Writing | Periscope Depth

From the Blog

Dec

feel like a touch, a touch too much

Posted by Perich at 7:06 am

Greetings, Carnival of the Indies visitors! You can check out what the finished product looks like by visiting its Amazon page or continuing to read. And definitely check out the other great articles featured in this month’s Carnival as well.

(Part 2 of my continuing series on the new novel, leading up to the big announcement on Friday)

The great part about self-publishing is you get to take responsibility over decisions traditionally left to a big publisher: editing, layout, cover design, etc. As it turns out, that’s also the daunting part. None of us got into this gig because we love obsessing over bleed lines.

When it came time to design the cover, I turned to Ryan Sawyer, who I’d worked with before in promoting Discount Shakespeare. He’d done up some catchy, colorful postcards that I really liked. We had a good relationship: friendly enough that we both felt compelled to give each other our best work and feedback, but not so friendly that we’d have a hard time asking for invoices or deadlines¹.

Having worked in the ad industry for years, I knew the frustration of dealing with vague client feedback (“I like it, but can you make it … pop a bit more?”). So now that I was a client, the first thing I did was to create as specific a list of guidelines as I could for my book cover. This was tough for me, as I knew the motif that I was going for – paperback thriller cover – but not the specific vision.

I told Ryan the following:

+ Generally dark, muted colors: blacks, nighttime blues, blood reds, etc.

+ Title in block letters, author’s name in smaller letters beneath

+ The novel is about a female reporter investigating a disappearance. So a female silhouette in an action pose (running, or looking over her shoulder, etc) would work. Just an idea; not at all required.

+ Also just an idea: city skyline (doesn’t have to be of Boston, though novel is set there), lake cabin surrounded by trees (critical portions of the novel take place at Lake Winnipesaukee), suburban house with front door ajar (double homicide takes place here). If any of these are used, a color filter or wash should be applied (see first bullet).

+ Also, the female protagonist is a photographer, so if any of the above is captured through a camera lens / reticule, that’s fine too. Again, just an idea, not at all required.

+ The general appearance I want is “would not look out of place in an airport bookstore.”

I also gave him a list of covers as sources of inspiration: P.J. Alderman’s A Killing Tide, Michael Connelly’s The Black Ice, Lee Child’s Second Son, Tess Gerritsen’s Harvest.

After a few days, Ryan came back with the following (click for larger version):

click for larger version

Of these, I thought the first had potential. I really liked the second, but told Ryan it was a little grittier than I had in mind. The third seemed like something I was sure I’d seen before. Ryan was almost apologizing as he sent it, so we discarded that one early on.

Over the next 4 weeks, we went back and forth on several variations of #1, Ryan actually going so far as to track down a real Glock to photograph. I liked them all, but they looked a little static. Nothing about them commanded attention.

And I couldn’t stop thinking about the second version.

By the time I had the penultimate draft of Too Close to Miss ready, I was already thinking about the next book. So every thought I had about the production process was colored by how I would market a series². And the more I thought about design #2, the more I thought it would work in a series. The same bold title up top. The same test pattern background, but with different color bars. And some different element of violence as a garnish – a bloodstain, a burn mark, a jagged tear.

What turned me off of design #2 initially was that Ryan, craftsman that he is, had made the blood spatter frighteningly realistic. It had texture. If I saw someone lying asleep on the couch with that book on their chest, my reaction would be, oh shit, what happened? So I asked him to tone the blood spatter down, putting it behind the title. We also did some back and forth on the width of the maroon bar at the bottom that had my name in it, as well as fonts and sizes.

The final result:

The process of turning a book from manuscript to novel had become a bit of a slog. But seeing that got my heart racing. That’s a professional cover. If this were a paperback book, that would jump out on the shelf. I felt proud to have that cover introducing my work³.

If you want to check out the finished product, you can download TOO CLOSE TO MISS off of Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes. Only $0.99 for a limited time!

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1 By which I mean: Sylvia is also a graphic designer, but I would never ask her to design a cover for me, largely because I don’t want to subject our relationship to my perfectionism. “I’d love to get a drink, sweetie, but shouldn’t you be experimenting with font sizes? Isn’t that a better use of your time?”

2. For instance, the next two books in the series are already titled. Each of the titles is four words. Try and guess what the first and third words are.

