Well, you’re in good company. The impulse to tinker is universal. So universal, that some people make vast fortunes just so they’ll have the ability to tinker endlessly. People like, for example, George Lucas.

I don’t need to belabor this point too much, other than to perhaps mention that George’s newest release of the original Star Wars trilogy contains MORE changes that do nothing substantive and occasionally undermine the original work’s dramatic power. You know, just like the last four times he’s released them. The movies people know and love, the original ones made way back when? They’ll never see the light of day again, at least until George dies.

His inability to resist indulging his tinker’s urge has had three basic effects on the world:
1) It has utterly arrested George’s creative growth. In the 70s, George was a growing creative force. He got better with every film. He was experimental. He was thoughtful. Whether he was writing or producing he turned out superior products, and he never sat still. Through the 80s, he came into his own as a producer, giving us great popcorn films (Indiana Jones and Willow), sharp-tongued comedies (Radioland Murders), and some really kick-ass breakthroughs in craft and technology for films and theme parks alike. In the late 80s and early 1990s, he created Pixar, then had the sense to let it go to make its way in the world. He produced The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, which were superior in many ways to the Indiana Jones films. George Lucas wasn’t just Francis Ford Coppola’s golden boy, he was THE golden boy, and he did it on his own, as a maverick, outside the studio system.

Where’s that growth now? Where’s the energy, the expansion? It’s all gone into the tinkering. Everything stopped and slammed into reverse when he dug Star Wars out and started rewriting it. And since then, his creative chops and the quality and appeal of his work have gone solidly downhill.

2) It’s deprived his industry of one of the finest producers in the world, full stop. When George is doing Star Wars, George is not doing the noir films, the mythology films, the art films, and the TV shows that he’s been talking about in interviews since the 1970s.

3) It’s rewritten a big piece of American cinematic history. The Star Wars films that (along with Jaws) changed the entire business structure of the film industry, that created modern fantasy cinema, that kickstarted the digital revolution, and that launched the career of Harrison Ford? They’re gone. We don’t get to see them anymore. Oh, and George’s other films–like THX-1138 and American Graffiti–they’ve been revised too. Nonsensically. We don’t get to see those either, even though they also became important cultural touchstones (Graffiti much moreso than THX, granted).

— — —

So, this is just me griping, right?

Well, no. This is me jumping up and down with a big sign pointing at George and saying “SEE? Heinlein was right!” The most important (and most controversial) of Heinlein’s rules of professional writing is:

You must not rewrite, except to editorial order. With Ellison’s addendum being And then only if you agree.

That rule is there to remind you not to turn into George Lucas. Rewriting a finished piece (I’m talking rewriting, not doing the normal copy edits, continuity tweaks, and fact checks that you do as part of the writing process) is the road to nowhere. It most often results in bad work, for a very simple reason, as exemplified by the post-1997 George Lucas corpus:

Writers are not competent to tinker with their own work.

With recent work, it’s because they’re too close to see what might be broken–this is why we have beta readers and editors. It’s also because, living with our own voice all the time, we don’t understand what makes it special.

But what about an old book that you’re wanting to bring up to date and/or perfect, as George keeps trying to do?

In that case, you’re not competent to do that either. And there’s a very good reason why:

That book (film, whatever) came from a person that doesn’t exist anymore. You wrote it at a different time in your life, when you had different concerns, and different skills. You don’t have access to that creative headspace anymore, and you’re very unlikely to be able to actually improve one aspect of the book without completely fucking up another aspect.

Now, if you’ve got a book like that that you REALLY want to redo, don’t rewrite it. Reboot it. Pick your favorite scene, or idea, or handful of characters and rewrite it from scratch. Don’t just rework the style, give it a new coat of paint, or try to do a new draft. Don’t even touch the old document. Start with a blank page. Do what’s called in Television a “reboot” or a “re-imagining.” It’s always possible that the first time you wrote the book you were too ambitious, tried to do things you weren’t close to being ready for. Books like that might do well with a reboot.

But do it going FORWARD. Don’t do it looking back. You’re not updating an old work when you do this, you’re reincarnating it. Make it new, and stretch yourself. Let the storyline go different places than the original. Let it surprise you.

Or, better yet, leave your old books alone. Treat them like they were written by another person. Leave then on the market, learn from them, and move on to the next story. Work on doing better this time what you did poorly last time, and work on that improvement every time.

Growth comes from moving forward, not moving backward. Tinkering is moving backwards, and it moves your creative growth backwards. You don’t want to wind up on this path. No matter how brilliant you are, you can get stuck in your own creative swamp. And if you wallow there long enough, that’s where you’ll die.

Just ask George.

Last night, I had occasion to have a long conversation with a new writer who’s vexed and confused by the options before him when it comes to writing process, and saying “you have to find your own way” only left him more despondent. I know that look–I’ve been there many times when faced with a new field of endeavor with so many options that at once feel constraining and non-specific. So, in the hope of letting those new writers who don’t comfortably fit a category know that they’re not alone, I’m going to describe my method.

But first, the reasons why the two popular methods don’t work for me.

Pulling Down My Pants

“Pantsers” are folks that write by the seat of their pants. They trust their subconscious and just fly on from word one, muddling through as they go–and often, they’re brilliant. Many of my favorite short story writers (including Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, and Dean Wesley Smith) write like this, and they are quite often bloody brilliant.

I’ve done this with short stories–sometimes, I’ve done it really well. But for every short story I’ve finished with this method, I have five that started, sputtered, and stopped. Some I’ve gone back and done in a way more suited to my workflow–others I’ve abandoned and think of fondly, like childhood friends I’m unlikely ever to see again.

Why do they sputter? Frankly, it’s because I often write from a milieu, and only infrequently is a milieu sufficient to sustain a whole story. My process often relies on the collision of two dissimilar ideas in my own head, and without those two ideas, the story won’t spin.

With novels, it’s the same problem, only worse. Unless the story itself is a discovery process with a very constrained point of view, there isn’t a lot I can get a foothold on. Even then, I only get so far before I have to resort to other methods.

Which brings us to outlining.

Sketchy Thinking

The beauty of an outline is that you never have to worry about where you’re going. You decide in advance what happens, and why, and when–sometimes in rough detail, sometimes in minutia. Many of my favorite novelists (including Gail Carriger, Stephen R. Donaldson, and Frank Herbert) work this way, to spectacular result, and the method has innate appeal. The question of “what’s next” that can get writers blocked on a project, and pre-laying the track means you don’t have to worry about going off it and losing the plot.

But it comes with a cost: spontaneity. My particular neuroses innately rebel against tight pre-plotting. Once I’ve written an entire story in my mind once, it’s a slog to write it again, and that slog sometimes shows in the finished product (which is why there are a few novels and stories that will never see the light of day–they are, according to my betas, stale-born, and I don’t have the heart to go back and redraft them from scratch).

However, for someone of my disposition there is a third way to write.

I call it “playing jazz.”

Why Jazz?

Using music as an analog, a pantser would be like a musician who has so internalized structure that they can pick up an instrument and do a solo jam that is neither dull nor directionless. An outliner would be a concert pianist who rote memorizes perfectly a pre-composed piece, and then adds texture and flourish by the way she performs the notes and accents the silences.

Jazz is an artform between. Like writing, music depends upon deviating from a well-understood structure. In both music and writing, structure is king–without it, you don’t have anything that resembles a story, or music. But with jazz, the structure is malleable within certain limits, and the bulk of the piece within those limits is made up of improvisation to such an extent that no two performances of the same piece will ever be the same. Sometimes, they may not even sound like the same song.

To play Jazz with words, you need the baseline structure–a few story beats you must hit for everything to work well. Then, in the vast spaces in between, you connect the dots by playing in between them–exploring the complications, finding the indirect ways between points A and B and C. In a long, plot heavy novel like The Antithesis Progression, the individual storylines will all have those points, and there will be planned points of intersection between them, but the jazz happens in the execution. In books with a more straightforward structure, like The Clarke Lantham Mysteries or Down From Ten, there is more improvisation–but in either case, the method lays in playing to the strengths of both outlining and discovery writing, while sidestepping the aspects of both processes that my particular twisted psychology finds unendurable.

It’s All About Process

My first million-and-a-quarter words qualify me as a neophyte in the writing world, but they have taught me why it takes so long for writers to find their voice. Learning a process will allow you to grapple with story structure in a way that will help you tell stories that connect with your audience. There is no right way. There is only the way that you find that works for you. If you, like my conversation partner last night, are feeling confused by the prescriptions offered by writers further along than you, take heart! It’s normal for all of us to think “my way worked for me, so it should work for everyone.”

But however well-intentioned that advice, the fact remains: only you are capable of working out what process works best for you. And whether you’re writing books and screenplays with highly developed structures (like episodic television, or category romance) or that are more free-form (like slipstream), the process you go through to get there will vary according to your psychology. Take my description of “playing jazz” as another possible option–but don’t take it as gospel. Your mileage may vary.

I’m one of those poor tortured souls who is a stickler for detail, to the point where I’m rarely able to meet my own standards when I write–but, let’s face it. If anyone wrote like that, they’d either write only in their area of historical specialty or after years of research. The trick with writing is to create a successful illusion, not a master’s thesis. Besides, the vast majority of readers aren’t the kind of obsessive compulsive pain in the ass that I am–a lucky thing!–so there’s a certain amount we authors can count on getting away with.

Still, I can’t help but think there’s some level of rigor that one ought to aspire to. Some minimal standard–particularly since the stories we professional liars tell often form people’s view of the past long after their high school and college history classes are long-forgotten–must surely be in order. Something that we can at least hold up to keep ourselves from being embarrassed at conventions when a fan calls us out on an obvious boneheaded anachronism?

