Michael Montoure's Blog, page 20

Write or Die

This is another one of those ideas that tap-dances on that fine line between "brilliant" and "completely mental."  Having trouble keeping yourself writing? There's an app for that:

The idea is to instill in the would-be writer with a fear of not writing. We do this by employing principles taught in Introduction to Psychology. Anyone remember Operant Conditioning and Negative Reinforcement? [...]

Write or Die is a web application that encourages writing by punishing the tendency to avoid writing. Start typing in the box. As long as you keep typing, you're fine, but once you stop typing, you have a grace period of a certain number of seconds and then there are consequences [...]

Gentle Mode: A certain amount of time after you stop writing, a box will pop up, gently reminding you to continue writing.
Normal Mode: If you persistently avoid writing, you will be played a most unpleasant sound. The sound will stop if and only if you continue to write.
Kamikaze Mode: Keep Writing or Your Work Will Unwrite Itself

– Write or Die by Dr Wicked » About.

There's a web-based version, a desktop version, and I'm pretty sure there's an iPad version coming soon, too.  When I first heard about this, I thought it was just kind of a joke, or an art-piece proof-of-concept, but no, I've read accounts from several people who say it's really helped their productivity, so there you are.  If you need someone to crack the whip for you, you might give it a try.

Turning the Tide

One of the big sneering refrains I've heard for years from naysayers who have tried to talk me out of being a writer is this: "No one reads any more."  I am ridiculously happy to tell you that finally seems to be changing:

For the first time in more than 25 years, American adults are reading more literature, according to a new study by the National Endowment for the Arts. Reading on the Rise documents a definitive increase in rates and numbers of American adults who read literature, with the biggest increases among young adults, ages 18-24. This new growth reverses two decades of downward trends cited previously in NEA reports such as Reading at Risk and To Read or Not To Read.

"At a time of immense cultural pessimism, the NEA is pleased to announce some important good news. Literary reading has risen in the U.S. for the first time in a quarter century," said NEA Chairman Dana Gioia. "This dramatic turnaround shows that the many programs now focused on reading, including our own Big Read, are working. Cultural decline is not inevitable."

– More American Adults Read Literature According To New NEA Study.

The article that I got this link from attributes a lot of this to the Internet, and I'm sure a case can be made for that. What do I think?

I think that, for years, I've been seeing other sneering naysayers (well, a lot of the same ones as above, actually) decrying the fact that Our Children aren't reading Real Books — that they were reading Goosebumps, or the Harry Potter books, or, God help us all, fan-fiction.  And therefore, that all that reading didn't really count, somehow, because they weren't reading LITruhchur.

And I've been saying, look, they're reading, they're reading something, anything, that's not being forced on them by a teacher, they're reading for pleasure, and if they get in the habit of that they'll be hooked on it for life.  They'll develop more sophisticated tastes later. But they'll grow up to be readers.

Looks to me like maybe they did.

Deeper Wizardry

Diane Duane tells us she's working on getting her Young Wizards novels ready for electronic publishing.  (Sadly, most of you out there are probably scratching your heads and saying, "Huh? Is that anything like Harry Potter?" Well, yeah, I suppose so, except these came first and are better-written.)

Since Duane is not herself a wizard — not that she's admitting to in public, at any rate — she's finding the conversion process just as frustrating and complex as any of us mere mortals. But she at least got to take one shortcut that had me laughing out loud in delight:

"And then of course there's the issue of where to get electronic texts to correct for books that were originally, you know, typed on paper. …What, scan them? In my thousands of hours of spare time? I don't think so. Why do that when various well-intentioned people have over time scanned my earliest books, sometimes even run them through several people to proof them, and then made them available via P2P? So I borrowed those texts back, thank you very much, and used them for my basic documents. (And in all cases, they still needed to be corrected. Sometimes the people doing the original scanning were none too sure of what a word meant, or how to spell it. I fortunately don't have this problem.)"

via dduane: Ebooks: a note from the pro-am self-pub frontier.

That's one way to make lemonade out of lemons, all right.  And what exactly are the book pirates going to do — take her to court for stealing their work?  Brilliant.

What Horror Writers Have Nightmares About

I've joked for years, "I don't have nightmares — I'm just a carrier."  Last night's dream wasn't — a nightmare, exactly, not in the sense that it was scary, but still, a full-blown anxiety dream. One that amused me enough that I thought I'd tell you about it.

I was at "Norwescon," although not in any real-life hotel any Norwescon I've ever been to has been held at.  And I was scheduled to do a reading.  Which I had completely forgotten about.  Someone reminded me five minutes after it was supposed to have started.