3. What I’m saying is, hire Ryan Sawyer to design your book covers.

Nov

make you work hard, make you spend hard

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

(Part 1 in a series of posts promoting my new novel)

One of the surest sparks to creativity is to take a familiar situation, reverse some element, and see if you can still make it work.

A few years back, I was reading a lot of thrillers for inspiration – Harlan Coben, Lee Child, Joseph Finder, etc. I’ve always been a sucker for revenge stories, where a man loses everything he loves and goes on a rampage until he drops. The husband who wakes up in the hospital after his wife and son are murdered; a genre cliche. But it works for me almost every time. A revenge flick has to be really bad (Edge of Darkness, the later Steven Seagals) to turn me off. The only good thing about Taken is that Liam Neeson speech from the trailer, and I’ll still sit through the whole thing.

Boring. More knife fights.

I was riding the Red Line home – the moment’s that distinct – when I started turning the notion over in my head. What can we change about that? We can invert the gender (the wife wakes up after her husband has been killed) but there’s no real hook there, aside from the novelty. But what if it’s the same scenario with someone outside of the family avenging the loss? The father? The ex-boyfriend?

What if a man loses his wife and son in a brutal attack, and the first person he sees at his bedside is his mistress? And what if she’s the hero?

His eyes fluttered. They opened once, then a second time. He looked around the room, pupils wide. I didn’t know what his last memory was, but to go from that to a hospital room at night must have thrown him.

I waited a few seconds before speaking. “Daniel,” I said.

He blinked. “Mara.” His voice was hollow through the oxygen mask.

“Danny.” My throat hurt from the effort of holding back tears. [...] He was okay. He would be okay. I could breathe again.

He smiled, curling his fingers into my palm. Then the smile vanished.

“Mara,” he said, “do … do they know?”

I sighed. Of course that’s his first question. “No. They don’t know about us.”

From that seed grew the novel that became Too Close to Miss. Once I had that idea in mind – a woman who was edgy enough to sleep with a married man, but noble enough to avenge the death of his wife – the character grew up from there. I fleshed out my protagonist, Mara Cunningham, by degrees: talks out of turn, can handle herself in a fight, solves puzzles with flashes of insight. I invented the kind of person I needed to tell the story I wanted.

More to come …

Nov

maybe I’m just like my mother; she’s never satisfied

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Gina Damico has an entertaining post comparing the five stages of the editing process to the Kubler-Ross stages of grief. It’s funny stuff, and it’s doubtless fresh in her mind since she just wrapped up galley proofs for her debut novel, Croak. So I’d trust her if I were you.

I’ve found similar reactions in editing Too Close to Miss, only it’s a repeated process. I wrote a first draft that was all right. I got some initial feedback and launched into rewrites. I set it aside, came back to it several months later, and revised a bunch more. I got feedback from my beta readers and wrote a few more chapters. Then I revised those. Then I got an editor, got her feedback, and made some revisions based on that. Each time, the same cycle of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

The process is grueling and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone who wasn’t making something they loved. But getting beat down so many times taught me something important: how to tell when your novel is ready.

If someone comes up to you and starts raving about their book, about how they’re so certain that they have an original story and a compelling voice, and how the characters are so real and yet entertaining, and the plot keeps the reader hooked from page one, and how the door’s left open not just for two sequels but for three prequels, and on and on … I would bet they’re not ready.

I say this not out of some deep knowledge of writing or publishing – I have neither – but based on my own personal experience. I was most enthusiastic about Too Close to Miss back when I finished my first draft. It reeked of newness and possibility. It also reeked of an undeveloped protagonist, an improbable series of plot twists and a hazy grounding in the legal devices that drove the story. It wasn’t saleable. I just didn’t know it yet.

On the other hand, if someone mentions their book with frazzled resignation, their eyes heavy from lack of sleep, hitting SEND with a prayer that please, please, just let the editor take this one; let me be done with it so I can move on with my life, so I can discharge this obsession I somehow gave myself and rejoin the waking world … if the best they can muster is, “it’s in its fifth draft, we’ll see,” then the novel is probably ready. Maybe one more polish.

The beauty of the legacy publishing model is the wealth of gatekeepers to ensure that you get to that necessary state of fatigue, that you pick your beaten manuscript up off the mat as many times as you have to in order to win the bout. If you self-publish, as I’m about to, you don’t have that gauntlet. You could fling your crappy first draft on the Internet, like a prelate burying plague victims, and avoid any sort of criticism whatsoever.

