Because I have blog stats and know what you folks are showing up for, here’s a picture of Admiral Coco Marshmallow Flerkin-Wittingstall for your general perusal and admiration. It’s astonishing how much colour she managed to find in our flat, given our general decorating preferences. Astonishing, also, how much of her belly fur is still growing back after she had some surgery prior to coming to live with us.
I found myself falling through a blog hole over at Kristine Katheryn Rusch’s blog yesterday, going back and reading earlier posts she kept referencing. Along the way, I discovered a three-paragraph section that was immediately snagged for my thesis: Then there were the series that I had to abandon because of the changes in publishing. In the 1980s and early 1990s, book publishers loved series. More than that, they loved poaching series from another publisher. Publisher A couldn’t make your series work? Publisher B was happy to snatch up the next book—mid-series—and prove to Publisher A how stupid their marketing department was. But with the collapse of the distribution system in the late 1990s, the consolidation of publishing houses, and the layoff of countless employees, suddenly this poaching practice stopped. A series wasn’t doing as well as it could for Publisher A? Well, then no other publisher would touch it. A series was doing passably well for Publisher A? Then no other publisher would want it mid-book, because they’d have to grow the series—and that wasn’t a guaranteed bestseller. I had one series die in that mess, but I saw the warning signs on the wall, so I wrapped up as quickly as I could. I sold three other series in that time period, and they continued for years—into the new century, when a new problem struck with two of those series: they weren’t growing fast enough. The Business Rusch: Popcorn Kittens. Kristine Kathryn Rusch (2011) There’s a lot writing about the
I’ve been re-reading Secrets of the World’s Best-Selling Writer: The Storytelling Techniques of Erle Stanley Gardner this week, tracking down a quote I wanted to use for my thesis. It’s an incredibly intriguing book–Gardner is, after all, best known for creating Perry Mason, but was also known as the king of the pulps for a time, including a year-long stint where he maintained 13 different series characters. What’s really intriguing is that Secrets isn’t actually written by Gardner–instead, it’s an assemblage put together by two other authors using the vast archives of his notebooks, correspondence, and other resources archived at a university library. This means there’s less “this is how you do it” advice, and more glimpses into the ongoing development of the writer for whom writing did’t come naturally. Gardner taught himself to write using a lot of diligent study and stress-testing of ideas, and recorded a lot of it in his dairies and notebooks. One of the quotes that has stuck with me, courtesy of his notes from a correspondence course on playwriting: To have the plot instinct is a great blessing for the writer. Lacking this, however, the most valuable asset he can possess is the note book habit. Carry one with you constantly. Jot down everything that may be of help in framing and developing a plot, as well as in creating a dramatic scene for a story… The rule of jotting down your thought on the instant does not apply merely to ideas that come as
One of the projects I’d like to work one, somewhere down the line, is essentially a deranged giant monster horror/thriller that should not exist. Since I’m primarily a fan of these in film form, rather than fiction, I set myself the task of reading a bunch of books that serve as an introduction to the form in a literary sense. The result was Shark Week. I kicked off with Steve Alten’s The Meg because a) I’d really enjoyed the recent film in all it’s goofy glory, and b) it had a surprising number of sequels, which immediately caught my eye as a researcher interested in series. The Meg in book form is a very different beast to the film. There are still giant sharks, of course, and plenty of people who get eaten along the way, but the character traits wrapped around the default archetypes are different enough to mean something. Our protagonist, Jonas Taylor, isn’t just a retired navy deep sea specialist, but now has a PhD in Sharks and a not-so-whackadoodle theory that megaladons are still alive after his experiences in hte navy. His ex-wife isn’t a fellow sub specialist, but a highly-ambitious journalist whose life has been destroyed by protagonist Jonas Taylor’s obsessions and isn’t quite an ex yet. Everyone else is similarly a few steps sideways from the film adaptation, giving us a decent spread of POV’s and a whole lot of internal dramas to play out. The Meg isn’t a subtle book, but its a
