Results tagged “writing”

On October 20th, I posted news titled Auction: Terry Brooks Character Name.

In short, Terry allowed fans to bid on an auction where the winning bidder could have their name in a future book. The auction helped raise $1700 for children, schools, and other non-profit entities around the world. Terry gives as much as possible for numerous charities throughout the year, and that one created a fun new opportunity for him.

The character from the winning bidder became the G’Home Gnome Shoopdiesel in the recently published A Princess of Landover.

That one turned out so well that Terry decided to do it again—this time for a Shannara character name!

The auction went live in October and ended at noon on November 11th. To help get news of the auction to Terry’s fans, I posted the information on Suvudu and the News section of his official website, mentioned it on his official forum, and sent out an email blast to his Brooksbooks newsletter which goes out to tens of thousand of people.

By the end of the auction there were 72 bids, fans hoping to get the chance to be immortal as a character in a Terry Brooks novel.

What dollar amount did the auction finally go for?

It is extraordinarily difficult to find a way to talk about the difficulties of the professional writing life without sounding like you’re whining. After all, I’ve got a 6 foot commute in the morning. I set my own hours. I’ve got the ultimate flex time set-up and if my son gets sick, I don’t have to worry about who’s going to stay home with him. And every so often, I get to see my name on a book on the shelves. And, unlike when I was in high school, people think I’m cool, ‘cuz I’m an author (not one of them believed it would happen).

How the heck do you have all that and still talk about the job being hard? But it is hard, and if you’re thinking about giving it a go, you should know that it is hard.

While I do what I do for love, and I worked like heck to get where I am, I also write for money, for the support of my family and to ensure there’s money for the future. But I’m a piece worker without insurance. If I don’t turn my product in on time, I don’t get paid. If I don’t meet expectations, I don’t get my contract renewed. I can write an entire novel, turn it in and have it turned down, or I can have the project cut in the middle and receive only a fraction of the money I was expecting (what’s known as a ‘kill fee’).

I’ve worked on killer deadlines where I’ve pulled all-nighters and typed until my hands cramped. I’ve written stuff I’d never read. I’ve written stuff I’d never let YOU read. I’ve written manuals and ad copy. I’ve done all this and I’ll do it again. It’s what I do well and the way I have to earn the money to pay the mortgage and put my son through college.

It’s my job and in a lot of ways is like any other job, with its good days and it’s bad days, it’s good people and it’s foolish people. It’s driven me to fits and to tears and to distraction and back. No glamor. Just hard, daily work turning out the product and hoping the project goes through this time.

And you know what? I still can’t complain.

Every project requires some kind of research. There’s got to be something at the bottom of it. No matter how much you are making up, there is going to be some aspect that has to be fact-checked, or some nuance that can be picked up from a little rooting around. I have in my time researched aquatic life and wave patterns in the Great Lakes, surface conditions on Venus, Russian and Indian mythology, lighthouse keeping, the Salem Witch Trials, contemporary restraunt culture and the lives of the daughters of George III.

I love my job.

I’ve got to say, however, I’m no scholar. I know authors who are, and they are highly methodical. They come up with their outlines, the call out the high points, they do their reading, compile their sources and only then do they sit down with pen and paper, and they are constantly checking as they go.

I’m not like that. Somedays I wish I was.

When the idea or the project comes to me, I go out and I start grabbing, either at the library or at the bookstore. I must confess that one of the reasons I do love research is that it gives me the perfect excuse to indulge my book-acquisition habit (I can stop any time, really). I’m lucky in that I have access to the University of Michigan’s graduate library. This is a building so huge there are sections with a compass rose on the floor so you can find your way out again. There are so many books in it, the average fate of a volume is to rot away before it’s read. Bibliophile Heaven.

But back to the grabbing.

I’ll grab whatever first comes to hand that is related to the subject or subjects I think I’ll need for the project, and I’ll dive in. Deep. I’ll follow the book currents where they lead, using the references in back, or grabbing other books by the same author, or simply whatever comes next on the shelf. Eventually I’ll slow down. It’s akin to realizing you’ve over-eaten. My brain is full of Subject. That’s when I totter over to the computer, and sit down and start writing.

All the Subject sort of mixes and jumbles and blends in my brain with the ideas for the story. This is where it becomes like the painters pallette; all the colors blending together into just the right hue for the canvas.