But if self-publishing is going to hold its own against the legacy model, authors need to produce work of the same quality. So instead of someone else telling you that your novel is ready, you need to tell yourself. And the way to tell yourself is by asking if you’re sick of it yet. If you are, then that’s a good sign.

Nov

when you say good-bye and walk on by

Posted by Perich at 11:38 am

Hardcore video gamers refer to a stack of games they’ve purchased but never played as their “pile of shame.” I think it’s a little silly as a term of art – what’s there to be ashamed of? – but I understand the origin. You recognize the disconnect between what you acquire and what you consume.

I don’t buy a lot of video games. I never buy new, unless the title’s deeply discounted, and I don’t play enough video games to need a stream of new distractions. But the “pile of shame” resonates with me at least a little.

My pile of shame: notebooks.

I love notebooks. I love clean white pages and sturdy covers. As a child, the desk in my bedroom was filled with notebooks full of story ideas, RPG characters, business plans simple enough for a 13-year-old and the like. I filled them up, then saved them until they yellowed. And I always had a notebook on me wherever I went^*.

My one quirk with notebooks is organizing them. Every notebook needs a purpose. This one is game ideas; this one is fictional brainstorming; this one can be random field notes but nothing I intend to save for the long term. Nothing frustrated me more than deciding this would be my Shadowrun notebook, only to lose interest in Shadowrun three months later. What do I do with all these empty pages? I can’t just repurpose a notebook. But I couldn’t just tear the front pages out; I might need them later! So into the desk drawer it went.

(Fussing over categorization is one reason I love tag-based filing systems, like delicious.com, more than folder-based hierarchies. With tags there are no “wrong” classifications. It’s virtual n-dimensional space; why treat it like a card catalog?)

Even with a laptop, a desktop and all the free cloud storage I can take advantage of, I still use notebooks. I’ve got the Moleskine knockoff in my left front pocket. I picked up a hand-stitched leather journal on Temple Street in Hong Kong. I’ve got another hand-stitched leather journal that’s a gift from a few years back; I’d use it more often, but I’ve already filled some of the pages and it’s apparently locked into a development cycle. I’ve got branded notebooks that I’ve taken from prior jobs or received as marketing schwag. I’ve got the cheap blue notebook with the We Are Scientists sticker that has achieved critical mass to be my official “writing notebook.” And I have at least a dozen notebooks in various stages of completion that I will probably never use again.

And it doesn’t stop! Jon Walton linked me to Scout Books the other day and I was fascinated. Not only do I want to try them out, I want to use them to print my own books as well. “How hard is it to learn Adobe Illustrator?” I asked Sylvia. “Like, Photoshop hard or HTML hard?”

If I’m learning anything – and it’s a slow, reluctant process – it’s that the tools are the least important part of the process. Writing your ideas down somewhere matters more than where you write them. So long as an obsession with format doesn’t get in the way of production, you’re doing all right.

Gamers only label their unopened discs a “pile of shame” if they plan to work on it: sifting through the shrink wrap, resolving to buy no new games until they’ve played all the old ones. This might be good for me. So I’m attacking my own pile of shame: no new notebooks until I’ve used up all the old ones. This will keep me from fussing over trivial details or spending money on blank paper when I should be doing important stuff: actually writing.

Of course, if I got a Moleskine as a Christmas gift I wouldn’t turn it down. Just saying.

_________________
* I remember a road trip with the family to Deep Creek in MD where I asked my mom if I could get a steno pad the next time we stopped near a pharmacy. My mother’s reaction was genuine open-mouthed shock that I didn’t already have a notebook with me.

Nov

the floods is threatening my very life today

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

A few years ago, Joel linked to a New York Times article on a famous experiment by Dr. Stanley Milgram. And no, not the one you’re thinking of:

Quickly, however, the focus turned to the experimenters themselves. The seemingly simple assignment proved to be extremely difficult, even traumatic, for the students to carry out.

“It’s something you can’t really understand unless you’ve been there,” said Dr. David Carraher, 55, now a senior scientist at a nonprofit group in Cambridge, Mass.

Dr. Kathryn Krogh, 58, a clinical psychologist in Arlington, Va., was more blunt: “I was afraid I was going to throw up.”

More than three decades later, the memories are still surprisingly vivid, testimony perhaps to the trauma of their experience …

The experiment? Boarding a crowded subway train in Manhattan and asking someone to give up a seat.

