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This post, by Chuck Wendig, originally appeared on his Terribleminds site on 11/30/11.

(Related: “25 Things You Should Know About Your Completed Novel.”)

Maybe you finished — er, excuse me, “won” — your NaNoWriMo novel.

That’s good. You should be beaming. Chest puffed out. Fists on cocked hips. Cheeks ruddy from neighbors and parents pinching them. Your pride is well-earned. Bask in it its triumphant musk.

On the other hand, maybe you didn’t finish — er, excuse me, “you lost” — NaNoWriMo this year.

That’s good, too. I see you there, blustery and stammering — “Buh-buh-buh but how is it good that I didn’t finish what I started? What’s happening? Why is my face numb? Who took my shirt off?”

My message to both of you is the same.

You’re not done.

I know. You want to be done. If you finished, you want to slam it down, freeze-frame high-five yourself, and then go have an egg cream. If you didn’t finish, you want to delete the file, close the drawer, and pretend that none of this shame spiral ever happened. To both of you: bzzt. Wrongo, word-nerds.

You’re not done.

Writing a book is a war. What you just did was experience only one of the many battles in fighting that war: muddy in the trenches, crawling through the ejected blood of your cohorts, the stink of burning ink slithering up your nose like so many grave-worms. Maybe you won this battle. Maybe you lost. But the war goes on, friend-o. The typewriter keeps chattering. The story keeps struggling to be born. The screams of forgotten characters echo (echo echo) across the battlefield.

Read the rest of the post on Terribleminds.

This post, by Bryan Thomas Schmidt, originally appeared on his site on 11/30/11.

Research, hate it or love it, is something every speculative fiction writer must deal with at one time or another. Most deal with it often. Research is an easy thing to neglect for many reasons. Above all, it’s usually less fun than writing and creating and it’s time consuming. Still, research is necessary. Here are ten mistakes writers make with research. Consider the costs of making them yourself.

1) Skipping the research. I don’t need no stinking research. Mistake number one. You may be able to fudge some things, especially in science fiction stories set in worlds far distant from our own, for example, but in your historical fantasy, your contemporary urban fantasy or your medieval epic fantasy, you’d better know the facts. If you don’t, readers will and they’ll be unhappy you didn’t care enough to make sure you did. In any world building or story crafting where facts and details readers could know or research are required, research it yourself. Know what you’re talking about. That’s usually impossible without research.

2) Relying on novels by other genre writers. How do you know Terry Goodkind or Patrick Rothfuss got it right? Where did they get their facts? People make up inaccurate facts all the time and write them into their novels. (I am not saying Goodkind and Rothfuss did. I have no such examples. Just using them as examples.) There’s nothing worse for fantasy fans than reading another stereotypical novel set in a stereotypical fantasy world that gets it wrong. Don’t trust anyone but yourself to do the research and do it well, unless you can afford to pay a research assistant, in which case, be sure and hire a trustworthy one.

3) Using only one source. How do you verify facts? Check them against multiple sources. Don’t assume the source you are using has it all right. Check their facts against other sources. The internet is a great resource as are libraries. You can find multiple resources on almost any topic you’d want to research. So make use of that and be sure you’ve got it right.

4) Researching only when and what they have to. To a degree, you only need research for a science in your science fiction, so to speak. But that doesn’t mean you should stop there. How do you know your world makes sense geographically? How do you know the dietary patterns and plants you place in various locations are correct for the climate or environment? Who cares? Informed readers, that’s who, and all it takes is one to blow the whistle and cause other readers to doubt you. Once they doubt you, they have trouble trusting the stories you tell and if they can’t suspend disbelief, your science fiction and fantasy can’t succeed very well. So research details whenever you can. Even if you’re not sure they’re important. This doesn’t mean you need to research every word, of course, but play detective and ask yourself what you can research to make your story better and more skeptic-proof and true to life and then get busy.

Read the rest of the post, which includes 6 more mistakes, on Bryan Thomas Schmidt’s site.

