Magical Words

I was going to write on muses today, but I got…um…off track. Stuck on a tangent, which can be a problem, as you’ll see farther on. Muses and writer’s block go hand in hand, and since I don’t believe in muses, I suppose I have to put writer’s block in the same *don’t believe in it* category. And yet, I’ve experienced both. How can I not believe in them and yet have experienced them? Sometimes it ain’t easy! Here’s my take today on Writer’s Block! *cue scary music*

Poets, fiction writers, non-fiction writer, all claim to get writers block. So IMHO – what is it? Several possibilities of why a writer can’t write, other than some amorphous *just can’t do it today* phenom.

It can be a problem with plot, where you have painted yourself into a corner. I usually call a friend when this happens and suggest tea or lunch. I often call Tamar Myers, a mystery writer pal. Together we sit down and I tell her the plot conflict line then a quick plot progression. And as I do, either she makes suggestions which stimulate my thinking, or I figure it out. Presto-chango, I am back writing. I wasn’t blocked, I was confused.

Another thing I do sometimes is read my story with 2 highlighters and mark all the stuff that works in one color and all the stuff that changes the plot line off and away from the central conflict in another color. Because it’s conflict that make a book really good. The more conflict to resolve, the better the book. I usually see what has taken me away from my central conflict, onto some less important track. As I highlight, I can see where I got lost on a tangent that took me away from the original plot line, writer’s block took me away form muses today. Of course, sometimes the writing is sooooo good, that I can’t toss it and go back to the place where I got off track. At such times I have to remember that writing is a commercial product. Unless I do it for myself alone, I need to keep in mind that this is one-size-fits-most product. It ain’t my baby. It will be rewritten a dozen times according to the specification of others. Perhaps two times for me. Two times for my agent. Three or four times for my editor. This isn’t a living being. It is product. In fact — it’s only paper. And I can cut and paste into a *use later* file, the lovely scenes I wrote but that are stopping the conflict line from going forward, and get back on track.

Sometimes the problem is that I didn’t set up the solution to the plot at the beginning of the story. For me, this is just sloppy writing. I don’t care how many famous writers say they just give a character a problem and let him work it out, for me this can make for confusing and poor writing. My best books come from a problem I envision and the solution to that problem. The writing part is the way it happens for me and the reason why I write!

Other times, when I experience Writer’s Block (that thing that I don’t believe in) is that I am afraid. Maybe I’ve tried something new and I fear that someone will laugh at me. Or I’m afraid that I’ll get halfway through and get stumped (get writer’s block, *snicker*). Or worse, that I’ll succeed, and then that my editor or agent (or, God forbid, both) won’t like it! And that I won’t get it published. Or that some critique will say that I can’t write, when all I’ve ever wanted to do is write.

I can’t help you with your fears. They are yours to do with as you please. Yours – to do with as you please. You own them, they do *not* own you, unless you give control over to them. Fight fear, injure it, slay it, treat it with medication. But always remember that it is yours… Not the other way around.

And sometimes – writer’s block come from simple boredom. I have rewritten this book so many times that I hate it. Hate it! I have started it ten times and frankly have lost interest. Then I can do one of four things: start another book, go to the next most interesting thing that will happen and write that, or kill off a major character to shake things up a lot, or go to the end, write that, then tie it all together. Sometimes this is the best thing to do because I’ve reached a place and just can’t get any more down on paper. The ending looks ten miles away. And the ending is what is really pulling at me. I write that, and it energizes me to work through the blasted middle.

So. I don’t believe in Writer’s Block, yet I have specific ways to deal with it when it appears. Am I strange? Yeah. But I’m a writer, and all writers are a bit strange!

Happy writing, ya’ll!

Faith

Tags: Faith Hunter by faithhunter
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Today’s my second book release day of the year.

