Writer's Grove

Today I am supposed to receive the copy-edited manuscript for my second book, Hexed. I’m incredibly excited about this—so much so that I might indulge in excessive superfluous exclamation points!!!!!!

You might wonder why.

Why would any sane person want to see their written work all marked up by a stranger 3,000 miles away?

Because there will be a title page with my name on it that the publisher made up all special just for me. There will also be an ISBN number assigned specifically to my book. It’s all proof that my dream of getting published will be real someday…in just a wee bit over a year from now. *tiny groan*

April 26, 2011…*another tiny groan.* It’s a long time to wait. Nineteen months and one day after the deal was struck, Hounded will finally hit the shelves. That is a bit longer than most deals, but since it’s going to be followed in quick succession by Hexed in May and Hammered in June, the extra time is built in there for me to actually write two books.

It will be bearable, of course, because the day will eventually come. I get to wake up every day and know I’m twenty-four hours closer to my goal. Eventually I’ll get to see my covers and do a little dance. I’ll get to hear the reader of the audio version attempt to do all the accents in the books (Irish, Polish, Tamil, Russian, Finnish, Mandarin, Icelandic, and German) and grin until my face hurts. And maybe, in the interim, I’ll get some good news from overseas, or some news about dramatic rights. It could happen anytime, and that makes waiting more fun.

As far as progress goes, I’ve taken a step backward, but I think it’s more of a course correction. I’ve been writing about these vampires recently and not digging it at all. I wrote about four thousand words, had this huge imbroglio set at University of Phoenix Stadium, and it didn’t feel right. So I highlighted the lot of it and pressed Delete. It wasn’t really a subplot; it was more of a derailment, a complete tangent, and it’s better that I wait on the vampires until I can develop them properly in their own story. Hammered isn’t about vampires. It’s about Ratatosk and Yggdrasil, Thor and Odin, and How to Tempt a Frost Giant.

O frabjous day! There shall be many words to cuddle, plus hot chocolate with marshmallows! I raise my mug to you, and hope you have some lovely words to cuddle up with too.

I expect there are many people staggeringly inconvenienced by Iceland right now. People who have never looked at a globe are now scowling at it, shaking their fingers scoldingly at the volcanically active island and complaining about their cancelled flights. I don’t know why they’re so surprised. I mean, you could just take a look at this map of Iceland from 1590 and know that someday it was going to throw out some serious shit:

Behold my new masterpiece:

I’ll get reviews of these up when I’m finished with them. I’m chugging through Silver Borne right now. The Impressively Inked Woman hasn’t read that book to me yet, but there’s still a hundred pages to go, so there’s hope.

There are several schools of vampires out there, some more appealing than others, and I’ve been working on the kind o’ vamps I want in my novels. There’s currently only one vampire in my world, but many more are coming along and my lone vampire is supposed to be different from the others. So the question I’m asking myself is, what are the others like? This isn’t an exhaustive list by any means, but feel free to add to it in the comments.

1. Old School: They’re predators, we’re food. That’s it. Well, maybe not. Sometimes, there are bat wings.
2. Anne Ricers: Bored dandies who seem mysterious because they still dress like courtiers from the time of Louis the XIV instead of in jeans and t-shirts.
3. Bikers n’ Goths: Leather and chains and bad-boy image.
4. Tootsie Rolls: Hard outer shell but a soft, chewy emotional center ready for that special human girl to nourish and control. Lots of paranormal romances have these.
5. Shiny vegetarian vampires who think self-absorbed teenagers are incredibly attractive.
6. Cold businessmen with an eye for long-term investments.

I’ve eliminated #4 and #5 from consideration. Working on lengthening the list of options or hybridizing it…

32K on Hammered.

My editor is THE COOLEST editor ever! Behold Exhibit A:

All of this was sent to me by my editor, except for the fruit. Here’s what you’re looking at, left to right, front row: Robert Redick’s The Red Wolf Conspiracy; a Braeburn apple; Daryl Gregory’s Pandemonium; another apple; Jaida Jones and Danielle Bennett’s Have Mercy; and then moving to the back row, an Advanced Reader Edition of Peter V. Brett’s The Warded Man; a NEW! AWESOME! copy of Mr. Brett’s latest novel, The Desert Spear, two weeks before it’s available in stores (Whoops! I just drooled on the keyboard in nerd ecstasy!); bananas, because this shit is bananas; Richard K. Morgan’s The Steel Remains; and a final apple.

And now we pause for a celebratory squee. Squeeeee!!!

I had no idea how cool it would be to get free books until I got them. I mean, when I was a younger nerd with more hair, I’d get “free” books from those book clubs, but we all know they weren’t really free because you had that commitment hanging over you to buy only six more books in the next year at regular club price and you had to return that card on time or they’d send you a crappy book of the month instead of something you wanted. These books are free. I don’t have to buy anything or “just pay shipping and handling.” And yes, I’m bragging about it. I’m having a nice brag right now, because this is the coolest perk I never expected for getting published. I didn’t expect any perks, to be honest; getting published is satisfactorily perky all by itself. It doesn’t need perks. But they are there, and this is one of them.

In coming days, weeks, (months?) I’ll be reviewing these. I’m reading The Warded Man first because I’ve heard nothing but stellar things about it and I’m fond of reading stellar books. But after that and The Desert Spear, I’m digging into Richard Morgan’s book. His Altered Carbon was awesome stuff and so were the sequels, so I can’t wait to see what he’s done here. Oh, and you know what? I almost bought that book over the weekend! I picked it up, all excited, and then I checked the publisher on the spine and went “WHOA!” kind of like that loud man in the Staples commercials but several decibels quieter. Richard Morgan’s with Del Rey, too! I had no idea. I put the book down—very reluctantly—because I thought maybe, just maybe, Tricia would surprise me with it. And she DID! So that is Exhibit B. The books & authors in the front row are unknown to me, but I’m looking forward to this particular introduction and I’ll share the experience when I get to them.

I really need to write an effusive missive o’ thanks to my editor now.

School’s keepin’ me busy and it’s tough to find the headspace to write, but I’m at 30K on Hammered now and deep in research on the Kabbalah for my Kabbalist warriors. Happy Passover to all my Jewish friends.

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!

Things I normally don’t blog about: bugs.

But I just recently realized that I’m sharing the planet with this particular bug and I think it’s cool. It’s called a wheel bug, and it’s the largest of the assassin beetles. Sort of like a ninja insect.

See that little tubelike doodad underneath its conehead with the googly black eyes? That thing will whip and stab another insect and paralyze it almost instantly, and then it’ll start pumping saliva and enzymes into the critter and liquefy its insides before sucking it all up like a slurpee. They kill lots of garden pests so they’re actually good to have around, but they’re kind of scary.

For humans their bites are painful and don’t heal very quickly; they’ll probably leave a scar. But they don’t attack unless provoked, and they move pretty slowly unless you’re right in their face.

These things usually go for caterpillars and such, but they can even take out bees with no trouble and yes, even praying mantises! Check out this YouTube video here; the mantis puts up a fight but once that beak is in there, it’s nothing more than a mantis milkshake to the wheel bug.

Sweet dreams!

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.

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.