Today (technically yesterday since it’s after midnight), I wrote 10,097 words. This is a big deal to me because this is the first time I’ve ever done this with original fiction. And I’d only done it one time with fanfiction. Looking back at the day’s work, I’m surprised by how doable it was. It wasn’t a horrific struggle, it just required sticking with it. I had planned to move between multiple manuscripts if I got stuck on a story, but that proved to be unnecessary, and as a result I was able to finish the novel I was working on. It ended up being a tiny bit shorter than I’d originally planned, but that’s okay. Some parts may get expanded in edits, but if they don’t, the word count I have should be fine. I’m not going to pad the story.

It’s crazy how I’ve stood in my own way and prevented myself from seeing how doable this was. Do I want to do this every day? No. I’m pretty tired. But I’m also running on a bit of an adrenaline high. Though I can’t imagine doing this all over again right now, after several hours of decompressing and then a full sleep, I may be able to do it once more before a break.

So here was what my writing day ended up looking like, for anyone curious about how it played out:

From start to finish my writing day spanned 8 hours and 45 minutes, but that includes the breaks I took.

I started at 5:45 pm. I’d just gotten up (yes, my schedule is THAT fucked up right now. I’ll get it fixed again next week). Tom, me, and my mother-in-law were going to order some pizza but I was determined that I would get my first 1,000 words for the day written before pizza crossed my lips.

The pizza arrived early while I was still writing, and then Tom’s cousin and her boyfriend came by. I said that the universe was trying to conspire against my word count, but I proceeded to write and finish up my 1k before eating or really socializing.

Rude? Perhaps, but dude, I had a mission and nobody told me anybody was coming by. And yes, I did totally just sit right here in a room with 4 other people and ignore them to write my words. I told them I had to finish something up and then proceeded to do so.

I ended up with 1,111 words when I found a stopping place. Then I took a dinner break and socialized for a bit. After Tom’s cousin and her boyfriend left, I dug into another writing session with a 3k goal this time.

A couple of hours later I had an additional 3,096 words. I took another break and then came back for another session that I managed to somehow accomplish in an hour and 20 minutes (I swear I blinked and it was over and I somehow had another 3,182 words.) Another break happened. I had a snack, stretched, checked some email, then buckled down for my final word count, ending up with another 2,708 words for a grand total of 10,097.

I may do one more day of this craziness before I take a couple of days off. Then Monday I need to get to work on edits for Dark Mercy so I can send it along to the copyeditor. I also hope to have the final cover art by Monday to post on my blog.

This is a reprint from The Weblog of Zoe Winters.

Publetariat staff will be off in observance of the American Thanksgiving holiday from now through the weekend. We will resume our normal editorial schedule of posting on Sunday, November 27 at 6pm PST. In the meantime the site will remain online and members can still use the Forum and post to their member blogs. We wish all who will be celebrating a safe and happy holiday.

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The latest episode of Thrillercast is out – Sorting Out The Civil War In Publishing. In this latest podcast, David Wood and I talk about the rise of evangelism on both sides of publishing – those advocating self-publishing as the only viable route, and those who think traditional publishing is the only acceptable path. And we discuss how we’re thoroughly sick and tired of both forms of extremism.

Listen, enjoy and share – Episode 32 – Sorting Out The Civil War in Publishing

This is a cross-posting from Alan Baxter‘s The Word.

This post, by Jeff Bennington, originally appeared on The Writing Bomb on 11/14/11.

If you’re a writer, I’m sure you’ve scratched your head and asked, "What the hell’s a platform anyway?" If so, you’re not alone. The question comes with the territory.

You send out your query letters, hoping that a website and writer’s group is enough to qualify for the ever coveted platform…whatever.

I struggled with the idea of a platform for the longest time. And honestly, it sort of pissed me off that as a newer author I was expected to have a platform. Really? I just finished writing a novel. Isn’t that a good enough platform for ya? Huh?

Hell,  I don’t know anyone in my circle of family and friends who’ve written a novel. That’s a pretty big deal don’t you think? And now you expect me to have an audience of hundreds, and even thousands. Get a life. 

That was then…this is now (9 months later).

I have sincerely swallowed those words several times over.

