Mary Sisson's Blog, page 139

That gun there REALLY needs to go off....

Today was a wash, work-wise--the problem is that I am not a morning person, and I let my sleep schedule slide over so that I've been keeping what one of my friends used to call "vampire hours." This would be less of a problem if I wasn't expected to periodically get up at the crack of dawn to watch kids. As it is, I was so exhausted yesterday that I went overboard with the caffeine and the sugary foods and the beer after the kid left to try to wind down from it all (note to self: That worked when I was 19, didn't get hangovers, and had a stomach of iron. It does not work now), and today I am, if anything, even more exhausted.

So, I read a book. This book was billed as a novel of suspense, and indeed it was a novel of extremely pure suspense, because nothing actually happened. That was actually fine for the first 90-95% of the book--it was a really, really well-written novel of suspense. But to quote Anton Chekov, "If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there." Especially, I should note, if your book is titled The Pistol and the whole damned book is about this evil, dangerous pistol lurking on the wall that is going to do something bad...something REALLY bad...something SUPER-DUPER bad...or maybe it won't. The End.

As a writer, I fallen into this trap myself. Part of it is the feeling that, well, gee, the pistol always gets fired, so it's a little obvious, right? It may be obvious, but it's really unsatisfying when it doesn't happen and the reader is asked to pay all this attention to something that doesn't matter. Of course, the pistol doesn't literally have to be fired--but at the very least the pistol should come off the wall and get pointed at somebody. If you can come up with a satisfying twist, all the better--the pistol comes off the wall and is pointed at somebody, but just as the trigger is being pulled a cannonball is fired through the wall, obliterating the dude with the pistol. Or whatever. The point is, if you make a big deal about the pistol, there needs to be some drama happening with it. Otherwise, just cut it out and make your story that much more focused.

Keep in mind, too, that what is obvious to the writer is not necessarily obvious to the audience. In Joss Whedon's Serenity, there is a very suspenseful scene where soldiers are pointing guns at our heroes, ready to blow them all away. In the early versions of the movie, it just cuts from that scene to a scene where our heroes are fine, because Whedon figured it would be obvious to viewers that somebody intervened and told the soldiers to stand down. It was not, in fact, the least bit obvious, so another scene was added in which the soldiers were told to stand down. (And that, my friends, is why movies have previews and novels have beta readers.)

But honestly, I think the main reason people don't have the gun go off is simple fear--fear that, as a writer, you just don't have the chops to pull off a big climactic scene. Those kinds of scenes are hard to write, and they're intimidating, because they're usually really important, and if they go wrong, it's a disaster. Maybe you'll come up with one of those scenes that make people laugh and laugh because they're so dreadful! Maybe you'll come up with the latter-day equivalent of "It was a dark and stormy night," and people will name mock literary awards after you! Maybe you'll biff it so badly that George Lucas will want you to help him revise Star Wars again!

Ah, well--it's the writer's job to overcome those kinds of fears. To complicate matters, the intimidation factor can be hard to recognize--when I first wrote Trang, I tended to have the dramatic events take place "off-screen" where no one could see them. In fact, the more dramatic the event, the more likely it was that I had put it someplace where I didn't actually have to write about it. That was NOT in any way a conscious decision: When I because conscious of it, I was immediately struck by what a self-defeating pattern it was--why would someone ever read something where all the exciting bits have been carefully hidden away? But that's how the subconscious works, right? You're afraid that you might write something bad, so you write something that's guaranteed to be horrible!

In which I look at the calander and go, AIIGH!

Boy, Thanksgiving's right around the corner, isn't it? That's going to be a crazy week.

OK, here's what I'm hoping to do before the Turkey Day insanity:

1. Input the proofreader's corrections to the e-books.

2. Set up a giveaway on Library Thing.

3. Input the corrections to the paper book; deal with the layout questions. With luck, I can upload the new files to CreateSpace before all hell breaks loose.

4. (This one's a bonus.) Get more adept with ePub.

Whew!

The future is now...ish

This is a neat article in the New York Times about a fellow named John Paton who is trying to save newspapers by removing the whole "paper" end of the business.