There might just be one. Let’s call it “The Wikipedia Test.” After all, most readers who are confused on a point of history or arcane knowledge (and who are of an intellectual or curious bent) that you employ will go to Wikipedia to catch up with you. It therefore follows that if a point in your story–particularly a major plot point–turns on a bit of arcane knowledge, you damn well better make sure that a cursory glance at Wikipedia won’t make you look lazy.

Not that I have anyone particular in mind, but for the sake of illustration, I’m going to pick on two popular authors (one of whom I really like, the other of whom I admire, but don’t much enjoy).

[Be warned: Spoilers follow]

First, Jeff Lindsay, creator of Dexter. For the book Dexter in the Dark he brings in a serial killer who leaves the device “mlk” at his murder scenes. Dexter, after a considerable amount of Internet research, concludes that this is a reference to the god “Moloch.” So far so good–anytime someone’s got the guts to work some obscure mythology into his storyline, I’m a happy guy.

Unfortunately, Lindsay then goes on to say that “the characters ‘mlk’ were from an ancient language…Aramaic.” And that’s where the book, for about two chapters, descends into the kind of incoherence that only badly-researched mysticism can create.

Moloch, you see, is a Phoenician god, and the Phoenician used an entirely different alphabet from Aramaic (the language of the Canaanites), despite the languages being related. Aramaic doesn’t have any letters that look remotely like an “m” or a “k”– but Phoenician does. There are a dozen other reasons, too, that the idea the Moloch would speak Aramaic is ridiculous, but let’s just stick with these two which–feel free to check for yourself–are easily confirmed by a Wikipedia search.

And, really, if you’re going to go to the trouble to use something as esoteric as Moloch, and you’re going to try to make it cool by dipping deep into Kabbalistic Demonology, you’re going to have to do some research (unless you’re like me who reads stuff like this for fun), so why in the world wouldn’t you do a basic fact check?

A more eggregious example of this kind of thing is Dan Brown, who writes occult history thrillers (so far so good), claims that admitted hoaxes such as Holy Blood, Holy Grail are legitimate true histories (not so good–at least he could rely on hokum that hasn’t been publically acknowledged as a prank by its authors), and then goes that one further:

In The Da Vinci Code, a multinational conspiracy of elite catholics spend gobs of money and kill loads of people in order to save the church from a secret that would destroy it: That Jesus was…married?

Um…come again? Okay, yes, the Vatican is a bastion of sexual repression that has inarguably engaged in a good bit of historical forgery and cover-ups over the centuries. But of all the secrets they could be hiding about the origin of Christianity, this has to be right up there with “Jesus used Crest Toothpaste” in the annals of “inconvenient facts with the fewest possible consequences to Christian doctrine.” If Brown wanted some real dynamite, he could have gone for another fringe theory that’s actually got some scholarly support and would actually give the Catholic Church huge headaches if it were to become commonly believed(such as the fringe scholarly theory that Jesus Never Existed).

Still, sex is sexier than fraud, I suppose. And Brown writes a hell of a page-turner, as evidenced by his amazing sales numbers.

[End of Spoilers]

I humbly submit that if we’re going to be telling stories that present the illusion of reality, that delve into the “what ifs” and “what could have beens,” why not at least put in Wikipedia-level research? Or, if we can’t be bothered, perhaps we should let go of pretense to connect our illusions to reality, and just make up the names as well. Seems to me it would be much less confusing–and present much less of a liability to the coherence of the illusion–than throwing out bogus facts that put us at risk of failing the Wikipedia Test.

—-
A few great authors that usually pass the Wikipedia test:
Gary Jennings, Ken Follett, Clive Cussler, Clive Barker, Isaac Asimov, Gail Carriger, Leon Uris, Cherie Priest, Thomas Harris, Stephen King (this is what I came up with at 4AM. It’s not an exhaustive list by a long shot).

In the midst of the upheaval in the publishing industry, I’m seeing this a lot. As agents are conning their clients into unethical business arrangements (and kudos to Peter Cox and Kristen Nelson for going on record about the danger this represents to writers), editors with excellent reputations are getting kicked off writing forums for providing data on the change, publishers are defrauding their authors and engaging in massive rights grabs, breaking the rules can earn you some pretty serious grief from other writers who are following the rules and hoping they’ll get reputation points for it.

Trouble is, this isn’t first grade. There are no gold stars for following the rules. And a lot of people are breaking the rules.
And they’re winning.

There are the people who are pursuing the established business model of licensing their work to a large publishing house, and they’re not following the script. You know the script, right? “You have to get an agent, then your agent will sell your book on to a publisher after they help you shine it up–because publishers don’t buy books that need work, and they don’t buy books from unagented writers.”
This script is, of course, a lie, and a dangerous one. Many new writers spend years hunting for an agent. Leaving aside for a moment questions about the future viability of the agented business model, there is one thing an agent can’t do, has never have been able to do, and will never be able to do: Write you a check. You can spend an entire career trying to sell your book to someone who is unable to buy it.
Or, you can do what over 40% of first-time novelists do–including my friend Gail Carriger–and say “fuck the rules.” Mail your book to an editor who doesn’t accept submissions, the worst they can say is no. You won’t get a bad reputation for it; frankly, you’re not that important. You’re one of thousands of names they see every month, and unless you’re extraordinarily rude, your name will be forgotten as quickly as your manuscript. On the other hand, you might instead get notes like some I’ve been getting recently–notes from people who swear up and down in public that they’ll never look at an unagented mss, who are asking to see yours. (But if you mention that you’ve done that, you’re likely to get attacked by people who feel threatened when others don’t follow the rules).

Then there are the folks pursuing the new opportunities provided by the changes in the industry–either exclusively working through the new distribution channels or pursuing both the old and the new models simultaneously, with varying degrees of success. These are people like J.A. Konrath, Barry Eisler, Amanda Hocking, Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, James Melzer, Jennifer Hudock, Nathan Lowell, Scott Sigler, Brand Gamblin, and (last and least) me. These people have looked at the rules and said “Well, we obviously don’t need those anymore.” And they’re really pissing people off.

Both camps have something else in common, besides breaking the rules: The people who feel threatened by rule-breakers call both camps “Outliers.” They make out as if the normal rules don’t apply to us, because we’re somehow special. That there’s something magical about our talent, or our social savvy–something that makes us so rare that we shouldn’t be studied or listened to.

Think of this logic: The people who are most successful at what they do (or even, as in my case, marginally successful at the beginning of their careers) should be ignored, because their experience is so atypical it can’t be learned from. In other words, if you want to win, ignore the people who are good at winning.

This, my friends, is a recipe for failure. Every author’s career path is different, and you’re going to have to cobble together your own as you go. If you’re slavishly following a program rather than adapting and experimenting, your odds of success are diminished. If you’re dismissing “outlier” data, you’re cutting off your arm. If you’re slavishly following the advice of an “outlier,” you’re probably also missing out. Business requires creativity and a willingness to experiment. It also requires resilience. You don’t get that by operating on tunnel vision.

From the point of view of the people who dismiss the rule-breakers, the world is getting smaller. The business is in upheaval, and the opportunities are diminishing. Self-publishers are flooding the market with crap, and no good work will get found in all the white noise.

This argument is a load of bullshit. If white noise were capable of preventing people from finding good content, then the Internet (which is, by some estimates, over 70% spam) wouldn’t function. You wouldn’t be reading this blog right now.

But this? This is the best time in history to be a writer–better even than the Golden Age of Pulp, and that was a damn good time.

You don’t have to take my word for it. You can listen to the other “outliers,” or you can listen to the Consulting Editor at Wiley Press, who says exactly the same thing. These are times of unparalleled opportunity.

So if you’re trying to figure out why your career isn’t going anywhere, perhaps it’s time to look at your paradigm. Do you have a million words or close to it under your belt, but aren’t selling? Maybe you’re not sending material to people who can write checks. Are you selling, but not making a living? Perhaps it’s time to put a foot into the self-pub world as well, and spend the time learning how to package your work to attract eyeballs.

Or maybe you’re a new writer, with only a year or two under your belt, and like most new writers (including me when I was baby-powder fresh), you’re looking for a program to follow: solid answers and prescriptions for writerly success in a few short months or years. It’s time to stop looking, because it won’t happen. Writing is a discipline that takes practice–at least a decade’s worth–to master. And it takes constant learning of all kinds. There is no end, unless you quit.

That’s the breaks. And don’t tell me I’m an outlier, because if you’ve got the stamina and creativity to write novels, you’re already more intelligent and determined than around 90% of the population, which makes you an outlier by definition. You become an outlier among outliers by taking risks, being adaptable, and working your ass off. Don’t use the success of others who have more years in this than you do, or a bit more luck, as an excuse to avoid experimenting.

Don’t wuss out.

If you find this post useful or thought provoking, please consider donating to the tip jar at the top right of this site, or buying a copy of any of the books you’ll find listed in the right sidebar. Writing is how I make my living–I enjoy it and would like to keep it up!

— — — —
Previous chapter: Market Awareness
— — — —

If God had a lounge singer in the 40s, 50s, or 60s, I’d lay you even odds that it would have been Peggy Lee. Along with Etta James, Billie Holiday, and Rosemary Clooney, she had a glorious, smoky, rich alto that wrapped naturally around horns and clarinets to make sounds that were the aural equivalent of chocolate.

Peggy Lee had a good friend named Walter, and Walter need a singer/songwriter for his new project. Walter did good work, and he was a good friend, so Peggy gave him a good rate, and in 1955 the result of that project hit the country like Christmas. It was a little movie called Lady and the Tramp.

It was a great collaboration, and they had a good contract for the time (Peggy and her cowriter retained rights to “transcriptions” such as record albums and sheet music–a smart move). Everything might have been peachy for life, if Sony hadn’t screwed up the world with home video.

