Sean L Flynn

An author's blog

Category: Author’s Journey (Page 2 of 3)

A Dance with Designers

September 23, 2020 /

Previously on Game of Tomes

In A Clash of Copyeditors, two talented freelance editors improved my Raether’s Enzyme manuscript and I then struggled to merge their edits into a final draft. I bought my own copy of the Chicago Manual of Style and verified that we now use the lower-case internet. There was much rejoicing.

Two is Good. Three is Better. Right?

Clash’s dual-slit copyeditor experiment went well enough that I was keen to try it again with the cover and interior design. I liked Reedsy as a place to connect with freelance professionals but it was too early to put all my eggs in their walled garden. One of my eggs, yes. The other I would entrust to someone else. Someone out there.

Be careful for what you wish for. To that end, I started my search with the following criteria in place and immutable:

  • One stop shop. For the cover, interior, and eBook to be consistent, I wanted one designer (or team) to develop all three. Typography on the cover should inform the interior. On a more concrete level, the dimensions of a paperback’s cover spine depends on the page count of the interior.
  • Genre agility. Raether’s DNA contains thriller, sci-fi, and a dash of superhero story. The designer portfolios I was looking for needed breadth. There are artists and studios out there who can land your cover solidly within the romance, science fiction, or fantasy spaces. I was looking for an artist who could compose from a multi-genre palette.
  • License free. Once I had the completed work, I needed to be free to use it without accounting for additional use fees. You know, in case I sell too many books.
  • I strive to be clear and forthright in my dealings. I prepared a project brief describing scope and challenges as I saw them. The designers I wanted to work with would cite details or ask pertinent questions in the course of formulating their offers.

The project brief I sent to each designer began thus:

Short version

Cover and interior design for eBook and print. 114,000-word manuscript. Mixed genre – a contemporary thriller with elements of science fiction and superhero origin story. Includes text messages, email, simple tables, and a few other stylistic flourishes that preclude direct application of a template.

I am exploring this process for the first time. I may hire more than one designer. In that scenario you would be paid in full and thanked profusely but might not see your contribution to the book go to market.

The long version goes on from there into spoilers territory.

After a long search, I landed on a book design site that I liked. Their portfolio was diverse and included authors that I recognized. The prices were higher than I expected and did not include eBook formatting in the package that was otherwise right for my project. There was space for my brief in the request-a-quote form, so I added it. I clicked submit and waited to hear back via email. The response was disappointing. Boilerplate outlined a cover and interior package that started out $500 more expensive than the package I had asked about. That base figure covered a page count that was much smaller than I knew Raether would need. The quote disagreed with the web site and indifferent to the details I had provided. I chose to go no further.

I approached the next design site with the same brief and more trepidation. Unnecessary trepidation. The designer (interior) had read the brief and asked to see the manuscript to better set the bid. These were folks I could work with. I had my non-Reedsy design team.

All this while, I had encoded most of my criteria into Reedsy’s marketplace search queries and spent many hours reviewing bios and portfolios. After much sifting and sorting I got it down to two candidates. One had a strong, broad portfolio and a background that fit the project well. The other had a distinctive distinctiveness to his work. I wanted to see what he would do with the project. I requested quotes from both. Be careful what you wish for. They were both available. Both were interested in the project and attentive to its requirements. Both were fair and reasonable in their offers. Dangerously reasonable. As in: I could hire both of them for what that first design site was asking. So that’s what I did.

Dosado and Away We Go

Every dance has certain steps. The copyediting dance is relatively simple. The writer presents the editor with a manuscript and any notes that might be helpful. The editor may in time respond with questions about the manuscript’s idiosyncrasies. The editor delivers a version of the manuscript with their recommended changes tracked by Word. The writer happily clicks ‘Accept’ on 95% of the changes and agonizes over whether the remain errors are something super clever and special. The dance partners thank each other and move on.

The book design dance is more involved and iterative. The steps I observed while collaborating with all three teams went like so:

  1. The writer supplies the manuscript, notes about what they are looking for, and examples of relevant cover art.
  2. The designer creates two or more preliminary cover designs.
  3. The writer spends a day thrilled with and fascinated by the designer’s imagination and skill.
  4. The writer agonizes about which design to choose.
  5. The writer picks one design to move forward and writes up their thoughts on the cover.
  6. The designer evolves the cover in response to the writer’s notes and delivers one or more variations of the core cover.
  7. Repeat steps 5 and 6. The designers I worked with offered more than one revision as part of their services. If you need more than three, chances are there’s a communication problem or you don’t really know what you’re looking for.
  8. The writer signs off on the cover design.
  9. The designer takes the manuscript, front matter (copyright, dedication, etc.), back matter (acknowledgments, author bio, etc.) and instructions from the writer and combines them into a print-ready PDF.
  10. The writer reviews the PDF and responds with any notes and corrections.
  11. The designer updates the PDF in response.
  12. Repeat steps 10 and 11 as needed. (Raether needed due to its formatting extravagances.)
  13. The writer signs off on the interior. The page count is now known and fixed.
  14. Optional: Paperback full cover design. Skip if the project is eBook only.
    1. The writer supplies back cover blurb text and ISBN number.
    2. The designer extends the cover design to include the spine and back cover with barcode.
    3. The writer reviews the full cover design and responds with notes.
    4. The designer updates the full cover design.
    5. Repeat steps c and d as needed.
    6. The writer signs off on the full cover.
  15. Optional: eBook interior design. This is like the print interior design, with EPUB files taking the place of the print-ready PDF.

Working with one designer, a manuscript with conventional formatting, and a story with clear genre, this dance is intricate but the choreography is straight-forward. Working with three designers on a more complex manuscript (by novel standards), a mixed genre story, and consulting with my beta readers, is where the dosado comes in. From my perspective, it was more of a square dance than a waltz. I was switching partners, repeating steps, and listening for the next call. The extra work was rewarded with sustained excitement.

The Covers

In the first draft of this post, I went into detail about dance Steps 1 through 8. I described each of the cover candidates, my reactions to them, and which ones I chose to develop and why. That was the right thing to do for a private journal and the wrong thing to do for a blog post. While I had anonymized the designers, I was still exposing details of our collaborative dialog and painting with words works-in-progress that were not intended for a wide audience. To put it lightly: It was unprofessional. To put it honestly: I was betraying the designer’s trust.

Allow me to summarize. Each design team started with the manuscript, some notes, and a link to the educational saga of my own attempt at designing the book. The preliminary designs were exciting and diverse. Each artist found their own themes to emphasize and each of these pictures spoke a thousand words about what I had written. Each was a key with the potential to unlock the interest of readers who will enjoy the book. Studying the designs and writing feedback for the artists sharpened my understanding of what I was looking for. Picking one design from each team to develop forced me to separate what I wanted and liked from what the book needed. Reaching Step 8 was an awesome milestone, repeated three times.