This article struck me so hard that I still remember it more than seven years later. Just reading about the process – a healthy man asking a stranger for a seat – makes my pulse race. I suspect if I had to actually carry it out, I’d have a reaction similar to Milgram’s: “The words seemed lodged in my trachea and would simply not emerge.”

This is probably why I have such a hard time asking for help.

I attended a talk given by Barry Eisler last week. After the Q&A, people circled around him, eager to talk self-publishing. One education writer lamented his experience with a publisher: feuding over the title, changing the cover. Eisler sympathized. The writer concluded by mentioning another book of his and giving Eisler his card.

I felt that same quickening of nerves that I described above – and I wasn’t the one talking! I was standing six feet away. But just seeing someone lay out their need like that was like watching surgery. And he wasn’t even asking explicitly for help! Not an introduction, or a recommendation, or even mentioning his book on a blog. Just making a connection. That alone terrified me.

But the odds that Eisler will remember that guy are greater than the odds that he’ll remember me. So the educational writer made the smarter play.

Why does asking for help bother me so much? Why does it bother anyone? Because it’s an admission of lower status. People consider Chinese culture exotic because of its obsession with “face”, but the same jockeying for position goes on in Western society. Passing someone on a narrow stairway, inviting someone to your house, getting a friend to pay back a loan: there are a thousand subconscious calculations about status that go on there.

The problem: if I want to succeed as a writer, I need help.

The good news, as anyone who knows me can tell you, is that I’m not a complete shut-in. I’ve asked people for help in the past. And it’s worked, too! Not always, but often enough that I’m making progress, both as a writer and as a person capable of asking for help.

When I do get over myself and put my hand out, it’s usually because I’ve done one of the following:

Own up to your lower status. The only thing worse than being a six is pretending you’re a ten. Acknowledge that, in this situation, you’re at the feet of a more experienced voice. I owned up to my need for guidance when I asked Tess Gerritsen for advice on my unfinished novel (and you think Gerritsen doesn’t get this question a thousand times a year?). And it netted me some useful advice.
Visualize the end, not the means. David Lieberman pointed out this behavioral quirk: we break down things we love into a few steps and things we hate into a lot of steps. Going shopping can be “drive to the mall, find what I want, bring it home,” or it can be, “go to the mall, fight over parking, try on a million things, find the cheapest one, get my friend’s opinion, etc,” depending on how much you like shopping. So, as much as I hate asking for advice, I try not to focus on the asking process. Instead, I focus on the expected result. That pleasant “Eureka” sensation I’ll get when they say the one thing that clears the fog^*. Focus on the finish line instead of the process. No one runs marathons because they like waking up at 4:00 AM and waiting at a registration table.
Practice the pitch. People get nervous about asking for help because they feel like it’s an imposition. Well, they’re not wrong. It is an imposition! Time is precious. So if you’re going to impose on someone’s time, ask in a graceful way. Rehearse the approach if you can. Work on an elevator pitch for your idea so you’re not fumbling and improvising. Buy a book on business writing: they’re easy to find, and they always have sections on how to write a request for help. Which dovetails into …
Be willing to pay. I think this is cheating, because paying for help isn’t the same as asking for it. There’s probably some good sociology on how transitioning to a currency economy atrophied our race’s ability to ask for help^**. But real effort costs money. And if you get the opportunity to work with an expert and have to pay for the privilege, don’t dismiss it out of hand. Money spent on access isn’t wasted.

To that last point: I signed up for Brazen Careerist’s boot camp on building your blog, hosted by founder Penelope Trunk. The first day’s webinar was on generating great content, the key to creating a successful blog. Trunk’s most important piece of advice: “be vulnerable.” A compelling blog should be about what you’re learning, which means showing the world where you’re vulnerable. Not mopey or helpless or overly confessional, because that shit’s boring. But people like to read stories about growth, because everyone’s trying to grow^***.

Being vulnerable. Admitting to lower status. Asking for help. Well, here goes.

_________________
* Or, if they don’t have anything useful to say, the smug sense of superiority I’ll feel afterward. “Ha! They think they’re so great …”

** Not that that’s an argument for going back to barter, mind.

*** And yes, this post is an attempt to follow through on that tip, along with others she gave. Clever of you to notice. Put your hand down; you’re already getting an A.

Nov

mean old levee, taught me to weep and moan

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Went to a great talk by Barry Eisler on Thursday, hosted by Grub Street at the Park Plaza Hotel. Eisler’s a great speaker: not just fun and engaging, but also immensely intelligent on whatever subject comes up. He was a little ragged from having talked at two earlier events that day, but I would still rather listen to him than most other speakers.