There’s a really good post about process, goals, and identity over on LitReactor at the moment. It’s worth taking a gander at the entire thing, but I’ve grabbed the key take-away here: You can never take the process away, but once you attach your identity to goals and results you can’t control, it’s a recipe for disaster. Dying on the Mountain: How Goals Will Kill You and How to Focus on the Process, Fred Venturini @ LitReactor Or, to phrase it as one of my writing mentors did: you have no control over whether you get published or read. You do have control over how much you write and how much you submit. I keep circling around that particular idea, because it’s so similar to the key takeaway when I was seeing my psychiatrist about anxiety: don’t focus on what you think or feel, focus on what you do. So much of my anxiety is predicated on what Ellen Hendrickson has dubbed The Reveal — the fear that we’ll be judged, and that those judgements are right. It’s a fear that a thing that is fundamental to who we are will be taken away, because we don’t truly believe that we are that person. It’s a measuring of success against results, rather than action. (For more, you can check out my original post about Hendrickson’s book and the lessons it taught me about writing). One of my recent reads was James Clear’s Atomic Habits, which comes at this from a
Mike Shazkin’s recent post about the 7 Ways Book Publishing will change is a great read (albeit one that’s influenced by his relationship with the distributor Ingram). I wanted to pull one entry out for here because it’s a really useful way to look at the the shifts in book retail: Books have a ton of characteristics that make them perfect for online shopping. You want to shop from a full selection no store has. It is very seldom when you must have a book right now. And books are heavy, so you don’t really want to carry them around if you can avoid it. The view from here is that it will continue to be very challenging to make physical book locations commercially viable. As a bookish person who has a bunch of friends who work in book retail, many of whom are doing it tough right now, that’s the kind of idea that’s not going to entirely welcome as a thing posted here on the blog. Especially since Shazkin suggests the people who are going to compete with the big river will largely be other big retail outlets who are moving into the online space (Walmart and Costco in the USA – god knows who our local equivalents will be here in Australia). Of course, I’m not in book retail directly, so there’s a bit of upside/downside there. For one thing, the move away from limited-shelf-space stores is actually a net plus for writers who have a deep
The Sunday Circle is the weekly check-in where I ask the creative-types who follow this blog to weigh in about their goals, inspirations, and challenges for the coming week. The logic behind it can be found here. Want to be involved? It’s easy – just answer three questions in the comments or on your own blog (with a link in the comments here, so that everyone can find them). After that, throw some thoughts around about other people’s projects, ask questions if you’re so inclined. Be supportive above all. Then show up again next Sunday when the circle updates next, letting us know how you did on your weekly project and what you’ve got coming down the pipe in the coming week (if you’d like to part of the circle, without subscribing to the rest of the blog, you can sign-up for reminders via email here). MY CHECK-IN What am I working on this week? I’m having one of those weeks where I’m largely following my nose on the writing front, but I suspect the next five days will be spent drafting a new short story (Project Hook) and trying to get my attention back on the thesis after nearly three weeks away from the project. What’s inspiring me this week? I read Shastra Deo’s debut poetry collection, The Agonist, earlier this week and immediately started taking notes about things to pay attention too in the work. There’s a precision to the language that really lifts of the page, but it’s
This week has been all about regrouping after the latest life-roll to disrupt my year (the third, and hopefully, the last). My brain is heavily scattered at the moment, and my anxiety gets to drive a lot more than I’d like, so I wanted to create a space where I could just sit down and get my priorities in order. Part of that meant dragging out all the work spaces on my desk and taking a close look at them. Which, inevitably, means dragging out a veritable mountain of notebooks and taking a look at everything that’s in progress, then looking at the current unfinished projects on the digital front. I had assumed I was in a notebook-lite workflow just prior to doing this. It would appear…not so much. That said, it looks worse than it is, as not every notebook represents an active work project. There are two finished Bullet Journals in there, left in place so I can reference details and notes from last year. There’s two full-length notebooks containing a novel draft that I really need to get around to typing up. There’s two of the smaller notebooks which are filled with notes for the Keith Murphy series and the various fixes and new works I might choose to do (and, at this stage, may not). Two notebooks for my superhero RPG campaign (you can see the rulebooks poking over the top of the pile on the left), and one for a campaign that I’m planning when
