First Book Friday: Stephen Leigh

Welcome to First Day Friday! For anyone new to this feature, I’ve posted submission guidelines and an index of previous authors.

Stephen Leigh (also known as Matthew and S. L. Farrell) is one of the nicest authors I’ve had the pleasure of meeting, which left me in a bit of a dilemma. I could write him a straightforward, flattering introduction, talking about how he’s both an experienced author and skilled filker, and has written a ton of books and stories under his various pseudonyms. Or I could make him feel old by pointing out that he started selling his work when I was still in diapers…

Anyway, please welcome Stephen Leigh. When you’re done reading, check him out on LiveJournal or Facebook.

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Let’s get rid of the obvious right away. I’m not anywhere close to being one of the New Hot Kids. I had my first professional sale back in the antediluvian days of the mid-1970s, and sold my first novel in 1980. This is a story not of How Things Are Done Now, but How Things Were Done Then.

Back then, the advice that many established writers gave to new writers was this: “Start with short fiction. Experiment with styles, play with different ways to approach a story, and allow yourself to fail. You’ll get lots of rejection slips. Keep writing until you start to find your voice. When you finally have a nice list of published stories and maybe an award or two, then you can use that as cachet to snag an agent…”

That was decent enough advice at the time (though in my opinion some of it no longer holds true in today’s market); I followed it. I collected the requisite ton of rejection slips as I honed my skills—because most of my stories were spectacularly bad—but a few were accidentally good enough that I also managed to sell a story here and there. I also realized that my stories (most of which were not selling, remember( were gradually becoming more complex, and as a result, longer.

Around 1976 or so, I read an article about the Hashshashin, an early band of assassins, which started me thinking about the concept of “ethical assassins”—murderers who would attempt an assassination, but would always for philosophical reasons allow the victim a small chance of survival. I started putting together a world with these ‘ethical assassins,’ which I was calling the “Hoorka.” I suddenly realized, as I starting planning and writing this tale, that this wasn’t going to be a short story or novelette, but a full-fledged novel.

Characters and sub-plots and complications. Oh, my!

Honestly, I rather rapidly became lost in the book. One thing writing short stories hadn’t prepared me for was how complicated novels are, how long they take to write, how difficult it is to hold the details in your head, and the amount of persistence and dedication required to complete them…

I panicked. Instead of finishing what I’d started, I eviscerated the book. I retained only the basic shell of the story and wrote a novelette called “In Darkness Waiting.” I sent the story (still bleeding from the massive surgery) to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and Gardner Dozois, who was the Assistant Editor there at the time, liked it enough to send me revision notes and a promise to look at the story again I made changes and sent it back, and Gardner (or George Scithers, who was editor at the time) bought it. It appeared in the October 1977 issue. (If you’re curious, it’s reprinted in my ebook short story collection A RAIN OF PEBBLES.)

I continued to write and occasionally sell short stories for the next few years, but I was realizing that if I ever wanted to have any shot at actually making writing a substantial part of my income, I had to overcome my trepidations and write novels. Why not start with the novel I’d already begun planning? I’d been smart enough—which is honestly a rarity—not to actually trash the notes I’d made. I began to reconstruct the novel, gluing back onto the skeleton of “In Darkness Waiting” all the material and ideas I’d trimmed away, rewriting the story from the beginning.

Early in 1980 I had a pile of paper that resembled a novel, which I titled SLOW FALL TO DAWN. I also had no idea how to market the thing to agents. Here’s where networking (of the pre-Facebook and LiveJournal variety, using letters and phone calls) came in.

Denise and I had begun attending the regional sf cons as well as the occasional worldcon or big east coast gathering. I’d met quite a few writers—most of them further along in their career than me—and become good friends with some. I contacted a select few, asking if they knew of an agent they’d recommend I contact. George RR Martin suggested a relatively new agent he’d met, Adele Leone, and was kind enough to say he’d send Adele a personal recommendation.

Just as good networking can lead to a “real” job, good networking can also lead to work in your writing career. People do tend to help other people whom they know and like.

