So, it's that most wonderful time of the year. There's still more than a few shopping days left in the season and it's a safe bet that most of us slackers have yet to finish checking off everyone from our list. For those of you who have an aspiring author in your family or social circle, I thought I'd help you and throw out a few items they may need (even if they think they don't):
The Amazon Kindle ($139). This thing is the Borg of e-readers. It's everywhere. It's not friendly with all e-formats (You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile). And I'll be frank, most writers hate these things, or think they hate these things. We love the smell and feel of paper; we love touching it and turning the pages. Writers are stubborn that way. But most importantly, writers are B-R-O-K-E, or at least close to it. A humble writer can save anywhere between $5 to $15 per book. Plus, it's green (green is the new black); they're not killing trees. Bonus- guys writing Romance under a female-esque pen names don't have to expose the cheesy covers of whatever they're using as research material.
The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th Edition ($49). Yeah, I know, it's a hardback, pricey, it's a lot of pulp (kills trees), and it runs contrary to the whole e-reader thing. But, it's not legally available in any e-reader format, and it's the King James of style (writing and grammar, not fashion; might be important to point out the difference). This is one of those things a new writer might not think to buy for themselves. Of course, it's huge and bland, and they may look at you like you have a dick growing from you forehead ('You think my grammar is poor?' i.e. 'Does my butt look big in these jeans?').
Grado iGrado Headphones ($49). Your lovable aspiring author may spend hours in a writing coma using music to isolate themselves from manic households and hone their focus. If they use Apple products, I'm going to bet that more than a few are still using those trendy little white ear buds. From that I can guarantee their ears get sore as hell after several hours of Boom Boom Pow. I'm not going to get into the geekery of audiophilia, but these behind-the-neck cans (slang for headphones) can be worn for days and sound better than anything you own. Even your Bo$e and Beat$. Sadly, I have a $200 set of Grados and these are damn near as good. I almost cry thinking about it.
Last gift: Time (free, or expensive depending on how you look at it). Laugh as much as you want, but I don't think there's anything nicer than giving your lovable aspiring author a gift certificate for time; there's simply not enough of it lying around. Pack up the kids, arm the security system, throw out the dog, lock the doors, and leave. Make sure you leave your writer behind. Do they have a conference coming up? Head to the relatives. Trying to get out a round of queries? Give them a weekend. Seriously, they'll be blown away by your kindness.
That's it. I could go on and on, but that should be enough to get you thinking. Or shopping. Go now, you lousy bunch of procrastinators. Go!
Friday, December 10, 2010
Friday, December 3, 2010
New Writer Seeks Advice
But I'm not the new writer. What? It appears I'm now an expert, or at least other people think I am. Personally, I prefer to think of myself as a student of the art. Over the last year, in the time I've gotten serious about writing and learning about the publishing industry, I've been very content to sit back, ask questions, and learn from those who did this before me, whether they were published or not.
(I think it's important to note that just because a writer isn't published, that doesn't mean an aspiring author should discount their wisdom and experience. This is a long journey; for a few, publishing happens, but for most, it doesn't. As we like to say in the military: it's the reality of the profession.)
Okay, back to title. I've blogged about this stuff in the past, but this is the first time it's hit me in real life. So, late last night dude walks up to me in that parking. (No, I'm not getting carjacked. We're both in uniform, so it's cool. I actually know the guy.) Here's how it went.
Him: "Hey, Ken, I heard you published a book?"
Me: (completely flattered) "Well, no. I'm working on it."
Him: "What do you know about publishing?"
Me: "Not enough, but I've learned a ton. What do you need?"
Him: "Well, I wrote a book. I've been working on it a while. I've tried to get it published, but I really don't know how?"
Me: "What genre is it?"
Him: "It's a series of humorous stories I've written down since I came into the Army."
Me: "Okay, that's interesting. How's your query letter?"
Him: "What's a query letter?"
Me: "How much time do you have?"
So he and I plan to get together and talk. He's a peer, so I'll do my best to help him out. The current problem is we're in the middle of a massive training event that will probably prevent us from getting together until after New Year's Day. To keep him occupied, I gave him a homework assignment:
First, find a writing group and ingratiate yourself with other writers. Second, Google 'query letter' and start educating yourself on how the publishing industry works. Last, go to a site like Querytracker.com and find agents looking for your specific genre.
Me: (military aphorism) "Know your enemy."
Him: (nodding) "Ah, target the right agents." (He meant for his book, not literally. Words matter. You have to watch yourself around Army dudes.)
