I canât say enough fantastic things about my foreign rights agent. Not only has she done a great job finding new markets for my books, but has a superb eye for picking âthe rightâ publishers. As I recall there were three publishers in Poland who had expressed an interest in my books and I couldnât be happier with having signed with: PrĂłszyĹski i S-ka. They recently (October 2011) released Theft of Swords as: Royal Blood. Tower of Elves. Yeah, interesting, huh?
Much like Orbit, PrĂłszyĹski i S-ka is intererested in more than just âputting a book out there.â They have placed my short story, The Viscount and the Witch in one of Polandâs Fantasy Magazines and are also releasing some of my writing advice blog posts as well.
Iâm sure that readers here in the US may not be familiar with PrĂłszyĹski i S-ka, Polish Publishers doesnât often come up in idle conversation. But they have some great US titles such as: 11/22/63, Stephen Kingâs latest book on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and in the fantasy genre they represent Terry Prachette, Ursula K. Le Guin, Orson Scott Card, and fellow Orbit author, Gail Carriger.
So, as authors are often known to do I googled: KrĂłlewska krew. WieĹźa elfĂłw. And to my genuine surprise I found hundreds of hits returned (More than 100 pages). I did a bit of exploring using the translation feature of my browser and discovered:
Many book reviews by online fantasy sites and individual book bloggers
A number of forums that were discussing the books
Multiple places where excerpts were posted
Tons of on-line booksellers with the book for sale.
At least one site where the book made a âTop 10 Listâ
A Goodreads-esque site (lubimyczytac.pl): where people are reading and rating the book (21 ratings, 10 reviews, 71 people marked to read)
In summaryâŚthe same type of thing that can be found in the US. While I shouldnât be surprised at this I was. PrĂłszyĹski i S-ka is obviously working hard to publicize the book and from every indication I can see they are doing a great job of it.
So Iâd like to thank Marcin Zwierzchowski (my contact person for Poland) and Mark Edward Szmigiel (translastor) and all the other people at PrĂłszyĹski i S-ka whose names I donât know but who have my heartfelt gratitude for all the hard work you have done, and are doing, on behalf of my books. I really appreicate your efforts and hope you find working on this project fullfillingâor at least amusing. How well do Royce and Hadrian jokes play in Poland?
This post isnât about writing, my books, fantasy books, or books at all. Itâs a little about me, but mostly not. It is semi-historical, perhaps a bit informative, but mostly it is a reviewâŚbut not of a book. In short, this post is something out of left-field. There are two reasons I am writing this post. The first is that itâs the Christmas season and often that means toys, and this post is about a game. The second reason Iâm writing this, is that my wife asked me to. Robin feels that if I admit to playing games, it will make me appear more human. Robin is obviously under the impression you all think Iâm an alien.
I can guess that many of you are wondering what this is all about, while quite a few others have been nodding at the computer screen since reading the title. Let me explain and to do that we need to go back in time to the era when MTV was as big as Twitter, HBO was brand new, and no one knew if VHS or Beta would win the war.
I got my first computer in 1983. It was a Compaq (because the Apple Macintosh wasnât invented yet, and thus I was trapped into using Windows machines for the rest of my life) with a floppy drive, separate monitor, and a ruby monochrome screen that ran DOS. I wrote novels on this using SAMNA a now forgotten program that was ahead of its time and so much better than a typewritter. I also played a few computer games, but I cannot stress enough how different computer gaming was back then.
Zork
In the early days there werenât even graphics. Everything was just text. Glowing green or, in my case, orangish text on a black screen. It took years before the most rudimentary images appeared. At first they were flat monochrome. Later they developed color. If youâve seen the Tom Hanks movie Big, you have an idea what they were like. The game in the movie isnât real but mimicked games like Ultima and Wizardry. This was the silent movie era of computer gaming. But starting in the 1990s, gaming shifted into high gear and took off. The 1990s became the golden age of computer video games and gave birth to a large number of game developers and publishers such as Activision,EA, Blizzard, and ID.
SimCity was released in 1989. Kings QuestV (with VGA graphics) hit shelves in 1990 ensuring graphic adventures would continue in the golden age. In 1991 came Civilization (perhaps the best game ever invented) and Lemmings. Alone in the Dark was released in 1992 a forefather of survival horror games. Wolfenstein 3Dand Doom were released in 1993, which while they did not invent the first-person shooter, if you lived back then, you might have thought so. Also in 1993 X-Wing, one of the greatest space combat simulators ever, was released. 1994 saw Warcraft one of the first real-time strategy games, and System Shock. In 1995 came Command and Conquer, and Half-life arrived 1997.
Game from the movie Big
What made this the golden age was the speed of technical advancements coupled with game desgin innovations that worked in tandem to drive each other to greater, more creative heights. There were no rules and it was as if there was this primordial soup back then where anything was possible. Every year game designers came out with something totally different. Some were crazy, some silly, some awful, but some were utter genius. God games were breed with real-time strategy to make things like Dungeon Keeper where you got to be the bad guy while a band of heroes tried to invade your dungeon and steal your treasure. And action games mixed with adventure games to create games like Outcast, a mystery, graphic adventure captured in an action strategy environment.
Over time however, the possibilities began to coalesce. Like planets in a new solar system, genres were born. The Puzzle game, the Simulator, the Shooter, the Turn-Based-Strategy game, the Dungeon Crawl, Graphic Adventure, the Real-Time Strategy game, the Role Playing game, and finally the Massive Multiplayer Online game, and the Squad game.Real-time strategy, and shooters dominated in the late nineties, but then the persistent world games like Everquest and later World of Warcraft appeared and a sort of balance was finally reached. Over the course of the next decade, games got prettier as technology continued to allow for better graphics and smoother game play, but the frothy maelstrom of inventiveness cooled.
Skyrim
I think part of this is that in the old days, graphics didnât matter much. Games were simple. As time moved forward, players expected better graphics and this required artists, time, and lots of capital. One guy in his bedroom couldnât put out a lush game like what we see today in the form of Skyrim, and simple-looking games could not hope to compete. Games became the territory of corporations, and businesses need to pay the bills. They canât try crazy stuff because they think it could be really cool. They need to focus on putting out what is proven, and then just incrementally polish that.
This is why I stopped playing computer games back near the end of the 1990s early 2000âs. It was all just the same thing. Either it was a shooter, a RTS, or a treadmill online game, and while they all looked a little better and felt a little tighter, it was the same game I played a hundred times before. Only now they were designed for the largest audience which meant they were, in a sense, dumbed-downâslick, but lifeless.
My favorite games had been Civilization, Half-life (1-2,)Age of Empires,System Shock 2, Outcast, and Everquest.And for more than a decade I never saw anything as good, nothing new that could capture my interestâŚuntil now.
When I first played DOOM, it was revolutionary. I was amazed at the game play, and yet it always felt like only part of a game, like a chase scene is part of a movie. Sure it was exciting, but it needed context. And even as I played it, I imagined how it could be great if only they added a story, a goal beyond survival, one that was integrated into the game rather than revealed in cut scenes. Id came out with DOOM II and later Quake, but they never did what I wanted. Then Valve came along and made Half-life. It was a huge hit and exactly what Iâd hoped for.
Everquest
I had the same thoughts when playing Everquest. I wanted to get rid of the treadmill, and be able to permanently change that world. I wanted to be able to cut down a tree, use its wood to make planks and then build a house of my own design. Strip back the grass and plant crops, raise farm animals. Build a wall to defend my land, create my own roads, bridges. I wanted eating and drinking to be required to survive. I wanted to suffer from the elements and freeze if I didnât have warm clothes, or couldnât start a fire in winter. I wanted to die of thirst in a desert if I did not have enough to drink, or was stupid enough to wear steel armor. That never happened in the MMOs. And as they advanced they offered less rather than moreâless freedom.