So I ran there, and  somehow had scattered pages with me — stories, parts of stories, rough drafts with scribbled corrections and notes, and absolutely no idea of what I was going to read, or in what order.  I couldn't remember what I'd read at my previous reading, and whether I was going to be repeating myself or not.  I was so unprepared I let another writer friend of mine who happened to be in the audience go on first, unscheduled, just to stall for time.  Annoyingly, he was pretty good.

I also didn't have any promotional postcards or bookmarks or anything like that, and no copies of either of my books to sell.

I couldn't find a full copy of any of my stories among these scattered pages, so I decided to read something that I had a copy of on my phone. Mind you, of course, I wasn't sure that the phone had enough battery left to make it all the way through the reading.

I finally went up on stage, half an hour late, and stumbled and stuttered through the beginning of a story, when I woke up, and started laughing.

Surviving

Just a quick note to say — made it through the surgery, doing okay. I feel pretty clear-headed on the meds I'm taking, but typing is really difficult, so I may not be very talkative for a little while here.

The Price of Instant Gratification

As I mentioned, I'm having surgery tomorrow, and as I've never had surgery before, I'm in full-blown freak-out mode over it.  It turns out that my brain's immediate instinct to gravitate directly toward "What's the worst that could possibly happen?" is a tendency that serves me well as a horror writer, but really, not so much in my personal life.

But anyway, when I've managed for a few moments here and there to shake my conviction that I'm going to die tragically from the anesthesia or from deep-vein thrombosis, I've been making plans for my recovery. The surgeon says it'll be a week or two before I can go back to work, so I've been trying to think of this as a nice little vacation. And since I don't really expect I'll stir much from my bed, what better time to catch up on my reading?

So I went on a nice little virtual shopping spree this weekend, picking up every Kindle edition I had in my Amazon wishlist:

"Full Dark, No Stars" by Stephen King
"Irregular Creatures" by Chuck Wendig
"The Newbie's Guide to Publishing (Everything A Writer Needs To Know)" by J.A. Konrath
"Smart Self-Publishing: Becoming an Indie Author" by Zoe Winters
"Among Others" by Jo Walton
"The Day After and Other Stories" by Wil Wheaton
"The Magicians: A Novel" by Lev Grossman
"Hold Me Closer, Necromancer" by Lish McBride

I nearly stopped myself almost before I really got started.  The first item on that list is priced at $14.99. Frankly, that seemed like kind of a lot of money for some ones and zeroes.

I tried to push past my hesitation. I was supposed to be indulging myself, and besides, I'd really, really been wanting to read this one — I love Steven King's short stories.

What finally struck me was a sudden epiphany — at this point, I'm entirely used to paying $11.00 for a movie ticket. For 90 minutes of entertainment, that honestly, may or may not be any good. But I do it smilingly and uncomplainingly, with nothing to show for it afterward.  Once I made that comparison, $14.99 for an e-book didn't seem that terrible after all.

In all, I spent around sixty-five bucks, which is not bad for eight books. I can't remember the last time I spent that much money on new books. I can see how "1-Click" purchasing plus instant wireless delivery could turn out to be a very dangerous combination.

Write Better, Not Just Faster

Man, I just don't know about this.  Belinda Frisch linked to this post at WORST BOOK EVER, and while I think they may have a point, I just can't agree with the conclusions they draw from it:

Write faster, no more laying around or drinking coffee to be happy with one book a year. You need to do 2-6 books a year at least. Now, if you keep up with your hungry fans you stand to make a great living. We are no longer in the time of the easy writers life. So, if you have a short story sitting around… Publish it! If you wrote a story in high school… Publish it! Content, content, content! Back list, out of print, old works… anything and everything just get it up and for sale, you never know what book will take off and lead the change for all your other works.

— THE WORST BOOK EVER!: WRITE FASTER!

Now, I certainly agree that it seems to be best for an indie writer to have as many books in "print" as possible, but . . . . I somehow just don't think that means that every single one of your unpublished trunk stories necessarily needs to see the light of day.  I mean, come on — a story you wrote in high school? Seriously? Okay, maybe you were turning out professional-quality writing when you were a teenager, but I know I sure as hell wasn't.

You can't just shove everything out there regardless of quality hoping that some of it will magically find an audience.  If you're looking to publish something that's been languishing on your hard drive for years, take a good long look at it first, and ask yourself if this, this right here, is really the piece of fiction you'd want a new reader to associate with your name.