But it doesn’t stop there, because there’s always something more. My rough drafts always have big holes in them with notes that look like this: [Ed. Double-check whether Venus glows in colors]. That’s when I go to the people. I’m done with the books, now I just want quick answers; names, dates, places], and nothing beats a human source for those.

Even more fun is the research trip. The difficult part of writing SF is you’re mostly writing about places you’re never going to get to. This gives you a certain amount of freedom, but it deprives you of the chance to visit the location, to soak up the atmosphere and energy, meet new people and just experience a different locale, and then write it off on your taxes.

Did I mention I love my job?

CL Anderson is the author of Bitter Angels and a bunch of blog posts, mostly on Thursdays.

Back in 2002 I had the opportunity to work on a Big Movie. It was a buddy cop movie and two Big Stars attached, a big director coming off a very successful teen flick, and a friend of mine was hired to write the script. Lotta money on the line. I came on to consult.

We sat down in a hotel room and started writing dialogue. It was a great experience. Knowing that the lines we were writing would be coming out of the mouths of two of the most popular male actors in recent cinema history was a great thrill.

Early on we wrote a scene where the two cops were checking out some suspicious house. There’s a vicious dog barking in the background, threatening them. You hear a gunshot and the barking stops. We thought it would hilarious to have one of the guys actually shoot the dog. Just the thought of how clever and funny it would be kept us sailing forward through pages, scenes, conflicts. This would be the greatest buddy cop comedy ever.

We turned in some pages.

Two weeks later we got fired.

There was only one note.

“You shot the dog?”

“Well, yes,” we replied, “it’s the last thing anybody would expect, which is why it’s funny.”

Deaf ears.

We shot the dog.

And we say, “Thank you, God, for the lesson.”

Several years later, I was writing a novel called Eat the Dark for Del Rey books. In it, some very nasty things happen to a family trapped inside an old hospital. They have a young son, a five-year-old, is hiding from a supernatural killer in the dark. At one point, Erich Schoeneweiss, the Production Manager at Del Rey, asked, “Are you gonna kill the kid this time?” His point was, in most horror novels, the author never actually kills the kid. They put the kid in jeopardy, they use him as a kind of emotional hostage to keep the reader guessing, but when the rubber hits the road, the kid lives.

Not always, of course.

Stephen King has killed the kid a couple times, most notably in Cujo and Pet Sematary. In the latter case King pulled the particularly cruel stunt of killing the kid, then making us think that the kid wasn’t really dead, and then revealing that he indeed had killed the kid.

Imagine the hate mail. But I must tip my hat.

The theory being that, sooner or later, in one book or another, you have to kill the kid. Especially if, like King, you include children as characters in most of your work. Because at some point, the reader is going say, “Now wait a minute. This fellow is a piker. I’ve read his work before. He won’t really let this child die.” Because the reader relaxes. Because he is not an idiot.

And at that moment, as a writer, you lose a little bit of your soul.

But back to dogs.

I have killed them, from time to time. In an unpublished novel called Stillwater, I had one get eaten by a bull shark in a lake up in Maine. The dog in question belonged to the bad guy, but still, it was a dog, and I hated to see it go. I like dogs, you see. I like children too.

And perhaps one day I’ll get up the gumption to kill one of them.

Being a parent doesn’t help. I can’t even read a book like Cujo nowadays, not even the part where the little boy and his mother aren’t trapped in the Pinto, dying of dehydration. I can’t even read the part about the monster words, the incantation that the boy’s father hangs on his wall to keep the evil things in his closet at bay. It turns me to jelly. I had no problem with the book when I first read it back in high school, but it’s emotional kryptonite to me now.

So does being a parent make you a worse horror writer?

No, I don’t think so. But only a fool would argue that it doesn’t change you. The paradox that I’ve discovered is that, while having kids in real life makes it infinitely harder to kill them on paper, it also makes it much easier to imagine and describe in detail the anxieties and outright dreads of their parents. One becomes so fluent in limning these parental phobias, exploiting them to maximum effect, that the urge to do so is almost irresistible.

And again, the writer who relies on these tricks puts his soul at hazard. He becomes like the impotent lover who, upon finding his noodle resignedly limp, redirects all his energies on becoming the world’s best kisser.

At first my short-term solution was to stop using children in my future work, until such time as I was able to actually finish one of them off.

Whether or not this will qualify as a step up in my development as a novelist, I have no idea. But I will tell you this—both Death Troopers and No Doors, No Windows have children and teenagers featured in them.

