Stuff

Twelve Months On

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Hornets Attack Your Best Friend Victor crept onto the top 100 free downloads in the Contemporary Fantasy section of Amazon Australia over Christmas, snagging a position at #16. This occurred twelve months after I first republished the story via Brain Jar, on the heels of nearly 300+ downloads in various storefronts.

It’s interesting to look at the books that surround it in that section—one of these things is very clearly not like the other ones. Not just in terms of being a short story, but in the choices around cover arts and fonts that position it within the genre.

This pleases me.

One of my great issues with the indie publishing scene lies in the rush to conformity. The conversations that dominate forums are how do I produce fast and earn some sweet kindle money, and familiarity is a powerful tool for achieving that goal. The advice always boils down to the same core principles: hit the genre tropes, use a cover concept that speaks directly to genre, publish fast and find a profitable niche to mine it for all it’s worth.

I don’t begrudge the folks who do it—making money from your writing is an important and powerful thing—but for me it fritters away the true joy at the heart of the indie publishing world: Every madcap idea is feasible & nobody can stop you. It’s a space where you can take chances without fear of wasting time and effort, because everything has the potential to find its audience if you give it long enough (and, unlike traditional publishing, you can).

Essentially, every barking mad literary project you’ve ever dreamt up has potential in the indie world, so long as you don’t have your heart set on making an immediate profit. The economies of scale that see traditional publishing focus all of it’s marketing push on the first six weeks are gone, replaced by a system where books can take time to find their audience.

It can be slower—Hornets Attack is over a year old and just finding a new group of readers who dig its weird little blend of slipstream sensibilities and teenage ennui—but it’s also one drop in a growing bucket of projects I’ve got out there for readers to find.

While Hornets has been killing it of late, Black Dog: A Biography overtook it in terms of downloads leading into Christmas. It’s the weirdest, least-accessible short story I’ve ever written, and it’s still finding its way into reader’s hands. I recently did the math and discovered the Short Story collections tend to sell a book a month on average

Are you Studying To Dream of Stars at the moment?

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If my email and messages are to be trusted, we’ve hit the point of the year where a bunch of students are sitting down to analyse To Dream of Stars and discovering they have questions.

I’m not in a position to respond to people one-on-one due to deadlines right now, but for those of you who have found your way here looking for more information, there’s a whole FAQ post about that story that might be useful.

Then again, it might not. The interesting thing about writing fiction is the way other people see things in the work that you don’t, and that’s been particularly true for To Dream of Stars since I sent it out to my beta readers and they started pointing at interesting-things-I’d-done that I was completely blind too.

Notebooks, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Accidental Creative

PETERMBALL Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption, Stuff

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 inspirations, or thoughts suggested by what you read or see, but it applies especially to ideas that come to you at the tie you give yourself up to concentrated thinking on play-production.

Secrets of the World’s Best-Selling Writer: The Storytelling Techniques of Erle Stanley Gardner

This is, going by the details that follow in the book, exactly what Gardner did.

What’s intriguing about this is the way it syncs up with a lot of the advice in Todd Henry’s Accidental Creative, which doesn’t necessarily advocate for carrying a notebook constantly, but does advocate for engaging in active reading that involves copious note-taking and setting aside dedicated time to ponder a particular problem or idea.

What’s really intriguing about Henry is the way he puts a frame around these activities. For example, when reading, he suggests a short series of questions to ask yourself and take notes about:

  • Are there any patterns in what you’re reading that are similar to something else you’re working on? (My friend Kathleen Jennings, upon reading Accidental Creative, took this a step further by forcing herself to draw connections and patterns to current projects, just to see what emerged)
  • What do you find surprising about what you’re experiencing?
  • What do you like about what you’re experiencing and why?
  • What do you dislike about what you’re experiencing?

I’m relatively bad at remembering to do this (despite the fact that the first step largely what I’m going here), although I do tend to set aside some dedicated study time where I actively take notes. Reading about Gardner’s approach has convinced me it may be worth taking things a step further–I’ve taken to packaging a small pocket notebook alongside my phone (aka my primary reading device, especially for non-fiction), in addition to incorporating any online reading into the bullet journal beside my computer.

It’s stepped up my notetaking game considerably–particularly when it comes to online content, which now involves a lot more thought about what I’m reading rather than just flicking through and bookmarking stuff that may seem useful.