Here are five of the things I learned during this part of the dance:

  • Don’t over-specify the design. What the designers created was far more interesting and original than what I had in my head. I put that creativity at risk by sharing too many of my own thoughts. If the designer’s process includes reading the manuscript, let the story itself make the suggestions.
  • Write good feedback on all the preliminary designs. You’ll only develop one, but what you loved about the others (and what didn’t quite work) will inform the evolution of your preferred cover. Getting your reactions and reasoning down in writing clarifies your thinking.
  • Putting your characters on the cover is hard. I read that without searching out a model and commissioning a photo shoot, you aren’t going to get a great match for features, expressions, or poses. This turned out to be true. Working with glimpses, abstractions, or silhouettes can put your protagonist on the cover without stealing the one of the most important things the reader imagines.
  • Test the designs at thumbnail size. Beautiful, subtle images and typography weaken when the cover is one of many thumbnails the reader is browsing through an online catalog. Unless or until the reader is looking for your book, the cover has to do its work when it’s small.
  • Favor fuel over maps when providing feedback. Inspire change rather than direct it. Request amplification or reduction of emotions instead of dictating new design elements. Identify problems in terms that allow the designer to find the solution. I did make some very specific requests. “Could we see the apostrophe more clearly?” The most nit-picky was: “Could we increase the kerning here?” Picking of nits should be the exception, not the rule.

On to the Interior

Dancing with designers inside the book’s cover is less emotional than the cover design. Absent interior illustrations, it’s all about layout, typography, and getting the fine details right. Some people have passionate opinions about fonts and might argue with their designer over which style of Baskerville to use for the body text. I’m not one of those people. Each design team picked a different set of fonts and all are pleasing to my eye. For a novel with the usual mix of narration and dialog, the first version of the interior may be the final one. Reviewing might catch widows and orphans, which are easily fixed.

Raether features stylings for which there appear to be no industry standards: dialog via text messages, email, and Slack chats. Its scene breaks take the form of headlines culled from the internet. These features presented a creative challenge for the designers. I had solutions for these problems and corresponding Word styles for the manuscript. The trick was to make them clear and pleasing on the printed page. As a general rule, a novel uses one font in its body text. There may be bold face in the chapter headings and occasional italics. After seeing the text messages in the main font, I asked the designers to use a sans serif font, like the ones you’re used to seeing on your devices, for all the electronic communication. This made the transitions between the digital world and the regular narrative clear.

The text messages were not done making trouble. In the manuscript and in each interior design, you see them as on your phone, with the messages from one person on the right and the other on the left. The designers had trouble keeping the messages on their correct sides. My bafflement turned to frustration. How are you getting this wrong? It’s right there in the manuscript! I didn’t actually blow up like that at them. I just made notes off all the places where the errors occurred. The errors were fixed. I cooled down and realized that if they were all having the same problem, it might well be in the manuscript. In the course of formatting the messages, I had allowed Word to spawn sibling styles for right and left side messages. Failure to consolidate those styles meant that while it looked right in the manuscript, the work the designers did to transform the message styles was error-prone. Document your fancy-pants styles and apply them with rigor.

The upside of needing revisions to the interior PDF was that I found seven manuscript errors that had slipped through copyediting. The designers were all kind enough to work those corrections into their revisions.

Popping down to the EPUB

EPUB is the (family of) standards underlying most eBooks. Under the hood, your typical EPUB eBook is a ZIP file containing XML documenting the book’s structure, CSS files describing its stylings, HTML files for all the chapters and sundry sections, and image files for the cover and any interior artwork. Having worked on Microsoft’s XPS documents and early versions of its web browser, this isn’t unfamiliar territory for me. Nonetheless, I sought help to ensure Raether’s eBook offered readers a polished experience.

Two of the three design teams opted out of the EPUB part of the project. To their credit, the Word files for the interior PDFs can be converted to EPUB and Amazon’s corresponding format via tools like calibre and Kindle Create. The process turned out to be mostly automated and otherwise straight-forward.

The third designer signed up for the job and probably wishes he hadn’t. Little did he suspect I would draw him into a vortex powered by my neophyte ignorance and long history in software development. He provided me with .EPUB and .MOBI versions of the book. I downloaded a variety of eBook readers to my PC, iPad, and iPhone to test out the file. I sideloaded the MOBI onto my Kindle Paperwhite. I changed color schemes and font sizes. There were problems. Some of them I attributed to dodgy apps. But on the Kindle, Kindle apps, and Apple’s books, I expected perfection and got bungled drop caps at the beginning of each chapter. The cover image was either clipped or stretched. I freaked out.

The designer was flummoxed. It looked great when he tested in Kindle Previewer 3. I downloaded this program and told it open the file. The other eBook readers had opened the file instantly. Kindle Previewer 3 popped up a little progress window. It wasn’t just opening the file. It was ingesting it. In the progress window, text flashed by. Something about ‘Enhanced Typesetting’. It turns out that drop caps are facilitated by ‘secret sauce’ that Amazon adds to the file as you hand it off to their KDP self-publishing site. Apple and the other big eBook sellers likely do the same. EPUB is an independent standard, but the big players “add value” to provide a more premium experience than the core standard allows. I needed to trust the system(s) to make things right. I apologized to the designer for raising the alarm. Ever the professional and diplomat, he said the project had been a learning experience for both of us.

When the Music Stops

I have three great designs. Each captures an aspect of my story and illuminates it with an artists imagination. Each is right in its own way. I want readers to see all three and pick the one they like best. But that misses the point. There aren’t any readers out there who will pay their good money for my book based on the strength of my name. I tempt myself with the possibility of selling different designs through different channels and tell myself it would be a form of A/B testing. Traditionally published books get different covers in different markets. I have spare ISBN numbers to apply as needed. Could I attract attention with such a stunt? Yes. Would I sow confusion where I need clarity? Probably. Am I trying to rationalize avoiding a hard choice? Definitely.

When the music stops, there can be only one. Somewhere down the line there may be an opportunity to share the other designs via special editions. For launch, I need one cover to share and advertise.

There is one more test to run. One more set of data to collect. I need proof that that each design works. Please stay tuned.

A Clash of Copyeditors

June 8, 2020 /

Previously on Game of Tomes

Mad scientists must science madly. It is their nature. In my A Game of Edits post, I confessed to not applying appropriate controls to the experimental changes in my writing process between Rather’s Enzyme and The Gray God.

Having learned about patterns of weakness and error in The Gray God via AutoCrit, I unlocked the manuscript for Raether’s Enzyme and applied the tool there. The results were generally good, but I knew that I had introduced at least one new class of error, which I resolved to leave for the freelance copyeditor to find. Mostly this was just laziness my part.

Two for the Price of Two

The next step for Raether’s Enzyme was to send the manuscript off to a professional for copyediting. Years of work as a coder taught me that no matter how good you think your code is, you really should get someone to test it. That someone needs a keen eye for weakness, diligence, persistence, talent, and a very particular set of skills. If you want your software to be worthy of a customer’s time and money, it behooves you to get someone with those skills to challenge your code to be the best it can be.

The written word is like computer code. Errors in syntax and grammar can crash the interpreter in the middle of informing or entertaining the reader. Ambiguous references can leave the reader in an undetermined state. Inefficient use of language can lead the reader to look for a better solution. If you want your book to be worth a reader’s time and money, it behooves you to employ a good editor to spot your surviving errors and suggest improvements.