I will point out before someone brings out the old cliché that “You see! It’s all just about who you know“ that networking only works to a point. Getting an introduction to someone via a friend might crack open a door you thought locked, but your fiction still has to do the heavy lifting—and that’s far more important. You can sell a novel without networking if it’s well-written and compelling; you can’t sell a poorly-written novel no matter how fantastic a network you have.

Fast-forward a few months… Adele, after reading the novel, had agreed to represent me. At the time, I was running a bi-weekly RPG game—mostly AD&D but with lots of rule changes we’d made on our own. During the middle of one of our games late in 1980, the phone rang and Denise answered. She passed the phone over to me. “It’s Adele,” she said. She gave me an eyebrow-raised look as I took the phone.

“I have good news,” the voice on the other end said. “Bantam’s made an offer on your book…” I don’t remember much of the rest of the night, except that I recall it involved more beer than usual and that I happily allowed the characters in the RPG to get away with far too much mayhem and treasure. Everyone went up a level or two.

SLOW FALL TO DAWN  [Amazon | B&N] was published by Bantam Books in October 1981.

That’s a long time ago, as impossible as that seems to me sometimes. Adele, sadly, is no longer with us. After three books with Bantam, I went on to other publishers with other books. I would start writing fantasy rather than science fiction (and acquire a pseudonym along with that genre). The field—and publishing in general—changed rather radically in the intervening decades. Hey, that first contract didn’t even mention electronic rights. The $3,500 advance I got for SFTD is roughly the equivalent of an $9,500 advance now… but the average first-novel advance offered now by the ‘traditional publishers’ is far less than $9,500. Agents now take 15% of a writer’s income, not 10%. We won’t even talk about ebooks and their impact.

It’s a brave new world out there now. It’s not the same one that I started out in, and I’m not certain that the path I took is still a viable one.

The Marvelous Land of Oz, Reviewed by my Son (Age 6)

My son and I just finished reading The Marvelous Land of Oz, the second of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books. One of Jackson’s first questions after we finished was whether we were going to do another review 🙂

Just like last time, I asked questions to guide the review, but what follows (except for my italicized comments) are entirely his own words.

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The Army of Revolt took over the Emerald City. The big mission in The Marvelous Land of Oz is to find Ozma and make her the rightful Queen of the Emerald City. The characters are Tip, Jack Pumpkinhead, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, the Woggle-Bug, and the Gump. The Gump is made out of a broom, a head, sofas, and palm leaves that the Tin Woodman cut and could have gotten killed seven times and imprisoned for life!

This is the first Oz book where people from Oz go outside of the land of Oz. They end up in a jackdaws’ nest, and the Scarecrow loses his straw because he uses it to protect Jack Pumpkinhead and the Woggle-Bug. He has to get stuffed with money!

Several people had warned me about reading this book because of the boy turning into a girl, saying this could be upsetting. So I asked Jackson what he thought about the ending.

I really wanted to see how Princess Ozma got hidden, and she wasn’t even hidden! She was in the body of a boy named Tip. I was surprised. I liked that Tip was Ozma because then the Sawhorse and Jack Pumpkinhead were still able to be in the Emerald City. … ! (Punctuation dictated by Jackson.)

I didn’t like the part where Mombi said she was going to turn Tip into a marble statue and make Jack Pumpkinhead work for her. I didn’t like the Army of Revolt because they took over the Emerald City.

I thought in the beginning Tip was a little mean because he wanted to scare Mombi, but in the end he was nicer. He punished the bad guys and let the Sawhorse and Jack Pumpkinhead stay.

I like both books the same. Everybody should read them.

Below: Jackson’s illustration of The Scarecrow in the Jackdaws’ nest.

Gaming the System

I love connecting with other authors. I’ve been doing it for more than 15 years. I love talking to people who get it. People who understand how you can be proud of being rejected more than 500 times, who can sympathize with bolting awake at two a.m. and scrambling for a pen, or who can help you through the twelve step program to stop obsessively checking your Amazon ranking.