Videotapes have been around pretty much since the Big Bang (or at least since 1951) in broadcast, but nobody really expected that it would wind up being something people used at home any more than the early computer manufacturers thought that your phone would contain twice the computing power that sent men to the moon (which some of them now do). Even if it were technically possible, why would anyone want home video when they had, you know, lives? And television? A professional toy like video tape wouldn’t appeal to a mass market–or such was the thinking. Sony, by the 1970s the world leader in miniaturization, disagreed. In 1975 they introduced Betamax, the first home video format.

It took a few years for it to catch on, but (thanks largely to the porn industry) by the 1980s home video was THE thing (and in the years since, this trend has only deepened with more formats being released). Studios started making their bread-and-butter money from video rentals and sales, rather than from theatrical exhibition. The only people who had a problem with this were the artists who weren’t getting paid for the work they’d done for theatrical exhibition–but most of them just grumbled. Not Peggy Lee. Peggy Lee pulled out her lawyers and said “Sic ‘em.”

Disney argued that the original license left them with an implicit right to sell the movie in any format, and that “transcriptions” didn’t cover home video because it was just another video format, like film and television. Peggy Lee argued that it was a transcription, and that she couldn’t have sold home video rights, because home video didn’t exist at the time that Lady and the Tramp was produced.

It took a long time for the lawsuits, contrafilings, and court case to run its course. At the end of it, in 1992, Peggy Lee won two important victories. First, she got a few million dollars for her troubles, which helped with her retirement even after her lawyers got their cut. Second, she got a precedent, known in entertainment circles as “The Peggy Lee Decision.” According to this decision, rendered in the California Supreme Court, an artist can’t sign over rights that do not yet exist.

Let me say that again. An artist can NOT license rights that do not yet exist. All those old movie contracts suddenly got complicated, as studio lawyers had to scramble to make sure their creatives (such as composers, songwriters, etc.) signed addendum allowing the use of their work in home video. At the time, Internet streaming didn’t exist except in experimental theory, so very few studios listed that in their addendum–that came later (this is, btw, one of the reasons that certain episodes of TV shows, and certain films, are not available on DVD and/or for streaming–studios would not meet artist’s asking prices for their music and other creative contributions in the new formats).

To get around this, studios started introducing bullying language, where artist signed over rights to “any other formats which may come to exist in the future.” It’s a bluff–at least on contracts adjudicated in California, this clause is probably unenforceable, but how many artists are likely to sue on grounds that nebulous? And in Hollywood, where there are guilds for talent, there are often other compensatory provisions entitling the artists to residuals for those future formats, to be negotiated through the guilds at that time, which further reduces the incentive to go through the expensive rigmarole of a court case.

To people outside of Hollywood, this used to be fairly academic. As of this last year, that’s no longer true. If you’re a writer (or a musician) and don’t know about Peggy Lee, you’re asking for trouble. Here’s why:

Kristine Kathryn Rusch has been doing an excellent series of posts on the transition currently underway in publishing. Some of the stuff she talks about, such as terms that have recently come into vogue in publishing contracts, is relevant to all entertainment fields, and I highly recommend reading the miniseries. You can find it here, here, and here.

In the most recent post, she touches briefly on a a rights grant clause that showed up in a contract she saw recently, and it’s a textbook Peggy Lee dodge, but worse.

The clause in question (pilfered from this post) reads:

“The Author hereby grants to the Publisher…the exclusive license to produce, publish, sell, distribute and further license any Electronic Version of the Work…. ‘Electronic Version’ means versions that include the Work…in a complete, condensed, adapted, or abridged version and in compilations for performance and display in any manner whether sequentially or non-sequentially and together with accompanying sounds and images, if any, transmissible by any electronic means, method or device (including but not limited to electronic and machine-readable media and online or satellite-based transmission or any other device or medium for electronic reproduction or transmission whether now or hereafter known or developed…)”

Kristine Rusch isn’t the only person I’ve heard about this from–she’s just the most well-established author who’s run into it. Read that clause carefully, because you might see it, or something like it, if you’re in the business of making a living off your creative work.

To my amateur eye, this isn’t just future-proof insurance for publishers. This is a wholesale rights grab. That pesky word “adapt” is one to watch for, because in context with the rest of the clause, it means that if you sign this contract you’re signing away:

Movies
television
web series
radio drama
audiobooks
games (video/RPG/board/card/all other kinds)
foreign language (maybe, if the lawyer is very clever and the author is a pushover)
“enhanced” ebooks
computer reference works/supporting material
versions of the story for other audiences (i.e. a bowdlerized version for church libraries, or a juvenile version for children)
ghostwritten sequels (for which you don’t get paid)
turning your book into a shared world a’la Dragonlance (with no further compensation to you, but with your name on it)
spinoffs

And a lot more. The list goes on–literally–for several pages depending on the level of verbosity with which you list them.

And it does all those WITHOUT FURTHER COMPENSATION. Your advance check (and the royalties on your print/ebook/subsidiary rights the contract entitles you to) is all you will EVER get. No long tail. No ancillary income. No retirement money, nothing.

But it gets even worse than that. Because it’s an EXCLUSIVE rights grant, it can be interpreted to:
Prevent you from doing paid public readings (and maybe even unpaid public readings) of your own work.
Prevent you from writing sequels to your own work
Prevent you from using the characters/world/gimmicks/etc. in any other work you ever create. Depending on how nasty their lawyers are, and how easily intimidated you are, after a few contracts like this you could wind up constrained from every writing anything fictional again, for any media or in any format, for the rest of your life.

Is this clause enforceable? I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t know for sure. I suspect that, if you got to the Supreme Court, a lot of it would get declared unconstitutional (based on the Work For Hire provisions in copyright law and the historic interpretation of the Constitutional nature of copyright law). But the trouble simply isn’t worth it. And there’s another problem.

It’s also worth remembering that the Peggy Lee decision was a California Court decision. Publishing contracts are normally adjudicated in New York, and their laws for this sort of thing are different. I don’t know New York law well enough to even speculate (even with all the disclaimers) on how such a case would turn out in New York.

Peggy Lee spent hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more), to enforce her rights and recover royalties due her, on a case that was much more clear-cut and less sweeping than this one. She lost nearly a decade of her life to that battle (5 years in court, plus all the preliminaries)–and it cost her her professional street cred (when she died, the Academy refused to run her obituary at the Oscars, as is customary. Her family rightly took this as a profound insult).

Clauses like this are sneaky, and they’re often distributed through contracts. I will never sign a contract like this, no matter how much money they wave at me. And with this kind of stuff going on, I will never sign a publishing deal without a qualified lawyer on my side–not an agent, no matter how good he or she is. Agents are not lawyers, and having dealt with a handful of very reputable, ethical agents, I’m very comfortable saying that publishing agents are, on the whole, not hip to this kind of legal sneak attack. If I deal through an agent, it will be IN ADDITION to a lawyer, not instead of one.

It’s situations like this that underline the unequal bargaining muscle that publishers (of all media) bring to the table. But there is something you can do to equalize that balance: When faced with a clause like this, say “no.” Period.

Next time, the long-promised post on dealing with power dynamics: Embracing Your Inner Two-year-old.

:::Addition:::
For those of you interested in further reading on the Peggy Lee case, a good starting point is the Variety article reporting the CA Supreme Court decision.

Please share your thoughts, criticisms, and reactions below. If you’re a lawyer and spot a problem with what I’ve said, or you just think I’m out to lunch, please say so. I’m happy to amend the article. And remember: I am not a lawyer, and this is neither legal advice, nor should you consider it adequate foundation to deal with this kind of contract without consulting a lawyer.

If you find this post useful, please consider donating to the tip jar at the top right of this site, or buying a copy of any of the books you’ll find listed in the right sidebar. Writing is how I make my living–I enjoy it and would like to keep it up!

All the original writing for Free Will is now done. I have a few days of continuity tweaking ahead of me, and then some cutting, but it really is now all over but the shouting.

New equipment for the studio arrives this week, and I’ll be resuming production on everything in two weeks after I give things a proper shakedown and take a day or two off.

What does this mean for you?

Predestination and Free Will paperbacks (and Free Will ebook) in June. New episodes of Sculpting God in June. New episodes of Free Will starting in July, and continuing through to the end of the book.

It’s been a marathon–two years of work plotting and researching, and four solid months of aggregated writing time over those two years.. Final count: 212k words. Manuscript page count: 848. (Don’t worry, that will shrink as I shake out the continuity).

Time to crack the champagne!

Well, no problem there. Turns out there was an excellent break point where book 1 could end naturally–and on a very nice cliffhanger–so I could move on to the new book 2 (which was originally the planned second half of book 1). I’d just sit down and write book 2 as soon as the time afforded.

Yeah.

If you’ve been following my progress with this book, you already know how that bright idea turned out. I’ve gotten four other books written in the meantime, and I’m quick on the way to finishing a further two, and still Free Will mocks me with its recalcitrance. And it’s not because I haven’t kicked ass on writing it either: Predestination rang in at 122,000 words after some serious cutting post-podcast and only had to cope with four major storylines. That’s a healthy sized book–it’s fantasy-novel length. Free Will is…well…bigger.

Much bigger. Two and a half reams of paper big. It isn’t done yet, and it’s north of 160,000 words with fifteen storylines (eight of them major). That’s too long, even though the second half of the book is wall-to-wall action and the first half moves along as a very fast clip. Too long as it is, and I’ve still got a lot further to go–easily another 50,000 words if I play the story to the original end point.

After printing the whole thing out today and separating out the storylines I had a read-through of each, and I discovered something:

I’ve done it again. My original planned Book 1 of Antithesis isn’t just two books. It’s three. Well, two and a half. And I’ve already written sixty pages of book three by accident.

What does this mean for you who’s been waiting eagerly?

