I just went to yet another online community (no, I won’t name it here, because there’s no point) (but here’s a hint – Michael Marcus mentioned it recently). I admit, I went to this particular one because someone pointed out an amusing discussion Writer X and Writer Y were having re the mistakes made (or not made) by Writer X. Not exactly the best reason to go and take a peek, I suppose.

But what I found, as I poked about, were a bunch of people who call themselves “aspiring writers,” who don’t use proper punctuation or spelling in the forums “because it’s just the internet,” who use ellipses (…) and the online phenomenon sometimes called the “comma ellipsis” (,,,) as punctuation in their comments, and so forth and so on, or as the King said, “Et cetera, et cetera, et ceterAH!”

I admit, I’ll use “cuz” instead of “because” on Twitter or in a text message, but such shortcuts only make any sense at all in the context of length limitations and bad keyboards. When you’re online, when your comments have no length limit, when you’re sitting at a real keyboard, then write. Write!

Stop being an “aspiring” writer and be a writer.

Be it, claim it, and do it.

---

Every day, I spend an hour or two online in the morning, reading and responding to email, keeping an eye on Twitter, catching up with blogs, watching crazy rock drummers, “Et cetera, et cetera, et ceter-AH!”. Some days, I want to extend these “office hours” all day. When I run out of real things to do, I start StumbleUpon-ing. Other days, I want to skip the last couple of dozen blog posts and emails, and just get back to the word factory.

This is one of those days.

I woke up at oneish, got out of bed, and wrote 2,300 words. Went back to bed and didn’t sleep. Got up this morning and put down some more. Thirteen days into this WIP, my spreadsheet informs me, and 43,441 words.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go tend to a man last seen handcuffed, on his knees on a concrete floor, in a room so dark he can’t see his own eye lids. His arms are stretched so wide he can neither sit nor stand nor lie down, he’s been there all night, and he last saw the woman he loved bounding away toward the tree line like a deer running for her freedom.

But now, his life is about to get uncomfortable.

Until a year or so ago, I drove an eighty-mile paper route every morning. It was so much fun! Not. Get up at oh-dark-thirty seven days a week (or don’t go to bed at all), be at the drop site by 2:00, spend four hours driving with your window down, in the rain and the wind and the snow and the ice and the whatever else that lady from the margarine commercials can dream up. Replace your brakes every other payday and change the oil every three weeks. Try not to grimace as you deduct all that from the shrinking paycheck as the rats abandon ship readers cancel subscriptions and go to the internet.

But it did have a good side. It gave me a four-hour stretch every day when my mind was pretty much free to wander and do whatever it wanted, which, for the most part, was tell stories. I did my best writing while I was nowhere near a keyboard, and even now, with the route far behind me (and me very much not looking back!), I still need to take that time.

Ever notice how, wherever we go these days, we always have entertainment with us? Music from magical little totems as big as two fingers. The internet in your pocket. That brand-spanky-new 12-pack of solitaire games on your phone. Some newfangled doohicky the size of a legal pad that puts the whole Library of Alexandria at your fingertips. Facebook from the bus. Twitter from the toilet. Connect, connect, connect, because something might slip by if you don’t.

And what slips by if you do?

I got up this morning, and I got a cup of coffee, and I turned off shuffle on my MP3 player, cued up Industrial Monk’s “Magnificat,” (absolute favorite album of all time) and sat in silence for 56 minutes, staring out the window and watching the trees get lighter and lighter. And I listened and watched and learned as one character came home from work, and another waited at home for him, and a silent killer plotted the death of one of them.

I haven’t even written it down yet, and it’s the best scene in all of the 20,000-ish words this ninth novel has so far.

To paraphrase Timothy Leary:

Unplug, tune in, drop in.

Another bunch of you took baskets woven of grass and went through the smooth morning to the river, to gather wild rice and those tiny shellfish, the ones like the teardrops of a giant. Some of us stayed home all day, to knapp the flint heads of your arrows, to weave the baskets, to plait the cords that held your sandals on. And even from those, I stood apart.

I stared at the cool dark embers of last night’s fire, and in that thin trickle of smoke, I found whole new terrors for you. When darkness fell, when the flames leaped again, when the meat of the antelope sizzled and spit and the aromatic steam drifted among the crude shelters, I began to whisper.