In the course of my writing journey I’ve learned that your platform is absolutely critical to a writer with long term writing objectives. So how do you get on? Where do you you find it? Can you buy it? Rent it?

No. You have to build.

A platform is simply the way you reach out to your readers. Like many authors, I learned that by default, or as we say in the trade, by screwing up a lot!

Over the course of the last nine months, yes I said nine months. You heard right. I did not have a platform  nine months ago.
Zip.
       Zilch.
                 Zero.
I had a book, a few family members and some friends who were sure to read it, but like many of you, I was starting from scratch…as in peel off the skin, muscle, and veins and  that’s where you’d find me, scratching the bare bones of my audience.

While looking up from that vantage point, I learned that every writer seemed to be doing his or her own thing. A platform, from my perspective, appeared to be vague and unattainable unless I had the readers first. This platform thingy was really confusing. I had no idea from whence would my readers come?

Ahhh, that’s the trick. But wait. Building your platform really isn’t a trick. It’s work.

Read the rest of the post on The Writing Bomb.

Back in May 2009 a reader asked Neil Gaiman, via his blog, whether it was reasonable to feel let down that George R R Martin was not giving any clues about the release of the next A Song Of Fire & Ice installment. Gaiman famously told that reader, “George R R Martin is not your bitch”.

GRRM is one of the best and most popular fantasy writers, but his A Song Of Ice & Fire series, which started in 1996, has been a long time to completion, and isn’t finished yet. At the end of book 4 it said to expect book 5 in a year. It took six years to see publication. There are still two more books to come, with no release date even hinted at. So people are getting concerned that the whole story may never be told, and the query posted to Neil Gaiman is still valid. As, potentially, is Gaiman’s answer.

Gaiman’s point is that GRRM doesn’t have to live up to our (readers) expectations. As a writer, I can kind of agree with that to an extent. Gaiman posits that the reader, by buying the first book, assumed some kind of contract with Martin. Gaiman says, “No such contract existed. You were paying your ten dollars for the book you were reading, and I assume that you enjoyed it because you want to know what happens next.”

Art is not something you can force, and Martin is well within his rights to do whatever he wants with his story. Even quit now and never finish. He’s not our bitch and that’s his prerogative. However, if he does do that, I think he is also letting his readers down. And not just GRRM – this applies to all of us as writers. If we’ve said we’ll do one thing and we do something else, that’s either our choice or a situation forced upon us. But we are letting people down when we do it. It’s not an either/or proposition.

Recently, Brent Weeks, author of the Night Angel Trilogy and The Black Prism, posted an opinion piece at SciFiNow in which he says that Gaiman is wrong. In the article, Weeks says:

“Part of what entices us to buy a book is the promise conveyed in the title. “Gragnar’s Epic Magical Dragon Quest Trilogy: Book 1” promises there will be two more books. Whether through the title, or interviews, or through a note to readers at the end of a book that says the next book will be out in a year, when an author makes that kind of commitment, maybe technically there’s no contract, but there is an obligation.”

He also says, “…writers make mistakes about how fast they’re going to finish books All The Time. GRRM’s situation is merely illustrative.” This is well worth bearing in mind, as I’m not out to bash GRRM here, or anyone else in particular. I’m simply addressing the issue as a whole.

But I think Weeks is right – there is an obligation there. When a writer says they’ll write X number of books, readers start to invest their time and money into that series. It’s quite reasonable to feel cheated when the author doesn’t come through on that promise. For this reason a lot of people are now loathe to buy into a series until they know it’s finished. After all, they don’t want to spend time and money getting into a story without an end. Which is fairly reasonable. I’m tempted to make a sexual metaphor here, about encounters without happy endings, but I’ll be a grown-up and rise above that temptation.

I wrote a piece a while back called While you wait for book three, authors die! in which I point out that this method can be damaging. If an author’s first book doesn’t sell well, their publisher may decide to cut their losses and not publish the rest of the series. Bad for readers and writers. I always advise buying the first book, but not reading it yet. Collect the whole series as it comes out and read it all once it’s finished. Of course, this could turn out to be a waste of your hard-earned if the author doesn’t finish the series. But life without risk is like an untoasted tea cake. There’s no crunch.