All this didn't click until this morning. One of my favorite agents, Lauren MacLeod of the Strothman Agency, tweeted that about 60% of the queries she receives are, for lack a better phrase, a wast of time. Of that, she said, only 10% are good enough to seriously consider. I know the competition was stiff. I know there are a LOT of writers out there trying to get published. What I didn't know (and I'm using beer-math) was that the huge majority of queries flat out suck.
So, when I do get a chance to get back with my peer and try to pass on some of my limited knowledge, I'm going to do my best to ensure he falls more into the 10% category rather than that dreaded 60%. I have to wonder what that 60% does with their free time. Obviously not research.
Research, people, it's your friend.
...and, hey, I'm an expert!
(I think it's important to note that just because a writer isn't published, that doesn't mean an aspiring author should discount their wisdom and experience. This is a long journey; for a few, publishing happens, but for most, it doesn't. As we like to say in the military: it's the reality of the profession.)
Okay, back to title. I've blogged about this stuff in the past, but this is the first time it's hit me in real life. So, late last night dude walks up to me in that parking. (No, I'm not getting carjacked. We're both in uniform, so it's cool. I actually know the guy.) Here's how it went.
Him: "Hey, Ken, I heard you published a book?"
Me: (completely flattered) "Well, no. I'm working on it."
Him: "What do you know about publishing?"
Me: "Not enough, but I've learned a ton. What do you need?"
Him: "Well, I wrote a book. I've been working on it a while. I've tried to get it published, but I really don't know how?"
Me: "What genre is it?"
Him: "It's a series of humorous stories I've written down since I came into the Army."
Me: "Okay, that's interesting. How's your query letter?"
Him: "What's a query letter?"
Me: "How much time do you have?"
So he and I plan to get together and talk. He's a peer, so I'll do my best to help him out. The current problem is we're in the middle of a massive training event that will probably prevent us from getting together until after New Year's Day. To keep him occupied, I gave him a homework assignment:
First, find a writing group and ingratiate yourself with other writers. Second, Google 'query letter' and start educating yourself on how the publishing industry works. Last, go to a site like Querytracker.com and find agents looking for your specific genre.
Me: (military aphorism) "Know your enemy."
Him: (nodding) "Ah, target the right agents." (He meant for his book, not literally. Words matter. You have to watch yourself around Army dudes.)
All this didn't click until this morning. One of my favorite agents, Lauren MacLeod of the Strothman Agency, tweeted that about 60% of the queries she receives are, for lack a better phrase, a wast of time. Of that, she said, only 10% are good enough to seriously consider. I know the competition was stiff. I know there are a LOT of writers out there trying to get published. What I didn't know (and I'm using beer-math) was that the huge majority of queries flat out suck.
So, when I do get a chance to get back with my peer and try to pass on some of my limited knowledge, I'm going to do my best to ensure he falls more into the 10% category rather than that dreaded 60%. I have to wonder what that 60% does with their free time. Obviously not research.
Research, people, it's your friend.
...and, hey, I'm an expert!
Friday, November 19, 2010
No Plan Survives First Contact...
...or 'the Enemy gets his vote', or 'Murphy was a Soldier.' These are all variations of Murphy's pretty well known law, 'If Anything Can Go Wrong, It Will.' But I digress. Point is, during my 15 years in the military, I've learned some good lessons, and some of them even transfer over to the writing world. One of the most important of them is at the top of the post: No plan survives first contact.
In the military, we plan operations days, weeks, even months in advance. We slave over maps, statistics, and manuals, arguing and screaming back and forth over the table, eventually arriving at a hard earned consensus on how to move forward to engage the enemy.
Sounds a little like writing? Yeah, it kind of does.
We brief the plan, rehearsed it to death, prepared, and prepared. Then comes the execution, the part where we jump into our armored death machines and move forward to engage the enemy. Modern nights donned with Kevlar-armor, 21st century optics, and weapons that would make Napoleon himself run in terror. There is no second place in war. We are confident that:
We. Cannot. Lose.
Writing is the same. We plan. We plot. For hours, we march back and forth in front of whiteboard full of plot diagrams and flow charts. The rooms are filled with heat from the multiple computers burning their CPUs day and night collecting the research and background data that provide a solid foundation for our story. When it's all done, we outline, building the ladder that's going to take us from Act I up to the top of our Climax.
Then there's the other guy. That dude on the other side of the map with his own death machines and a hard-worked campaign plan. That's the Enemy. And guess what? He gets a vote too. When those armored warriors make contact and the steel starts flying, guess what happens to our plan. It goes right out the window.