Well, it means I’ll actually finish Free Will this century. Probably this month. And I’m close enough to the end to head back into production on the audio this week, which I’m doing. It also means that Free Will will be a reasonable length–it might even sneak in under the equivalent of 650 pages when all is done. It means you’ll get a book that ends on a sequence of scenes that is the biggest, brashest you’ve seen yet…

And it means that the first two acts of book 3 are going to be incredibly explosive.

This series keeps surprising me with how much story is wrapped up in it. I can’t wait to share that surprise with you.

There’s a word for “it.”

Resonance.

Emotional resonance is that thing that makes us look at a book title and go “oh!” (or “oh?” or “ah” or “huh?”). A title with immediate resonance requires no thought–it jumps down below our conscious minds and evokes something before we know what it’s doing. Here are some titles that tap into something specific in our cultural atmosphere:

Soulless by Gail Carriger: The title contrasts with the subtitle (“A novel of Vampires, Werewolves, and Parasols”) to subvert the connotation of “soulless” as being something negative and monstrous, but not entirely. It creates enough ambiguity that it makes us interested. Ambiguity that lures (rather than confuses) is good–it’s one of the basic elements of seduction.

The Pillars Of The Earth by Ken Follet: A title which is actually a quote from 1 Samuel 2:8, a Bible verse that almost nobody has heard in a couple generations–but which was a favorite a couple hundred years ago. So much so that the image of eternity and strength becomes tied to this phrase in our language. Even though the cosmology (flat earth as the center layer in a layer-cake universe) is now completely alien, the phrase still evokes the sense of permanence and imperiousness that it did to its original audience. It is, to borrow another ancient image, titanic. And it works so well that it’s helped Follett’s book become one of the bestselling books of all time.

A Dark And Hungry God Arises by Stephen R. Donaldson: You gotta hand it to him, Donaldson knew his audience–this is the third book in a five-book space opera based on the Ring Cycle and steeped in Wagnerian and Lovecraftian imagery, and anyone vaguely familiar with Lovecraft will feel the echo of Cthulu in this title. Both of these mythoses serve (throughout The Gap Cycle) as a veneer over a plot which is centrally concerned with Babylonian notions of the war between Chaos and Order, and Nietzschean notions of power and responsibility. The titles of the entire series are themselves a philosophical statement, and they resonate with the target audience because they pull at, and subvert, ideas that anyone who reads SF or Fantasy is steeped in to the point they don’t even realize it.

So these are titles with immediate resonance because they hook into something deep in the cultural consciousness, often without the customer knowing what they’re doing.

But there is another kind of resonance–an acquired or secondary resonance, if you will. These are titles which require a bit of thought, but which become unforgettable after that initial bit of thought. For example:

The Unincorporated Man by Eyton and Dani Kollin. This is a double-take title if I’ve ever seen one. The mental process it elicits goes something like this: “The concept that a person is not a corporation is so basic as to be completely obvious, right? But if it’s SO obvious…then why make it the title of a book?” If you make it that far in the trani of thought, they’ve got you. You’re hooked. Even if you don’t buy the book, you WILL remember the title.

The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe. Yeah, we’ve all heard it so often that it feels like immediate resonance, but it’s really not. It’s a non-sequitur–he’s putting together two things in this title that really don’t seem to belong together, and yet they hint as desperate suspense. Pits, after all, are deep, dark, unpleasant places, and in Poe’s time “The Pit” was the preferred polite term for “hell.” Pendulums, on the other hand, regulate clocks, and signify order and dependability–so right away you have a very short mental journey from “a list of nouns” to “a terrifying juxtaposition,” and that’s enough to make the phrase stick in the mind, which makes it a great title.

The Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams. Adams was a master of titles that twisted the language just enough to mke them stick, and this one might be his best. It’s a mash-up of that most British of civilized frivolity (tea-time, that pseudo-meal of tea and desserts and nibbles at 4pm) and one of the most potent metaphors for despair and depression in the English Language (The Dark Night of the Soul, from the poem of the same name by St. John of the Cross, 16th century). So, what do you get when you throw together civilized frivolity with existential angst? A title that makes you go “huh?” long enough to pick the book up and read the back.

— — —

Now that we’ve seen how titles work, let me let you in on a few tricks I’ve seen other authors use (or used myself) in creating catchy titles:

Juxtaposition: setting two contradictory elements against each other in a way that suggests a deeper consilience, or which promises a gripping conflict, or both.

Cultural cannibalism: stolen quotes and aphorisms, sometimes (but not always) mangled just enough to pull them out of background cliche` and make them fresh. Examples include almost all of Agatha Christie’s titles.

Subversion: As in the Douglas Adams example above, taking images from the cultural background and subverting them to suggest a mystery or explanation within the pages.

Movement: I once wrote and directed a film called The Hunting of Kestral Mannix, which sounded a lot grander than the film aimed at being. Eventually we retitled it to Hunting Kestral. The title change made raising money and casting the film MUCH easier, because the tense is active and the title suggests movement.

Atmosphere: Titles that deal primarily with weather or emotions can be effective and evocative, such as David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars.

Surprise: A title which is simply too ridiculous to be taken seriously, to the point where it can’t pass unnoticed. Examples: Ice Pirates, The Unincorporated Man.

Allusion: A title alluding to another famous title can be quite effective. Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None has proved useful to me twice. In the first instance, it was originally released in the US as Ten Little Indians, also the title of a poem in the book which is structured like a slasher film (the book became the blueprint for slasher films, despite its genteel aesthetic). This led directly to the title of my own book Down From Ten, which has a few plot similarities (though only a few) and works on a countdown-clock structure, with each chapter title counting down from day ten to day zero. I’m told the title is arresting–if it is, it’s because I cheated and borrowed a bit of Dame Agatha’s thunder.

Of course, the same title also served as inspiration for my own book And Then She Was Gone. Same cadence, almost all the same words, but with a plot very different. The reason? It’s a damn good cadence–it’s very suggestive, it’s a sentence fragment, it’s evocative, and everyone has heard the old title, even if few have read the book, so it sets up immediate resonance: the title feels familiar in exactly the way I wanted it to. 80% familiar+20% alien=intriguing.

Pun or Double Entendre: Seth Harwood’s Jack Wakes Up refers both to awakening from sleep (at the beginning of the book) and to awakening from a mid-life stupor. Ken Follet’s Eye of the Needle is a complex pun: his villain is codenamed “The Needle”, the story depends on his perspective, in the climactic sequence his eyes are injured, and he is the proverbial rich man (or, at least, well-financed by the Germans) attempting to get into the kingdom of heaven (or, receive the honors due him in his home country, to which he can’t wait to return).

Recombination: Some authors keep interesting titles, and then combine bits of them at random. You can get some great stuff this way. For example, combine Stranger in a Strange Land with The Jaguar Hunter to get The Stranger in the Jaguar or Hunting the Stranger or any number of other permutations (notice that this is not my preferred way, as I’m not all that great at it).

And, of course, there’s hundreds of other ways to do things: Euphemism, Dysphemism, Jargon, appealing to status, an interesting character name (Amadeus), a defining characteristic of an important character (The Time Traveller’s Wife), or a totemic image (The Piano, Captain Correlli’s Mandolin). You can go on forever with techniques for titles just as you can for techniques for storytelling, but the important factor remains the same, and it’s still one word long:

Resonance. Shoot for that, and you may find titles just a little easier.

Vanity
For your starter today, I’ve recently finished Sam Harris’s book The Moral Landscape. We recently had a three episode set discussing the premise and arguments Harris addresses in the book. I’ve also posted a review at Goodreads. It’s an interesting and provocative book–if you have an interest in ethical philosophy, I highly recommend it.

Whimsy
This is an oldie, but goodie, video of a squid filming its own escape from a skin-diver.

Civil Liberties
Are you offended and frightened by the recent shooting? Wish you could silence people who are talking about “targeting” and “taking down” the opposition? Think that such speech is the moral equivalent of a terrorist threat? I humbly suggest that you might want to rethink your position in light of this excellent piece from Slate.

In a similar vein, the attempt to silence political speech on the Internet has been whole-heartedly embraced by the Obama administration. EFF brief here.

Politics
In the “I reserve skepticism but it’s starting to look like I was wrong” department, there’s encouraging news about the early effects of the new health care bill.

Business and Writing
In the “cool research for Steampunkers” department, the Guardian talks about the FEMALE criminal underworld in Victorian London.

Ever wondered what the real scoop is on the most important part of you’re book’s marketing (i.e. the cover)? Turns out that Laura Resnick did a very extensive series of articles a few years back that goes in depth on how the whole business of covers works. Well worth the read.

The charming Kate Elliot posts a great article at SFWA offering advice to teen writers from someone who’s been there. If you’re a teen writer, check it out.

Bob Mayer expresses admirably why I’ve not yet done a book trailer, and why it would take a special project for me even to consider it. A quick read, worth the click.

For your treadmill-listening pleasure, Gail Carriger gives a delightful and characteristically witty interview with SF Signal, discussing the impact of social media on the book industry and the author’s business model.

Nathan Lowell’s publisher Robin Sullivan does a guest blog for J.A. Konrath in which she busts some myths about indie publishing and talks about the sales growth curve of her authors. Interesting, useful stuff.

If you thought 2010 was tumultuous for the publishing industry, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Borders is in the process of a crash-and-burn, and depending on how it goes down, it could do anything from expanding the print-book market to seriously shrinking it over the near-to-medium term (though I doubt it will actually sink any of the publishing houses along the way, it may mean a lot less cash going around to buy new titles). If you have print books on the market or on the way to market, it behooves you to read Joshua Blimes’s excellent and thorough Borders post-mortem report.

Science and Technology
As an enthusiastic tender of a bacteria culture (lacto bascillus San Francisco), this kind of stuff fascinates me. An in-depth article, with sub-links, on the unique ecosystems that exist within cheeses.

