This post, by Vérité Parlant, originally appeared on her Whose Shoes Are These Anyway blog on 6/9/09.

You know that song "Dinosaur" by Al Jarreau? Lately I feel just like that.

Despite the success stories I keep hearing about people who’ve published their own books, despite knowing exceptional writers who have, due to the blindness of publishers, had to publish their own books to prove that their work is marketable, I still struggle with the notion that self-publishing is a legitimate route to book publication. This hang-up is about me, I think, internalizing old media messages.

Maybe it’s that self-publishing is also called vanity publishing. After many years of Sunday School, I know vanity is a sin. Perhaps my mind is equating self-publishing with sin-publishing. Hmm. I need an exorcism!

If you look at this poll on self-publishing that I think I created in 2003 or 2004 at a site I rarely visit now but for sentimental reasons am still a member, you’ll see that my apprehension about self-publishing is not a new affliction. When I say afflction, I mean torment. The debate keeps me confuzzled.

I can tell you why self-publishing, especially for people for color, is viable and reasonable. I know the history, how many well-known African-American novelists had to publish their own works first because white publishers wouldn’t do it and black publishers were nearly nonexistent. I concede that even today, good poets in particular, still have to step out on faith and publish their own books of poetry first.

At the same time, I applaud writers who finish their books because it’s something I have yet to achieve. Grrrr! And I cheer them on when they send them to press themselves. "Oh, you go girl!" I say, gesturing thumbs up, weeping on the inside that my book still isn’t done.

Furthermore, I know as the African-American Books Examiner, I will be reading novelists who are either self-published now and will be big names in the future or who used to self-publish and are big names now. And yet for myself I don’t think I will feel published until I finish a book and sell it to a publishing house.

Even if I wrote a book, couldn’t sell it to a publishing house, then turned around and sold millions after publishing it myself, I think the devil on my shoulder would still needle me and say, "Ah, but you didn’t really publish a book, now did you?" Clearly I suffer from giving "authority figures" too much power over my value as a writer.

Read the rest of the post on Whose Shoes Are These Anyway.

This post, by bestselling mainstream author Joe Nassise, originally appeared on the Genreality site.   

In which Mr. Nassise deconstructs the economics of publishing and gives many of us all the more reason to be glad we’ve gone indie.

Let’s say you’re a stock boy at the local supermarket.  You put in twenty hours of work during the week.  You are paid at a rate of $10 per hour.  At the end of the week, you’d expect to walk away with a check for $200 (minus a bit for taxes and such.)

Now, for the sake of argument, let’s say that your boss decides not to pay you that way this week.  “I’m going to pay you a third of the money I owe you at the start of the week,” he tells you, “and a third roughly eight months from now, and then the final third somewhere in the next two years.”  As you begin to protest, he remarks, “and by the way, if you want to keep working here, you’ll be happy to get that.”

Welcome to the wonderful world of publishing economics.

Alright, maybe it’s not as bad as all that, but it’s close.  You see, a writer is paid for their work in an often varying scale of increments and understanding the hows and why of it all can be confusing to the newcomer trying to figure it all out.  I know it was for me.  So for the next few minutes, let’s take a stroll down the road of economics publishing style.

Let’s start with two very key terms – advance and royalties.

An advance is the money a writer is paid up front for the time, energy, and effort that goes into writing a book.  Just in case you were wondering, the typical advance for a first time fiction writer is usually in the neighborhood of $5,000 to $15,000, give or take a few thousand.  (In other words, a single book a year will earn you somewhere in the neighborhood of poverty wages.)

Now that advance is just that – and advance against future royalties.  A royalty is the percentage of the cover price that you get for every copy of your book that gets sold.  Again, things vary, but this is usually in the neighborhood of 5%-10%, depending on number of copies sold. 

The advance is money given upfront against money you are expected to earn by selling copies once the book is published.  Now a writer doesn’t get the advance money all at once – oh no, that would be too easy.  More often than not it is broken down into three, sometimes four, payments. 

This usually means you get 1/3 of the advance when you sign the contract, a 1/3 when you turn in the completed manuscript, and a 1/3 when the book is published.  Given that the time frame from sale to publication date can often be anywhere from one to two years, you can wait a long time for that money to come in.

