Category Archives: writing

writing

Punk Writing

I’m starting to like punks a whole lot. But not this kind:

I’m talking about steampunks. Dieselpunks. Atompunks. Fiction that’s set in an alternate-history, alternate-tech sort of world, populated by characters who don’t shop at IKEA and The Gap. Lots of brass gadgets and clockwork. Dirigibles. Language from a time when people used to read outside of school.

And the aesthetic is just plain cool. Look at this steampunk computer somebody made:

That’s a working computer, folks. If you want to see the details and more pictures, click here. A lot of steampunk fans are also Makers. Have you heard of them?

Maker culture is thriving: here’s a link to Make magazine. Broadly speaking, they’re people who reject pop consumerism and make something new out of found items. There’s a strong DIY ethic and a premium placed on personal creativity. And in terms of design, they usually don’t want to hide the way something works, like modern doodads; they’d rather see all the gears and gizmos and the wires and so on. Here’s a link to a video of this year’s Maker Faire to get a sense of what they like.

In terms of writing, the opportunities are vast. The market isn’t glutted yet, demand is increasing, and there’s so much that can be done. In terms of writing trends, I think there’s still plenty of room to get in on the ground floor here. Granted, if you’re trying to come up with a Sherlock Holmes clone, that might be a tough sell, but look at what else is out there and doing well. Boneshaker by Cherie Priest features a kid and his mom in 19th-century Seattle. Leviathan and the forthcoming Behemoth by Scott Westerfeld feature a couple of young’uns, too, and that’s WWI-era stuff, qualifying it as dieselpunk (though there are significant biopunk aspects as well). The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi, is a biopunk novel doing quite well now. And then there’s Gail Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate series, set in 19th-century London, which is definitely steampunk with a bit of urban fantasy and Jane Austen mashed in. (By the way, my next author interview is with Gail, and I’m very excited!)

I’m hoping inspiration will strike me soon for a punkish short story…or even a novel, heck, why not? I’ve started an epic fantasy and I’ve outlined the fourth book in my urban fantasy series, but it’s never too late to start something else. Plenty of burners on the stove, right? Multitasking keeps the brain fresh and all that. Food for thought, anyway. :)

writing

Help is Out There

…if you’re writing a query. There’s two kinds of help readily available on the Internet(s): what to do and what not to do. A couple of “what not to do” links:

First, an amusing collection of query fails from an agent in Slush Pile Hell. Go back and read some of the archives, too, they’re seriously funny. But also kinda sad…they’re all real.

Second, here’s some recent advice from agent Jessica Faust about queries: Query Don’ts. Gotta thank @GailCarriger for directing me to it via Twitter.

Sticking with Ms. Faust, here’s her deconstruction of a successful query letter for a mystery novel.

Then, I highly recommend joining the Absolute Write Water Cooler. Lots of published and soon-to-be-published writers there, and it’s a very helpful community. They have a Share Your Work forum which is behind a password wall, so that the work doesn’t show up on search engines. Inside, there’s a lovely room called Query Letter Hell where you can post your query letter and get feedback. It can be brutal but it’s helpful—you’ll get a response and personal attention that agents and editors never have the time to give. There are many success stories in there, too—writers who got partial and full requests from agents and representation as well. Hope it helps.

writing

Market Analysis: An Anecdote

Sometimes I wonder where writing fads come from…and then I look at the bestseller lists and go, oh yeah. All the people writing vampire books are looking at the Twilight series and the success of the Sookie Stackhouse novels and saying, I want a piece of that. And it’s tough to blame ’em for wanting a slice of bestselling pie. (If I’m fortunate enough to be served up a plate, I won’t say no; I’ll ask for whipped cream.)

But here’s the problem with writing according to fads or the market: what’s popular now won’t necessarily be popular a year or two from now, which is what you have to be thinking about if you’re trying to anticipate the market. It takes a year for a publisher to get a fiction book onto the shelves—ten months if they rush it, nine if nobody sleeps. And before that, you have to actually write the book and get an agent, and said agent has to get you your deal. (Unless you’re going to go the slush pile route, in which case you can add on another year to eternity.) So let’s keep the math simple and say for the sake of argument, if you’re trying to anticipate things, that you need to predict what editors will want to buy a year from now if you’re writing your book. They, in turn, are gambling that your book will be popular the year afterward. If you write something derivative of today’s market, thinking it’s hot, by the time somebody has to make a decision, they’ll be looking at your book like the hundredth peanut butter and jelly sandwich they’ve had in as many days. They’re not going to be excited.

