Publishing is Loosening Up!

The tectonic shifts taking place in the world of publishing are yielding some interesting outcomes. Years ago, when I began submitting short stories with the hopes of cracking into venerable magazines such as Cemetery Dance and Fantasy & Science Fiction, attention to editorial uniformity was such a big deal. Everyone seemed to use William Shunn's "proper" manuscript format (I use it still, for the most part, by the way), and many magazine would conclude their guidelines with the dour sentiment that they would reject the work directly if it didn't adhere to the guidelines. 

If you published your work online (outside of the remarkable exceptions of folks like John Scalzi, who did just that with his first novel prior to being offered a contract), then most agents and publishers wouldn't touch it. The stain of amateurism was, alas, too great for a work to even enter the slush stream.

But now, with markets like Simon451, Hydra, and Alloy Entertainment sensing an opportunity to work with (primarily) digital authors to market and publish (yes, that ordering is intentional) their writing, it seems those ideals are loosening up a little. Many of these hybrid publishers will re-brand an already proven independent success. They'll accept a work in a number of different formats, and the guidelines are less stringent. 

I think this phenomenon is remarkable. It happened relatively quickly, and it illustrates just how fast a segment of the market has shifted to remove some of the traditional barriers to publication that were once pervasive. It also illustrates that content is once again king. That's not to say that professionalism and appearance don't matter, because they surely do. Your submission should still follow a rhetoric of organization and clarity that allows the reader to focus on the story, and not be distracted by typography or novelty.

But I think writers can relax a little, and focus more closely on the story. Write the work you want to read and, hopefully, your readers will agree, support you, and the piece will garner additional attention. Then, when a third party comes knocking, just send them the file and let them make sense of it. If they want it, they'll grab it, regardless of its attention to the almighty guidelines...

 

A Few Quick Thoughts on the Publishing Landscape...

Amazon and Hachette have been locked in a titanic rock'em, sock'em joust since January that is negatively affecting a number of authors' sales. It's the kind of big-business contractual nightmare (they're fighting over the marginal pricing share on e-books, among other things) that makes a writer with an eye toward business want to go out and work in the garden. 

Not all writers care about business, of course, and that's all fine and dandy. I dig the dedication of the 4thaluv crowd, but I also like to get paid for my work. Thankfully, there are loads of good options out there in a landscape in which the emphasis is increasingly placed on building a bigger megaphone. 

The variety of self-publishing services (there are bunches out there beyond those three) are getting pretty sophisticated. Their software is intuitive, and many authors are experiencing strong sales with their independent works. 

Services like Goodreads, Jellybooks, and Library Thing help authors with exposure. They also facilitate contact between writers and authors, which was pretty...stilted years ago. Stuff an envelope. Mail it to a publisher. Wait a few months for a form letter.

Rinse and repeat.

But now folks are chatting in real time, and it's all the better for the world of writing, in my view.

What about short stories? The surge in e-books has spawned a host of fine digital magazines that pay good rates and publish fine stories. If anything, we're seeing a stronger market for speculative short fiction in this digital era. Have a tale you'd like to shop? Check out the Submission Grinder for a home for that story.

All told, there seems to be a lot of fear about the future of publishing, but I think things are following the trends that accompany most disruptive technologies. 

Digital opens more doors for novellas. It allows for experimental stuff that has traditionally been harder to place. It allows for poetry and multimedia and unique new themes that publishers might not have touched in the past.

Things are healthy out there. Some traditions are crumbling. New ways of doing things will take their place. The trick is to find your own path, be pro-active with your writing, and work hard to create something of quality. 

If you have a story that you want to tell, put it on scibd.com or wattpad. If you have a novel, shop it to an agent or send it to Tor or put it up on your own free Web site. There are a number of paths, and it's up to the writer to find the one that doesn't scar his or her feet...

Starting Down a New Path...

I began a new story today. For the last two years, the thrill of starting a new creative project has proven elusive. I've written a few short stories that I'm  proud of, but I've mostly been working on non-fiction.

I was hiking the Timucuan Preserve last year, and the seed for a novel that I'd like to read began to germinate in my imagination. I've thought about that tale for twelve months now. In that time, that seed sprouted into something real--at least as far as my imagination was concerned.

I envisioned the settings, the characters, the narrative arc, and the broader ideas I'd like to play around with. In short, the story was begging to be written, and today I started it.

Four pages. 1100 words.

Chapter one...

Meager beginnings, but exciting times, let me tell you.

It feels good to have finished a novel in the last few weeks (this one dating back many, many months), but it feels even better to have begun another. 