If one editor is essential and good, would two be better? Surely! I am a novice novelist and Raether is my first novel. There is room for improvement. Enough room that writerly insecurity alone was enough to rationalize hiring more than one copyeditor. I didn’t want to admit that I was acting to quell mere insecurity, so I came up with additional reasons.

  • Redundancy improves robustness. Raether is 114,000 words long. Even the best editors will miss or excuse something in all that text. The more editors you employ, the lower the odds of an error getting past all of them. If one editor fails to deliver for whatever reason—say, a pandemic–the other(s) might still come through.
  • A good editor is hard to find. The internet presents a cornucopia of talented freelancers with solid resumes and glowing testimonials. It might be hard to lose, but how hard is it to win? To find the editor with the skills to polish your book, the diligence to make it happen on schedule, and who you otherwise want to work with in the future. The odds of making that match go up the more editors you work with. (You can also improve the odds via word-of-mouth referral, but that requires having friends who know editors.)
  • Two more people will have read my story. Granted, an editing pass isn’t a normal reading and I’d be paying them to do so, but it still counts. Doesn’t it?

After this, the whole experimental methodology thing began to take a familiar turn away from rigor. Working with gradstudentfreelancers.com had been productive on the (premature) proofreading. The editor had pointed out some copyedit-level errors gratis. I knew he had more to contribute to the project. He would also enjoy a head start to the extent copyeditors must suppress their curiosity as readers about “what happens next?” and he knew the answer.

The search for a second editor led me to reedsy.com. The site features a marketplace of freelance professionals from various disciplines who post descriptions of their backgrounds and selections from their portfolios. Client ratings and testimonials provide additional information. An elegant search feature makes finding the right candidates straight-forward. Finding the right one for the job in this talented pool remains challenging for a noob like myself.

For my first pass, I searched for copyeditors who work on mash-up genre fiction. That produced a nice, small slice of the professional pie. One editor had a background and an eclectic portfolio that resonated with me. We exchanged messages and he cheerfully agreed to provide a sample edit of an excerpt from Raether. The excerpt was a slice from a few chapters with a good mix of dialog and narration. It also featured my which/that error. He returned the sample edit, Raether and my first contact with professional copyediting. He had fixed my which/that and various other minor errors, which was all to the good. He also rather aggressively changed my simple saids and askeds to more descriptive dialog tags.

There is a style schism in the writing world between those who limit dialog tags to said/asked, and those who like to mix in other verbs for more nuanced tone and general variety. In Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, he rules in favor of only using said. Cormac McCarthy declines to use any dialog tags, or quotation marks for that matter. Numerous beloved and successful writers have characters that whisper, grumble, reply, and query. I decided early in the writing of Raether that I would only break with the said/asked camp on special occasions. As a rule, I treated dialog tags as a form of punctuation and used them to slip pauses into characters’ lines and clarify the speaker in scenes where more than two characters were talking.

My initial reaction to the sample edit was: Dude, I wouldn’t allow me to make a stylistic change this sweeping at this late date. I cooled off and realized that his edits were, in their own way, cool. This fellow was engaged in the project on a level where he was creatively making it better. By the lights of his preferred style. It wasn’t my style. If I hired him but told him not to improve my dialog tags, I’d be asking him to fight his preferences and suppress his creativity for the length of the project. I’d be asking him to not do his best work. I declined his offer and revised my search criteria to cover the mystery and thriller genres.

In the interest of efficiency, if not fairness, I approached five new editors with my work proposal. One was no longer available and declined. The remaining four graciously provided sample edits. The number of corrections and suggests varied. Some went light with their virtual red pens. All had useful observations and Chicago Manual of Style corrections. One editor stood out for her ability to both correct the text and suggest improvements without trampling on the story’s voice. She found my which/that, moved the text towards reconciliation with Chicago, made good suggestions, and highlighted patterns of weakness that I had missed in my many passes over the manuscript. She was a good match for the project.

I accepted her offer. We exchanged messages and I briefed her regarding some of the manuscript’s eccentricities. She started the work on schedule, asked a few pointed questions during her edit, and delivered her final edit before the scheduled deadline. During the coronavirus outbreak of 2020. I was (and am) happy with both her work product and with the overall collaboration.

The Double-edit Interferometer

Sending one manuscript to two editors is akin to a double-slit experiment.

Doubleslit3Dspectrum

The interference pattern that emerges when you compare and combine the edits can tell you more about the text and the process than you would learn by looking at only one or either independently. In many places, the editors agree on a change. The editing waves reinforce each other. I don’t recall any cases where they recommended conflicting changes. There was no destructive interference.

The interesting part of the interference pattern broke the interferometer metaphor. Each editor made corrections that the other declined. One enforced Chicago’s deprecation of using capital letters for emphasis. Raether’s narration is sympathetic to the POV character of a given scene. The protagonist mentally capitalizes certain words: the Program, the Look, The Thing on the Screen. That edit lowercases these to align the manuscript with Chicago. The other editor left Megan’s capitalizations alone, but lowercased ‘internet’. It turns out that the 17th edition of Chicago declares that in general use, the Internet is now the internet. I had to buy my own copy of the style guide after searching the Internet internet failed to resolve the dispute for me.

Both editors were generous with their observations and suggestions, bringing complementary strengths to the project. The manuscript is better for their efforts. The strange curves of the story are polished so that the reader’s eyes might glide over them. Any surviving errors are artifacts of my combining their edits or stubbornly resisting their advice.

Raether’s Enzyme is ready to go to the book designers.

I can’t help but think of an old computer science joke:

Every program can be made one byte smaller. There is always one more bug. Therefore, at the end of optimization and debugging, all programs are one byte long, and wrong.

A Game of Edits

March 2, 2020 /

Failing Hard at Experimental Design

When you’re setting up a scientific experiment or exploring an alternative engineering solution, it’s a good idea to fix as many variables as you can so that you can better judge the ones you’re studying. I have utterly failed to exhibit this prudence in the course of writing The Grey God. Many of the writing process variables are in play. Few are fixed. This is not methodical.

  Raether’s Enzyme The Gray God
Incubation Screenplay NaNoWriMo
Drafting Planning Pantsing
Word Processor Movie Magic Screenwriter 2000 and Microsoft Word Scrivener
Notebook OneNote Scrivener
Workshopping Helium Exchange (screenplay) Scribophile
Self-editing Tools Word and Grammarly Grammarly, HemingwayApp, AutoCrit

This post will attempt to tease out the results of my ongoing experimental use of AutoCrit in the self-editing phase of the project.

Gamifying the Editing Process

AutoCrit is a suite of editing and text analysis tools that lives in the Cloud. Its advanced features are accessed via subscription. The free tier includes a text editor that is adequate for composing a novel’s manuscript. Where it gets more interesting is in the ‘Professional’ mode. For $30/month, AutoCrit will dice and slice your text with a variety of statistical and heuristic analyzers and assign your work corresponding quality scores. It will also give you a score relative to your genre and major authors. AutoCrit turns editing into a game.

Gamification is not a new phenomenon. Reframing tasks as games has a long history in education, sales, and other endeavors which include elements of competition or self-improvement. Rewarding people with scores, badges, smiley faces, and thumbs-up add game-like perks to fitness trackers and social media. AutoCrit rewards you with better scores for ‘improving’ your writing.