I have, for the last three years, been publishing contemporary series: two urban fantasy series and one spy novel trilogy. Those series have been first-person (the Walker Papers), tight third-person with two viewpoints (the Negotiator Trilogy), and tight third-person with a single viewpoint (the Strongbox Chronicles). I regard them–particularly the Walker Papers and the Strongbox Chronicles–as being well within my typical writing style, which I consider to be efficient: get in, tell the story, get out. Hopefully leave ‘em wanting more. The Negotiator books linger a little more, with slower builds and more emotional resonance, but I still see them as essentially action-filled novels, no time to rest between one scene and the next.

These books have been doing pretty well; this is a niche I can fit into comfortably, and in which I love to write. There’s … a hell of a lot of conventional wisdom in saying, “Hey, stick with what’s working.”

I think my agent, as well as pretty much anybody else who knows me, would be fairly willing to say that I’m not all that inclined to run with conventional wisdom. In fact, if I was, the Walker Papers would be a book or two longer by now, and the Negotiator Trilogy wouldn’t be out at all, because the Walker Papers were (and are) *working*: people want to know what’s going to happen with Jo. But instead of telling them, I took a chance on the opportunity to tell a different kind of urban fantasy story with a new lead character and a whole different world. I did, though, stay in the UF sub-genre.

THE QUEEN’S BASTARD is my first foray outside the contemporary era, and my first fantasy novel that’s not urban fantasy. And it’s emphatically not: it’s set in an alternate Reformation-era Europe, and though told primarily from Belinda (the titular queen’s bastard)’s point of view, it has … five, I think, other viewpoint characters. At least five. It’s a completely different, lusher writing style for me, and the pacing of the book is unlike anything I’ve ever written. I love it.

And I’m both excited and nervous as hell. I think it’s a good book. I think, in fact, it’s the best thing I’ve had published so far. There are parts of it that make me want to fling my hands up in triumph because I got it right. But my readers are urban fantasy readers, and I’m giving them something *completely* different with this book. I don’t know how they’ll react. I hope they’ll love it too, obviously, though I’m sure some of them won’t. I don’t know if people who aren’t urban fantasy readers will pick this up because it’s visibly different. I hope they will, and I hope they might try some of my urban fantasy after reading it.

This is a balancing act, I think. Treading a line between making yourself happy as a writer (oh, *God* was I glad to write something non-contemporary, something in a different voice, something in a totally new style, and oh man was I nervous, too, because who knew if I could pull it off? Not even me, when I started.) and giving readers what they’re looking for; what they’ll keep coming *back* for.

It’s a lot more comfortable to stick with what’s working. It wouldn’t be personally satisfying for me to do that, and I think for many writers it’s not, which is why people often write more than one series at a time, if they can. I happen to be doing a lot of different things very early in my career (which probably speaks to my sanity, or lack thereof, if nothing else!), so it’s perhaps unusually visible, and I’m perhaps unusually aware of spreading wings that one might more reasonably be doing eight or ten years into a writing career instead of three. For me–because I write fast, because I had novels already finished or well-begun and waiting for possible publication before I got my first book published–I’ve been able to do this, and to my mind it’s at least partly worth the risk in order to be certain of never being pigeon-holed. I’d love my readers to be able to come to expect oh, anything from a C.E. Murphy book: anything, with the confidence that yeah, even if it’s different, it’s going to be a good story.

Arright. This is already a long entry, but I’m going to post an excerpt for THE QUEEN’S BASTARD behind the cut. Let’s astound my editor and send the book back to press before the month of May is out, shall we please?

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Tags: C E Murphy by cemurphy
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I attended RavenCon in Richmond, Virginia this past weekend and had a great time.  Saw some old friends and met several new ones, sat in on some interesting panel discussions, and even managed to sell a few books.

We’ve blogged here before about cons, and about the purposes they serve for us professionally, so I won’t go into that again.  Usually, though, I come home from a con feeling one of two ways.  Either I’ll have spent the weekend talking shop with friends and thinking about work in new ways, in which case I’ll come home completely energized, or I’ll have a disappointing con and arrive home somewhat dispirited.  But this weekend I seem to have discovered what for me is a new post-convention emotional dynamic (oh, joy…).