If you have a story rattling around up there, just begging for some clothes, then I hope you'll follow your instincts and take it to the tailor's shop. Dress it up and take it out on the town. 

And (not coincidentally), I'm teaching a creative writing course this fall at FSCJ for those of you that would like some college credit to go along with your creative production. CRW 2000, offered Thursday afternoons at the Deerwood Center. Sign up, and we'll make some magic happen... 

The Art of Repetition

I coach a youth soccer team. The kids are five or six years old, and sometimes they practice great. They stay engaged, they take coaching, they play hard, and they don't fart around out there.

Other times (and, blessedly, this is rare) they don't. They dig in the dirt. They pick flowers. The pick each other up. They karate fight and get stuck repeatedly in the net. 

The field we practice on is next to a small urban farm, where the owners keep pygmy goats. You can imagine my success with running practice on the day they discovered that little nugget of information out.

It all boils down to the good and the bad when it comes to repetition. I listened to a great interview yesterday with Buzz Williams, the new head coach at Virginia Tech. He took a $500,000 cut in pay to go to the ACC because he wanted to test himself against the best. He also talked about how much he loves coaching. Sometimes, he says, the practices are better than the games.

It's so true. Sometimes, you sit down to dinner after a good practice and you just feel energized to have coaxed a nice effort out of the kids. You're happy to help them out, and you're thankful that they care about something enough to show up and work hard at it.

Similar lessons apply to writing. If you sit down every day and try to string words together toward some actual purpose, you're bound to experience the highs and the lows. If you have a bad practice (which is what I consider pre-edited drafting), but you stayed after it--even if it's all going to wind up on the cutting room floor tomorrow--then there's still some real value in that effort. Repetition is the cornerstone of mastery, and mastery is a huge part of identity. You want to call yourself a golfer? Play lots and lots of golf.

You have to write a lot if you want to be a writer.

And then there are those days when the words just pour out of you. On those days, you can only hold the blowtorch and let it go (anybody else out there here this song before? Because it's driving me insane, I tell you...insane). Those are the days that put a little pep in your step.

Sure, the games are exhilarating. They're damned fun. But it's important also to never lose perspective on the process as well...

Trust Yourself and Move Forward...

Along with language arts educators and psychologists, we are aware that as humans most of us carry around a little voice, the editor, that tells us that what we have to say is not entertaining enough or substantial enough to be heard. That editor is a composite figure of everyone in our lives who has diminished our sense of creative ability, from family members, to teachers, to employers, to the society as a whole. We live in a culture where expert story making is a highly valued and rewarded craft. Joe Lambert, Digital Storytelling Cookbook, page 2 

Creativity takes a lot of courage and more than a little perseverance. It's important for those interested in the creative arts to trust themselves and, on occasion, silence that editor. If you've ever written something that wasn't fun for you to capitalize on a trend...well, that's the editor talking. If you've ever cut a scene from a film because its inclusion might not get your work in the finest places, that's the editor talking. Editors are important, of course, but so are instincts, and it's a shame when a voice becomes stifled (or silenced altogether) in an effort to fit into a specific space or ideal... 

Strange Days!

I like to hit the golf course on Thursdays. When I turn fifty years old one day, I'd like to be a scratch golfer with a chance of playing on the Champions Tour.

Super pipe dream, but I shot a low score today on the back nine at Mill Cove...

Anyway, I went to my usual nineteenth hole (Mudville Grille) and I had to hit the can. I'm handling things when the fellow next to me says, "I read your book on vacation. I loved the stories. You have a lot of talent!"

He was talking about These Strange Worlds. He went on, while we were both using the urinals, to highlight his favorite stories ("Picture This," "The Graduate Student" and "Brinn's Mural").

I was flattered, for sure. And thankful. I offered to buy him a beer, but he said he'd get me one the next time he saw me.

I opened up my e-mail the other day to find some fan mail. From Maine! "Dust Country" and "The Graduate Student" scored big, and it was nice to get the feedback.

These are the reasons I hit the word processor. These are the reasons that I really enjoy the creative process.

It's just nice to tell stories that people enjoy...

On Finding Inspiration

I'm teaching a creative writing course for the first time since I moved from Oregon to Florida. It strikes me as humorous that in the last two or three years I've learned more about the writing process than I ever could effectively articulate back in the first part of the decade, and yet I'm less equipped to discuss how to "make" a decent story. The more I write, the more I recognize that the process is simply organic, and any approach to segmentation (that incremental approach almost universally endemic to American higher education) likely leads to mental constipation.