Readers and authors are entering into unwritten contracts with each other. The author says, “I’ll write this series.” The reader says, “Cool, I’ll buy it and read it. I might even like it and give you a positive review and tell my friends about it.” It’s a symbiotic relationship.

The author doesn’t have to finish that series. There’s no legally binding contract, no demon’s blood on the page to force the magic out. But, should they not see through that originally stated obligation, they are letting the readers down. We all fuck up sometimes, we all get distracted by life and things that happen which are beyond our control. We all let people down sometimes, however much we may wish and try not to. But we should also own up to that let down. “Sorry, folks, I let you down” is lot more conducive to an ongoing relationship than, “Fuck you, I’m not your bitch!”

I really want GRRM to finish A Song Of Ice & Fire. I’ve invested a lot of time and money into it and I really want to know how it all works out. But Martin isn’t my bitch and I can’t force him to do something that he may not have the ability (due to other things in his life) or inclination to do. But, should the series not be wrapped up, I will feel let down.

How do you feel about it?

This is a cross-posting from Alan Baxter‘s The Word.

Publetariat’s staff is off in observance of Veterans Day, which is a national holiday here in the United States and is also observed in some other countries as Remembrance Day or Armistice Day. No new content will be posted to the site until 6pm PST on Sunday, 11/13/11, when we will resume our normal editorial schedule. Members can still post to their own Publetariat blogs, and the forum will remain open, but new registrations, moderated comments and contact form messages will not be processed during this break.

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This post, by Dean Wesley Smith, originally appeared on his site on 10/30/11.

It has been an interesting time for me and writing over the last three months that has gotten me to a spot where I can see clearly (even tired) some observations about indie publishing that without the last three months I would not have noticed. At least not now. I’ll talk about them one at a time over the next month or so.

The first observation:

The Money Doesn’t Stop

In late July and early August I worked really hard on getting some experiments ready for the World Science Fiction Convention in Reno, Nevada. Book cards and the like. I had no book deadlines and the only writing I was doing for the summer and fall was the short story challenge and getting up indie published a Poker Boy novel and a thriller I had written a few years back and done nothing with. It felt wonderfully freeing.

Now understand, I am a professional fiction writer. Not having book contracts, not having deadlines used to be the most frightening thing that could happen to me. In fact, before this year, I loved having at least five and up to ten book deadlines lined up like planes on a runway waiting for take-off, as Kevin J. Anderson calls them.

In fact, on my office wall I used to have a bunch of images of jets cut out of paper and a book title written in bold on the side of each jet image. In one color ink I had book projects I was thinking of writing, in another color book projects I had under contract.

If I finished the book and turned it in I would cut off the wheels of the plane so it looked like it was flying and put the plane on another wall. At one point I had fourteen novels in the air at the same time in that period between turn-in and publication. (Those of you who don’t understand traditional publishing time, you won’t understand how that was even possible.)

Read the rest of the post on Dean Wesley Smith’s site.

For those who edit books and articles professionally, occasionally you might run into a special challenge. How do you deal with works written by clients for whom English is not their native language. I certainly can’t claim to be a trained linguist; however, I have faced this challenge a number of times in my past. As a retired intelligence professional, I have been interested in other languages and have lived in other countries where languages other than English are spoken. Here is a list of languages for which some of my editing clients spoke as their primary languages:

• German
• Spanish
• French Canadian
• Korean
• Chinese
• Farsi
• Japanese

What can you expect if you find yourself working for such a client? First,English is one of the more difficult languages in the world. We have so many exceptions and sound alike word choices. We have been influenced by so many other languages. When you couple these with the usual writing and punctuation mistakes we see in native speaking English writers, it’s not surprising that writers from other languages have problems.