That was always the problem. From the very start most all of these games were long corridors that you, as the player, were forced to walk down. There was no turning from the path set before you. Occasionally a game like Elder Scrolls pretended to provide freedom by including tons of repetitive villages and repetitive side-quests that let you deviate from the main storyline. And some allowed for multiple endings, two or three if you were lucky. But the games still locked you in, a prisoner forced to play how they wanted.
With multi-play games that problem was helped as the games became merely settings where live opponents came to compete, but that did nothing to benefit those who werenât onto competing, those who enjoyed exploring, creating, and more contemplative games. Each year offerings sported slicker, more photo-realistic graphics like in this yearâs Skyrim, (which looks beautiful) but it is still the same old game.( I have to admit I have not yet tried Skyrim, though I have watched my son play it.)
I had all but given up, believing that since corporations were in charge nothing revolutionary would happen. Then a year ago my son was in the car with me. We were driving a friend of his home and on the way they were talking.
âI went to sleep in my own house and I was killed,â my sonâs friend said. That right there will catch your attention.
âYou had a door right? And it was closed?â My son asked.
âYeah.â
âDid you have torches? You have to make a small room and put your bed in it then circle it in torches or they find you.â
They? I thought. This wasnât the typical teenage conversation and it caught my attention. When I inquired what the heck they were talking about, my son explained it was a new game he had downloaded called Minecraft. When we got home my son showed it to me.
I think I might have actually laughed at the pathetic graphics. It was all blocky and crude. There was no detail, and it had none of the lovely atmosphere and realism of the newer games. It looked like a childrenâs cartoon where people had square heads and dots for eyes. Then he showed me how it was played and I stopped laughing.
This was it. This was something different.
It wasnât made by a corporation, which explained the graphics. Minecraftis an indie computer game originally written in java by its single creator, Markus Persson, or âNotchâ as he is known. It is whatâs called a sandbox game, in that there is no point to itâno goal, no finish line, no levels to achieve, no classes, skills or races, no opponent to beatâanymore than there is a point to playing in a sandbox. For the most part you make your own fun, which might seem a cop-out on the part of the game designer…until you try it.
Player made castle in Minecraft
The thing with Minecraft is that you exist in a world that is completely transfigurable . You can dig a hole in the ground and use that dirt to build a wall. You can cut down a tree, turn the wood into lumber to make a house, or tools like a hoe that you can use to clear land and plant seeds. You can divert rivers, set trees on fire, create stoves. You can kill pigs then cook pork chops in that stove you made or smelt iron ingots from iron ore and use that to make armor or tools. You can even create rudimentary electrical circuits to power devices. You can, in fact, virtually do anything you want and the world works in a very logical manner. Put sand in a hot stove and you will get glass. Jump off a cliff and you will die. And you have to eat, or you will also likely die. It is good that things are sensible because the game has no directionsâno manual. You have to figure everything out, or go online to do research, which surprisingly, is part of the fun. Although, honestly, it is best to watch an introduction video or better yet, have someone show you the game as this is not WoW, and Notch doesnât hold your hand at all.
Nature in Minecraft
This is gaming the way it used to be when people of vision and little money took crazy chances to make things that made you forget the crappy graphics because you were having too much fun playing the game. And actually, after just a little while, you imagine the graphics as being oddly beautiful. Minecraft is a throwback to the golden age of gaming, an Indian summer popping up in the 2010s.
There is one more thing, and this is where the spice comes in. In this world of Minecraft, there are days and nights. This cycle works just like it does in the real world except that a day lasts only ten minutes, thankfully so does the night, because at night, monsters come out. They come in a variety of types. Zombies, skeletons (who use bows and arrows,) spiders that can climb walls, Creepers that have a nasty tendency to sneak up behind people and explode. Most monsters catch fire in sunlight like a Buffy vampire, but not all, and the challenge of the game is to create a defense against the night. So as the game begins you are Charleston Heston in Omega Man and have ten minutes to build yourself an adequate shelter before night falls. After that youâll be left blind and defenseless in the darkness as monsters roam the world. This is no easy feat for the newbie, as just learning how to gather resources, make simple tools, and construct a hut can take more than ten minutes.
Award Winner player made building
The best materials like iron, red stone and diamond are found by digging down into the earth, but underground it is dark, and in the dark, the monsters live. Sometimes you stumble on monsterâs lairs where if you kill them you can take their horde for your own. There are also abandoned mine shafts alternate dimensions like the Nether and the End, and special hidden strongholds which can be found by creating Eyes of Ender, letting them fly and following them.
Player built mine?
So adventuring and exploring are important parts of the game, but an equal, and perhaps greater part is creatingâbuilding homes, farms, towers, villages even whole cities. It is as if you were dropped on a new planet all alone and had to learn how to survive. The game is at its most entertaining when you are trying to do a simple thing. You want to add something to your house, you need a to make a tool to do it, to make the tool you need to get a mineral that is found underground.
You dig and find an abandoned mine. Youâre curious so you exploreâjust a little, then you fall. You plummet four stories. Youâre still alive, but youâre in the dark and only have a couple torches. You only have a stone sword and not much food because you never expected to be trapped in a mineshaft. The adventure you go through just trying to get home is epic. You have to fight through nests of posion spiders, figure out how to build a stairway up. You get lost but discover a random chest with some food to keep you alive and steel to make a better sword. You fight zombies and skeleton, and it is a heartpounding thrill ride, but perhaps the best part is that you know this isnât scripted. This isnât some preordained plot. This is all just the result of an accidentâyour own foolishness, and that makes the game more real than the most photorealistic graphics ever could.
The game can be played singularly, or on a server with others. I visited one where the players had created an entire working city with skyscrapers, paved streets with signs, banks and libraries. Others have wars where people create armor and swords (or in some cases guns,) and attack each other. And as the game has an endless supply of randomly generated worlds, and as each world is infinite (you can just keep walking and it will just keep getting bigger,) so there is plenty of replay value.
The kind of city people make on multiplayer servers
I started playing a year ago when the game was in beta. This past November the game was officially released. So besides distracting me from writing, and proving, as my wife wanted, that I am human with other interests, why mention this here? Thereâs a certain kinship factor. Minecraft is an indie produced gameâself published if you will. Persson made it himself and it caught on. With no publisher and no commercial advertising or backing, he sold the alpha and beta versions of his game by word-of-mouth and (at this time) heâs sold around 4 million copies. This has allowed him to start his own gaming company while he continues to refine and add to the feature set of Minecraft.
So, in return for providing me with something new that I can talk with my teenage son about, I felt Notch deserved a plug, even though his audience is way bigger than mine.
At present, my son, his friends, Robin and I all play together on my own server. At least I know where my son is on a Saturday night, and exactly the kind of monsters heâs likely to meet. He also has dreams of being an architect and I can think of no better past time for that.
So if youâre looking for that last minute Christmas gift that someone will smirk at, roll their eyes and say, âAre you kidding?â and then disappear playing for years to come. You can buy a gift code for Minecraftfor $27, and they can download the game Christmas morning (which usually takes five minutes.)Setting up your own server so you can play together can be a herculean odyssey, but that too is part of what the golden age of gaming was all about.
Yesterday Theft of Swords went live on the StarbuckâsDigital Network. What that means is if youâre in a WiFi enabled Starbucks, when you log in to the Internet you will be greeted by a splash screen asking if youâd like to read my bookâŚfor free.
Thatâs right, for the next two weeks you can read the entire novel for free on your computer, tablet, or phone. So if youâve been wondering if my books are worth buying, or if there is someone you want to get interested in the series, now you can do it for the price of a cup of coffeeâactually no purchase is necessary, but given that Starbucks is being nice enough to host this, I donât think buying a cup of coffee is too much to ask.