One of the most useful guidelines for blogging is sitting down every morning and asking yourself: “what is the most useful thing I can put out into the world right night?” Some days that will be a deep thought. Some days, it will be much simpler. Like this: There are plenty of reasons to be irritated by the Christmas season starting in October, but I’ll admit that the easy availability of panettone for three months of the year almost makes up for it. My partner sold me on these a few years back, when she described it as “delicious Italian bread cake,” and it lived up to the hype. Remarkably soft to bite down on, and lighter than most cakes I’ve picked up in my life, but also filled with fruity awesomeness. Interestingly, there’s an attempt underway to try and designate authentic Panettone as a product of a specific region, much like certain wines, but it hasn’t yet reached fruition. I suspect ours wasn’t authentic, but it’s still damned delicious. So. Panettone. It’s worth picking one up if you’ve never tried it before. Great fresh. Even better when you toast the last few slices and put a little butter on it, which may not be the traditional method of eating it, but so it goes in these, the late stages of capitalism.
Today I return to the internet the same way I left it a week ago: by posting a picture of my cat doing cat-like things. There’s a lot of gathering-up-the-threads going on today, trying to figure out where I’m at in a whole bunch of projects. First cab off the rank is calling the shelter we adopted the Admiral from last month, letting them know that our thirty-day trail is going well and that our cat is very definitely going to be our cat. We like her and want to keep her. Second cab off the rank is taking a look at my daily routine and hacking it a little, trying to figure out where the kitty fits in. The admiral is an inside cat, and our apartment is kinda small. That means she needs a lot of exercise of the hunting-and-pouncing kind, or the thing that she hunts and pounces will inevitably be our feet. This means there needs to be two or three sessions of play fit into the daily routine, giving her a half-hour or more of chasing a mouse on a string around the flat. It’s a genuinely gleeful experience for cat and owner, but it’s also disruptive. A new daily behaviour with no strong indicators about when it needs to happen, or what occurs after it. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, but we picked up the need for this much play after watching Jackson Galaxy’s show (and reading his book,
Offline today, on account of heading to my Grandmother’s funeral, so I’m posting this picture of the Admiral engaged in one of her weirder sleeping habits. You don’t get to hear the tiny snores that kick in when she falls asleep with her head like this, but trust me, they’re adorable.
Craig Mod’s latest Roden Explorer newsletter features excerpts from a long speech he delivered about dopamine, smart phones appholes, and the social contracts of entertainment. You can check it out via his newsletter archive, and I’d suggest it’s as required reading if you’re an author trying to forge a living in a social media world. Part of what interests me about the speech is the way he charts the progression of certain media outlets into dopaminergenic publications–a frequent problem with legacy media outlets transitioning into an online space, forcing them to at least partially shift their business model to capturing your attention and keeping your eyeballs on their sites in order to reap sweet advertising bucks. When these incumbent newspapers were print only, there was only one way to “enter” the content: Through the front page. The front page was all you could see on the news stand. Once you bought the thing, you were converted to a paying participant. Make note: Design and contract parameters go hand in hand. When the front page is the only entry point, only a single page of the publication requires hyperbole to convert passers-by to readers. Online, every article becomes a potential entry point. And so there is an incentive for pervasive hyperbole in order to “convert” eyeballs in service to ads and the consumption of more attention. Media Accounting 101: Appholes and Contracts, Craig Mod This, in turn, changes the contract between reader and publication, and not always for the better. Where my interest
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