Bad Good Habits

I’m bad with goals. On January 8^th I started writing my next novel with the goal of a minimum of a thousand words per day, but with my attention on writing scenes, chapters and arcs – of getting the text right. I write much more when I focus like that, which became the problem, because on the first day I wrote about 2,900 words. On the second day, I wrote about 2,900 more. On the third, I wrote 2,300, and felt exhilarated, having never started a novel so quickly, but also like I’d cheated and profoundly failed.

Do you recognize the problem? Do you have it, too?

Last week I managed to drag my chubby butt to 2.54 miles on the elliptical machine. It was the farthest I’d ever gone, and was so hard on my body that I was trembling for the next hour and felt exhausted the next morning. When I climbed on the next day and didn’t match that all-time record, my heart sunk. I was sweaty, and spent, and my neuromuscular syndrome flared up so badly I couldn’t bend my knees, and I felt like I hadn’t done enough.

I've habituated expanding my goals to a cancerous degree. We often talk about failure in terms of not reaching goals. Figuring out what you can achieve and what’s reasonable to push is vital. You have to learn to make a routine, and then to push. I fail in these ways all the time – it is, allegedly, mortal. But there are other ways to fail. Victory can defeat you.

It's a good line. ... Shut up.

Goals can’t remain static. It’s ridiculous to teach a baby to take her first steps and then never expect her to perform more than that. In writing, you want to push you productivity up if you can. If you can write 500 words in a weekend for months, then it’s healthy to try for 1,000. If you can bench fifty, try sixty. Sure.

But figuring out the limits above those goals is essential, and it’s something I’m terrible at. You can psychoanalyze me as the boy who learned to walk again, who didn’t readjust into school well enough and was brutalized for it, who wound up with nerds who all pulled better grades, and thusly craved to exceed his performance. I don’t think the mind is that simple, or that one reason is ever trustworthy for a whole personality. But I knew within seconds of seeing “2.56 miles” on the elliptical’s panel that I was going to guilt myself over not hitting that again tomorrow. And I knew I shouldn’t, and that it wasn’t healthy, and that I couldn’t stop it.

This is part of why I hate critics who backbite at authors for having a slow pace. It took Harper Lee a lifetime to make To Kill a Mockingbird, and then she was done. Truman Capote, of significantly faster work and greater output, supported and championed Lee. They weren’t competitors, and one wasn’t failing for not having the process of the other.

Goading people into rushing risks breaking them. Screw breaking their work – and yes, dashing towards word count like #NaNoWriMo ruins plenty of decent novels – it can damage their development.

No one browbeat me into writing 33,700 words in my first two weeks on this novel. That I am now significantly ahead of schedule and feel the dread of being behind is a doom of my own making.  It’s hardly fast composition – I have friends who are self-publishing books like they shed manuscripts. But today, after writing two emotionally demanding chapters in separate time lines, and having difficulty even sitting up in the chair afterward, I didn’t feel accomplished. I felt sicker and I felt like I’d failed.

Don’t do this. And if you’re like me, let’s talk it out.

Consequences.

There are authors I respect who advise to lock everything up, to be cold, and be as productive as possible. As someone who won’t fall asleep tonight because the mere strain of writing has jacked up his health problems such that he may not fall asleep tonight, please take my advice: ignore those authors. Mind yourself. Mind your goals and your limits.

And if somehow I become the Capote to your Lee, trust me that I will be overjoyed to share your one book with the world.

Bathroom Monologue: Editing Better

“I'll tell you how to make it better. I can't do crap to make it sell, or tell what this agent prefers, or what resonates more with Heartland audiences. I can only tell you how to improve every single paragraph, and the plot strung along them. Somebody else can tell you what they'd like better. I won't argue with them. They'll be wrong. All of them will be wrong if they disagree with me, but I won't argue. Everybody has an opinion. Mine just so happens to be correct and will guide you to producing the best art. Whether anyone else agrees? I don't see why you’d care.”

Bathroom Monologue: Paper Vs. E-Books

Your book is made out of dead trees.

Your Kindle sucks electricity.

Your book doesn't work in the dark.

Your Kindle needs to be plugged in or it goes dark.

Your book is the same book every day.

An e-tailer can't rescind my paper copy of 1984.