Read the rest of the post on Genreality.

This post, by Scott Esposito, originally appeared on the Conversational Reading site on 6/20/08.

I tried very hard to take seriously Nicholas Carr’s article in The Atlantic, which has the provocative, and lately rather fashionable, thesis that the Internet is changing the way we read. Google is making us all info-snackers in search of the quick answer; there’s so much content at hand that we can barely stand to get halfway through something before we’re jumping off to the next thing.

I’ll admit, certain aspects of Carr’s argument feel intuitively correct. And I’m seeing an awful lot of books lately about how dumb Americans are becoming.

But when an idea becomes this popular, when it begins to develop that plasticized reek of conventional wisdom, it’s almost begging to be refuted. This is an oblique way of saying that, at this stage in the Google-is-ruining-information debate, someone looking to write an article on how the Internet is killing our attention spans needs something more substantial than the bland assertions Carr brings to the table.

Or to take on this essay from another angle, when someone gets a basic fact like this incorrect, it’s an indication that he’s not being especially rigorous in his theorizing:

Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet.

One problem: Chinese doesn’t consist of ideograms. No, it consists of characters that stand for morphemes, which are similar to syllables found in languages formed with the Roman alphabet. That this small fact completely subverts Carr’s example is emblematic of the problems confronting the essay a whole. For more on this, just wait till we get to Nietzsche’s typewriter.

I picked up the information about the Chinese language while reading a book (one about the deciphering of ancient Mayan, another character-based language that doesn’t consist of ideograms), and the fact that I read said book all the way to the end makes me a sort of rarity, at least according to Carr’s anecdotal research into his friends’ Internet-ravaged reading habits. I maintain the ability to read lengthy texts despite regular exposure to the Internet, and among Carr’s circle that makes me pretty special:

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether.

Okay, a confession: I’m not special. I’m just normal, or maybe a little too smart for my own good. I’m not sure, but what I will state with full confidence is that anyone who uses the Internet regularly retains full capacity to read a book. It’s not very hard. What’s hard is leaping from Carr’s stories about his friends to any meaningful warning about the Internet’s effects on our reading habits.

Read the rest of the post on Conversational Reading.

This post originally appeared on the HELP! Educational Blog on 3/11/09.

Let’s get right to the point. Misusing words makes you look less intelligent than you really are. If you misuse words in your writing, it can damage your credibility and diminish the point you’re trying to make. Even worse, it could completely change the meaning of the sentence.

What follows is a list of the 32 most commonly misused words and phrases.

1. Accept/Except- Although these two words sound alike (they’re homophones), they have two completely different meanings. “Accept” means to willingly receive something (accept a present.) “Except” means to exclude something (I’ll take all of the books except the one with the red cover.)

2. Affect/Effect- The way you “affect” someone can have an “effect” on them. “Affect” is usually a verb and “Effect” is a noun.

3. Alright- If you use “alright,” go to the chalkboard and write “Alright is not a word” 100 times.

4. Capital/Capitol- “Capitol” generally refers to an official building. “Capital” can mean the city which serves as a seat of government or money or property owned by a company. “Capital” can also mean “punishable by death.”

5. Complement/Compliment- I often must compliment my wife on how her love for cooking perfectly complements my love for grocery shopping.

6. Comprise/Compose- The article I’m composing comprises 32 parts.

7. Could Of- Of the 32 mistakes on this list, this is the one that bothers me most. It’s “could have” not “could of.” When you hear people talking, they’re saying “could’ve.” Got it?

8. Desert/Dessert- A desert is a hot, dry patch of sand. Dessert, on the other hand, is the sweet, fatty substance you eat at the end of your meal.

9. Discreet/Discrete- We can break people into two discrete (separate) groups, the discreet (secretive) and indiscreet.

10. Emigrate/Immigrate- If I leave this country to move to Europe, the leaving is emigrating and the arriving is immigrating.

11. Elicit/Illicit- Some people post illicit things on message boards to elicit outrageous reactions from others.

12. Farther/Further- Farther is used for physical distance, whereas further means to a greater degree.

13. Fewer/Less- Use fewer when referring to something that can be counted one-by-one. Use less when it’s something that doesn’t lend itself to a simple numeric amount.