So have a merry caffeinated Wintertide, andâif only those people who visit Starbucks in the next two weeks take the time to read my bookâso will I.
So you got your book done. Youâve edited it. Youâve published and seen a few reviewsânow what?
My wife once compared the career of an author to climbing the Blue Ridge Mountains. Every time you think youâve reached the top you see another, even taller ridge, rising ahead of you. It never ends. Now comes the time when you have to sell yourself. Youâve spent years learning how to write. Youâve poured hours into creating a great book, but now none of that matters as you realize youâre at square-one again. Now you must learn how to be a marketing genius and a charismatic salesmen.
Marketing, publicist, salesmen? Clearly if you had wanted to be any of these you would not have written novels for the last few years. Instead you shut yourself up in a small dark room, living in imaginary worlds because youâre a sensitive, introverted, self-conscious, shy, person likely lacking in confidence. And now you have to go out in public, jump up and down, wave your hands and shout, âLook at me everyone! Iâm great!â
It sounds about as much fun as six-chambered pistol roulette.
It is awkward and scary unless you have that âsalesmanâ gene, and you know the type, the person who loves talking about themselves to a group of strangers, but hates being alone in a quiet room for more than five minutes. Without that superpower, which few writers haveâgiven that most of their time is spent alone in quiet roomsâpromoting yourself is unnatural and most uncomfortable.
All the writers I know (including myself) begin this stage the same wayâwith self-deprecation. âI wrote this book, you probably wonât like it. Itâs not all that good. Wanna try it anyway?â With a sales pitch like that, itâs amazing you arenât a bestseller. Still, it feels wrong to lie, to present yourself as something you arenât, and you know you arenât anyone great.
This creates a negative spiral. People are drawn to people who exude confidence, (the good kind at leastâbecause there is a bad kind.) Confidence is most often derived from experience, (the bad kind comes from an artificially inflated ego.) This is a problem, because everyone starts with a want of experience. You need confidence to get people to read your books, but you need the experience of people reading and liking your books to gain confidence. So how do you do it?
First you must realize that you really arenât being honest when you undersell yourself. You donât really think your book sucks. You wouldnât be trying to sell it if you did. You like your book. In fact, you should love your book. You should feel itâs the best book ever written. Iâm not joking. Given that you wrote your book, given that you created it to suit your own personal taste, it is like a tailor-made suit. It should fit you better than any store bought suit and as suchâfor youâyour book had better be the best book youâve ever read, because if you donât love your bookâŚhow can you expect anyone else to even like it? So recognize that at least one person in the world thinks your book is the best that has ever been written. Obviously, not everyone will agree with your sentiment. Not everyone liked Harry Potter either. Yet it is a mistake to focus on this single point. Logically, if one person in the world believes it is the best book ever, then it is very possible there could be dozens who would at least like it. Maybe more. Probably more. And who are you to judge what the person in front of you will or wonât like?
I did a bookstore signing where I stood at a tiny table near the front doors. I was a veteran by this time (or felt I was,) and I had a good idea who would be interested in my books and who would not. Big guys in football jerseys and old men, always ignored me. Old ladies in clusters, and women with lots of make-up, did too. So I was trying real hard to catch the eye of the geeky twenty-something guy wandering the sci-fi stacks even though a gray-haired gentlemen dressed like a corporate banker was glancing over at me.
The old business man closed the distance and started asking questions. He was just wasting my time, he would likely have a daughter who was trying to get published and want to talk about the business, and I needed to concentrate on attracting the geek. Of course, by this point you realize what happened. The old guy was intrigued and bought my books. Later he wrote me emails of appreciation (thinking I would not remember himâha!) He loved the books, posted great reviews on Amazon for me and is a wonderful fan. The geek, when I did get to talk to him, wasnât interested. So you never know what people will like. You canât predict their tastes based on how they look, anymore than a person should judge a book byâŚwell, you know.
All this is fine, but it isnât really going to help you the first time you have to go to a bookstore to do a cold table signing, or a convention where you man a vendorâs table, or even the first time you do a reading where you and maybe two other people are there. And how miserable might you be on a panel, sitting beside five other authors, all of whom have more experience than you? How can you be confident when people ignore you, when they sneer at your books. The answer is simpler than you might think.
You fake it.
You see, humans canât smell fear like hyenas. You just pretend that you know what youâre doing, that your book is great, that they are missing out on the story of a lifetime if they pass this opportunity by. It isnât a lie, because as far as you personally are concerned, itâs true. You arenât afraid to tell a friend to go see the movie you really liked. You donât fumble over words and say, âWell, I liked it, but you probably wonât.â No. You say, âWow, that was a great film, you should watch it! Youâll love it!â Why is that so easy, but selling your book is hard? Itâs because it is your book, your creation. So for that brief moment, pretend it isnât. Pretend itâs someone elseâs book and youâre just selling it. Instead of saying, âWhat I was trying to do here wasâŚâ say, âThe book is aboutâŚâ as if you just found the thing on a shelf, read it that moment and had to tell someone how good it was. Maybe they wonât agree, but hey, youâre entitled to your opinion.
The thing is if you act confident, and if you pretend long enough, it stops being a pretense, because somewhere along the way you actually pick up enough experience to be genuinely confident. So your first few tries at anything will be disasters. Even if they arenât, youâll feel they were. Youâll be terrified, nervous, embarrassed, and awkward. And the only thing youâre certain about is that everyone looking at you knows this. Each one is suppressing laughter out of polite kindness, but none of that it actually true. What people see is an authorâa published author. For what itâs worth, thatâs still a rank with privilege. People will grant you respect. They will be impressed even if they havenât heard of you. There are a lot of famous authors that people never heard ofâyou might be one of those. They donât see a person fumbling with words, shaking, sweating and repeating themselves. They see an accomplished author, standing in front of people speaking, talking fast because they are so smart, or slowly to help the audience understand their genius. Of course they are a genius, they wrote a whole book.
Occasionally you might run into another author, or a serious aspiring writer, and they will see through your charade, but they above all people should be sympathetic. Authors rarely criticize other authors, because we know, weâve been through it, weâve worn those shoes and know how that feels. Besides, there is never a shortage of people willing to try and destroy what others have built. When you live in tornado alley, you donât rip down your neighborâs walls.
It has been my experience that when you take a chance, when you stand up and hold out your work, people are far more likely to applaud than to throw things, and it has nothing to do with the quality of the story or the writing. Contrary to what we are often led to believe, most people are generally very nice, kind, understanding, compassionate, and empathetic. They realize the risk, they see the vulnerability, and knowing how hard such a thing would be to do, they respect the person standing there, for doing that, for having the courage to stand in the open and reach for an impossible dream.
Looking back you might catch a glimpse of that respect and suddenly, youâll discover youâre feeling a lot more confident. Maybe youâre worth something after all. In that moment, the negative spiral reverses itself. Positive begets positive. Invisible gifts are exchanged. And while youâd still rather be writing, well, it isnât so bad after all.
With the new release of the books large numbers of people are hearing about the series, but donât know if itâs something they would like. Recently Iâve seen several posts asking what people would compare it to. I normally prefer to have readers do the comparing as my opinion is bias, but I do know what others have compared it to in the past and in most cases they told me why.
So for those of you trying to determine if my books are right for you, here is a list of novels that readers most frequently used to describe my books, and my understanding as to why they did so. Following the list is my own personal summary description for those who might not be as fantasy-genre literate.
FritzLeiber/Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser: Most often compared by fantasy veterans I suspect because of the big fighter/little thief similarity, and sword and sorcery feel, but I havenât read Leiber so I canât say for certain.(purposely staying away from these due to the comparisons.)