I put improving in quotes not to disparage what AutoCrit has to offer, but point out that optimizing your score in AutoCrit has notable limitations. The software doesn’t read your story. It can’t judge the depth of characterization, find plot holes, or critique your pacing and structure. What it can do is apply fixed rules and identify patterns that deviate from an analysis published works. It can flag word usage that is considered poor form in commercial fiction.

Working with AutoCrit is like having a precocious six-year-old niece who has taken an interest in your work. You explain to her a few of the rules you’re working with and she takes them to heart. She sits down beside you and starts pointing to the text. “What about that?” “And that?” “Right here, you have an adverb. Adverbs are bad, right?” She really gets into it. You say, “That’s okay, it’s where my character is talking, so it doesn’t need to be right.” She ignores that because she’s on the hunt. You’re just about to politely suggest she go outside and play when she points out something you missed. You realize that what she lacks in nuance, she makes up for in tenacity. Playing the game with her is productive, but it is not without risks.

Applying AutoCrit to The Gray God required exporting the manuscript to a Word .docx file and uploading it into AutoCrit. I parked Scrivener on one side of the screen and the AutoCrit browser tab on the other and worked my way down through the manuscript. The biggest initial finding was that I had an adverb problem. Sure, I didn’t overuse words ending in -ly, but I dropped in ‘just’ all over the place. Things were just outside. Just before. Just it. I used the word in just about every adverbial form it could take. I just didn’t see it until AutoCrit called me out on it and suggested I remove just about a couple of hundred uses. Cleaning that up tightened the writing and improved my score. I got into the game and was happy with the results.

I was so happy that I cracked open Raether’s Enzyme, which had been in lockdown since the proofreader worked on it. The AutoCrit pass took longer than I expected. I corrected passive voice issues. In pursuit of a higher score, I shaved over 3,000 words off the text. The manuscript was leaner and smoother than before. This was good. It was also broken.

The damage resulted from my ignorance conspiring with my greed for a better score. AutoCrit flagged ‘that’ as a (potentially) problematic filler word and recommended an aggressive target for reduction. In the course of lowering my ‘that’ count, I substituted ‘which’ for ‘that’ in numerous places. My score improved. As you might guess, the two words are not entirely interchangeable. I suspected as much and researched ‘that’ vs. ‘which’. Sigh. Yes, there is latitude for using ‘which’ in place of ‘that’, but to be right you should use ‘that’ for restrictive clauses. And you precede ‘which’ with a comma in nonrestrictive clauses. I shouldn’t have made those changes. Now I wonder what else I broke playing the AutoCrit game.

I’ll find out over the next month when the Raether manuscript comes back from the copyeditor. I may reactivate my AutoCrit Pro subscription to see how it scores the changes.

Scribophilia At First Sight

February 17, 2020 /

Putting the ‘Social’ in Anti-Social

Wanda Wilcox: “I can’t stand people. I hate them.”
Chinaski: “Oh, yeah?”
Wanda: “You hate them?”
Chinaski: “No, but I seem to feel better when they’re not around.”

– Charles Bukowski via Barfly

It has been said that writing is a solitary endeavor, but very few writers work in total isolation in our connected age. Many writers meet in local critique groups. Others split the difference between being cloistered and interacting with actual people at a fixed time and place by joining online writers’ groups.

My Raether’s Enzyme screenplay was lightly workshopped at the defunct Helium Exchange website*. The novel was written in isolation. For The Gray God, I resolved to experiment with my writing processes. I moved from Word to Scrivener. I employed additional editing tools. And I resolved to join a writing group.

Actually meeting people seemed a bit much and I wasn’t optimistic about the odds of finding a local group that was a good impedance match for my strange signals. I set off in search of an online community to commune with aspiring authors. As you might well guess, the /r/writing subreddit has a great many people to connect with. Oh so very many. Over one million. The signal-to-noise ratio is less than one. Much less. Moving on. WritersCafe has fewer people and a better s/n. It’s free to join, and that may be part of the problem. It attracts all levels of interest and engagement. Its commitment to openness leads to a wild proliferation of ad hoc groups. Finding people with something interesting to say seems to be a matter of luck. Moving on.

Scribophile filters for commitment by operating on a karma economy. To get feedback on your work, you must first provide quality critiques of other writers’ submissions. To keep things flowing and manageable, the text is limited to a few thousand words at a time. The site is well-designed with good tools for inline feedback. There are still myriad groups and plenty of discussion forums to wander around in when you should be writing, but Scribophile offered enough structure and support for me to give it a try.

Editorial Pachinko

The population of Scribophile is self-selecting. The site is open to all experience levels and ambitions. Sign up and you’re welcome to participate. Contrast this to a Masters of Fine Arts program and, as you might expect, you get a wider variation in skill levels and ambitions. We can look at the population in various ways, but let’s look at experience and ambition.

Two ways to dice-and-slice Scribbers

On the horizontal axis, we have ambition. Hobbyists are writing primarily because it is something they want or need to do. They have no expectation of publication but they do enjoy being read and sharing in the writing life. Aspiring Professionals have publication as a goal. Participation in the community is a means to that end. If you asked the population, many or most would describe themselves as aspiring professionals. If you asked us to list the steps we have taken to reach professional status, many or most would have a short list indicative of being closer to the hobbyist end of the spectrum than we’d like to admit.

On the vertical axis, we have experience. Neophytes are new to the craft and are there to learn. Old Oaks have been writing for years, have mastered many aspects of the craft, but since they’re here, they probably haven’t broken through in the publishing world. Neophytes benefit from the oaks’ feedback. Oaks help each other refine their craft and have opportunities to learn from teaching the neophytes. There is virtue in paying forward the efforts of earlier oaks.

Absent access to user surveys and data analytics for the site, I’m going to guess that users are scattered up and down both axes and that the distribution is not a nice bell curve centered in the middle. More likely, it is multimodal.

Scribophile’s karma economy and primary workflow are such that you earn your karma and then launch a piece of your novel into the reviewing spotlight. The reviewers that critique your work (to earn their own karma) can come from anywhere on the graph. It’s like pachinko. You might get lucky. Three karama-hungry old oaks might be looking for work to review when your piece enters the spotlight. Or three (other) hobbyist neophytes might jump on it and give it their best. As with pachinko, success is subject to a complex array of variables that you might hope to control, but chances are it’s really a matter of chance. To get a polished manuscript out of this process, you must either be incredibly lucky or be willing to resubmit every piece of your story through this process enough times to accumulate the experienced critiques and edits they need.

Are you saying Scribophile is foolishness?

No. Pachinko is a multibillion-dollar industry that’s bigger than Las Vegas. As with Vegas, Pachinko and Scribophile provide entertainment to most of their customers. For a minority, pulling the handle or working the karma become addictive goals of their own. Know yourself and know your budget and you’ll be fine.

And the payout on Scribophile’s editorial pachinko is not bad. It’s good. Every story benefits from reader feedback. Learning to weigh and incorporate feedback is a valuable skill for a writer to develop and maintain. Keep your goals in mind, periodically evaluate the effort vs. reward, and Scribophile can be a productive part of your writing process and evolution.