When you cringed back, I thrust forward. When you whimpered, I roared at you. When you were quiet, I slipped again into that gravelly whisper, claws on stone, talons scraping the very bones of your souls, and we danced our dance together, the dance of the storyteller and the audience.

This was the payback for me. Not the roasted antelope you let me eat without hunting. Not the sandals I didn’t make, not the rice I didn’t gather. The need I met in you, the need to listen, the need to be an audience, that need in you was the payback for me, and the dance we danced in the dark was payday. Every laugh, every tear, every crinkled nose and hunched shoulder and nudge of your elbow against your neighbor, those were the coin I took from you. I was more magic than the shaman, more wise than the Elder. I made people up out of whole cloth and made them so real to you that you laughed and cried at the misfortunes of those who had never been, and each and every one of us was better for it.

But those days were long ago. Now, the fire is this screen in front of me, the screen or the page in front of you. Your laughter, your tears, your secret smiles as you see yourself or your best friend or your most dreadful enemy in my whispers, those are far from me. I tell my stories in the dark alone, writing them on stones, casting them up out of the wishing well and not knowing where they go, who they’ve reached, who they have touched and changed forever.

And yet I still tell them for all the same reasons. I still tell them to all the same people. The one with the twisted foot, who is so slow on the path to the river but who gathers her share anyway. The ones ahead of her on the path, with their whispers and giggles and sideways looks that they think she must miss simply because she has a twisted foot. The hunter whose game was always biggest, always best, always fastest, whose name would be the loudest in all the tribe if only he’d caught it, whose foot had rolled on a stone just as he loosed his arrow. The ones who laugh and cry and see themselves, drawn in twisting, shimmering smoke.

The storyteller is still the same. The audience is still the same. Only the fireside has changed.

What are you reading? What change has it worked in you? Have you told the author?

Only the fireside has changed. Now it’s not smoke and embers, but email and Twitter and Facebook. It’s comments on author blogs. It’s not face-to-face anymore, but that feedback is still important. That need is still there. Reach out through the screen or the page, find your storyteller, tell him or her that the story has touched you.

Feed your storytellers.

---

2,000 miles. 

By train,
by steam bus,
by river boat,
by horse-drawn wagon.

Through an alien dystopia.

To find herself.

Coming March 25
for Kindle and Nook

I’m currently working on the final formatting of my next novel, Lightning of Her Own, which will be released in ebook formats only, sometime this month. I have the book currently in the hands of a few capable beta-readers, and I have to say it’s a Very Good Thing that I do.

Part of it is my own fault, as I am an incorrigible text-tweaker, who can’t read anything I’ve ever written without grabbing a pen and oh, I’ll just tweak this a little, and that over there… I change but to yet, add a comma, take a comma out, take out the one I just added… on and on and on. I reread my comments on blogs a zillion times before I finally hit submit. I’ll read this blog post at least a jillion times. And there will still be a typo somewhere.

Combine that with the fact that I’ve been using Sigil to do the epub formatting, which is a great program, which I highly recommend, but which isn’t OpenOffice (ditto and ditto, by the way). I’m used to seeing squigglies when I misspell something, and Sigil has no squigglies. So… things like thatt’s get through. Fun.

The point is Never trust your own eyes!

If it weren’t for the people reading this for me, some of these would get through to paying readers, no matter how many times I read it.

All my ebooks are $.99 for all of March!

And watch for this book:

(@AlwaysJenNV says she dreamed about it after reading it! That’s another Very Good Thing.)

That’s the novel every author supposedly has in a trunk somewhere, or the deepest, darkest bottom of a desk drawer. It’s the one that never got accepted, and never should have, and after about title #3 or so, the author begins to hope that it never sees print. What would happen if I died, and that book got published? I’d be spinning in my grave so fast it would slow the spin of the Earth and reverse time!

Well, here’s a little secret about the POD process that nobody ever told you:

You’re going to have a trunk POD, except, like the truth, it’s out there.