Scott Lynch/The Lies of Locke Lamora: Mostly because of the thief motif, but these are denser reads and more focused on the heist aspect, where mine are more adventure novels.
George Martin/Song of Ice and Fire: I think people compare me to this because it is what everyone has most recently read, but Martinâs work has a very different writing style, very different tone. If this is all you know, then imagine a light-hearted, version with more traditional elements (wizard/elves,) a much faster pace, humor, and easier to read, (some would say simplistic,) prose.
Brent Weeks/Night AngelTrilogy: Weeks has a similar light writing style, but his work is far darker and grittier in tone and topicâthese are about assassins assassinating after all. Mine are about thieves who donât get to do much stealing.
Jon Sprunk/ShadowsTrilogy: I would actually compare this to Weekâs books more than mine, (both about assassins,) but the tone is a shade less gritty which makes it a step closer to mine.
David Eddings/Belgariad series: I think people compare me to Eddings because along with Feist, this is the last good traditional fantasy they can remember. But this falls in the âboy destined to defeat the dark lordâ category that my series lacks.
Raymond Feist/RiftwarSaga: Like Eddings, this compares to mine in that it is from a time before fantasy turned cynical and gritty. Aside from that I donât notice too many other similarities.
Jim Butcher/Dresden Files: We share a similar light, casual writing style that employs humor and a quick pace. Of everyone here, I personally feel Mr. Butcherâs Dresden books read the most like mine even though our settings (his is contemporary Chicago) and stories are very different, and Butcher’s books are far more episodic (heâs got like 13 or 14,) where mine, while generally complete stories, form a single series arc that is finite and therefore has a larger, single-story feel.
How I would describe the series for someone who might know very little about fantasy:
Take the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, mix it with the television series I Spy, set it in a post-Roman era mythological Europe, and then sprinkle in the long view political-mystery-building plot of say the Babylon 5 series, with the reading ease of Harry Potter and the standard traditional fantasy elements popularized by Tolkienâs Lord of the Rings, and the pace of Star Wars. That ought to do it.
Feel free to add any additional comparisons you think are applicable.
It was the howling that first alerted me. I heard the sound of howling and peered out of the kitchen window. The dog was in the ivy, pacing and howling near my neighbor’s side door. I did not see a human companion. Just the dog, bounding around and howling. Clearly something was wrong. I went out my front door and crossed to my neighbor’s yard. The dog looked dubious. “Hey boy. What’s wrong?” The dog bounded past me and returned, tilting its head quizzically. The side door of my neighbor’s house was open. Not good. I approached and called out “Mike? Robin? You there?” No response. The dog came and went always just out of arms reach. “Good boy.” I nudged the door open a bit farther with my foot. “Anyone home?” And then I saw the blood on the floor…
This thriller intro was written by my neighbor, Steven Jones. It isnât the opening of a book, a short story or flash fictionâit isnât even fiction. It is from an email he sent describing what happened on Wednesday. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
For those of you keeping track, this last Wednesday was the official release of Rise of Empire, the second in the Orbit Riyria trilogy, and Robin and I were in New York. While there, maybe it was the season, or the fact we took a train, but I kept hearing lines from Itâs a Wonderful Life, most notably:
You wouldn’t mind living in the nicest house in town, buying your wife a lot of fine clothes, a couple of business trips to New York a year, maybe once in a while Europe. You wouldn’t mind that, would you, George?
New York is a giant movie set. You see scenes, or what might have been settings for films and shows everywhere you look, everything from thirties gangster films to present day romantic comedies. The city appears to be conscious of this and the stores, coffee shops, and bars play music from the forties that fit just as well with your classic holiday movie as it does with the more modern Nora Ephron film.
After a day of walking down Fifth Avenue and ogling the Christmas window displays of the major storesâMacyâs wins hands downâwe met with my agent in a swank hotel bar. Everything in New York is dark inside. Every bar and restaurant Iâve been in makes me wish I brought a flashlight, and yet outside due to the electronic billboards, its bright as day. We had drinks, chatted about the release that was only hours away, if there was any news on the movie or video game frontier, and I signed contracts for the Japanese version of the Riyria Revelations.
It all felt kind of dream-like. I suppose Manhattan can do that. Youâre either walking around in a dream or a nightmare depending on your circumstance. I never bought into the vision of life as an author. I never fantasized about the lifestyle. I think there are some aspiring writers whoâthatâs all they think ofâand maybe a few accomplished novelists actually live in that world. I personally never believed it was real and I certainly never thought I would have the chance to taste it. This idea of being wined and dined by agents and publishers as if you were famous, is the stuff of movies and mystery/detective television shows. First, I didnât think it really existed, and second, Iâm not a big name authorâIâm barely an author at all. But there I was with my wife in this world of glamour, one book out and the second about to hit. In this episode of Living the Dream, the part of “rising star” will be played by Michael Sullivan. I didnât walk around in a daze, but every once in a while it would sneak up and thwack me on the head.
Look at you all spiffafied! Walking around Manhattan like you have a right to be here. It felt like catching a perfect snowflake. Beautiful, but you know the moment it hits your glove, the moment you have the opportunity to really see the beauty, it will melt. I didnât want to get attached to something that was fleeting.
The next morning I was up early because a newspaper reporter was desperate to interview me before her deadline. So I sat in my tiny New York hotel room, feet up on the modern art table looking out the window at the myriad of architectural styles as I recounted my life story to Lois Lane. Yes, itâs true, I crashed to Earth in Smallville, Kansas⌠I sipped my Starbuckâs mocha watching as people entered their offices across the street and watered their plants, the sun glinting off a Petticoat Junction style water tank while in the background it did the same with the gold-leaf covered pinnacle of a skyscraper . This was all too weird.
We did some Christmas shopping, and couldnât help stopping in every bookstore to sign their copies of Theft and Rise. Store clerks can get surprisingly excited, even if they donât know who you are. It was nice to see the books on the shelves and gracing the New and Noteworthy tables.
Later that day we met my publisherâmy editor Devi, and marketing and publicity director Alexâfor lunch near Grand Central Station. Turns out Theft of Swords already sold out its first print run, as has Rise of Empire. A second print run is underway. Also Theft and Rise were number one and three on Hottest New Release in historical fantasy both in book and ebook. This had everyone at the table smiling and made for a very nice lunch.
The one hair under the iPhone protector in all this, (fly in the ointmentâseems dated so I thought Iâd modernize the adage,) was an email that came in from my neighbor.
You see my wife and I have a dog. Heâs an American Foxhound mix. We got him from the local pound three years ago. Hounds like packs and he hates to be alone. Heâs also learned how to open the front door. Even though my daughters and son were home they were at work and school, that morning and Tobi did his magic trick. Unfortunately for him, his door opening Houdini cut his paw and he proceeded to smear blood all over the inside of the door and on the floor before getting out, looping around the neighborhood and howling. Apparently he figured weâd hear him in New York. Oddly enough, he was right.
I received an email from my neighbor who, as you might be able to tell from the opening paragraph of this post, was a bit concerned that he should call the police. After speaking to me on the phone, Steve was kind enough to coax Tobi back in the house and lock it up, and I am extremely grateful for his help. Itâs wonderful and reassuring to have a neighbor like that. I havenât always.
So thanks Steve, thanks Teri, thanks Devi and Alex, and thanks to everyone who bought a copy of Theft and Rise. The snowflake on my glove might not last long, but you all contribute to make it awfully pretty.
When at long last you finally manage to get published, either through a traditional house, an indie press, or by self-publishing, you will have to face reviews both good and bad. How do you deal with people bashing your work? How do you handle critics who make comments about your novel that are blatantly wrong? Comments, through intent, preconceived blindness, or lazy reading,slam you for things you didnât even do? Or did do and they said you didnât? How do you deal with people putting words in your mouth that you didnât say, or making assumptions that are completely false? Even accusing you of plagiarism?