Eisler talked about selling his first book, Rain Fall, and the journey he took to get there. “We tend to look at published authors as a breed apart,” he said, “as if they were born published.” He described the hard work, the repeated revisions and the rejections he went through (50 agents turned it down). But eventually it was sold, it succeeded and it blossomed into the seven-book John Rain series that’s popular today.

It’s the seventh book in that series, The Detachment, that made recent headlines. Eisler first shocked the publishing world by walking away from a $500,000 contract with St. Martin’s Press, electing to self-publish electronically because he figured (accurately) that he could make more money that way. This got Amazon’s attention. Amazon had recently set up its own publishing imprint, Thomas & Mercer, and pitched Eisler a “hybrid deal”: generous electronic royalties, control over editorial and design decisions, and the strength of Amazon’s marketing platform. He accepted. Both decisions drew fire: the former from legacy publishers and the writers attached to them, the latter from independent retailers and self-publishers.

Eisler spoke about the above process with gentle humor and clear reasoning. “You can’t criticize someone’s tactics without understanding their objectives,” he said. He explained that Amazon’s terms were still vastly superior to anything he could get with a legacy publisher^*. That, plus the marketing weight that Amazon can throw behind a flagship author, gave him an expectation of selling more copies and making more money. And it’s paid off: his sales of The Detachment have not only “blown away” sales of his other work, they’ve also lifted his previous titles as well.

The paper edition of The Detachment just came out, but Eisler made clear that he thinks the future is in digital. “In a digital world, [legacy publishers and self-published authors] are on an absolutely level playing field with distribution,” he said. No longer is the self-published author driving from one small bookstore to another with a station wagon full of books. Of course, marketing is now an issue, but that’s a challenge for all first-time authors. And the way the digital field is growing, it seems to make sense to focus your efforts there. “I don’t care if I sell another paper book in my life,” Eisler said, and he wasn’t bluffing.

Eisler had one throwaway comment at the beginning of his discussion. “Craft used to get discussed a lot more,” he said, referring to the writer’s conventions he’s hit up over the last couple of years. Ever since the explosion of electronic publishing, however, all anyone wants to talk about is business. That’s entirely understandable. Two years ago, self-publishing was a joke in the industry (literally; I attended a conference where an agent laughed it off); today, electronic books outsell paper books and Amazon offers 4X royalties that a legacy publisher can for self-published authors of Kindle titles. An industry that’s centuries old is becoming unrecognizable and everyone wants to get a handle on it. Hopefully, though, things will settle down soon and writers can get back to worrying about the craft. (Although they shouldn’t stop worrying about craft until then)

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* Though he wouldn’t exactly say what they were. Amazon asked him to keep the exact terms of his deal secret. Eisler said he thinks it would be better for the industry if he could talk about it, but he understands that Amazon doesn’t want every new writer it brings in coming to the negotiating table armed with that kind of knowledge.

That said, we know it’s better than the 17.5% of retail price that a traditional publisher will offer as a royalty on an ebook. And we can figure it’s not as good as the 70% he could get if he published it on Amazon on his own. So maybe 50%? 60%? He’s been circumspect about it whenever the subject comes up, and if there’s one guy you can trust to keep a secret, it’s a former employee of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations.

Nov

picking up the pieces of love

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Writing continues apace. I knock off just over 1000 words a day, five days a week, which means I’ll probably finish this first draft about 15 weeks after I started. I may take a day to just plow through it and add another 10,000 words to the pile, but that seems unlikely and unnecessary.

By the way, my thanks to the folks who recommended Scrivener to me: it’s a phenomenal piece of word-processing software. Right now all I use it for is full-screen writing and tacking up notes on a virtual corkboard. But the full-screen writing is excellent, easily allowing me to resize and realign my display for ease of reading. And even if I’m not taking advantage of every feature of the notes, it’s still a huge help to have them in the same file as my draft. I’ll definitely be buying it when the trial expires in just under three weeks. Scrivener charges $45 for a working copy; Microsoft charges three times as much for Office, which works sort of well. You figure it out.

