Publishing – Page 7 – Kelly McCullough

Tastes Right

I do all sorts of things as a writer and critiquer on the basis of how they taste to me, whether the words feel right in my mouth as I’m mentally speaking them—I always internally voice as I’m writing, perhaps because I came to writing from theater.

The best example of this comes from a critique I did for fellow Wyrdsmith Sean Michael Murphy. There was a sentence where I wanted one word changed—I don’t remember which one now, but that doesn’t really matter. It was one of a large number of suggestions. Sean was pretty happy with most of the suggestions, ignored some, and wanted to understand what I was thinking with others. This was one of those last and the conversation went something like this:

Sean: Why did you suggest this change? I think you’re right, but I’m not sure why.
Kelly: It just tasted better.
Sean: But why did it taste better?
Kelly: It just did.
Sean:…(waiting patiently)
Kelly: (unable to let the silence stay silent, begins mentally unpacking the process) Let me think about it…

It turned out that when pressed I had six separate reasons for wanting this one word changed. For me, the change reinforced something in the sentence, reinforced something in the paragraph, reinforced one of the story’s themes, amped up a plot point, showed a contrast between character voice pre and post traumatic event, and removed a slightly clumsy related word repetition.

I’ve found that’s usually the case when my brain says something tastes better rather than opting for a specific reason—my sub-conscious has a bunch of reasons to change something and is too lazy to articulate them all without being pressed. My new structural sense is definitely atasting thing because it’s hugely complex. I trust it in part because I know that the taste of something is very important for my process, but I still want to unpack it because I enjoy unpacking.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog March 19 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Writing Order /= Publishing Order

Update up front: I originally wrote this in 2007 when I had just finished my 10th novel and started my 11th. My 1st, which was also my 4th came out last year, and my 9th was going be my 2nd.

You with me so far? My 11th may well be my 3rd, but I’m hoping that my 12th won’t be my 4th, because there are several earlier books that I’d like to see sell and go to print before that and I might try to slip a 12th in before I write the 4th that’s currently sold.

It’s moderately complex now, and likely to get crazy over the next couple years, and that’s ignoring that some of the books were written concurrently. When you add in proposals and partials (which could be characterized as quantum manuscripts) it gets really loopy. So I thought I’d put it all down here as a memory aid and to illustrate an earlier discussion about why you can’t tell anything about writing speed from publishing speed.

Currently complete and projected novels in writing order (updated through 2013):

01. 1990 Uriel
02. 1991 The Swine Prince
03. 1992/1993 The Assassin Mage
04. 1998/1999 WebMage
05. 2001 Winter of Discontent
06. 2002 Numismancer
07. 2003 The Urbana
08. 2005 Chalice book 1
09. 2006 Cybermancy
10. 2006 The Black School
11. 2007 CodeSpell
12. 2008 MythOS
13. 2008 The Eye of Horus
14. 2009 SpellCrash
15. 2010 Broken Blade
16 2011 Bared Blade
17. 2011 Crossed Blades
18. 2012 Blade Reforged
19. 2013 School For Sidekicks: The Totally Secret Origin of Foxman Jr.
20. 2013 Drawn Blades
21. 2014 Darkened Blade
22. 2014 ?????

Currently complete or projected novels in tentative publishing order:
01. 2006 WebMage
02. 2007 Cybermancy
03. 2008 CodeSpell
04. 2009 MythOS
05. 2010 SpellCrash
06. 2011 Broken Blade
07. 2012 Bared Blade
08 2012 Crossed Blades
09. 2013 Blade Reforged
10. 2014 School For Sidekicks: The Totally Secret Origin of Foxman Jr.
11. 2014 Drawn Blades
12. 2015 Darkened Blade

But any of the following could end up in print between #2 and #4 (2013 update: That was the 2007 order and projection—now Uriel is out of the lineup, though some of the others might get slotted in somewhere after Blade Reforged but before Darkened Blade)

Uriel
Numismancer
Winter of Discontent
The Urbana
Chalice
The Black School (goes to my agent in March)