I’m on a lot of writing e-mail lists and Facebook groups and so on. And sometimes it’s great. Other times, it degrades into a groupmind effort to game the system. Lately I’ve started getting messages about the new “Like” button at Amazon. I’m paraphrasing here:

Please, please, please go to Amazon and like my books and I’ll like all of yours and we’ll get bigger like numbers and that will (somehow) sell books and soon we’ll rule the universe!

Before that it was swapping tags and reviews on Amazon. And you can’t forget vote-trading for awards, big and small.

Too much self-promotion can be obnoxious, but to me this crosses the line from promotion to deception. If you’re begging your readers to “like” your books, you can at least assume they’ll only do it if they actually like you and/or the books. Whereas when it’s writers running around to click each others’ books just so those writers will do the same for them, you’ve basically rendered the whole thing meaningless.

I don’t know why it bugs me, because most of the time, this scrounging for clicks and tags and likes and whatever makes very little difference. I think part of it is a principle thing: I hate seeing authors going down what feels like a rather slimy path. Partly it just feels sad.

Yet, occasionally, manipulating the system works. One self-published author told me how successful he had been with adjusting the price of his e-books, dropping them to 99 cents to boost sales and get onto the Top 100 lists at Amazon where random browsers are more likely to find them, then raising the price to $2.99 for the bigger royalties.

But that’s an exception. (Given the number of 99 cent e-books, the vast majority are not making the Top 100 lists.) And it’s not deceptive the way the “Hey, I’ll give your book five stars if you do the same for mine!” approach is.

So I guess to those authors trying to game the system, I’d say:

  1. I understand the urge. I know how desperate we are to somehow control and improve our sales.
  2. Swapping “likes” with a dozen other authors is not going to have any significant impact.
  3. Whatever I might think of Amazon’s practices, they’re smarter than just about anyone at selling and marketing books. Thinking you’re going to beat their system and make it work to you is about as likely as heading to Vegas with a system to beat the house. Good luck with that.
  4. Worry more about writing the next book and less about the trappings of false control.

That’s my rant for today. Discussion and debate are welcome, as always.

Five Weeks Until Snow Queen

The Snow Queen’s Shadow [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy] comes out in exactly five weeks, and I’m delighted that the first review spotted in the wild is a starred review from Publishers Weekly. Be aware that the review does contain a small spoiler.

We’re recovering from a power outage here, so I don’t have much prepared for the blog. So instead, here are a few highlights from losing electricity…

  • Rebuilding the LED blinky from Penguicon using a pair of old watch batteries so that we’d have an LED night light for the hallway.
  • Brushing my son’s teeth to the light of a Mace Windu lightsaber.
  • Charging my phone in my car so I could read a bedtime story.

The only other random news I’ve got is that Kitemaster and Other Stories will also include a sample from Libriomancer, for those who want a sneek peek at my current project.

So … um … have a picture of this Halo Master Chief costume, by Benny Brickster. Not bad, eh? Especially when you consider that, except for the visor, it’s built entirely out of LEGO.  Click the pic for the full photoset.

A Spoileriffic Review/Discussion of Mira Grant’s “Feed”

I finished reading Feed [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy] by Mira Grant (aka Seanan McGuire) this week.

The zombie uprising began in 2014, due to a combination of two viruses meant to eliminate the common cold and cure cancer. Everyone is infected: when you die, the virus reanimates you as a zombie. But if you’re bitten/infected by a zombie, that also triggers the transformation, and you’re a walking corpse within minutes.

The book is set twenty-five years after the uprising, and society has adapted (somewhat) to the presence of zombies. Certain territories are more hazardous, and declared off-limits. Blood tests are everywhere. And a trio of bloggers has just been selected to follow and report on presidential candidate Peter Ryman.

One of the key lines for me came early in the book, when Georgia Mason (our protagonist) remarks that the zombies aren’t the story. I can’t remember the exact wording, but that line captures why the book works for me. We’ve all seen story after story about zombie uprisings; Feed is the story of what comes next.