Does this mean I finally bit the bullet and did what was necessary?

Well. You’ll have to read for yourself and find out. Hopefully I made the right choice.

I’ve already killed the damn dog.

So, yesterday I just found out from The Editor that BITTER ANGELS has done well in its first month. Very well, in fact. I was, as you can imagine, thrilled to hear it. I was also relieved, because, well, you know, it might easily not have done well and that would have been much less good.

I also realized I was well and truly back on the rollercoaster that is a career in professional writing.

Everybody (well, almost everybody) knows that when you’re setting out to be a professional writer, you face rejection. How much rejection?

Well, I climbed aboard the ride back when the world was new, no one had heard the word “internet,” there were still jobs in Detroit, and I was typing manuscripts on my pale blue Smith Corona Selectric (which I abandoned without a backward glance for a Commodore 128 when I hit college). Back then, of course, you mailed out your manuscripts and the replies were mailed back. Little envelopes meant acceptance. Big envelopes meant rejection, because they’d sent the mss. back with a little slip of paper attached telling you what you already knew, that they weren’t buying this one. Some of them were nice, some of them were rude, most of them were forms. All of them were painful.

I got my first rejection slip at 16. It was from Young Miss magazine. I saved it, and I continued to save every slip I got after that. Then, I sold my first story to this micro-zine out of New Jersey. Immediately after that I sold another to a slightly bigger mini-zine out of Chicago.

This is it! I thought to myself. I have arrived! From now on there will be no more big envelopes!

You can guess how well that prediction turned out.

After that it was a solid year of collecting more little slips. And another. And another. Oh, there were sales here and there, but there were way more rejections than anything else.

On the tenth anniversary of that first rejection slip I threw a party. For a decoration, I took all my rejection slips and taped them together into a banner and hung it around the living room. One of my roommates measured it. It came out to 55.5 feet. I was averaging 5.5 feet of rejection per year.

Actually, I was very proud of myself. To me this was a sign I was really working at my dream.

But I should have paid attention to the way that work was going, because it was predictive. Even if you do manage to hit the top, this is a precarious business and it is full of things one cannot control. Publishers get bought up and bought out, lines suddenly change direction, technological changes turn the world over, whole economies crash. And that’s just on the big scale. On the small scale, covers can be poor quality, marketing plans can fail, a Big Name can come out with a book that absolutely swamps yours, and you can be dropped, or simply not renewed.

All of the above have happened or happening to me and to authors I know, and these are the times that not only try our souls, they are the the times that separate the adults from the kids. Because the blackest period of writer’s block is nothing compared to the call from your agent telling you you are not wanted by the people who last week were assuring you they loved you.

This is the time when you rage. You storm, you cry and you throw things. You wear out your friends’ patience wailing about the unfairness of it all.

But then you dig deep. You must. Because the only way, the only way out is to write something new and to send it out again. This is not getting back on the horse, because eventually you and that horse might come to an understanding. This is more like wrapping the bungie around your ankles and heading for the edge of the cliff once more, because you and publishing are never going to come to an understanding any more than you and the laws of physics are.

But if you understand that, if you can go in knowing that the rejection will come again as sure as the drop after that first high hill, it can be one hell of a ride.

So, last week Joe Schreiber did this great post about the book he’d like to write, but is never going to. His is called The Survivors Club.

Mine is called Player.

It’s the story of a young black man in the Jim Crow south. He’s a talented musician and is starting to pick up good money playing piano in honky tonks. But then one night he breaks up a lynching, a man dies in the process and he has to flee. He runs to Washington DC where he seeks help from his former girlfriend, only he has to be REALLY careful, because she’s passing and is now married to a US Senator.

She helps him get enough money to make a run for it, and in the end, decides to go with him. They marry and Our Hero finds himself alone in Paris in the Ex-Patriot community of African Americans, living the high life and playing piano for the likes of Dancer and Jazz Queen Josephine Baker.

All is fantastic, until Fascism begins to rise and Hitler begins his March. Our Hero is contacted by the US Government. They want him to spy for them. As a musician he can travel with a fair amount of impunity and pass coded messages in the form of musical scores (Josephine Baker actually did this). Our Hero, although bitter about how he was treated in America, agrees HItler and the Nazis are much worse. He sends his wife and kids back to the US, and finds himself a down-and-out white ex-pat to act as a front to set up a Jazz club where he can play and use as a base. Problem is the guy’s a boozer and has a tendancy to get mixed up with women who turn out to be trouble.