Plus there are proposals which could get written at any time
Chalice books 2-4
The Eye of Horus (proposal—now complete)
The Shadow in the Blood (proposal)
2013 update adding a few more books in pontentia:
The Hand of Light (Black School III)
Aqua Vitae (series proposal)
Mirror Duel (series proposal)
Nightmare Academy
The Uncrowned Prince (series proposal)

And partials which may or may not ever get written (still true)
Uprising
Outside In
Ave Caesar (mystery)

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog March 12 2007 , and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

The Interface

Writers have things that really excite them. Readers have things that really excite them. The trick is connecting the two, because in real terms the two are only intermittently the same. Furinstance, the thing that really makes me want to write is creating a cool new world and bringing people there. Of course, there’s no market for writing travelogues for places that don’t exist. So, I need to make sure that I find some way of connecting my passion to my readers, because no readers means no sales which means having to find something else to do. That means telling a really cool story that’d peopled with characters that my readers want to spend time with. And that’s more or less the order in which a story goes together for me:
World and all the cool stuff.

Story that shows off said world.

Characters that are appropriate to the world.

But that’s only one of 1001 and one ways to do it, all equally correct, and all of which have to have some way of addressing and engaging the reader. So, I’m wondering, how y’all handle that interface. In On Writing Stephen King talks about having his target reader (I think it was Muneraven who brought this up at Marscon, but I’m terrible at remembering that sort of thing, so if was someone else, please leap forward and take credit). I don’t have a specific target reader other than myself. I try to write a story that I would really want to read. Others will have other systems, including (I presume) pretending that there is no audience, because the thought of actual readers is paralyzing for some while they’re working.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog March 5 2007 , and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Pitching Your Book Part V: Pitch Sheets

Most of what I want to say about how to write a pitch sheet I’ve already said in the previous four parts of this series talking about synopses. The main difference between the two forms is length.

So, what I’m going to do here is post a diverse set of examples. Below you will find a pitch for a novel I’ve never written, one for a novel I’ve written and haven’t yet sold (though it’s out with an editor who would like to buy it), and one for the first novel I sold, WebMage. All of these are exactly as they went out to editors. I will also include the long form synopsis for WebMage for comparison. After each pitch I’ll include a brief note. Oh, and there will obviously be major spoilers.

The rest of this post is beyond the cut to hide the spoilers and because it’s enormous.

Continue reading “Pitching Your Book Part V: Pitch Sheets” →

Deciding Not To Quit

We had an interesting discussion at Wyrdsmiths the other night about not quitting writing. It was stimulated in part by a note in the acknowledgments of Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty and the Midnight Hour “to Dan Hooker for calling the day after I almost decided to quit.” It was something that resonated for me when I read it—I always read acknowledgments—so I brought it up at the meeting.

It was a moment all of us who were there had experienced at least once, and I suspect that almost any writer you talk to, no matter how well published, will be able to tell you about that moment. Maybe five times I’ve felt frustrated and depressed enough about the whole writing gig to seriously contemplate finding something else to do, but I’ve had only one true deciding not to quit moment.

It came in January 2005 right after a Wyrdsmiths meeting. At that point I had a good agent who believed in my work, more than 20 short stories either in print or forthcoming, 2 novels in the trunk and 5 out with various editors none of which had sold. I was also having major family stress and had seen a three book hard/soft deal that was over three years in the making fall apart at the last possible moment. That had happened a couple of months earlier and several editors had passed on the books involved since.

I was depressed, not clinically, but damn close, and I felt like 15 years of hard work had officially gone to hell. But worse, far far worse, I wasn’t enjoying writing. I was doing it—I can’t not—but I wasn’t taking the joy from it that I always had. For perspective, I’ve worked at art or entertainment my entire conscious life. I pursued theater in serious way from ages 11-22. When I was 23 I switched to writing and found the second great love of my life (my wife Laura is the first) and I never looked back. Not until January 2005.