Unless you learned the secret arcana of cover design and page layout somewhere where there was a more experienced mind to say “Um.. No.” then you’re going to have to go through the process. You’re going to have to put a book out there. And yes, you’ll make a half-dozen changes before you approve a version, but guess what? You do another book, and another and another, and that first one is going to begin to look, um… shabby. You’re going to begin to see it as the poor cousin who came to Christmas dinner and never went home. You’re going to hope no one buys it.

Yes, you can change the cover, change the page design, change this and that as you go on, as you learn more, but that gets expensive and it confuses the market. My first book out had a bad cover. I mean ugly. [AUDIENCE CALLS OUT] “How ugly was it?” You could stomp that cover in a bowl of dough and make gorilla-butt cookies, is how ugly it was. I changed the cover, but the pages are still ugly.

Some day, I tell myself. Some day. But here’s the funny thing – no one has ever said to me “Hey, dude, that first cover? Totally tossed my gorilla-butt cookies, man!” They didn’t read the cover. They didn’t buy the cover. They don’t lie on their beds and stare at the ceiling after they finish the book and think about the cover. And had I never put that first book out there, I never would have gotten to where I am, and I kinda like where I am.

*****************************

I haven’t got much patience for people who say silly things like “I wish I had time to do X,” regardless of what X is. No you don’t. You don’t wish any such thing, because if you did X, you’d have to give up something else, something which you obviously value more than you value X.

So stop kidding yourself.

What these people mean is “I might do X, if I thought it was worth my while. But I don’t.” The fact is, we all find time for the things we want to do, and that’s fine. If you spend twenty minutes a day on your hair and say “I wish I had time to write,” you’re kidding yourself. You’re saying that twenty minutes spent on your hair is more important than twenty minutes writing.

I have hair, too. Some of it is gone on top, but what’s left is two feet long. It takes maybe two minutes a day of my time. So get a new excuse.

And stop kidding yourself.

*****************************

Mr Piraro’s answer (well, part of it):

Quite honestly, I just don’t care. I think that creative efforts are what they are. You reach down into your soul, pull something out, and you throw it out there. There’s no way to control how it’s accepted or not accepted by individuals or by society as a whole, and it is of no concern to me.

Something we all need to take heed of. Forget the reviews that got it so wrong, forget the people who missed the point, forget even the people who keep starting your books and never finish them. None of that is in your control. That’s their path.

Your path is to take the next step, to reach down into your soul again, to pull something out again, to throw it out there again.

And again. And again. And again.

I use a Melitta “non-electric coffee maker.” I’ve been using it (the same one) since sometime before I got married, and that was thirty years ago. It’s nothing but a plastic cone, with a flat apron to sit on top of the long-gone glass carafe that came with it. It sits nicely on most other carafes, too, of course, but I use just use a big mug. You can get their so-called “one-cup” maker, but don’t bother. Did you know that “cups,” as counted on the side of your coffee maker, are 3/4-scale models of cups? Yup. Six ounces instead of eight, and then you’re supposed to be leaving room for various kinds of pollutants like cream and sugar and… I don’t know – horseradish? Do people do that? So just get a true writer-worthy mug and then get the Melitta cone for the carafe, and you’ve got it made.

You stick a filter in it (I use a stainless mesh filter, also an antique. On unrelated news, my next novel will be called I, Cheapo), stick some coffee in that, and pour boiling water through it. Under two minutes, counting the water-boiling time.

But… don’t let thirty years of “getting up to make a cup of coffee” turn into “He gets up to make a cup of coffee” in your WIP! I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve had to change that into something my readers would be more familiar with. Say “he gets up to make a cup of coffee,” and people are going to think you’re talking about instant. You know, that aquarium gravel stuff you’re supposed to pour hot water on and say a magic spell, and it turns into coffee? Only problem is, I have either forgotten the spell, or I’m misspelling it, or something, and it turns into the water from a very badly kept aquarium (heh – get it? Misspelling the spell? Get it?).

You don’t have to use some bizarre, eccentric kind of forty-year-old technology to fall into this trap. I read a novel recently where the guy works in a windowless room in a basement, but at least twice in the novel, he looks out his window to ponder some imponderable question. Why? I’m betting because the writer leaned back, looked out his window, and went Hmmm, what to do to show him pondering the deep imponderables of his life? And then wrote that down, forgetting that the poor guy had no window.