I can see why this book has broken out the way it has. You’ve got classic SF extrapolation of future trends, like Grant’s presentation of the blogging world. You’ve got zombies that make sense (at least moreso than 98% of the zombie stories out there). You’ve got plenty of zombie-fighting action, political intrigue, and nonstop tension. You’ve got relevance in the strong parallel between fear of zombies and our present-day attitudes toward terrorism. And Georgia and her brother Shaun make a great pair of characters, complementing one another beautifully.

I’m about to get into major spoiler territory, so if you haven’t read it, look away now. (To anyone reading on an RSS feed, I’m sorry – I’m not aware of any way to put a cut tag into the feed.)

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First Book Friday: Kristen Britain

Welcome to First Day Friday! Click for submission guidelines and an index of previous authors.

Kristen Britain (LJ, Facebook) is a New York Times bestseller. Her latest book Blackveil came out in February of this year. The series even has its own wiki, which is pretty darn nifty. Kristen is another DAW author, meaning I suspect it pained her to keep this post under 1000 words 🙂 (I sometimes think I’m the only DAW author who can write a book in under 100K words.) Kristen is also part-centaur, and lives in Maine, where I’m told they’re more tolerant about that sort of thing.

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I’d like to start by thanking Jim for his informative-funny-passionate blog, which is on my daily reading list, and for inviting me to participate in First Book Friday! Here’s my story…

I was one of those people who had loved reading and writing from a young age and dreamed of being published. In high school I completed my first novel, which I still keep stashed away in a box. Even after college, the dream remained. I tried my hand at writing short stories because back then, the general (though not necessarily correct) wisdom was that if you wanted to sell a novel, you first had to sell short stories. I tried, but short stories were not really my thing, and traditional adventure fantasy did not seem to be most markets’ thing. I consider this period one of training in which I continued to develop my writing skills and learn about the business end of writing.

In the fall of 1992, after too many short story rejections, I decided I might as well put my energy into my true love, long fiction. At the time, I was a seasonal park ranger, moving from one park to another every three to eight months. By then, I’d grown weary of the moving, and even with prospects of a winter season in the sunny south, I decided to settle at Acadia National Park in Maine for the winter, working part time. If I weren’t a frugal person, I couldn’t have managed this. The extra free time was a perfect opportunity to delve into writing a novel.

And I did, exulting in the hours of uninterrupted time, composing on my 80/88 XT computer. By the end of the following summer, I had a beginning, middle, and end to a novel I called Green Rider [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy]. I embarked on revisions and tried to learn more about publishing from books, magazines, and workshops. In one workshop, literary SF novelist Richard Grant was the first pro to point out that my novel held promise as a publishable entity.

Note that none of my research or feedback took place on the internet since there wasn’t much of an internet in the days of yore, and I certainly didn’t have access to it. My road to publication was the way of the ancients and much of my research took place mostly in libraries. As a shy and introverted person, attending conventions didn’t even seem possible for me, so I did my networking at workshops and … by chance.

After revisions, I sent out the manuscript, unrequested, to SF/F publishers, not an uncommon practice back then. I received a couple form rejections, but others were “nice,” and even encouraging. I even received a phone call and long letter from an editorial assistant at Warner Books (now Grand Central). What, I wondered, is one supposed to think?

Then one of those “by chance” moments happened. On a visit to my post office, the postmistress noted the ad on the back of my Locus Magazine for a fantasy novel by a new author who, she said, just happened to live almost down the road from me. I was second in line at his first local signing. I told him of my situation of “nice rejections.” What, I had asked him, might be his advice? “Get an agent,” he said. Then after a pause he added, “First you have to have a great story.” I told him I thought I did. “Get an agent,” he told me.

