James’s Comments (group member since Jun 24, 2012)

James’s comments from the Q&A with James Maxey group.

You know, it's funny you should ask. I just finished the last chapter of Witchbreaker on Saturday. This was my second draft of the novel, but the first time I actually wrote the ending. I confess, I didn't write the ending the first time because I wasn't sure how to do it.

Without revealing spoilers, my final chapter is a big fight involving TWENTY-ONE named characters with dialogue. This is similar to the end of my novel Dragonseed, where I have two big set piece battles, the fight against the Goddess in Atlantis and the fight against Vulpine at Dragonforge. But, in these novels, I was writing from multiple POV's, so I was able to jump around from character to character to keep the action flowing. In Witchbreaker, I have one POV character, Sorrow, who has to directly witness the actions of all the various cast members.

Getting the sequencing right so that everybody gets to say their lines while at the same time keeping the action moving forward at break-neck speed (since they are locked in mortal combat with a primal dragon) is a hyper-complicated logic puzzle. It becomes very easy to plan yourself into paralysis in order to try to write it right.

So, here's my trick: I write it wrong.

I just turn off my filters, accept that my first pass at solving the problem is going to fail, and start typing. Soon enough, everything I need to put into the big scene is out of my head and onto the page. After that, I can edit and revise. Advance readers can tell me what's confusing them or what they think is really cool. By the second draft, it's coherent. By the third draft, everything is in it's place, and then all that's left are polishing drafts to fix all the typos and artifacts created by my initial sloppiness.

Not everyone works this way. I know writers who outline every important event before they sit down to right, and when they finally sit down, they get it in one draft.

Alas, I have to work with the brains I got, and my brain doesn't work that way. I have to shake out all the jigsaw pieces of plot onto the mental table so that I can see how everything fits together.

Your last question, by the way, is kind of a good motto to type out and tape to your monitor: Forward and through. Just keep momentum, stay loose, start typing, and get out on the other side. Writing a bad chapter is never fatal to a novel. Not writing a chapter because you're stuck, however, can be the kiss of death.

As for the first half of your question, I'm happy to be back in bookstores, of course. And, two years ago, I was worried that I might not find a publisher for Greatshadow, since the last book in my Bitterwood series had a big drop in sales. (My publisher was in the process of being sold to new owners and when Dragonseed came out, zero promotion was done. They didn't even mention it on their website.)

Today, the advent of ebooks and the ease of self publishing has completely changed my possible career path. I was able to write a book like Burn Baby Burn and publish it myself purely because I loved the project, not because I had to think in terms of what a publisher was willing to buy. Burn Baby Burn hasn't been on the market for a full year, but if sales trends hold in one year I'll have made a comparable amount to an advance from a traditional publisher. And then, the book will keep selling, since I never have to worry about an ebook going out of print, or failing to earn out an advance. It's too early to state this with confidence, but my hunch is that income over the course of five years is going to be much better for a self pubbed ebook with modest sales than it would be from a traditionally published genre paperback from a mid-list author like myself.

I do worry, of course, about losing the very large pool of readers who will never switch to ebooks. But, there are probably some people in the world who never updated from vinyl records. And, I do intend to have my agent continue to pitch by novels to publishers. I've never had a book come out as a hardcover, and if I found a publisher willing to bump me up to that format, I'd probably go with the deal since it's been a long term career goal of mine.

Of course, we live in extremely turbulent times in the publishing industry, so it's difficult to imagine what the book business is going to look like in even ten years. It's possible that publishers will improve terms for writers in order to keep them from jumping into ebook self-publishing. Or, Amazon could change their currently generous royalty rates. But, for the next three books I plan to write, I can do so with the confidence that I will always have a path open to place the work before readers.

That is an excellent question. Other ghosts/immaterial men in my books are Ap in Burn Baby Burn (who has a ghost mode among his many powers), Witness in my short story Where Their Worm Dieth Not, and Walker, a ghostly character in Witchbreaker.

And, of course, Vendevorex and Jandra in my Bitterwood novels rely heavily on the power of invisibility.

As a purely practical matter, an immaterial character serves me well as a storyteller since they get to witness events that would kill an ordinary observer, like Stagger being caught in Greatshadow's flames. On a symbolic level, I think my invisible, immaterial men stand in for the everyman who is often swept up in events beyond his power to shape. When I placed Nobody in the center of the Arab/Israeli conflict in Jerusalem, his sense of helplessness reflects what I suspect is a common reaction to such tragedies: What can I do? How can I possibly make things better? In the face of such tragedy, am I truly nobody?

On a personal/psychological level, I lived a great deal of my life feeling a bit like a ghost trapped ever so slightly out of reality. I grew up in a fundamentalist church, but by my teens I'd become an atheist. I didn't tell anyone; I felt like I couldn't tell anyone. It would have caused my family great pain, and, vice versa, I worried about being shunned and isolated. So, for several years I withdrew into myself. I kept my nose in books every waking moment, either reading or writing or drawing. My body continued to go through the motions of being the person others thought I was. I went to church, to school, and to family gatherings, but my true self was completely unseen, hidden behind my mask of shyness and bookishness.

I've become much more comfortable in my own skin as an adult, but it doesn't take much for me to slip back into the role of detatched observer, with the sensation that I'm watching my life from a distance rather than being emersed within it. How common this feeling is for other people I can only guess. But, I suspect it may not be that rare, which may explain why so many readers do connect with my ghost men.