I intend to continue my Scribophile experiment for a while yet. I’ll go back, Jack, do it again…

  • If you browse to www.heliumexchange.com you will discover that garish animated GIF banner ads are alive and well. If that’s your thing, go ahead and click the link.

That Sinking Feeling

October 21, 2019 /

Uncle Jack (Michael Bowen) and Todd (Jesse Plemons) – Breaking Bad _ Season 5, Episode 14 – Photo Credit: Ursula Coyote/AMC

You know the one…

It’s that fishing weight sliding down your throat and landing in your stomach. It’s the one you get when you realize that a part of your story, one which you were quite happy with, was lifted from the fiction of another. It doesn’t matter that it wasn’t deliberate theft. The reader will see it and say, “I recognize that! He totally stole that from X.”

There I am, preparing for El Camino by watching the final episodes of Breaking Bad when the badness breaks. Jesse Pinkman has been enslaved by a white supremacist meth gang. His main tormentor is a stone-cold psychopath named Todd. Todd reports directly to the gang’s leader. Todd addresses the leader as “Uncle Jack”.

Doom. On. Me.

I named one of the antagonists in The Grey God Jack Hughes. He is the protagonist’s mother’s brother. There are even a physical resemblance and a nexus to the drug trade. My cunning, ruthless, manipulative character was so heavily, if unconsciously, inspired by the big bad on Breaking Bad that they have the same name. Sigh.

To be fair to Jack Hughes, he’s not a neo-Nazi. He may be a terrible surrogate dad, but he is important to the plot and to Pete. I’m not going to edit him out of the story. I do need to create some space between Jack Hughes and Jack Welker. To start with, Jack Hughes needs a new first name.

The Rules of Names

Character names are crafted. An author can assign a random name as a placeholder, but the reader is due a bespoke name for every character of importance. That doesn’t require the name to be fanciful or even colorful. It means the name has to be right. Or at least not wrong in a way that throws the reader out of the story. It’s important to set reasonable goals.

At this point in my writer-hood, I’m working with the following character name heuristics.

The name should:

  1. Fit the setting. Duh. A modern name in ancient Egypt won’t work.
  2. Match the character’s background. If an Amish woman in the story has a Spanish surname, that’s okay, but the reader may well want some backstory there.
  3. Be distinct from other character names in the story. Unless confusion among Jeff Lebowskis is part of the story, avoid having overlapping names, including Bob/Rob/Robert. I know a family where all the kids’ names start with D and another where they begin with J. I try to scatter names across the alphabet.
  4. Be pronounceable by the intended audience. The reader needs to a least think they’ve got a handle on the name or they’ll stop in their tracks and try to puzzle it out. Westerners are notorious for mangling Asian names.
  5. Sound good every time you use it. Tyrannosaurus Murphy may sound awesome at first, but the reader will tire of it quickly. A name that’s colorful and long is a problem. His friends call him Ty. Tyrannosaurus should be used sparingly.
  6. Not be shared by family or close friends. Even if the character is super-cool. It’s just not worth the hassle.

Working with these guidelines, I’m closing in on a replacement name for Uncle Jack. Progress on this is now imperiled by my desire to write about the adventures of Tyrannosaurus Murphy, PI.

The Gray God is Narrative Complete

June 25, 2019 /
Terrible author cover art mock-up.

Still so wrong.

On Monday, 6/24/2019, The Gray God reached its Narrative Complete Milestone. A more detailed version of what this means to me, see the tail end of Adapting the Screenplay. Short version: The beginning of the story connects to the end of the story. If you attach electrodes to both ends of the manuscript, current flows, but there are whiffs of acrid smoke, dangerous hotspots, and a disturbing buzz.

The 50,000 words written during NaNoWriMo 2018 have 26,000 siblings, more of which have a fighting chance of making it into the final product, as none of them are flagrant cheating.

And there was much rejoicing.

Forward Unto Draft

There’s still work to do before I’m ready to inflict the manuscript on my intrepid first readers. During NaNoWriMo, and this Spring’s Camp NaNoWriMo, I bounced up and down the storyline, adding full scenes when inspired and inserting placeholders where I knew something about what needed to happen and had no clear idea how to write it. This process didn’t result major plot holes. As far as I know. Minor inconsistencies abound.

As of this writing, I’ve identified the following issues and tasks to tackle before I can claim a first draft.

  • Extend Research – Focus on mycology and hot springs of the Olympic Peninsula. Field trip!
  • Consistency of Names – Various locations, roles, and concepts may need capitalization.
  • Consistency of Geography – The details of the map and floorplans evolved over time. Relocating and rebalancing of the setting descriptions is required.
  • Consistency of Props – Significant props need staging. Guns on mantlepieces, as it were.
  • Consistency of Voice – The Gray God, like Raether’s Enzyme, is written in third person limited. In Raether, the narrator reflects the vocabulary and worldview of the scene’s POV character, heroes and villains alike. I tried this with the kids in The Gray God. It works in some cases but falls short in too many others. A general rewrite in a more articulate adult voice will make for a better story.
  • Edit for Quality – Much of the text got hammered out quickly, and it shows.
  • Edit for Length – When you’re NaNoWriMo-ing and you’re on a tear, you let the scene stretch out so you can claim word count. Those scenes need to be cut down to size.
  • Edit for Flow and Momentum – Writing scenes out of order runs the risk that Scene 42 does not flow smoothly into Scene 43. Similarly, having been written as a discrete unit, a scene may end without enticing the reader with the all-important question: “What happens next?”
  • Fix known issues – To keep my writing momentum up, I add minor problems that occur to me to a ToDo list. Before I ask anyone else to read and make notes, I owe it to them to fix all the things I know are wrong.
  • Consult AI – Give my trusty algorithmic and machine learning associates a crack at spotting spelling, grammar, and higher-level writing issues. This will be sadly painful. See below.

This will keep me busy.

Scrivener Revisited

NaNoWriMo was also a test run for using Scrivener as my main writing tool. I’m still liking it. Its binder view is a serviceable outliner and great for navigating around the text. The project statistics report word counts at the chapter level, allowing you to recognize when a chapter is getting over-stuffed relative to its peers. The corkboard, index cards, and metadata features haven’t made their way into my writing process. Gathering notes, research links, scene fragments and reference images into Scrivener has proven ever-so-marginally useful compared to maintaining a companion OneNote notebook.

The big test is still to come. Readers and editors are not likely to have Scrivener. None of my friendly proofing and analyzing tools plug into Scrivener. The collaborative phases of manuscript development require exporting my Scrivener project to a Word or text file. There’s no automated way to bring the edits back into the project. It’s a one-way ticket to Editsville.

Still…

Narrative Complete is an important milestone. It feels good to have reached it. I’m one step closer to sharing a new story with you. Please stand by.