I queried agents, including this author’s, Russ Galen. To my astonishment, Russ asked to see the manuscript. I quickly received another nice rejection, this one full of helpful comments. I reread my manuscript and realized he was spot on. I embarked on a new series of revisions and when I became unsure and muddled, I asked the local author if he’d look over the manuscript and tell me if I was on the right track. I was thrilled when he agreed to do so.

My author friend would have made a great editor. Using his comments, I fixed the manuscript, and in 1996, he re-read it. When he finished, he invited me over to his house and when I arrived, he spread his arms wide for an embrace and said, “Congratulations! You’ve written a novel!” He provided an introductory letter which he faxed to Russ Galen, and the next day I received a message from Russ’ associate, Anna Ghosh, requesting the manuscript. She soon became my agent, and a month or two later we sold to DAW Books. Green Rider was first published in hardcover in November of 1998.

I believe that even without my author friend’s help, I would have found my way to publication—it just would have taken longer, and I would have had to learn much more on my own. But I was determined, and I never stopped writing. Each novel since has provided its own writing challenges forcing me to “up my game.” Meanwhile, the 21st century has presented challenges on the biz end. Much has changed since the 1990s: ebooks, self-publishing, hard economic times… It is difficult to keep up with and the learning curve is never-ending, but if there is one constant, it’s my writer friend’s advice: “First you’ve got to have a great story.” After all, even with all the changes and challenges, I am confident there will always be demand for great stories.

Surgery Update

Thanks for all of the good wishes on my wife’s surgery yesterday. The surgery went great — in some ways, better than expected — and we’re hopeful it will take care of this particular underlying pain. If all goes well, I should be bringing her home later today.

I was able to get a First Book Friday post prepped for tomorrow, and I started writing a new rant this morning, so regular blogging service should resume soon.

Until then, here’s a peek at a cover sketch for my next collection, Kitemaster & Other Stories. (I’ll be sharing more soon!)

Surgery Break

Later this morning I’ll be taking my wife in for surgery. It’s not an emergency, and should be fairly straightforward, but she’ll be at the hospital for a night or two. So my online presence may be a bit spotty.

On the bright side, I should be able to finish up Mira Grant’s Feed [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy] while hanging out in the waiting room…

In Which Rick Castle Writes about Clark Kent Flying the TARDIS over a Shark

I don’t watch too much TV, but I’ve been tuning in recently to see how various shows wrap up this season. I even recorded the series finale of Smallville, which I hadn’t watched in years.

Warning: potential spoilers follow for Smallville, House, Castle, Star Trek: TNG, Trek Classic, Buffy, and Doctor Who…

Finales bug me. Not all of them, but the ones that call attention to themselves, that break your suspension of disbelief and remind you, “Oh right, this is the season finale.” The finale of House did that. They escalated the character’s already over-the-top behavior until I rolled my eyes and gave up. In trying to turn it up to eleven, they reached a point where I just didn’t care.

Contrast that to classic Star Trek. Unlike a lot of shows today, every episode was self-contained, and I couldn’t have told you what shows marked the end of a season.

It’s not that big season finales can’t be done well. If you’re working with season-long plotlines, it makes sense to build to an end-of-season climax. Buffy vs. various big bads, for example. In season one, while each episode stood on its own, they also led toward the big confrontation with The Master.

Or look at the third season of the new Doctor Who, which leads episode-by-episode toward … well, the big confrontation with The Master. (That guy gets around.)

Those finales worked for me because the structure felt natural, and because the viewer is more deeply invested in the conflict. But sometimes season-long arcs backfire. Smallville tended to build up to big confrontations they couldn’t pull off. In the series finale, I loved seeing the costume and the seven-years-later ending and hearing the John Williams score, but the big confrontation with Darkseid was the most rushed, boring thing I’ve seen in ages.

I thought the finale of Castle mostly worked. We went back to the long-term plot with Beckett’s mother, and the storyline with Captain Montgomery was a good twist. But then we had to end with Beckett getting shot, a tacked-on cliffhanger to make people tune in next season.