And so you must look at what’s out there in the genre you wish to write—market awareness is good—and then write something new enough to stand out. Then, more importantly, decide if what you’re writing is something you’d actually want to read. If you read a lot (an excellent idea), then you will pick up on the tropes of a certain genre and maybe, after a while, figure out what’s missing. And if you want to read what’s missing and write what’s missing, then you might have landed on top of a Great Idea.

I don’t think I’m a brilliant market analyst, but back in 2008 I noticed something missing from the urban fantasy market: dudes. Not only dudes as protagonists, but dudes as writers. There weren’t many of either. The market was dominated by women writing about women, and the men in such tales were primarily romantic interests (all of which is fine, but as a reader dude I wanted more broken bones and fewer broken hearts). So I thought, hey, maybe there’s an opportunity here. Would I like writing urban fantasy? I’d never tried it. But there was this webcomic idea I was working on, tremendously fun for me to imagine and write but extremely difficult to illustrate, that perhaps could be adapted…so I started toying with it. And once I found a groove, the writing went extremely fast—and that was before I added Mountain Dew.

“I’m a dude! I’m writing about a dude! This is great! Mwah-ha-ha-ha!” It was kind of like that, except twice as nerdy as you’re imagining. But it wasn’t simply reveling in my dudehood: I was also steering away from vampires, werewolves, demons, half-faeries and half anything for my main character. The shelves were already full of those. They’re good stories—I devour them!—but the authors writing them were well established and I didn’t have anything new to say there. My webcomic, though, was about a Druid. A quick check of the shelves at Borders and Barnes & Noble revealed that there were zero urban fantasies featuring a Druid in the title role. Heck, I couldn’t find a Druid in a supporting role. Morgan Llewelyn wrote a book called Druids in 1993, but that was about historical Druids, not urban ones. So there you go—I figured out the market was missing urban Druid dudes, and I really, really wanted to write about one.

There’s always a risk in doing something new, because if a story is too weird, agents and editors won’t know how to market it. But the risk in following a fad is that when your manuscript arrives on an agent’s or editor’s desk, it will be the twentieth gnarly vampire romance they’ve seen that day. Would you rather they say, “WTF?” or “Not another one”? I’ll take the WTF every time. (Which may come back to haunt me: I can see the reviews now.) But I got lucky: I found an agent who liked my Druid, and then my agent found a good number of editors who liked him, too—enough that I got the insane luxury of choosing my (extremely awesome) publisher, Del Rey.

Part of what’s exciting about urban fantasy is that there’s SO MUCH room for new ideas and twists—so the preponderance of the same few creatures appearing over and over is puzzling. I’m waiting for the story about the short supermarket clerk—often mistaken for a dwarf—who doesn’t realize he’s half gnome, and the emerald ring from his unknown father gives him complete control over cats if he wears it on his index finger…or something. Gnomes are always background critters, but they’re begging to be fleshed out as a species. Somebody needs to write a gnome character I can care about. And what if trolls are only stupid and violent because of their militant political leadership and a poor education system? A visionary troll—self-taught through the Internet(s)—could arise and transform her culture if only she can survive the malignant attentions of the entrenched Club and Loincloth merchants who would keep them all lurking under bridges forever. Heh! You get the idea. My unsolicited advice is to always write what you like—but try to like something fresh in hopes that the market will be ready for it.

writing

Some days are better than others

You probably noticed before now.

But when one has a really good day, the question must be asked, why was it so good? Can we isolate the goodness? Did it involve small furry animals at their cutest? Pizza at its tastiest? America’s home videos at their funniest?

For me, really good days are those of staggering accomplishments, and today I accomplished a stagger, amongst other things.