If my Kindle falls apart, they’ll send me a new one.

I love the smell of my old books.

I love the grayscale on my reader.

I like to make notes in the margins.

I like never losing my place.

My book never runs out of batteries.

My Kindle never runs out of stories.

Yours is worse.

Yours is worse.

Both are risky in a bathtub.

The Next Big Thing Blog Award (x3?)

So, October was rough. My grandfather passed away, Hurricane Sandy rocked the region, and I only barely kept up the Bathroom Monologues’s daily streak. But while I did keep it up, I was granted the same award by three different people and never had the opportunity to accept it. This is a little embarrassing.

The blogging award? THE NEXT BIG THING. Unfortunately, this doesn’t turn me into Brock Lesnar. It means these three writers have faith in the novel I’m writing, and want me to answer a few questions about it. I’m very flattered to have been granted it by Richard Bon, Cathy Webster, and Virginia Moffatt. 

So, those questions?

1. What is the working title of your book?

The House That Nobody Built. There was a toss-up between that and the shorter “Nobody’s House,” but it turns out the latter was also the title of a children’s television show. I don’t want the confusion. My book is not for kids, except particularly smart kids.

2. Where did the idea come from for the book?

In Kung Fu Hustle, there’s a scene where the bad guys dig the worst assassin out of the dingiest dungeon in the darkest prison in their madcap world, and he just looked like some old fisherman. It was a striking moment. After the movie, I went for a walk and ruminated on who else would be in that cell block. That expanded to making an entire prison for that kind of prisoner, or even less usual prisoners, like carnivorous plants that won’t stop growing, or succubae that can phase through normal walls. After a few hundred yards, the setting was born. It’s since been brought to my attention that places like Arkham Asylum and Azkaban had me beat by years, which was humiliating. Humiliation is good for you, though. I do it to my protagonist a lot.

3. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

A riot at a supernatural prison sees hundreds of monsters form an army unlike the world’s ever known, to defend themselves against the army that locked them up.

4. What genre does your book fall under?

It’s Fantasy. Perhaps Epic Fantasy, except it’s not about a journey. It’s about fortifying this prison.

5. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
Let me think… Min-sik Choi, most famous as Oldboy and the serial killer in I Saw the Devil, would probably a great as this one character: Merlet, a one-armed revolutionary who never let go of his war. I loved Ahney Her in Gran Turino, and would be excited for her to screen-test as a certain witch.

But I didn’t envision actors in any of the roles as I wrote it, so it’s a little hard to cast out. All our human players are people of color, and I’d furious if they were whitewashed. Meanwhile, most of the cast are non-human characters, including non-humanoid types – there’s a sentient ball of horny snakes that friends joke should be voiced by H. Jon Benjamin (Archer, Bob's Burgers), and I’d enjoy that.

There’s a giant cyclops who I sometimes read to myself in the voice of Kathy Bates. I’d be tickled for that. I actually have a longstanding invitation that Kathy Bates and Gene Wilder can play any and all characters I ever write. Come to think of it, Gene Wilder would make a bang-up Nobody, the insane elemental who none of the other monsters remember seeing before the riot. Though if he did that, I'd cajole the director to have Wilder parody Sarcastic Wonka.

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I have queries out to a few agents that I deeply respect. There are a limited number of highly talented agents I’d like to work with, and to connect me with some particularly attractive houses. I mean, if you can get me into Tor, then let’s shake hands. But if the house doesn’t help the book significantly, then it’s not worth the commission on an agent, let alone splitting profits with the house they find. And I have friends with agents who have waited years (and two who are still waiting) for a sale. So it’s all a matter of finding someone reliable.

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

Five months, from January to May of 2011. That included more than a month’s worth of absolutely laughable delays. I actually collected what I did on every day of the composition here.

8. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
Most often the book has been compared to Terry Pratchett’s Discworld and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, allegedly because I handle these enormous casts of conflicted beings, bring them to a personal level, and relish in their humility. There’s no good way to say, “I’m funny.” Let someone else say it. But I do seem to enjoy running from extremely absurd to extremely serious, which is a little too rare in Fantasy. Scott Lynch, author of Lies of Locke Lamora, is incredible at that, but we don’t write alike. His world is full of scoundrels and backstabbers, but I don’t think they’d do any business with my crew.