14. Flair/Flare- A flair is a talent, while a flare is a burst (of anger, fire, etc.)

15. i.e/e.g- I.e. is used to say “in other words.” E.g. is used in place of “for example.”

16. Inflammable- Don’t let the prefix confuse you, if something is inflammable it can catch on fire.

Read the rest of the post on the HELP! Educational Blog.

This article, by Marg Gilks, originally appeared on her Scripta Word Services site. In it, she discusses how to tell when your point of view has shifted, and how unintentional shifts in POV can undermine your characters and make your work difficult to understand. 

Dalquist was shaking with rage, tears streaking down her face. "Get out," she whispered. Then she lunged for the other woman, shrieking, "Get out! Get out!"

Tamlinn managed to hide her surprise at the doctor’s reaction; she’d expected an angry denial, not near-hysteria. With an exultant laugh, she dodged Dalquist and ran for the door to the head. It hissed shut behind her.

Shaking uncontrollably with the roiling emotions the other woman had dredged up, Dalquist collapsed onto the bed, sobbing, and covered her face with her hands.

Yikes! Reading this excerpt from my first novel now, I’m not surprised that agents bounced it back to me so fast, the glue was barely dry on the stamp.

If you can see what’s wrong with this excerpt, congratulations. You understand point of view (POV). If not, don’t feel bad; of all the skills a writer must learn, maintaining point of view seems to be one of the hardest. As a freelance editor, I see POV slips in almost every manuscript I work on. Once attuned to it, a careful reader will even notice subtle POV switches that slip past editors to wind up in published novels.

What’s wrong with the above excerpt?

Paragraph one is ambiguous. Who’s the POV character? The tears streaking down Dalquist’s face could be either felt or seen. Referring to "the other woman" implies that this scene is from Dalquist’s POV. But then, in paragraph two, we are inside Tamlinn’s head, privy to her thoughts. There is no way that Dalquist can know what Tamlinn had expected, so Tamlinn must be the POV character. However, in paragraph three, our POV character, Tamlinn, has left the room; the door has shut behind her, leaving the reader behind to see what is impossible for Tamlinn to see. More, the reader knows not only that Dalquist is shaking — something Tamlinn could have seen, had she stayed — but that she is shaking because her emotions are in turmoil. Tamlinn may have suspected rage, but "turmoil" suggests more. This is Dalquist’s POV.

Every scene should have only one POV character, and everything must be filtered through that POV character’s perceptions. Only the POV character can know what he or she is thinking — he can’t know what anyone else is thinking, so the reader can’t, either. The POV character can’t see what’s going on behind her or what the person on the other end of the phone line is doing while they are talking, so the reader can’t know what’s going on in those places, either. Keep that in mind — stay firmly inside your POV character’s head — and you’ll rarely have trouble with point of view.

But, isn’t it so much easier just to tell the reader what character X is thinking, rather than trying to show it in ways the POV character (and thus, the reader) can see and understand? Why stick to the one-point-of-view rule?

Let’s look at that again, and we’ll see a hint: isn’t it so much easier just to TELL the reader what character X is thinking, rather than trying to SHOW it in ways the POV character can see and understand?

Yup: "show, don’t tell."

"People become, in our minds, what we see them do," says Orson Scott Card in his book, Characters and Viewpoint. We believe what we see more readily than what we’re told. And what are readers learning, watching through our POV character’s eyes? They’re learning about the characters. Firstly, they’re learning what character X is like by viewing his actions, and secondly, they’re learning about our POV character by how he perceives character X’s actions.

Yup: characterization.

Read the rest of the article on the Scripta Word Services site.

Sandy Nathan, award winning author, rides her horse for the first time after having her ankle fused. Little did she know that getting over writer’s block would be harder.

I wrote an introductory article on unlocking writers block a few weeks ago. (The one illustrated with photos of us trying to get a horse into a trailer.) After three weeks of vacation in New Mexico, I’m home and happily and productively working on the rewrite of Mogollon, sequel to my award winning novel, Numenon.

What did it take for me to break through the dreaded block?

Well, I stepped in a rut in the driveway with my fused ankle about three days into my vacation and spent the next two weeks in great pain and unable to walk. Before that, I had in a kidney infection along with a major flu.

