ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG

I’m off to nurse my throat infection today, spending some quality time drinking tea and staying warm. With that in mind, I figured I’d throw out a grab-bag of recommended reading for writers from elsewhere on the internet. Two of the links below are on the list of things I wish every writer read before they started their career, while the other two are interesting ideas that really change the way you approach either the craft or the community of writing. A Definition of Author Platform (Jane Friedman) The internet irreversibly changed the nature of writing and, as a result, the nature of writing advice.It became truly noticeable about five years ago, where suddenly new writers would ask as many questions about blogging and promoting their work as they would getting their work published, with Author Platform replacing the publishing deal as the thing every writer was chasing. Jane Friedman breaks down the idea of Author Platform into its component parts and really looks at what it is and why it’s useful. Along the way, it actually serves as one of the most useful advice columns about Platform that I’ve come across, in addition to providing an effective definition. For my money, this is one of three things all aspiring writers should be required to read before they set out on their careers, simply because it’ll help them make smarter business decisions. Unasked For Advice to Writers About Money (John Scalzi) This is basically finance 101 for writers and freelance types. Which is

Writers aren’t fond of the word no. It comes from a career that is built around rejection – we spend so much time getting told “no” by editors and agents that it just because natural to start saying yes to things for the sake of hearing the word. And while there are some phrases where this habitual yes can have all sorts of benefits, there are at least three times when aspiring writers really need to learn how to utilize the word No for their own benefit. NO…I’M NOT AVAILABLE FOR THAT PROJECT When you’re starting out, the thought of saying no to a project seems untenable. You’re spending so much time wanting to be published, sending your work out to slush piles and getting back form responses, that the thought of someone contacting you and offering you a writing gig is vaguely dreamlike. And when you do start publishing and the invitations to write for this anthology or that project come through, you say yes without thinking, eager to be part of the working writer fraternity. This is perfectly natural at the early stages of your career, but eventually you hit a point where you have to start saying no. It may be because you’ve got too much work on your plate already, or because the pay rate isn’t quite up to the standards you need it to be at (personally, I’m disinclined to write for free and always have been, even when I started out). Either way, you

I first heard about Donald Maass and his five-books threshold for establishing an audience when I met Australian Fantasy and SF novelists Karen Miller, who’d spent the early years of her career powering through a pretty impressive number of novels back-to-back in order to establish an audience as quickly as possible. The results were impressive: two fantasy series under her own name, an urban fantasy under the pen name K. E. Mills, plus tie in work for both Star Wars and Stargate universes. Eighteen books total in the first five or six years of her career, if the release dates on wikipedia can be trusted. They’re good books, too; you can see my response to her debut, The Innocent Mage, in the blog archives. I’d only just turned my attention to writing SF at the time I first met Karen and I’m not sure I’ve ever told her how revelatory that conversation was for me. It was the first time I’d ever really talked to a writer who had an actual plan to build and establish their career instead of finishing a book and then figuring out the next thing. Holy shit, I thought, I can have a plan. There is data out there that can tell me what to aim for. I’ve been thinking about this a lot for the past few weeks, courtesy of the discussion that surrounded my post about writers not wanting to be published. A lot of people seized on the five books number, and

Last Friday I went out to do a presentation at a local school, talking to kids aged ten to seventeen about becoming a science-fiction and fantasy writer. I’m not usually the guy who gets asked to talk to school-age writers, as evidenced by the notes at the top of my presentation – don’t swear, and don’t mention Horn – and I was actually pretty impressed  when I succeeded in obeying one of those edicts. Talking to kids about writing is kinda weird. See,on the surface, almost all writing advice boils down to three basic tenets: read a lot, write a lot, submit your work. The rest is really a matter of nuance and how to apply that knowledge, neither of which was a strength of mine way back when I was eleven or twelve. Mostly what I ended up thinking about, in terms of the presentation, was the difference between the advice I heard that was actually useful, and the stuff that did actually help me figure out how writing worked. ONE: LEARN TO TOUCH-TYPE WHILE YOU’RE YOUNG When I was thirteen and first faced with the possibility of selecting my own study topics at high school, my mother sat me down and suggested, rather strongly, that I was going to be taking typing as one of my electives. In fact, it may not have been a suggestion. It’s hard to tell with parents, sometimes, especially when you’re thirteen. Now this was back in the early nineties. Not the early nineties