I feel a little self-conscious about not using every feature available in Scrivener. It stems from my desire to pass myself off as a superuser – “oh look, did you know about this?” But it also originates from the deep seated fear that I’m wasting time on something. If I can avoid going to a meeting, or catch a train just before it leaves, or drop something off in my kitchen while crossing my apartment without having to abruptly double back, I’m operating with efficiency. I feel like time is under my control for a bit. Of course, this isn’t true. But if there’s an easy way to get a notecard in Scrivener to automatically update if certain text changes, I swear I could just kill a man.

Nov

it’s all right, darling; I can think of nothing better

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Given that I’ve sold exactly zero books in my life to date, it’s a little presumptuous of me to give out writing advice^*. But the writing process is a long one with many distinct stages. So I took a quick inventory of those parts of writing that I have a handle on:

* Writing first drafts.
* Taking bids for a cover.
* Attending writing workshops.
* Blogging about writing.

So let’s take that first one, anyway.

The novel I’ll be trying to sell in a month or so isn’t my first one. It’s probably my fourth. I say “probably” because I have a hard time nailing an exact count. Every time I make a mental catalog of my past efforts, I forget some early project that I tacked together years ago. And even though this is my fourth, I wrote two others before revisiting this one and making some serious rewrites. So maybe it’s my sixth. I don’t know.

If you’ve read any sort of writing advice – Stephen King, Anne Lamott, any of them – you’ve come across the guideline that your first draft is going to suck. It will be full of poor words, bad sentences and dumb characters. It’s okay, the experts say. Keep going. Conventional wisdom holds that the novel doesn’t really emerge until at least the second draft, and maybe even later.

Let me tell you: that is exactly true.

The only fault I can find with that advice is that it’s not very evocative. You can see Stephen King write, “Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.” (On Writing) And that’s an odd enough image to be clear. But that doesn’t tell you much about what it feels like to write a first draft.

Ira Glass touches closer to the subject:

And I urge you to watch that video again, even if you’ve seen it before, because Ira puts it better than almost anyone else. But while he’s great at giving voice to the feeling, he doesn’t describe the process. He doesn’t tell you what it’s like to create crap.

So let me give it a shot:

It’s dark out when the alarm goes off. You roll into a seated posture and slap the alarm before you’re fully conscious. You wrap yourself in a bathrobe, gnaw on a breakfast bar and fire up the computer. You set a timer for forty-five minutes because you made a deal with yourself, write every weekday for forty-five minutes before you go to work, before you get dressed for work, before you take a shower, every weekday, every day that you go to the office, no exceptions, and you get to call yourself a writer, and because it’s a deal with yourself, not with your girlfriend or your supportive pals or your writing group or your coworkers, it’s a deal you can not break and forgive yourself.

Your head jerks forward. You rub at your chin to keep yourself awake and fire up Word. You page down or search through to find where you finished yesterday. You stopped mid-sentence, because that’s the discipline. What were you thinking? You had something really clever in mind, something really powerful and moving. Whatever it is, it’s gone now. You look through your notes – scraps of paper from notebooks you stole from work or got at conferences as dealer schwag – but find only hints.

Time’s wasting. You feel cold. You pull the bathrobe tight, fire up the timer and start typing.

The words plop out of you like chunks. You struggle with dialogue. You struggle with description, sweat beading under your armpits as you look for the right way to depict a man passing an open elevator door. You forget why this scene started, so you stay in it like a child in a hulled lifeboat. Only now the scene’s become the entire chapter. You give a weak smile, telling yourself that this is one of those crazy moments that authors talk about, when the characters get away from you and the book takes on a life of its own, but you know better: the characters have escaped from you and this book is now the nightmare life-in-death.

You know with fatal certainty that what you’re writing now, right this second, will not survive the final draft. It won’t surprise you and turn out to be the secret heart of your novel. You’re wasting your time. You could be in bed right now, or fixing breakfast, or showering and dressing and starting a productive day. Nothing that you’re creating right now will be here in six months. It’s a total loss. You’d be a fool to continue.

And yet you keep going. And the pipes start to run clearer and the words start to come smoother. Suddenly you’re humming along. Everything fits into place. You come to some amazing revelation that’s going to turn your characters down a path that’s both completely unexpected yet absolutely perfect for them in hindsight …

And the timer goes. Forty-five minutes. Time to start the day.

The first draft isn’t the time to be creative. The first draft is when you dump all the Legos on the table. The second draft is when you start building. The first draft tells you what your characters could do; the second tells you what they actually did.