This is much on my mind lately, because at Norwescon last weekend, I ran into an old friend of mine who asked me when I was going to self-publish Scratcher, which was my first horror novel.  She looked at me with wide-eyed shock when I told her I probably wasn't.  I'm glad to hear that she still thinks of it so fondly, but — I'm just not sure I feel like it's up to my current standards.  And I think having standards to apply to your own work is important, if you want to build an audience over time.  If editors and agents aren't the gatekeepers of quality anymore, we have to be our own gatekeepers.

I may still dust off Scratcher and take that good long look at it.  But I strongly suspect that at the end of the day, I'm going to quietly put it back where I left it, and move on to something better.

Back on the Air

Good morning! Sorry for my silence the past few days — I was busy getting ready for, and then recovering from, Norwescon, the big annual regional science-fiction convention. Not that I really saw anything of the convention itself — I was too busy prepping for a party I was running. Totally worth it.

I used to be on panels at Norwescon, but they haven't invited me to be a guest in years.  I think this next year I need to get in touch with them and remind them I'm still around.  I miss doing panels and readings there.  I feel like I'm only doing half my job when I'm just writing — the other half of it is getting out there and connecting with people.

Anyway, I apologize for being gone, although I have to say I may fall silent again next week.  I'm having surgery on May 3rd, and I may not be posting for a few days after that — or alternately, may start posting nonsense through a painkiller-induced haze.  I guess we'll see.

No link for you this morning — instead, I went looking for a quote to share, and found this one that I thought was rather lovely:

"You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what's burning inside you.  And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke." — Arthur Polotnik

Writing in Coffeehouses

Here's an article in the Atlantic that I immediately identified with — "Working Best at Coffee Shops." I figured out quite a while ago that when I'm writing, I get a lot more done at a coffee shop (such as the late, lamented Aurafice on Capitol Hill, and the closed-until-further-notice Wayward in Greenwood) than I ever manage sitting at home. A lot of my friends find that kind of strange — they think the environment would be too distracting. But as this article says, I find it just distracting enough:

"Put in a silent room before a blank page, it's almost impossible to write. Neither is it be ideal to work near a television set that keeps drawing one's attention or a room where a child keeps interrupting. In a coffeehouse, its rare for someone to intrude on the space of a patron with an open laptop and a look of concentration. Still, there is just enough conversation and foot traffic in the background that you're forced to semi-consciously tune it out [....] Forced to focus on a single thing the mind rebels, whereas adding another element somehow focuses it. The coffeehouse somehow provides that element."

The article goes on to provide other theories as to what's at work here, and I agree with them, too.  If you're having trouble sitting down at home and making yourself write, you might try getting out of the house instead.

You could, I suppose, if you really wanted to, try to find the same level of detached engagement in a tea shop, a restaurant, a library. . . but I think there is something particular about coffee at work here.  "Coffee sets the blood in motion and stimulates the muscles," observed Honore de Balzac; "it accelerates the digestive processes, chases away sleep, and gives us the capacity to engage a little longer in the exercise of our intellects."

A Veteran Of A Thousand Psychic Wars

I was pleasantly surprised by the content of Anne R. Allen's post, "3 Questions to Ask Before You Jump on the Indie Publishing Bandwagon." For one thing, with a title like that and the use of the word "bandwagon," I really thought this was going to be another post from someone who's just trying to dismiss self-publishing as an all-around bad idea.

It's really not, though — she's not trying to dissuade anyone, she's just presenting literally that: three questions to ask first.

The main kind of preparedness she's talking about is something I don't see a lot of people mentioning: emotional preparedness. Namely, are you sure you're ready to deal with snarky comments and bad reviews?

"There are some unspoken benefits to the old query-fail-query-fail-submission-fail-editorial meeting-fail, fail, fail system. It not only gives us numerous readers to help hone that book to perfection—it also teaches us to deal with rejection, failure and bad reviews.

If you choose to self-publish because you can't handle the rejection of the query process, you're setting yourself up for worse pain later on. If those form rejections in your email sting, think of how you'll feel when very personal rejection is broadcast all over the blogosphere.

So there's a lesson here: don't publish until you're psychologically prepared to take the heat. Always keep in mind this is a business, and business can be nasty."

Emphasis above is mine, not hers. That was the sentence that leaped out at me — it's an excellent point, and very well put.

Me, I've got a pretty damn thick skin, earned in the constant flame wars of my youth. (I know the media likes to call this current generation the "Digital Natives," but I've been kicking around on the Internet since 1987. This is home to me, and I'm entirely used to the way people talk to, and about, each other.)