Carolrhoda Lab, the new imprint putting out DRAW THE DARK (my YA paranormal mystery that started life as STALAG WINTER, a 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award semifinalist), goes live this morning.  Check it out: http://www.carolrhodalab.com/

Oh, and Marcelle?  I’ve always remembered what you said after reading the proposal: “I want to read that when it gets published.”

Looks like you get your wish, girl .

This article is enough to make you weep.  The topic’s like global warming; you feel helpless and angry and wonder how people can be so damn selfish as to believe that they’re the only important species on the planet.

Once more into the breach: struggling with a short story while pondering this article from the NYT, I have to admit that while I can see the argument–I really can and Mike Stackpole had a great breakdown on the costs of e-publishing on his blog–there is something profoundly unsettling about the conclusion.  A new range of telling stories?  The ability to jump around within a book so much that you lose track of where you’ve been?  Hmmm–in an age where everyone demands novelty and constant stimulation, there is something to be said for the sustained concentration a linear narrative demands. I agree that books are about content, but divorcing form from content seems to miss the point.  Books aren’t video games.

So I’m in the worst time of all: the time between when I have finished one project but not yet begun the next.  Oh, I have vague ideas, but they’re a jumble–just this inchoate mass that leaves me feeling all prickly inside and antsy and dissatisfied.  Honestly, I just hate my brain right now.

Part of the problem is I have to let go of the book I just finished, which is hard to do when you’ve lived it–in every sense–for the last few months.  Living a book is both absolute torture and the most magical kind of obsession that stirs up all kinds of interesting feelings.  It’s the same reason why I can’t talk about what I’m writing as I do it.  It’s hard to explain–if I understood it, I would definitely tell you–but when I’m developing an idea, I hate talking about it because putting it into words, trying to translate the feelings I have into something that can be understood–especially when the ideas aren’t very logical–feels like it drains all the vitality from what I’m thinking.  Now, coming from a shrink, that sounds dumb, but hear me out.  When I LISTEN, especially to myself, my critical, analytical mind frequently kicks in to pick apart the logic. That is absolute death to creativity because then I’ve put myself on the couch.  Part of the goal of analysis or any therapy is to rid ideas of their emotional valence.  That is, if you’re having problems, spelling them out, looking at them from all the angles, is a way of helping you not act on the emotions without understanding where they’re coming from.

Well, I don’t want to kill all those feelings.  Those feelings drive the narrative.  So I won’t talk about a book until I’m good and deep into it–when I know that talking a little bit about it won’t drain away the energy.

Right now, though, I’m trying to organize all this in-between energy–the prickly uneasiness I get when one book is done, the next one still just a formless mass, and me casting around for something to bloody DO.  Usually, I write a short story in between books, just because.   Good practice.

I know writers who can make the switch from working on a novel to banging out a short story on a weekly basis.  Me, I’m either obsessive or inflexible, or both.  I can’t switch mental tracks like that because I’m so involved in hanging onto the people I’ve created in my head, I worry that I’ll lose track of them if I allow myself to become obsessed with other people in a different story–which is easy for me to do.  When I throw myself into writing, I dive into the deep end and I’ll stay there until the darned thing is done.

Occasionally, derailing myself works out.  I remember having to break off from one book because an anthology editor popped into my inbox with a request for a short story–and I’m certainly not going to refuse   So, for four days, I lived that story: a day to think of it and three to bang it out, tune it up, send it out.  I thought the story, “Second Sight” (and, actually, it turned out to be VERY long, more like a novelette) went well.  The editor liked it.  LOCUS’s reviewer liked it even better.  After that, I was able to jump back into my book and finish it–but that was the exception.  It was just the right request at the right time and it helped that the story parameters–give me guidelines and I’m set–meshed well with the genre in which I was working.

For me, writing is like being an air-traffic controller.  All the jets are lined up on the runway, but they have to go in an orderly fashion.  My editor kindly called this my ability to compartmentalize–and I guess that’s true.  I don’t tend to allow myself to get very scattered when it comes to writing–I’m not one of those “organic” writers who can just sit down and start working without a clue where I’m going–but  I would suspect that this is the same quality that allowed me to handle the deluge of material you get when you go to medical school.  For that matter, when you’re seeing a patient–whether it’s to do surgery or listen to their story or do an exam of any type–you proceed in an orderly fashion.  Doctors are famous for their mnemonics, those little acronyms or sayings that allow us to remember important information.  For example, I still remember this little ditty– C3,4,5 keeps the diaphragm alive–that clued me in on which cervical roots make up the phrenic nerve.  (Here are some others.) All of medicine is like that: compartmentalized information organized into algorithms that you have to then bring together to form a useful picture of a patient’s symptoms.