As I say, I had a good con, so I’m certainly not depressed or sapped of energy.  But I don’t feel particularly energized, either.  Instead, I feel restless.

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Tags: David B. Coe by DavidBCoe
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Poster’s note: I met Alethea a couple of years ago at World Fantasy Con in Austin when we were both on a shuttlebus together, and she and her friends very kindly enveloped me into their group and invited me to lunch. We (all) hit it off splendidly, embarking on a weekend that involved people throwing themselves through hedges to greet one another and other such silliness, and it is my utter delight to have invited her to post about a day in the life of an Ingram Buyer.

Ingram Books, for the uninitiated, is the world’s largest wholesale distributor of books. As such, it is very, very important, and not a little mysterious, to those of us who write, and so we thought a back-door look at what the people who help bring our books from publisher to bookshelf actually do day-in and day-out might be interesting…and it is.

-Catie

–

A day in the life of Alethea Kontis, Incredible Whirlwind of Beauty and Dynamite — Ingram Buyer by day, New York Times best-selling author by night.

April 14, 2008

3-something a.m. — The rumble of thunder wakes me up. I stumble out of the bedroom in the dark, unplug the laptop, shut down the desktop, and stumble back to bed.

6:15 a.m. — Wake up before the alarm goes off. Check my email. Solaris got my copyedits yesterday, but they can’t open the attachments. Can I please resave them as .rtf and send them again? Sure. Walk down to the office to power the desktop back up.

6:22 a.m. — Walk back through the kitchen. Put bread in the toaster. Look out the window. Laugh hysterically. What woke me up at 3 a.m. wasn’t thunder.

6:25 a.m. — Grab my digital camera and walk barefoot through the cold grass (there’s a freeze warning tonight) to take pictures of the dead tree that has fallen from my next-door neighbor’s yard onto my back fence. I know to take pictures of the evidence before anyone has a chance to tamper with it. I watch CSI.

7:23 a.m. — Arrive at work. Turn on computer and multicoloured rope lights. Stop by International Department for chai tea. Stop by fellow buyer’s office and check out the thumb she broke while swordfighting. Assemble audio bestseller report for NY Times. Review orders that have come up for release. Check out what my weekly returns cycle looks like. Not too bad.

7:45 a.m. — Send an email to my supervisor reminding her that I’ll be working lunches and staying late this week, because I’m leaving work early Friday to catch the plane to NY Comic Con. I still have no idea what to pack.

(Poster’s note: All this before 8am. I don’t think I do that much in a *day*. And yet there’s more!)

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Tags: C E Murphy, Special Guest Stars by cemurphy
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SF Signal (a very cool blog for those who want to keep a finger on the SF/F media pulse) posted a list of 10 Obscure But Superb SF Novels. I’ve read Wasp, but none of the others.

So many books fall between the cracks - good books, books that seem like secret treasures to those few who actually find and read them. Sometimes the author only had one good story inside him to tell. Other times the sales just didn’t support offering a second book contract, and the author either changed names or left writing. Death, of course, takes good writers before we’re ready for them to go. We, as writers, never want to think of our work slipping into obscurity that way, but it happens. Lots of reasons for books to fall by the wayside (especially if the changes Faith spoke of yesterday continue.) It’s good for writers to read not only the bestsellers, but the obscure books as well. What did those writers do wrong, or not do at all? What did they do beautifully, and why didn’t it work for the majority of readers?

I scanned my own bookshelf for some of my favorites, and I found:
Frostflower and Thorn by Phyllis Ann Karr
(the first feminist fantasy I ever read, recommended by my first game master)
Harpy’s Flight by Megan Lindholm
(I still miss Ki and Vandien, Robin! Just so you know!)
Phaid the Gambler by Mick Farren
(a rambler and a gambler and a sweet-talkin’ ladies’ man - I love a good rogue!)
Soulsmith by Tom Dietz
(Contemporary fantasy before much of anyone else had even tried writing it - I still love the radio tarot reading)
Jane-Emily by Patricia Clapp
(this short, gothic novel scared the pants off me back in 7th grade, and to this day, I can’t look into a reflecting ball without getting the willies)

I love every single one of those, even though no one I’ve talked to seems to have heard of them. A dreadful shame, that. If you need something good to read, (and you’ve read all of our books already *grin*) try one of the titles above. In the meantime, I’m sure there are a few titles you love that I don’t know about. No longer must they suffer in silence - bring them out into the light! Tell us what books you love that no one around you has heard of or read. Why do you think they’re languishing now?