I'm using Shaping the Story and Jeffrey Ford's The Drowned Life as texts. I've fashioned the course, as was my custom in Oregon, into what I hope will be a rigorous workshop. Write, read, revise...repeat. That said, I like to look at interesting stories for inspiration (hence The Drowned Life) and I like a clear discussion of narrative theory (Shaping the Story). We'll season our discussion with a few snippets from Stephen King's fine text On Writing.

There's a passage in On Writing in which King, pretty humorously, cites a number of stories that inspired him to write--not because they were great stories, but because they were so astoundingly poor that King found himself thinking Hell, I could do better than this!

Those moments of epiphany have been happening for me a lot lately, only mine have been the antithesis of what King is saying. Peter Beagle, Laird Barron and Jeff Ford are the kind of writers whose work I'd love to place a story next to, simply because their work leaves an echo. It leaves a bruise, in some cases. When I read these guys, I get anxious to get to the keyboard.

The same thing happened to me when I was a kid and I read C.S. Lewis. My mom gave me an old typewriter way back then, when we were living over on Scotland Road in Pueblo, Colorado. It had a mostly dry ribbon that, when I really got to banging on that sucker, would suddenly clinch up. I had to straighten that thing out over and over again, until it would look like I'd just left central booking when I was done working on a story. Those were the days of perfectionism, so the pages were always covered with whiteout. I was a little OCD that way.

And I absolutely adored The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. That book really got to me; I internalized the plot and tried to capture the voice and I started my very own rip-off, only my kids found an enchanted chest with a set of stairs beneath the blankets.

The story was bad, but you couldn't have told me that. The story's quality simply didn't matter. When I was writing it, I felt the juices pumping. I felt the story, no matter how derivative (a word I probably won't know or understand until my fiftieth year in the world), was golden, and that I was born to give it life.

I mention this because I think we need to capture that sense of inspiration this week. It's all about possibility. We need to, as a group, get jazzed about building worlds. We'll do the theory and we'll read the stories; we'll study the structure and we'll work with postulates.

But more than anything, we just need to do justice to that age-old phrase: I have a story to tell you...

Grow, Baby, Grow!

Literary journals come and go. Some are glossy and smooth; they exist in the corporeal world. Others are comprised of code, existing on the Internet in an organized cloud of neutrons. Some pay well and are widely read. Others pay nothing at all and exist in obscurity.

I have a longish story that is better than a year away from being published. When the check for this one comes (if it comes, which will be another post altogether), I've been considering using the proceeds to pay ten writers $50 each for stories. I might solicit two or three and then open a call for submissions in a short window for the others. I'd pay for some cover art and set the anthology up myself. It's not much money, but whatever it amounts to, it would probably just be scattered on the wind.

I'm under no illusions that it would be a profitable venture. But I think I'd like to try it, all the same. If these were funds coming out of our savings account, that's one thing. But proceeds from a short-story sale are all together different...

I bring this up because I haven't been writing or submitting short fiction. I have a little folder on my hard drive where I lock up these misfit children. Although my file is called "retirees," so it's actually a bunch of obnoxious elderly folks, hitting each other with their walkers and fondling one another with wrinkled tentacles.

I wonder what life is like in that file?

I digress. These stories, maybe one day, will be infused with life. More than likely they won't.

There are thousands of journals, anthologies, magazines and digests on Duotrope. They need content. So why don't I keep making the rounds with these stories?

Many just aren't that good.

I think, at some point, every writer has to look at the less-than-successful work (which, in his or her eyes, once gleamed like a new bike on Christmas day) more objectively as practice. When that happens, it's time to expand your inventory.

Read the magazines upon whose covers you would like to see your name. Explore creative angles on universal themes. Grow the inventory, and try the markets you admire again.

Because the alternative is probably not optimal. It's nice to have a long list of credits, but quality should be the endgame. It's like that theme song to Cheers, right? Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name (or will, if you are writing the kinds of things you also admire).

Writer and editor Rajan Khanna offers a useful insight into the editorial process here.

An excerpt: As far as the reading slush part goes, it can be trying of course. I think sometimes the hardest to take are the stories that have such promise, but don’t manage to deliver on that. Or those that start out with an interesting premise and then go in the direction of well-worn cliche.

I keep a file on my desktop of story ideas I'd like to explore, but I'm committed to working on the novel at this point. I'm tempted to blast older submissions out into the world, just because it's a little odd not having irons in the fire, but I think it's going to get crowded in that old folks home on my hard drive. The plan will be to complete the novel prior to Halloween, then grow the inventory again later in the year.