Perhaps I’m showing my age–and I can’t believe I just said that–but I’m still blown away by the return of lay people to the sciences. Last week, a ten-year-old girl discovered a brand-new supernova, and setting a world-record in the process.

The Singularity (in the loose sense) continues apace with the development of contact lenses that display information directly in the field of vision. This is the very epitome of “augmented reality” technology. Wonder how long it’ll be until we can buy them at Walgreens.

Another nifty extra-solar planet discovery–this one very like Mercury.

It’s early days yet, but there’s more rumblings from legitimate autism research that might just have nailed down one of the reasons for increasing incidence and prevalence of Autism Spectrum Disorders in the last couple decades. Encouraging news, as this one is completely preventable. Also weird as hell, which tickles my interest-o-meter.

In archeology news, physicists seem to have cracked the secret of the Mayan ability to make dyes that last forever.

At the end of December, the BBC did a wonderful 1-hour documentary on the most world-shaking scientific and technological advantages which, thanks to the marvels of YouTube, you can now see for yourself.

Along similar lines, here’s an article on 8 Science Fiction gadgets and plot devices that became a reality in 2010.

Laser weapons deployed for use on the high-seas! That’s right, non-lethal stun lasers are now being tested for use against pirates. No joke!

And, for the sake of great science-fictiony fun, here’s a great essay by Ronald Bailey speculating on the GOOD things that the lack of ET signals could portend.

Orwell
In other news, moral crusaders continue to Bowdlerize and lie about history “for the sake of the children.” If I can point to the single most harmful strand of human nature, aside perhaps from the propensity to commit genocide, this is the one I’d pick.

On the other hand, there are people of genuine moral fiber still circulating in the world. If you want something that will make you cry or stand up and cheer, check out this statement by the father of one the 9-year-old girl slain in the assassination attempt this week. Someone who takes his responsibility as a member of the body politic seriously enough that he’s unwilling to call for the curtailment of the civil liberties of others as salve for his grief? Uncommon! And displays most excellent character.

Weird Apps
Digital Life has info on an app for all you iPhone folks that will tell you when you can leave the theater to hit the bathroom without missing any plot points in currently-released movies. Behold, RunPee!

And that’s it for this time. Catch you around next time the world gets weird!

Also, they’re fun to rant about.

So, for the first entry in this series: Plots that depend on thinly-justified character derailment.

1) Characters act out of character because an alien took them over
Invariably, the “acting out of character” is so obvious that a blind macaque could spot it at a hundred yards, and yet their friends never notice until it’s convenient for the plot. Also, see #5

2) Characters act out of character because a virus is running rampant
There are viruses that do this. Recent research suggests that a virus might even be responsible for schizophrenia. However, such viruses aren’t cured by a quick zap by the magic thingamajig. They don’t cause the most plot-convenient conflict. And people don’t magically forgive injuries done to them by a virus-maddened former-friend who’s now trying to kill them, steal their spouses, and sexually molest their pet parakeets.

3) Characters act out of character because a computer replaced them with a hologram.
Really, guys, is this the best you can do? A computer wants to feel what it’s like to be human so it takes over someone’s life? Again? Didn’t I see this on every other SF show ever produced? And didn’t it really suck then too?

4) Characters act out of character because someone stole their DNA.
Because, really, if you were jealous of someone’s life, you couldn’t think of a better way to get petty vengence than by putting your body through a painful and likely fatal mutagenic process just so you could attempt to pass for them and kiss their significant other? Whatever happened to framing someone for murder, besmirching their character, or doing something else that might,for example, leave you alive and able to feast on the spoils of your victory instead of dying a horrible death at the hands of your own experiment? Or worse, getting contrived forgiveness after everyone you just greviously wronged manages to save your sorry ass from your own blinding stupidity?

5) Characters act out of character because someone stole their body/swapped bodies with them.

The personality exists in the brain, which is part of the body. If you’re going to swap bodies, you’re going to have to do a brain transplant. If, in your fictional universe, there is an immaterial soul that carries the personality, is it really going to sit around defenseless while you try to redirect it into another body by clever manipulation of television antennae (or the functional equivalent)? If your soul is so fragile that it’s vulnerable to anything nearly as flimsy as the Mcguffin’s in Science Fiction, then having one is clearly overrated in the first place–or your fictional universe would have fallent to pieces at the drop of the hat far before the time when your story takes place.
This story is dead, really. Heinlein did this one first, and best, with The Puppet Masters. The rip-off, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, was almost as good. When something’s been done as good as it can be done, you just stop. Period. In both cases, these worked because they paid attention to the way human anatomy, physiology, and psychology work: The Puppet Masters hijacked the nervous system but left the original personality intact, while the Body Snatchers made a cosmetic copy of the body and killed the original person off while they slept, but copied over memories to avoid confusion.

6) Characters act out of character because an imaginary scientific anomoly is driving people crazy
Because, in real life, when astronauts go through the Van Allen belt, or walk on different planets, or breathe a different oxygen mixture, or look at the sun without sunglasses, or get exposed to radiation, or inadvertently eat bad food, they always go on a psychotic killing rampage or a nymphomanicial sex bender or feel the irrepressible urge to reconfigure their equipment to enable an alien invasion.

7) Characters act out of character because of an external influence because it’s the only way to get the characters to have sex.
Because we all know that post-pubescent and otherwise apparently mature adults (particularly unrealistically attractive single ones who are constantly flirting), never, ever have sex with anybody–and if they do, they’re completely embarassed and self-conscious for several episodes, unless they can claim that an alien plague made them do it.

Characters act out of character because the plot requires them to be uncharictaristically stupid.
Because really, where’s the drama potential in a cast of highly intelligent, eccentric characters with opposing interests and differing vaules all being forced to work together (i.e. the plot of every series drama ever written)? You could never get conflict out of that. What you really need is for someone to accidentally lick an experimental battery and decide to take over the world.

9) Characters act out of character because it’s the only way to generate enough conflict to keep the story interesting.
See #8, but remove the experimental battery justification.

10) Characters act out of character for any bullshit reason involving made-up science, magic, violations of the laws of physics, or an insult to the viewer’s intelligence.
Granted, this would kill over 90% of all televised science fiction, but you can’t make an omlette without killing a few writers.

Fall is crazy, right? Halloween, Thanksgiving, School restarting, Christmas, RenFaire, Dickens Faire, conventions, festivities, and all those bleeding birds nesting in my trees and eating my pears, it’s enough to make one want to accept exile to an obscure Italian island.

After my writing binge this summer, I’ve been caught perpetually in the feeling that I’m wading through treacle, and it’s been driving me bonkers. Too much time on the road, too much Real Life ™ getting in the way, not enough time podcasting, or writing, or doing any of the half dozen other things that are in the top five of life priorities.

Turns out I’ve traded up one set of problems for another. As I conquered the word-rate barrier, I ran into a bunch of other roles and problems I had to grow into right-quick. And that can take up a lot of time and even more mental space.

What problems? Well, there’s new properties to manage and market. There are old projects that went begging that needed finishing up. There are three more books to finish by the end of the year, and new short stories that refuse to wait their turn.

It’s enough to make you feel like you’re working your ass off for no accomplishments whatsoever.

So, imagine my surprise when I total up my progress for the year and discover that, even with time on the road, I’ve been consistently writing at NaNoWriMo rates or better. The binge wasn’t a fluke, it just turns out that there’s a rhythm to the way I write: 5k words one day, 10k another, 1k another, 500 words another, but it averages out to 3k a day or better, and the progress on the various projects only feels slow because that work is spread over three novels, several shorts, and two nonfiction books. But they all grow.

Lesson: The next time someone tells you that one novel a year is really fast, spit in their eye. And keep writing at whatever rate you can manage. And next time you feel like you’re not accomplishing anything, step back and take a look at the last three months. Use some kind of objective measure. Then, make a change if you need to, or power through if you don’t.

Me? I didn’t do NaNoWriMo this year, and I probably won’t do it again, but it’s not because I don’t want to write a novel in a month.

It’s because I’m already doing more than that in an average month.

This year, I’m on track to do 6 short stories, 1 novella, 3 novels, 1.5 nonfiction books, and 15 articles. Fully 1/9th of my lifetime’s word output has happened this year. And I also landed a collaboration deal for a nonfiction with one of the veterans in the business (you’ll hear more about this during Q1 of next year).

During the same time, I upped my education a lot. I’ve gotten my footing in what had previously been a bizarre and foreign business to my way of thinking, learned how to apply past lessons to the current domain, and taken several other business projects forward specifically because of the gaps this education has filled in.

One of the things that surprised me is the lesson I learned ten years ago at the beginning of my time in and around independent film is even more important in the writing business than the film business. I’m henceforth calling it Sawyer’s First Law of Apprenticeship:

When you want to learn something, look for the folks with the gray hair and the bad attitude. (Caveat: “Bad Attitude” doesn’t mean “asshole.” It means “cynical and difficult to impress, and don’t give a damn what you think about them.” This is important because it means they’ve been around the block and they have their shit together).

In an industry like publishing that’s in the throes of tectonic shifts wrought by technology, particularly for a child of the Internet age, it’s easy to assume that it’s the young lions who know the score.

And, for us Gen X-ers and Gen Y-ers, it’s a cultural cache to be insular: to be highly social among ourselves, and to not bother much with the older folks unless they’re the rare ones who are hip to the changing times.

But if you’ve ever hung around old soldiers, you know this one: When the rules change, the old soldiers who survive the change do so because they know why things work the way they do. And they are usually willing to talk to people who are willing to listen–and they are also willing to encourage people to only take the parts of their advice that suit them. In writing, there’s a group of writers who are adapting faster than *anyone* to the new world of ebooks and small presses and making new media pay rather than just making it work, and they’re all over 50 and each has more than 50 novels under their belts.