As editors, we owe these clients two important aspects. First, we want to help them get their English correct. Second, we want to try to insure we help them communicate what they really mean when transitioning from their own languages. The following are some hints that you might find useful for accomplishing these two goals:

1. Watch for patterns in sentence structure and word order. Usually these will become noticeable as you read through their work. If these sound funny or unusual, they may express how the client’s native language is structured. I have edited a number of clients who first wrote their book or article in their native language and then directly translated over word by word without considering how we arrange our words in sentences.
    
2. Watch for unusual ways of saying things. My Korean martial art instructor had funny little ways of driving points home. For example: “If you hit him here, he should be die.” He was a professional translator with a degree in English from Seoul University, yet he still used these little idiosyncrasies in word choices.
    
3. Sometimes clients will use idioms from their native languages that don’t make sense in English, just as we have many that don’t translate into their languages very well. You’ll need to ask what the client meant when you run into these. Idioms are the mark of true fluency in foreign languages. For example, I remember one phrase in German that translated into English thusly: “That place is so strange, that foxes and hares greet each other and shake hands.” This is not something I’ve ever heard used in American English, but it was common in Bayrish Deutsch (Bavarian German).

The bottom line is that editing folks for whom English is not a native language requires a lot more work and care in communicating. For this reason, I charge higher rates for such jobs because of the extra time, thought, and care they take. Such a client needs to understand this up front. It is always a good idea to ask for a sample of the work before coming to terms. I have had jobs that have required a complete re-write. They always take more time and effort. You may find you just don’t want to take it on, and that’s OK as long as it’s determined up front.

Editing non-native English can be challenging but not impossible. It can lead to frustrations, but it can also lead humorous situations. It also can open doorways into a better understanding of another culture. Although I was initially raised as an Indiana farm boy with no travel experience or exposure to other languages and cultures, that certainly changed when I went to college and into the military. For these reasons, I always provided foreign cultural opportunities to my four children, which has held them in good stead in their lives. As editors, we must be open to learning about other languages and cultures in order to improve our abilities of communicating with and understanding of people throughout the world. Editing non-native English users is a good place to start.

This is a reprint from Bob Spear‘s Book Trends blog.

flense
verb, flensed, flens·ing

1. to strip the blubber or the skin from (a whale, seal, etc.).

2. to strip off (blubber or skin).

Beware – Harsh truth approaching: We are not good enough.

None of us are good enough. Sure we can get good. Good enough to be published. We can continually get better, assuming we have that desire and constantly work at our craft. Which we all should, of course. But, on our own, in our little bubbles of imagination and twisted ideas, we’re not good enough. We need to be better than we’re capable of being on our own. For that, we need the unbiased, critical eyes of others.

As a writer, I work alone. It’s part of the job and it’s one of the things I love about it. I also love the community of writers I’ve gathered around myself over the years, online and in real life. And therein lies the key. I have a handful of talented writer friends who are happy to read and critique my work. I’m happy to return the favour. It’s how our world goes around. I’m actually very lucky in that the majority of writerly friends happy to critique my work are far better scribes than I.

As the writer of a story (or novel, screenplay, webserial, whatever) we’re far too close to the thing to be objective. We’ve invested our time, imagination and effort into creating it. We’ve extruded the guts of it from the labyrinthine depths of our subconscious and regurgitated it into being. Up to a point we can be critical of our own work. We can put the first draft away for a while to let it fester, then pull it out again and read it with fresh eyes. The longer you’ve been doing this, the better you get at spotting flaws and being honest with yourself. We can turn a first draft into a pretty decent final draft. But we’re still not objective enough and it’s not really a final draft at all.

I wrote a short story recently that I was really pleased with. I spent a while going over it, polishing it, getting it just right. I sent it out into the world. And it came back. And again. And again. The rejections stacked up. It’s cool, I’m used to that. Every writer is. We have hides that make rhino skin look like tissue paper and a solid fuck-you-attitude that keeps us working in the face of constant rejection. It’s the only way to work in this game. After all, it’s not necessarily the story – it could be the editor just doesn’t dig that vibe, or the publication ran something a bit similar recently, or the publisher’s cat swallowed a bee and she’s sore at the world and takes it out on a good story. That last one is unlikely, but anything’s possible.