That’s how I tend to approach writing, too.  I get an idea that I research and organize and then develop into an outline.  Along the way–if I know the kind of book I’m trying to develop–then I focus only on reading and/or listening to books in that genre.   I keep my eye on the proverbial ball and don’t allow myself to get sidetracked.  That doesn’t mean my brain isn’t hopping–it is–and even having done an outline doesn’t mean that I slavishly follow it.  Used to do that in the beginning.  In fact, I pretty much used to wrote the entire book in outline form.  Like, we’re talking several hundred pages of outline, scene by scene, line by line . . . One editor joked that all I had to do was put in adjectives and I was done.  This wasn’t far from the truth.

Now, though, with more experience and a tad more confidence, I think I allow myself to be a bit freer–to realize that what felt good in outline doesn’t work in terms of pacing or whatever, or just isn’t flat-out necessary.  These days, once I’ve finished an outline, I almost never look back.  Occasionally, I’ll check and remind myself where I was headed, but once I inhabit a work, my brain is on track and I need to let it go.  I need to step out of my own way.  There’s a time to be your own traffic cop and there’s a time to let the traffic just go where it will.

Just need to get out of my own way . . .

Right now, I’m working on figuring out what kind of short story I want to do.  Almost there.  Damn well better be.  I keep going like this, my brain is gonna explode.  Then I’ll write the story, send it and then get cracking on the next book.

All this is necessary incubation time.  I get that.  I just hate it when I’m living it.

Currently reading: The Best American Mystery Stories 2009 edited by Jeffrey Deaver and Otto Penzler

Bad Girls Don’t Die by Katie Alender

Currently listening to: When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead (oooh, I wish I had a site like this . . . so much eye candy!)

I’ve already commented about this Huffington Post article on my Facebook page, but I’ll reiterate here:

Uh . . . YEAH. Helllooooo, editors are the people who find you the books you’re hot to read. As a writer, I can tell you that editors have vision; they are constantly thinking of their readership and their writers; they are out to give you the best experience with that book you can possibly have. All the editors I’ve worked with have been tireless advocates and do a lot of very thankless jobs, including dealing with nervous, insecure writers. (Moi? Never . . .) Anyone who believes the reading world would be better off without editors has a) never been a writer, b) never dealt with an editor, c) decided that sloppy is okay. And we’re not just talking where to put the bloody periods or semicolons, either. We’re talking plotting, pacing, characterization . . . the whole shebang.
Sheesh. I can’t believe this is even a topic for discussion . . .

Dean Wesley Smith has a great article up on one of the traps a bunch of writers fall into: believing that, once they’d made a couple of sales, they know everything they need to know to keep selling.

Uh . . . no.

For me to keep my medical licenses current, I have to rack up a bunch of CMEs–continuing medical education–credits a year.  They’re required; the state wants you to keep learning–and honestly, you really do WANT your doctor to keep learning the  latest, right?  Speaking from experience . . . sure, some of the stuff at these conferences is stuff I know, but I always pick up a gem or two.  (And, for me, it’s double your pleasure, double your fun.  At the last forensics conference I attended, I heard a fabulous series of lectures and then took the ideas and turned them into a short story, “Where the Bodies Are,” that will be appearing in Crimewave #11.)

It’s the same thing with writing, but continuing your education as a writer is also knowing what it is that you don’t know.  Sometimes, you won’t figure that out until you go and listen to a bunch of writers and hear something that blows you away.  Sometimes you need to rely on other, more established writers who will tell you, “This, you need.  This, you don’t.”  Those people, you can only trust if you feel they know you well.  That actually happened to me with Dean and Kris, who know my writing and me pretty darned well–way better than I know myself sometimes.  Most times . . .  I was trying to figure a way to get to one of their workshops and Kris, ever so gently, kept peppering me with questions: What do you think you and I can do together?  What is it you want to learn? In that instance, Kris was trying to help me see that THIS workshop would not help me; that I needed to use the tools I already had and just go write–and then write some more, and she was right

How you learn depends, in part, on what your style is, how well you know yourself and how much anxiety you can tolerate.  See, learning depends on your willingness to take chances.  Doing that makes a lot of people uneasy and anxious; it’s much easier to wash, rinse, repeat.  But Dean gave me a great piece of advice once: do something new with every book, every story.