Fueled partially by beer and partially by this incredibly hypercaffeinated song called “Valley of the Damned” that I had playing on loop, I wrote 4,000 words today. Usually I manage a mere thousand or a little bit more. It probably helped that I was writing a battle sequence between my Druid and twelve Valkyries. I mean, you’re not going to listen to DragonForce with the speakers turned up to 11 when you’re trying to write a poignant mother-daughter scene in a melancholy train station. Or maybe that’s exactly what you’d do, because you’re just that edgy…I don’t know. ;-)

But when you want to have a really good day writing about people swinging swords at enemy appendages, you owe it to yourself to start out watching this video, which is what happens when the Platonic Ideals of Luxurious Hair and Manual Dexterity meet. Seriously, endure the commercial at the beginning, watch the whole thing and you’ll be amazed. By the time you get finished watching the part where they have isolation cams on the guitar players’ hands, you’ll want to go get some high quality shampoo and conditioner, scrub it into your scalp really really fast, and then write about people killing each other. Heh!

74K now on Hammered. Next up, the climactic battle in Asgard! I just need to find the right song….oh, wait! Here it is! If that can’t inspire me to write up some total carnage, I’m doomed. (Though I think parts of this video are unintentionally funny…)

writing

Word Counts

Whenever you’re tackling a big project like a novel, small goals are important, and the word count is an easy way to measure achievement. I’m at 60K words on Hammered today, so that’s technically three-quarters of the way to my word count goal. It’ll probably wind up going over 80K—Hounded and Hexed are both in the mid 80s—but heck, you take your milestones where you can. And I’m not saying these 60K words are golden. They’ll get edited and revised and some passages will get cut out completely and replaced with something else. In the meantime, reaching a word count goal is an excuse to do a happy dance, because you need them while you’re writing. It’s far too easy to get discouraged otherwise.

Here’s the difference between writing during school and writing during the summer: During school I averaged only 2550 words a week. During this first week of summer, I’ve written 9,000. It’s really encouraging to make so much progress. I’m hoping I can keep up the pace to finish by the end of June…my deadline’s at the end of July, and I like to be early if I can.

In other news, my brilliant wife, Kimberly, is also going to be published. Her article on F. Scott Fitzgerald and the American dream was accepted by The Explicator, an academic journal, and will appear in their next issue. She’s amused that students can now cite her in their papers about The Great Gatsby.

And for fans of Norse mythology (I know you’re out there, Amalia), check out Norse Code by Greg van Eekhout if you haven’t already. His protagonist is a valkyrie and he knows his stuff really well. He switches POV between the valkyrie, one of Odin’s sons, Hugin and Munin, and others. I’m not finished with the book yet, but I’ve been entertained so far.

writing

Alphas & Betas & Editing

This is about alpha and beta readers, not werewolves. Rarr! Sorry. It’s also about all the fixin’ that needs to be done before a book appears on the shelves.

Nobody writes perfect, golden prose on their first draft. Or even their second or third. I could be wrong…but I doubt it.

Every writer’s different on how they approach these things, but it’s fairly common to have some sort of feedback during the writing process. An objective pair of eyes can catch inconsistencies and let you know whether what you’ve written A) makes any sense and B) if you’re entertaining. I use two alpha readers who look at each chapter as it’s finished and one beta reader who looks at the whole novel only. These three people all look at the book before my agent or editor sees it.

So hey, shout-outs to my alphas, Alan and Tawnya: They catch all sorts of good stuff and let me know when I’ve made a factual error. For example: “Kevin, blue spruce trees don’t grow in Europe. Dumbass.”

Calling me a dumbass wasn’t really part of the original comment—I simply felt like one. And I’m grateful to my alpha reader for checking on these things. I should have taken the time to research that, but I was probably in a character/plot groove and didn’t want to pause to make sure I named the right species of tree. A good alpha reader will call you on stuff like that, and it’s hard to find good alphas. Who’d want to read a novel in spastic spoonfuls, sometimes weeks apart, and nitpick instead of simply enjoying the story? Such people are a rare breed.

My beta reader, Andrea, is my Politically Correct filter. (Sometimes I put things in there just to set her off. It’s funny when she gets into a snit.) She also finds inconsistencies in tone that occasionally creep in during the course of writing, and she suggests that I flesh out a character here or maybe leave out something there. Since she reads the whole book in a sitting or two, she spots larger issues rather than tiny ones.

After the alphas and beta are finished and I’ve made changes according to their suggestions, I send it off to my agent, who may/may not have plenty to say (there was a lot for Hounded, but he had me deliver Hexed to Del Rey as is) and only then do I deliver it to my editor. This means my editor is probably seeing my fourth or fifth draft, but I go ahead and call it my “first” draft in terms of my computer files.