But once something has been bounced a few times in a row, you can start to see the common denominator. It’s the story, schmuck. It ain’t good enough.

So I went to my friends seeking help. In this particular instance I was fortunate enough to get the Evil Drs Brain* on the case. Given that it was a dark and twisted fairy tale vibe, I asked Angela Slatter* to have a look at it for me. She read the story, liked it, but took her flensing knife to it with abandon. I got it back and sobbed quietly for a few minutes, then manned up and listened to her advice. It was good advice. She’d seen flaws I hadn’t, picked up things in the story that needed to work differently. She’d identified character inconsistencies I would never have seen.

The story was greatly improved, but it still needed something; we could both see that now. Angela sent it over to her other brain, Lisa L Hannett*. Lisa added her flensing knife to the mix and my story was further eviscerated, but she saw the things that needed fixing.

One of them was really harsh – the whole story had grown from a killer closing line. I came up with the final line, something I really wanted to use to finish, and the whole story grew out of that. Lisa pointed out that the final line didn’t work. The story had outgrown its seed of conception and that line had to go.

I wailed and raged, but I knew Lisa was right. The line was cut. I killed the fuck out that particular darling. There’s no room for pussies in this caper.

The story has just been sold to a very prestigious market and I couldn’t be happier.

The moral of the story? We need our friends. We need beta-readers, critiques, flensing knives flashing in the cold light of dawn. And we must listen to these people.

Hopefully it gets to the point where our writing is good enough that we can usually get something to a standard editors want to buy and then they do that last bit of flense and polish. A good editor will see the gem in the rough diamond and draw it out. But they don’t have time for much. It behoves us to make our work shine as brightly as it possibly can.

In essence: fresh eyes, beta readers, honest critique, listen to advice and kill your darlings. You know, the usual shit. It’s been said before, and it will be said again. But it needs to be repeated.

Say it after me:

We are not good enough.
We must try harder,
All the time.
And help our friends as they help us.
For this is the flensing,
And the power of the story,
For ever and ever.
RAmen. (Quick and easy, the snack of the starving, jobbing penmonkey.)

Now, go write.

* CAVEAT: Angela and Lisa were happy for me to mention them in this post and applaud their shining word razors, but they won’t critique your work. This particular flensing was done on the basis of friendship and collegiality, built up over time. You can, however, get your own friends on the case. Join writers’ groups and crit circles and help each other. You’ll all grow and improve together. Just get involved and know that you need help and that you can help others. Meet people, be nice, take advice. It all grows from there.

This is a reprint from Alan Baxter‘s The Word.

Okay, so I maybe putting the cart before the horse, but I believe in getting a head start when I can. I’m only about half finished with my third book (first draft!) and I’ve been considering cover art. Why? Because you only get about 8 seconds to entice a prospective reader to take the time to read the blurb about what’s inside the cover.

Well, as this post’s title indicates, I’m not an artist. (I can draw a mean stick figure, but that’s about as far as it gets. ) I did design the cover for my first book, Fear Not!, using a photo from the drive-thru window of the Northwest Missouri Regional Credit Union where I work and Photoshop to create a rainbow. I also designed the text for the cover. However, being as it was a Bible study I felt the artwork was appropriate in its simplicity. With this Apprentice Cat being a fantasy, though, I thought maybe I should see if I could hire a real artist to design the cover.

I went to Lulu.com first because they “supposedly” have professionals who do cover designs. Here’s my problem: each Lulu sponsored designer stated that they would design my cover for a fee, but I would have to submit all the images I wanted to be incorporated in the cover. Huh? I have to give you the images? Isn’t that your job? That’s the whole reason I’m looking for a designer. Sure I could probably merge some pictures together and come up with something nice, but I want a really great professional cover.

I’m still looking for a good artist with reasonable fees, but in the meantime I’m trying to find ways to use my Photoshop and the skills I learned at Rush Printing as a desktop publisher to create a cover I can be proud of.

When buying a book, how important is the cover art to you? If you’re an Indie Author, how have you tackled the cover design?

This is a reprint from Virginia Ripple‘s blog.