So came, the meeting that sent me over the edge. The trigger doesn’t matter. It wasn’t about that, it was about me and writing. I drove home (an hour) getting more and more down the whole way. When I got in I went off to stare at the ceiling. For probably three hours I did nothing but think about how something I had loved and pursued for years had come to this and how I just wasn’t feeling the joy of it anymore. And I tried to figure out what else I could possibly do with my time—I was writing full time. And the answer was nothing. Nothing. There wasn’t anything else that appealed to me half so much.

I don’t know what I’d have done if something else had occurred to me. And the fact that nothing did was totally bleak at the time, because I felt like the only thing I wanted to do was going nowhere and would continue to go nowhere. But in retrospect it was a powerful moment. I had come to place where I realized that writing wasn’t just something I did that I could walk away from. It was who I was down in the bedrock, and I would keep at it no matter what.

The next day I got up and wrote, though I didn’t much enjoy it. And the next day. And the day after that. And somewhere in there I started to love the work again, and then WebMage sold and Cybermancy. In the last year and a half I’ve written three novels that I am damn proud of, one of which is hands down the best work I’ve ever done. And now, two years on, I’m finally loving writing with the same joy and deep passion that I found when I first started. 2014 edit: adding that seven years and eleven novels have passed since I wrote this and I’m more in love with writing than ever.

Deciding not to quit was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made and one of the hardest. If you’ve been there, you know what I mean.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog February 22 2007 , and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Pitching Your Book Part IV: What a Synopsis Should Do

I’ve been mulling this over a lot lately. The marvelous agent/blogger Miss Snark* claimed at one point that all a synopsis had to do was be short, not painful to read, and show that the author hasn’t screwed up somewhere in plotting the book. I’m not sure that I agree. Those seem like good minimum conditions, but I think I want more from my work than to demonstrate I haven’t screwed up in the minimum number of words.

I want to leave the reader with questions that interest them enough to want to read the whole manuscript. This does not mean questions about what happened–those are by way of screwing up, because the reader of a synopsis needs to end their perusal knowing what happens. What I’m talking about are questions of method. I want my reader to say something like That’s cool, I want to see that or, Really? Why didn’t I see that coming, I have to read this, or just, oooh, nice.

A well written synopsis gives conflict, plot, setting, character sketches, and some genuine flavor of the book, at least in my opinion, and if that takes slightly longer, I think it’s okay. I keep coming back to the idea of talking about what excites you about this story as a writer, because that’s what’s going to convey the important parts of the book’s flavor. Perhaps this is another instance where strong voice is important.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog July 20 2007 (this one is out of its original sequence to include it in synopses week), original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

*Once upon a time there was an agent who also blogged under the nom-de-blog of Miss Snark. She was smart, funny, and extraordinarily helpful. Enough so that as a reader/working writer, I went through and read here entire blog front to back and created an index for it. That index was one of the most useful tools for educating writers that I’ve ever created. It was originally published at Wyrdsmiths, and now I’m mirroring it on my site.

Pitching Your Book Part III: Bite Sized Advice

Practical advice on writing synopses.

1. Learn how to do it. If your career ever takes off, it’s likely to be an important and painful part of your life.

2. This is easiest if you can A, write several of them in quick order, and B, get your hands on someone else’s synopsis to read and really thoroughly critique. Knowing what worked or didn’t work for you in someone else’s synopsis is a great learning tool. Doing this with several is better, and synopses that have sold books are probably best, especially if you can read the book at the same time. You needen’t ever give the critique to the author, that’s not why you’re doing it.

3. The normal structural stuff: one inch margins, double spacing, etc.

4. The abnormal structural stuff: Present tense. Five pages is standard for most synopsis requests. For pitch sheets one page, (single spaced!?!-what’s up with that?) is what I’ve been told is standard and how I do mine. different editors and agents often have different rules for these, so YMMV.

5. Dig through your favorite books. Read the dust jacket or back of book blurbs. Really study the ones that successfully represent the book in question. Try to write several of those for your book. Do the the same with the ones that strike you as bad. Pick the best of your sample and expand from there. Don’t try to trim it down from the book.