Then comes the invasion of Paris. Our Hero wants out, but his handlers have a job for him. A major member of the German resistance has escaped the Nazis and is on his way to Paris to rejoin his wife. Our Hero is asked to get to the Resistor, help him hide, find his wife and get the pair of them the BLEEP out of town.

Our Hero’s quite stunned to find out the Resistor’s wife is currently hanging around with his boozing front man. Our Hero has to get her away from the front man, get her back with her husband and get the pair of them out of Paris. He’s almost not quick enough, and has himself to flee with his front man whom he can’t quite bring himself to leave behind. When he’s sober, he’s a decent guy and good in a fight, and he makes great cover.

Together, they end up setting up a new nightclub in Morocco, ostensibly to wait out the war.

Yes, Our Hero’s name is Sam.

And in the “Where do you get your ideas from?” department: This all came from the initial realization, after watching the movie for the umpteenth time that Sam MUST have known the letters were in the piano. They would have affected the tone.

C.L. Anderson has been known to tell people she lives in a stately Victorian home on a windswept island in Lake Superior with her three sisters and their pet wolf Manfred. She has also been known to tell people she is a science fiction writer living near Ann Arbor, Michigan with her husband, son and cat. What is known is that she is the author of the novel Bitter Angels and that she’s very much looking forward to many more.

I’ve been reading for research lately. This has led me into the realm of the Published Rant. Which has in turn, led to the following:

LETTERS TO A CYNICAL WRITER
By Anne Author

Dear M. Writer:

I understand that you are Cynical. I understand that you have seen much of the world and that you are wearied and angered by it all. I understand that beside you I am a Babe in the Woods. After all, who am I? A mere provincial Romantic who still might take things at face value, and who might still enjoy what is nice, pleasant, charming or, well, Romantic. I understand that you are here to open my eyes, to save me from the evils of trust and romanticism and, most of all, to show me the Truth. And the Truth is going to be unpleasant. You know this because you have seen it and that is why you are Cynical.

However, M. Writer, if you are going to tell me the Truth, and are going to make the scales fall from my eyes, there are several things you are going to have to do first.

If you wish to shock me out of my nievete, you are going to have to show me something new. Contrary to what you may believe, I have heard coarse language. As a resident of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, I have been exposed to bodily fluids and know several homonyms for them. Showing them to me with unusual backdrops does not shock me. It might, however, lead me to mistake you for a frat boy rather than a cynic, and have me wondering if the fart references are coming next. Further, I am aware that people get drunk and behave badly in public, especially if they are rich and/or famous. Informing me that this happens produces no revelation, but may induce a discreet eye-roll in your direction.

I am likewise acquainted with several of the common, or garden-variety, forms of hypocrisy and greed. Telling me they exist, especially among the rich and famous (or the service industries) likewise fails to cause a blanch to fall over my delicate complexion. I am likewise unmoved by graphic violence or invocations of Hitler or Stalin. I am also aware that advertising frequently disguises the slip-shod and/or unhealthy and that corporations do not have my best interests at heart. Merely declaring the aforementioned conditions to be so without naming names, citing specific incidents, referring to interviews with participants or experts does not enlighten, or, more importantly, shock.

I don’t. Really. I don’t believe there is a mental disorder that only strikes writers. As my friend the writer Steven Harper Piziks put it: dentists do not wake up in the morning, go into the office, stare at an open mouth and say “OMG, I can’t drill! I just…can’t…drill…” Or if they do, we call it burn out and the smart dentist changes jobs, or gets a better shrink.

But writer’s block is mysterious, it’s dramatic. It is regarded as a sign of true artistic temperment and possibly genius. Because everybody knows Geniuses are tempermental and a little c/r/a/z/y eccentric.

In short, unlike the dentist’s failure to drill demonstrating the symptoms of writer’s block gets you attention and sympathy and even a weird kind of respect. Kind of like the ladies of old Great Britain with their Nerves and Vapors.

Don’t get me wrong, writing is a tough gig and there are days it does not go well. In fact, there are days it doesn’t go at all. I have been stuck, even mired. But usually this is because of something I’m doing, or not doing. Usually, I am not looking at the scene in the right way. I don’t have a clear handle on the goals of the characters, or, worse, I’ve gotten lazy and ignored something important further up the line, or refused to acknowledge that the way I had planned to write the scene is no longer going to work because of changes I’ve made to the plot.

