Talking to an Empty Room

Earlier I wrote about how obscurity and indifference are the writer's greatest enemies, especially at the beginning of one's career. Obviously, if people can't find you, you're going to have a hard time growing your audience -- and there's only so much self-promotion can do before it becomes off-putting and counter-productive. But obscurity and indifference can also be detrimental to a writer's career in a more subtle way.

Imagine that you've been asked to give a speech. When you arrive, you discover a rather unusual arrangement: the podium is brightly lit, but the rest of the room is in darkness. You're having to speak to an audience you cannot see.

Or at least you assume you have an audience you cannot see. As you proceed with your speech, you become uncomfortably aware of how quiet everyone is. No whispered comments, no little rustlings of papers as someone fidgets with their program, just silence. Maybe the rumble of the building's HVAC or other mechanical sounds, but nothing human.

And then you finish and the lights come on to reveal row after row of empty seats. And you wonder: did the announcement not go out that I was giving a speech? Did nobody consider it interesting enough to be worth their time? Or worse, were some people out there in the beginning, but found it so terrible that they tiptoed out without a sound and left me standing there talking to an empty room?

Most of us who've tried the traditional publishing route know how disheartening it is to get one after another say-nothing form rejection. But we could always comfort ourselves by noting how many stories that did get published were nothing we wanted to read. Maybe they just weren't to our tastes, or maybe they struck us as overly lit'ry or just plain badly written. But their presence in the markets we were trying to crack let us comfort ourselves with the idea that the gatekeepers really didn't have a clue about what they were doing and were picking stories by guess and by golly, and if we could just get our writing on the right editor's desk, things would start happening. And that thought enabled us to keep pushing on past rejection after rejection.

But for those of us who've decided to go indie, putting something up and seeing no evidence anybody is even interested can be particularly disheartening. We're not dealing with gatekeepers who may be flaky or beholden to clueless suits in the corner office. We're dealing directly with the reading public, and none of them are coming. It gets to the point we'd almost welcome a harsh critique for the simple reason that it means that someone actually cares. And so it becomes harder and harder to scrape together the enthusiasm to write the next story, the next chapter, the next novel. That little voice in the back of your mind starts asking whether it's time to give it up, if nobody wants to read what you're writing.

Which means that it may not take that much to rekindle one's enthusiasm -- just evidence that someone out there is reading and likes it can be enough to get the words flowing again. On JukePop Serials,  just getting a few +votes here and there have been enough for me to be able to get the words flowing on that next chapter and have something new to put up again.

Shadows of the Past

When I first got the idea of pulling out The Steel Breeds True and getting it ready for publication on KDP and other online e-book platforms, I thought it would need little more than a quick polish to get it into shape. Maybe a few changes here and there to bring it in line with some developments in some other novels, particularly in the relationships between some of the people in Tsar Joseph's court. And I figured it'd be good to break up some of the really long chapters for online reading. But I was pretty sure that I'd left it in decent shape when I last sent it out to a novel market in 2003.

But when I got it out and started working with it, I was astonished to find that it wasn't in nearly as good of shape as I'd remembered. The first couple of scenes in Chapter 1 weren't bad, needing only a couple of names changed. By the time I came to the third scene, I knew I was going to need to do some substantial work, and in later chapters I found whole scenes that needed to be restructured or cut altogether and summarized in some other scene.

By the time I got to the seventh chapter, I decided not to even try to plan in detail. There was a very real possibility that major changes in an earlier chapter would invalidate everything I was planning for later ones. So I decided to focus on doing the detail rewriting.

And in doing so, I realized that I was going to need to do some thinking about the deep-level concepts. The Steel Breeds True is one of my oldest novels. Although the current text dates back to the early 2000's, having been begun shortly after the September 11 attacks, I originally started writing it way back in 1995, when I was a freshman at the University of Illinois (where it's set). When I first wrote it, I thought it was going to be a short story, but it soon grew, drawing in more and more characters and goings-on around it, at least partly in response to various issues in my own life at the time.

In 1990 I finally ended up setting it aside, thinking it unsalvageable. It was partly the result of a particularly blistering critique, complete with snarky and condescending comments that seemed deliberately intended to wound rather than just to point out problems. But a big part of it was the changing world, which I thought had left it behind so thoroughly that it simply no longer had a market, and thus there was no reason to even try to do another rewrite. Better to just put it away and move on to other projects, of which I had plenty.

When the crumbling of the Soviet Union turned into full-out dissolution and the various union republics became fully sovereign states, I was certain of that judgment. Not just about the novel, but about the entire world in which it was set. Even when I wrote stories that were supposed to be part of the same continuity, I tried to minimize or conceal the connections. In the early 1990's, when I wrote Shapeshifter!, set in the middle of the Sharp Wars era, I avoided any mention of the Russian political landscape. Instead, Japan became the principal external enemy of the dictatorship that had taken over the US, a state of affairs that perfectly suited a story in which the protagonist takes the form of a World War II admiral and the antagonists are constantly making references to events he was involved in. Of course it helped that the first-person protagonist was a teen and thus not particularly aware of the world scene.

Yet it was still there at the back of my mind, even when I carefully avoided mentioning the Russian monarchy or anything that might draw awkward attention to what had become Yesterday's Future. Hardly surprising, considering that the world in which The Steel Breeds True is set was already several years old when I started writing that novel.

The Lanakhidzist Revolution timeline had its beginning when I was in junior high, when it still seemed unimaginable that the Soviet Union could fall from within. It was too strong, too well controlled by the iron fist of the Communist Party. If it were to be brought down, it would have to be by military force, which might well mean nuclear war and the post-apocalyptic future that was featured in so many books ranging from the hopeful Alas, Babylon through the grim Canticle for Liebowitz to the downright hopeless On the Beach. And through the 1980's, it was still possible for me to write it as a future history, although as Gorbachev's Perestroika progressed, it became increasingly Zeerusty. But when the Wall fell and when the Soviet Union dissolved, I could no longer imagine anybody buying it as science fiction.

When I did finally decide to pull it out and tackle it afresh as alternate history in response to an online discussion in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks (basically, the thesis that old-style Cold War novels might well have a sudden resurgence in the market, either as straight-up historical fiction or as alternate history, as comfort reading for people longing for the certainties of a faceoff between two nation-states in this uncertain new world of non-state actors carrying out attacks in secret, without allegiance or accountability), all that internal history was still bubbling under the surface. All that unconsidered stuff left over from my high-school exuberance, which was then overlaid with an only slightly more mature exuberance of my college years, particularly when I was studying Russian.

And now, as I'm pulling The Steel Breeds True out yet again, I'm seeing places where stuff established way back in high school was simply assumed as background. Now, looking back with the eyes of a middle-aged married woman, I find that a lot of it just doesn't hold together under closer examination -- yet I have no idea what should be put there in its place.

I'm finding that I have a great deal of sympathy for JRR Tolkien's struggles to put The Silmarillion into publishable form after the success of The Lord of the Rings. How could he reconcile the sometimes whimsical elements of his youthful exuberance with his new stature as the author? In his case, death cut short his dithering and the process of putting his papers into order was left to other hands, not always in a completely satisfactory fashion. Which on reflection could serve as a warning against letting the best become the enemy of the good.

Considering Strategies to Proceed

Right now I'm at a point where I need to decide how best to allocate my writing time, especially now that I'm trying to maintain some level of forward motion on my book reviewing site, my jobhunting site
and my economic awareness site. I have a number of writing projects in various states of completion, and I need to decide how to prioritize them.

I have multiple novels jockeying for my attention. I've been serializing Holovideo at JukePop Serials, and I'm rapidly closing in on the ending. My original outline from the early 1990's called for 28 chapters, but I've just combined chapters 19 and 20, and I'm looking at the possibility that several other planned chapters should be combined because there just isn't enough material in them individually to make a solid chapter. That means I may well have no more than 25 chapters, and if I do the remaining ones on a weekly basis, I'll be done with the novel by the end of the year, leaving me with the question of what (if anything) I want to serialize next.

However, interest in Holovideo has really fallen off. I'd had some good interest in September, but since the beginning of October I've posted three chapters and haven't received a single +vote on any of them. This lack of interest may be partly the result of new-chapter notifications not getting to the people who've put it on their bookshelf (I have not received a single notification for it, and neither has a friend who has it bookmarked), but it's not exactly conducive to enthusiasm about getting Chapter 20 written.

Meanwhile, I've been wanting to try out KDP and some other e-book programs that some friends have been having good success with. Rather than try to write a complete new novel from scratch, I had decided to rewrite an old novel, The Steel Breeds True, on the theory that it would be easier to spiff up something that already had a complete text.

However, I've been rather surprised to find out just how bad the existing text looks after ten years. It's going to take more than just a little surface spiffing of the text to get it into shape. A lot of the chapters need to be broken up into shorter chapters for electronic reading, and there are places where scenes need to be presented in a different order, and a few scenes may well be eliminated altogether or reduced to a quick summary at the beginning or end of another chapter.

So it's going to take a lot more time than I'd anticipated to get it done, and with all the trouble I'm having with Holovideo, I'm not able to give The Steel Breeds True nearly as much time as I'd like. So what I thought would be a quick and easy polish has turned into a stalled major reconstruction job.

Not to mention Last Moondance on Farside, which I was making such good progress on back in 2013, but then stalled on me when I needed to take care of other projects, particularly a couple of short stories for invitation-only anthologies (both of which were subsequently rejected, and I've been shopping around in hopes of finding some home for them). Chelsea Ayles and her adventures among the community at Shepardsport keep tugging at the back of my mind, wanting to be finished, but I keep feeling that my first obligation needs to be to finishing Holovideo.

And speaking of short stories interrupting novel progress, I'm working on a short story for an anthology with a deadline at the end of this month. I've got a full outline for it, and I've got it moving, but it's still time I don't have for any of the novels. And there's another, related story I want to write for the Jim Baen Memorial Science Fiction Contest. That's not due until the beginning of February next year, but it just keeps tugging at the back of my mind, wanting to be told, to the point it's a distraction. So I'm wondering whether it'd be better to just give in and get it written, then hang onto it until closer to the actual deadline so I could look at it with fresh eyes and give it a really good polish.

So that's where I stand right now on my writing projects.

Bad Words

It's been said that learning to write publishable fiction is a matter of getting all the bad words out of you so the good words can take their place. But what did they mean by "bad words?"

I think most of us know what comes to mind when we think of "bad words." Swear words. Cusswords. The seven words you can't say on television, and all their variations. Words dealing with the deity, with supernatural punishment, and with those messy pelvic issues of elimination and reproduction.

And yes, there are good reasons to want to keep those kinds of bad words out of our fiction, for they tend to be empty venting of anger, no more meaningful than the barking of a dog or the quacking of a duck. JRR Tolkien suggested that his orcs were far more foul-mouthed than he ever portrayed, but that such detail would appeal only to "those to whom the sordid seems strong." Herman Wouk artfully suggested the crudity of sailors' speech in the first shipboard scene in The Caine Mutiny without dropping a single f-bomb (or even specified it as the word that became like a haze in the air, although one familiar with servicemen's slang would be confident in identifying it as such). But there can be places in which one cannot elide over one or another forbidden word without weakening the scene, especially if it somehow reflects the shock or horror of a situation in a way that nothing else will do.

Another type of bad words are the ones that have fallen out of fashion, especially those that have done so as a result of overuse and abuse. The most obvious of these are the -ly adverbs, which are often treated by critiquers, especially the amateur variety, as being The Work of the Devil. And to be honest, it is true that overused words have often had their power sapped by that overuse, such that they no longer have the power to conjure up imagery in the reader's mind. Yet they too have their place, especially to capture the flavor of a particular character's speech, but now and then because there simply is no single verb that can do the job without the qualification of an adverb.

Yet another possible candidate would be those words that have become more heat than light. You know what I mean -- the ones that have been co-opted for political purposes, to the point that daring to use them in any but the Approved Sense, with the Approved Attitudes, will bring down the shrieking hordes to tell you in great detail how Eeeeevil you are. Race. Culture. Prejudice. Even seemingly innocent words like "cure" have taken on a taint of Bad Words among certain disability activists (who seem to be advocating more for the disability than the people dealing with it). Just avoiding them altogether often seems to be the best way to avoid having your time and energy sapped by the sound and fury signifying nothing crew.

Yet it might be possible that we need to drill even deeper, especially in relation to the saying about the "million bad words" we need to get out of us before we can start writing really good stories, publishable stories that people actually want to read, and most importantly, to pay money to read. It can't be just the dirty words, the disfavored words, or the politically charged words we need to get out of us. Maybe it's not even specific words at all, and it's not a matter of purging them from our vocabularies.

Instead might it be ways of using words -- the sloppy, unthinking words that don't do anything. The colorless words that sap the life from a story. The bland words that, like small plans, lack the power to stir the soul. And getting rid of those is a lot harder, because there's no simple, easy way to identify them, or even to know how to replace them with good words. It's something that comes only from lots and lots of writing, and even then it's not guaranteed. Many would-be writers have simply kept churning out more and more bad words, thinking that they were making headway.

But there's one sure way to see if you have been making progress. Take out an old story, one you stopped working on a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago, and haven't touched since. Re-read it. Does it  make you wince? Do you want to grab a red pen and rewrite sentences and paragraphs, even cut whole scenes? Then you've been busily pushing out the bad words and replacing them with good ones.

Research

Writers are told again and again to write what you know, but taken too literally, that advice can be excessively constraining. Limited to our own personal experience, we'll soon run out of things to write about -- not to mention that it pretty well shuts out the possibilities of speculative fiction. Who among us has commanded a space fleet or led a conference of magic-users?

Obviously we can draw upon our knowledge of familiar things to understand by analogy. But there always will come a time when we need to extend our knowledge beyond personal experience.

That means doing research. Google, Wikipedia and other online sources can be excellent starting points, but often you need to go beyond them. There are numerous guides to doing library research, but depending on what libraries are available to you, they may not be adequate to provide the information you need. It may be necessary to contact and expert and request the information you need.

Cold-calling a stranger for help is a scary process. Might they consider your approach an affront? Might they brush you off or shut you down? The fear of being rejected in a humiliating manner can be paralyzing.

In fact, there's no reason to fear the process. If approached properly, most experts are happy to talk about their subject of expertise. After all, they often become experts because it's a subject they're genuinely interested in.

The key is, approached properly, which means presenting yourself professionally. And it's not just the old "a writer is an artist, and therefore suspect" canard. Since the rise of the Internet, there has been a growing problem of students at all levels in the education system writing to experts in various fields effectively trying to get their homework done for them.

As a result, you need to be careful not just to introduce yourself in a professional way, but also to make it clear that you've pulled your weight and have reached the end of the resources available to you. You probably don't want to disgorge a huge laundry list of books and websites you've used without success, but you probably want to mention the most critical sources.

There is some debate as to whether you should name the specific institutions where you've done your research, especially if they would indicate your location. Some people have a vastly different idea of what constitutes a reasonable travel distance, especially if your circumstances are constrained by responsibilities or finances. I still remember writing to a departmental library at a major university and getting a snippy answer that I could "just hop onto (road) and drive over to visit in person" because I'd mentioned our local public library by name. At the time I did not have a vehicle of sufficient reliability that I'd want to make a three-hour drive (each way, not round trip) alone, and my husband was working full time and not available to travel with me unless he used up a vacation day.

While it may be acceptable to shade the truth a little, soft-pedaling some facts and emphasizing others to enhance your appearance of a professional researcher who has exhausted local resources and is not able to travel, don't outright lie about your credentials or your situation. Don't claim degrees or institutional affiliations that you don't have. Don't give a big sob story about nonexistent misfortunes that  make it impossible to travel even a short distance. People in a field generally know enough other people in it that lies will catch up to you, and while you may get results once or twice, eventually you'll get a bad reputation that will make it impossible to get anybody to help you.

Presenting yourself as a professional is only the first part of the proper approach. The second is presenting your question in the proper way so that the recipient will welcome it, rather than feel it is an imposition and become annoyed. Typically the student trying to get out of doing homework will present an overly broad "tell me everything you know about X" type of question. As a result, you want to be as specific as possible in formulating your question. Again, show you've done your homework by using the correct terminology -- but avoid name-dropping or using big words just to impress.

The best questions are the ones that are closed-ended, requesting a very specific but obscure piece of information. For instance, recently I was writing a story with a scene in a building at a university I once attended. However, I couldn't remember where the department's main office had been located, and when I went to the university's website, I discovered that the department had moved to a building that had been built since my last visit. Unable to locate any historical information on something so specific, I wrote to the university library and asked for the room number -- a very specific bit of information that could be easily researched in older directories and catalogs that they would have on hand but were not available to me.

Finally, be sure to communicate your gratitude for the expert's assistance. Close your initial contact letter or e-mail with a thank-you, and when they answer, make sure to thank them again. There's some question about whether that final thank-you note needs to be handwritten and posted, even in the case of a contact that was initially made by e-mail. I'd say it's a generational thing. If your informant is older, you may well want to post a longhand thank-you note, especially if this person has given you extensive help. Younger people who've spent their entire lives communicating electronically will probably consider an e-mail thank-you note more than adequate, and might even find a snail-mailed note vaguely stalkerish, since it means you found out their physical location to send the note.

The Gnawing Porcupine of Self-Doubt

In the beginning of The Steel Breeds True, Amanda Lordsley-Starcastle is struggling with her internal editor, who has taken to carping criticism and faultfinding instead of anything useful. He alternates between two forms, sometimes appearing as a tiny Nikolai Yezhov and at other times as a literal hedgehog.

Since there are no native hedgehogs in North America, mine takes the form of a porcupine. And unlike the insectivorous hedgehog with its generalist teeth, the porcupine is a rodent, with specialized gnawing teeth. And oh gods, but does mine ever gnaw at everything. Sometimes just getting words on paper is an uphill struggle as he gnaws away at every word, every phrase, every image.

And now that I'm beginning to prepare The Steel Breeds True for indie publication, it's getting even worse. Not just is my writing good at the word and sentence level, but is the story any good? What if the whole thing is so stupid that people will laugh and point?

It's the problem of finding the balance between being relentlessly self-critical in order to attain our best and being able to believe in ourselves when nobody else does. I wish I could offer a nice pat answer for everybody out there who's struggling with the same problem, whether in the form of an unending stream of say-nothing form rejections or a serialized novel posted to a reception of such utter indifference that one is left almost wishing for a blistering review because it would mean that someone actually cared. But all I can offer right now is fellow-feel, the knowledge that you are not alone in your uphill struggles, and at least now you do have options beside struggling to fit through the narrow door that is so carefully guarded by the gatekeepers of traditional publishing.

Putting the Pieces Back Together

The last several months have been difficult for me. At the beginning of June, I was trying to get serious about my writing and promoting it. I'd had some moderate success with my serialization of A Separate War, and I wanted to make my new serialized novel, Holovideo an even bigger success. In addition to keeping up with a regular posting schedule, I wanted to get to blogging regularly on the several blogs I maintain.

Then we got an unexpected call that upended everything -- a medical emergency that turned into a death in the family, and all the emotional fallout that flows from that. On the top of that, our book and t-shirt business had several major events which took an enormous amount of my time.

Now that things are calming down again, I'm wanting to get back on track again. I have gotten some fresh chapters written and posted on Holovideo, and I'm getting some more +votes, but I want to reach more readers. So I'm wanting to get back to blogging, both here and on some other blogs I run.

Which means that I need to figure out how to keep everything moving forward and not have forward motion on one thing come at the expense of everything else grinding to a halt. So that's my new challenge.

Pushing Through

Anyone who's been writing for any length of time knows the ups and downs. Sometimes the words just seem to flow from your fingers to the page, every one glistening with perfection. Sometimes each word has to be pried loose and dragged kicking and screaming onto the page.

And then there are the times when Life gets in the way. It's one thing to force yourself through a daily set time period or word count when the words all seem dull and lifeless, when you've become convinced that your story is the most boring thing ever written and everyone who reads it will yawn their way through a page or two before wandering off, that your alpha reader is just being polite to drag through it. It's quite another when it feels like the world is crashing down around your ears.

Recently I had to deal with a death in the family, and another family member who needed a listening ear for their grief and uncertainty about the future. I'd gotten a good momentum together with Holovideo, and it was more than a little frustrating to barely have a chance to write a sentence or two now and then. But at the same time, I just couldn't shut this person down and sit there writing while they needed someone to listen to the anguish that they were feeling.

And looking back, I don't regret the two-week hiatus. Sometimes we do have to put the writing on pause for a while when genuine emergencies intrude. So don't beat yourself up when something major like sickness or injury, of yourself or a family member you're responsible for, puts the writing on the back burner. Think about your stories when you can, and when the situation passes and you can write again, re-read your existing text and you'll be surprised at how quickly and easily you'll be able to pick things back up.

In fact, your biggest problem may actually be having too many projects all demanding to be written Right Now. With so many worlds, so many characters tugging at your sleeve, how can you get any of them done?

In that case, the best thing is often to choose one project and concentrate on it until you've re-established your rhythm. Perhaps something relatively short and closed-ended, so that you can feel a sense of accomplishment when you finish it, and move on to the next project or projects with renewed energy.

Say What?

Every now and then somebody says something outrageous that you just blink in astonishment. Did they really say what you just heard coming out of their mouth?

Just recently The Guardian, which used to be one of the respectable British newspapers, published Self-publishing is not revolutionary -- it's reactionary , which tries to claim that the rising trend of independent publishing is in fact a step backward which helps neither writers nor readers.

When I first started getting serious about writing, you had basically two choices -- traditional publishing, or vanity publishing. And the latter term pretty much speaks for itself -- if you were to turn to one of these presses, paying them for the privilege of seeing your book in print, you were obviously doing it solely to tickle your vanity. You thought so highly of yourself that either you couldn't bear to lower yourself to submitting it to a publisher and accepting their judgment of your work, or that you couldn't accept their determination that you weren't as good as you thought you were. In either case, your book and you as author would bear the ugly stigma of Loser, and quite possibly of Poseur.

Truth be told, by the latter decades of the twentieth century, there was a very good reason to place a heavy stigma on subsidy publishing, and not just on the grounds that it represented a failure of proper humility on the part of the author. Although there had been a time when it was perfectly respectable for an author to pay to have a book published, and many gentleman hobbyist writers of the Victorian Era and Gilded Age got their works in print in this way, during the twentieth century a large number of unscrupulous actors entered the industry, preying on the hopes and dreams of unsuspecting writers. These predators would acquire large numbers of books with little or no editorial oversight and do the minimum legally required to be able to fulfill their contracts. Often the quality of the books were grossly inferior to industry standard. Sometimes the wouldn't even bind all the books the author paid for unless additional fees were paid. There was no effort on the part of the publisher to actually market the book, and the author generally ended up with a basement full of books and had to hand-sell them -- which generally meant bugging friends and families or haunting flea markets with a pile of unwanted books.

There was a sort of third path of genuine self-publishing, in which the author did all the layout and design and contracted the production of the actual books with a print shop. However, that required skills that most authors didn't possess, and it still required the author to do all his or her own marketing. So it was really only a viable option for a book that had a clear niche market, such as how-to books or histories of very small organizations (frex, veterans writing up the history of their unit). For fiction your only real choice was still to struggle through the endless rounds of rejections and probably end up with a huge pile of trunk stories that had worn out their welcome everywhere. After a few rounds of that it becomes harder and harder to convince your family that your writing is anything but a hobby for your spare time, as opposed to something that should be taken seriously and given time. Lots of promising writers became discouraged and wrote only for their own amusement or gave up on writing altogether.

By the turn of the millennium, the growth of the World Wide Web made it possible for ordinary people to create webpages that could be accessed by anyone, anywhere that had Internet connectivity. The old barriers that made it almost impossible to market your work without a publisher's access to distribution channels began to crumble. But the old stigma remained -- if you were sticking your writing up on a website, you were obviously doing it because it wasn't good enough to make the big time, and therefore you were a loser. Aspiring writers were warned not to kill their careers before they began by marking themselves out in this way.

And then something happened. A lot of the midlist writers who'd once been publishing houses' small-but-solid sellers but were squeezed out as the industry moved to a "bestsellers only" model discovered that used copies of their books were selling quite briskly on Amazon and ABEbooks. Obviously there was still a market for their writing, if they could just re-tap it, but the big publishers didn't want to reprint anything that wouldn't sell millions. So these authors began bringing their books out on their own, either through various small presses and co-operatives or entirely independently.  Some made electronic editions, and others used xerographic-based print-on-demand systems such as LightningSource to create hardcopy editions. And since these were books that had already gone through the editorial vetting process but had just fallen out of print, a crack appeared in the wall of stigma against self-publishing.

That crack widened when established authors began releasing new books through these channels. Some of these authors had been squeezed out altogether by the publishers because their sales numbers, while decent, just weren't growing fast enough to keep the bean-counters happy. However, some were authors that were still enjoying success in traditional publishing, but couldn't get this particular book to sell. Editors would tell them that the book was wonderful, but nobody in marketing knew how to sell it, because it didn't fit neatly in any of the established genre slots.

And guess what -- the books didn't sink like a stone on the marketplace. In fact, some of them quickly rose on Amazon's best-seller lists and became rousing successes. It became obvious that no, self-publishing a work of fiction was no longer the kiss of death, the admission that you were a Loser who simply couldn't hack it in the real world of publishing and had to pay someone to publish your lousy, boring tripe.

At the same time, I can sort of understand the sour-grapes sentiments that underlie these attacks on the new dawning of independent publishing. I've spent the last several decades struggling and straining to get my novels and stories accepted through the traditional publishing system, and now, just as I'm beginning to see a glimmering of success, the brass ring for which I've spent so much time and energy striving seems to have been rendered worthless.

And then I remind myself of the days when I wished there were some way to use the Internet to reach readers directly instead of having to jump through the gatekeeper hoops of getting published, and being told that it might be possible Someday, but that would be a long time down the road and right now I needed to buckle down and focus on doing the things that were necessary to make my works acceptable to the gatekeepers, even when it hurt.

And now Someday is here, and quite honestly, the crumbling of the stigma and the growing success of self-published writers took me by surprise because I was still operating in circles that assumed you had to have that imprimatur of a publisher's acceptance to be any good. So it's frustrating to have so much catching up to do, to shift gears from shopping stuff around in hopes of finding someone, somewhere who'd like it to getting stuff out there in front of readers in this brand new marketplace and trying to get it on their radar so they'll Find It, Like It and Buy It.

It's a whole different ballgame, and I've just barely begun to get into it with A Separate War and Holovideo. There's a whole lot more I still need to do -- and I'm feeling like I'm torn a dozen ways with all the projects that I've had lying around in various states of completion while chasing the ever-shifting editorial whims of publishers.

Obscurity and Indifference

Writers worry about a lot of things, but oftentimes we end up worrying about the wrong things. We minutely agonize over word choices when we need to consider whether we're telling an interesting story. We worry about writing the perfect cover letter for the market when we should be considering whether the markets we're looking at are even worth bothering with. We worry about piracy when we should be thinking about the problems of promotion. And we fear a hostile reception when we should be concerning ourselves with obscurity and indifference.

Recently I began serializing a short novel, A Separate War, at JukePop Serials. When I took that first chapter live, I felt more than a little trepidation. I'd heard all the horror stories about writers offending someone and having their e-mail inboxes fill with angry messages, even outright death threats. And I could see all the possible things that could set someone off: would someone accuse me of spitting on the graves of the Apollo 1 astronauts because I portrayed a world where they escaped in the nick of time as one with a more expansive and advanced space program, including a moonbase by the 1980's and at least one trip to Mars? Would someone find my portrayal of the Muslim police officer as less than perfectly deft and accuse me of racism?

Instead, I got nothing. No angry diatribes, no nasty accusations of hidden wickedness revealed through my prose. It was almost as if my novel were invisible -- in fact, even a sharp criticism would've been welcome because it would've showed that someone cared.

It got to the point that I had to really struggle to keep writing further chapters, when the initial few +votes were not followed up with subsequent +votes on new chapters. I wondered why I was getting so little response, so little evidence that anybody was even reading my novel. Was it falling under their radar, and if so, what could I do to increase its visibility without becoming shrill and turning people off? Or were people finding it and deciding it wasn't something they wanted to read -- or something they didn't want to make an issue of, lest the Streisand Effect make it a success? With no response, I was operating in a vacuum, so I began to second-guess myself.

After much struggle and toil I finally completed A Separate War, and moved on to another novel, Holovideo. I'd chosen it specifically because it would be similar to several other novels that were enjoying success there, so I was hoping to see interest pick up on it fairly quickly.

However, it too has been slow to attract attention, and I have no idea whether it's staying under the radar of potential readers, or if they're finding it and not liking it. It's a very frustrating situation to be in, but it's a very real proof of the problem of obscurity, and the need to break into people's awareness -- but without turning them off in the process.

Pulling Teeth

That's how it's felt to write the latest chapter of A Separate War, which I've been serializing at JukePop Serials. My plan was to put new chapters up on a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule, but Friday night I was still stuck so hard on it that I could tell there was no way I'd get it done in time. I didn't even know how I was going to get it done at all.

So I printed it up and decided to take a second look at it, away from the computer. Sometimes looking at the text in different format will shake something loose in the subconscious and the words will start flowing again.

After a little consideration, I realized I needed to redo the beginning. Instead of having Nora and Deniz get the water rescue call in the middle of the chapter, it would start out with the call coming through and them racing off to respond.

However, although I got some good momentum going Saturday afternoon, I couldn't maintain it all through the evening. I'd been hoping to get the chapter done and up by Saturday evening and be able to start on Chapter 6 Sunday, preserving some semblance of my MWF schedule. But that wasn't happening, so I decided to give this one some extra time and make it my Monday posting.

So I'm now a little behind, but it's not a disaster. I'm hoping the next several chapters will prove less difficult to get written.

Assuming of course I don't have to deal with Life Happening.

Bummed about Space

Ever since the end of the Space Shuttle program last July, I've been feeling glum about America's space future. Right then, I was so bummed out that I couldn't even imagine a future for American space flight, to the point that I was imagining a scenario in which aliens arrived and told us that our status in their polity would depend on our ability to travel to another world. We point at the Apollo moon landings and are told no, they don't count, because we no longer have the capacity to do it.

Although my initial idea was unpublishable (other than as Real Person Fanfic), I realized it could be done as steampunk. So I jotted down some ideas for a Gilded Age version of Apollo, with the UK as our adversary in an alternate Space Race, and some decades later the elderly moonwalker is visiting the Smithsonian before testifying to Congress, only to have the aliens arrive and announce that no, that decades old landing doesn't count unless they can replicate it Now. So our aging moonwalker, after his initial outrage, buckles down to lead the new effort to get back to the moon -- but where does the story go and how? Is it a short story, or a novel, or a whole series?

But even as the effort peters out, I begin to see the possibilities of the Lanakhidzist timeline. I'd made some cursory mentions of there being US and Soviet space stations and a moonbase at the time of the Lanakhidzist Revolution, but had never really developed it, because my interest was on terrestrial events. However, even in my earliest versions of the Lanakhidzist universe, I knew that America's slip-slide into dictatorship was ended with a confrontation between the Administration and America's permanent space settlements.

So since then I've been working on the rocketpunk side of the Lanakhidzist universe, how the moonbase grew into a full-fledged lunar settlement, and how others developed, how the first expeditions to Mars led to a personal base, etc. It's interesting to see a completely different side of that world -- although frustrating that most of these stories are bouncing around from one market to another, and the one that has been published is the one that has no obvious alternate-historical content, and is recognizable as part of the Lanakhidzist universe only if you read other stories in which those characters show up, and in which clearly Lanakhidzist elements like human cloning as a Cold War secret project are mentioned.

And now I get the news that Neil Armstrong has passed away, and I'm even more bummed about the future of space exploration here in the Primary World. And worse, I feel weird about writing Lanakhidzist space stuff, because in that world Gemini VIII went very differently, and as a result Neil Armstrong isn't the icon he is in this timeline.

Perseverance Rewarded At Last

My short story Royal Steel went up today at Swords and Sorcery Magazine.
   
This is a story with a long history. I originally wrote it back in 2002 for the first Sword and Sorceress volume published after Marion Zimmer Bradley's death. It get held a long time and I actually thought I had a chance (especially after I had a story held right down to the final cut for the last three volumes, which were published out of her "hold" pile at the time of her death in 1999). However, at the very last minute it came back with a "liked it but couldn't find a place for it" response.
   
After that, it bounced around from one market to another for several years. I went through some rough times in which I pretty much quit marketing stuff because I barely had seconds to jot down story ideas because I was so busy in frantic efforts to make money to pay the ever-mounting pile of bills. So when that situation finally eased up, I decided to put it through a major revision -- but by that point so many markets had already seen it that I didn't have many places left to send it. So it's really great to have it finally see print, right as I was ready to give up on it.

Oh, Rocketman!

It's now official. My short story "Tell Me a Story" will be appearing in Rocket Science, an anthology of hard science fiction.

This story has a rather interesting genesis. I originally wrote it for the September 2001 On the Premises contest prompt. However, I apparently screwed up the submission process, because a completely different story showed up in the listing at Submishmash. Don't ask me how I managed to goof it up that bad. The other story sort of fit the prompt for that contest, but not as well. So I now had a story that needed to find a home.

Meanwhile, I had tried several different story ideas for Rocket Science, and none of them were working out. Worse, all of them seemed to fall into thematic zones that were already well covered by the existing submissions, so I wasn't sure if I wanted to spend a lot of time wrestling a story into shape only to have it rejected because it was too similar to stories already accepted.

In writing "Tell Me a Story" I drew upon my background as both a librarian and a historian, not to mention my own personal experience of being a small child and having my parents read to me. Telling the story through the eyes of successive generations of children gave me an opportunity to take a new look at humanity's future in space, not to mention showing how the historical memory can become confused as events recede into the past.

Rocket Science is scheduled to be released in April, with a big party at the UK convention Eastercon. It will be coinciding fairly closely with ConGlomeration, a convention in Louisville, Kentucky, which I'll be attending, so I may try to do some promotional activity for it there.

The Length Problem

After getting a personalized rejection on "The Angry Astronaut Affair" (the first three were form rejects), I'm thinking that I need to give it a serious rewrite to expand it. When I originally wrote it, I was aiming it at a contest with a 4000-word length limit. In order to make it fit, I had to leave out several elements that I really wanted to get in, because I could tell that nips and tucks in the wording wouldn't bring it back down if I added those things.

However, on retrospect, I think that letting them fall by the wayside actually hurt the story more than I realized. Yes, people do miss them, even if they don't know what those specific things were supposed to be. There's still a gap that leaves the reader less than satisfied.

And I'm thinking that I really need more than one POV. Reggie Waite's a difficult character, and in this story he really comes off as a jerk, which is probably making it difficult for him to be the story's protagonist. But if he could be seen through other eyes, so that the reader gets more of a sense of his complexity, it might get past the reader sympathy problem. The Jerkass Hero is a recognized trope, after all, and it's common enough that it obviously does work.