Then we go back and forth with changes until she says heck, this is pretty good, I’ll accept this. At that point everybody takes a few minutes for a happy dance. To give you an idea of quantity, there were five rounds of changes for Hounded, only three for Hexed.

But wait! We’re not finished! Next the copy editor gets hold of it and lays down some Grammar Fu with a green pencil. He/she will also catch lots of factual issues, ask great questions, point out inconsistencies, and I can make changes there as necessary.

After that it goes to typesetting, and the only changes I can make then are minor spelling/punctuation doodads. Inserting/deleting passages is probably not a good idea at this point, because it costs money.

Finally, it’s finished. Only after months of work will it go out to the general public. The author’s name is on the cover so he/she gets all the credit, but quite a few people are involved with any publication. (I didn’t even mention the cover artist and all the people in marketing and publicity. That’ll be a blog for another day.) So to my alphas and beta and my agent & editor(s), thank you, and cheers.

writing

Narrative Voices

Since my books are first-person narratives, it’s easy to get into a bit of a rut. Ruts can be nice, mind you. Sometimes they’re downright comfy. But sometimes you’d like to put on a new pair of shoes and step out of that rut. Stretch your legs, go on a minor perambulation off-road, discover wombats lurking in the undergrowth. Find buried treasure. Or simply find out where the hell this metaphor is going, because I’m not sure anymore.

I’ve been stepping outside the (entirely pleasant) rut lately. For five chapters in Hammered, I get to tell the story in the voice of a different narrator. Making each narrator sound (and read) differently than my accustomed narrative voice is the fun bit. And it’s really bizarre what it can do to your head when you sink yourself so deeply into a character that you begin to think like him.

One of my characters is especially hirsute—as in, don’t let him make you any food without a full-body hairnet. After writing in his voice for an hour, I was overwhelmed with an urgent need to shave. And get a haircut. I actually felt hairier after writing and thinking in his voice.

That might indicate I have a dire need for therapy. But I hope it means I’m writing a lively character with his own personality.

Hmmm. If writing a hairy character makes me want to shave…I think I’ll create a skinny character next and drop ten pounds after writing a thousand words in his voice. And I will never, ever write a criminal because I like living outside of jail.

I know not how others do it, but I create a very specific set of verbal tics for each character. Leif Helgarson doesn’t use contractions often, for example, giving his diction an almost ridiculous level of formality. A Russian character neglects to use articles and often forgets to use pronouns, etc.

51K on Hammered now. For some reason, being over 50K makes me feel like I’m sprinting for the finish line. I do a little “Halfway!” dance all through the 40s, but once I hit 50K I know I’m on the home stretch. D’oh! Writing “home stretch” made Mötley Crüe’s “Home Sweet Home” pop into my head. And now that I’ve written it down and you’ve read it, it’s in your head too. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Mötley Crüe is a virus.

writing

Three Writing Myths Busted

I like encouraging folks to write. It gives me warm fuzzies. I think most everyone has a story to tell, and if they want to work at it hard enough and long enough to tell it very, very well, then they should be able to find an audience for that story and someone willing to pay them for it.

But it can be discouraging, I know, to work for so long on a project with no certainty of it ever sitting on a bookshelf with its own cute little ISBN barcode.

Luckily, there’s some encouragement to be had. Fantasy author Jim Hines recently conducted a survey of 246 published sci-fi/fantasy authors about how they sold their first books, and the full results of that survey are now posted on his blog. Here’s the link to his awesome work, please check it out.

Though it’s obviously skewed toward sci-fi/fantasy authors, it contains information that should be useful to everyone, and busts a few pervasive myths. I’ll highlight a couple of them here and throw in my personal, anecdotal info.

Busted Myth #1: You have to sell short fiction first. 
Out of 246 authors, 116 sold a book without ever selling a short story. That includes me. (I participated in Jim’s survey.)

Busted Myth #2: Traditional publishing is dead, self-publishing is the way to go.
Not so much. There are huge, isolated success stories—Christopher Paolini is the one that comes to mind—but the key word here is isolated. Those kinds of success stories are anomalies. Out of the 246 surveyed authors, only one self-published first before getting picked up by a major publisher.

Busted Myth #3: You have to know someone in the business to get published.
140 of the authors (over half) had no contacts at either their agency or their publisher before making their first book sale. I’m one of those. I know four whole people in the industry now, but I still haven’t met them in person: I know my agent and a colleague of his, and I know my editor and assistant editor at Del Rey. But I “met” my agent through a query letter. And I didn’t “speak” to my editor until my agent made the deal. So the proof is there and it’s solid: you can get into this business based solely on the power of your written words.