6. Again, what’s cool to you should drive the synopsis. But don’t forget plot, character, setting, and theme.

7. Try to write it in the same style as the book, not the same voice necessarily, but a funny book should have a funny synopsis.

8. Pace and swear. No really, this helps. So does a long walk away from the computer where you mutter to yourself about what your story is really about.

9. Call your writing buddies. If they’ve read the book, ask them what they thinks its about. This will be enlightening and possibly terrifying. If they haven’t read it, tell them about it. Remember what you’re telling them and use it.

10. Treat yourself when you’re done. The job sucks and you deserve a pat on the back.

11. It goes to eleven!

12. Write the one sentence version. Expand from there.

13. If you outline, grab the outline and trim it to the right size. Then edit for tone and format.

14. The rules can sometimes be bent. My WebMage outline was ten pages double spaced. Both agent(s) and editors were cool with this. Don’t try this at home, i.e. without the approval of your agent if you’ve got one.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog February 2 2007, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Pitching Your Book Part II: Building The Pitch

Synopses suck. Really, they do. It’s pretty much a truism that if you the writer could have condensed what you wanted to say down to five pages, you’d have written a short story. So, we’ll just take as a given that you are going to lose a lot of detail in the process of converting your baby into its operating instructions. This is doubly true of pitch sheets (more on those later) and pitches, which have the added benefit of performance anxiety, a live audience, and any issues you personally have with public speaking.

So, first, the pitch. A pitch is the verbal version of the pitch sheet, which is your novel on a page, and worse, it begins with the tag line, also known as the one sentence version. Aiee!

There’s all sorts of advice out there on how to do this, what to include in the synopsis, proper format, etc. I’m just going to assume that if you want to look for those things you can, and focus on the key internal emotional context. If you can get that, the rest is an extremely aggravating exercise specific to the book.

What someone is really asking when they ask you about your book is not all the fiddly details, though those are important too. What they’re asking is: Why should I read this book? What’s exciting about the story?

Now, you can never really pick out what will excite someone else about your work, because everyone outside your head interacts with your story in strange and mysterious ways. What you can pick out is what turns you on about the story. For example, I’m a world-driven writer. I do all the other things too, plot, character, theme, prose, etc, and as a part of a pitch or synopses I need to talk about those things. But at core, what gets me going is coming up with a cool world and exploring it through story.

It has been my experience that when I start with setting, and let my enthusiasm about the world drive the conversation, editors and other writers become involved in the conversation and interested in what I’m telling them. Contra, when I start with what I think they want to hear, I bomb.

So, with my novel The Black School, I might start out with “It’s an alternate World War II novel set in a world where industrial scale black magic— sacrifice magic—has become the most important means of combat.” Then I’ll go on to give my audience some of the back story of the world because that’s where a lot of the cool is-like, there is no white magic, at least not at the beginning of the book.

After that, I’ll address the specific setting and the characters involved: The Black School, a young mage student, his mage girlfriend, the teachers, the enemy—shape changers from another dimension—etc. As I go along, I’ll also explain my themes: industrial impact on environment, the ethics of war, the implications of fighting a genuinely, verifiably, evil enemy, when does the end justify the means?

That’s all rough and off the top of my head as I sit here, but it’s also the product of a lot of practice. I’ve been answering the What’s it about? question for years on more than eighteen novels and dozens of short stories. Mostly those questions come from friends, family, and fellow writers, but that’s all to the good. If you practice with a friendly and genuinely interested audience, you’re going to have better results at crunch time.

The things you’re excited to tell your sci-fi buddies about your work should be the exact same things you’re excited to tell an editor or agent, because agents and editors aren’t the job, they’re people who are really interested in the same kinds of stories you are. Neither job is one that someone gets into without loving the genre (Note: the same is true no matter the genre). Run with that, talk about what excites you in the field and what you love about your story and others. You may not make the sale, in fact, considering the odds against any particular sale, you probably won’t. But you might make a friend and you’ll have a hell of lot more fun.