NaNoWriMo PoMo

January 6, 2019 /

No, no, the cat hasn’t been partying on the keyboard. There is no cat. NaNoWriMo is the friendly abbreviation for National Novel Writing Month. It isn’t so much a contest as a creative writing challenge. Can you write 50,000 words of new fiction in 30 days? That’s an average of 1667 words per day, each and every day. For reference, paperbacks run 300-350 words per page and the larger 6”x9” trade paperbacks are about 350-400. Four or five pages in a book you’d read. If you do the math, 50,000 words is a very slim novel. These days, novels with only 60,000 words are on the slender end. 120,000 words is considered bulky for a first-time author. Established authors can publish as many words as they want. For better and worse. If you reach the NaNoWriMo goal, you’re probably more than half-way through an initial draft. Yay!

PoMo is usually an abbreviation for postmodern. Here I’m saying it is short for postmortem. This is cheating in service of a bouncy blog post title. The corner of the software industry that I used to inhabit used this term to describe analysis and discussion after a project’s completion that focused on questions like: “What went well? What went wrong? What can we do better going forward?” Participating in NaNoWriMo for the first time provided a great opportunity asking such questions.

Pantsing Not Optional

And whose fault it that? Mine. I dithered about doing NaNoWriMo as Summer gave way to Autumn. I lied to myself about resolving the question during my October road trip. As November loomed, I had a story idea, a setting, a few characters, a couple of scenes, a couple of monsters, and the hint of a theme. I also had months of not-writing on my conscience. I needed to shake the funk of Raether’s Enzyme’s submission/rejection cycle.

This meant taking a trusting, desperate leap into Chapter 1 with no story outline and only a vague sense of the ending. This was at odds with my engineering mindset. I am a planner, a plotter. I want to hold the architecture and structure in my mind and work towards a design. For this project, I would be flying by the seat of my pants. In NaNoWriMo parlance, I was about to become a pantser.

On the Precipice

In the last week of October, I set up my NaNoWriMo profile under the alias Scriblius (contains spoilers for this metastory). The site encourages participants to supply book cover images for their novels. If you’ve read my earlier posts, you know I have an enthusiasm for dev art that is coupled with a serious deficit of artistic talent. I combined some dubious Microsoft Word WordArt with a crude approximation of one of my monsters. The result was art only a developer could love. To be honest, I did not. But here it is.

So wrong.

Scrivenering Things Up

As part of the whole experimental/improvisational thing, I decided that The Gray God would be my first attempt to use Scrivener. Scrivener is a creative writing tool that fills the role of an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) in the software world. It combines a word processor with tools to organize, reorganize, annotate, research, and format projects ranging from articles to screenplays, short stories, and novels. It doesn’t impose a workflow. Its outliner is useful for planners. Its ability to shuffle sections and scenes around is a boon to pantsers.

Into the Breach

The plan, or perhaps intent is a better word, was to write 2,000 words per day for a long as possible. For the first week, I did just that. If I had kept that up, I’d finish on the 25th, or have a chance to be properly human for a few days that month.

To reach that goal, I had to set aside editing as I went. I stopped stopping to correct and improve the text. Mostly. I just let it flow. If a sentence ran on or a scene was unnecessary, I kept it for the sake of the word count. This felt dirty. It felt like cheating. If I slowed down, I’d bail out of the scene and move on, sometimes jumping to some unknown point in the story and filing the material in the Chapter Pending folder in my Scrivener project. It was disorganized. It was naughty. It was fun. The results are…rough…to put it politely. To see what I mean, check out the excerpt I posted  to NaNoWriMo from Day One’s writing. Yeah…it needs work. Lots of work.

The Joys of Pantsing

Pantsing offers the thrill of discovery. I started with what I intended to be the prologue. Two young men, Pete and Scott, are heading off into the deep woods with a nefarious purpose. Pete will cook meth while Scott collects edible mushrooms. At the end of the weekend, they’ll come back from “mushroom hunting” with no one suspecting they were breaking bad. Something supernaturally terrible happens to Scott. The original idea was that our main character would meet Pete later in the story and they’d reluctantly work together to survive our horror story. What I discovered was that Pete and Scott were younger than I expected. They were the same age as the main character in the story. I discovered that Pete was the main character and that Scott’s disappearance is what drives him towards confronting Lovecraftian horror.  

This meant that my prolog needed to be the first act. Wow. It also revealed the template the evil cult used to select its victims. These kids were all at-risk youth, like Pete. I might well have sorted this out during planning. We’ll never know.

The Perils of Pantsing

Letting things flow and discovering the characters and the narrative voice on the fly is all well and good, but it does entail risk. The Gray God was intended to be straight-up Young Adult (YA) fiction. Pete and Scott are contemporary adolescent males who drop F-bombs with coarse frequency. Don’t get me started on their insidious Uncle Jack, who was another discovery in this early writing. That’s uncool for the audience of The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner. Can you imagine J. K. Rowling allowing Ron Weasley to curse like a soldier? “Bloody Hell” has a certain weight of profanity to it, but it’s still PG-13. Harsher language is alluded to while Rowling uses her fantastic setting to substitute more wizardly oaths for common profanity.

So, pending significant adjustments to tone and language, pantsing blew my marketing plan to smithereens.

The Terrible Two

NaNoWriMo encourages its writers to update their word counts daily. Combine that raw data with anecdotes from its vibrant user community and a pattern emerges where the second week is when things get more difficult. The initial adrenaline is spent. Mistakes made in the opening rush have been accumulating, threatening the narrative integrity of what follows. If you’re pantsing, the number of directions the story could go is rising with the square of the number of central characters.

As I reached the end of the second week, I had most of the unexpected first act down. In a desperate bid to escape the aftermath of Scott’s disappearance, Pete unwittingly crossed over into a realm of eldritch horror. I had scattered scenes ahead of him, but the threshold he crossed was a major reset to the thriller/mystery balance. I struggled for word-count. This was bad.

How to Cheat at NaNoWriMo

Short version: Write backstory for your characters.

Long version: I was stuck going forward, so I went back. Pete’s uncles, Jack and Dan, had a history of violence that informs Pete’s actions in The Gray God. I hadn’t worked out many of the details, but I did have a few of lines of dialog from different scenes:

Uncle Jack (threatening Pete): “It’s another sort of sin to make your mama cry. One I am ashamed to bear. Don’t make your mama cry, Peter.”

Leah (Pete’s mother): “Don’t even think about it. I’m sure Jack told you stories about what Dan was like before he met Aunt Jan, but you haven’t seen him in a fight. It’s scary as s**t, Peter. Look, I know he did some bad things to Scott, but the counseling really did help. If he lost control again…”

Pete (to his new friend, Joseph): “My uncle says I should kick the guy in the nuts and punch him the throat. Then, I guess your mom hasn’t done time for aggravated assault.”

I logged 3,888 words over two days with a short story that ties these lines together. Writing The Steve Incident taught me about the dynamics of Pete’s family.

Breakfast of the NaNoRhinos

NaNoWriMo is an event that brings a vast and far-flung community of aspiring novelists and self-publishing authors together for a frenzy of artistic creativity that is bigger and longer than Burning Man, if not as flamboyant. The website buzzes with updated word counts and discussions in its various forums. Out in the real world, volunteers organize meet-ups and write-ins where participants can share the joy and pain of the thing. They work hard to make NaNoWriMo both fun and a catalyst for ongoing writing community.