For example, with one of my books, I really wanted to try doing it as a murder mystery (the fact that this was in a well-established gaming universe made it all the more challenging).  I told Dean and his response was, “What fun.”  Well, it wasn’t FUN at first, but it was certainly challenging and then I DID have fun because it was completely unlike any book I’d done before.

I just finished a book a couple days ago that may or may not see the light of day, but I worked at making it different than what I’d done before.  I took an earlier idea that worked only . . .  okay.  Not great.  I let it rest and now, looking at it with a year’s worth of writing other things, I could see what was wrong with it.  So I didn’t “fix it.”  I completely retooled it; rewrote it from a different POV, different format, different emphasis.  I’m biased, but I think the final product is much better and tells a story that really resonates with me versus trying to do a story that’s primarily plot-driven.  (Or I could be completely wrong, and it’s a total flop.)  Oh, there are many machinations in the plot and redoing it the way I did opens up a whole other avenue in terms of the sequel (and yeah, there has to be one; it’s just too big a story to tell in one book); and it was a very, very difficult book to do.  I think I ended up with more than six hundred pages that simply don’t work.  But I learned something from tearing apart what I’d done and recognizing that I could not do what I had done before.

Drove me nuts.  NUTS.

But I certainly learned something by the very simple maxim of forcing myself to do something I hadn’t done before.

Will this book sell?  Beats me.  Sure, I hope so.  If it doesn’t, then I will read the comments from all the editors because no matter how well I thought I did, I didn’t do well enough.  Which means that even though I’ve sold a couple books, I don’t know it all and I must continue to learn.  It will hurt like hell.  It will make me reach for Kleenex, I’m sure.  But it is no different than being an intern in surgery and having a chief resident tear me a new one for some dumb mistake.  Hurt like hell–but I never made that mistake again.

Dean is absolutely right.  You must keep learning as a writer.  If the only way you can do that is by trying something new with every work, then do that.  Take the time to get to know other writers who are further along than you and LISTEN to what they have to say–even if they have to say it to you a couple hundred times.  But do learn.  Don’t let EGO and arrogance get in your way.

Because that’s another great piece of advice Dean gave me and what his article is all about.  EGO will kill you.  An ego’s okay to have.  We all need one.  I mean, really, I’m going to sit here and NOT believe that someone might want to read what I’ve written?  But we all need to know when to put our ego away.  You gotta box it.  Trust me, your ego will still be there when you lift the lid.

Currently reading Catching Fire (again!) by Suzanne Collins; The Ask and the Answer by Patrick Ness

I’ve gotten a couple comments from folks who say that the RSS feed doesn’t work in the Google Chrome Browser.  My handy-dandy, trusty webmaster has looked into this–and indeed, this is an issue, though no one is sure why.  According to my WM, “the only explanations appear to be either that Chrome hasn’t  fully implemented that function or WordPress hasn’t updated their RSS  function for Chrome.”

So, sorry, guys.  The page can still be seen, of course.  As for RSS feed . . . I’d suggest dashing off an email to Google and/or Wordpress.

Douglas Preston on consumers, entitlement and e-books:

“The sense of entitlement of the American consumer is absolutely astonishing,” said Douglas Preston, whose novel “Impact” reached as high as No. 4 on The New York Times’s hardcover fiction best-seller list earlier this month. “It’s the Wal-Mart mentality, which in my view is very unhealthy for our country. It’s this notion of not wanting to pay the real price of something.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Publishers haven’t done themselves, the readers or the writers any favors by offering books for free or dirt-cheap.  In fact, I know they haven’t.  Any reader who doesn’t get that the low price of an e-book was to get you to buy the READER–hello, this is the same reason iTunes was originally DRM, so you’d have to buy the iPOD–is missing the boat.  Publishers–primarily driven by Amazon’s desire to sell the Kindle (and, originally, the Sony eReader before Sony wised up)–capitulated to a piece of tech.  Now they’re trying to take back control, which is much harder to do once you’ve let someone else control expectations.

Check out the entire article here.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about what words are worth, considering all the brouhaha lately.  Lurk on a bunch of forums and blogs, and everyone’s been weighing in on their buying habits, how much they’re willing to pay, whether people should boycott ebooks priced higher than $15, etc., etc.  The latest salvo comes today; the NYTimes has this article about publishers beginning to wrangle with Google.

Making me wonder what words are worth and how much should be free and, perhaps most importantly, who should be offering them up for free to begin with.