**Special bulletin!** Stay tuned to this blog for a fabulous guest appearance tomorrow by Alethea Kontis, Ingram Buyer by day, New York Times best-selling author by night!

Tags: Misty Massey by Misty Massey
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I replied yesterday to a post about what was happening in the market. I’ve blogged elsewhere about this, but not in depth here, so I thought I’d do so today.  Bookstores have problems keeping books stocked, buying books that don’t sell in quantity, tieing up their stocker’s hands stripping covers and sending them back, (paperbacks don’t go back to be resold, they are stripped, covers sent back, and contents recycled.) The time the stockers spend costs the story money. So the big chains have all instituted changes that directly affect you, the book reading public, and you the writer.

First, up front, near the registers, they will only stock new books by bestsellers and new books by unknowns.  Your fav author who is not a bestseller? His/her book is back in the stocks. Er…stacks.

Second, they are cutting the numbers of new books they will buy.  Rather than stock, say 100,000 books in the store, they are stocking say 65,000.  Roughly 2/3rds the previous number.  They are making them all face-out, which is nice, but if you want an author’s backlist, (previous books you have not yet read by this wonderful author you just discovered) you have to special order it in the store or from Amazon. Amazon is gonna love this change BTW.

Third, they *may* only keep the new books on the shelves (in any quantity) for one month. So, if you don’t go to the book store every month, you may well miss a release. And a writer has only 4 weeks to make him/herself noticed in the market. Which totally sucks, pardon my English.

Fourth, they are dictating to to publishers the length of the books they will carry. They have discoverd that they make the same profit on a book that is one inch thick as a book that is three inches thick. One book takes up very little shelf space. The other…well, it takes up more. Duh. Plus the price of paper is going up fast. So publishers are now specifying the length of a book to writers.  And they mean business. I had to cut BloodRing by 24,000 words. Of course, that meant that I was a fourth of the way through Seraphs, but still, it was tough to do.

Can I understand why chains are doing this?  Yes. Do I like it?  Not really.  I want to write what I want to write. But I still want to have it read by the buying public. And if I fight, that ain’t gonna happen.

Faith — who has about 50 more pages to write in the WIP, Skinwalker.

Tags: Faith Hunter by faithhunter
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I was, hrm, what was I doing. Participating, I think, in the “books I’ve written” meme (available here, if you want to read it) and someone asked me how I knew how long a book was going to be. (This question could’ve been put to me/us here, too, and I just can’t remember. But I thought it was a good one, so I’m addressing it!)

Your average SF/F novel that you pick up, not the ones that make you go “Damn! That’s a big book!”, but the average ones that are an inch or so thick, run anywhere from, say, 90,000 words up to around 135-150K. That’s (using Courier New 12pt font with 1″ margins, .3″ tabs, and 25pt exact spacing) 380-600 manuscript pages, which is quite a spread. How, indeed, do you know how long your book’s going to be?

Well, if you’re not under contract, you generally want to be aiming for about 100K, not 150K. (There are exceptions. There are *lots* of exceptions. But *generally*, publishers like 100K books better than 150K books, because you can put 4 100K books into a supermarket wire rack and only 3 150K books. And I’m talking about SF/F here, not mystery or romance or YA or thrillers or anything else.) So if it’s your first book, you’re *probably* better off aiming for 100K than 150K. This is a pretty decent rule of thumb, I think.