I’ll go into more specifics on pitch sheets and synopses later—though it looks like I may have to write a brand new part four to this series to do it, hmm.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog January 30 2007 , and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Pitching Your Book Part I: The Elevator Pitch

This will be a multi-post discussion of pitching, pitch sheets, synopses, and proposals, none of which are much fun for most writers.

We’ll start with the elevator or, personal, pitch. Why do it at all? That’s the first question since it’s really the book that makes the sale. What’s the point? I’m not too fond of them myself, for reasons I’ll explain below, but here are a number of reasons why you might want to do this.

1. Many writers have never actually had any interactions with an editor beyond the profoundly impersonal form-rejection. A pitch session allows a writer to actually verify the existence of a real live human being at the other end of the process as well as exerting their own personhood to the editor. This may not do any good, but it can help a writer feel that they’re not up against some giant inhuman system and make them feel empowered.

2. Mad personal skillz. Despite what stereotypes might say, many writers are social creatures and some are even very good at personal interactions. Writers who fall into this category may believe (with some reason) that they can do a better job of convincing an editor to give their novel a look using tone of voice, gesture, eye-contact and other interpersonal tools than they could through a query and synopsis or pitch letter. Depending on the writer’s skills on that front—a related but not identical skill to novel writing—they could well be right.

3. Multiple projects. Some writers are idea fountains. They have ten or twenty novel ideas at any given time. And, as part of deciding which one to work on next, they’re interested in editorial opinion, believing (not unreasonably) that an editor is going to be more likely to buy a novel on a subject they liked from the inception.

4. Nothing else has worked. After the tenth rejection on the fifth book, a writer can get to the point where anything that has any chance of moving their career along looks like a good idea.

5. Choose your own adventure. I’m sure there are many other reasons, and I’m sure some of you could name them.

Okay, so here’s my promised explanation of why I don’t like to pitch my novels. First off, I’m a writer. If I wanted to work with a live audience I’d have stayed in theater. I really really don’t miss stage fright, and pitching triggers it for me. When an editor asks me about my current book I’m not fool enough to decline to talk about it, and I do practice thinking through what to say in those situations. That’s because if I have to improvise on the subject of novels I turn into a babbling cretin. The question “What’s your novel about?” induces instant split personality disorder.

The half that is still a theater person usually goes into “wit” mode and tries to say things like “it’s about a hundred thousand words, why do you ask?” This is not a smart idea, and the frontal lobes are pretty good at stepping on the impulse. But having half of your brain trying to turn a serious conversation about your work into a stand up routine leaves only half a brain for the actual conversation. Worse than wit mode though is the actor’s nightmare, when the actor side of my brain suddenly realizes it’s in a terribly important performance and that it doesn’t know its lines!

Then there’s the writer half of my brain, which immediately starts whining to itself. “If I could tell the story of my book in two minutes I wouldn’t have had to write a novel.” This is true on some level, but also pointless. Then my writer brain starts trying to condense and synopsize, both of which are important skills, but are much easier to deploy at the keyboard with plenty of advance notice—or at least that’s what my internal writer voice says.

Basically, without proper preparation, it’s all bad. The separate parts of my brain make horrible individual decisions and then start yelling blame at each other when it all goes to shit.

So, what should you do when you’re on the spot? I’ll talk about that next time in part II, Synopses Suck.

This post was originally written in part to respond to a thread over at making light. In the original thread there was some discussion of the pluses and minuses, real and perceived, of pitching a book to an editor.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog January 29, 2007 , and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)

Pen Names

There are five good business reasons to use a pen name. At the time I wrote this I believed the following to be true:* I am likely to write under multiple names for the first two, and it is possible that at some point I will be forced into the third, though I hope not.

Overpublishing (see H&F III below). You produce more novels than the market, in the form of your editor(s) are willing to let you publish. This can be because you’ve got a big back catalog that shouldn’t all be released at once, or because you’re simply a fast writer—more than two books a year. I definitely fall into category one, and I’m hoping to fall into two as well once I can get loose of some non-writing commitments and gear up to writing at the pace I think I can comfortably achieve.