You donât.
When you hear/read comments that make you want to chew through steel, you just have to repeat this simple mantra: People have the right to their opinions.
It really is as simple as that.
You might think they are wrong, but in a way that is only your opinion, and how can you expect them to accept your opinion of a topic when you refuse theirs?
The thing you learn after a few years of listening to people both praise and destroy your work is that everyone has different tastes. Some people will love the very thing that someone else abhors. And there will be large groups on both sides of any argument.
Last year I wrote a post called The Best and Worst of 2010, that was passed around a bit back then. In it I cut and pasted comments about my first book The Crown Conspiracyâall from people I never met. I went to the effort of matching them so that for every comment on a specific subject, I also listed the exact opposite opinion presented by someone else. For me it was a way of venting, for others who read it, the example was enlightening and reassuring.
The problem with writing is that it is very hard to tell what the majority of people think.
When I was in high school I was known for my art, and Mrs. Franchi, my English teacher, suggested I do a comic strip for the school newspaper. I wasnât in the journalism class, and I wasnât in the newspaper club. I just asked the teacher overseeing the school paper if they would publish a comicâno one had ever done it before, certainly not on a regular basis.
So I created an ongoing fantasy story, the adventures of Fobert the Fibbit and his trusty side-kicks, a bird and a dwarf, who he picked up along the way. I did a full page comic each week that was inserted into the paper. I expected instant praise, but heard nothing. Months went by and still I heard nothingânothing good. The journalism students and the members of the newspaper team, hated me and my comic. They asserted in their self-important attempt to act like real journalists that the comic demeaned the serious nature of their work in the news. All I ever heard were insults and jokes. When finally the teacher overseeing the paperâs publication claimed I intentionally inserted the word âfartâ in the text after she had approved the comic for printing (which I did not) and proceeded to berate me and insist I was a liar, I gave up. The comic wasnât worth the effort. It wasnât fun to work each week making something that nobody wanted and that everyone universally hated. I ended the comic series and washed my hands of the whole affair feeling depressed.
A week later, the first week the paper came out without a comic, I ran into a kid in the cafeteriaâa kid I never met before.
âAre you the one who made the Fobert comic?â
âYes,â I replied cringing.
âWhyâd you stop?â
âNo one liked itâactually everyone hated it.â
âI liked it.â I must have looked surprised, because he went on. âI never bought the paper before, but I bought it every week just to read your comic. It was nice that it was an insert cause I just tossed the rest. I wish you hadnât stopped. Now I have nothing to look forward to on Fridays, well, besides getting out of school.â
He was the first, but he wasnât the last. Other kids found me to complain that I ended the comic. A lot of them were people I only knew by sight, underclassmen, girls who I was only just getting the nerve to speak to. One was my future wife. The year after I graduated I returned to talk to Mrs. Franchi, and saw a copy of the new school paper on her desk. There was a comic in it that looked a lot like mine.
âSomeone is stealing my idea,â I told Mrs. Fanchi with a decidedly irritated tone. âAnd not doing a very good job of it. I thought this school taught that plagiarism was bad.â
âHeâs a huge fan of yours,â she said. âHe loved your comic, and when you stopped he was very disappointed. This year he decided to do something about it. His comic is a tribute to your work.â
I just stood there looking stupid. And like any good teacher, Mrs. Franchi let me.
All these invisible people loved my comic, but I never knew. This was a lesson I learned and kept in my back-pocket knowing one day I would need it again:
People are slow to praise, but quick to complain.
When things are the way people want, they are content and silent. It is only when something happens that they donât like that they become vocal.
The same thing happened again almost a year ago when I announced I was accepting a deal with Orbit Books that would delay the release of the final installment in the series. Until then I got two, maybe three comments on my blogâmost of the time, none at all. And sure I had sold a lot of books, but that didnât mean people actually read them, and it certainly didnât mean they liked them. That post about the delayed release had over thirty comments almost all negative. I also received email and lots of forum attacks. I honestly had no idea my books were so popular until I decided to withhold one for ten months.
Itâs hard to determine how appealing your book really is when you know youâll only hearâand hear in detailâhow much people donât like it, while those who do like it, donât say a word. Iâm the same way, and this extends beyond the scope of books. I have a childhood friend who was quick to compliment others. At the time I assumed he was disingenuous, (he wasnât) even so it made me feel better whenever he said something nice (even if I thought he was lying). As I got older I made an effort to be more like thatâto tell people when I approved. I even told my friend that I admired his ability to praise so easily, when for me, it was hard and often uncomfortable. I was stunned to discover no one had ever complimented him like that before and I could see the smile I put on his face.
For writers however, it is easy, and almost impossible not to focus on the negative when it comes to their own work. The bad reviews and comments are always so much louder. Even a great reviewâif it has one nit-pickâis remembered as awful, because the negative criticism is so overwhelming on an emotional level, while the nice things are always seen as the polite fluff. Everyone asks âHow are you?â upon meeting. They donât really care, itâs just a way of greeting. But if they say, âYou look awful.â You know they mean it.
And as a writer, just as ignorance of the silent approvers is bad, so is focusing only on the bad.
Not long ago there was a woman who responded to what was generally a decent review of her book, but had some negative things to say as well. She responded defensively on the reviewerâs blog in a series of comments that degraded into insults. This public conversation went viral and became the poster-child for how to destroy a writing career before it starts. The idea of âany publicity is good publicityâ has its limits. All the other bloggers and reviewers read it and declared they would never read her booksâever.
When someone criticizes your work, all you can successfully do, is thank them for taking the time to read it. Anything else is putting a gun in your mouth.
And just because a review pointed out flaws, doesnât make it a bad review. Iâve had four and even five star reviews where the commentary that followed it made me believe the critic hated the book. People have ripped my novels apart and then ended by saying they were eagerly awaiting the next book. This happens a lot.
I think, as a writer you need to put yourself in the position of a reviewer. Whether they host a review site as a hobby or as a job, they feel responsible for their readersânot the authors. And this is how it should be. Their job is to evaluate books and give recommendations to readers. If they fail in this, no one will listen to them. I think there is also a fear of fan-boy stigma.Even if you absolutely love something you feel obligated to find something to complain about, if only not to be seen as a total gushing teenage girl, bouncing incessantly in front of a stage where the Beatles are playing. Such overwhelming praise is not dignified and might not be accepted by the critical audience they write to. Nothing is that good, and reviewers who do nothing by gush, will not be taken seriously and soon ignored.
This isnât to say there arenât bad reviews. And when I say bad, I mean objectively bad. Reviews that even if they are full of praise, are just badly done.
The worst reviews are those that succumb to hyperbole, give away spoilers, and provide nothing of value or insight for the reader. A good example would be this short review of L. Frank Baumâs work: âThis is the worst book Iâve ever read! I really hated The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and I knew all along it was a dream.â
This kind of review is awful. Not only is it worthless to readers hoping to gain some real information to help make an informed decision, it ruins the story for all who read it. I am lucky not to have received many of these, but there are a few out there that I wonât name in the hope they will just fade away.
The fact is, Iâve read wonderful reviews by people who hated my books. People who took the time to write down detailed explanations of why they felt my books were poorly done, using intelligent examples and comparisons, but always careful not to spoil the story for those who might disagree.One such individual I personally contacted and asked if he would be willing to expound even further so that I could make corrections. He was so surprised, he agreed.I did make changes to the book (which were not so major as he first suggested) and as a result, he altered his review to a more positive position.This was never my intention, but it was a pleasant result and shows what can happen if you respond to those with opposing opinions with respect and a checked ego.