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?

J.R.R. Tolkien for making the Ring Wraiths so much cooler than the hobbits. Peter S. Beagle for giving the Red Bull majesty, and Michael Crichton for making the t-rex and raptors the stars. Stephen King for making Leland Gaunt and Randall Flagg so much cooler than anyone they preyed upon. Grendel. Circe. Skeletor. Thanos. Pretty much an entire life of finding the villains more appealing set me up to eventually write about a desperate army of them.

10. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

At no point in this book am I afraid of subjects, and the classically underrepresented have a habit of showing up. That one-armed revolutionary is an amputee, which is a minority group that has astoundingly low representation in Fantasy fiction. Just think about the time periods Fantasy tends to ape, then ask yourself why every other person you run into isn’t missing a limb.

I don’t rub it in, even as much as I’ve done answering this question, but it’s there. Things are there. There’s a trans love interest, a sexually confused main character, and robotic bigots who think living is irresponsible. And for everyone who knows how much I hate children – kids show up. You’ll see a little bit of how I look at kids. I’ve made some beta readers cry.

Oh, and it’s not generic Medieval Fantasy. It’s post-post-post-post-apocalyptic – the world has ended so many times that people have just learned to deal with it and fear other things, you know, like each other.

The Brutal 2,000-Word Day

Last week the New York Times ran an article suggesting that authors only writing one book a year is slacking. Nowadays indy authors have a better chance of building an audience if they write multiple books a year, and big publishing houses view additional output as useful promotion. To write less might just mean we’re lazy. Lisa Scottoline has received particular bile on social networks for being described as struggling to write 2,000 words per day.

How do I write so much per year? Bubble baths.

 Twitter whipped out the ballistics-grade snark. Writing is easy! Anyone can bang out a thousand words in an hour. That’s just a long blog post. I didn’t work that hard on NaNoWriMo! Get back into the salt mines, authors!

What rankled me was the number of mediocre writers espousing this condescension. Many were hacks whose e-books aren’t worth 99-cents and whose blog posts run over 2,000 words because they don’t know how to edit. Of course it’s easy to fluff up word count if you don’t care about craft. 

It rankled worse with rush-pundits who actually show raw talent that, with the time and reflection they insist you eschew, could develop into something great. What they’d learn from experience will be stifled by the positive feedback loop of rushing adequate chunks of text to market. Traditional publishing has nearly killed the Max Perkins style that gave us Fitzgerald, Wolfe and Hemingway. God save us if the next wave of publishing kills taking your time.

Slacker! He'll never go anywhere.

John Scalzi was particularly level-headed. He advised folks to calm down and recognize that everyone has his or her own writing speed. And he was right. Many of us grew up on Stephen King, who seems to write at the speed of sound. Amanda Hocking and Seanan McGuire do multiple novels per year, and Jim Butcher has at least one door stopper a year. Meanwhile Jo Walton and Justin Cronin take about two years to release one book a-piece, and Patrick Rothfuss and George R.R. Martin can run even longer.

In a better world those authors who were at ease with promotion and speedy production would use their platforms to help the slower. I stump for talented authors of all paces routinely and have been lucky to find like-minded folks. But while Scalzi was correct, I still ran hot.

Last night Jo Walton’s Among Others took the Nebula Award for Best Novel, and it took her at least two years to release it. This should remind us of great works that make that schedule seem liberal: it took Harper Lee decades to give us To Kill a Mockingbird, and just as long for Larry McMurtry to produce Lonesome Dove. Imagine an editor yelling at J.R.R. Tolkien to meet his deadline on Lord of the Rings. Imagine the next genre luminary getting the same browbeating while she tries to puzzle out world-building we haven't conceived of yet.

Or imagine some blowhard on Twitter screeching that she's not working hard enough.

A great work, but also one of privilege.

The self-publishing world, and particularly the Locke-and-Hocking world of cranking out as many e-books as possible, is not delivering such works. The best of these books I've read were passably entertaining and couldn't strive for more in their production cycles. In a market where a large catalog and frequent releases are your best shots at a career, it really can’t, and if you want to make a living, that two-year cycle of a Jo Walton or Justin Cronin seems implausible barring a very lucky hit. And when Amanda Hocking got that hit? It was having her sizable catalog that helped her become a millionaire.

