit history of Machine Man all the way
back from notes. And you can browse to any particular page and see how
it evolved from something to nothing.

Here is an example, using
Version 1 of Page 18:

It's just a note to myself about what this page might be about.
By clicking the
"→V2", you move ahead to
Version 2 of that page:

New words are green, deleted words are red. This page is hard to read because the
software is making bad guesses about how the different versions fit together.
In actuality, I simply deleted my note and wrote a first version.

Then I corrected
a spelling mistake:

And continued tweaking in versions 4 through 9.

The final version is here. And if you have
the book, you can follow along at home to the
version that wound up in the novel:

I'm not sure what use this is to anybody, other than for exposing my writerly
fumblings in an even more humiliating manner than I've already done.
But it was POSSIBLE, so I have DONE IT.

To access the Source version of a page in the Machine Man serial, click
the tiny, near-invisible nut on the top-right of
any serial page. Or append "&v=1" to the
URL, if you're that nerdy. Which, if you've read this far, you surely are.

Schlepping the Book

I'd kind of forgotten what it was like to have a new book out. It's like this:

Some people are incredibly nice and love the book and take the trouble to say so, which makes you feel like kissing their toes
Some reviewers say you are smart and you think, Hey, yeah, I am smart, I'm REALLY GODDAMN SMART
Some reviewers mistake your book for something else entirely and you have to remind yourself it's not a good look for an author to post angry comments listing their CLEAR FACTUAL AND CONCEPTUAL ERRORS
You are invited to speak at festivals and bookstores and on radio, which causes you to gradually re-learn atrophied social skills like talking
Your time for writing shrinks and you start to panic because you're not getting enough one-on-one time with your work-in-progress, which loves and needs you
Some people you haven't heard from in years remember you exist
Some people take the time to email you how much you suck, which often seems to be a reaction not to the book or to you exactly but rather the fact that you are receiving attention, which infuriates them for reasons that are hard to know
Some people give oddly insulting compliments, like, "Of your four terrible books, this is at least fairly readable," and honestly seem to expect you will be pleased to hear it
You notice things in the book you wish you had done differently
You kind of want to know how it's selling but kind of don't
Some people don't seem to realize you have a new book out, and how is that possible, you're spending all this goddamn time doing interviews and blogs and book trailers, have they seen that book trailer, HOW CAN THEY NOT KNOW

Basically, a strange time. And that's even without a US book tour, which is
usually a whole added level of surrealism for me. But I replaced it with
the Skype tour,
so I guess it balanced out. Actually, the Skype tour was far more successful
than I expected. Or, more specifically, it contained far less crazy than I feared.
I'm not saying you people are crazy. Not all of you. It was just that I was pretty
sure that at some point I would find myself talking to a person who wanted
me to join his underground resistance movement, and read his manuscript. But that
didn't happen. So thank you to everyone for being so nice and sane.
The best part of book tours is getting to chat to readers—well, that and the
hotel room service—so it was like taking just that part and condensing it down.

Tomorrow I'm off to the
Brisbane Writers Festival,
but next week, guess what? A clean calendar! I'm really excited about that.
That means I can write.

P.S. I just realized I should probably link to some of the promotion I've
been doing. To, you know, promote.
I've been uploading YouTube videos, how about that?
Here's one: