First up, Edmund Schubert at Magical Words posted this lovely set of thoughts on the naming of stories, and why it matters. Go forth, read, consider, and take a look at your own works in progress. And now...

I have always had a very love/hate relationship with titles. A good title makes everything wonderful. A bad title does the exact opposite. Most of my songs have titles that are so generically descriptive as to be direct quotes, usually taken from the chorus, usually forgotten in favor of "let's do that one, you know, with the buffalo stuff in the chorus." (This does not apply to "Wicked Girls," which couldn't have had a different title if I'd wanted it to.) Titling songs is hard.

Titling books is a little easier, because most of my books come sort of "pre-bundled" with their titles. There are books in the InCryptid sequence that have titles and point-of-view characters, and not very much else. This can be disconcerting when a book gets re-titled on me, as happened with Feed—a decision I think was absolutely the right thing for the book, but after literally years of calling it Newsflesh, it took me a while to change gears. It was easier when book two became Deadline two-thirds of the way through the writing process, because it had already had one name change (from The Mourning Edition). I really don't know what I'll do if I'm ever told I have to change a title I'm really emotionally attached to, like Professional Goreography, or Sit, Stay, I Hate You.

My short story titles are the ones I'm really proud of. The long, Tiptree-style titles. "Dying With Her Cheer Pants On." "The Tolling of Pavlov's Bells." "Laughter at the Academy: A Field Study in the Genesis of Schizotypal Creative Genius Personality Disorder (SCGPD)." "A Citizen in Childhood's Country." The short, accurate but interesting titles. "Lost." "Indexing." "Knives." "Let's Pretend." Again, the titles usually accompany the stories they describe, and changing them is even harder than changing the names of books, but some of them make me really, really happy.

(And if I ever publish a collection of short stories, I am going to fight like a cat in a sack to title it Dying With Her Cheer Pants On. Because dude, would that not be an awesome book to read on the train? Knowing me, and knowing my overall body of work, it's more likely to be called The Tolling of Pavlov's Bells, but a girl can dream.)

I guess it's sort of like naming babies. All the care in the world to find something that fits, something that's right, and most of all, something that won't rhyme with any unfortunate swear words or insults (for those halcyon playground days). And half the time, we grow up and shorten or change the names our parents gave us—so Rosemary and Rue becomes Rosemary, Newsflesh becomes Feed, and Dying With Her Cheer Pants On becomes "no, really, it's about cheerleaders fighting an alien invasion."

Titles are evocative and magical and strange and enticing, and can make the difference between an impulse buy and a dismissal.

Food for thought.

A year ago, I was in a state of low-grade panic because of the upcoming release of my first novel, Rosemary and Rue. Was it really going to happen? Would anybody buy my book? Was my book even worth reading? What if this was some sort of elaborate practical joke (admittedly, one pulled by someone who could afford wasting a book advance on fucking with my head)? What if DAW hated me? What if, what if, what if?

Six months ago, I was in a state of low-grade panic because of the upcoming release of my second novel, A Local Habitation. What if the first book was just a fluke? What if nobody liked Toby when she was less broken? What if everyone lost interest and went off to read something else, and my publisher dropped me, and my numbers were terrible, and my agent told me I should be a dishwasher or something? What if, dammit?!

Right now, I would be in a state of low-grade panic, but I'm honestly too tired to work up the flailing. An Artificial Night, the third Toby Daye book, is out now, and I would really appreciate it if you'd go out and buy a copy, assuming you haven't already. My reasons are legion: I really think it's the best book of the series so far, I really love it as a piece of work, and it's the last book on my original contract with DAW, so it would be nice if it went out with a bang. Like all authors, I worry vaguely about an unknown god known only as "the numbers," and I'm sure I want the numbers to look on me with grace. So that means book sales, and maybe, I don't know, sacrificing a pizza. I'll get on that.

I really love this book. I love the way it looks, I love the way it feels, I love the fact that it exists. It makes me feel like a real girl, because now I can look at my brag shelf and see three Toby books in finished form, all of them there, waiting to be opened. It's amazing. And still a little terrifying.

Release parties start next weekend. Fun for the whole family!

A movie called Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was released recently. It's a classic "boy meets girl, boy fights girl's seven evil exes to keep girl, boy learns important life lessons through kicking ass" story, told with all the manic intensity of a Nintendo game on Red Bull and speed. Is it perfect? No. There are probably things that could have been done better, or at least differently, without changing the movie into something that it didn't want to be. But it's good. It's quirky and strange and wild and totally new; it's something we've only ever seen before if, say, we ate a dozen Krispie Kreme donuts before challenging our boyfriends to an all-night Super Mario 3 game session that ended with sweaty sugar-buzz groping on the living room couch.

For example. And even then, it was a hallucination, whereas Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is something you can show to other people.

Sadly, when the opening weekend box office for Scott Pilgrim was reported, it was well below industry expectations, and the movie was promptly written off as a flop. It doesn't matter if it makes back its budget and more on DVD; it failed. It didn't bring in big bucks in the theater. The same thing happened to Slither, which has been one of my favorite movies of all time basically since the first commercial aired. Bad box office, great DVD sales, game over. (And yes, opening week matters. It's incredibly rare for something to have sales that climb after the opening rush has passed, which is why, weirdly, it's important to be a part of that initial rush, if you can. That initial rush is what tells the accountants "this is going to be okay.")

A lot of people said a lot of things when the numbers for Scott Pilgrim started coming in, and what a lot of them said boiled down to, "Why do you care?" You are not, after all, involved with writing, producing, marketing, or selling the movie; you're just a consumer. The movie was there to be consumed, you consumed it, now move on. And to a degree, they're right. No one can ever take Slither away from me; all the bad box office in the world can't keep Scott Pilgrim out of my DVD collection once it's released in a purchasable format. So why do I care?

I care because we're not going to get another movie like Scott Pilgrim any time soon. I care because Slither tanking at the box office is why we had to wait five years for Zombieland. I care because all entertainment is profit-driven, and when we don't put our quarters in the plastic pony, it stops bucking.

Why do book series end in the middle? Because not enough people bought the books. Sometimes they can live on, as with tim_pratt's online serialization of his fabulous Marla Mason stories, but for the majority of authors, if the sales aren't there, the story's over. Why do midlist authors disappear? Because their sales weren't good enough to justify their continued publication. Why are TV shows canceled? Because not enough people gave money to their advertisers. All entertainment is profit-driven. We pay to play, and when we stop paying, they stop playing.

Scott Pilgrim is important because it's a weird, wacky, wonderful movie, and it's going to be a long time before we see something else like it. Next time you love something weird, wacky, and wonderful—whether it's a movie, a TV show, or a book—remember the lesson of Scott Pilgrim, and the eighth evil ex: the box office. In this economy, it's more important than ever that we kick its ass.

In keeping with their great love for chart porn, Orbit (my/Mira's science fiction publisher) has posted a fabulous comparison chart of 2008's urban fantasy heroines vs. 2009's urban fantasy heroines. According to the sample set they have scientifically* assembled and presented for your viewing pleasure, stiletto heels and pouty lips are out, while sensible shoes and kicking your ass is in.

Check out the chart. Now check out this blog post by sandramcdonald, which includes a handy visual guide to many "classic" urban fantasy poses. What I find interesting is that the majority of these covers are classic-turned-cliche; they're not bad, they're just things that were very, very popular, and were consequentially overdone.

When I first sold the Toby books, a few people said to me, "You realize Toby's going to be a busty blonde with a tramp-stamp, right?" I acknowledged that I did, in fact, know this, but that I was okay with it if it would get the book out into the world. When my editor at DAW asked if I had any requests for the cover, I said I had two.

"I'd like her to have brown hair, and wear clothes."

Anything else? Nope. Just brown hair, and clothes. Toby is not the sort of girl who goes out in a miniskirt and a halter top—not unless she's under extreme duress—and she's never dyed her hair. I was incredibly lucky, and got what I asked for, along with a leather jacket, a petulant expression, and a gloomy, atmospheric backdrop. She didn't look much like an urban fantasy heroine (a few people even thought she was a boy), but she looked exactly like I wanted her to look. Now, a year later, she looks a lot like an urban fantasy heroine, because the rules have been changing. And it's wonderful!

Don't take this as "all urban fantasy covers used to be bad," because they weren't, and I really, really like a lot of them. All the elements currently in decline have their place in the genre. Toby doesn't have any tattoos...but Alice does (Alice is practically a biker gang all by herself), and so do pretty much all the lycanthropic teens in Clady's universe (since that way, your body can be identified even if you die when not in human form). Toby doesn't wear stiletto heels...but Verity does, and thanks to her specific combat style, she would be more than happy to kick your ass while she's wearing them. I just think it's fantastic that the genre has managed to expand to the point where it can include all these different types of heroine, all presented the way they should be presented, not according to some focus group-ideal that half of them don't live up to.

Evolution is awesome...and, apparently, wearing comfortable shoes.

(*In this case "scientifically" means "whatever the summer intern could get her hands on." It's a generous definition.)

When I was a very small Seanan, I wore blue jeans and frilly pink dresses and liked to have my hair cut so short that I looked like I was auditioning to be one of the Midwich Cuckoos. (That impression was helped by the fact that I was a cornsilk blonde who spent all her time in the sun.) I caught lizards and snakes and crawdads and frogs; I collected buckets of garden snails and jars of rolly-polly bugs. I skinned my elbows and knees and stubbed my toes and once gave myself carpet-burn all the way across my face by goofing off on the stairs. I collected My Little Ponies and loved to read just about anything I could get my hands on. I watched He-Man and She-Ra and the Muppets and reruns of Doctor Who, and I never really gave any thought to whether or not I was acting like a girl.

When I was a slightly larger Seanan, I wore blue jeans and flowered jumpers and kept my hair in ponytails so it wouldn't get in my eyes while I was running around the creek or sliding down Cardboard Hill. I drew crazy pictures and read until my eyes ached and spent my Saturday nights watching horror movies and rooting for the monsters. I filled the bathtub with bullfrogs and tried to teach them to follow simple English commands (it didn't work). I still collected My Little Ponies, and my favorite author in the world was Stephen King. When asked what I was going to grow up to be, I usually answered either "a writer" or "a horror movie host, like Elvira," and I was totally planning to marry Vincent Price, because we could honeymoon in any one of his many, many haunted castles. And I still never really gave any thought to whether or not I was acting like a girl.

Somewhere around age eleven, things started changing. Suddenly, about half the things I liked, and had liked my whole life, were "boy things." My love of horror movies was a problem, not because it was going to give me nightmares or warp me into a serial killer, but because it was "worrisome" to other mothers, who thought I might lead their daughters into "bad behavior." This "bad behavior" would apparently involve, I don't know, being able to name the current lineup of the X-Men and explain the mechanics of spaceflight. I was naughty. Again, I was doing exactly what I'd always done, but the world around me was shifting, and I wasn't shifting fast enough to keep up with it. Now, some of this was my fault; I wasn't a very socially aware kid—there was always something more important to do!—and I didn't keep up with the cultural norms. But a lot of it was mystifying to me then, and is mystifying to me now. I'm fortunate to be cisgendered. I have always been a girl, felt like a girl, known I was a girl. I'm just a girl who likes horror movies and musicals, spiders and kittens, Stephen King and My Little Pony. So what the heck is the problem?

Apparently, that is the problem. If I'd been more of a tomboy, people would have had a convenient box into which I could be placed. My sisters, faced with the same issue, grew up to be James Dean and a goth Betty Page. I kept trucking along as Marilyn Munster, frustrating people who wanted me to be easy to categorize. That was okay, because they frustrated me, too. I always just assumed it would eventually go away, and we'd all get to be people, and the girls would do things like girls because girls were doing them, not because of some innate "girliness" of the things, and the boys would do things like boys for the same reason. Better still, maybe we'd all just do things like people.

It didn't go away. If anything, it's gotten worse, since now it's "cute" when I know horror movie trivia, and "totally predictable" when a spider scares the ever-loving crap out of me by dropping on my head while I'm trying to work. It's "strange and interesting" when a girl writes horror, even though the majority of people in your average horror movie audience are female. (Mind you, the gender ratio inverts for written horror, I think largely because there is so much rape in modern horror fiction. Every other chapter, the rape returns. I can skip it when reading, but I have real trouble writing it, current genre standard or not. Maybe I'm weird? But when I write a book, I want to enjoy it, and I don't really enjoy writing about rape.) I'm expected to be nicer, better-dressed, and work harder than the men of my acquaintance, just to stay on the same footing—because otherwise, I'm trying to get by on being a girl.

I am a girl. That's not changing. I am a snake-loving frog-catching horror-watching virus-studying skirt-wearing Midwich Cuckoo Marilyn Munster girl. I'm not getting by on anything. I'm not making comments on gender politics when I combine my Bedazzler with my chainsaw. I'm just being me. It's about the only thing I'm any good at.

Everything I do, I do like a girl. And that's okay.

This past weekend, with very little fuss or bother, we officially slipped past the one-month mark. In less than a month, An Artificial Night will be showing up on bookstore shelves, full of words and wonders for people to experience and enjoy. This is my third October Daye book, and my fourth book overall. Those numbers are very "wait, what?" to me. How did I go from no books to four? How do I make sure I get to keep doing it? How do I find time for a nap? How?

I like to think I'm more centered as an author than I was a year ago. I've had good reviews and I've had bad reviews; I've wanted to argue with some in both categories (although I didn't, because I'm not insane). I've had fan mail and I've had...not hate mail, exactly, but definitely the opposite of fan mail. I've attended conventions that were new to me, and attended familiar conventions in a new context. It's all very wonderful, and very strange, and I've learned some things from the whole experience, which is good, 'cause if I wasn't learning, my friends would probably beat me to death.

So here. Have some hard-won wisdom. Or something. I'm going to go sit under a desk and hyperventilate.

Ten Things Seanan Has Learned About Being A Published Author.

10. You know how your book is the center of your world, and it feels like you talk about it constantly, and everyone you know is sick of it? Well, you probably do talk about it constantly, and everyone you know probably is sick of it, but the rest of the world has no clue who you are, or that you just put out a book, and while they'll be very impressed, they don't necessarily care. Don't take it personally.

9. Other things not to take personally: when people answer "I wrote a book" with "Oh, really? Can you sell me a copy?" and then look surprised to hear that they can buy it from the bookstore, just chill. Yes, it's faintly upsetting, but again, they don't mean anything by it, and at least they're asking where they can get the book.

8. You are probably not going to see anyone reading your book on the train. I'm sorry.

7. Assuming you've written the sort of book that shows up in airport bookstores, the first time you see it there, you're going to cry. Just accept that and move on. Also, carry tissues when you're trying to surreptitiously check bookstore stock.

6. Somebody is going to get a copy a week early. And that somebody is going to email you three days before the actual release date, and go "When does the next one come out?" It is actually rude to fill somebody's bedroom with live fiddler crabs while they sleep, no matter how much that question makes you want to. Just learn to grin and bear it.

5. People are going to assume that you have an endless supply of free books to hand out, like candy. When you say you don't, they're going to sulk at you, and may even say you're being mean. Carry pictures of sad-looking cats or children, and inform these people that your babies need to eat. It works.

4. If you spend all your time reading reviews and answering email, you will go insane. Don't do that.

3. Assuming you're writing a series, or even if you're not, odds are good that by the time the first book comes out, you'll be neck-deep in the second, or even the third, and it's going to be really hard to switch back into thinking about the new book as "current." Just try to remember what happens when, so you don't accidentally spoiler an entire book release party.

2. It's going to be hard to find time to write, but you have to. That's what got you into the position of not being able to find time to write, remember?

1. All the reviews in the world can't change your book. Nothing can change your book. It's yours. You made it. Everything else is just opinion, and you can weather a little opinion. Promise.

So there's this publisher, Leisure Horror, that prints, well, horror. Lots of it. At least one new paperback release a month (probably substantially more, given the size of their catalog), spanning everything from the classic movie monsters to the modern splatterpunk. I love them. They're my literary popcorn, and I devour them the way my grandmother used to devour category Harlequin romances. It gets me funny looks on the train, since if you run down the line of afternoon commuters-with-books, you'll usually get "woman with romance, woman with romance, man with science fiction with big guns on the cover, me," and Leisure's graphic designers don't believe in being stingy with the arterial spray.

Last weekend at Spocon, in the dealer's hall, I was lucky enough to find a man with an entire box of Leisure Horror that I hadn't read yet. Yes, that's right: a box. I went through it to pick out duplicates, squealing as I did about how unrelentingly, gloriously terrible some of the books looked. Brooke, who was with me, initially thought I was rating them. Then she realized I was buying them, and made the best "Oh God why have you allowed this to happen?" face I've ever seen her make. I got twenty-one brand new horror novels for twenty bucks, and he threw in the box. Total win.

(My total win only increased later in the weekend, when trektone expressed delight over my horror novel haul. Now I have someplace to dump all the ones I don't want to keep! FUCK YEAH, SEAKING!)

I have since devoured three and a half books from the haul. The first one, Snow, was an incredible reminder of why I'm not actually a very good straight horror author. See, these things come out of the snow, and they kill people. They stick their creepy snow-creature arms into peoples' backs, and drive them around like disturbing meat-suit zombies. And then they eat you. Unless you can kill them first, in which case, hey, points to you. That's it. That's all. No science, no justification, no "oh my stars and garters, the Wendigo myth was based on reality"—there are snow monsters, and they want to make you die. I loved this book. If I'd written it, it would have been twice as long, involved a lot more why-porn, and probably lost a few entrails in favor of a) the scene at the top-secret government lab where we learn about the aliens, or b) the scene at the top-secret monster-hunters' library where we learn about the folklore behind the snow-creatures. It always makes me happy when I get a reminder of why I'm not the kind of horror author I sometimes secretly wish I were.

The second book, Dwellers, was the first thing I've ever picked up from Leisure Horror that could actually be adapted into a Disney movie. It would be a sad Disney movie, sure, and it would lose a lot of, again, entrails, but it would work. Dwellers is like Harry and the Hendersons crossed with The Thing. It's sad and poignant and tragic and funny and altogether wonderful, and I really didn't expect it. Again, there's very little "why" in the book. Horror doesn't need "why." Horror needs entrails, and horror gets them, but oh, wow, is this a fabulous book.

The two I've read since then haven't been even remotely as good, which is why I'm not identifying them by name. Altogether, it's been a fantastic reminder of why I read horror, and why I'm not so good at writing it in any format longer than a short story. Why is there a monster in the closet?

Because.

In 2008, Entertainment Weekly decided to rank "the new classics," and made lists of the "100 Most Influential" bits of various media in the last few decades. They had a list of movies, a list of books, a list of TV series, and so on. This, naturally, made me grumpy and contemplative, because their list looked absolutely nothing like mine. I then took umbrage, as I am wont to do, and made my own list of books that influenced and informed my reality. I proceeded to update it in 2009, because things can change considerably in a year.

I bet you know what comes next.

Books on this list aren't necessarily high literature; they're not necessarily classics; they're not even necessarily particularly good, although I think the bulk of them are. They're just the books that combined to construct a me. They are, in short, not the books I was supposed to fall in love with; just the ones that I did.

Your list will probably be drastically different. You may still want to take a look at mine. You might just find a few things that will surprise you.

( Click here for Seanan's updated list of 100 books that have influenced and rocked her world, and which may have influenced and rocked yours. Complete, in some cases, with commentary. Because she can, that's why.Collapse )

I am weirdly superstitious. I say "weirdly" because the things about which I am superstitious tend to be, well, weird. I think black cats and the number thirteen are lucky, but I won't walk under a ladder (at least in part because I don't want anyone dropping paint on me). Finding a penny on the street is cause for celebration and declarations that all day long, I will have good luck. (Finding a nickle, dime, or quarter is cause for a ticker-tape parade, as people tend to be more careful about their silver.)

I count crows, I count cherry pits, I hunt for prime numbers and multiples of nine. I use my slide show screensaver as a funky sort of personal oracle. Get the concept? Superstitious and weird, that's me. So...

Yesterday, I found out that Hugo voting (and hence Campbell voting) is open to Supporting Members of AussieCon, and that voting is open until July 31st (along with registration for Supporting Members). Details are here, in case you're curious. That was pretty cool, as people have been asking me about it for a while now, and I like having answers.

Yesterday, I went to Borderlands Books to pick up the three most recent Repairman Jack books (I had a craving). As I was walking down 4th Street to the BART, I saw a coin on the sidewalk. I'm always on the lookout for coins; they might be pennies. So I stopped and picked it up.

It was an Australian two-dollar piece.

I'm weirdly superstitious, and found money is always a cause for making guesses about the intent of the universe. Last night, I dreamt about Australia. Who's surprised? Not me. And not the pony-sized huntsman spider I was riding around Sydney, either.

Ladies and Gentlemen of the speculative fiction world, if I could offer you only one tip for the future, research would be it. The long-term benefits of research have been proved by scholars and scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience.

I will dispense this advice now.

Enjoy the freedom and insanity of your youth. Scratch that: you won't understand the freedom and insanity of your youth until they've faded. But trust me, in twenty years you'll look back at your fanfic and your first drafts and recall in a way you can't grasp right now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really were.

You're not bad at this as you imagine. You're not as good at it, either.

Don't worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to correct your spelling through interpretive dance. The real troubles in your career are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you on the Monday after a five-day convention.

Write one thing every month that scares you.

Doodle.

Don't be nasty when critiquing others, don't put up with people who are nasty when critiquing you. Revise. Don't waste your time on jealousy; sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind, but the race is long, and in the end, it's only with yourself. Remember the compliments you receive, forget the insults; if you succeed in doing this, tell me how. Keep your old fan mail, throw away your old reviews.

Stretch.

Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to spend your life writing. The most interesting writers I know didn't know at twenty-two what they wanted to write. Some of the most interesting forty-year-olds I know still don't.

Get plenty of sleep. Be kind to your wrists, you'll miss them they're gone.

Maybe you'll publish, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll write novels, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll wind up remaindered, maybe you'll make the New York Times Best-Seller List six books in a row. Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much. Don't berate yourself, either. Your choices are half chance, and so are everybody else's.

Enjoy your mind. Use it every way you can. Don't be afraid of it, or what other people think of it, because it's the greatest instrument you'll ever own. Dream, even if you have nowhere to do it but in your own living room. Read directions on how to write, even if you don't follow them. Do not read Amazon reviews, they will only make you feel ugly.

Get to know your readers, you never know when they'll be gone for good. Be nice to your fellow writers; they are the best link to your sanity and the people most likely to stick with you in the future. Understand that friends come and go, but there are a precious few you should hold onto. You'll know them when you see them. Apologize, even when you think you might be right. Take apologies gracefully. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people you knew when you were young.

Go to the San Diego International Comic Convention once, but leave before it makes you insecure. Go to a small, intimate literary convention once, but leave before it makes you egotistical. Travel.

Accept certain inalienable truths: prices will rise, reviewers will pan you, you too will get old, and when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young royalties were plentiful, editors were accessible, and writers respected their readers. Respect your readers. Don't expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a movie deal, maybe you have a successful series, but you never know for sure when either one will run out.

Don't mess too much with your early drafts, or by the time you're finished, they will look artificial.

Be careful whose advice you take, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past out of the wastepaper bin, wiping it off, rewriting the ugly parts, and recycling it for more than it's actually worth.

But trust me on the research.

—with apologies to Mary Schmich, of "Wear Sunscreen" fame.

I'm in the home stretch now, because this is the forty-third essay in my fifty-essay series on the business, craft, and never-ending cookie party that is the wonderful world of writing. If I seem to be getting a little bit punchy, it's because I've given up sleep until my deadlines are met. These essays are all based around my original fifty thoughts on writing, which were written in no particular order. This explains a lot. Thanks for sticking it out this far. Our thought for today:

Thoughts on Writing #43: Research Is Love.

Context is also love. Bearing that in mind, here's today's expanded thought:

Your ass is for sitting on, not for talking out of. If your characters are supposed to be gun experts, talk to some people who shoot guns. Read some books about guns. If the books don't make sense to you, hand your manuscript pages to someone who knows guns and say "please fix." My original draft of Feed literally included "INSERT VIROLOGY HERE," because when I wrote that chapter, I hadn't finished designing my virus. I finished my virus, double-checked my epidemiology, went back, and finished that scene. If you don't know what you're talking about, learn enough to fake it.

Authors very rarely write about characters that are exactly like them, down to the classes they took in college and the things they know how to cook for dinner. In almost all cases, even when writing "realistic fiction," we're going to be writing about characters who know things that we, as authors, don't necessarily know. Sure, we'll probably stick them in our areas of interest, because those areas interest us, but how do we deal with the fact that our characters actually know things we don't? How do we make it work?

It's time to talk about research, faking it, and when it's acceptable to bluff. Ready? Good. Let's begin.

( My thoughts are not your thoughts; my process is not your process; my ideas are not your ideas; my method is not your method. All these things are totally right for me, and may be just as totally wrong for you. So please don't stress if the things I'm saying don't apply to you -- I promise, there is no One True Way. This way for my thoughts on getting the facts right.Collapse )

Until I went into publishing (which makes it sound so studied and intentional—"went into publishing," instead of "wrote a book and somehow got the damn thing published"), when I heard the word "ARC," I was likely to start singing that old camp song about Noah and the Arc. God said to Noah, there's gonna be a flood-y, flood-y...

But anyway.

In the world of publishing, the ARC is not King. The ARC is sort of like the King's herald, the one who goes beating at the doors of every noble in the land to announce that way-hey, there's a ball coming up, and every marriageable girl in the Kingdom is invited. When the ARC arrives, all the local lords assess it, maybe take a peek at it behind closed doors, and decide just how much they're willing to spend on new dresses for those pretty little maids in waiting. The ARC sets the stage, and gets the discussions started.

The ARC isn't your only marketing tool, of course. There are hundreds of ways that people learn about books, from author websites to word of mouth to advertisements in industry magazines. But it's the ARC that kicks things off, much like Noah and his ark kicked off an international boat-building industry. You know. Later. After we got over that whole "fear death by water" thing that was going on at the time.

I'll be honest: There are issues with ARCs. Some people sell them, which is bad and wrong and totally uncool, and also makes me die a little bit inside. Some people don't actually get around to reading them, turning them, instead, into somewhat expensive, really weird paperweights. They're fragile, so they fall apart under any sort of rough or extended use—and for people like me, who tend to read their favorite parts eight times, take books in the bathtub, and generally...let's not say "abuse," but, instead, "experience" their reading material, this can result in my finishing the ARC in its new incarnation as a handful of unconnected pages. They aren't perfect.

That said...the ARC is a way to build buzz early. The ARC is a way to get the book out there into the world, gaining support, courting blurbs and positive reviews, and basically saying "Hi, how are you, I'd really like it if we could get to know each other better." Have I had ARCs show up on eBay? Yeah. I have. I've gritted my teeth when people came up to me to proudly tell me about the ARC that they just bought off of the Internet, and tried not to say anything when they went on to tell me that they wouldn't be buying the mass market edition because "This one is more special."

But I've had more people come up to me and tell me, in all sincerity, "I heard about your book when a friend loaned me the ARC." Or: "I saw a review posted of an ARC of your book, and that's when I decided I wanted to read it."

What brought all this on? John Scalzi has some comments on the concept of the "eARC"—an ARC issued only as an electronic file, and I found them really fascinating, from both a practical and a philosophical point of view. The discussion in the comments is also fascinating, with people calling out both the good and bad aspects of the physical and virtual ARCs. One of the ones that really spoke to me was the concept of scarcity. See, ARCs are intrinsically scarce. Only so many are printed; there is no second print run. If there's an error in the ARC, that goes out to everyone. If an ARC gets out before you want it to, well, that's your tough luck. And I look at all the fuss and bother about runaway ARCs, and wonder...

How long is really going to take for somebody to break the encryption on the eARC? And really, how long is it going to take before some people start saying "Well, if you're posting the text of something that was always intended to be free (because ARCs are not for sale, remember?), how is that piracy?" I can see the justifications from here. (No, I don't think the majority of people would ever even consider that. Sadly, as keeps coming up, piracy isn't going anywhere, and it makes my cats cry. Making my cats cry is a cruel, cruel thing.) Going eARC-only limits the chance for surprise readers, for readership on buses and in bathrooms, and for readers who don't have an ebook reader. If we go eARC-only, I won't be reading my own ARCs. Pardon me while I find this...ironic.

I hope we can find good answers. I hope we're asking the right questions. And I hope that when you're invited to the ball, you'll put on a nice dress, and you'll come.

Please?

"Live by the compliment, die by the criticism." —Monique, Sinfest.

So I am in a really fascinating position right now. Like, really fascinating. See, I have two relatively new books on the shelves, one as myself, one under the pen name of "Mira Grant." One is urban fantasy, one is a science fiction medical thriller with horror elements. Both of them are in their primary visibility windows, those periods of time where the majority of books will get the majority of their reviews. Book reviews will continue to come in probably forever—even out of print books get the occasional newly-written review, as they're discovered by new readers, and that's awesome—but otherwise, it's a literal application of the old "penny in the pot" fable. (Short form: If a couple puts a penny in a pot for every time they make love during their first year together, and takes a penny out of the pot for every time they make love after the first year, they'll never run out of pennies. No, I'm not saying this really happens, so please don't tell me how many pennies you've spent.)

Because most of your reviews come in during the first few months of release, it makes sense that the majority of your "extreme" reviews would come in during this window. By "extreme" reviews, I mean...

"This book causes spontaneous orgasm and cures cancer and did my laundry and bought me flowers!"

...and...

"This book kills puppies and causes pandemic flu and its publication means that the terrorists have already won!"

It's fun! It's insane! It's like a roller coaster inside your head, one that goes from "dude, I'm awesome" to "dude, I should be recycled into Soylent Green to protect the English language from my foul attacks" like sixteen times a day. And you can't get off the ride, because the ride operator is a total jerk and refuses to release the brakes. And maybe you shouldn't have eaten all that cotton candy before you started. And maybe this amusement park sucks.

Finding balance between the peaks and valleys of the coaster is really hard. I have to watch the curve, and throw away the things that go too far in either direction. I'm pretty sure my books neither cure cancer nor kill puppies. Crying myself to sleep because someone says I caused the death of the dinosaurs with my prose isn't going to do anybody any good, and neither is declaring myself to be a golden god of love. But wow, can it be difficult to hold on to a sense of perspective when it seems like I'm being hit from every possible side, all at the same time.

Live by the compliment, die by the criticism.

Stay sane by the Diet Dr Pepper.

1) I find it really interesting how many people, when presented with a time travel thought experiment, will proceed to do things that result in their original timeline being immediately and irrevocably destroyed. Time paradox is not a cuddly kitten that you want to bring home and play with! Time paradox is bad! Remember, kids, friends don't let friends mess around with the laws of time.

2) Books I have read and loved lately: I Am Not A Serial Killer. Saltation. Freaks: Alive On the Inside (which I found at the used bookstore, signed!). Unshelved: Volume I.

3) Books I have written and loved lately: Deadline. The Brightest Fell. This is a much shorter list, and that's a good thing, because it means I probably haven't actually sold my soul to the devil. Much.

4) I love superheroes. I love Disney. I love these Disney heroines presented in glorious super-heroic style. I especially love the zombified Snow White. This is because I am, in many ways, predictable, and I am not ashamed of that fact. Not in the slightest. Nor do I think I should be, really, as my predictability makes me easy to shop for.

5) Lilly and Alice have figured out that, together, they now possess sufficient mass and surface area to prevent me from moving when they don't want me to move. This is fine when I have a book with me and nothing in the oven, but other times...not so fine. In other news, the house did not burn down, although it was a somewhat close thing. And it wasn't my fault.

6) What he said.

7) This looks like it's going to be an amazing season for movies. My favorite so far this year are How to Train Your Dragon and Kick-Ass, with The Crazies coming in as a close third, but oh! The glories ahead! Nightmare on Elm Street, Iron Man 2, Prince of Persia, Shrek Forever After, and Letters to Juliet! Splice! Even Resident Evil: Afterlife, because my love for the franchise outweighs my scars from the third movie. What a wonderful thing a movie ticket can be.

8) I appear to be thinking in almost purely short fiction terms right now, as I recover from finishing Deadline and tackle the trickier bits of The Brightest Fell. So far this week, I've finished two Toby shorts, started a third, finished an InCryptid short, and started my story for an invite-only anthology. I'm hoping I can even get a Vel piece shoved in somewhere, before the steam runs out.

9) Guess what I get tomorrow. I get a Vixy. Do you get a Vixy? No, you do not. I am not much of a gloater, but right now? Right now, oh, I'm gonna gloat. Because I get a Vixy. Of my very own.

10) Jean Grey is dead, James Gunn needs to call me, and zombies are love.

I do not have a library card.

I do not have a library card because I grew up poor—very, very, After-School Special poor, cockroaches in my bedroom and scavenging from trashcans poor—and I was badly bullied by the kids in my school, leading, eventually, to a group of girls stealing and destroying my library books. I couldn't pay the fines. I couldn't even tell anyone what had happened, because when the scruffy little poor girl complained about the sweet, well-groomed rich kids who had each others' backs, well...I had been down that road. The only people who would believe me were my mother and my teachers, and all I could do by telling them was upset them. I couldn't change anything.

I'm not that girl anymore. But the idea of getting a library card terrifies me, because some small, irrational part of me is convinced, incurably, that if I were to get a library card, those girls from school would show up, and slap my books out of my hands, and leave me standing alone on the sidewalk, sobbing over the loss of one of the things I loved most in the world: the ability to walk into a library with my head up, feeling like the books were free for anybody who wanted to read them.

The library books weren't the worst thing that happened to me during my school career. I was weird, I was geeky, I had frizzy hair and glasses and didn't really "get" a lot of the unspoken rules of the playground. I blew grade curves and didn't let people cheat off me on tests. I was basically invented to be the school punching-bag. But the library books were one of the things I never got over, because the library books taught me, once and for all, that sometimes the bullies win. Sometimes, you can't fight back, you can't stand up for yourself like the adults tell you to, and the bullies. Just. Win.

Phoebe Prince lost, too. But she's never going to be a grown-up, secure from bullies, writing a post like this one. Because she lost to the bullies so hard and so overwhelmingly that she killed herself.

Megan Kelly Hall is organizing YA authors against bullying, in memory of Phoebe Prince. Please. Go and read what she has to say. Consider what the current culture of bullying is doing to us, to our children, to our nieces and nephews, to the children of our friends. Even bullying that you survive can scar you forever, and Phoebe isn't the first to take her own life over this sort of thing. It's gotten so much worse than it was when I was in school, and I cried myself to sleep for years over the bullying.

This needs to stop. We need to stop it.

Please.

I am a media consumer; I consume media. I watch more hours of television a month than is probably strictly healthy (especially given how much of it is "reality" television). I go to the movies an average of once every three weeks. And as for reading, well...let's just say that there's a reason the city I live in considers my house to be a library, rather than a residence. (The cats appreciate my reading habit, as it causes me to build many interesting stacks of books for them to knock over. The housemates do not, as it causes me to build many interesting stacks of books for the cats to knock over. There's no pleasing everyone.) My interests are broad and easily modified to suit the type and quality of the work at hand. If you're looking for someone to consume your media, I'm probably your girl.

All this media consumption, however, comes with a price, and that price is a tendency to notice—and sometimes be bothered by—trends. Most recently, it's been an unexpected consequence of that old fairy tale saw, the happily ever after. You know the one I mean. Where they meet and kiss and marry and run off to live forever and ever in unchanging bliss. At least until the sequel, where she dies and he remarries and the new wife is horrible but luckily their daughter is beautiful and smart and looking for a husband, and...

Yeah.

This seems to have created the belief that once a couple hooks up, that's it, it's over, no more fun, no more fantastic adventures, no more anything but a rapid excuse to break them up. They can get together for good at the end of your story, but dude, once they're together? The happy ever after kicks in, and your options are "breakup" or "death." And it's not limited to the shows and stories aimed at a female audience, since we're supposedly the ones who are only in it for the smootchies; most of the relationships in male-targeted media meet the same end, which seems weird to me. After all, once you're together, you have access to regular sex, and you don't have to do all that sentimental "building a relationship" stuff. Maintaining, yes, but building, no. And yet only the sitcom couples who were married before the show started (or got married in the premiere) seem to stay together.

As Dave Davenport once said: "Where do I want to be in five years? Sleeping with a homicidal maniac, or sleeping with a homicidal maniac who occasionally cleans my toilet?"

I find this trend deeply upsetting. I mean, maybe this is my romantic streak showing through, but I like to believe that once I have invested in the relationships of fictional people—fictional people who were, in many cases, willing to spend years flirting and falling and feinting toward finally hooking up—that maybe I'll get some of the payoff. Not three episodes or one volume of the writers realizing they never figured out how this would work beyond "sweaty kitchen sex and SCENE" and breaking them up in a prefunctory, often utterly silly way. You sold me this relationship! It was for sale, and I wanted it, and now that I have it, I don't want a factory recall! By the time most fictional couples hook up, I am sick and fucking tired of the longing looks, the swooning sighs, the silly banter, all of it. I want them to get it out of their systems, settle down, and get on to telling whatever larger story they used to lure me in in the first place. What I don't want is another five seasons of sighing and swooning. What I don't want is the sort of breakup that could be resolved with thirty seconds of conversation and maybe a flowchart.

Romantic tension is awesome. But seriously, people! So is having a lasting romantic relationship! Where can I find the Nick and Nora Charles of today? No, really, where?

It doesn't help that, again thanks to the fairy tale structure, things get rushed like whoa as they try to give the media consumers "what they want." And yeah, we're a filthy-minded lot; we want Character A and Character B naked and sweaty five minutes after they walk in. But we're willing to wait if you'll promise to give us something that lasts for more than fifteen minutes. Promise me four seasons of Veronica and Logan making out after every successful case, and you will have my full attention for the four seasons it takes to get me there.

This is why I take my time. This is why I let my characters figure out what they want. Because I refuse to take it away from them just because I never bothered to consider the long-term consequences. And no, I don't believe that romance only belongs in the happy ever after.

I want my Nick and Nora.

(As a quick introductory aside: remember that you have until Sunday night to enter to win an ARC of Feed. This drawing is open to everyone located on the actual planet Earth. If you want to enter from Mars, or from a parallel dimension, you have to pay me for postage.)

First up for today is...well, not exactly a review, per se, but a very well-considered endorsement of sorts for Feed, from the awesomeness that is Book Banter. This was written in response to my receiving an entertainingly bad review, and says "Feed is not just a book about zombies, running from zombies, being afraid of zombies, killing zombies, and all that zombie jazz. It’s about a changed world that has had to deal with a zombie invasion, and how life for every living person on the planet is now totally foreign to the reader." Very accurate, and very awesome.

A fun review of both Rosemary and Rue and A Local Habitation has been posted over at Book Sexy. The reviewer says "The endings of these stories aren’t always happy and the successes all come with high costs attached. McGuire has created a damaged heroine torn between two worlds and unable to find peace in either. Add a supporting cast of characters with motivations as mixed as Toby’s and you have a winning formula." Also: "It all makes for surprisingly good pleasure reading on beaches and buses. And while these books are imperfect—Toby sometimes misses the obvious clues and has a bizarre habit of underestimating her powers—they are steadily improving." Let's hope that trend continues, shall we?

Lesley W. has posted a review of Rosemary and Rue, and says "I've been looking at a few reviews of this story and I've come to the conclusion that whether you hate it or love it will largely depend on your opinion of the heroine. I loved her." Also: "I think I'd almost despaired of finding something new and original in UF—preferably ferret free—and yet here it is. October is a melancholy heroine, so if you prefer something jolly, this one probably isn't going to be for you. But she has lost so much, she has a right to be withdrawn." I'm not sure what's up with the ferrets, but I agree with the assessment of Toby.

Marianna at Strictly Antisocial has posted a nice, critical review of A Local Habitation, and says "I liked the book, a lot. It is not a perfect book. But it is entertaining and a slightly different fare than what I have been immersing myself in (vamps and weres!). McGuire, it is obvious, does her homework. It feels like the faeries in Toby's world are real, with a rich and detailed past, that we, as the reader, have yet to uncover." Yay!

Amy at A Room of One's Own has posted a short, sweet review of A Local Habitation. No pull quotes, but I like it.

Karissa's Reading Review has posted a review of A Local Habitation, and says "This is the second book in the October Daye series. Last I heard there were eight books* planned for this series; the third book An Artificial Night is due to come out September 2010. I thought this book was much better than the first book in the series; I really enjoyed it." Also: "I thought this book was much more well put together than the first one. The plot was more engaging and really propelled the reader forward; Toby develops into a much more likable heroine (she was not as whiny as in the first book)." She whines even less from here, promise.

We close this roundup with the obligate Livejournal review, this time from silvertwi, who has posted a lovely review of A Local Habitation, and says "A Local Habitation is the second October Daye novel. If the first, Seanan's debut, was good (and it was, I loved it) this was even better." Also: "Some mysteries of Faerie (like the night-haunts and the murders) are solved, but there's clearly a lot more to come. What's going on with Toby's mother? What will happen between Toby and Tybalt? ... And so much more. I can't wait for September and the sequel, An Artificial Night."

That's it for right now. More soon, as my link file is getting out of control!

(*This footnote is mine, not the reviewer's, so's you know. Anyway, there are currently five books sold, two books published, and somewhere between nine and eleven books planned, depending on how you count the prequel. I clearly need more hobbies.)

(Since there's some unclarity surrounding the release date for Feed, which Amazon insists is April 27th, and my publisher insists is May 1st, here's my official party line: The book comes out May 1st. It may actually come out earlier than that; it won't come out later. I am reserving my panic for May 1st, that being a good day for freaking out, and fully expect to be hyperventilating by late April regardless. But May 1st is the date that sits at the end of my countdown.)

The little "days until Feed comes out" counter on today's planner page reads "25." If I had a penny for every day between now and book release, I would have...a quarter. Which is still enough to buy a super high-bounce ball from a vending machine, or maybe some cheap generic M&Ms that look kind of like candy-coated bunny turds. Quarters are cool. I like quarters.

This is my third book release and my first book release at the same time, which isn't exactly an experience I was ever anticipating having. I mean, half of me is like "I should be so zen right now," and the other half is going "HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT I AM RELEASING A BOOK WHY IS THE ENTIRE WORLD NOT FREAKING RIGHT THE FUCK OUT?!" Then the zen half is forced to punch the hysterical half in the face, thus increasing the hysteria while reducing the zen, and eventually I just slink away to play with my My Little Ponies until the screaming in my head stops. Also, there is a lot of television involved in this particular healing process. Without cable, the world would be in serious danger right now, that's all I'm saying. Only Fringe and America's Next Top Model stand between you and the death of all mankind.

It's very difficult to yank my brain from fairy tale mode into politics-and-zombies mode, despite the fact that I'm currently ass-deep in edits for Deadline (and sinking deeper every day). It doesn't help that I can't do my normal "carry your netbook and work while commuting" routine, since my back is giving me trouble, and that means I need to minimize what I'm carrying. My netbook is small, yes, but it's dense, and it represents a fairly substantial carrying-capacity commitment, especially when I'm also toting around my purse, my lunch, and reading material for the day. Right now, my writing time is confined to those moments when I am sitting in front of an actual computer. And yes, it's driving me batty. But that's really nothing all that new, now, is it?

It all seems a little break-neck and terrifying, because Feed has been such a fast journey for me. I finished it and sold it inside of six months; the second two books in the trilogy were sold before they were even written. It's a trilogy, which means there's a beginning, a middle, and an end, unlike Toby, where the story gets to go as long as I think it needs to (and I think it needs to go a long, long way). This is the first time I've told a story this big that actually knows where to stop, rather than continuing to spread and grow. I've lived with the Masons for a few years now, but in the grand scope of things, those few years haven't been that long. And now I get to share them. And it's scary. And it's wonderful.

Alive or dead, the truth won't rest.

Rise up while you can.

...quite soon, actually. Like, in a month. Actually, like, in twenty-nine days. (That's twenty-nine days if you believe the date I got from my publisher, IE, "May 1st." Everyone else seems to think the book comes out on April 27th. I am choosing to continue believing May 1st, because at least that's two months after my last book release, not one month after my last book release, and implies that I might have had the opportunity to take a nap in the interim.)

I am terrified, elated, and a whole bunch of other things that are surprisingly difficult to describe. See, Feed was a thought experiment. It was my game of "What if...?" What if the zombie apocalypse happened...and we lived? What if society had to restructure itself around the idea that the dead will always walk? What if this wasn't going to go away? What if?

I walked around for years with a zombie world and no zombie story. I tinkered with the ecology when I got bored, working out dozens of things that will never make it into the novels (as I lack a naturalist protagonist), but which combined to make a deeper, more convincing reality when I finally started really having a party there. I periodically bitched to my more understanding friends about how I had this truly awesome world, all full of zombies and personal firearms and stuff, and no story to tell there.

Then my friend Micheal Ellis said "Well, why don't you write about a Presidential campaign?"

And it all happened from there.

I'm sure I've told this story here before, because I've told this story a lot. But I'm still so grateful, and so overjoyed, that there are no words. I love the Masons, and my weird journalistic world, and everything else about this series, and for all that I am girl, paralyzed by fear, I really am unbelievably excited that you're going to get to meet them all.

One month 'til the Rising. Wow. It's been a long time coming.

It is fairly common for authors, on April Fool's Day, to announce utterly ridiculous projects and pretend that they're seriously writing them, no really and for honestly true. So I thought I'd do that this year.

And then I actually looked at the things I do write, and realized that there was just. No. Point. (Also that there was a good chance any "totally crazy ha ha funny right" idea I put out there would magically turn into the next thing I was actually working on, and I just don't need the extra work.) I mean, these are all real projects:

* Teenage horror movie geek discovers that she is, in fact, a werecoyote, horror movie monsters are real, and a serial-killing grizzly bear with a thing for hunting lycanthrope teens is on her trail.

* Hannah Montana follows Harry Potter into a dark alley, beats him up, and takes all his product endorsements before walking into a wall and developing traumatic amnesia.

* It's a romantic comedy. About jet lag.

* Perky blonde cocktail waitress fights to protect the cryptid and human races from one another using the combined powers of bullets and ballroom dance. Also, talking mice.

* Snarky brunette research geek fights to protect the cryptid and human races from one another using the combined powers of pit traps and punk music. Also, talking mice and traveling carnivals.

* The bastard daughter of Veronica Mars and Jareth the Goblin King decides to use Dante from Clerks as her role model, and wasn't even supposed to be here today.

* Bunny-themed superheroine fights the forces of evil (and corporate marketing) with her army of teddy bears.

* Hitchhiking ghost from the 1940s roams modern America in search of revenge and the perfect cheeseburger.

* It's about politics. And zombies. But mostly politics. Except for the zombies. And everyone's named after George Romero.

* Alien pod-plant with a conscience decides to assist the human rebellion in standing up to the forces of her own invading vegetable race.

I mean, this isn't everything—not by a long shot—but the things that aren't on this list aren't any less silly-sounding. I'm not sure I'm allowed to make an effort to be silly. Near as I can tell, silly just happens.

"When I was a kid, I always imagined I'd be normal by now." —Hannelore, Questionable Content.

I had a phone interview the other day in which I was asked about my writing process. I explained it—the checklists, the word counts, the editorial process—and the interviewer laughed and said, "So it's almost like an OCD thing, right?"

"Not almost," I said. "I have OCD."

He stopped laughing.

On most weekday mornings, I get out of bed at 5:13 AM. I write this in my planner. On Wednesdays, I get out of bed at 5:30 AM. I write this in my planner, too. On the weekends, I sleep later; last Sunday, I slept until 8:23 AM. I know this, because I wrote it in my planner.

After I get up, I dress, ablute, and check in online. This is done by visiting Gmail, personal mail, Twitter, LiveJournal, and FaceBook, in that order. Always in that order. I pack my lunch. On weekdays (except for Wednesdays) I leave the house at 5:34 AM, to catch the first bus. I know this, because all these things, too, are written in my planner. So is everything else. What exercises I will do, what my assigned word counts will be, what to remember to say to my roommates, whether it's time to brush the cat...everything.

I have been a member of Weight Watchers since late 2004. I like Weight Watchers. It gives me an excuse to write down everything I eat, and turn every activity into a number to be added to a little column. In the times where I can't attend meetings and get new "official" trackers, those same counts wind up going into my planner, along with a record of what time I took my multivitamin and how much water I've had to drink. What shows I watched that day. What books I read.

Tiny columns of numbers march along the sides of the calendar—how many days to book release, how many days since book release, how many days since I did something that I'm waiting to hear more information on. I record the return dates of shows that I watch, the release dates of movies, the official dates of conventions. Birthdays and ages. I celebrate friendship anniversaries and remember strange holidays that, having made it into my calendar once, are now a permanent part of my personal year.

When I see street numbers or phone numbers or the like, I will automatically start picking them apart to determine whether they are either a multiple of nine or a prime number. Either of these is deeply comforting to me. Numbers that are one digit off in either direction can be distracting, if I've been having a bad enough day. I would be perfectly happy eating the same things for every meal, every day, for the rest of my life.

People sometimes ask me how I can bear it; how I can break my life down into schedules and checklists and tasks without going crazy. But the thing is, that's how my brain works. I look at other people's lives and wonder how they can bear it—having to agonize over menus, not knowing where to sit, not remembering the order of the primes, not knowing when all their favorite TV shows come back on the air. I find the framework of my life to be freeing, not confining, and I don't really comprehend living any other way.

And yes, sometimes I have to make concessions in order to remain stable. I arrive at the airport two hours before my flights, period. I don't care if I have to miss things to do it; the rules say "two hours before," and I arrive two hours before. I become uncomfortable and have difficulty focusing if someone takes my chair in a setting where I have defined patterns. Some things have to be done in a certain order, and if I try to do them in a different order, I am likely to become very difficult to deal with. Failure to complete a to-do list is upsetting to me on a deep, profound level that I have difficulty explaining in verbal terms; it's just wrong. My friends learn that if you're going on a social outing with me, you need to arrive on time or deal with me having a meltdown, that I do not want to have adventurous food, and that I will throw you out of the house if your arrival interferes with standing scheduled events. And the beat goes on.

Because I am very functional, and because the standard image of "someone with OCD" is Adrian Monk or Hannelore, I do occasionally have to deal with people assuming I'm exaggerating. I don't compulsively wash my hands or clean my kitchen, I'm definitely not a germaphore, and if I re-type books completely between drafts, well, that's just a quirk. But obsession and compulsion both take many forms, and while I have found peace with mine, and consider them a vital part of who I am, that doesn't mean they don't exist. (Why I would joke about having something that is considered a mental illness, I don't know.)

Remember that just because someone is a functional, relatively normal-seeming human being, that doesn't mean they're wired the way that you are. I have to remind myself that not everybody wants their day broken down into fifteen-minute increments, because for me, that is the norm. The human mind is an amazing thing, full of possibilities, and each of us expresses them differently. I am a cybernetic space princess from Mars, and that's not a choice I made; that's the way I was made. I can get an address on Earth, but Mars will always be my home.

Whatever planet you're from, that's okay. Just try not to assume that everyone you know is from the same place. I'd be willing to bet you that they're not.

Hello! It's been a little while, but at last, I can welcome you to the forty-second essay in my fifty-essay series on the business, craft, and insanity that we like to refer to as "writing." This essay series stems from my original fifty thoughts on writing, which were written in no particular order, resulting in an essay series that has wandered drunkenly around the topic, usually stepping in something useful along the way. We're almost done, and here's our thought for today:

Thoughts on Writing #42: The Very First You.

To provide a little bit more context, here's today's expansion:

You are not the next Stephen King. You are not the next Emma Bull. You are not the next anyone. You are the very first you. Comparisons are wonderful things, because they tell people whether you're working in a style or genre that they enjoy ("If you like Warren Ellis, try..."). But don't let comparisons turn into a prison. You are always allowed to bust out with something new and amazing and blow the roof right off the goddamn nightclub.

It's common to hear a new author described as "the next (insert latest hot thing here)." The next Stephanie Meyer. The next J.K. Rowling. The next Tom Clancy. Even our fictional characters get it. They're the next Harry Potter, the next Harry Dresden, the next Harry Houdini if he were secretly a teenage werewolf with telekinetic super-powers, the next new versions of the last big thing. So how do you deal with the pressure having everyone tell you that you're the next somebody else? Is that even possible?

I don't think anybody is the next anybody, and it's time to look at that in detail. Ready? Good. Let's begin.

( My thoughts are not your thoughts; my process is not your process; my ideas are not your ideas; my method is not your method. All these things are totally right for me, and may be just as totally wrong for you. So please don't stress if the things I'm saying don't apply to you -- I promise, there is no One True Way. This way for my thoughts on updating familiar themes and stories.Collapse )

I was talking to a friend of mine—who shall remain nameless, unless she chooses to name herself, because I don't throw anyone out of the closet unwillingly—who said "I am glad I know you, for I can admit to a person on Earth that I still secretly love My Little Ponies." This, coming less than a week after someone reacted in horrified confusion when I admitted to sharing my bedroom with more than two hundred of the plastic darlings, made me decide that it was time to stand up in bold defense of Ponyland. Because sometimes, a girl's gotta do what the talking horses tell her to do, goddammit.

(Please note that I am not defending Ponyville, home of the current My Little Pony line. The denizens of Ponyland would have beat down these little pink pretenders all the way to the glue factory, where they would doubtless be rendered into cheap, glittery paste that didn't actually hold anything together for very long. No. I'm talking about the originals, the Ponies that started with Megan and Firefly and expanded to encompass Spike and Wind Whistler, and oh, it was one hell of a time...)

Girl's toys tend to be pink, and pastel, and visible from space. Girl's toys tend to be anthropomorphic, and look more like cartoons than human beings. Girl's toys tend to be short on projectile weapons and high on castles and the trappings of a romantic fairy tale past that never really existed. These aren't things that most girls get a say in; that's just the way the toys come. And yes, that's what some little girls want, while other little girls would be a lot happier if they were allowed to play with the He-Man guys once in a while. I was fairly equal-opportunity as a kid—I'd play with anything—but my true passion was reserved for the infinitely expanding stable that contained the My Little Pony world.

My first Ponies were Cotton Candy, a pink horse with white speckles on her rear and pink hair, and Minty, a green horse with clover markings and white hair. Minty wound up getting her tail braided by my grandmother (something I allowed almost no one to do, ever), and became the My Little Pony housekeeping service, because she could use her tail to sweep the floors. The herd sort of exploded from there, growing to overflow shelves, fill a large trunk, and generally make me the darling girl of Hasbro's Marketing Department. If they made it, I wanted it. My room was a sea of pink. And yet...

See, during the 1980s, people were so worried about violence in cartoons aimed at boys that they kept all the censors busy watching GI Joe and Masters of the Universe. No one was paying attention to what was happening over on My Little Pony and Friends. Let's start with the special, wherein a pink pegasus named Firefly crossed the rainbow to kidnap a farmgirl named Megan in order to save the rest of the Ponies. Save them from what?

THE DEVIL.

Because, you see, THE DEVIL was harassing the Ponies, largely by kidnapping them and turning them into GIANT FUCKING EVIL DRAGONS. Once they were GIANT FUCKING EVIL DRAGONS, they would go kidnap more Ponies, so that THE DEVIL could turn them into GIANT FUCKING EVIL DRAGONS. His plan, once he had enough GIANT FUCKING EVIL DRAGONS, was to unleash his sack o' dark shit that, y'know, was bad-ass enough to turn magical teleporting unicorns into GFEDs, and bring about eternal midnight. Also, evil. Also, did we mention that the sparkly pink horses were fighting THE DEVIL?

After the My Little Ponies made their entrance by kicking the ass of THE DEVIL, they went on to fight against the evil witches who lived in the Mountain of Gloom. They, like many people, only saw the fact that the Ponies were pink, and never bothered to ask themselves how insanely badass something would have to be to have that little natural camouflage and yet still survive to procreate. My Little Ponies, like poison arrow tree frogs, are brightly colored for a reason, and that reason is to provide an immediate and easily visible warning of the fact that if you mess with them, they will FUCK YOUR SHIT UP.

The witches unleash the Smooze. The Smooze is like "Yo, I am coming to FUCK EVERYONE UP." The Smooze makes its case by eating the Rainbow of Light, which was previously used to defeat, as you may recall, THE DEVIL. So the Smooze is also pretty badass, and messes solidly with the normal "frolic, nap, frolic" schedule in Ponyland. The surviving Ponies travel to Flutter Valley, where they meet up with the Flutter Ponies, who look like they should be easy to kill with a fly-swatter (and are thus, naturally, the baddest badasses in the world). The following occurs:

MEGAN: Rosedust, Queen of the Flutter Ponies, the Smooze fucked everyone up.
ROSEDUST: Sucks to be you.
MEGAN: Please come fuck the Smooze up.
ROSEDUST: No.
MEGAN: Guess we'll just live here, then.
ROSEDUST: Let's fuck up some Smooze!

Then here's a musical number, and then? Smooze-fucking. Big fun.

The cartoon went on from there, and taught an entire generation of girls that it was okay to be pink and pretty and also FUCK SHIT UP. My Little Pony was like Gormenghast with frills. The boys got bloodless battles and exploding helicopters and moral lessons, and bad guys who never went away. My Little Pony got THE FUCKING DEVIL. And anybody they beat down? Stayed beat down.

My Little Pony is FUCKING METAL, yo.

(Also, for a laugh, check out My Little Demon. I have way too many of these hanging in my house.)

(Yes, that is a quote from Spinal Tap. No, I am not ashamed.)

We begin with a fabulous essay about a worst-case scenario that I have yet to encounter, but probably will someday, that being the way the publishing world seems to work: My Horrible New York Times Review. It's funny, it's well-written and well-considered, and it's made me want to read the author's books (Ronlyn Domingue, this random mention in a blog you've never heard of is for you). To quote a bit that seemed particularly true to me...

"My novel is, in fact, one of the worst books some people have ever read. An insipid waste of paper. Readers writhed in agony at florid prose, gnashed teeth at familiar characters, fumed at confusing shifts of time and place, and grimaced at the triteness of it all. There are unsubstantiated reports of eyes bleeding.

"My novel is, in fact, one of the most amazing books some people have ever read. A soulful work of beauty. Readers found peace while grieving lost friends and family, bonded more deeply with people they care about, and enjoyed the story long past their bedtimes because they couldn’t put it down. This book changed lives.

"I'm a horrible writer, and I'm a brilliant writer. Next time, I won't need reviews to reveal this. Lesson learned."

I may print this out and hang it on my wall. Or ask Erin to do it in calligraphy so I can hang it on my wall. Or design a cross-stitch pattern, make a sampler, and hang it on my wall. Or...

You get the picture. Everyone knows, intellectually, that they won't be the first author in history to be universally loved and praised by all that they encounter. There are people who hate Shakespeare. I mean, I could give a whole list of famous people, but let's be serious, here: there are people who hate Shakespeare. If he can't be universally loved, no one can. At the same time, emotionally, every author I've ever known has been quietly hoping that maybe, just maybe, they'll be the exception that proves the rule. I am not leaving myself out, here! No matter how much I say "no, no, not everyone will like my work, I'm braced for that," I'm secretly going "please love me please love me please love me." That's how the human mind works.

Michael Melcher wrote an excellent article on what to do when your friend writes a book, which I also sort of want to hang on my wall. It includes such gems as "Do you think your birthdays are important? Well, to a writer, writing a book is like ten birthdays, maybe twenty." Also, "When things touch our soul, they are beyond logic and practicality. If you have a friend, relative, or distant acquaintance who writes a book, I can guarantee what they want: for you to share their joy. That's it. End of story. Share. The. Joy." Read the article. It's a good one, and very helpful, whether you're a writer or just trying to survive in close proximity with one.

Which brings us around, at last, to the original point: bad reviews. Bad reviews can be useful. They tell me what I did wrong, what I did right but not quite right enough, what people were hoping for, and what I need to improve. I can use bad reviews to become a better writer. Bad reviews can be hurtful. They tell me I'm terrible, I'm talentless, I'm insane for thinking I could write in the first place. I can use bad reviews to justify drinking a lot of cheap port and passing out on the couch while Dinoshark vs. Mega-Croc plays on SyFy. Bad reviews can be hysterical. I had someone write me to ask whether I was aware that my publisher had badly revised my film noir detective story to insert—drumroll, please—icky girly fairies.

Yes. Apparently, DAW rewrote Rosemary and Rue to insert the fae. Good to know, right?

Today's round of contemplation was brought about by a bad review for Feed, which was posted at Fatally Yours, and which falls into the fourth category for me: reviews which are either funny or frustrating, depending, because they are reviewing me on the basis of what I didn't actually write. Sort of like the people who pan Evernight for not being Twilight, or get cranky at Rosemary and Rue because it isn't paranormal romance. (I have a much longer post on the urban fantasy/paranormal romance divide brewing, but it needs a little more time to come together). You know what? A Local Habitation is bad erotica...because it isn't erotica. Discount Armageddon is bad horror...because it isn't horror. And now, to quote this review of Feed:

"To be honest, when the book started reading as an adolescent version of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail with a dash of zombies my interest dwindled. I didn’t want to read about a bunch of politicians having tense meetings in board rooms. I wanted to read about zombies. And if you think that you’re going to offer me zombies and then try to bait and switch me with a bunch of unbelievable and boring political drama and still walk away with a good review, then you’ve got another thing coming.

"So it’s not really a book about zombies.

"It’s a book about politics."

Yes! That is correct. It's a book about politics. It's also a book about zombies, virology, Internet culture, wireless technology, bad beer, brand loyalty, sunglasses, the CDC, and horses. But mostly, it's a book about politics. Politics, zombies, blogging, and how George Romero accidentally saved the world, which is why I tell people it's "The West Wing meets Transmetropolitan meets Night of the Living Dead."

If you're looking for full-scale zombie gore, you probably won't like Feed, and I'm sorry. The zombies are the way they are because that's what they are in this universe. I may someday write a book called The Rising, and set it during the Rising, and that will be full-scale zombie gore, but Feed? No, and if I've somehow given you that idea, I'm sorry.

Bad reviews. Just one more part of this balanced breakfast.

Some days, you think about politics, philosophy, and art. Some days, Pliny and Socrates are the defining stars of your existence. Some days, the question of which came first—the chicken or the egg—is all-consuming, worthy of endless contemplation and consideration. Some days, just the movement of the heavens is enough to take your breath away, leaving you locked in endless awe of the cosmos and all its wonders.

Some days, you're just not that deep.

Guess what kind of day I'm having?

I spend a lot of time locked in intellectual pursuits. Maybe "figuring out strategic survival tactics and social innovations following the zombie apocalypse" and "building a better pandemic" aren't your standard thought experiments, but they're time-consuming and they take a lot of mental processing power. I guess it's only natural that I'd occasionally get exhausted and want to spend a few hours gazing off into space, counting air molecules while Food Network amuses the cats. (Seriously, they love Iron Chef, although Alice has been known to attack the screen when Bobby Flay comes on.) This also accounts for my love of movies like Dinoshark*, one more gem from the SyFy mines.

Tonight, everything will change. Tonight, I have edits to process on two short stories, a battle plan to write for tomorrow's official opening of the San Diego International Comic Convention hotel block, and at least eight pages of The Brightest Fell to get through. Tonight, I need to sit down and seriously outline two potential urban fantasy shorts, one Toby-based, one InCryptid-based. Tonight, I must brush the cat. But all of that is tonight, and right now, it's daylight, and I'm just not that deep.

Thinking is hard. Let's have strawberry ice cream.

(*Over the course of a two-hour movie, Dinoshark eats a kayak, several swimmers, an expedition boat, a crocodile, and a helicopter. Dinoshark is totally metal, yo.)

With A Local Habitation [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy] now on shelves, I can breathe a little easier and worry a little less about getting my Advance Reader Copies out into the world. Well...for that book, anyway, since I'm still in the midst of pre-release madness for Feed [Amazon], and there are thus still ARCs worth their weight in kittens kicking around my house. (And right about when those ARCs go away, the ARCs for An Artificial Night should be showing up. I would complain, but it's so damn awesome that it's sort of difficult.) I have been awash in ARCs for months. And, because I am me, I have been thinking a lot about them. Here are some of those thoughts.

1. ARCs have a purpose. ARCs exist for one reason, and for one reason only: To drum up advance publicity for books. They're sent to reviewers. They're sent to people who might be able to provide cover blurbs, either for the book in question or for the sequel. They're sent to authors for distribution to bloggers, people who win contests, and their moms. Note that the purpose of ARCs is not "to become collectibles" or "to be sold to people who just can't wait for the next one." This is why people are somewhat protective of them, and why their numbers decrease with each volume in a series. By book eight, odds are good that people are already as excited as they're going to get.

2. Authors are not being bad people when they refuse to give you an ARC. My friend Anton just put out a new book, Dead Matter. He did not give me an ARC, even though I love the series. Why? Because he had a limited number, and he knew that I'd both buy and talk about the book anyway. To put things, briefly, in totally mercinary terms, he had nothing to gain by spending a very limited resource on someone whose goodwill he already had. When I have infinite cake, it's cake for everybody, but when I only have three slices...

3. Yes, authors get upset when people sell ARCs. As stated up in item one, the point of the ARC is to get early reviews, early buzz, and early attention. It is not, sadly, to pay for cat food. Not for my cats, not for my publisher's cats, and not for anybody else's cats. They represent money spent, not money made. Someone who buys an ARC and doesn't buy the real book is taking money away from the publisher, and hence, money away from the author. More, if the ARCs are sold unreviewed, they didn't even accomplish their purpose before they were cast out into the cold, lost forever. Poor ARCs.

(As a footnote, and this is getting a little personal, but there you go: If I send someone an ARC, and then that ARC appears on eBay without a review having appeared first, that person is so never getting another ARC from me. Casting ARCs into the cold makes me sad.)

4. Once the book is out, concern and compassion for the ARC goes way, way down. Mia makes jewelry from my ARCs. Other people do other interesting things with ARCs. Some of them are awesome. Some of them are confusing. One way or the other, I don't care, because again, once the book is out, the ARC loses most of its mystery. I'd still rather not see them flooding the resale market, but there aren't enough of them to make a huge difference...once the book is out.

5. ARCs are delicate. Part of why I get annoyed when I see people selling ARCs for large amounts of money is that ARCs are fragile. I have one ARC of Rosemary and Rue that got turned into a continuity reference after Alice sort of chewed on it a little, and it's basically dissolving after fewer than four reads. So they make great collectables, and great review copies, but as things to keep? Well, only if you like to do your reading in loose-leaf form...

Thinking is hard. Let's have strawberry ice cream.

Well, we're two days out from official release, and I'm sleeping a little better at night, which is nice, especially since being two days out from A Local Habitation [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy] means I'm now fifty-eight days away from Feed [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy]. This is basically guaranteed to be a fun year, if you consider the distant sound of chainsaws and hysterical giggling to be the soundtrack of fun. I...kinda do, really. So that's all right.

As an author, it's natural and expected that I'll go a little crazy right around release day. I tell people it's less like having a baby and more like planning a wedding. You sink your heart and soul and resources and time and energy into this one day, and you just pray it'll be perfect, and that you haven't slipped into a horror movie (since weddings are basically catnip for demon serial killers). And then, whether it's perfect or not, you go to bed, you get up, and you carry on.

As a professional, it's also expected that I'll do my best to keep the majority of my crazy off the Internet. I'll twitch and flail and make little gasping noises about the pandemic, but at the end of the day, I won't scream at people, throw things, or threaten to have you all tracked down by my elite army of dinosaur commandos. (Well. Maybe the dinosaur commandos. They get so bored when they just sit around the barracks all day...) The Internet, as I have said before, is forever, and the fact that I'm having the release day crazies right now doesn't mean you won't be able to find my hysterical meltdown in black-and-white (or whatever your screen is set to) six months from now. As I do not want my crazy preserved for all time like fossilized mosquitoes in amber, I try to have more sense than that.

So if I've been overly crazy in the march toward release, I apologize, and hope that you'll forgive me. If I haven't been overly crazy, then, in the words of London Tipton, "Yay me!" You have all been wonderful, and I appreciate you all being here. I'll be running a few more contests in the weeks to come—as a hint, if you've already purchased A Local Habitation, you may want to say your receipt. I'll also be continuing to wind back down to my usual levels of madness, which has more pandemic, and less panic.

Life is good.

We are now officially entering release week for A Local Habitation [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy]. Yes, I know that the book has been unpredictably available for the last week and a half or so, but as of tomorrow, we're really and for truly in the realm of "this is your release week," and I will become prone to bouts of random twitching.

I don't know, honestly, whether release week trauma is a thing I'll ever fully get over. When I look at my saved email, the earliest mention of Toby Daye is from January 6th, 1998. That's officially more than twelve years ago. For a decade, Toby was just this weird girl who lived in my head, and who I sometimes claimed to be writing a novel (or novels) about. Some of my friends read those early drafts, and gave me useful critique, and I kept writing...but for a really long time, she was practically my Mr. Snuffleupagus, the protagonist of a series I kept saying existed, yet could never produce.

It is constantly strange to me that people I don't know have met Toby. She's not my secret friend anymore; she's everybody's, and they get to have their own ideas about her, about the things she does and the places that she goes. People send me letters thanking me for writing. How weird is that? Writing is that thing my friends yell at me for doing when they're having parties, not something that I get thanked for. It's bizarre. So when release day rolls around, I get a little twitchy, waiting to find out that it was all just a dream; I didn't get to kick the football, nobody went to Oz, and Jean Grey isn't dead after all.

So. Weird.

Thank you all for reading, and for being here, and I'll do my best not to rip a hole in the fabric of reality, allowing the black hounds of the unreal to pour through and devour all that lives or dreams on this plane of existence. Promise.

Just three days remain before the official North American release of A Local Habitation [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy], which has been cropping up in stores around the US as we get closer and closer to release day. It's been fun, in that way of things that are both glorious and flat-out terrifying. Whee!

In honor of day three, and because I am a predictable creature, I give you today's entry in the countdown. Enjoy.

3 Myths About Writing.

3. Writing is easy. After all, we all have ideas, and we're all smart people, so we should all be able to write books, right? Sadly, this is not the case. Writing may be easy, but writing well is damn hard, and even with as much practice as I've had, I'm constantly aware of how much more practice I need if I want to get really good. Whoever first said that it was ten percent inspiration, ninety percent perspiration was very right. This does not relieve my urge to punch them in the nose.

2. All real writers are inaccessible and intellectually difficult. I periodically get people asking me when I'll stop writing to "what's hot" and start writing what's in my heart. You know what? My heart is full of fairy tales and zombies and blonde girls in high heels kicking monsters in the head. My heart is full of snappy dialog and cinematic tropes and screams in the muggy summer air. I am a real writer. It's just that what I really want to write about is occasionally the Fighting Pumpkins cheer squad, a hitchhiking ghost with a thing for cheeseburgers, and genetically engineered parasites. And that's okay.

1. Good writing will always be recognized. Sadly, this is also not true. There are a lot of books released every year, and a great many of them will be excellent, yet somehow manage to go essentially unnoticed by most of the reading public. This is a crying shame. This is the fear of every working author, at least at the beginning of their careers, because what if you do the best you can do, what if you're hailed as an amazement and a rediscovery of the written word...and you fail anyway? This is why authors are a little bit crazy. Be kind.

I am now four days out from the release of A Local Habitation [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy]. The uncontrollable twitching hasn't started, largely, I'm assuming, because I've been too tense to twitch. I literally coughed myself into a migraine yesterday, which only went away when I went home and went to bed.

In an effort to keep myself breathing, I am now going to envision my perfect world. A world of sunshine and zombie puppies, where all I have to do is watch horror movies, take long walks, go to conventions, and write. In that world, I don't have to put things aside because there's no time.

I want to live there.

4 Things I'd Love to Write.

4. It's been on my "current projects" post for a while now, because hope springs eternal, but I really, really want to write this crazy math/language/Greek philosophy epic urban fantasy monster called The Nativity of Chance, which should probably have moved into the head of Tim Powers, but wound up with me instead. It's book one of a trilogy, and it's so deliciously messed-up that I just want to spend some serious quality time in its loving arms.

3. Lady of the Underground is the sequel to a romantic comedy I wrote a few years back, called Chasing St. Margaret. (I'm planning to revise Chasing St. Margaret this year, probably on the plane to Australia, and get it into publishable form, because I love it so.) Lady of the Underground would give me an excuse to spend more time with some characters I really adore, and that's just an awesome concept.

2. Spelunking Through Hell: A Visitor's Guide to the Underworld. It's the tenth book in the InCryptid series, and the story of Alice Price-Healy's quest for her wayward husband (who is going to be getting so punched in the face when she finds him). Don't judge my series-oriented ways. My idea of pacing is not like your Earth idea of pacing.

1. The rest of Toby. I want the world to arrange itself so I can write this series until it's finished and over and done. And then I will do a little dance, and it will be glorious.

I'm a writer. I've been a writer for as long as I've had a grasp of written language, although my earliest works were, admittedly, not all that complex. I get asked "when did you start writing?" pretty commonly in interviews, and my response is always something along the lines of "I have no idea, in the womb, maybe, I don't know." Because really, I don't.

So as we continue our countdown (five days! Sweet pumpkin pie, five days!), here's today's list:

5 Reasons I Love Writing.

5. Stephen King put it best when he said that writing is like a form of telepathy. I make things up, I write them down, and then you can see them, in your mind. You "hear" dialog that I wrote. You "meet" people that I invented. When I write, I am Emma Frost, and that is awesome.

4. Writing continually surprises me. No matter how long I do it, no matter how much time I spend working to improve, I still find myself staring at things on the page and going "whoa, where did that come from?"

3. Writing comes with a very concrete and visible reward for hard work. If I write 2,000 words, I have 2,000 words that I didn't have before. If I write a book, dude, there is now a book in the world that didn't exist before I started typing. Me! I made that! It's incredibly fulfilling. Very few things in life are this immediately fulfilling.

2. I have to work to write. It's my hobby and what I do to relax and it makes me happy, but it's also work. If I don't revise, edit, check my spelling, check my continuity, and basically do hard labor, I don't get good books. I feel like I've done something when a story is finished, and that's amazing.

1. When I'm writing, I make all the rules. I don't think there's anything better than that.

My pre-release countdown for A Local Habitation [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy] continues. I'm six days out now. Books have been sighted all over the place (although still not in my home town, which is probably good for my overall level of twitchiness, if not for the local folks who want to buy them). And I've been thinking a lot about urban fantasy.

I've been thinking so much about urban fantasy, in fact, that it's today's countdown item. So there.

6 Awesome Things About Urban Fantasy.

6. Because urban fantasy is a relatively new genre, there's a lot of flexibility for making up rules as you go along. No one says "oh, this book was terrible because they didn't all meet up in a bar and there was no quest for the magical wing-diddy of Macguffindonia." There's an insane amount of freedom in urban fantasy.

5. Because urban fantasy in an incredibly old genre that's just making its reappearance, there are centuries of tradition to draw on. Seem like a contradiction? It's not. As I've said many times, we are the children of Lily Fair, and we are carrying on the traditions of our fairy tale ancestors. There are monsters in those woods.

4. Urban fantasy gives its authors the freedom to play with creatures from both sides of the divide between "fantasy" and "horror." You can have pixies and werewolves, if that's what makes you happy, and nobody gets to tell you different. It's awesome.

3. The modern/pseudo-modern settings of most urban fantasies make it easier to build engrossing and detailed non-human societies, without needing to first introduce your readers to a whole new reality. That creates an illusionary accessibility that reveals itself only when it's too late to escape. Mwahahaha.

2. The scope of urban fantasy means that it really does contain something for everybody. Maybe you don't like my work. That's fine. Kelley Armstrong is more horror, and Kim Harrison is more sexy, and Anton Strout is more funny. We can find you a match!

1. All the ass-kicking heroines. Naturally.

Hello, and welcome to the forty-first essay in my fifty-essay series about the process, art, and business of writing. This set of essays started almost as an accident, and has provided me with lots of interesting discussion and contemplation, so thanks to everyone who's been participating. I've learned a lot, and I hope you have too. All the essays have been based around my original fifty thoughts on writing, which were written in no particular order. That's why they weave around like a drunken centipede. Here's our thought for today:

Thoughts on Writing #41: Something Old, Something New.

To provide a little bit more context, here's today's expansion:

Just because somebody else did it first doesn't mean that somebody else did it better. At the same time, just because you think you're going to do it better doesn't mean you necessarily will. Be just as objective with reworkings of old stories as you'd try to be with totally new ones. You actually need to work harder when you're dealing with the familiar.

Some people say that there are no new stories under the sun, just new ways of telling old ones. To look at the books and movies that hit it big in the mainstream, well, there's reason to believe it; Alice in Wonderland gets re-imagined again and again, the same fairy tale princesses show up everywhere from Disney to DAW, and Shakespeare has now been retold in just about every format imaginable. So how do you make an old story fresh and new again, and how much can you rest on what came before? When does "too similar" become a killing blow?

There are a lot of factors at work here, but we can at least start looking at what they are. Ready? Good. Let's begin.

( My thoughts are not your thoughts; my process is not your process; my ideas are not your ideas; my method is not your method. All these things are totally right for me, and may be just as totally wrong for you. So please don't stress if the things I'm saying don't apply to you -- I promise, there is no One True Way. This way for my thoughts on updating familiar themes and stories.Collapse )

Okay. So this article appeared in the New York Times, explaining, in brief, how authors are greedy bastards trying to screw the e-book reader. (I'm sorry, are my prejudices showing there? Oh, wait. Yes, they are. Because I like being able to feed my cats.) To quote one of the more charming bits:

"This book has been on the shelves for three weeks and is already in the remainder bins," wrote Wayne Fogel of The Villages, Fla., when he left a one-star review of Catherine Coulter's book KnockOut on Amazon. "$14.82 for the Kindle version is unbelievable. Some listings Amazon should refuse when the authors are trying to rip off Amazon's customers."

So let me see if I've got this straight, shall I?

1) The author sets the price, not the publisher.
2) The author is, apparently, getting a huge percentage of the cover price.
3) The right way to object to this is to make people think the book sucks.
4) It doesn't matter if this means the author can't sell another book; they shouldn't have been greedy.

Um, what?

There is this incredible, eye-burning, heart-shattering impression that all authors are rich; that we sign that first contract, receive that first check, and spend the rest of our days lounging on the beach in Bura-Bura while dictating our works of creative genius to a scantily-clad cabana boy named Chad. If this is true, something's wrong with my authorial contract. I've sold six books—by the standards of any beginning author, I'm doing pretty well—but Chad has yet to put in an appearance, and I'm still not sure where Bura-Bura is. Instead, I get up every morning at 5AM to travel an hour and a half to get to work, spend my evenings hammering away at my keyboard and praying for another sale, and all my grocery purchases are heavily influenced by what's currently on sale. I make a weekly trip to Target to stock up on frozen dinners and kitty litter, because I can't actually afford to let my cats crap on silken beds of cedar shavings hand-milled for them on a little organic farm in Minnesota. I buy sweaters at Goodwill, and consider myself blessed by the Great Pumpkin when I find an Ann Taylor top for five dollars, because it saves me a trip to the mall that I really shouldn't be making. And I'm doing well.

The fantastic rolanni has posted a very realistic view at a working author's finances. This is someone who's been publishing for years, and has actually reached the stage of getting royalty payments (not every book will reach the royalty stage; many books never actually earn back their advances). If anybody deserves their ticket to Bura-Bura, it's her. And she ain't on a plane right now.

Look: the $15 price point that some publishers are proposing is for the hardcover edition. The Kindle edition of Rosemary and Rue costs $6.39, which is 20% less than the price of the physical item. Because the physical books are published, at least currently, in bulk, 20% is a fairly valid reflection of the cost of paper and distribution. 80% of the cost of the book goes to the author, the editor, the copyeditor, the layout artist, the cover artist, the marketing department, and the magical mystery adventure we like to call "keeping the lights on at the publisher's office." Saying that an electronic copy of the book costs the publisher "nothing" is like saying that an MP3 of one of my songs costs me "nothing." So wait, I don't have to pay my recording engineer anything if I'm only selling virtual music? It's all free money? Score! Sure, Kristoph won't be able to make his mortgage payments or upgrade his equipment, but what do I care? Free money!

If publishers aren't allowed to charge more for the electronic editions of expensive books, they'll refuse to offer the electronic editions until the mass-market paperbacks come out. Hardcovers cost more for a variety of reasons—including the fact that often, hardcover authors are getting slightly larger advances. So that is, I suppose, a bit of authorial greed, because we're putting our desire to feed the cats (and ourselves) ahead of the consumer's desire to pay six dollars for something we spent two years writing. Sorry.

Also, these reactions are, well, hurtful. By saying that authors are "greedy" for wanting to make a living, people are saying that our time has no value. These are often the same people who will willingly pay ten dollars for a movie ticket (and ten more for popcorn and a soda), knowing that the actors were paid thousands, if not millions, of dollars to speak lines that somebody wrote. Every cool quip you've ever heard in a movie or on TV? Yeah, somebody wrote that. If somebody had been flipping burgers to keep the lights on, maybe somebody wouldn't have had the time to come up with that awesome line. Authors need to eat, and if we can't do that through our art, we'll find another way to do it...and things won't get written. I mean, look:

Time to write a book, six months to three years.
Time to sell a book, six days to eternity.
Time to edit a book, six months.
Time between publication and print, one to three years.

How much money do you make during that time? (Don't actually answer that, I don't want to know. I'm just making a point.) Unless you're Stephen King, writing is never going to make you rich, and saying you'd like to eat doesn't make you greedy, it makes you sane.

I am not saying that publishers should be charging whatever they want for everything—just that e-books cost money, too, and that not all the costs of creating a book are in the physical artifact you can point to and shout "book" about. My publisher wants to make money. My publisher wants me to make money, because when I'm making money, so are they, and more, when I'm making enough money, I can actually get that cabana boy and spend a lot more time writing. Right now, I'm literally working myself sick, spending three days in bed, and then doing it again, because that's the only way to stay on top of all the things I need to do.

Authors, as a class, aren't greedy. We're just tired.

Now where's my damn cabana boy?

I am in the fascinating position right now of having two books in the ARC stage—A Local Habitation (Toby two) and Feed (Newsflesh one)—at the same time. This means there are ARCs all over my house, making people feel that I have an extravagent number of the things. My care and caution with giving them away is hence viewed as channeling my inner Scrooge, rather than conserving limited natural resources. (This makes me think of ARCs as some sort of rare bird. The migratory North American ARC, majestic in flight, aerodynamic like a brick.) The cats view them as natural enemies which Mommy Likes Better, and stalk them with ears flat and whiskers in full threat position. My mother attempts to steal them. And, occasionally, reviewers request them or contest entries win them. Right now, they're worth their weight in kittens, and as the window of their usefulness is narrow, I'm enjoying them while I can. Reviews of A Local Habitation are starting to appear, and various bloggers are starting to announce that they've received their copies of Feed, which means reviews of that should start appearing right about when I get my equilibrium back. Fun!

People periodically ask me* how ARCs get out into the wild. Well, there are three main ways, not counting contests. Namely...

1) You are already on a list, which is in the possession of my publisher, and they will send you one automatically. Most large review outlets are in this category. Feed is being sent to Fangoria Magazine, which is sort of like saying "Seanan, we're going to dip you in chocolate, roll you in selected pages from the script of Night of the Living Dead, and deliver you to James Gunn with a gift tag."

2) You contact my publisher and request an ARC. You probably need to prove that you have a review site or an affiliation with a legitimate review outlet. Your Livejournal is unlikely to count, I'm afraid. I'm sure there are exceptions, but you'll need a readership the size of like, Ohio.

3) You contact me through my website and request an ARC. I go through a lot of the same vetting steps as my publisher—I'll go read your blog, I'll look up the magazine you say you're affiliated with, I'll ask the magical moon ponies whether they've really seen you dancing naked at midnight in the middle of Mare Imbrium—before I decide one way or another.

Be aware that any time you elect for an option that includes the word "ask," you may get told "I'm sorry, no." ARCs are an extremely limited commodity, and just to make things more fun, the number printed tends to decline with each book. It's reasonable math. Your first book, you want to spread it as widely as possible. So you give more copies away, trying to create as much early excitement as possible. Your second book, well, some of that buzz already exists, right? So you don't need quite as many free copies out there, circulating and being read before the actual release date. As the number of people asking for ARCs goes up, the number of ARCs to be had goes down. This isn't the author being mean, or the publisher being dumb. This is using your promotional dollars as sensibly as possible.

What do ARCs have to do with promotional budgets? A lot. Page for page, making an ARC costs more than printing a hardcover. The print runs are small enough that they never tip over into bulk pricing, and since ARCs have no resale value (people selling them on eBay and earning my eternal annoyance aside), there's no way to recover the cost, beyond praying that sending the ARCs out into the world will result in positive reviews and higher sales. So as the "spread the word" value of the individual ARC goes down, the number of overall ARCs printed will also decline, putting those dollars back into the promo budget. I've been very lucky, and have received a decent number of ARCs for all three books to date. The definition of "decent" will continue to shift as days go by.

As a secondary note, if you ask me for an ARC, and I say "yeah, okay," and the ARC then shows up on eBay, I'm afraid I won't be sending you any further books. I can't afford the copies or the postage.

Hope this helps.

(*For values of "me" that mean "the Internet at large, only they use my name, so my Google spiders pick up the post and bring it back to me.")

It's time for the fortieth essay in my ongoing series about the art, craft, business, and mild insanity known as "writing." We're in the home stretch now; ten more essays and I'm done with the series. Kate and Amy are watching me like hawks to be sure I don't start something else insane. All the essays in this series are based around my original fifty thoughts on writing, which were written in no particular order. That explains a lot. Here's today's thought:

Thoughts on Writing #40: Starting the Discussion.

As always, context is our friend, and the thought needs to be expanded on. So here's today's expansion:

Talk to other writers about what works for them. Half the things on this list may be pure crap from your perspective; that's okay, because in order to decide that they were crap, you had to think about them. You have put thought into what kind of writer you want to be, and how you want to work. That's fantastic. Listen to everyone, and decide for yourself what you want to take to heart.

The thing about writing is that it's a weird combination of "learn by doing" and "learn by discussing." You have to understand certain things before they can be done; you have to do certain things before you'll understand why the way you're trying to do them is completely wrong. I learned to write a novel by writing a novel. I learned a lot of the things I needed to be watching for by discussing writing with other writers. But how do you filter the good from the bad? How do you justify rejecting advice from someone more successful than you are, or learn to take it from someone who seems to be less successful?

The lines are different for everyone, but let's talk about where to find them, and what they really mean. Ready? Good. Let's begin.

( My thoughts are not your thoughts; my process is not your process; my ideas are not your ideas; my method is not your method. All these things are totally right for me, and may be just as totally wrong for you. So please don't stress if the things I'm saying don't apply to you -- I promise, there is no One True Way. This way for my thoughts on conversation.Collapse )

I called jimhines the other night to talk about some writing stuff and reviewing stuff and other such fun things we have in common. As is pretty normal when a parent is on the phone, his kids found multiple reasons to interject themselves on his side. As is pretty normal around my house, my cats found multiple reasons to interject themselves on my side—more, in fact, than his kids did. They came up to "tell" me things, either in a Siamese bray or in that odd Maine Coon half-trill half-gasp. They brought me toys and demanded I throw them or wave them in the air for cats to bat at. They were, in short, damn nuisances, and they're lucky they didn't get drop-kicked across the house. (To be very clear: I would never do that. Not unless one of them had contracted a zombie virus and was going for the other, and even then, zombie cats is probably the fastest way to take me out during the inevitable zombie apocalypse.)

I apologized, because that is what you do, and the conversation continued. A bit later Jim said, quite reasonably, "I've noticed you take your cats very seriously."

You know what? I do. My cats are cossetted and cared for, cuddled and cursed at, spoiled and sheltered, and I'm proud of that fact. Lilly and Alice are some of the sweetest, friendliest, most social cats you could ever hope to meet. When you come to my house, the cats are there, ready to greet you, ask you about yourself, and demand as much attention as they feel they can get away with. They're the WalMart greeters of the cat world. Anyone who thinks cats don't care about their people only needs to spend a little time with my cats to learn that this doesn't have to be true, and part of why they are the way they are is how seriously I take them. They are some of the most important people in my life, and it's not their fault that they don't have thumbs or speak English.

I periodically get flack over the fact that my cats are pedigreed, rather than being shelter rescues. I've actually learned to recognize that particular lecture as it gets started, since it always seems to begin with one of three or four mostly-harmless statements. My answer stays the same from lecture to lecture: I donate to the SPCA, I do shelter outreach and volunteer work when I can, and I give to private no-kill shelters. I do my part. But I lost a lot of cats when I was a kid to health conditions that are genetic, are passed through family lines, and can be anticipated if you know the cat's family history. In short, I get pedigreed cats so I can meet their grandparents and ask their breeders about the possible health problems within the line. I take my cats too seriously to deal with losing them more than once a decade. Lilly is six. With her health, and her breed profile, she'll probably be around for another ten to fifteen years. Still not enough time, but at least it's long enough that I'll probably be over Nyssa when she goes.

Mostly.

(Not everyone has had my bad luck with cats. I also grew up way below the poverty line, which made veterinary care difficult as hell to afford. That doesn't change the degree of comfort I take from saying "This is Alice, and this big puffy guy here? That's her great-grandfather, who is fat and healthy and happy and beautiful and could probably bench-press Godzilla if he had to.")

My cats are intelligent and friendly; well-behaved because it never really occurs to them that they shouldn't be; stand-offish on occasion, but far more inclined to be right up in your business, checking out whatever it is you think you're doing. Alice will follow you around the house, tail down and eyes wild, watching you for signs of mischief. Lilly will stay between you and me whenever possible, waiting for you to do something she doesn't approve. In short, my cats are individuals, and I take them as seriously as they take me.

So jimhines made a well-considered post on character death, which, naturally, got me thinking about the topic. Because I am a thoughtful blonde, this thinking took about fifteen forms, and eventually resulted in something far too long to be a comment. I think too much.

First off, I want to say that I don't have a problem with the concept of character death. Sometimes, people die. Sometimes, yes, even in fiction. And as an author, I don't think I'm allowed to have a problem with character death. There's a point in Stephen King's Misery where Annie Wilkes, the crazy nurse, is accusing Paul Sheldon of being a murderer because his main character, Misery, has died in childbirth. He protests, saying very firmly that he didn't kill her. She just died.

Sometimes characters just die.

I've had that happen to me twice now: characters I really expected were going to make it through their stories have turned around and said "no, I'm sorry, this is where I get off the train." Once that point was reached, I couldn't go back. I walked away from a book for six months once, and I still couldn't take it back. I'm not saying that fictional people have free will, but I am saying that a well-made character will do things the author doesn't expect, and that a story acquires a narrative weight that can sometimes make certain things inevitable. Sometimes the only way an author can have control is to be untrue to the story, and readers can tell when that happens. A good story is alive. Saving a character who's supposed to die can kill it. I may love zombies, but that doesn't mean I want to turn my books into zombies, y'know?

Similarly, if not the same, sometimes you just need to kill people. It's entirely unrealistic to, say, write a zombie techno-thriller in which absolutely everybody lives. So sometimes, I have characters who are just, in the immortal words of Spider Jerusalem, here to go. Not all of them actually leave! Sometimes people I created as "fire and forget" wind up sticking around, refusing to die, while characters I expected to be working with for years politely take their leave six chapters in. I try to be true to the story. I try not to fight it.

At the same time, very little pisses me off more than a bad character death. One of my favorite television shows recently killed off one of my favorite characters in a manner that was unnecessary and just plain mean. It felt like they were going "how can we make it clear that things are getting really, really serious? Hey! Let's bring back this minor character that everyone thinks we've forgotten about, and just kill the crap out of 'em! That'll make everybody sit up and take notice!" Shock and awe deaths don't do anything but upset me. I've stopped watching shows entirely for pulling that sort of stunt—after the episode of Torchwood where I spent an hour crying and saying "I am not okay with this" over and over, I took the show off my watch-list. I dropped Sanctuary over a death that felt less plot-serving and more "the focus group says..."-serving. And yes, there are books that I've thrown aside in disgust, because it all just got to be too damn mean and purposeless to take.

This is not me saying "if you kill a character I like, you, too, are dead to me." For example, one of my favorite movies is The Fly. Yes, with Jeff Goldblum. For those of you who don't know it, it's a horror movie, and things don't go well for most of the main characters. I've been known to watch it when I'm not feeling well, in the hopes that I'll fall asleep and it'll get a different ending in my dreams, Just This Once. At the same time, the ending is so right, and so justified by what came before it, that I don't mind. And that's sort of the thing. When a character's death is right and true and meant to happen, it shows, and those deaths, even when they upset me, are the way things ought to be.

Jim also makes the point—and it's a good one—that killing is contextual. If I kill someone in a Toby book, that's expected. If I kill someone in one of Mira Grant's books, that's practically a legal requirement. But if I kill someone in a Corey book, people are going to be going "Um, w-t-f, over?" and threatening me with sticks. Genre determines a lot of what you can get away with, and what I'm willing to accept as a reader or viewer. I don't like to be blindsided; I don't think anybody does. (This isn't me saying "no deaths in YA," by the way. People will die in the Clady books. Just that the genre really does determine what is and is not okay.)

I will always kill characters. I can't help it. Sometimes the story needs people I care about to die, and sometimes individual stories are just done. I will also always get upset over senseless character deaths, because there's a big, big difference between "this needed to happen" and "I'm the author, that's why."

Thoughts?

Pretty much every culture I'm aware of has some sort of winter celebration, whether it's religious, secular, or somewhere in-between (since killing a dude to bring back the sun doesn't necessarily imply a particular faith, but definitely implies a belief that something out there takes requests). The depths of winter are the time when we most need to have faith in something, because in the days before cheap insulation, imported food, and really good central air, failure to have faith meant that you were prepared to have the sun go away forever. That's my favorite thing about this time of year. Everybody gets something they can celebrate. Even if all you're celebrating is not being the dude who finds the bean in his bread.

I celebrate my family, both blood and chosen. I woke up beneath a veil of purring blue cats. I spent the morning at the International House of Pancakes with my mother, my little sister, and my little sister's girlfriend. And now I'm on my way to Seattle to spend a week with Vixy, who might as well be my sister for as much as I love her, and Tony, and Jennifer, and all the other members of my extended family that I can cram into my days. I won't see everyone this week; not everyone is there to see. But I celebrate them all.

I celebrate reconstruction. We all burn bridges in our lives, either accidentally or on purpose, and while we may be sorry that we did it, it's hard as hell to shape the ashes back into something useful. In the last year, I have been fortunate enough to rebuild some bridges that provided essential access to the highways of my heart. Just as importantly, I've finally admitted that some bridges needed to be condemned, and ordered them quietly, respectfully torn down. I am happy with the choices I have made, and with the bridges I have built.

I celebrate my writing career. I've been a writer for as long as I can remember. I was explaining the plot of a short story to my mother the other day, and she said "You always have to be writing something, don't you?" I'm not sure even she realizes how true that is. It took me a long time, and a lot of effort, to get to where I could say that my work was of publishable quality, and there are days when I wake up and go "Wait, what? Was there some sort of mistake?" The sight of my book on store shelves has made me cry more than once. It's just amazing.

I celebrate the fact that we are living in the future. I'm writing this entry from 36,212 feet; I know that because the Virgin America trip display tells me so. I can send new stories to my beta readers without the words ever having touched paper—in fact, at least one story managed to make it to print without ever, so far as I know, being printed in any form prior to the page proofs. I can post this entry, and you can read it no matter where in the world you are. We are accessible to each other in ways we have never been before, and for all that it's a double-edged sword, I can't imagine living any other way.

I celebrate you. I celebrate the fact that you have things in your lives to celebrate, and those things are not the same as mine, and that's amazing. I celebrate the fact that we have all shared another season (although not necessarily the same one, since it's summer in Australia), and the world has continued to turn.

Have a wonderful winter. I promise that if I get any say about it, the sun will be coming back again.

Hello, and welcome to my thirty-ninth essay in my accidental series of essays about the wacky little thing that we call "writing." It's a little daunting to realize that not only do I have an accidental essay series, but that accidental essay series is well on the way to being finished. Soon, I'll have to find something else to do with my spare time. Anyway, this series of essays will soon be fifty essays long, all of them based around my original set of fifty thoughts on writing. The original fifty thoughts covered a lot of aspects of the writing life; the essay series is doing the same. Here's today's thought:

Thoughts on Writing #39: Getting Jealous.

There are lots of reasons for getting jealous, so it's probably important that we expand today's thought, and give it a little bit more context. Without context, after all, we're essentially lost in the woods. So here's today's expansion:

Envy is useful; it motivates you to work harder. Envy is toxic; the world is not innately fair. Acknowledge your envy, take a deep breath, and let it go. You're going to find yourself with a lot more room to work if you can do that, and you're going to be a much happier person.

Envy is a fascinating emotion. It's natural: everybody has it to one degree or another. It's normal: it really does happen to pretty much everyone. It's no more automatically a "bad" emotion than anger or sadness or fear, all of which happen naturally and normally and to everybody. But we're taught that envy is bad; that it has no positive sides; that if we're envious, we're somehow in the wrong, and will be punished if we're caught. So how do we deal with something that's natural and normal—and yes, unavoidable—and how do we harness its powers for good? Let's take a look at envy, why it's a good thing, why it's a bad thing, and how to use it. Ready? Good. Let's begin.

( My thoughts are not your thoughts; my process is not your process; my ideas are not your ideas; my method is not your method. All these things are totally right for me, and may be just as totally wrong for you. So please don't stress if the things I'm saying don't apply to you -- I promise, there is no One True Way. This way for my thoughts on envy.Collapse )

Well, it's finally started: Rosemary and Rue is now showing up, with some regularity, on the various pirate sites. (No, I won't link to them, and no, those torrents don't stay up for very long; as soon as I find out about them, I report them to my publisher, who has them taken down.) I find this somewhat upsetting. Not because I hate the Internet. Not because I think that books should only be available to the wealthy. But because, at the end of the day, pirated books are really, really bad for my career.

Multiple studies have been done on the people who pirate music, and they've found that, on average, people who pirate buy more music than people who don't. That makes sense, if you stop and think about it, because music has a very high replay value. I discovered one of my favorite bands, We're About 9, when my friend Merav gave me a mix tape—the oldest form of music piracy—with one of their songs on it: I've since purchased several albums, including the one with that original song. I don't tend to listen to the full albums very often, but every time the individual tracks come up in my iTunes shuffle, I remember that I want to buy more music by these authors. It's music piracy as a form of private radio, and most people—not all, but most—understand that if you want to keep hearing things you like on the radio, you need to support the artists.

Just about everyone I know has at least a few pirated songs. I recently acquired a pirated copy of Freddy's Greatest Hits, a parody album featuring none other than Freddy Kreuger himself. It's been out of print for twenty years. I do not feel any shame about listening to this rare treasure from the horror graveyard...although I'll definitely buy the actual album, if I ever find it.

Book piracy is different, because the way people interact with the media is so different. According to my iPod, I've listened to the Glee cover of "Don't Stop Believing" over two hundred times. Two hundred times. Of course I paid for it. That song is part of the soundtrack of my life now. Looking at my bookshelves, the single book I've probably read and re-read the most times is Stephen King's IT, where I lost track at eighty. I'm a dedicated re-reader. I re-read IT at least once a year, and frequently more often than that. And I'm only up to eighty. Many people don't re-read the way I do, and very few people re-read immediately. So if I download a torrent of the new Ikeamancer novel, I'm pretty unlikely to run right out and buy myself a copy...and if I want to re-read the book six months later, I may just dig the file out of my hard drive, because it's there. Never underestimate the power of instant gratification.

Past experience tells me that this is the point where someone says "Does that mean you hate libraries/people who loan their books to friends/used book stores?", and the answer to all these things is the same: No. In all of these cases, someone has bought the book. In the case of libraries, the number of copies purchased by a given branch is determined by the number of people who request the book, or check it out once it's in the system. Yes, ten or twenty people may get to read a single copy, but with a pirated book, that number is a lot higher, and that initial sale may not have happened. If I loan a book to a friend, the book comes with a high recommendation ("Here, read this"), and even if my friend doesn't buy their own copy, we're looking at one sale for two people, not one sale (or one OCR of a library copy) for some unlimited number. Even used bookstores are limited by the size of the print run, since they can't get more copies than were initially sold, and are thus a vital part of building the readership for ongoing series. They're part of the natural ecosystem.

People complain about how slow some publishers are to adapt the e-book format, but honestly, the concerns over piracy are a really, really big deal, just because of the impact it can have on a book's overall sales—especially for a beginning author. No, I'm not saying that best-selling authors somehow "deserve" to be pirated, but piracy is likely to be a much smaller overall part of the book's footprint. Dan Brown is not going to be told not to write another sequel to The DaVinci Code over piracy. The author of the Ikeamancer books...might.

Publishing is changing. E-books are, and will continue to be, a big part of that. But unless people remember that book piracy isn't exactly the same as music piracy (and hence culturally viewed as "try before you buy," but almost always leading to that eventual purchase), they'll also continue to be a problem.

The Internet and Girls Gone Wild have more in common than you may think. They both encourage nudity. They both involve a lot of audio-visual equipment (and a lot of folks who once belonged to their high school A/V Clubs, myself included). They both look like fun, fun, fun until your daddy takes the T-Bird away, especially when you're half-drunk and it's spring break and nobody's telling you what to do you're not the boss of me. And, of course, both of them are a lot more public than you try to convince yourself when you wake up the next morning. You could walk into your living room one morning to discover that your kid sister has discovered your DVD hiding space, and be greeted with "Is that you/your girlfriend/Mom?" before you've even had a cup of coffee. But while DVDs get accidentally thrown in the microwave and no one's really rushing out to watch Girls Gone Wild: 1994, there's one big thing we all sometimes forget about the Internet.

The Internet is forever. You can't shove it in the microwave. Even if you take down a post, website, or poorly-considered picture, the odds are good that someone, somewhere, may have it in their cache...and may decide to re-post it, just because they can. "Because I can" is a totally valid reason for doing almost anything on the Internet. This is where the wild things are. The wild things have cookies. The wild things also have your really horrible fifth grade school photo, and they'd love an excuse to put it up.

The Internet is not as private as you think it is. I recently read a thread wherein an agent (not mine) said that she had decided not to work with someone because she saw a blog post they'd made, complaining about agency response times and being fairly unpleasant about it. Without saying anything about whether the response times were out of line—largely because I really don't know—I will say that I understand where the agent was coming from: I wouldn't want to enter into a professional relationship with someone whose response to irritation was to identify me by name while complaining loudly. It wouldn't be fun for either one of us. The agent went on to say that she had been notified of this post by a Google spider (magical Google spiders do that sort of thing), and that she later discovered that the blog post was, in fact, locked. Several people promptly started castigating her for being "unprofessional." Some even implied that she had broken into this person's account, or otherwise violated her privacy. Which, well...not so much.

If there was a privacy violation in this instance, it was on the part of the blogging site where the original entry was made—the blogging site that did not lock itself against Google spiders. (Now, I'm not very technical; it could be that the site can't be locked against spiders. If that's the case, I still say the blogging site was at fault, because they probably didn't include "locking a post will not prevent it being mined by search engines" in their privacy setting descriptions.) If there was a judgment error, it was on the part of the person who said "I'm going to use my blog to slam on someone I'm hoping to work with by name, rather than either being really, really vague, or by calling my best friend and ranting until I feel calm." Clicking on an email in your inbox? Not a privacy violation. Reading what it says? Also not a privacy violation. And sadly, the "unsee" button has yet to be invented for the human brain.

The Internet is never private. In the sixteen-plus years that I've been online, I've had embarrassing pictures crop up; I've sent emails and instant messages to the wrong people; I've messed up the privacy settings on blog posts; I've said things I regretted later, and had no way of taking back, ever. I've seen people I care about get burned really badly, either because their missteps were bigger than mine, or because they dodged a little more slowly. It's going to happen to all of us, forever, because that's what the Internet is. So I give you...

Seanan's Reminders for Surviving the Internet.

1. Remember that the thing you least want to have repeated is going to wind up being the one that that gets posted everywhere. The snarky off-handed comment or the bitchy update to your Facebook? The one you think only eight people will see? See, as soon as you think "at least only ____ will see this," it's time to re-think. It's okay to let it all out. Just consider whether you want to do it on a public forum, or via email or instant message to someone you trust.

2. It's not as private as you think it is. Blog posts, Twitter feeds, Facebook accounts, they're all a lot less secure than we like to think they are. People lose jobs because of pictures they put up on their Facebook. Authors lose readers because of things they say on their blogs. I am absolutely not saying "censor yourself into mashed potatoes." We are all people; we all have a right to the ball, and honestly, if you think I'm a freak because I love Disney and horror movies and chainsaws and frilly pink dresses and pumpkins and Halloween, you're probably right. We wouldn't have been good for each other anyway. But I've given serious thought to how much I wanted to share about all these things, and while I am absolutely honest, there are some things that just don't need to be shouted from the mountaintops.

3. Bridges burn easy, and they make a lovely light. We're all human here. If I stomp all over someone else's party, people will remember that. The person who was having the party is probably never going to want to invite me over again...and half their guests may well feel the same. When the person throwing that party is a professional in your chosen field, this is maybe not the best idea ever.

4. Tone doesn't always come through. I make a joke, you take offense and think I hate you forever. You make a snarky comment, I think it's hysterical and never leave you alone again. If people seem to be reacting to you in a way that is the opposite of what you expected, it may be time to step back and a) apologize for the confusion, followed by b) clarifying the situation. A vague disclaimer remains nobody's friend.

5. The Internet is forever. Keep it in mind.

Hello, and welcome to the thirty-seventh essay in my accidental series of essays on the art, craft, and process of writing. We're almost done; the series will eventually be fifty essays long, all of them based around my original set of fifty thoughts on writing. Because the list of thoughts was written in no particular order, the essays are addressing the various components of the writing life in no particular order, and will eventually cover just about everything. Spooky. Here's today's thought:

Thoughts on Writing #38: It Isn't Good Just Because It's Bad.

You may remember that the previous essay, number thirty-seven, was all about hype, and not believing everything that you hear. Now, I'm going to contradict myself a bit, because I said in that essay that there was no such thing as bad hype. Which I still hold that to be technically correct, I'm going to use the word "hype" to describe the flip-side of the "believing too much good press" problem, because it's easier. Today's thought expands to:

At the same time, don't sit around telling yourself how horrible you are, and don't let a few bad reviews shatter your sense of self. Look at the negative feedback as critically as you can, and if everyone is saying the same things, try to figure out whether that's something you can fix—and whether it's something you're willing to fix. I'm not going to stop writing horror just because there will always be people who hate horror. At the same time, if multiple horror reviewers are going "zombies, you're doin' it wrong," I should probably reassess. Don't buy the bad hype any more unreservedly than you buy the good.

It is human nature to believe the bad more than we believe the good. It is hammered into us, practically from birth, that listening to the bad makes us "responsive to criticism" and "realistic," while listening to the good makes us "vain" and "self-absorbed." So how do we find the balance between the two without losing our minds or sinking into the mire? Where is the line between buying our own press and becoming lost in the negativity? You're going to need to remember everything you know about balance and not believing everything you hear, and the sooner you start, the better. Let's take a good look at bad press, what purpose it serves, and how to keep yourself from falling under its sway. Ready? Good. Let's begin.

( My thoughts are not your thoughts; my process is not your process; my ideas are not your ideas; my method is not your method. All these things are totally right for me, and may be just as totally wrong for you. So please don't stress if the things I'm saying don't apply to you -- I promise, there is no One True Way. This way for my thoughts on negative feedback, and why it's so hard to get past.Collapse )

So in case you've managed to miss the news (I sometimes wish I'd managed to miss the news), Harlequin Romance has formed a new self-publishing imprint, Harlequin Horizons, and people are ticked off about it. By "people," I mean "the Romance Writers of America, the Science Fiction Writers of America, and writers here, there, and everywhere." The basic deal is this: you give Harlequin Horizons a substantial chunk of cash, and they will print your book. Oh, and if it's drop-dead awesome enough, they may allow you to sell it to them later (although they won't give you back your money at that point). In the meanwhile, you, too, can be a Harlequin author. Whee!

Watching reactions to this around the Internet has been fascinating, because there are a substantial number of people who don't understand why the community of authors is generally so upset. Unless, of course, we're just trying to keep ordinary people from discovering how easy and fun it is to write novels, and how quick you can get famous once you get past The Man who's been guarding the front gate. What they're overlooking is a set of rather nasty complexities attendant on the idea of this model.

With self-publishing, you must be able to pay to play. Being a first-time author is highly unlikely to make anyone wealthy unless they're already a celebrity. I don't know how much Stephanie Meyer got paid for Twilight, but I'll bet you she wasn't quitting her day job until the royalty statements started coming in. Under the normal model, your publisher pays you. That means that it cost me nothing but time to write Rosemary and Rue. Under the self-publishing model, it would have started off by costing me about six thousand dollars, and that doesn't include any sort of promotion, publicity, or advertising.

Writing is not an unskilled profession. Before you assume I'm saying that if you aren't published, you can't write, please hear me out. Like any creative profession, being a writer takes certain learned tools (a functional grasp of a language, for starters), combined with talent and lots and lots of practice. It's a weird cocktail, and the most intrinsically talented writers in the world still need all three components. How do you get practice? By writing, and by being forced to be critical with your own work. When I first wrote Rosemary and Rue, it was the best thing I'd ever written. By the time I finished rewriting it for publication, it was ten times better, and the first draft had become actively embarrassing. Does using publication as the gold ring work for everyone? No. There are some truly amazing authors who have never been published, either because they're writing things viewed as non-commercial, or because they just don't feel like taking the time. But for most of us, the need to improve in order to achieve publication is a lot of what actually drives our improvement. Taking that away is like saying "okay, you've read a bunch of anatomy books, now take out this woman's spleen."

It takes a village to raise a child. People involved with getting Rosemary and Rue to a bookstore near you: me. My agent. My editor. My publicist. My line-editor. My layout and graphic designers. My cover artist. The entire marketing team at Penguin. The guy who sold all of the above their coffee. People I had to pay for their help: the guy who sold us the coffee. People who knew more about what it takes to make a book successful than I do: everyone but the guy who sold us the coffee (and that's a guess; he may be a former publishing mastermind who just likes the smell of java). It takes an army of people to get a book from manuscript to market, and while you can potentially fill all those roles yourself, if you're not independently wealthy, it's going to be really, really hard. I thought I was pretty savvy about how publishing works; then I published a book. It turns out that what I knew was vague and superficial—now we're at "okay, you've watched a bunch of medical shows, now take out this woman's spleen."

We cannot be our own quality control with absolute accuracy. "But wait," you may cry, "it works in the fanfic mines." "Yes, that's true," I would reply, "but in the fanfic mines, you can edit your work for free." Once you expand to novel-length, the chance for errors expands exponentially, and once you've paid someone to put your book in print, your ability to fix them drops like a rock. Consider the number of errors in the average full-length published novel. Now consider the village that played whack-a-mole with the book before you ever saw it. Being expected to be so perfect that you don't need editing isn't just unfair; it borders on actively mean.

Now, all of these points may seem like they're anti-self-publishing, and the thing is, they both are and aren't. There are totally legitimate reasons to self-publish. Maybe you have six thousand dollars to spare, and you just don't like Disneyworld that much. Maybe you're printing a book of short stories written twenty years ago by your high school writer's group. Maybe you have a huge pre-existing Internet following (Monster Island and John Dies at the End, for example, although these were both small press, not self-published). Maybe you just want a printed edition of your grandmother's cookbook. Whatever makes you happy! Most comic books are self-published, and it works out fine for them (although most self-publishing comic creators also form their own imprints).

At the same time, taking aspiring authors and effectively telling them "you don't need to work to improve and learn, you don't have to deal with rejection and unwanted critique, you don't need to do anything but sign the check" is just...it's mean. It's preying on the vulnerability of young authors who don't want anything but to see their works in print. Sadly, most self-published books will never reach a wide audience; they aren't on the shelves in brick-and-mortar stores, they aren't in print advertising (unless you're really independently wealthy), they won't be sending advance copies out for review. They'll just appear in a catalog somewhere, and on the author's website, where the number of copies sold will depend on just how fast the author can tap-dance for the amusement of the masses. By adding the name of a big house to a self-publishing imprint, and the seductive offer of "maybe we'll buy it after all," Harlequin is effectively monetizing their slush pile, and potentially taking the opportunity to grow away from a great many of the aspiring authors involved.

If I had self-published ten years ago, I would never have improved enough as an author to write Feed, or Late Eclipses, or Discount Armageddon, or Lycanthropy and Other Personal Issues. Now, your mileage may vary. But these are my concerns, and these are the reasons that I really think that this sort of "business venture" is just another way of preying on the vulnerable.

So a while ago—not that long ago, but not yesterday—I made a post about the author/agent relationship, and why I think literary agents are so damn important. I like my agent. I know that state isn't universal, but neither is liking your haircut, and I'm pretty cool with that, too. I try to be mellow when I can.

This morning, I was pointed to a post over on GalleyCat explaining why nobody needs an agent. Apparently, the electronic revolution means that the "middleman" between author and editorial is no longer necessary. Who knew? Or at least, that middleman is on the way to becoming fully outdated. Naturally, at least one literary agency feels differently, and has said as much. I suggest reading both links before continuing, because I, too, feel differently, and will now say as much.

These are the things I do: write books. Make changes according to the requests of my editors. Discuss possible changes with my editors. Review page proofs. Blog. Run blog giveaways of ARCs and published books. Attend conventions. Write outlines and proposals for books I want to write. Play Plants vs. Zombies. Watch TV.

These are the things my agent does: get my books to the editors who are most likely to not only appreciate them, but work with them in a way that is beneficial to both the publishing house and my career. Negotiate advances. Negotiate sub-rights. Protect my interests in areas like audio, comic book, and foreign rights. Make sure that I get paid on time. Follow up with my editors when things are unclear, or when I need more time to finish something. Check in with me to see what space I have on my plate. Understand the industry. Explain things like "co-op" and how marketing budget works. Tell me where my energy needs to be spent, rather than where I necessarily want to spend it.

Beyond the fairly standard notation that many major houses no longer consider submissions from unagented authors, the agent serves a thousand functions that, frankly, I don't have time to deal with. It's possible that I would have time for them, if I wasn't writing four books at once; on the flip side of that, I can also say that if I was dealing with all the functions served by my agent, I wouldn't have time to write four books at once. It all feeds back to a question of resource allocation, and I have chosen to externalize certain resource needs in the form of my agent.

Agents don't just negotiate the size of your advance; they negotiate contracts, which are huge, complex, complicated things. Without an agent to go through the contract and understand it, you need to not only speak the crazy language of literary rights, you need to have strong feelings on all those things. What do you think about comic rights, merchandising rights, foreign rights, audio rights, film rights, the right to construct an amusement park based on your work? What do you think of the time the contract says you'll have to review your page proofs, of the concept of seeing your copyedits, of the way the next work clause is worded? Do you understand half of what I just said? 'Cause honestly, without my agent, I wouldn't, and even now, I'm a little vague on some of the specifics, although I'm learning.

Agents deal with your editors, and can mediate when, say, you miss a deadline because your cat got sick and you just can't cope and what do these people want from you?! Well, they want you to hold to the terms of your contract, and they want you to make a lot of money, because everybody would like to have a lot of money, and if you make a lot of money, so does your publisher. But without that buffer between yourself and the publisher, it's very possible that you could flip out and take somebody's face off, thus ruining the working relationship. Instead, flip out on your agent, and they'll take care of making nice while you hyperventilate in a corner.

A good agent will help your career in a hundred ways...and more, they're very often an excellent gatekeeper, because as soon as you're salable, the agents will be happy to let you know. It's not their job to get you to that point, but once you get yourself there, their job begins, and that job is a hard one. Frankly, it's not a job I'd want to do.

Are literary agents outdated? No. Are literary agents like having the cheat codes to the publishing industry? Yes. You still need to understand what you're doing, but they can make things go a lot more smoothly, and they can keep you from dying too many times before you finish level one. That's more than worth the cost of their commission.

Back in May, I posted about the damage that a bad cover can do to a good book. You can view the original post (and ensuing discussion) here. The consensus at the time was that having a bad cover sucks, and that if your book's cover is bad, it will probably impact the sales of the book. Not exactly rocket science, but still, it's a good thing to think about, especially since—as authors—very few of us have control over our own book covers, so it's good to be prepared to do damage control.

Recently, I got a look at the cover for an upcoming book in an urban fantasy/paranormal romance series That Shall Not Be Named, because I try to be polite like that. For purposes of discussion, we're going to call it An Armchair to Remember, book three in the Ikeamancer series. Our main character, Casey Carpenter, has inherited the family gift for communicating with furniture. Naturally, she uses this power to fight crime, since she doesn't really have anything else to do with her time.

On the cover of the first book, Cushioning the Blow, Casey was pictured as described in the text: reasonably pretty but not going to be anybody's new super-model, with dark hair that needs styling, a wardrobe that looks like it could handle her daily duties as a general manager at Ikea, and a few iconic items in the background. On the cover of the second book, From Desk 'Til Dawn, she was drawn slightly differently, but still believably the same character. Same basic styling, attitude, etc.

On the cover of An Armchair to Remember, she looks like a seventeen-year-old Goth hooker. Please join me in saying, um, what the hell?

Now, I understand that characters will look slightly different from cover to cover. Toby looks a little bit different on the covers of Rosemary and Rue, A Local Habitation, and An Artificial Night...but these differences are, at least from my perspective, still allowably within the range of "this character is Toby." It's the variance between a picture of Alice drawn by Mimi and a picture of Alice drawn by Bill—they look different, but she's still clearly Alice Price-Healy, getting ready to kick your ass. You can draw the same character within a range and still have it believably stand for the same individual.

The cover for An Armchair to Remember isn't doing that. In fact, if I didn't know the book (the theoretical book), I'd guess that we were looking at the first in a spin-off series starring Casey's ironically trampy-campy younger sister, Carrie, who communicates with clothing and manages a Hot Topic in the mall. It doesn't look a thing like Casey. Casey wouldn't be caught dead in that outfit. It is, essentially, the equivalent of sticking Toby in a mini-skirt and push-up bra for the cover of Late Eclipses, after giving her a bleach job and some serious makeup.

How jarring is this for you? How likely are you to pick up An Armchair to Remember when it looks so different from the other books in the series—when the main character looks so different? Is this going to make you look elsewhere, or do you not care by the time you get to the third book in a series? What about new readers? If this was the first volume you'd seen, would you buy book one after digging it out of the back catalog? Inquiring minds (namely, me) want to know.

Recently, I picked up a book that looked interesting. It hit many of my "sweet spots" for plot, description, and cover blurbs from people I trust. The cover didn't do it any favors, featuring, as it did, a generic Urban Fantasy Hot Girl standing in a Playboy circa-1984 pose, but I've enjoyed books with way worse covers. I entered the text in good faith.

By page two, I was ready to fling the book across the room. Why? Because the author had chosen to scramble the spelling of a common-to-the-genre word in a way that made it look not only pretentious, but difficult to read. This is a personal bug-a-boo of mine, since I really do feel that spelling was standardized for a reason, and while I managed to soldier through, it colored my ability to sink into the text for several chapters.

(As an aside, seriously: not all words become more interesting and mysterious when spelled with a vestigial "y." The worst example I've ever seen was in a YA series full of "mermyds," and the fact that I made it through all three volumes is a testament to the power of raw stubborn.)

One reader of Rosemary and Rue posted a lengthy, positive review, more than half of which was taken up by complaints about the pronunciation guide. Specifically, I didn't write down the correct pronunciation of "Kitsune." It's a fair cop—if you pronounce the word as written in the pronunciation guide, you'll be saying it wrong—and it's been corrected for A Local Habitation, but it was, for this person, as bad as if I'd spelled Toby's name "Aughtcober" and then claimed it was pronounced just like the month. Bug-a-boos for all!

Kate recently delivered a long and eloquent diatribe on "back cover buzz-word bingo," which I really wish I'd had a video camera running for, because it was awesome. The summation is that she watches the back covers of books for certain "buzz-words," and, if the book works up to a magical bingo score, she doesn't read it. I do something similar with bad horror movies, since there are specific buzz-words that mean "soft core porn" and "gratuitous torture," and those really aren't what I'm watching the movie to see.

So what are your bug-a-boos? Terribly twisted spelling? Pronunciations that you don't agree with? Buzz-words oozing off the back cover and getting all over your shoes? How about heroines with ruby hair and emerald eyes who aren't appearing in an Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld fanfic epic? Inquiring blondes want to know!

I was intending to make this post yesterday, on the actual two-month anniversary of Rosemary and Rue being released into the wild. Tragically, intentions only count in horseshoes and hand grenades, and my post-World Fantasy exhaustion resulted in my spending the evening watching Supernatural and playing "Plants vs. Zombies." I'm actually not all that sorry. I really needed the rest. All that being said...

Rosemary and Rue has now been available for two full months. People I don't know and never will have bought and read my book. (Sometimes I can tell who doesn't know me, because they call me "Mr. McGuire" in their reviews. I find this adorable.) People have loved it, people have hated it, people have called it original and amazing, people have called it the usual urban fantasy fare. I have stopped having chest pains when suddenly confronted with large book displays. I have stopped having stomach pains when stores had other books in my genre, but didn't have mine. I have, in short, calmed down a lot. Much like a woman who spends a year planning her wedding, then finally realizes she can do other things, I am basically recovered.

Which is good, because now it's time to get ready for A Local Habitation. Which is, I think, a better book than Rosemary and Rue (and I do believe Rosemary and Rue to be a good book; I wouldn't have bothered trying to publish it if I didn't). Rosemary and Rue was the book that established my world, and that means that large chunks of textual real estate did have to go toward making the rules coherent and clear; without the rules, the whole towering palace comes tumbling down. It was also the book that made the largest number of introductions—much like inviting all your friends who've never met to the same cocktail party. A Local Habitation gets to skip all that, and go straight to the "smashing stuff" part of our program. I like smashing stuff.

I have learned a lot about self-promotion, event organization, not taking everything personally, keeping myself pointed in the correct direction, organization of the world in general, and not exhausting myself too much. I have learned that no matter how much I feel like I've thrown my book at everyone in the known universe, there will always be people going "Who are you again?" I have learned that a bad review is not the end of the world, and that a good review is exactly as awesome as I always hoped it would be. I have learned to take the time to breathe.

And now, in a hundred and thirty days, I get to learn all these lessons all over again.

Whee!

I get this question a lot lately. "Why aren't you rich yet?" It sometimes travels in a pack with its two kissing cousins, "Haven't you quit your day job?" and "What do you mean, you can't afford to ________?" I don't punch people who ask these questions, because let's face it, the authors most people think of when they hear the words "professional writer" are Stephen King and Tom Clancy and the like, and they are rich. They live in the country of rich people's problems.

I, as yet, do not. I live in a different zip code altogether. While I'd love to move to their country someday, the odds are very low; they don't issue many passports, and they're very particular about their citizenship applications. For now, I live where I've lived for most of my adult life, in the country of the lower middle class, where shopping runs to Target are a reality, you thank the Great Pumpkin for five-dollar generic prescriptions (and recognize how lucky you are to have medical insurance at all), fifty-percent-off "eat it before the flies come" meat is sometimes the best excuse for a barbecue, and used book stores are a fiscal necessity, rather than a fun form of antique shopping. I'm not dirt-poor. I've been dirt-poor, I didn't like it, I hope to never do that again...but that means I don't quit my day job, and I don't take day-trips to Peru, or whatever other crazy rich person thing people are proposing today.

Publishing is a business. Almost every author, myself included, works on the royalties system, which goes like this:

Person A writes a book. Person B agrees to give Person A five dollars for the right to publish that book, with the understanding that Person A will not need to return the five dollars unless they violate the terms of their contract. This is called an advance. A certain percentage of the cover price of every book sold will be applied against this advance. Let's say six percent, which comes to just shy of fifty cents on your average mass-market paperback. Now, until the cumulative percentages from books sold come to more than five dollars, Person A will not be getting any additional payment. This is called "earning out." If the cumulative percentages never come to more than five dollars, Person A is basically done.

Once the cumulative percentages exceed five dollars, royalties become an option. Awesome! But remember, Person A's agent will still get a percentage of that royalty payment, and Person A will also be taxed on that income. (Self-employment tax is a nasty beast. Seriously, it's the monster under my bed these days, because the taxation on book payments is terrifying.)

Selling a book doesn't automatically make you rich, and I highly recommend that the first thing any new author does after selling a book is contact an accountant who works with authors, because otherwise, the self-employment tax is going to eat their lunch. Selling a book doesn't mean you can automatically quit your day job, and doesn't magically create medical insurance out of the air. John Scalzi once said that a smart author would marry someone with a stable job. I continue to support this as a sensible, if mercenary, approach.

This post brought on by a) the questions above being asked, yet again, and b) a lengthy discussion with my dentist about the incredible amount of work we're about to have done in my mouth, none of which would be possible without my medical and dental insurance. Finances are fun. Self-employment tax is not.

The human mind is an interesting thing. jimhines (who doesn't use tags, and hence isn't getting a link-back here—sorry, Jim!) posted a while back about how it takes ten positives to equal one negative, and he's basically right. I mean, seriously, think back. How many times have you seen a friend (or been the friend) who gets told "wow, that's a fantastic dress" twenty times, then gets told "that dress makes you look like a bloated rhino" once, and puts the dress away forever? Or better still, burns it?

We seem programmed to make negative connections much more quickly than we make positive ones. Example: when I was a kid, I loved-loved-loved strawberry ice cream. I loved it so much that I ate way more than I should have at my sixth birthday, and made myself sick. It was about ten years before I could eat strawberry ice cream again. Another example: I had a big fight with a close friend over a book that she liked and I didn't. I now feel sick whenever I think about re-reading the book to see if I might like it better the second time, because it is forever linked in my mind to the feeling of being yelled at by someone I trusted.

We make positive connections, too—the treasured doll, the lucky T-shirt, the special song that was playing when you kissed your high school sweetheart for the first time (sadly, in my case, the song was by Gwar)—but they tend to be slower to form, which I think is a tragic flaw in the human emotional programming. (I can also see how this is a survival trait, since the ten non-venomous snakes you catch do not keep the eleventh snake from killing you. This does not change the part where I'd really rather be happy for ten snakes than petrified because of that potential future snake with the bitey, bitey fangs.)

I find it sort of depressing that one unkind word can shatter a good mood, especially because we seem so easy with the idea of slinging nastiness at one another—an ease that just grows with anonymity and the Internet (see also Gabe's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory). The resonance of negativity is tempting, because it's intoxicatingly powerful. If I'm having a bad day, everybody can be having a bad day, right? Yay! Bad days for everybody!

It's tiresome. I'd rather just have cupcakes and street pennies for everybody. The human brain is a mysterious and messed-up thing, and there are days when I really just want to take it apart with a chainsaw.

ETA: Jim found the post for me! Yay for Jim!