That’s right, I had a kidney infection at the same time as the flu.

Is suffering necessary to break through writer’s block?

It was for me.

I put a longer and deeper write up of my experience these last few weeks on my personal blog (SandraNathan.net). Here, I summarize a few key learning points that may help you deal with your dragons:

1.    Accept and surrender. If you’re unable to write what you want, or reach the depth that you know you’ve got with your writing, acknowledge it. You don’t have to like it or embrace it, just accept the fact you’re blocked. And surrender to the fact. Journal about it. Write a blog article or entire book about it.
2.    If you don’t accept your blocked state and surrender to it, you can search the Net for tips and techniques to deal with writer’s block and paralysis. You’ll find lots: Try them all. Maybe they’ll work. Chances are they won’t. When you discover this, accept your block and surrender to it.
3.    Hit bottom. I did this in my idyllic New Mexico escape, bruised ankle propped on pillows and my foot and lower leg––all the way to the knee––looking like an angry eggplant. That was after I got over the kidney infection and flu.
4.    Truly give up. Hand your whole life over to your Higher Power. If you don’t have a Higher Power, make One up.
5.    Note that the universe really is in control of your life, not you, despite what The Secret says. Healing is a combination of grace and self effort. When you surrender, the spooky stuff starts happening. For instance, when I finally hit as bottom as I’ve been in recent years, I decided to read by book club’s selection for the next month, which was:
6.    Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust by Immaculee Ilibagiza. This best-selling book tells the story of how Immaculee Ilibagiza survived the murder of one million of her fellow Tutsi tribe members by rampaging Hutus. She hid in a 3 X 5 bathroom in Rwanda with 7 other women for 3 months. This book is a miracle, the finest example of contemporary Christian mysticism I have read. It jolted me into contact with my spiritual roots and provided the ground of my healing.
7.    It’s also evidence that writer’s block is not the worst thing that can happen to you.
8.    Neither are low book sales.
9.    You don’t have to be obsessed with your on-line sales, the number of blogs you write on, your web site stats, or anything about the world of writing.
10.    Life would go on if you never wrote another word.
11.    You might even enjoy your life more.

Freedom is letting go of attachment and aversion. No more: "I gotta have it," alternating with "I’d better run from him/her/it." Freedom is our birthright.

This is freedom. Once you attain this knowledge that you don’t need to write and the inner state that goes with it, the fountain of creativity inside of you may start to bubble again. You may get new angles for the book you were working on. You may WANT to write. You may be able to write.

Or not. You may want to run screaming from the literary world.

Try my method: Drop everything. Get to a dead stop. See what your soul says to you about your writing and your life. Do what it says.

I’m back at work writing, but in a different way. No more pounding the keyboard until my shoulders won’t move and my wounded ankle feels like it’s poured full of molten lead. No more obsessing.

I’m doing things differently and letting the immense love and good will of the universe carry me forward. If my stuff is supposed to sell, it will because people find value in it––and in getting to know me.

In God we trust, right? That’s the title of that other article I wrote about my recent three weeks of high altitude spiritual regeneration in Santa Fe.

Two more tips that could radically improve the level of peace in the world and might even help your writer’s block:

1.    Watch where you put your feet. If you watch where you put your feet, you won’t step in it. It can take many physical and metaphorical forms. The rut in the driveway that nailed my already screwed-down ankle taught me the wisdom of simple truths: Watch where you step.
2.    Keep your ankle above your heart. This is a variant of an Eastern spiritual practice. In Eastern religions, worshipers pranam, bow, to their gurus, sacred objects, or representations of deities. The pranam involves either going down on one’s hands and knees and touching one’s forehead to the floor or a total prostration, lying face down on the floor with your hands over your head––a full pranam.

The pranam honors the sacred and forces one to put one’s head below one’s heart. That is, a pranam puts the rational, judgmental function of the intellect below the empathetic, intuitive, compassionate function of the heart. This is a good thing. Few people get in trouble because they’re too compassionate.

My episode with my ankle indicated that keeping your ankle above your heart can be an equally powerful means of attaining surrender, peace and nonviolence. Could those Hutus have murdered all those people if they’d kept their ankles about their hearts? No.