The Romer family of Wanderers play a major role in Witcbreaker, where we learn more of the back story of the pirate wars. I will also say that Witchbreaker ends with the Romers well positioned to play an important role in the 4th book as well.

I doubt I'll be writing many short stories any time soon. The second I turn in Witchbreaker, I have three novels competeting for my immediate attention. There's the fourth Dragon Apocalypse book, tentatively titled Soulless, another superhero novel in the Nobody universe titled Covenant, and an as yet untitled steampunk novel that I'm really excited about. Between these three projects, my writing world is pre-booked for at least the next year.

I'm really proud of the short stories I've written to date, but short stories take a disproportionate amount of time in comparison to a novel. A 5000 word short story can take me several weeks of work, while a 5000 word chapter of novel is often a one or two day project. If I get an idea that absolutely must be told as a short story, I hope I'd write it, but for the foreseeable future, it'a nothing but novels.

Currently on the last chapter of the second draft of Witchbreaker. It's been a long, weird trip. Curiously, I've made it to the last chapter without killing a major character... yet. It just feels strange.

I know many of my biggest plot turns when I sit down to start a novel, but often don't have much idea of the specifics of how I'm going to get my characters to them. For instance, in Greatshadow, I knew the climax of the book would have to take place in the spirit realm, but I really had no specific idea of how I was going to have my characters make the crossing. But, the funny thing is, if I just sit down and right and trust my imagination, something always pops up at the right moment that gets me where I want to go. A lot of my writing is pure improv, with the advantage that, if it doesn't work the first time, I get a second draft.

My plotting often creates my characters. In my previous Bitterwood series, I'd ended the first novel with a religous fanatic named Ragnar going off with his followers vowing never to make peace with dragons. In the next book, I knew that for Ragnar to be an effective rebel, he needed to team up with someone who was an excellent war engineer, someone who could design weapons and handle the logistics of feeding and moving an army. The plot led me to create the character of Burke the Machinist, who was the brains behind Ragnar's fiery, rabble-rousing leadership. But, after the plot led me to create Burke, Burke wound up creating the plot. I had my big ideas of what Ragnar wanted to do with his army, and as Burke came to life he kept thinking of smarter solutions than what I'd originally planned. By the third book, Burke has become so important to the plot that he wound up on the original cover.

I very seldom start with a character and no plot. But, I also seldom have plots that survive unchanged by the characters. One key is to just keep writing and see who shows up. When I started Greatshadow, I never intended for Aurora to be a major character. In fact, Bigsby the fishmonger from chapter three was going to be going along on the dragon hunt, as was Relic's golem, Patch. Then I started writing the fight between Patch and Infidel and realized there was no way she was going to just shake hands and play nice after he'd swatted her around for a few pages, and that the only proper fate was to have him beaten to death with his own dismembered limbs.

This left an opening in the cast for another big muscle bound character. Aurora was mainly in the book to explain the lore surrounding the Jagged Heart, but the next thing I knew she was along for the hunt and suddenly Infidel's best friend. When characters volunteer like this, it makes my job a lot easier.

I will say that, if primal dragons can die, it must follow that they can be born. Just because Verdant, the primal dragon of forests was killed long ago doesn't mean that the elemental power of the forests has vanished, and it's still possible that some dragon--or perhaps some other intelligent being--might claim it. By the end of Hush, there may be a few job openings for elemental beings. By the end of Witchbreaker, the line-up of primal powers will be significantly different than it was from where Greatshadow began. Whether that's a positive development or a negative development for humanity we'll have to see.

A forum to discuss tips and tricks I've learned about writing novels. Mysteries of the writing life deobfuscated!

What's next? Will we see Stagger and Infidel again? Just how many primal dragons are there? Any questions about the future of the series are welcome.

HUSH has a very different take on the world than most of my previous novels. I tried to write my Bitterwood series following science fiction rules, placing a lot of emphasis on making things seem realistic. With Hush, I've just jumped straight out of reality an into the "abstract realms," where stories shape the physics. The night sky is an ocean, and the stars are specs of ice. The sun is an obsessive compulsive dragon with a fetish for organizing time. Entropy can physically manifest as a rotting snake the size of an island and chase our heroes across the Sea of Wine.

Reality is under no obligation to make sense. Myths must follow a certain gut-level logic. But, in this era of human history, is there still a place for mythical thinking?

Let's face it: I spend a lot of time in Greatshadow and Hush talking about how hot Infidel is. Part of this flows from the fact that Stagger is the narrator, and he's head over heels in love. There's an element of boasting to his descriptions. I also approached Infidel's sexuality with a bit of a humorous nod toward exagerated female portrayals common in sword and sorcery art. (For the record, I understand the impracticalitys of chain-mail bikinis.) That said, I have written a book in which a hot blonde virgin repeatedly gets her clothes shredded in battle after battle, providing me with opportunities to describe her pubic hair.* I know it's a fantasy novel, but maybe that's a bit more fantasy than people are asking for.

What do you think? Is Infidel sexualized to the point that it becomes offensive? Or does she stand up enough as a character that she transcends the sexual stereotypes?

*I will note that I also describe Stagger's granfathers pubic hair, and no one has accused me of oversexualizing him!