My home region for NaNoWriMo is the Snoqualmie Valley. Our Municipal Liaisons put together a full calendar of events and entertainments. Lacking a laptop to take my work on the road and being overwhelmed by the self-imposed workload*, I missed most of these events. I did make it to the Traveler’s Breakfast Meet-up at the Fall City Roadhouse. It was a good time with friendly, interesting folks. The slice of the valley’s sixty-nine writers were busy with projects generally fantastical in genre and varying in tone from horror to whimsical mystery. I enjoyed the company and the eggs Benedict. If you decide to NaNoWriMo, avail yourself of the community events set up by your local volunteers.

Dreams and Horrors

As you may recall, before the pleasant interlude with NaNoRhinos, I was getting stuck as to how Pete’s journey into horror and madness should proceed. While I struggled to sort that out, there was work I could attend to. The Gray God is a story of Lovecraftian horror. It needed more horror. There were characters that my planner side knew were doomed. I set to writing scenes describing their ghastly fates. When these events occurred wasn’t set yet, but the power of Scrivener allowed me to park those chunks of text in Chapter Pending for safekeeping.

Another important aspect of the Lovecraftian fiction is dreams. Great Cthulhu torments sensitive minds and incites his followers with dreams of monstrous alien cities and worlds afire with chaos and death. Dreams reveal the Doom that came to Sarnath. Dreams in the Witch House transport poor Walter Gilman to frightful dimensions and ensnare him in hideous rites.

Many writers (and not a few readers) will roll their eyes at the prospect of a dream sequence.  And, yes, they can be abused to shoehorn in exposition and/or heavy-handed symbolism. In Lovecraft’s work, dreams are frequently either an experience of an alternate dimension or something the character uses to rationalize a horrible experience. It was only a dream. It had to be a dream. I chose to break from the subgenre in this regard and give the dreams in The Gray God the realism of weirdness. The characters in question have reasons to suspect something is very wrong, but what is wrong is beyond their reasoning minds’ abitility to accept. It’s up to their subconscious minds to raise the alarm. The dreams are short and very oblique. The alarm is raised but the danger is not revealed. To get the surrealism and disjointedness I was looking for, I wrote backwards from the ending event or realization that snaps the character awake. There’s a flow to it, but it’s not normal. I think it works. Some day soon, you’ll have a chance to judge for yourself.

How to Cheat at NaNoWriMo – Part 2

Entering the home stretch, I was pantsed-out. Dreams and horrors were duly recorded. Numerous scenes between the heroes and villains made the characters and conflicts clear, even if the plot wasn’t. I was still thousands of words short of the goal line and I didn’t have another short story dangling before me.

What I did have was memories of fast and fluid work in the screenplay format. Descriptions are lean. Grammar is relaxed. The format itself decides how and when to interleave action and dialog. If you want to fly through a story, write it as a screenplay. Scrivener is happy to help with that. You can drop into screenplay format for any scene and it will attend to the format and auto-complete your character names.

To make things fun, I sat the villains around the dinner table and had them talk freely. This was inspired by the Villain Pub series on YouTube. They are in a safe place where everybody knows their name. They discuss what they each plan to do once their evil scheme succeeds. They argue with one another. I learned more about them. Perhaps I can salvage some of the better lines for the main story.

To balance this out, and cheat a little less, I also screenplay-sketched a scene that I did want for the main story where the heroes are gathered for a brief respite. It’s cold and wet, but Joseph brought some beer and Amber has a joint to share. Kids around a campfire. What fun! Why on earth would you think it’s the last time any of them will be happy? Oh, it’s a horror story. Yeah. Sorry, kids…

Always Cheat. Always Win.

I kept the campfire scene going until Scrivener and the NaNoWriMo word-counter agreed that I was over the finish line. Scrivener says 50,347. NaNoWriMo credits me with 50,087. I won! Yay!

PoMo Take-aways

Things I learned in my first NaNoWriMo

  • Pantsing can be great fun. It offers exciting opportunities for serendipitous discovery.
  • Pantsing allows the story to go where it wants to.
  • Allowing the story to go where it wants may not get you to where you want and need to be.
  • I would prefer to have an outline or other roadmap of the characters, conflicts, and story beats before diving into Chapter 1.
  • I enjoy talking with folks about stories and storytelling. Maybe even enough to join a writing group.
  • Scrivener is a solid tool for the early phases of creative writing. I will continue with it at least through the first drafts of The Gray God.

Thanks for reading this far.

* 2,000 words per day is an ambitious goal, but not an outrageous one. Professional authors range from 500 to 10,000, with prolific and skillful Stephen King right at 2,000. King also writes every day of the year except his birthday and Christmas, if you were wondering. And he doesn’t stop after one month to play Red Dead Redemption 2, catch up with his Netflix, and travel to see his family. Unlike some aspiring authors I could mention.

For reference: Word says this post is 2,522 words long.

Traditional Publishing from 10,000 Feet

August 29, 2018 /

This post is for friends and family who are curious about what I’ve learned while working on my book. For readers who walk the writer’s path, there won’t be much news here. Folks who are farther along the path may even roll their eyes or gently shake their heads.

I am pursuing a publishing deal for Raether’s Enzyme. I would like a book publisher to pay me money for the right to print my story as a book and sell copies on the open market. The terms are negotiable, but I’d expect a certain portion of the proceeds for each copy sold. This general arrangement is quite old and used to be pretty much the only way to bring a novel to market. Here in the 21st Century, e-books and print-on-demand technologies have changed things enough that the classic author-and-publisher business model is now referred to as traditional publishing. In the course my pursuits, I have learned enough to refine my very hazy notion of how the publishing business works to where I can now form a 10,000-foot view*.

From my 10,000-foot perch, the traditional publishing world (in the United States) looks something like this**:

Feel free to correct me in the comments.
Attribution for crowd scene: By Sérgio Valle Duarte
Wikidata has entry Q16269994 with data related to this item. CC BY 3.0, from Wikimedia Commons

Working our way from top-to-bottom and left-to right…

Readers

  • There are still a lot of them.
  • Their appetites range from voracious to picky, so each year an author may have many or few opportunities to connect with them.
  • Their tastes range from refined literary fiction to fun commercial genre fare to a wide variety of nonfiction subjects.
  • They consume novels as eBooks, paperbacks, hardbacks, and audiobooks. The latter three formats remain a strong suit for traditional publishers.
  • Usually prefer novels from authors they’ve read before and non-fiction from authors with established platforms.

Sellers

  • Buy books from publishers. There is usually a clause in their agreement that allows the seller to return unsold books after a specified time.
  • Present books for sale to readers in their bookstores and on their websites.
  • Promote a limited number of new books by placing them near the front of the store, on the aisle endcaps, and higher in their web pages. This can make or break a book’s commercial success.
  • Amazon and Barnes & Noble are also publishers. Self-publishing authors can place eBooks in their marketplaces directly and offer paperbacks via print-on-demand services like CreateSpace.