You can’t do much lying on your back with your ankle above your heart. This posture does provide a perfect opportunity to catch up on the meditations you’ve missed since you started writing seriously twenty years ago. You can contemplate existence like crazy.

With your ankle above your heart, your ankle’s swelling will go down, and so may that of your head. It’s a humbling thing, lying with your leg in the air. Humbling enough to allow your soul to talk and tell you what it thinks of the way you’ve been living.

Your soul may point out certain deficiencies in your behavior that have contributed to your inability to write anything but checks. Your soul may suggest alternative behaviors. In my case, if I didn’t run myself into the ground and chase foolish …  (Contemplation can be brisk.)

Writing and lifestyle are interrelated, or so my ankle and heart told me.

In words my editor sent me (from Ephesians): Live a life worthy of the calling you have received.

In God I trust, while walking the walk.

If you want the longer form on my personal blog, click here to go to Sandra Nathan.net

This article, by Laura Miller, originally appeared on Salon.com on 5/18/09.

Why do we often care more about imaginary characters than real people? A new book suggests that fiction is crucial to our survival as a species.

Why do human beings spend so much time telling each other invented stories, untruths that everybody involved knows to be untrue? People in all societies do this, and do it a lot, from grandmothers spinning fairy tales at the hearthside to TV show runners marshaling roomfuls of overpaid Harvard grads to concoct the weekly adventures of crime fighters and castaways. The obvious answer to this question — because it’s fun — is enough for many of us. But given the persuasive power of a good story, its ability to seduce us away from the facts of a situation or to make us care more about a fictional world like Middle-earth than we do about a real place like, oh, say, Turkmenistan, means that some ambitious thinkers will always be trying to figure out how and why stories work.

The latest and most intriguing effort to understand fiction is often called Darwinian literary criticism, although Brian Boyd, an English professor at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and the author of "On the Origin of Stories," a new book offering an overview and defense of the field, prefers the term "evocriticism." As Boyd points out, the process of natural selection is supposed to gradually weed out any traits in a species that don’t contribute to its survival and its ability to pass on its genes to offspring who will do the same. The ability to use stories to communicate accurate information about the real world has some obvious usefulness in this department, but what possible need could be served by made-up yarns about impossible things like talking animals and flying carpets?

Boyd’s explanation, heavily ballasted with citations from studies and treatises on neuroscience, cognitive theory and evolutionary biology, boils down to two general points. First, fiction — like all art — is a form of play, the enjoyable means by which we practice and hone certain abilities likely to come in handy in more serious situations. When kittens pounce on and wrestle with their litter mates, they’re developing skills that will help them hunt, even though as far as they’re concerned they’re just larking around. Second, when we create and share stories with each other, we build and reinforce the cooperative bonds within groups of people (families, tribes, towns, nations), making those groups more cohesive and in time allowing human beings to lord it over the rest of creation.

The popular understanding of evolutionary biology can be sketchy even among (I’m tempted to say especially among) its most enthusiastic lay proponents. That’s why it’s important to point out that, whatever you’ve heard about "selfish genes," the secret to humanity’s success lies less in Hobbesian competition than in individuals’ capacity to cooperate, and even to act altruistically. While there are short-term benefits to individuals who behave selfishly — say, by stealing or hoarding food — the long-term benefits of sharing usually outweigh the quick payoff, provided that everybody else in your group also participates fairly. Human beings are what biologists call "hypersocial," more social by far than any other animal, and the major product of our deep investment in sociality is our culture: our language, tools, political institutions, clothing, medicine, sculpture, songs, religions, etc.

In short, humanity itself is an element, like the weather or seasons, that each of us needs to negotiate in order to survive. We’re innately skilled at reading each other’s intentions, judging a person’s position in the current social hierarchy, checking the emotional temperature in a room, detecting when our companion isn’t paying attention to us, and so on. Those who are especially adept at this are said to have good "social skills," but the average human being is a pretty impressive social navigator even when not conscious of what she’s doing. It’s only the rare exceptions — people along the autistic spectrum, for example, whose social instincts and perceptions are impaired — who make us aware of just how essential these abilities are when it comes to getting by in this world.

Read the rest of the article on Salon.com.