The first point is subjective. The short answer is: depends on my pocketbook and the author.  I’ll buy a hardcover by certain authors the moment it hits the stands and forgo the movies a couple weeks or more.  (I mean, really: all this fuss about paying for a book from which you get HOURS of enjoyment versus the amount you pay for a movie that lasts less than two hours, not to mention the obscene price for a box of Raisinets.)  Others, I’ll wait for the price to come down, or for another edition–the paperback, for example.  Some, I’ll just check out of the library.  If I like the book enough, I might spring to own it.  And sometimes, when I absolutely MUST have a certain book this instant and my library doesn’t have it and the nearest bookstore is, for me, a good hour’s drive . . . I’ll try to find it as an e-book.  And I’ll pay for it, regardless of cost, because the need is there and it’s immediate.

The second point isn’t subjective, even though you might think so.  There are forums on which I lurk where they routinely inform you where to get free e-books, free e-stories.  Many times, these freebies come from the publisher–usually, the first book in a series or a very old book by an author designed to pique your interest enough to plunk down the money for another, more recent e-book by the same author.

Me?  I think this is a bad thing, and let me tell you why.  The reason I think this is bad is that it’s the same freebie mentality driving newspapers out of business.  Everyone is used to getting their content on the Internet for free.  You just don’t want to pay.  Worse, you feel ENTITLED to your freebies.  Newspapers have tried to make you pay, but you won’t.

And the result is disastrous for everyone, even if you don’t realize it now.  Not only does, for example, the NYTimes get thinner and thinner every day, the quality also suffers because they can no longer pay for the kind of reporting you want, for the content that is, say, free of errors and fact-checked.  (And, no, a blog does not substitute for real, investigative reporting.)

How many people would be willing to pay for the e-edition of the NYTimes?  For Google News (which, by the way, culls from other sources)?  For The Huffington Post?  For The Daily Beast?

Yeah, I thought that was a resounding silence.

So long as publishers continue to devalue the worth of their words by offering them up for free, then everyone suffers.  In my private practice–way back in those shrink days–I did not have a sliding scale.  I didn’t see people for free.  I didn’t take insurance.  My fee was my fee.  You paid it, or you saw someone else.  I did fine, by the way, and had a full practice until the day I shuttered my doors and took down the shingle.  This business model wasn’t cruelty or arrogance on my part; there are plenty of child shrinks, so it wasn’t a matter of life or death.  But I discovered very quickly that people value what they must pay for–in money, in time, in work, etc.  Take away the need to pay and you automatically signal that you, really, may not be worth very much.  Now why would you take advice that you may not agree with offered by someone for free?  You are, after all, free to ignore it in any case–but you did pay for my time.  Presumably, you think my words are worth something.  So then the words become harder to ignore.

Words can be free, in my opinion, if the author offers them up for free.  Not the publishing house.  Not the store.  Not a pirate.  The author.  Because we are the ones spending the time trying to come up with ways to entertain you.  The words are ours, and maybe it’s time for authors to start insisting on a bit of fine print in their contracts–that nothing of theirs is given up for free without prior agreement.  In a digital world, backlists are suddenly available, and those books should not be offered up for free simply because they are not recent.  No one should have that control–to offer something for free–but the authors.

Check out Dean Wesley Smith, who’s been talking about this on his blog, too.  Honest: See for yourself.  Oh, and don’t miss Mike Stackpole’s blog either.  Nice stuff in there about what writers stand to make for their words in the digital world.

My two cents.  But they are mine, and the only reason you’re reading them now is because I’ve put them down–for free.

http://www.authorsguild.org/advocacy/articles/the-right-battle.html

On the other hand, PW notes:

Despite reports that the two parties were discussing ways to restore Macmillan’s buy buttons yesterday, customers were still unable to buy Macmillan titles directly from the Amazon site, including Winter Garden, the just released title from Kristin Hannah for which St. Martin’s took out a full page ad in today’s New York Times.

This won’t be over for a long time yet, but the implications are huge.  One of the best parts of this, though, is that readers are (hopefully, finally) beginning to appreciate what goes into actually publishing a book and a view into the publishing world in general.  I’m very hopeful that this type of energetic advocacy will help us not go the way of the music industry.  (And, yeah, don’t think the irony escapes me: that the same company, Apple, which almost single-handedly did in that industry–although swap sites and pirates got in on the act, too–has now fired the first salvo over books.)

February 2nd, 2010 by ijbadmin | No Comments »