And now, a digression (are you surprised? Didn’t think so). If you can write more than two books a year without a significant deterioration in the quality of your work, your chance for long term financial success as a writer is significantly increased. This is because, A, you get paid more on simple linear basis and it helps build a dedicated readership if you produce reliably and, B, a good part of writing income is a non-linear phenomena. Book advances can run anywhere from ~5,000 dollars (a typical advance for a new writer) to ~3-4,000,000-deep fantasyland for almost everyone but the tip-top sellers in the fiction markets. Advances are based on previous sales which are wildly non-linear. 20,000-50,000 copies is pretty good for a first book, and what a lot of writers sell each time out. However, every so often, for reasons that no one seems to understand, a book will hit the sweet spot in the reading public’s mind and take off like a rocket. It is not unlike winning the lottery, though the returns are generally lower in comparison to the work involved. And, of course, the more books you write and sell, the more chances you have to hit big.

Multiple Unrelated Genres or Styles. Say you write sweet sappy romances, dark vicious serial killer murder mysteries, and oblique literary fantasy. The readership overlap for these is not going to be huge, and if a reader of one of these stumbles on another by dint of looking your name up and ordering from the other genre, the cognitive dissonance may cause them to have trouble reading future books from the you they liked before. In my case, I’ve written high-fantasy farce, adventure fantasy with a humorous element, dark adventure fantasy, urban noir fantasy, and dark to very dark YA fantasy. If you add in short stories and partials, I’ve also written space opera, hard sf, psychological and fantastic horror, light murder mystery, romance and a variety of poetry. I guarantee that someone going from my farcical FimbulDinner short (WT #339) to The Black School’s ultra-dark WW II YA without any warning is going to feel a certain amount of whiplash.

Dead Name. Because of the way sales are now tracked and books bought, an author, even a multiple-award-winning author with decent if not great sales can end up in a position where the editor who loves their work can’t buy books from them under that name anymore. This leads to one of two choices, quit writing or use a new name. For people like me, who can’t not write, the choice is an easy one. It’s even one I’ve consciously planned for and, though some writers have trouble with the idea of writing under a name other than their own, I don’t. One of the reasons I’m seriously considering starting a pen name sooner rather than later is to try to establish multiple parallel careers from the get-go. For writers who choose this route there is a decision to be made in concert with their editor, which is: how open should I be about being multiple people? There are writers who use multiple pen names that everyone who wants to make even a modicum of effort can dig out. There are also writers who have pen names that are so secret that when the writer makes an appearance they do so under that name with no hint to anyone that they exist as any other person. And, of course, there are writers who fall everywhere in between.

Necessary Anonymity. This can come from having a dead name, mentioned immediately above, or from having a non-writing career that is incompatible with your literary work. For example, an author who writer fetish erotica as second career or hobby while working with children in the day job. This is one of those cases, where no matter how good and responsible the writer is in their day job, there is going to be a certain percentage of parents who would object violently to the idea.

Unpronounceable/Hard to Remember/Too Long for a Book Spine. I think this one is self-explanatory.

Other reasons. There are many other reasons why someone might choose to write under a pen name, but I think I’ve covered the bases for business choices. I’d like to note also that I’ve heard from a couple of editors that they prefer where possible to have writers write under their own names, and are somewhat suspicious of writers who “don’t want to put their name to their work.” Also, anyone submitting work under a pen name must include their real name with the submission. Names and pen names are authorial tools, use them well. And that’s all for now.

*These days, I am much less convinced that I would ever write under a pen name. The field has changed radically with the growth of indy publishing—writing under a pen name makes much less sense in a world where your career is much less dependent on finding a good publisher than it is on making sure your readers can follow your career wherever it goes.

(Originally published on the Wyrdsmiths blog December 21st 2006, and original comments may be found there. Reposted and reedited as part of the reblogging project)