Over the last few years, I’ve been the beneficiary of a lot of wisdom from people with gray hair and bad attitudes, in a variety of businesses. Most of them, I kid you not, I met in bars or in line for movies, just chit-chatting with strangers who seemed interesting. Some of them I sought out at conventions and conferences. All of them have been a masters-level-or-better education on their own.

And I’ll still be learning for a lot of years. My current endeavor is listening to the Superstars Writing Seminar until my ears fall off. In another month, I’ll have them more or less memorized. And a month after that, I’ll have the lessons integrated into my business strategy. I highly recommend it for anyone in the first couple decades of a writing career (from “ooh, I want to do that” to “So I have a dozen books under my belt, now what?”).

Whatever your business is, your peers are people you need: support, friendship, innovative thinking, industry gossip, you’ll get a lot of it through them. Treasure them. Nurture those relationships. They are the people who you’ll be with as you conquer the world.

But to level up, you need three things: learning, discipline, and mindset.

Learning comes from the people who earned their gray hairs.
Discipline comes from seeing what people twenty or thirty years ahead of you can do in their sleep that you dare not even dream about yet, then trying to push to reach that level. Maybe you’ll find your limits, more likely you’ll push them, and that’s where growth comes from.
Mindset comes from listening to people who’ve been there before you. You learn very quickly how easy it is for a newbie (even a newbie with a resume) to worry about the wrong things, to be as diligent as possible and make dumb decisions, and to self-sabotage without ever realizing it.

Some of this stuff you can learn from books. The rest of it only comes from experience, and from talking with people who’ve had experiences.

Whatever your art, business, or career, maintain your networks. And keep an eye out for gray hairs and a bad attitude. When you find them, buy them a drink and ask them questions. You’ll be glad you did.

Generally people find it easy to start a novel, not so easy to keep it going after the initial burst of action and setup. The reason is that concepts are easy. Sustaining them, particularly when you’re not practiced at it, is hard.

Concept
Concepts are the easy part. Here are a the concepts for four of my novels (three you might recognize, one is in the works:
“The National Security Advisor escapes a contract on his life by leaving the planet.”
“A group of bohemian artists gets buried in an avalanche.”
“A soccer mom hires a surly private detective to find her missing daughter.”
“On her first night in her new apartment, a woman’s car is stolen only to be returned in the morning.”

This is your elevator pitch, stripped down to its bare essentials. It’s what is technically known as your “inciting incident,” and it’s where most people start a story: an idea that can be described in a single, action-oriented sentence.

When Concepts Run Out
If you’ve got a good strong concept, it’s easy to barge into your new novel with all the confidence in the world, right up until you hit a hard wall and can’t write anymore. The story just doesn’t have anywhere else to go.

We all hit this wall at some point. Some of us hit it with every book. Some of us write short fiction splendidly, but can’t quite ever do novels, because the mystical power of sustaining action eludes us.

Well, I can give you the secret to the mystical power. All you need are the Six Magic Words.

Six Magic Words
There are six magic words that you can append to the end of any concept sentence that transforms the idea from something appropriate for a short story, a sketch, or a prose poem into one that is more appropriate for a novel. Those words are:
“…and then everything goes to hell.”

Why?

It gives you a bridge into act two. Your concept is act 1 of the traditional five act story structure. Act two is “complication,” which can be hard to get into once you’re done with all the setup. You have your scene set, and now, for drama to proceed, you have to break something. You don’t want to, cause it’s beautiful. Or you can’t figure out what to break, because you don’t know what will happen. But if everything goes to hell, your life is simpler. You can break everything, see what works, then fix the things you didn’t need to break or that get in the way of the story. Or you can stagger the order in which things break. You have options–but you don’t have to pick between them right away.

Which gives you the freedom to plunge on writing.

I’m not the first to come up with this — most writers have their version. My favorite was Raymond Chandler’s answer when a fan asked him “How do you beat writer’s block?”

He said: “Someone with a gun comes through the front door. By the time I figure out who they are and why they’re there, the story is moving again.”

Happy writing!

So, you may ask, what did I learn from writing 123k words in 50 days?

Plenty.

What do you need to know if you’re gonna try for this kind of marathon?

Try these on for size:

First, as you can read in my post about the health problems I developed as a result of crappy Microsoft workmanship, ergonomics are everything. You can actually seriously damage your arms, hands, and wrists if you don’t move around regularly, have a comfortable keyboard, and pay attention to your body. Being in a groove is no excuse.

Second, food. I tried a variety of different styles of eating throughout the ordeal, mostly motivated by whatever I could think to put in the kitchen that week. What I wound up discovering surprised me. I expected to want junk food—pre-prepared high calorie, high density, high-protein, ultra-tasty nibbles supplemented with fruits and finger-friendly vegetables. However, it turned out that I gravitated toward made-from-scratch fare. I actually learned to make wood-oven pizza, sourdough from scratch, knishes, and a few other things during this time, and not just because they were tasty. It’s because it gave me something else to do.

If I was doing anything but writing, I felt a lot of pressure to get back to work. But if I was cooking or cleaning, I was holding up my end of the household. Pouring creativity into the cooking also gave me a chance to spoil my partner rotten in return for the tremendous support she was giving me as I tried to see just how far I could push my productivity. There was a lot of culinary experimentation, and between the quality of the food, the physical activity in preparing it, and the fun of creativity without pressure, it seriously boosted the quality and quantity of my output.

Third, exercise. I didn’t get enough of this, really. I can’t write very well at the walking desk—too many typos—so I was only getting on it two or three times a week. When I did get on, though, I went for the long haul. A couple hours at a stretch, and then within an hour of stopping I’d have a new creative flood. Activity helps supply the brain with oxygen—it also flushes lactic acid out of the system, and when you’re sitting that much the cellular waste sits in your muscles and makes them sore. Like bedsore-level sore. It makes you never want to move again, but once you start moving, it feels SO much better.

Fourth, massage. I’ve been doing massage for a long time now, and I have a friend who’s a pro who I trade with. Lifesaver. Getting them kept my RSI from crippling me before I fixed my ergonomics problem (and I did fix it, resulting in a heavenly experience for the last couple weeks here). Giving them helped me relax and remember there were other kinds of touch in the world besides typing.

Fifth, socialization. Weekly gatherings with my nearest-and-dearest, some festivities surrounding my birthday, impromptu meals with friends, all very important. Getting out to help build a retaining wall or join a moving crew for an afternoon was also lots of fun. All of it kept my mind limber.

Sixth, as Number Five said: INPUT! NEED INPUT! Keep your mind ticking over. Hrab’s new album was wonderful for this (you can buy Trebuchet here—it’s a mind-blower, though not for the easily offended). My weekly doses of P&T’s Bullshit!, True Blood, and The Pillars of the Earth kept me thinking in nicely twisty ways that helped the story. My Region 2 DVDs of the British quiz show QI kept me laughing and distracted during the long hours. Reading a Kellerman novel and Mary Roach’s STIFF during down time when I just couldn’t write, and listening to Steven H. Wilson’s Peace Lord Of The Red Planet (which I plan to review soon) kept me smiling and remembering the larger world outside my little projects.

Seventh, pay attention to what motivates you. For me, sitting at the keyboard wasn’t the hard part; it was keeping the juices flowing so my time at the keyboard was effective that I found difficult. Yes, I put in long hours–tortuously long, sometimes. But it wasn’t to hit a word count–I’ve found that doesn’t work for me consistently. It was to finish a story chunk or an article or a topic-based chapter. I wanted to find out how it ended, and I wouldn’t let it go till I did.

What motivates you might be different–figure out what it is and then keep it in the front of your mind.

At the root of all of this (and the plans I have for the rest of the year) is the realization that my backlist is too small. By lifetime word count, I’ve hit pro level. I now have over 900,000 words under my belt (that means 13.6% of my entire life’s writing output has happened in the last fifty days). But the number of properties I have on the market (everything finished piece since the 500,000 word mark) is simply too small, so I’m changing that. And, I suspect, I’ll keep changing that as long as I’ve got the fingers for it.

Telling stories is life for me. Even this one. Hopefully, if you like telling stories too, you’ll find some of these lessons useful.

Happy writing!

For the first half of the duration, I did it by accident. So, I thought it might be worth something to those of you who write or want to if I documented the experience.

It started off with a chat with another author who asked me some questions about guns for a book she was working on. Over the last couple years, this sort of thing has gotten pretty common as I’ve inadvertently acquired a reputation as something of a level-headed gun nut.

I got to thinking that much as I enjoy the excuse to talk shop with other authors, the volume of conversations I’d been having on this topic should tell me something: A lot of the current generation of authors simply don’t have first hand experience with firearms, but almost all of us use them in our fiction. Wouldn’t it be handy if there were a special podcast episode that went over the basics?

It seemed like a harmless enough project when I posted my first call for questions on June 22nd.

The questions came in fast, and in a large volume. By July 5th I had an outline for a fifteen episode podcast series, each episode being roughly fifteen minutes covering information on a single topic. So, on July 8, I started writing.

By July 15, I knew I was writing a book. The chapter list had grown to forty, and I’d split it into two books. I decided to write the first now, and the second in a couple months when I had a break.

On August 4, I finished the book. At fifty-five thousand words, plus illustrations, tables, and references I thought it would shape up to be a very nice e-book release. A companion podcast goes without saying.

But I was also on a roll, drunk on my power over the English language. I’d just done over fifty thousand words in a few weeks. Some of those days I put out more than ten thousand words, others only a few hundred. I had terrible RSIs, I was having trouble keeping up with other stuff (particularly paperwork), and I nearly missed an article deadline, but the words were still coming.

I needed to get back to fiction though. For one thing, if I wrote one more word about firearms I was going to want to use one on myself. For another, I desperately needed to finish Free Will so I could get on with my next projects.