So the bottom line is, never respond to a negative review except to thank the reviewer. I try not to even respond to positive reviews as, then by omission, you are showing your disapproval of negative ones. You can also make it appear as if you and the reviewer are buddies which can undermine the criticâs credibility. The last thing you want to do is hurt a reviewer who likes your books. I have written some private messages to reviewers who I feel did not just like my work, or happen to write what I felt were excellent reviews, but understood my books on a level I did not expect most people would. Hearing that someone really âgot it,â that they understood exactly what it was I was doing, is fantastic. But even then I hesitate because I feel establishing a friendship with reviewers is, in a way cheating, and can make it harder for a critique to slam my next book if they feel it warrants it.
Reviewers are people too, and they have opinions on what is good and bad. Some like long books, some like short ones, some like simple books, some like complex books. If a book is in contrast to the values the reviewer holds, it doesnât mean it is a bad book necessarily, but only that individuals who share those values will most likely not enjoy it. Just think about those friends you have whose opinions on movies you know not to take. Good reviewers understand this and restrain their comments to reflect that while they did not like it, those of other tastes, might. You donât see them making statements like: âWorst book ever/just shows that anything can be published/evidence of how far civilization has fallen/donât buy this book!â
Good reviewers also donât rate a book based on the price anymore than they rate it on the cover artâalthough they may mention both so readers can be aware, and explain whether they feel it was worth the cash or how well the cover reflects the contents.
It is a reviewerâs responsibility to be honest so that those who have grown to trust them (knowing their personal book-ideological slant) can evaluate whether your book is a good fit for them. And a well-done-bad review can be a very good thing for an author. It will wave away those individuals who, if they had read it, would post scathing reviews on Amazon, or make it their lifeâs work to denounce you as a hack. A well-done, negative review can save you from this fate because no matter how good a book youâve written, no matter how universal the appeal, someone will hate it and it is best to keep it out of their hands.
Most reviewers don’t like posting negative reviews. Many refuse to. They simply restrict themselves to reviewing only the books they like. They are well aware of the pain they can cause, and there is a reason why executioners are rotated in their responsibility, only psychopaths have no problem hurting others. And yet it can cause even more problems, hurt even more people, being dishonest.
This is why you never see, nor ever will see, reviews of other author’s books on this blog. I would make a terrible reviewer for the same reason I was so impressed by my friend who finds it so easy to praise others. I am both a very honest and critical person, particularly when it comes to writing, or stories in general. Getting praise from me is like squeezing water from a stone. It’s a problem I’m still working on, and one of the reasons my wife never asks me the famous, “does this dress make me look fat?”
Iâd just like to end this post by thanking the 99% of all the book reviewers out there for doing a great job. As for the 1%…Iâm pretty sure Dante wrote about a special plane in hell for them, which I am certain they reviewed poorly.
When youâre not published and you are writing a book, you donât always think about the possible long term repercussions of what you type. When I originally penned the Riyria Revelations I never expected it to be published; I never expected anyone to read it. Every once in a while I would get lost in a conceit-filled dream where I hit it big and had a massive and rabid fan-following where long after I was dead, people would write spinoffs, and there would be movies and tv shows and Broadway plays (canât you just see Royce and Hadrian singing and dancing?) and additional stories set in the world of Elan, but always, the original six books would be considered the canon, and anything in them sacred. It was at times like this that I would pause over a name I had just made up and think, maybe I should put more thought into this. Then I would realize I was just full of myselfâwhat were the oddsâand just left it. I mean the name was good enough. It looked pretty on the page. It looked like the kind of name the character ought to have. Did it really matter that even I didnât know how to pronounce it?
The thing is, when I read, I often come across names of people and places I canât or donât bother working out the sound for. Iâm usually wrong anyway. I pronounced Aragorn, Aragon and still do. And Sauron will always be Saron in my head. Instead when I read I merely register the odd, hard to pronounce words visually and move on. I assumed others often did this as well. Even if they didnât, it wasnât likely to matter, as the books would never escape the black hole of my bedroom where I toiled away in silent Sisypheandespair.
I was wrong.
The books were published. People read them. And while I thought I was going to skate by on this issue, I received a phone call this week from the company creating the audio version of the books. You guessed it. He wanted to know how to pronounce a long list of words.
Nathan Lowell had already done an audio podcast of The Crown Conspiracy, but there were not as many names in that one. Now Theft of Swords is being produced, and there are a lot more twisted, mangled words to deal withâincluding some lines of elvish. In a review of my books, someone commented about my use of the elvish language, âHeâs no Tolkien.â In case you donât know Tolkien was a professor of linguistics, taught Old and Middle English, worked for the Oxford English Dictionary, and created new languages for fun. I, on the other hand, had trouble spelling âevil.â So I think it is fair to say the reviewer got it right in that criticism. So it was with great consternation that I awaited the phone call.
They had sent me a long list of words they wanted me to pronounce for them. Most were easy. I mean, I know how to say Arista (Ah-wrist-ta) even though many people pronounce this (Air-wrist-a.) And even some of the stranger ones like Percepliquis and Gilarabrywn, trip off my tongue daintily as Iâve spoken them a thousand times. But there are some that I stared at wondering, what the heck is that? Is that even in my book? I called them on one, but no, it was in there and I stared at it wondering what I had been thinking when I wrote that.
I was wondering the same thing when I came to, Dioylion. This was the author of a rare scroll. A one-off name, never to be used again. But I do know what I was thinking. I was shooting for a vaguely ancient Greek sounding name like Aeschylus, Diogenes or Pythagoras, something educated and ancient. I never thought I, or anyone else, would need to know how to pronounce it. As I said, you just donât think of that when youâre sitting at a cardboard folding table in a corner of your bedroom staring out the window at neighborhood kids playing kick ball in the cul-de-sac and you need a name to fill a slot in this waste-of-time you have the self-involved arrogance to call a book.
But there I was staring at this list of monsters I had created, on the phone with David who was using some sort of magical short-hand to take the sounds coming out of my mouth and record the way I said them.
Sometimes I would cheat: âHow would you say it?â I asked sounding all, Iâm testing you, dude.
He would read it and I would reply. âAh yes, thatâs it exactly!â
Still, I felt like I was being grilled by a police interrogator. âGive us a name! Is it Ni-fron or Neye-fron? And is it Lye-um, Lem, Lee-um, Lime, Leem? I was actually stumped by the simple looking word Liem. It is actually a misspelling of Liam, as in my head I hear it as Lee-um. To be honest I donât see how Liam can be pronounced Lee-um anyway. Personally I think it should be spelled: Leeim or Leeum. Why I didnât do that, I donât know.
Sensing my panic, David assured me that, âHey, itâs fantasy. You can pronounce it anyway you like.â
I liked David.
Then I got to the line of elvish that looked like I just mashed my palm on the keyboard. I didnât, but still. I took a pass on that one, and granted carte blanche to the narrator on however he wanted to handle thatâbecause Iâm not Tolkien.
When I was done, I was satisfied with my performance. I got most of the answers right.
So for those of you who were wondering, yes there will be an audio version of the series. The books will be narrated by actor and artist, Tim Gerard Reynolds, an Irishmen (this will please my mother) who will lend a little Celtic favor to the books. I havenât actually met, or spoken with Tim, but on his Facebook page he writes:
I’m soon set to record Michael J. Sullivan’s “Theft of Swords,” Volume one of the Riryia Revelations. These fantasy novels have been years in the making, and with their intricate and satisfying plots, they are also remarkably, and refreshingly funny too. Looking forward to it!
So, I like him already.
The only ETA I have on when the audio books will be available isâsoon. Given that Tim hasnât started recording, even that might be a bit optimistic. Iâll let you know.