Newspapers have this fabulous infrastructure--they can print up a solid ton of papers and distribute them all over a city in no time flat. It's pretty amazing, but nowadays there's an even faster method to distribute information that doesn't use paper at all: the Internet. That remarkable infrastructure newspapers have that lets them move a solid ton of paper also happens to be really, really expensive, and to support it, newspapers have to make another solid ton of money.

Web sites and the like make less than a solid ton of money. The article notes, "Mr. Paton has heard all about how choosing digital revenue over print revenue is like choosing dimes over dollars. He points out that the print dollars have dropped by more than half in the last five years and perhaps it is time to start 'stacking the dimes.'"

In other words, newspapers don't have the revenue to support this paper-moving infrastructure any more. If they want to stay in business, they'll have to shed the expensive infrastructure (not an easy thing to do because they usually own printing presses and delivery fleets and all that). If they do that, they have a shot of remaining profitable even if their revenues are lower.

If they become newspapers in name only, they will have the reporters and the editors and the news--but they won't have the paper. Instead, they will function just like a Web news site, adding features like reader blogs that they never had before.

Along those lines, Dean Wesley Smith notes that Penguin has a new agreement with a print-on-demand publisher to provide POD services for all of Penguin's imprints. In the past, POD was expensive, but it's become cheaper at the same time that ordinary printing runs are getting smaller and more expensive. So, voila, here's a traditional publisher suddenly looking a lot more like an upstart small press or self-publisher--eliminating expensive infrastructure and bringing down costs so that they can profit even as revenues shrink.

I think another aspect of the business that is going to be drastically altered is acquisitions. I've said this before, but I just don't see why you would bother trying to guess which books are going to be best-sellers when you can just look at the Amazon rankings and see who is already a best-seller.

I'm not the only one thinking this way: If you read the comments on Hodges' scary agency contract story, you'll see that the agent basically mass-solicited indie authors with good sales records. This kind of mass-solicitation isn't inherently unethical, and we'll probably see more of it (hopefully with better deals for authors) because it is so efficient.

So, I think just as newspapers will become news sites, traditional publishers will become much more like the POD/e-book-reliant indies. Just as newspapers will incorporate things like reader blogs, traditional publishers will figure out how to incorporate and monetize self-publishing. And just as the newspapers that don't do these things will vanish, never to be heard from again...yeah.

Proofed!

Trang came back from the proofreader today--oh my God. If you're wondering what the difference is between a good proofreader and a bad proofreader or just a normal reader: My sister, who is intelligent, educated, and literate, but not in any way a publishing professional, read over Trang and noted any typos she found. In the entire book, she found five. This fellow found way more than five--way more than five in each chapter. And I do mean outright errors, not debatable questions of style.

The thing that people often don't appreciate about proofreading is that it's rarely about catching misspelled words--those are relatively easy for readers to catch, but spell-checking software does a good job of catching them, too. I left in a lot of things like "he said replied." Each of those words is spelled correctly, so the eye tends to skip over the problem, but one of them needs to go!

The proofreader also had some good suggestions for the layout--I think I'll input the changes to the e-books first (and do a giveaway on Library Thing) and then tackle modifying the print layout. One thing he suggested was removing the "***" I have to mark breaks within the chapters. I think it makes sense to take them out of the print book, but I wonder if I should leave them in the e-books. Maybe they're not necessary, but I'm a little paranoid about formatting, and the "***" makes it absolutely clear that the breaks are supposed to be there and aren't the hard returns magically multiplying. Then again, maybe it looks amateurish. Hm.

Anyway, I don't know if the guy wants me to put his name here, and he doesn't have a Web site to link to, but I do recommend him. If you e-mail me (use the Contact Me form to the left there), I'll give you his contact info. He charges $25 an hour, and it took him 14 hours to proof Trang, which is 108,000 words. As always when you use a proofreader, you want to give them your final copy--there's no point in having someone proofread something if you're going to, say, completely change the ending. Clean copy will be proofed more quickly and less expensively, so have your friends and writing buddies look it over first before you send it to a pro.

And, as a former freelancer myself, I must say, PAY ON TIME. You get the manuscript back, you look it over to make sure the job's been done, and you immediately write a check and put it in the mail. Nothing says "Thank you!" like timely payment.

Loyalty to a monster

(The kids are here today; no work shall be done.....)