But Free Will wasn’t ticking over for me. It was going to take a lot to get back into it–a couple hundred pages of reading to get back into the characters. I needed a good short story to get my fiction juices flowing again, so I pulled the pilot project for a new series of mystery shorts up and started working on it. Those of you who were at my reading at Balticon remember this one–you were all laughing pretty hard. For those of you that weren’t, think Douglas Adams writes Chinatown.

It was just supposed to be a nice little story, about six thousand words, pleasantly twisty with an appropriately bizarre solution. That was my idea, anyway.

The story itself had other ideas. In the last few weeks, I’ve written it twice. Once as a 20k word novella, and then (after being told it was far too dense) as a nearly 60k word novel (which I finished today). I suspect it’ll grow by another 10-20k over the next couple weeks as I revise and polish it.

Which is, I suppose, a long way of saying “Projects have a way of growing on me like a fungus.”

So if you want to do something this ridiculous and write this fast, how can you do it? Click here for a list of the lessons I learned from this little adventure that might make it replicable!

I’ve been writing and hacking since the age of four, though I don’t hack much anymore, so I need an ergo keyboard to keep my wrists functioning properly. The only ergo on offer was the Microsoft Natural Pro 4000, so I paid through the nose for it ($60) and took it home.

It looked gorgeous. The spacebar was sticky as if the tolerances were a little too close, but I figured it would work out. Unfortunately, I never got to see if it would–the keyboard failed in about sixty days.

A return trip to Best Buy, and some carefully measured profanity coupled with very complimentary sweet talk, got me a new one of the same model for free.

Fast forward six months to tonight. I’ve written 70k words in the last five weeks. The first 20k were on my laptop keyboard, which is a very comfortable, light-touch HP. Unfortunately, it’s not versatile enough for the amount of moving around I have to do during marathon writing sessions–and the ergonomics really don’t work for writing on the treadmill. I had two books backed up in me that wouldn’t wait, so I grabbed the Microsoft Ergo off the audio workstation, and started smashing away.

Over the next 50k words, I acquired the single worst case of RSI I’ve ever had. Crippling tendonitis from the fingertips to the elbow on my right hand, to the point where I couldn’t even raise my tea glass without shooting pain. I still managed my weight workouts, regular chores, helped one friend move and some others build a retaining wall, but I paid an unexpected price: Any time I wasn’t actively writing or working on a task, I was so fatigued I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I’ve got a nice high pain threshhold, so it took me about two weeks to figure out that the ongoing pain was sapping my energy.

Massages, vicodin, and anti-inflammatories didn’t help much beyond making it bearable for everything but driving (driving is currently searingly painful–even holding my companion’s hand is enough to make part of me want to curl up and die).

A couple days ago, I finally got fed up and set off on a quest to find out what was going on. After a couple hours paying attention to every movement I was making, I realized that the spacebar on the Microsoft keyboard was doing it. Turns out that it is so poorly designed it took a *very* hard hit to depress the spacebar if my thumb hit even a half inch off center. Fifty thousand words of this over a very short space of time had simply worn out all the muscles and tendons in my right forearm (imagine hammering a nail with your thumb approximately 60,000 times, day and night, for two weeks, and you get the idea of what it might do to your hands). Bad juju for something that cost $60.

Nothing a little re-engineering couldn’t fix, right? I tweaked the sway bar, shaved the edges, added some silicone lubricant to the guide posts, and loosened the thing up a little bit. I gave the keyboard a thorough cleaning while I was in there.

The result? It was worse. Other keys were now binding up (after a routine cleaning). The spacebar was slightly smoother, but the effects faded after a couple thousand words. And then, the keyboard died.

Or, more specifically, the spacebar gave up the ghost. The membrane switch simply went dead.

I’ve cleaned, fixed, and even rebuilt a lot of keyboards in my life. Never have I seen one fail irreparably as a result of removing the keys and blowing out the dust.

Never. Once. In 28 years of using, cleaning, and repairing computers.

I was a Microsoft repair monkey for a chain of computer stores, and then on my own, for fifteen years during my misspent youth. I am pleased to report that the Microsoft Natural Pro 4000 keyboard lives up to all the expectations instilled in my by fifteen years of making my living off Microsoft’s engineering and quality control.

If any of you up in Redmond are listening, please communicate to the moron who designs your keyboard my sincere, earnest desire that he meet an untimely end during a sexual encounter involving a wolverine and copious amounts of PCP. Fuck you very much.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go order a proper ergo keyboard, and ice my aching arms. I got a book to finish and an article due.

It’s scared me since I was 12, when I read Writer’s Digest religiously at the library every day (which, in retrospect, was my first mistake). To my twelve year old mind, it described a world full of arcane rituals, secret handshakes, nepotism, and strange protocols – and a game at which nobody made a dime to boot.

Of course, I’ve learned better in the meantime, but the terror never quite went away. For years I’ve coped by doing other things I needed to do anyway in order to go pro – focusing on craft, learning to network at cons, podcasting and learning about how to interact with an audience, building my platform, and romancing the occasional agent, but I’ve hit the point in my career where I’ve got a hell of a backlist piling up (at least, for someone at my point in their career), and a handful of fiction sales that prove that my terror (which is largely born of the sense that I don’t understand a goddamn thing about the fiction publishing culture) is well past the point of being about 75% bullshit.

So, this summer, in addition to bringing you Free Will and working on the other projects I talked about at Balticon, I’m sending everything out that is not currently under contract — and I do mean *everything.* And I’ve got a pile of treatments in front of me to keep the pipeline full once all the existing stuff is in the mail.

I was going to just do this quietly and wear my glory or shame quietly, but after some conversations at Balticon and then reading Mur’s blog post this morning, I’ve realized I’m not the only person in this boat.

I’m getting off my ass. And I’ll put up ten bucks against anyone who wants to race me. Let’s make this a proper horse race. Here’s what I’ve got in mind:

We’ll go from now till the end of the year (or perhaps we should go to next Balticon?). Everyone bets $10. Every story we submit gets 3 points. Every novel proposal we send in gets 4 points. Every nonfiction submission/query gets 1 point. Every sale – of any fiction – gets 8 points. Every sale of nonfiction gets 3 points. Any sale that pays money and has a contract counts. Non-paying and/or clickthru and/or under-the-table markets do not count.

At the end of the year, the person with the most points wins the pool (which will operate on the honor system – those of us that lose will paypal our $10 to the winner).

We can keep a running tally for this and a forum at ANMAP. We prove our submissions and sales by posting photos/scans of the query and acceptance letters.

Thoughts? Should I formalize this, start a forum dedicated to it, and get this rolling? Any ideas for how to make it better/more useful? Chime in in the comments!

—Edit—
We have a few participants, so I’ve officially opened things. You can find the rules and competition forum here.

…between the execrable puns that had me wailing in pain and laughter simultaneously (“Not with a whim, but a banker” — you should be utterly ashamed of yourself in the best possible way. I doubt I shall ever have the guts to do *that* to my readers), and the glorious moments of beauty and mourning, it is the best read I’ve had in quite some time, and will, I daresay, be one I re-read just as I do the rest of the best Heinleins on my shelf.

I discovered Robert A. Heinlein when I was twelve, literally on the day he died. I caught my father crying on the porch – not something he was given to doing in public. I asked him what the matter was, and he told me that Heinlein had died – and then he stared at me slack-jawed when he realized I hadn’t a clue who the man was. He took me to the garage, had me pull a box off the top shelf, opened it up, and produced Tunnel in the Sky. He thrust it toward me and said “Read. And when you’re done with this one, read the rest of them in this box.”

I found in Robert’s books exactly the kind of bitch-slap I needed to begin learning to take responsibility for myself, and the beginnings of my formal training in critical thinking, as well as permission to fall in love with life without embarrassment. It felt like mourning the passing of a well-loved uncle when, in 2001, I closed the page on The Star Beast and realized that there was nothing new left – I’d read them all, even Grumbles and Tramp Royale.

For the last few years, I’ve had Variable Star and For Us, The Living sitting on my shelf, waiting for a rainy day. Two weeks ago, after a long stretch of 12-18 hour work days, I took down Variable Star and nursed it for as long as I could, savoring all the echoes of my favorite author coming through the pen of the man he, from what I understand, considered his best successor.

It was a fabulous duet.

Thank you, very much, for having the courage to take it on. There’s one song left on my shelf, and I’m saving it for another rainy day, but for my money you’ve produced a near-perfect elegy in Variable Star.

Damn you for having the balls to quote Ulysses at the end. And thank you, so very, very much, for giving me one last grumble to treasure.

-Dan Sawyer

Part three of three of the live call-in show that launched Down From Ten — this one plays almost like a Reprobates Hour episode on the history of the podcast novel. A change of pace from the previous episodes, and a very interesting one.

Part two of the live call-in show we did for the launch of Down From Ten, in which we take your calls, talk about the craft of writing and podcasting, and argue about what makes for a good story. We also take more saucy calls from listeners.

[In honor of her new book Soulless, which impressed me with its groundedness in the Victorian world, I asked author Gail Carriger to blog about the art of finding good research sources for Steampunk writing. This is her contribution - thank you very much, Ms. Carriger! -JDS]

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: nothing beats primary sources. I hate to be a traitor to the Author Guild’s justifiable objection to the Google Book settlement, but Google books does already have a number of good primary sources from the 1800s available.

* One of my personal favorites, with recipes and other interesting tidbits about domestic management in 1876, is Things a Lady Would Like to Know

* Floote’s Medical Common Sense is another wonderful resource for a historical perspective on the Victorian attitude towards medical science, not to mention a window into scientific, social, and psychological theory. This is an American classic (if non-fiction can be called such).