So write what your character knows. Write what your reader knows.

Just don’t write what you know.

I’ve said all of this before, but I’ll say it again. And again and again and again, no doubt. I’ll shout it from the rooftops until all the naysayers stop saying nay. I self-publish for one reason and one reason only, and that reason is this: Control over my art.

It’s funny how many times people have voiced the opinion that self-published books aren’t any good, that they can’t be any good, because they’ve never been edited, that writing a book is a collaborative process, that writers can’t possibly actually create anything of value on their own. Oddly enough, though, no one has ever said that photographers can’t take good pictures, or that someone else, someone with some magical talent that the photographer can’t possibly have, needs to Photoshop all photographs before they can be allowed be sold. No one tries to police the eBay market for hand-turned wooden pens. There’s a guy a few miles from here who makes choppers. No one says he should go try to get West Coast Choppers to edit them, to turn then into “real” choppers. No one says he’s not a “real” chopper maker, that he’s hurting the “real” chopper makers of the world. No one snubs him on the street because he’s independent.

It’s also funny how many times people have told me that I have no idea how things really work in the publishing industry, that I’m spreading ignorant misinformation. “The writer always has the final control over all these things,” I’m told. When I point out real-world examples of all the things I’m about to list, they tell me that I simply don’t understand how these things don’t mean what they seem to mean, but they never offer alternative explanations. A major author complaining about the cover she got doesn’t mean she had no control over the cover – it means some other, unspecified, thing. A writer and teacher blogging about the ways agents take control of the lives and careers (and income) of the writers they are supposed to be working for doesn’t mean they take control over the lives and careers of the writers they are supposed to be working for – it means something totally different. When a publisher says in the contract that the “Publisher shall edit the Work for voice and style to suit the standards of the Publisher,” it means something other than what it says. When the contract says if the writer doesn’t agree to the edits, tough cookies, ‘cause we’re publishing our way or not at all, it doesn’t mean that.

But they never say what these things do mean.

Let me list some of the things I know I have control over, without having to worry about what things mean:

I have control over my publishing timeline.

I determine when I can publish the book I’ve just written. There’s no reason I can see why it takes eighteen months or longer to get a book to print, and I’m not even talking about POD. There are printers on the internet (and in my own home county) who can produce offset-printed, perfect-bound books, in commercial quantities, in weeks, not months (some of them even promise days, not weeks). I’ve spent six months writing it, rewriting it, editing it, re-editing it, revising it and editing and re-editing the revision. All my beta readers have seen it and loved it. It’s ready to go. I can upload files today and have it available for sale in a matter of days. Why should I wait, just because some suit with no talent of his own says I have to?

And don’t even get me started on waiting for the money. I’ve seen more than one statement from writers saying that they didn’t even get the advance until after the book was in print. I can only imagine what it’s like to wait for the royalties.

I determine when I can publish the next book. Maybe it’s ready early. Maybe it’s not ready on time. Maybe it’s a sort of a not-quite-sequel to Jillian’s Gold, and it says it’s three years later, so it’s coming out three years later, in 2012. Maybe I changed my mind, and decided not to write some particular book. Guess what? I get to do things like that! Go ahead, all you naysayers, tell me deadline doesn’t mean deadline.

I have control over my online presence.

I blog what I want to, I tweet what I want to. I can leave whatever comments I want, wherever I want. I follow a bunch (I’m not going to bother counting them) of agents, editors, publishers, etc, on Twitter and in Google Reader. I don’t think a week goes by that I don’t hear of an agent saying something like “Be prepared to have your agent read your blog,” or “The way for a writer not to blog,” (complete with a link), or some other statement that makes it abundantly clear that your agent will not only read your blog, but will take control of your blog. Not directly, of course, because that would mean that your agent was taking control of your blog, while it really means – um… something else.

In fact, in the last six months, I’ve been contacted by agents who have said they would be willing to represent me if I stopped blogging about self-publishing, and an editor who has sent some agents to my site and been told the same thing. When I said this was proof I was right, the response was “No, you’re just misinformed!” Followed by a chorus of crickets.

I have control over my covers.