We live in a culture that credits all success with hard work and prizes effortless mastery above all else. While hard work is necessary to succeed at writing, it’s not sufficient. You also need patience, creativity, a supportive network and insight. But above all else, you need to have a high tolerance for your own mistakes. You need to give yourself permission to suck. Then, once you start sucking, you need to show up the next morning and suck all over again. There is no other path to progress.

Those of you who are trying NaNoWriMo this month, please keep that in mind.

_________________
* Yo, come here, come here.
What?
See right here … he says it’s presumptuous, right? Now watch, he’s going to do it anyway.
No, he wouldn’t … damn.

Oct

but it’s no laughing party when you’ve been on the murder mile

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Updates on writing:

I commissioned a cover from Ryan Sawyer. The back and forth on design elements took about a month. Coming from a job where I deal with imprecise client demands all day, I tried to be considerate and clear in my comments on each draft. Ryan says I was fine to work with – and he stuck with me long enough to take my money anyway – so I must have done something right. I did not use the words “pop” or “wow” or “slick,” at least not in their most annoying contexts.

I also solicited an editor on Guru. There’s something daunting about having over thirty strangers compete to offer you their services. It’s also exhilarating: I can see where clients get it from. After a week of bids, a winnowing to a final seven and a stab at a sample edit, I picked a winner. Guru is holding some money in escrow for us and the novel is in their hands.

(By the way, nothing will depress you more at the future of self-publishing than asking a freelance editor, “Show me something else you’ve been asked to edit.” Some of the hack jobs that people try to turn into novels … I admire the patience of anyone willing to edit it. I think my stuff is good – I know my stuff is better than that, anyway – but reading my future peers makes me feel uneasy. Then again, I had to get over my snobbery sometime. This is as good an age as any)

Now, of course, with the current project off with an editor, I have nothing to do at the moment. Except start writing another novel, obviously.

Oct

check the technique, see if you can follow it

Posted by Perich at 2:04 pm

Forbes.com has published an op-ed that is the least literate thing I’ve read since the last time I read a Forbes.com op-ed. And I’m not talking about content. I’m talking purely about the ability to string a sentence together and make its meaning clear.

Some highlights:

Call me prejudice [sic], but if the credibility of an organization is inversely proportional to tattoos and body piercings per square inch, this is a movement of dim prospects.

[...]

Since attending the Houston rally, the movement has metastasized globally to include hundreds of thousands or even a several millions. [The movement attended the Houston rally? It could now number 'a several millions'?]

Notwithstanding, the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, even egged on by our president, so far, in my opinion, has little more than nuisance value. [Not enough clauses separated by commas. Could you add seven or twelve more?]

[...]

Apparently, it was monumental injustice that the big bad bank was enforcing its contractual rights in light of over a year of non- payment. Comfort in being surrounded by the same species of fish. Engulfed in a haze of nescience was all I could feel. [Could someone tell me what that second sentence is describing or modifying? And is there an easier way to phrase that third sentence?]

And that’s just a casual scan. This is embarrassingly poor writing. If someone found this on my blog, the same blog where I write about video games, I would be mortified. Forbes is a respected business periodical.

Finger seeds his rant with words like “metastasizing” and “nescience” to give the illusion of being well-read. But people who actually read a lot know how to string a sentence together. I can’t say with certainty that Finger used a thesaurus to find the densest possible synonym for “ignorance” (“ooh, nescience looks promising”). But Finger can’t say with certainty what a protester’s “indeterminate hair color” looks like. C’mon, Dick: greenish? pinkish? Take a stab at it.

While it would be irresponsible of me to judge Richard B. Finger of Ariadne Capital as an investor based on one column of garbage, that doesn’t stop Finger from judging the rigor of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement based on a few colorful characters, so here I go: Richard B. Finger of Ariadne Capital is a fraud. He puts tremendous effort into appearing smarter than he is. He is incapable of clear and insightful language, suggesting he’s incapable of clear and insightful thought. I can’t say that his inability to form a coherent sentence guarantees that his investments will fail, but I can say it doesn’t make them more likely to succeed.

To bring it from style back to subject: Forbes.com is so desperate for anti-protest content that they’ll throw a sub-literate peasant, the sort of ranting hack who would make a LaRouchie roll his eyes, on their op-ed page. They’ll throw him up without any sort of editing, or vetting, because they need the pageviews. Righteous conservatives will link to it to make fun of hippies; irate progressives will link to it in order to get mad. This is the face, or rather death mask, of traditional media.

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