Me personally, my writing approach is by thirds: the first third of the book is setup, the second third (which often pushes through to the 3/4ths mark) is plot & character development, and then the final third is all hell breaking loose on our way to the climax. So for, say,the Walker Papers, which are 110K books, that means I’ve got about 36K per third. It does not work out that tidily. Ever. But it’s not a bad mental structure to approach it with.

There is almost always a point in any book where I have two *extremely* different panic attacks at the same time. One is: “Oh my GOD how am I ever going to get all this story into the wordcount space I have left?!” and the other is, “Oh my god there is no way I have enough story to reach the wordcount I’m supposed to deliver.”

This (for me) means everything is going according to plan, and the book will come out at the right length.

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Tags: C E Murphy by cemurphy
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Hi, all.  David here.  Faith and I have switched days for a while.  She’ll be posting on Wednesdays for the foreseeable future.

This past weekend marked the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Passover (also known as Pesach).  I’m Jewish, but I wasn’t raised in a religious household.  My parents, siblings, and I didn’t go to temple, we didn’t observe Yom Kippur, which is the holiest of Jewish holidays, we actually celebrated Christmas rather than Hanukkah, because it was more convenient.  But every year we went to a Passover Seder at my aunt’s house, and even when I was young, I looked forward to Passover.  As I’ve grown older it has surpassed all other holidays to become my favorite.

Why?  Because, like Thanksgiving, it’s a holiday that revolves around family and food, two of my favorite things.  And because it is entirely about shared history, about storytelling as a way of reinforcing heritage and tradition, and about using symbols and metaphor to reinforce that storytelling.  Passover is, in short, a holiday that is made for writers.

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Tags: David B. Coe by DavidBCoe
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“Where DO you wacky writers get those crazy ideas?”

I don’t know if fantasy writers get this question more often than mystery or romance authors, but we get it quite a bit. And I have decided, in the interest of fair play and brotherhood, to share the Secret. Yes, you guessed it - there IS a place we all go to get these nutty ideas: the Gregorovich-Feister Idea Farm and Fresh Market. It’s a coop tucked into the high grass along Interstate 26 between Columbia and Charleston. Take exit 132 and 2/3 (it’s a dirt road, so be sure and slow down on the curve, else you’re liable to go flying!) and drive at exactly 42 miles per hour for exactly 17 minutes. Stop at the 17 minute mark, close your eyes, and whisper, “I just can’t think of what to write,”, and the gate will appear on the left. Drive in quick, since it only stays open about 30 seconds.

Once you’re inside, you can pick up a bushel basket and hit the fields yourself. The urban fantasy trees are over on the west side of the farm, under those dark clouds.  Keep one eye open for the random questing parties in the epic fantasy orchard, and whatever you do, don’t pluck the golden rutabagas in the mythic fields - the demi-gods are terribly sensitive about that.

If you don’t feel like doing your own work, you can go straight to the fresh market and buy the ideas Viktor Gregorovich picked first thing that morning. Viktor’s a darling, and if you can’t find what you want, he’ll waddle out to the fields to find it for you.  (Don’t ask him where Feister is, though - it’s still a sore subject, ever since Hurricane Hugo came through.) They only take golden dollars and dull pennies in payment, so stock up before you get there.

Okay, you’re not buying the story. The truth is that when I answer that question honestly, people never seem quite satisfied with the truth.  The wacky ideas are all in my head, just as they are in yours.  My first novel was born on a trip to the Olympic Rain Forest in Washington State, when my husband started telling me about a news story he’d read about lost trees at the bottom of Lake Superior.  The second novel I began came from my love of Renaissance faires, and the third, Mad Kestrel… well, heck, I was missing the beach and the ocean, and pirates could take me there fastest. I get ideas from flipping through the latest issues of Newsweek, Scientific American and Skeptic. I half-listen to news stories on the radio, and let my mind run wildly with the portion I did catch. I hear songs that send my mind fluttering in another direction than the poor songwriter meant for me.  I read histories and wonder what secret ambitions drove this general or that dictator to do the things he did.  The trick is to think “What if?” instead of assuming what you heard or read is all there is to the story.