Believe me, I don’t want to do all of my own covers. But it’s pretty insulting to read, in an agent’s Twitter feed, that “The quickest way to insult your publisher is to say that you have an idea about the cover. You don’t.” I don’t? I don’t have any idea about the cover? Who knows the book better than I do? Who knows better than I do what themes and threads the cover has to embrace in order to properly symbolize the book? Certainly, other people could help me do it better. The ideal thing would be for a publisher to say “Here, this is the cover artist who’s going to do your cover. He/she/it has read the book three times. You guys collaborate until the cover is as good as the book.” Until that happens, I can only assume that I’m going to get the same plot spoilers, the same pictures of non-existent situations, and the same pictures of non-existent characters that I’ve seen so many times before on “real-published” books, and that means I have to do it myself.

I have control over my titles.

I hate to keep pounding on the same cymbal, but, again, titles are an area where I’m told over and over that I’m misinformed. Apparently, “You can give it whatever working title you want, but it will change. The publisher titles the book,” doesn’t mean the publisher titles the book. It doesn’t mean the title you’ve chosen will change. It doesn’t mean your book will be titled by some suit who skimmed the first dozen pages. Ok, a committee of suits, who may or may not have skimmed the first dozen pages.

I have control over the layout and format of my pages.

Again, I don’t really want to do all this, I just want to have control over it, but the only way to do that is to do it myself. I’m told, of course, that self-publishers can’t do interior layout, and that that’s why self-published books are so bad, but I happen to truly believe that the way the book is presented makes a difference in the way it is perceived by the reader. I happen to truly believe that every single thing that makes a difference in the way a book is perceived by the reader must lie fully and completely in the hands of the author. Again, I’d be delighted to have a publisher say “Here’s the page designer who’s going to work on your book, who has read it three times. You guys work this out.” But… yeah, see the bit about covers, above.

I have control over editing.

Let’s do an experiment. Let’s take a sentence from one of my novellas (not saying which one, because it’s a bit of a spoiler). Let’s even admit that it is my absolute favorite of all the untold thousands of sentences I’ve written. Here it is:

Sometimes she swirls in on Mercury’s own skates, bringing him a treat for his lunch or a book she thought he’d like, or sometimes just a kiss she found among her own that she’s pretty sure must be his, and she gives it to him across the counter.

Give that sentence to each of a dozen editors and tell them to edit it. Go ahead, you have my permission to copy that sentence and send it off to any editor you can get to do it for whatever you’re willing to pay. Just don’t tell them it’s your sentence, and don’t try to stick me with the bill. The point is, you’ll get back as many results as you choose editors, because there is nothing wrong with it as it stands. They’re not editing for errors. They’re not looking for things they have serious reason to believe I didn’t mean to do. They are (according to each of the contracts I’ve been offered now, from four separate small presses) editing “for style and voice.” To “suit the standards of the Publisher.”

Not, of course, that this means they’re trying to take control of my work. Oh, no. It means – um, something else. Cue the crickets.

And anyway, they only want my book to be the best it can be. They’re only improving it. Every single change they make will make it better.

Do they not even realize how patronizing and demeaning that is? My book, that I’ve spent months on, is so bad that every single thing they can do to it will make it better. If I disagree, it only means that I’m defensive and afraid and don’t know how to take criticism.

I’ll sign the first good contract that comes along.

The first contract that grants me the same control I have now. I’m willing (in fact, I’m eager) to give you some part of my income if you’ll take away all the marketing and selling, but I need evil-totalitarian-dictator control over every aspect of the appearance, content, and formatting of my book.

I have now been contacted by four small presses and five agents who have all tried to convince me that I need to drop the self-publishing shtick and go their way. I have told each of them that I’m perfectly willing to do that, if they give me the level of control I have now, if they bring something to the table, if they have advantages to offer, rather than simply taking from me. The few who have responded (two presses and one agent) have told me that I’m being unreasonable. Me. Not them, me. I’m being unreasonable to tell them I’m not willing to give them some (or most) of the income from my books, as well as giving up all control. When they came to me. I didn’t go to them. But I’m the unreasonable one.

• “Hey, you! Stick ‘em up! Gimme your wallet. And that watch. And your coat.”

• “No.”

• “You’re being unreasonable!”

I’ll sign the first good contract that comes along. Until then, I’m independent. And that’s why.