Publishers

  • Acquire publishing rights for manuscripts from authors via contracts brokered by literary agents.
  • Edit manuscripts to raise the quality and character of the writing to meet their standards and commercial goals.
  • Format and design the interior of the book in consultation with the author and agent.
  • Produce cover art and jacket text for the exterior of the book.
  • Print, or arrange to print, paperbacks and hardbacks.
  • Design and prepare eBooks for electronic distribution.
  • May produce or edit the audio book.
  • Provide variable amounts of sales and marketing support. New authors can expect less of this in the modern publishing world.
  • Take a risk by publishing new authors.
  • Have a finite catalog of books, new and old, that they publish.
  • Have a limited number of slots in their publishing calendars, most of which are spoken for by established authors.

Para-marketing

This is my term for a portion of the industry which is outside of the sellers and publishers. It serves readers by informing them about new books and serves publishers and sellers by bringing new books to the attention of the readers.

  • Provides readers with reviews of new books.
  • Prominent reviewers are courted by authors and publicists.
  • Favorable (or cleverly excerpted) reviews are blurbed on and within books, promotional materials, and on web sites.

Agents

  • Buffer the publishers from the vast number author manuscript submissions enabled by the word processing revolution.
  • Solicit submission of author query letters matching the agent’s interests/specialization by announcing their interest via websites, wish lists, and by participation in real-life events such as writers’ conferences and workshops.
  • Represent a small number of authors at a given time.
  • Pour through large numbers of query letters and manuscript samples to find the rare query or proposal that justifies the risk of investing their time.
  • Work on spec. The agent gets paid a percentage of the books sales (typically 15%). If the book doesn’t sell, the agent doesn’t get paid.
  • May offer to edit the manuscript make it more marketable.
  • Use their experience, tastes, market insights, and intuition to identify which publisher’s editors are in the market for a story that matches the author’s manuscript.
  • Pitch their clients’ stories to appropriate editors.
  • Broker publishing deals between authors and publishers.
  • May offer career management services for authors they represent.

Pre/para-publishing

Another one of my terms. Here I’m talking about a segment of the industry that is largely invisible to the reading public. It’s general function is to provide advice to authors on the craft and business of writing. No one organization is likely to do all of the following, but they link to and advertise each other.

  • Provides how-to advice on a wide range to topics: story structure, genre conventions, characters, pacing, market trends, writing query letters, etc.
  • Publishes directories of literary agents and publishers.
  • Offers freelance editing services that scale from developmental (structure, plot, characters, pacing, tone, etc.) to proofreading (this word is misspelled, needs a comma here, the word you want here is abstruse – not obtuse).
  • Organizes conferences and workshops where writer’s gather to learn craft and business, usually from speakers with industry experience.

Writers’ Conferences

  • May be organized by para-publishing organizations or writers’ groups.
  • Speakers may include literary agents or publisher’s representatives.
  • May offer opportunities to pitch stories to literary agents in-person.
  • Provide opportunities for real-time Q&A with industry and para-industry professionals.
  • Provide opportunities to network/commiserate with other writers and contact new writers’ groups.

Writers’ Groups

  • Provide authors with socialization in an endeavor that can be very, very lonely. Oh, so very lonely.
  • Provide a first line of readers to critique and encourage a writing project.
  • The success of one member can benefit other members with referrals to agents, blurb-able endorsements, etc.
  • You have people to hang out with at Writers’ Conferences.

Authors

  • Make up stories about people and events that aren’t even real.
  • Struggle to make these lies compelling enough that readers will want to believe them.
  • Want someone, somewhere, to affirm these made-up stories with praise and/or renumeration.

Oooops! I did it again!

Okay, for all its 10,000-footness, that’s probably more than any of my friends and family really wanted to know. Friends who were also coworkers might offer a rueful smile in memory of my overstuffed Brownbag talks*. Sorry. Then, as now, I have trouble with the short story format.

* Back in the day, there was a program within the engineering division called Brownbag Talks. These were scheduled at lunchtime. Bring your own lunch. An engineer prepared a thirty-to-forty-minute presentation about something her or she was working on. There were PowerPoint slides. Early in such talks, the engineer oriented the audience with a high-level overview of the subject. “How high?” you ask. The number typically cited was 10,000 feet. That’s a ways up there. You don’t see any intricate details, but the whole of the landscape is visible.

** In the unlikely event that someone working in the industry reads this, the choices here were the result of googling in August 2018. No offense of exclusion was intended.

Lockdown

July 31, 2018 /

In its final stages of development, a classic Microsoft project enters lockdown. No further changes to the software are accepted for that version unless they are recall class bugs. Teams wishing to fix that one last issue must plead their case up the line, providing evidence that the fix is both necessary and won’t jeopardize the stability of the project. No matter how mortifying a late-breaking bug might be, if it doesn’t meet the bar, the stern archons of the Ship Room will punt it until after launch. Knowing a bug is going out to a vast community of users can curdle the joy of releasing exciting new software, but for a project the size of, say, Windows, there’s always someone who wants to make one last fix. If the project is ever going to get out there and work for people, there has to be a cut-off, and it has to be enforced with rigor.

The manuscript for Raether’s Enzyme is in lockdown. Bugs identified by early readers and editing passes have been addressed. Addressed isn’t the same as fixed. In some cases, the responses of early readers conflicted. Fixing one reader’s bug would break another’s feature. Further revision risks removing the polish the proofreader provided. As much as I would like to tinker with text until the Sun balloons into a red giant, the time has come to focus my efforts on connecting the story with a literary agent and a publisher. They will have their own ideas as to what constitutes a recall class bug.

The Pfast and the Pluperfect

July 2, 2018 /

Raether’s Enzyme passed a major milestone recently when its corrected manuscript returned from the proofreader. The first post on this blog marked its departure. I am happy to report that the editor did indeed spot remaining errors and called shenanigans on a stylistic experiment that did not pay off. The manuscript is stronger for it. Yay!

Reviewing the marked-up version of the manuscript revealed patterns of error that I will work to stamp out in future projects.

  • Truly embarrassing misplaced apostrophes.
  • Missing question marks.
  • Absent and misused commas.
  • Dropped articles that escaped my eye.

Finding a run of clean pages was a source of joy.

The proofreader identified and began correcting another class of errors. He saw a pattern emerging and began to wonder if I was playing a stylistic game, or if I really didn’t know what the past pluperfect was.

BUSTED. On both counts, really.

I would have lost on Jeopardy! if the clue had been:

“DENOTING AN ACTION COMPLETED PRIOR TO SOME
PAST POINT OF TIME SPECIFIED OR IMPLIED,
FORMED IN ENGLISH BY HAD AND THE PAST PARTICIPLE”

Raether’s Enzyme is written from the subjective third person limited point of view, where the character who is in focus can change between scenes. The narrator takes opportunities to reflect on events in the focal character’s past when those events are relevant to the action of the scene.

Raether imagines itself to be a thriller. Thrillers move relentlessly forward. The narrator’s interest in the characters’ pasts put forward momentum at risk. I had made a pass to purge the pluperfect in an attempt to hide the retrograde motion. I had rationalized this by telling myself that the remembering the narrator was doing on behalf of the characters was portraying the characters’ thought processes in the scene. My illusion of continuous forward motion caught fire in the eyes of an important reader: an editor.

My recent work in the manuscript included unwinding my de-pluperfect-ifying shenanigans. There are other games afoot that will add to your enjoyment without making you wonder what time it is. I am an important step closer to sharing them with you, thanks to my proofreader.

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