In cases like these, the answer is similar to that with any other sticky problem. Step back. Walk around the block. Take a shower. Do a load of laundry. Work on something else. Come back fresh and ready to do the needed work. Amazing how the words almost seem to rearrange themselves and provide the answer.

This can be hard to do, however, when you’re under pressure. And everyone who writes professionally is under pressure. Writing is a performance art and it is also piece work. You don’t produce, you don’t get paid. You don’t produce, you lose your audience. To make your living eventually something of yourself has got to get out there and face the judges and the judges have to buy it, literally.

Which means there is a condition similar to what gets called writers block.

Stage nerves.

A lot of writer’s block stems from simple fear. Fear of failure, or the less recognized but equally debilitating fear of success. Fear of rejection, criticism or of simply not being able to meet your own standards. This can all make your brain and fingers seize up tight. But it is not mysterious and it is not unique. It’s just fear, pure, simple human fear.

So what do you do? Ultimately, there’s only one thing to do; You put on your big girl panties and you deal. You start meditating, you find a good shrink, you form a support group, you adjust your routine, you write the book that’s just for you and you’re never going to show to anyone so the pressure of having to go on stage is off long enough to prove to yourself that you can still lay words down. You do whatever you have to that does not involve self-destruction. NOTE: If you are doing alchohal, drugs, self-cutting (and I’ve known writers who do all of them), GET HELP NOW. But you do not lie on the sofa eating bon bons and wailing (unless they’re really good bon bons and then you have my permission to do this for three hours on a Sunday afternoon). Or sit in the bar nursing your scotch and wailing. That’s not how pros behave, that’s how my seven-year-old behaves (metaphorically speaking of course).

The ultimate problem, I think is, the Writing Life is one that lets you get away with a lot if you let it. Deadlines tend to be long term. You’re on your own. It’s easy for the bad habits and the self-doubt to creep in and with them the self-justification. But it’s not real. None of it. What’s real is that if you’ve stopped writing there’s a reason, and it’s an identifiable reason and you, the writer, need to find it.

And who knows, your next great idea might be hiding under it.

First, the plug:

I can’t believe it’s only 5 days until Bitter Angels comes out. I now have my author copies, and the book is GORGEOUS. Of course, I expect your book is like your own baby in this respect. It would be VERY difficult to acknowledge it as ugly.

Second, the admission:

I haven’t been doing a lot online lately, but I’m trying to fix that. My Facebook page and the fan page for Bitter Angels are up and running, although very much under construction. If you’re on Facebook and so inclined, my pages could use some friends, otherwise I think they’ll start mewling around the back door asking to be let in. The blog is in abeyance until I figure out how much I can keep up with. For the moment, I’m going to concentrate on becoming a regular here, so watch this spot.

But that’s not what I was going to write about. I was going to write about The Writing Life. I’ve had a bit of a kink thrown in my routine this week because my DS (that’s the Darling Son) is at art camp, which is Downtown. So, rather than deal with parking and driving back and forth and so on, we’ve been taking the bus in. I drop him off and go work at any of a Whole Bunch of WiFi and caffine hot spots around town until it’s time to pick him up. I mean, that’s one of the major upsides of being a writer, right? You can work anywhere. Plus you get little bonuses like spotting a Fairy Door you’d never seen, and seeing Rob Reiner having his breakfast at the Fleetwood Diner (and there is no way to make that not rhyme. I really tried).

The downside is finding out you’ve probably been deluding yourself about your ability to work anywhere. Especially when you decide anywhere include the coffee shop at Borders. Especially when the new Philippa Gregory novel is out and sitting there all warm and lovey and full of court intrigue and just _waiting_ for you.

Sigh.

C.L. Anderson has been known to tell people she lives in a stately Victorian home on a windswept island in Lake Superior with her three sisters and their pet wolf Manfred. She has also been known to tell people she is a science fiction writer living near Ann Arbor, Michigan with her husband, son and cat. What is known is that BITTER ANGELS is her first novel and she’s very much looking forward to many more.

I have been the webmaster for author Terry Brooks officially for almost a decade.

A decade. My, how time flies.

The website, like myself and Terry I hope, has evolved over the years and taken many forms. The official site went live on January 1, 2000 and quickly grew in popularity. More and more I was inundated by fans who had questions for Terry, questions I knew Terry could never hope to answer without it hurting his writing time.

That’s when I devised Ask Terry.