Yawn. If the show isn’t renewed, all you’ve done is piss off lots of people. (Alien Nation and V come to mind as shows that ended on season cliffhangers.) Otherwise, we know perfectly well that Beckett will recover, and you’re just yanking our chains. It’s a tactic to manipulate the audience, one that calls attention to itself, thus snapping me out of the story.

Star Trek: The Next Generation did the cliffhanger thing. The most famous example is probably The Best of Both Worlds, when we ended the season with Captain Picard’s assimilation by the Borg. Yet that worked for me, partly because it didn’t feel forced, and partly because it was just a damn good story.

I get that you want to end the season on a memorable note to make sure people tune in next fall so your ratings don’t fall off. Just don’t be so blatant with the manipulation.

Doctor Who includes tacked-on bits in the season finales, whether it’s a bride materializing for no particular reason or the Titanic crashing into the TARDIS, but I like those. They feel less like I’m being manipulated and more like a way to show the Doctor getting back to “normal,” which for him means bizarre and random things happening. It’s not a hook so much as a denouement.

From a writing perspective, I think it comes down to not letting the audience see behind the curtain. Fiction manipulates the readers/viewers, but when you’re clumsy and obvious with that manipulation, you fail. And a lot of shows get pretty clumsy, especially at the end of the season.

What do you think? What works for you and what kicks you out of the story?

Google & Piracy

Over at SF Novelists, author David B. Coe has been talking about the response from Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, to proposed anti-piracy laws.

“If there is a law that requires DNSs to do X and it’s passed by both houses of congress and signed by the president of the United States and we disagree with it then we would still fight it,” he added. “If it’s a request the answer is we wouldn’t do it, if it’s a discussion we wouldn’t do it.”

Agent Richard Curtis says this is game over, calling it “a staggering and possibly fatal blow” to authors and publishers.

Really? Fatal in the same way that Napster and other file-sharing sites were fatal to the music industry? (Which, as we know, completely ceased to exist on July 13, 2001.)

Coe states unequivocally that piracy hurts an author’s numbers. “Only the most naïve observer could possibly think that piracy doesn’t hurt an author’s prospects for success.”

I guess I’m naïve. Or a “piracy-denier,” to use Coe’s terms. Because I don’t know. I’ve seen data to suggest that sometimes piracy helps overall sales, and I’ve seen other numbers suggesting it hurts. Finding unbiased data is a lot harder. I’ve spoken to individuals who’ve said they pirated one book and went on to legally purchase others. I’ve also seen the “fans” posting to sites asking where they can download the latest release from their favorite author, or boasting about getting an illegal copy of a book on release date.

I’m not saying I support people sharing and downloading my work without paying for it. For the most part, piracy pisses me off.

And my general feeling toward Google is unprintable. This is the company that decided they had the rights to scan and share any out-of-print book that they liked, in blatant violation of copyright law. They’re rallying to “freedom of speech,” but I seem to recall Google merrily censoring their search results for China… “Don’t be evil” my ass.

I don’t believe piracy is hurting me much right now, but I don’t know how that might change in the future. What happens in five or ten years, when a much larger portion of my readers are reading electronically? What happens as my work becomes more popular? (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I see my German books popping up on pirate sites more frequently than my English work.)

DMCA feels like an endless, generally futile game of whack-a-mole, putting the burden on authors and publishers. Law enforcement, from what I’ve seen, rarely bothers to get involved until you’re talking about massive file-sharing operations, and even then international boundaries make it difficult to do anything about certain sites. We’ve seen from RIAA and the music industry that going after end users is a losing battle. I don’t know what the right answer is here.

I don’t like Google, but I don’t necessarily think that going after search engines instead of going after the file-sharing sites is the best way to go. Where does the responsibility lie? The site hosting the illegal files? (In that case, am I responsible if you post a plagiarized poem in the comments to this blog post?) The individual users who upload them? The search engine who links to them? The author who can’t be bothered to scour the net and send takedown notices?

I don’t have answers, but I think it’s a good conversation to have. I just wish we could have that conversation with more data and facts, and less “end of the world” hyperbole.

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