When I began writing these posts I started by discussing the various tools of the trade, in particular word processors, one of those being Scrivener. My computer runs Windows 7 and back then I was using MS Word and was having trouble seeing the point in using any of the writing programs. I had heard great things about Scrivener, mostly from folks with Macs. I even know of one person who bought a Mac just to be able to use Scrivener. But last year around this time I tried the Windows beta and was not impressed. I tried several of the available writing programsâthose applications supposedly designed for writers as opposed to general office useâand found them all to be just a lot of gadgets that were more fun to play with than a useful tool for writing a novel. In other words, they were great for people who wanted to pretend to be writers. And I concluded that to actually write all you needed was any basic word processor like Word or Open Office as all the extra bells and whistles only served to distract from the task at hand.
Last month, at the start of November, Scrivener ended its Windows beta and put out their official release. As I was starting a new book back then, and as I was playing with the idea of conducting a non-official NaNoRiMa of my own and as I knew Scrivener had a word counter, I tried it again.
I was pleasantly impressed.
A lot of changes were made from the year before, and those aspects that had made the program unusable by me, (the most glaring being the inability to resize the text on the screen independent of the print size,) were fixed. That was good news, but was it worth it? Could it really make writing easier, better?
The thing about Scrivener is that it is open-ended, meaning that it is simply a tool like a hammer, not a process like a diet plan. You can use it anyway you like. So if you want to tap a nail in with the wooden endâthatâs fine, whatever suits your style. The question was, would this tool accommodate my style?
I sat down to find out.
I took time to watch the tutorials, I read how others used it, and talked to fellow writers Everyone else cited things like the ability to write out-of-order and then shift scenes around, or to being able to construct plots using the âindex cardâ aspect of the program. I donât do those things. I start at the beginning and write to the end, which is why Word has always worked just fine. They also spoke of how the program complies the draft at the end of the project. Again, since I write from start to finish there is no need for thisâanother unnecessary step. They also spoke of the lack of formatting options as if that was a good thing. In the end I was about to give up as it did not appear to suit me, but then I decided to just âplayâ with it and see what it could do. I spent a weekend exploring the possibilities and discovered, a bit to my surprise, it is a useful program.
Three very practical aspects of this program changed my mind.
The âBinderââthe panel that appears on the left side, which works like a document indexâhouses folders and document trees that form the basic construction of the draft. In other words, there is a âDraftâ folder, and inside that you can create folders and inside those you can create documents, in any combination you like, just as you do in your Documents Folder on your computer. The first hurdle I faced was how should I best organize my book in this program?
Friends all spoke about just writing scenes and organizing later. To me thatâs just crazy talk, like saying, âjust start building the house, and weâll draw up the architectural designs later.â Instead, I very methodically began by making a folder represent a chapter, and each document inside it a scene that would be divided by scene breaks. Scrivener is actually designed to handle this nicely. I wouldnât say âintendedâ as like I said the program is open enough that you can do what you like. Instead of entitling the folders Chapter 1, Chapter 2 etc. I named them like I would for the finish book. âThe Battle of Gateway Bridge,â âThe Ghost of High Tower,â and so on. This let me know approximately what I was going to cover in that chapter, and should I wish to change the order of the chapters I could just drag and drop in the binder tree without having to then change the numbers.
Inside the folders I created files and entitled them with short descriptions of what I planned to cover in that section. âOpening fightâ, âHiding in the Barn.â This kind of âsetupâ work that I was forced to do before even starting to write annoyed me a bit until I realized that in laying out the structure for the program, what I was actually doing, was outlining my book.
This idea of an interactive, practical outline was the first reallyâoh! moment. This intrigued me. Instead of writing out a bulleted list of events as an outline, I was making containers that did the same thing. Only I would later be able to use these folders and documents to make the book.
2. Notes
As you can see in the screen shots, on the right side is a “notes” column consisting of an index card at the top and below that a general notes window. At first I ignored these, but as I worked I saw this as a good way to replace scribbling things on pieces of paper that got lost. Soon however I realized that putting notes in each of the sections commenting what that section was about added to the idea of this interactive outline.
As I went through making my folders and section documents inside them, I put in short sentences in each sectionâs index cards mentioning the important points I needed to address in that section. And in the notes windows more elaborate thoughts I wanted to remember for that scene. This completed the outline just as I would have done if I were typing out a bulleted, or paragraphed list of events.
After finishing the folder-tree for the binder, I could then go back to the first document and begin writing the book. Opening that document I saw the notes I made of what I needed to write. When I finished that, I opened the next and there were the notes needed to remind me what to write there.
So instead of writing out an outline and constantly referring to it, the outline was in the book itself. I lost no time and this streamlined the writing process. I liked that.
3. Research
In addition to the âDraftâ folder there is a âResearchâ folder. This is where Scrivener expects you to put all the info you found in preparing for your novel. Fact is I donât do a lot of research for my fantasy books. I make all of it up. Still I felt bad looking at the Research folder thinking I should have something in there. Because it was the weekend, and because I was actively, and knowingly wasting time playing with the program, I started looking for stuff to put there.
I do have some lists that Iâve used. I have lists of names that Iâve created. Lists of medieval occupations, that sort of thing, and dropping them in here saved lots of time in finding them. I put the world map in, and made a couple of new ones for specific areas. My wife, suggested that I drop the Riyria novels in there too, so I could easily check them for references. That was just genius.
But it wasnât enough. I found I started creating family-trees, and coats of arms. I created character timelinesâtheir lives from birth to death, crossed indexed in an excel spread sheet against major story events, and added this to the eight thousand year history of the world I already had. I listed ranks of nobility and their appropriate address, and clan histories.
It still wasnât enough. Then I realized what I really needed to put here were character sheets and setting descriptions. This would be a huge waste of time. I never did them before, but heh, I was supposed to be wasting time, so why not? I even went so far as to drag and drop photos from the web into the character sheets as reference. And on each page I started with the basics: when and where were they born, who were their parents, what was their childhood likeâŚas I did this a funny thing happened. I started getting story ideas. I found that as I created these character outlines, I was going back and forth to my newly minted story outline and dropping notes into the note panels adding more things I wanted to bring up. New plot twists and new directions revealed themselves.
Wow! This really helps.
I took a whole week doing nothing more than âresearchâ (making stuff up.) By the time I got done sketching in the major players in the story and a few of the major settings, I had the whole book laid out in fairly good detail, with lots of rich background that I could draw on.
Over the next few weeks I began writing the novel. The process was a breeze not only because I had everything right there, easy to find and easy to access, but also because so much of the work was already done. I didnât have to stop mid-stream and think up a name for a new character. I already did that, in fact I had a whole history of the guy which I could use if I wanted, or just have as a basis for establishing his personality in my own mind. Less questions popped up as I wrote, and as a result the writing flowed with fewer roadblocks.
I was pleased enough that I will continue to use Scrivener, but more importantly, Scrivener managed to help improve my writing by showing how creating some character outlines and setting descriptions can provide fertile beds for adding in plot building and in smoothing out the writing process.
Writing a book can seem such a huge task that the initial reaction is to just start writing, as everything else feels like a waste of time, but some preparation up front can speed the process down the line and more than make up for the initial time investment.
Scrivener is $40 and they have a 30 day free trial. It is available for both Mac and Windows, although the Mac version is more advanced and has more features as it has been out longer.
For those of you who werenât at the launch partyâI was inspiring.At least thatâs what one attendee told me. I laughed, but he corrected me insisting he was serious. So Iâm choosing to remember it that way.
As it turned out more than five people showed. We didnât take a head count, but best guess stands at more than fifty, less than a hundred, somewhere in there. It was a chilly but dry night in northern Virginia as people gathered in the little bookstore that everyone agreed was charming.My publisher, Orbit Books, graciously paid for wine to be served, which lent a degree of Sothebyâs style sophistication to the event. What we did not drink, we made into door prizes. My wife also created little gift bags, and we gave away some Riyria t-shirts.