Ask Terry went live in April 2000. Essentially it allows Terry’s fans to post two questions per month. From those questions gathered over the month, I randomly select five of them for Terry to answer. Some of the questions are about Terry’s books, others about the craft of writing. Or about what books he suggests fantasy readers read. Still others are concerned with the two movies or how Terry spends his time away from his keyboard. It has easily been the most dynamic part of the website and now, after a decade, hundreds and hundreds of questions come in every month with the hope Terry will answer them.

Today I posted the Ask Terry answers for questions posed in July. Feel free to visit, ask a question you may have, and we’ll see if we can’t get it answered in August!

Ten years have almost passed.

Unbelievable.

When I think about what it takes to be a writer, multiple ideas immediately come to the fore—long hours slumped over a keyboard, deleting of numerous characters and insertion of countless others that may survive, the solitude of being left alone to tell a story that others will read in solitude to enjoy, and the aggravating unknowing knowledge that the story might come together and yet might not.

But I’ve discovered for myself finally that there is so much more that goes into it.

The hard way.

It took me a total of twelve months to write the first draft of The Dark Thorn, my contemporary fantasy that takes place in Rome and Seattle and weaves Arthurian Legend, Celtic Mythology, the history of the British Isles and the history of the Vatican. To me I felt like it should have been wrapped up six months earlier by some internal deadline I can’t even begin to explain. By the time I entered the final four-month stretch, I poured my heart into it. In the morning I wrote for Suvudu, usually only eating a very brief breakfast of wheat toast, before then jumping into the book. I would write until late afternoon and by that time I had the shakes from no lunch. After a good dinner out somewhere I would write some more at night before going to bed and begin anew the next day.

Once I finished the first draft, I felt good about it—but something was not right.

I thought it had to do with the book. I thought it had to do with my main character, Bran Ardall, who seemed devoid of personality. I gave the book to Terry Brooks, a close friend and someone I knew would not pull any punches. He read it right quickly. I soon received his comments and suggestions, and while very positive I still had a lot of work to do to make it a “great” book—and I of course want it to be great, not just good.

I spent a solid week thinking about nothing but his thoughts and how I could improve upon The Dark Thorn. I barely left the apartment. I kept away from friends and family as I mostly had for four months. Why the hell did I feel so terrible? Why had it taken me so long to finish the book? Why did I feel like my entire life had crumbled and I had nothing left?

It wasn’t the semi-rejection of the last twelve months of my life. After the first three of fifteen or so rejection letters on my first book, I had overcome the resentment and anger that usually surfaces from such denial.

So what was it?

As it turns out, having asked advice from Patrick Rothfuss, Vicki Pettersson, Tobias Buckell, Chris Evans, Jacqueline Carey, Robert V.S. Redick and Peter V. Brett, it is something that most writers deal with.

“Where do you get your ideas?” is one of the most common questions asked of writers.

Ideas are everywhere. My ideas come from current and historical events, myths, science and nature, pop culture and the mundane. Writers are patient observers. We sit like dogs beneath a picnic table, waiting for crumbs of inspiration to fall. When we snag something particularly tasty or useful (a phrase, a gesture, an expression) we run with it.

I consider myself a quilter, more so than a creator. I’m not starting from scratch, weaving masterpieces from the air. I collect, trim to fit, design and craft something new from scraps and leftovers. The most enduring themes, locales, images and characters spring from the most unlikely sources.

“Ice Song” has been lauded for its originality, but I simply used existing elements to develop a new world. For example, the “Sigue” was inspired by the faux-punk band Sigue Sigue Sputnik. Ostara, a small fishing village on my fictional Sigue, is named for a Wiccan holiday. A pagan variation of Easter, Ostara celebrates rebirth and reawakening.

Sidra was the name of Terri Hatcher’s character in a Seinfeld episode (“They’re real and they’re spectacular!”).

Sorykah became a Trader, not because she can trade genders, but because it sounds like ‘traitor’ and I imagine that people close to her feel betrayed by her mutability.

Matuk the Collector’s white marble manor was cobbled together from my favorite fairy tales—Bluebeard, with his dead wives and love of blood sport, Rapunzel’s impenetrable tower and every crumbling castle ever inhabited by a foul-tempered ogre.

Dunya the dog-faced girl must have come from a William Wegman image, because I can see her so clearly.

Sorykah’s insult to Chen, “You are as shallow as topsoil!” is merely the product of a silly high school joke. Top soil, tee hee.