Still with me?  Cool.  I’d love to hear some of the interesting or unusual or bizarre places that you’ve found ideas for your own stories.   If you haven’t gone so far as to write your own stories yet, tell me where you found an idea that made you want to write.

Tags: Misty Massey by Misty Massey
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In yesterday’s post, Catie made reference to “new shiny ideas.”  Great phrase that, because it is SO true.

People often ask me what I’m working on, usually in the context of trying to figure out if the sequel to that book they’ve just bought, or are in the middle of reading, is going to be available any time soon.  More often than not, they’re surprised to learn that I’m a book ahead of them, that in fact I’m already writing the third book in the sequence or the first book of a new project.

It is a fact of the publishing world that for most of us, particularly those of us who are midlist authors, our books appear in print a good year or so after we’ve finished writing them.  There are many steps in the publishing process.  Writing the book, of course.  But then there’s the edit/revision process I go through with my editor; the copyediting, which I need to go over before the book goes to press; the checking of page-proofs for typos; not to mention the other things going on simultaneously:  jacket art, maps, pre-production publicity, etc.  It’s a complicated process and it takes time.  So by the time my book comes out, I’ve pretty much written the next one and have moved on to the one after that.

What’s my point?  Ha ha!  You assume I have one!  Well, yeah, okay.  I have a point.

I’m currently writing the third book of my Blood of the Southlands trilogy.  I’ve only just started it, but I expect to have it done in another five or six months.  It being the third book of my trilogy (and me being a writer who actually writes trilogies that are only three books long), I need to have something in mind to write next.  The book might be in production for a year, but as I’ve said, that doesn’t mean that I won’t spend that year writing something else.  And that something else is going to be brand-spanking-new.

That’s where the shiny comes in.  I already know what I’m going to be writing.  I’ve done most of the worldbuilding.  I’ve started to map out the first book.  I’ve developed characters.  I’ve even written a short story set in this new world that I recently sold to Black Gate Magazine.  It should be out later this year.  (Yay!)  I love this new world.  I want to play with it.  I want to immerse myself in it and meet the other characters waiting for me there.  I want to see where this first plot line takes me and discover other places in the world that I haven’t yet explored .

But I have this other book to write.

You ever buy yourself a new toy — a new camera, for instance, or a new stereo component, or a new computer?  And you bought it not because the other, older one had died, but because it was getting rickety and wasn’t doing for you all the things you wanted it to, all the things you knew this new one could do.  The last thing you want to do is go home, put the new toy aside, and go back to playing with the old one, right?  You want to play with your new toy, damnit!

That’s how I felt when I was writing book three of my LonTobyn Chronicle.  I already had an idea of what I wanted to do with Winds of the Forelands and I couldn’t wait to get to it.  But I had to.  It’s how I felt when I was finishing Winds of the Forelands and was starting to map out the contemporary fantasy that I’ve started and am still trying to sell.  And it’s how I feel now.  I know that I have to finish Blood of the Southlands.  I actually feel good about the way the third book has started; I think it will be a fun and satisfying conclusion to the series.  Really.  I do.  So . . . uh . . . you want to write it for me?

Because I want to play with my new toy!!  It’s not that I don’t like Blood of the Southlands.  I do.  I love it.  THE SORCERERS’ PLAGUE was great fun to write and THE HORSEMEN’S GAMBIT, which has recently gone into production, might well be the best thing I’ve ever written.  I love these books, including this new one, just like I love all the books I write.  But the world isn’t as fresh for me as it was, the plot line doesn’t hold as many surprises.  The characters are old friends and I still care for them, but I want to meet someone new, someone exciting, someone who will fill me with passion.  Again.  (I don’t have mid-life crises, I have mid-series crises….) 

I have a great new shiny idea.  But I can’t play with it until I finish my last great new shiny idea.  Yeah, there are worse things.  But right now it’s buggin’ me a little.  Or had you noticed?

Tags: David B. Coe by DavidBCoe
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