There are other useful primary sources as well, that you might be able to order through Amazon or a rare books dealer. My two favorites are:

* Baedeker, Karl. 1896. Baedeker’s's London and its Environs. (or any Baedeker’s dated to the Victorian era) for maps, railroad time tables, popular museums and visitors areas, not to mention names of shops, clubs, restaurants, news papers and more.

* Edwards, Amelia B. 1877. A Thousand Miles Up the Nile. For language and the Victorian adventurer abroad feel.

As for secondary sources, what you need may depend upon what you’re writing. I write comedy of manners, so my needs reflect this more pedestrian interest level, someone with a more military bent probably has a different list. Never the less, I find myself constantly reaching for the following:

* Pool, Daniel. 1993. What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew. For the basics.

* Cunnington, C. Willett. 1990. English Women’s Clothing in the Nineteenth Century. For anything to do with women’s clothing

* Flanders, Judith. 2003. The Victorian House. For domestic life questions. The information is not well structured, but it is there.

* Farwell, Byron. 1972 Queen Victoria’s Little Wars. For the quickest insight into the Empire Building mentality and military history of the age.

Aside from Wikipeda, which can be an okay place to start, there are some good, if not particularly well organized, research tools dedicated to the Victorians online as well.

* By far the biggest and the best is the Victorian Web which is a great spiderweb of all sorts of useful information

* The Victorian Dictionary offers up primary newspaper articles on different topics

And here are a few interesting individual offerings online.

* Victorian Slag Dictionary

* Victorian Etiquette

* The Illustrated London News (starting in 1842)

* Victorian servants

* The Ladies Journal

* Godey’s Lady’s Book

* Naval Ships of Victorian times

* Nick Names of Cavalry regiments

* Some ways to tie a cravat

* La Mode Illustree LiveJournal group

Other tips:

* If you have a DVR or Tivo trigger in keywords pertaining to your topic of interest. You never know what the history channel might be dealing with next. It will at least give you a jumping off point.

* Watch BBC costume dramas, and or, rent the DVD and check out the extras, they often have interviews with historical experts.

* Having a really hard time answering a research question? Cold call a local university history department. Experts love to talk about their expertise, perhaps there is someone in the history department you can ask. They may at least give you a book or article to read.

Lastly, of course you can keep an eye on my website, I often put up bits and bobs I’ve discovered around the net.

First, the appearances. You can find me on recent episodes of Podioracket, The Dead Robots Society, and doing voice work as the German Army in Philippa Ballantine’s Weather Child. You can also hear my fantasy story Buried Alive In The Blues, for which I also did some of the voice work, on the excellent (if racy) anthology series Erotica A La Carte.

For those of you who enjoy my Open Source madness will be pleased to hear that there are new LinuxJournal articles – one is a review of the Indamixx portable recording studio, and the other, which hasn’t yet published, is a review of OpenGear’s new KVM management console. I’m currently stalking a couple more regular writing gigs, so if the internet gods smile upon me, you may be seeing quite a lot more out of me in this vein in the coming months.

Podcast monkeys, you may have noticed the new buttons on the right side of the page – each podcast feed now has an iTunes one-click subscription link, as well as the normal RSS buttons. There’s also now an Uberfeed, which will give you everything I podcast (except Apologia, which you can get here).

You also may have noticed that I’m now podcasting my new novel Down From Ten. This is a comedic country house mystery with elements of romance, horror, and science fiction around the edges – it’s a change of gears from The Antithesis Progression. It’s also listed on iTunes now, so if you’re listening and enjoying it, please leave a review and tell your friends.

I’m also the subject of, and participant in dialog to, a blog series about the doctrinal foundations of Christianity by Scott Roche on the Spiritual Tramp blog. If you like my arguments on Apologia, you’ll definitely find this one entertaining.

I’ve also recorded MORE Reprobates Hour episodes, which, along with all the other special features I have on my hard drive, I’ll hopefully start spooling out here again this month.

As far as writing projects go, Free Will is picking up steam and is now officially on schedule for a November release. I’m also working on a couple more secret projects, which hopefully I’ll have news about soon here.

Finally, I hope to have some good news on sales in the next couple weeks, so watch this space!

Literacy is like heroin – it’s habit-forming. The more people try out the habit, the more likely they are to retain it. Exposure to books breeds consumption of books, which is good, because the act of reading requires deliberate commitment. This is important to keep in mind, particularly for those who wish to arrest the publishing industry’s current implosion before it becomes more like the razing of Carthage than the decline of the British Empire.

Despite its pretensions to the contrary, publishing is a business. The novel, the newspaper, the short story, and the magazine were all shaped to fit market niches, not vice versa. Eventually, somewhere along the line, the people who actually produce and polish the content (i.e. the writers, editors, and publishers) have to get paid.

We writers – and the publishing companies that once made a tidy profit off our work – don’t have a divine right to exist. If there’s no market, we go away.

ARTIFICIAL SCARCITY IS A LOSING GAME

The artificial scarcity strategies that media companies have (unsuccessfully) employed to preserve their markets won’t work for books, even in theory. All DRM is laughably easy to crack or circumvent. Also much DRM strips both content creators and consumers of their rights. Readers, like music fans before them, won’t put up with that. They will pirate instead.
While publishers try to create market scarcity by fiat, writers are trying to stay alive — and readers are trying to figure out how to find the books they want. In the struggle to limit readers’ ability to read the books they pay for, publishers (like the movie and music industries before them) are cutting their own throats, because readers (unlike movie and music fans) have ALWAYS been able to go elsewhere to get what they want. It’s perfectly possible for almost anyone in the western world to read for a lifetime without ever paying a dime for the privilege. That’s been true ever since Andrew Carnegie started endowing libraries.

Therefore, the game for book publishers is different than it is for music or film publishers. People like to search favorite books for quotes. They expect to be able to excerpt passages. They prefer books that are always available. While DRM doesn’t work well for relatively disposable entertainment like pop music and movies, it doesn’t stand a chance in the world of publishing. No copy protection scheme could possibly work, and no reader will endure draconian limits placed on her for long.

LIBRARY AS PUSHER

Public libraries might be a contained threat for now – but increasingly they are going online like a monster version of Google Books. How can our culture survive that? Authors’ copyrights will be shot, our revenue streams will dry up, and the whole literary establishment of the western world will…

..Oh, wait. I’m sorry, for a moment there I thought I was a record company executive.

But seriously, what of freely available books online? If everything is on Google Books, isn’t our business model blown?

No. Google Books merely samples sections of books – a drug pusher’s trick, wonderful for whetting the reader’s appetite. Our libraries should do the same thing, and go one step further:

Let people rent online access to books.

If someone wants to read a book online — or maintain access to one for a research project, or just have an old favorite at the ready wherever there’s wifi — let him pay a dollar for a week, or $2 for two weeks, or $10 for lifetime access. Let him read it on his Kindle or his Mobi or his laptop or his iPhone. And let it remain on the library’s server accessible only with his library card account.

This approach benefits both authors and publishers by providing a new revenue stream for themselves and for libraries. It creates a new market segment without gerrymandering artificial scarcity. And it does all this without curtailing the existing rights of readers, who may still walk into a library and check out the book, or buy the book in a bookstore.

It might also boost e-book sales: creating a niche market among travelers and others who want access to a broad catalog while away from the ‘net, and who will accept draconian restrictions in exchange.

Of course, there will always be a segment of the literate market who won’t actually read. For a variety of reasons, some readers will always gravitate towards audiobooks. Well, libraries could rent out streaming audiobooks. They could even promote print books with audio samples – call it a “gateway drug” strategy.

The audio sampling method is a proven success. A number of novelists (myself included) are already cultivating new markets by giving away audiobook versions with resounding success. Scott Sigler, the front-runner in this new game, hit the NYT Bestseller list for a print book he’s also giving away online in audio form. His strategy is enough like a drug dealer’s that his fans call themselves “junkies.”

THE END OF THE BEGINNING

Saving its market won’t be enough to save book publishers — but it will help them survive long enough to fix their other massive internal operational problems. Between print-on-demand, e-books, and Google Book Search, we have the opportunity to grow- the literate market share from its current historic lows, rather than letting it continue to shrink.

If we’re going to do this we must adapt to the market rather than try to strong-arm it into standing still for us. Tom Lehrer had it right for heroin, but he could have been talking about literacy, too. Remember the less on of the Old Dope Peddler:

He gives the kids free samples
Because he knows full well
That today’s young, innocent faces
Will be tomorrow’s clientèle.

Often, fantasy and historical fiction falls prey to this far too easily, because we don’t often question where certain expressions in our language come from. For example, you wouldn’t want to describe a complete package as “Lock, Stock, and Barrel” if the story you’re writing takes place before the seventeenth century when the musket became widespread in Europe. The reason? “Lock, stock, and barrel” are the three major components of a musket, and all three together means that you have everything you need to assemble one.

This kind of thing can shatter the illusion that you work hard to create, as it did for me in Peter Jackson’s “The Two Towers” during the sloppiest moment in the film. At the battle of Helm’s Deep, Aragorn commands a brigade of elf archers to “fire” on the enemy. I can’t emphasize this enough: nobody in the history of the world has ever fired an arrow. The notion of “fire” being synonymous with “activate” was nonsensical before the invention of the first ever fire-powered weapon, the cannon in the 13th century in China (not introduced into Europe until much later). Even so, archers were not commanded to “fire” until many generations after bows, arrows, ballistas, catapults, and crossbows ceased to be used in military combat. When commanding archers, the term is “loose” or, less frequently, “release,” “arrow,” or “trip” – NOT “fire.”

To further the historical literacy among fantasy, science fiction, and historical fiction writers, I recommend bookmarking the phrase finder and using it frequently when writing and proofreading. A good etymological dictionary and slang dictionary wouldn’t hurt either.

Suffice it to say that psychoses are back in full swing, and it’s a beautiful thing.