Fantasy gives me the freedom to corrupt facts. Reality no longer depends on the actual, only what is plausible. My creations can be as strange or lovely as I like, as long as they are stitched together with tender care. Then they will endure the ages, their beauty unfading, until they too are cut apart and recycled.

The creative process differs for everyone.

Who would have thought my creative process would be, however, the same for writing a book and developing a website.

I began working in this business as a web developer in 1996. The internet(s) had not broken as a tidal wave yet and no tutorials or books existed for people wanting to learn how to build a website. I didn’t take classes; I didn’t have a teacher. I had to learn everything on my own and that meant creating my creative process from the foundation up.

It took several years—and many website designs—to feel comfortable with it.

The website that took the brunt of my learning curve was a dedication website to Terry Brooks. At that time my work was not official and Terry had no idea who Shawn Speakman was. Once we began to work professionally, I took it upon myself to keep learning. To me, website design is an art form, the process fun. Every year I redesign the front page of the Terry Brooks site because I love the process as much now as I did then. I also feel as though if he can write a book a year the least I can do is keep the site—and more importantly the fans—updated.

For the last week I have been redesigning Terry’s website. I spent a week before I began, thinking how I wanted this particular front page to look, letting ideas percolate into a solid idea. It came relatively quickly this time. Some do not. Despite keeping a similar style I do alter the look—to become complacent is to be bored. Since A Princess of Landover is the first Landover book in 14 years, I decided to strictly feature that series on the front page, highlighting the new book, the two new omnibus volumes and the August 18th date of release.

Here it is:

I realized upon finishing the initial new site design today that the process mirrors my craft of writing:

This post isn’t solely an excuse to show cute seal pups. But, okay, here’s the goods:

The photo hails from the camera of The Betrayal author Pati Nagle, who recently attended a workshop on the Oregon coast. Observing the seal pup’s beached resignation, she opines:

Sometimes the business of writing makes me feel a lot like that pup. You finish a novel, and you have to try to find a home for it. Suddenly you’re in deep water, flailing around with no idea where to go. You get pushed around by forces beyond your control. Editors and agents are extremely busy people, and you have to try to get their attention for your baby. And the sea is very, very big.

I finished writing my book last night—again.

Yes. Again.

I completed the first draft of The Dark Thorn about a month ago. I was fairly happy with it but knew it was only one step in a series of steps. Months ago when I had submitted its first four chapters, my prospective agent asked for the book when it was done but warned I had a great deal of purple prose that would need editing before he would send it to a publisher. It meant once I finished it I would have to start from the beginning and remove as much of that flowery, ornate language as I could.

After a long month of analyzing every word, sentence, paragraph and bit of dialog, I have a much tighter—and shorter—book.

The first draft of The Dark Thorn was 162,000 words. It is now 149,000 words.

Hence my finishing the book yet again.

It is now time for the next step though. The agent submission.

The first of what I hope will not be many!

Ironically, a few days ago I received an email from a hopeful writer concerning the next step for him to take now that his manuscript and editing are completed:

A whole other article can be written on how to fully submit a book to various agents and editors. There are rules upon rules for doing it correctly and just one error can end an opportunity. More on this soon!

Have a question for me? Other than why do you talk about your unpublished book so much? Send them in to me! I love to talk about the craft of writing.

And the business that comes after!

I’ve professed this before.

Neil Gaiman is a god.

Or maybe he’s just a very talented writer with a fantastic imagination who has the ability to succinctly make a point with a flare!

A few days ago on his Journal, Gaiman decided to answer a question posed him by a fan concerning the perceived lateness of A Dance With Dragons by George. R. R. Martin. My thoughts on this were documented in my article In Defense of George R. R. Martin, so it won’t surprise anyone that I fall on the side of Gaiman and his opinion.

Gaiman sums it up quite nicely with one sentence:

“George R.R. Martin is not your bitch.”

That’s right! He said it! George is not your bitch.

Pause. Soak it in. Become one with the philosophy.

It is important to point out that Gaiman didn’t need to answer that question. He decides which questions to answer and post on his Journal. The spite many send toward Martin is a spite most authors are aware of on some level; I can’t even tell you how many author events I’ve attended where a fan asks the writer what they think of George R. R. Martin. For whatever reason, Gaiman felt it necessary to chime in on the subject.

You can read the entirety of his thoughts on his May 12th Journal!

Gaiman makes some great points. I’ll post two I think are important.