There are many more nuggets of golden info to be found in the survey—I highly recommend it—but here are the last couple of stats I’d like to point out: It seems most of the authors sold their first books in their mid to late 30’s. (I was 38 at the time of the sale.) And while 58 authors sold the first book they ever wrote, many wrote 2-4 books before they got their first sale. I wrote two other books before I wrote Hounded and learned so much in the process. I also learned quite a bit from the process of writing Hounded; I wrote the next book in the series more quickly and it didn’t require as much editing.

Hopefully this info will encourage some of you on your journey to getting published!

writing

Enormity of a novel vs. wee little goals

If someone says unto thee, “I must have your completed novel in five months. Begin,” what you would begin is not a novel at all, but an epic freakout over the impossibility of the demand. The number of words involved—75,000-120,000, depending on your book—boggles the mind and shuts down the engine of the little train who could.

So don’t think about that. All that will get you is a plate of roasted fail drizzled in a savory fail sauce and served with a side of fail.

Instead, think about all those people in November who write novels in a month. And think about writing the equivalent of a three to five-page paper each day until you’re finished, the kind your English teacher made you write. About a thousand words per day. You can do that. It’ll take you a couple of hours, maybe three. Plus you can hold down a day job. You might not get to watch TV, but what you’re writing is better than anything on TV anyway, right? Maybe on a weekend you could write more than a thousand. If you were super diligent about that, you’d have a 90,000-word novel in three months.

But you’re not going to be super diligent, because you have a life. Or if you don’t, I’m sure you’re trying to get one. That’s okay, I highly recommend having a life. You can take off a day or two here and there and still make your deadline in five months. And you know what? The year’s not even half over! You can write another novel before the year is out! You can even take two months off for a backpacking trip across Europe and then come home and write a novel about it!

The first novel of my series, Hounded, took me over a year because I didn’t have a deadline and I was attempting to have a life. I left it alone for weeks, even months at a time because there wasn’t any urgency. After I got a contract, I wrote much more quickly. :) I wrote the second book in five months. Now I’m already a third of the way through writing the third book and I have until July to finish it. The practice helps, and the deadline helps a lot.

So give yourself a deadline and start practicing. If you’d like to see how long many Sci-fi/Fantasy authors worked at getting published before selling their first book, check out this handy-dandy info here courtesy of fantasy author Jim Hines, who surveyed 246 SF/F authors and crunched the numbers. You’ll see that some of them worked a long, long time. Decades. Some of them, on the other hand, sold books after a just a few years. None of them ever gave up. My data is in that survey; I wrote for 19 years before I sold my first book. If you’re an aspiring writer, I hope you’ll be one of those who sells theirs quickly—but if the time of “quickness” has already passed for you, I hope you’ll keep working anyway—the practice helps.

writing

Serendipitous surprises

I love it when something cool happens in the writing process that I didn’t plan ahead of time. Just like a reader enjoys being surprised (most of the time) by what happens in a book, I like to be surprised while I’m writing it. It’s a large part of what makes writing enjoyable. The characters take on a life of their own and do things I never expected, and sometimes these surprises turn out to be major plot points.


When I’m planning a book I write chapter by chapter outline that contains the major events of each chapter, nothing more. It’s a guideline with lots of room for detours. Sometimes the detours are lengthy.


For example, in Hexed I had a priest and a rabbi walk into a pagan bookstore as a joke and it turned out to become a major subplot of both that book and Hammered. 


Right now, as I’m writing Hammered, a trip to Asgard that I thought was going to take one chapter has now taken four. And because of the way things have developed, there is going to be a vampire problem that I never outlined at all, but I can’t wait to write it. Jesus was to make a cameo appearance in chapter four, but now he’s going to be pushed back to chapter nine or ten because of other events that have developed in the meantime.


After the book is finished I like to compare the outline to the finished product. All the events of Hexed I had outlined are in there, but they’re in a different sequence than I originally planned and there are several bonus events that crept in, like the priest and rabbi subplot.


25K on Hammered now. And if anyone knows a reliable Hebrew speaker, give me a shout; I need to translate a couple of sentences for the book.