We owned the store. I donât think anyone was there who hadnât come for the event. Robin and I mingled for the first fifteen minutes, then with a clinking of a glass, Eileen called the launch to order. I was properly introduced and proceeded to talk for about forty-five minutes.
In the pre-speaking mingling, I accessed the crowd and discovered quite a few had questions about the books and myself and how I managed to get published, and had I published six or three books? I hadnât prepared anything in advance not knowing what kind of group Iâd be facing. As enough people were in the dark about me and my books in general I just explained the basics of both and then took questions, mindful of the clock. Initially, two years ago, I struggled a bit with presenting in front of an audience, unsure what to say. Now itâs more a matter of making sure I stop talking. This just comes from interviews and answering questions. You get asked the same things over and over. These act like drills, or exercises so itâs rare to get stumped by a question, or to not know what to say. You just hope those in the audience havenât heard the stories too many times.
Someone asked about publishing, and Robin got to speak for a bit, and she called Robert Bidinotto, author of Hunter up to the front. Robert is a thriller author who came to a few of Robinâs free self-publishing seminars and who we helped with some advice. That night his book had hit number 8 on all of Amazon Kindle beating out the recent releases of King, Patterson, and Evanovich, so it was nice to see him there, to see him smiling.
Then I sat down to sign books.
One More Page had both copies of Theft of Sword and Rise of Empire on hand. People I knew, people who had purchased the first copies of The Crown Conspiracy two years before, commented upon reaching the table, âThis is the first time Iâve ever had to stand in line to get you to sign you book!â I have to admit, that was nice. Most everyone bought both novels, and some went through the line twice buying seconds for gifts.
I knew several people who were there. Some were from writers groups and some from book clubs, but a fair number I didnât know. One fella was in from Vermont, where they already have snowâhe was buying books for his wife. There was a woman and her husband who had bought Crown from me in Manassas at one of my first book signings and still had the newspaper clipping announcing it. There was also a young couple I didnât know who came with a full stack of my original, self-published books. They approached the table a bit sheepish and quietly, self-consciously asked if it was okayâif I would sign them. I felt a bit like George Bailey during the run on the bank when Mrs. Davis asks him for seventeen-fifty. I could have kissed them.
I just want to say thank you to everyone who came. To those who filled the folding chairs and to those who stood behind them, who listened politely as I tried to be charming. And to Eileen, Katie and Lelia who hosted the event, served wine, and made certain everyone felt welcome.
I hope you enjoyed it. I hope it was worth coming. I hope I was inspiring.
Today, Wednesday, November 30th 2011, I am celebrating the official launch of Theft of Swords, the first Orbit published book of the Riyria Revelations series. It will be held at 7pm eastern, in Falls Church, Virginia at One More Page Books. (2200 N Westmoreland Street #101 Arlington, VA 22213) Every human living on the planet is invited, and yes, they will be selling the books there, and yes I will be signing them.
One More Page Books is a wonderful little independent bookstore. This âshop around the cornerâ is owned by Eileen McGervey whose passion for books and reading is evident in her choice to leave the world of corporate marketing for one of books, chocolate, and wine. This place is a gem and deserves to be noticed.
Two years ago, on October 1st, 2008, I held the official release of The Crown Conspiracy at the Barnes and Noble in Clarendon. About twenty people came. When you realize no one had yet read the book, there was no Internet buzz, and I was new to the area, that was very good. Sure, most everyone there was someone I knew. They came so I didnât look stupid, and I appreciated it.
I have no idea if anyone will come tomorrow. Itâs not like we sell advanced tickets, and all the people who came to the first launch read the book already. In numerous discussions, my wife and I have decided that at least five people will show. Her and I of course, then thereâs my now famous daughter, a close friend and my agent who is traveling in from New York for the party. Iâm hoping more will show up, but if becoming an author has taught me one thing, itâs not to get my hopes up.
Iâve done signings at huge books stores where Alan Alda had a line stretched out the door. They had a reserved parking place for me in the front of the store with a sign that read: âReserved for Author.â My wife saw that and then looked at me as if reassessing my value. Like that Old Spice commercial: Look at the sign, look at your man, look at the sign, look at your man. I thought perhaps I was about to gain a new level of respect in her eyes, and then we went in and it was just me, Robin, and the store clerk all night. Well, not all night. We only hung around for thirty minutes and then gave up and left. The sad part was I didnât even get to use the parking spot. We didnât see it until after we had parked in the big garage. In retrospect it was for the best. I didnât feel I deserved an author reserved spot. I didnât even feel I deserved a wife.
So as I look forward to the big event, it is with a degree of trepidation. There wonât be a sign, but Iâm sure there will be more people. After all Iâm guaranteed at least five, even if I am counting myself as one.
I was recently asked if a writer should edit as they go or just write the novel and then go back. I think the generally held wisdom is not to look back and just plow through to the end, but I don’t entirely agree. I also don’t think you should edit as you go. I think you might see why I decided to write a blog post on this. A tweet won’t cut it.
Should you, or should you not, edit as you go?
The pitfall of editing as you go is that you end up like a car stuck in the mud just spinning your tires. Editing is a form of quicksand. Nothing will ever be perfect, and you can edit forever. Writers can spend a year working on the first chapter. Then the realization that there are twenty more chapters in the novel can seal the fate of a career. You can also spend three times the hours writing a book only to get half done and realize the plot won’t work. If you had skipped the editing, you would have saved months. And then there’s the frustration of polishing prose to a fine luster only to discover you have to cut that chapter, now all that work that you made so perfect, and all that time is lost.
So why am I not against editing until the book is done?
Two reasons. The first is that invariably you will get to a point in the writing of any novel where you hit a patch of trouble. This leads to a lack of confidence, both in the work and in your own abilities as a writer. Your mind will play tricks on you, spin you into a depression and cause you to remember everything you’ve written up to that point as crap. It is very easy to fall into a defeated state and just give up.
The solution to this mid-book doldrums is to go back and read the first chapter again. If you did a good job on it, you’ll impress yourself right back into confidence. You’ll remember what was great about this idea, and why you wanted to write it in the first place. But, it has to be good.
As a result, I always polish that first chapter as a safety net. Even if I later cut it, it served it’s purpose, and that is to ensure I have something in the work that I’m proud of, something that can inspire me to keep writing.
I don’t edit much more…until I reach the middle of the book. Once I pass the middle point I will go back and do one light passâa read through really, but I make corrections as I read. Why do I do this?
When I write I don’t as easily commit a story to memory as when I read one. I often forget what it is I wrote until I re-read it. I also tend to forget little things that I put in and thought could be expanded later. Furthermore, in re-reading I get ideas. I see patterns emerging that I hadn’t noticed while writing. I see things I want to make certain I take advantage of.
Editing at the halfway point allows me to reorient myself, reevaluate the tone, pace and feel so that as I go ahead, I can better aline myself to conclude the book with the best possible results. It is the same as reading a book and anticipating what will come next, or how it will end. The reader will do this, so I want to do this too, and then either take the book another way, or really hit that nail hard to provide the reader with the best possible reading experience. Sometimes when you re-read you can see that the obvious best ending isn’t the way you are planning to go, but because you are only at the midway point, you still have time to make it happen.
The last point of divergence from the wisdom of not editing until the book is done, is that when I sit down to commence writing, I often read over and edit the last page I wrote the day before. I do this just to get myself back into the mood to write, and to get my mind back into the same mindsetâto orient my thoughts to pick up where I left off.
Aside from these however, I would advise not editing until the book is done.
Nothing is ever easy…including responding to a tweet about editing.