And sometimes a story really does need to be allowed to find its own length, instead of being forcibly crushed down to an arbitrary length.

Well, Drat

I just got a rejection from an anthology I'd really hoped I'd have a chance to get into. It looks like he got a lot of really good stories, to the point that it was really hard to pick between them.

Now I've got yet another story I'm going to need to send through the rounds in hopes of finding someplace it'll stay at. Which is getting harder as I have more and more stories circulating, because most markets don't want you to send more than one at a time. When you've got five or six stories, it's fairly easy to keep them all out at any given time. When you've got thirty or forty, it gets a lot more challenging.

Details

I swear, some readers feel positively threatened by details. If they don't see an immediate purpose for the detail, it makes them anxious, like they need to take notes or they're going to have a quiz on them. They can't just let the details be part of the flavor of the story.

I wonder if some of them have had one of those nasty teachers who thought the best way of testing whether students actually read the story is to give quizzes on the minute trivial details of the story -- the sort that you're apt to read over if you're just reading normally, to absorb the gist of the story rather than to search for details you may be quizzed on.

Just Lovely

As I'm trying to hash out the problem with "The Man I Love Is on the Moon," I'm becoming increasingly convinced that I'm going to have to completely tear out the existing beginning and redo it from scratch. I guess it's better that it's just three handwritten pages I need to toss. It could be 300 double-spaced MS pages on the computer, as happened to one writer I know.

And worse, I think I really need to give more thought to several of the characters before I can really push the story forward. Which means it may need some back-burner time to let the subconscious mind work on it.

At least that will give me some time to focus on getting "The Shadow of a Dead God" ready to send to its intended market.

The Proto-Draft

Sometimes it's called scaffolding. It's that stuff that you've got to write to make part of a story clear in your own head, but doesn't work as finished story. Stuff dealing with the background of character relationships, or (in speculative genres) the hows and whys of the technology, magic or creepy stuff that's essential to making the story work.

In a novel, it may be possible to have an infodump work, especially in relatively hard sf. A lot of readers of Heinlein, Weber, Kratman, etc. actually enjoy those solid blocks of information about the hows and whys of the science, technology and political systems that make the world work. It makes the imagined world read more real for them.

But that's not true for all readers -- I know some readers who absolutely will not read some of my favorite authors because of their information-feed techniques. And a short story won't have room for all of that information, so you have to very carefully choose what's the absolutely essential parts that must be explicitly presented to the reader and find ways to salt them into the story.

As I'm working on "The Man I Love Is on the Moon," I'm running into that problem -- I've just written a lengthy passage in which the protagonist is reflecting upon how the current situation makes her think of a similar space disaster when she was a kid. It's important stuff, both the backstory (which is so critical to how Kitty Strowger became who and what she is) and the current events on the world scene. But it's just her telling the reader all this information directly (since it's written in first person), and I'm not sure that it works as a short story. I've seen plenty of first-person novels that stop the action so the protagonist can directly address the reader and tell about how he or she became interested in a line of work, or suchlike (the one I'm currently reading, Travis S. Taylor's Warp Speed, does, and it really gives you a feeling of this down-home sort of guy sitting there and telling you the story over a couple of beers). But when you've got only a few thousand words, can you spare the room for recollections?

I'm hoping that, as I get a completed text, I'll be able to see how to get the critical information woven into character interactions so it isn't just a big lump of the protagonist telling the reader Important Stuff.

Genre Expectations and the Problem of the Cross-Genre Story

Recently I started writing a short story for a horror fiction contest. I decided to draw upon the image of a faceless colossus in an ancient desert from the list of HP Lovecraft's unused ideas in A Commonplace Book of the Weird: The Untold Stories of H.P. Lovecraft. To make my story distinctive from the one in that book, I decided not to set it on any earthly desert, but on the Moon.

But as I'm writing my story of my astronaut hero's desperate trek across the lunar regolith, heading toward his encounter with the ancient and menacing colossus, I realize that this story is reading more and more like hard science fiction rather than cosmic horror. But I really don't see any way around having the technical details of the problem at the mining outpost, the operation of the hopper he's supposed to be taking to get help from a larger settlement, or how he jerry-rigs parts of it with an old Apollo lunar rover -- it's essential to the growing sense of menace to understand why he's in deeper and deeper trouble, and I don't know how many horror readers are familiar enough with issues of astronautics to intuit how dangerous the lunar surface is, even for someone with equipment half a century more advanced than what the Apollo astronauts took to them, without it being explicitly laid out for them.

At the same time, I'm constantly aware that if it doesn't read like horror, a lot of the gatekeepers are apt to assume that someone sent a straight-up hard-sf story to them by mistake, or without bothering to read the guidelines, and never even get to the point where the protagonist encounters the terrible faceless colossus and all its existence implies, or the terrible effect it has upon his mind.

Of course at least part of this problem could be the problem of being a beginner. When one has established a reputation in the business, there's an implicit trust that one knows what one is doing, that just isn't there for a beginner. The established figure is assumed to know what he or she is about, and is trusted until it becomes clear the story is simply not suitable. By contrast, the beginner, or relative beginner, has to prove up front that yes, he or she is worth being given the time of day.