Since I see something like this self-publishing model dominating the industry in a few years, this is disturbing for the future of an art form. We can’t stop the price cycling that Amazon, Apple and the Big Six have steered us toward. We can alter how we interact and help each other. That novel Harper Lee spent so long on owed a debt to Truman Capote’s assistance. Those who succeed in the speedy new market can help not just teach and critique, but to promote talents that have different paces.

The rebuttal is that the market doesn’t want great literature. It wants twists and thrills and titillation, and little else. It’s too dumb to recognize exposition and formula, and authors are fooling themselves for caring about more than dollars. This "market" would become a race to the bottom of both price and ambition, allowing The Novel to survive a few more years by imitating reality television’s innovations. If the future of publishing really is who can write the most blood-and-smut the fastest, then I might as well kill myself now.

You may notice I haven’t committed suicide today. Like yesterday and last week and last month, I’m taking exactly as long as my novels require. I will not sell you something that is unworthy of your time, regardless of whether it’s through HarperCollins, Tor or Kindle Direct Publishing. And when I read something great, hailing from any country, creed or composition cycle, I’ll share it. If the next Lord of the Rings emerges from self-publishing, I’ll grin through my humiliation and help its author out. Whoever it is will probably need the help.

Quality: Self-Pub Vs. Traditional-Pub

So, Kristine Kathryn Rusch wrote a really long and strangely strawman-heavy argument that traditional publishing doesn’t guarantee quality. I like Rusch’s blog, and this was just one of many pieces defending the self-publishing market’s reputation at the expense of traditional publishing.

Honestly, I wanted to be on board with her. I know that there is quality work in the self-published market, and that there are some incredibly talented and hard-working freelance editors, and that many of the traditionally-published writers will be better off moving to self-publication, and most certainly there are publishing house editors that slack off.

But so much of Rusch’s diatribe (like many similar diatribes) was oversimplified or felt like deliberate untruth. She claimed to receive e-mails from traditional-publishing writers and editors who, “believe that only traditional publishing can guarantee that the reader will get a quality product.” How many of those e-mails actually espoused belief in that guarantee? I'm willing to bet very few, though I don't have the evidence since it's her inbox, not mine. No one in my inbox, and no one I can remember talking to, espoused this belief. I damned sure don’t believe traditional publishing guarantees quality work, and haven’t believed that since I was eleven and bought a bad traditionally published book at a school fair.

Now, I have run into many people who presumed it more likely that a traditionally-published book would be worthwhile than a self-published one. It seems like most of those people believed this based on experience with vanity publishing and the stuff that mucks the 99-cent zone on Amazon, though I didn’t keep a tally. There is definitely the cultural impression that your odds are better with a mainstream publisher’s book than with self-published book. That's a serious (and in several ways flawed) concern authors must deal with, but rarely gets a fair hearing.

Not everyone who works in traditional publishing thinks all their products are better than all the products in the self-publishing market, nor do all writers view it that way, nor have I ever heard anyone ever voice the opinion that, in Rusch’s words, "Amanda Hocking’s books [are] better because St. Martins Press published them." For such a long article, she created many unfortunate strawmen that only undermined the credibility of her argument, especially when what she was arguing towards could easily be oversimplified to "Any self-published books are just as good as any traditionally published books." Whether or not she believes this, it is something these arguments reduce to too often, and it is only invited by pre-emptively engaging in this sort of oversimplification.

I'm reading Tom Perrotta's The Leftovers right now. No self-published book I've read in the last fifteen months can touch it. In fact, most of those self-published books weren't worth finishing.

Does that mean all self-published books are crap? No.

Does it mean self-published books can't meet the high quality of the best traditionally-published books? No, and I'd sure hope not, as it's the avenue I'm considering.

But does it indicate that most self-published books don't meet the level of quality of high-end traditionally-published books? That's the sticking point Rusch failed to address rigorously, and in my experience, that ardent self-pubbers circle around in over-defense of their distribution model. This is the sticking point that, more than anything and despite the talent of many writers in the e-pub world, sustains the current stigma.

Have I read crappy traditionally-published books? Yes, too many. Too many not to laugh when traditionally published authors leave the big New York houses to self-publish. It’s a funny world.