Some of my authors have begun tweeting about their writing progress. Perhaps they are unaware that I can use this new tool to spy on them as their deadlines approach. Those who are going to be on time have nothing to fear. It’s those who are twitching and moaning about being late, o so late, I can’t help it, it’s my neuralgia / unfaithful boyfriend / deadline for another publisher / inability to stop rewriting / addiction to WOW that’s getting in my way of finishing. And wasn’t “Lost” great last night?

To these authors I say: You’ll have something to tweet about if I catch you.

But I got a big laugh out of John Birmingham’s recent messages. Read all together like this, they give the impression he’s been drinking heavily, but the last tweet contradicts that. He’s in the throes of finishing the sequel to Without Warning, the apocalyptic SF thriller that postulates what would happen to the rest of the world if the U.S. were essentially wiped off the map. [Answer: Nothing Good.]

Anyway, here’s how the sequel is coming along:

Writers are only supposed to let readers see the good stuff. You don’t show people the stories you’ve already rejected: the bad zombie tale that never found an ending, or a middle; the moment-of-genius-idea that looked so dreadful in the morning; the unedited, awful prose that makes you squirm; those pieces of work that cause you to sputter and say, “What was I thinking when I wrote that?”

No. That would be a bad idea. I don’t think my publishers would like it. They’d worry that people who saw the worst of my writing would be put off. And that I wouldn’t sell any more books.

Then again, I’d love to look inside the reject folders of other writers. So, in the hope of persuading any of the other writers who blog here to bare all (don’t leave me out on a limb, guys), I’m going to swallow my pride and post my most embarrassing attempts at fiction.

These are all scraps of stories and ideas I junked years ago. I’d forgotten about most of them until I dug them out for this blog. The majority never got beyond the first paragraph. I binned them all because they were missing something (a plot, characters, common sense), because they’re clumsily written, pointless, or because they’re just generally awful. They will not be available in any good bookshop.

1) UNTITLED SHEEP STORY. Ashamed as I am to admit it, I wrote the following two lines with the full intention of turning them into a story. I have absolutely no recollection of what it was going to be about, but it worries me.

Something weird was happening to McTavish’s sheep. Something unnatural.

2) UNTITLED CANNIBALS IN SPACE STORY. Next is an SF tale I started three times, then abandoned. Set on a spaceship, it was going to be about a couple who wake from hibernation early, and must survive the long trip by defrosting the rest of the crew, one by one, and eating them. It never got beyond the second paragraph, because it is silly.

Colony ship Edicol Stephens shot through the freezing dark like something spat from Earth, rolling and shedding pinches of starlight from her hull. Inside, in a cramped dark conduit on deck 64, a torch-beam shone between the close-pressed faces of John and Elizabeth Nightingale. They were looking at a waxy green circuit sheet the way two murderers would look at evidence about to be presented against them.

in⋅spi⋅ra⋅tion
/ˌɪnspəˈreɪʃən/ -noun
an inspiring or animating action or influence

When I write about inspiration, I don’t mean, “Where do you get your ideas?”

I wrote an article about that HERE and it is wholly separate.

I may get great ideas from the newspaper or television or witnessing an exchange between two people on the bus or even from the same secret box Neil Gaiman finds his ideas. You will never know! In the end, though, ideas are powerful but lack longevity; they do not possess the passion to see a book through to the end of its creation. Ideas make up books but books are not produced by ideas alone.

In short, it takes more than an idea to sit at a keyboard every day for a year and produce an entire manuscript.

After all, a great many people have wonderful ideas worthy of being written about, but a great many people also fail to see their ideas through to the end of a project.

Why is that?

I make no secret that I know a few writers. It comes with having worked in a large bookstore, owning a signed book business, attending writing retreats and conferences as well as just being a fan going to local store events. Over the years I have picked up my share of great writing advice, using a great deal of it or rejecting it after discovering it didn’t work for me personally.

Every author I have met says the same thing. Inspiration is one of those things that must be discovered by each individual writer. Some people learn listening to the same music for the duration of writing a book sees the work completed. Some people have actionable routines to drive their creativity—taking a walk or organizing their desk or ensuring every dish in the house is clean. Still others are inspired to write because they have important people in their lives and they simply cannot fail. Everyone is different. Everyone is unique.

I have two different aspects in my home that inspire me. They are very important. Without them I doubt I would have finished Song of the Fell Hammer or The Dark Thorn.