My sister and I were discussing vampire romances the other day: Namely, the Twilight/Stackhouse convention that nothing is more erotic, sensual, sexy, and exciting than making love to a cold, hard, stone statue.

I'm just going to get inappropriate for a moment and say: Bullshit. Take a stone phallus, stick it in your freezer for a day or so, and then jam it into your orifice of choice. Having fun yet?

Anyway, the point I made to her is that for some people, the simple presence of vampires is enough. They love themselves some vampires, so a book with vampires in it is a winner for them, no matter what. Likewise there are quite a number of people who seriously object to sci-fi that has no aliens in it. Aliens = quality, period.

I'm not that way, and I get the feeling this is part of my problem with horror. Right now, I'm 184 pages into Dan Simmons' 766-page horror novel The Terror. Now, I LOVED the Hyperion books, so I have hope that Simmons is going to do something interesting. But at the moment, I've got two problems.

Problem #1:

The book is based on Franklin's lost expedition, an arctic expedition that was lost back in the 1840s. It is believed that every person on the expedition died as a result of:

1. Inadequate supplies

2. Disease

3. Inadequate planning

4. Severe cold

5. Exhaustion

6. Poor command decisions

In The Terror, the men are facing:

1. Inadequate supplies

2. Disease

3. Inadequate planning

4. Severe cold

5. Exhaustion

6. Poor command decisions

7. A HORRIBLE MONSTER

See, here's where the fact that I'm not the kind of reader who is just delighted by the mere presence of a HORRIBLE MONSTER works against me. To my way of thinking, that HORRIBLE MONSTER just isn't bringing anything to the party: Factors 1-6 killed off everyone perfectly well all by themselves. The HORRIBLE MONSTER is just superfluous.

And he is really HORRIBLE, which brings me to....

Problem #2:

OK, you're a HORRIBLE MONSTER in the arctic. You are 12-feet tall, massively strong, with claws as big as Bowie knives. In addition, you can materialize and de-materialize into the ice, and bullets don't hurt you. Oh, and you can control the weather.

You come across two ships stuck in the ice, filled with delicious humanity you want to kill for some obscure reason.

Would it take you months and months, because you insist on picking them off one or two at a time?

I'm serious, HORRIBLE ARCTIC MONSTER, let's talk about your time-management skills. They are stuck inside their ships. They are sitting ducks. With a little effort, you could be inside their ships, slaughtering away. I know this has occurred to you, because you tried to break in through a ship's hull. Helpful hint from your bear friends: Don't try to break the windshield, break the back window. In ship terms that means: There are doors on the deck leading down--go in that way, instead of trying the fortified hull of an ice-breaker.

And if you were in a situation where a HORRIBLE MONSTER kills the lookouts on deck, but never goes into the ship, would you ever go on deck? I know characters in scary movies are constantly leaving places of safety to get killed, but it always annoys me. (I liked 28 Day Later in no small part because when the guy roamed off in an apparently stupid manner, it turned out that he had really interesting reasons to do, and they resonated thematically with the rest of the film. That thrills me so much more than the presence of zombies.)

Eeeeerrrrrghhhh

Yeah, I woke up late today, and everything has just been a mess since then--I don't think I'll manage any writing today, and this weekend looks bad, too. We shall see--the dank and crappy weather we're having may actually open my schedule more, because no one wants to go out in it.

One thing I did realize was that I needed to update that DIY Publishing thing. I mention in it that I wrote it last spring and that the portion on e-books will probably be out of date by November, and guess what? Actually, part of it went out of date in September, but still more should be out of date next year, so I put little Out of Date Alert!s in it.

The upside of all this out-of-dateness is that it seems like people are actually trying to make the process easier for authors, which is good. The downside is that it seems like ePub is going to rule, and ePub is actually the format I'm least adept at. So, I'll have to edjumacate myself a little more....

Progress report

Yup, I started Trials today, and wrote 1,827 words!

GoodThingAri

I got some bad news about a friend last night, so today I'm just sticking with the lighter tasks, among them sorting out what the heck I'm supposed to do now that I'm on Goodreads, Library Thing, and Shelfari.

You can give away review copies of your book on Goodreads and Library Thing. With Goodreads, it has to be a hard copy, which means I have to buy the copy from CreateSpace and pay for postage to send the copies out. If I do, say, 10 copies, that's going to cost more than BookRooster did, with equally little guarantee that I'll get reviews. However, I do think that's a reasonable expense--it's always the case that a lot of review copies get sent out, and while 90% end up doing nothing for you, the remaining 10% can do an awful lot.

With Library Thing you do e-books, so there's basically no cost to you. As a result, instead of people offering up, say, 5 or 10 copies of their book, they offer up 1,000 or 2,000 copies! I'm suddenly understanding why people would join that site--I guess as an author you just cross your fingers and hope that your entire potential audience isn't already on Library Thing!

Anyway, I think both giveaways are worth doing, although I'd rather wait until the proofreader gets Trang back to me, which should be soon.

It's easy to overestimate your own importance

I know, again with the Passive Voice, but it's a great blog! And he has a really good post today that features Mike Shatzkin saying, "Hey, most self-pubbed authors won't go the DIY route," and Passive Guy saying, "Oh yes they will."

Given my experience in the encyclopedia industry, I have to agree with PG. We certainly liked to think that what we did was Very Important indeed, but consumers decided that it was not nearly so important as being to access similar information for free.

And I have another example to point to: Amanda Hocking. I finally read My Blood Approves (the library had a hard copy, howzabout that). I thought the book was OK, but bear in mind that romance is really not my thing--that said, her female lead was relatively free of self-loathing.

From a production standpoint, however, the book was bad. I found several errors in there that you simply wouldn't see in a traditionally-published book, even in the sort of really cheap mass-market paperback that are notorious for typos. The thing that drove me crazy was that frequently the wrong word appeared--a word that sounded like the word Hocking meant, but wasn't it. That's a terrible mistake for an editor or proofreader to let through, because it makes your author look stupid and ignorant. (I'm not shocked that one of her main reasons for signing with a traditional publisher was to get decent copy editing!)

So, have those kind of below-par production values hurt Hocking's sales? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA-HAHAHA-Aha. Ha. Oh, you know that was joke, right? The same errors that made me want to hunt down the people she hired and punch them in the nose mattered not at all to the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people who bought her books. For 99 cents, people will sort through slush. For 99 cents, they'll tolerate typos and errors (especially if the $17 books are no better). It's just 99 cents, fer Christ's sake!

Stressed for success

I was thinking of yesterday's post, and wondering why it is that articles on 30 Ways To Market Your Novel! or 47 Ways To Maximize Twitter!! or 167 Ways To Annoy People on Goodreads!!! or Are You Sabotaging Your Sales?--Yes, You Are, You Moron!!!! always stress me out so much.

Much of it I can dismiss, because the people ensuring you that you MUST do X or Y and if you think it's not important, it's super-important, you idiot, and you're screwing it up, badly, are usually selling services. That kind of thing reminds me of one time I went in to get a facial, and the facialist walked in, informed me I was hideously ugly (not in so many words, but the import was clear), and then tried to sell me a bunch of expensive services in order to protect small children and other innocents from the horror that was my face. Need I mention that she looked exactly like a frog? Need I mention that I was propositioned by a complete stranger on my way to the salon, so clearly I was doing OK in the looks department beforehand?

But some of it is coming from people who actually love to do this sort of thing, and do a whole bunch of it, and I don't, and it makes me feel stressed and guilty. The irony is that, if I wanted to be commercially successful, I would have written a commercial book. One of the reasons I started writing novels was that I was tired of always having to write to various rigid commercial standards--at some point, you're not so poor anymore, and you weary of having to constantly contort your writing to match the market (which typically wants stuff that's "good enough," but not stuff that's actually good).

On the other hand, I do want Trang to, you know, be appreciated--for it to find an audience. And I think that's why this stuff stresses me out: I believe in the book, and I don't want it to fail because of something I did or didn't do. I think way too many things get compared to having a child, but there is that element of wanting what is best for this thing and feeling obligated to make that happen that is somewhat parental.

Still, when I take a step away and get some perspective, I think--is this crap actually going to help? Seriously? I have a hard time believing that Trang will succeed or fail (whatever either of those terms actually mean for me) based on whether or not I write the headers of my blog posts as questions.

And I calm down by thinking of the advice that comes from long-time writers, which boils down to:

1. Be patient.

2. Keep writing.

Ahhhhhh...much better....