Same thing in writing. In our writing cave, chapter summaries and character outlines get taped up next to the monitor and whiteboard. Then we move out, punishing keyboards to put words on the screen. (Frankly, I missed the days when I was whacking away on my IBM Selectric. It had a certain rhythm to it that was just awesome). As we roll out and start giving our characters bona fide opinions and that all-important snappy dialogue, something occurs to us: The story doesn't make any sense; it's going in a different direction. The plan was great; the outline, bulletproof. But it all changed. So what the heck happened?
At this point, you have a few choices. You can scratch your head, back away from the keyboard, pull down the outlines and rework your plot-equations until the math makes sense. After all, your intended story was g-e-n-i-u-s. It will work-- it has to work.
Okay, option two. Roll with it. Another military saying, 'An eighty percent plan executed violently is better than a perfect plan, poorly executed'. Be flexible, adapt. Let the narrative and dialogue lead you on their natural course until the muse decides it's time to hang it up. Every great military leader knows that momentum on the battlefield is critical to success. It's the same for writers. Keep that momentum; keep the words flowing left to right. Follow the plot rabbit down the hole until you've reached a natural stopping point.
The real Enemy here isn't the change in your outline; it's the break in momentum. In the end, the objective may not be the one you originally intended to conquer, but like on the battlefield, it may be the one that ultimately leads to that greater success. I will offer a few caveats:
No matter where the flow of the battle (story) takes you, don't lose sight of the desired endstate. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. It may be an ugly baby, but it's yours. (Like real life, some babies are genuinely ugly. Really) Also, your new story may not be better than the original. You may have had a bad batch of No-Doze and your new storyline is nothing more than a bizarre caffeine-influenced sidebar. Know the difference. There's no real formula for success here other than:
Be flexible and know when to exploit success.
In the military, we plan operations days, weeks, even months in advance. We slave over maps, statistics, and manuals, arguing and screaming back and forth over the table, eventually arriving at a hard earned consensus on how to move forward to engage the enemy.
Sounds a little like writing? Yeah, it kind of does.
We brief the plan, rehearsed it to death, prepared, and prepared. Then comes the execution, the part where we jump into our armored death machines and move forward to engage the enemy. Modern nights donned with Kevlar-armor, 21st century optics, and weapons that would make Napoleon himself run in terror. There is no second place in war. We are confident that:
We. Cannot. Lose.
Writing is the same. We plan. We plot. For hours, we march back and forth in front of whiteboard full of plot diagrams and flow charts. The rooms are filled with heat from the multiple computers burning their CPUs day and night collecting the research and background data that provide a solid foundation for our story. When it's all done, we outline, building the ladder that's going to take us from Act I up to the top of our Climax.
Then there's the other guy. That dude on the other side of the map with his own death machines and a hard-worked campaign plan. That's the Enemy. And guess what? He gets a vote too. When those armored warriors make contact and the steel starts flying, guess what happens to our plan. It goes right out the window.
Same thing in writing. In our writing cave, chapter summaries and character outlines get taped up next to the monitor and whiteboard. Then we move out, punishing keyboards to put words on the screen. (Frankly, I missed the days when I was whacking away on my IBM Selectric. It had a certain rhythm to it that was just awesome). As we roll out and start giving our characters bona fide opinions and that all-important snappy dialogue, something occurs to us: The story doesn't make any sense; it's going in a different direction. The plan was great; the outline, bulletproof. But it all changed. So what the heck happened?
At this point, you have a few choices. You can scratch your head, back away from the keyboard, pull down the outlines and rework your plot-equations until the math makes sense. After all, your intended story was g-e-n-i-u-s. It will work-- it has to work.
Okay, option two. Roll with it. Another military saying, 'An eighty percent plan executed violently is better than a perfect plan, poorly executed'. Be flexible, adapt. Let the narrative and dialogue lead you on their natural course until the muse decides it's time to hang it up. Every great military leader knows that momentum on the battlefield is critical to success. It's the same for writers. Keep that momentum; keep the words flowing left to right. Follow the plot rabbit down the hole until you've reached a natural stopping point.
The real Enemy here isn't the change in your outline; it's the break in momentum. In the end, the objective may not be the one you originally intended to conquer, but like on the battlefield, it may be the one that ultimately leads to that greater success. I will offer a few caveats:
No matter where the flow of the battle (story) takes you, don't lose sight of the desired endstate. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. It may be an ugly baby, but it's yours. (Like real life, some babies are genuinely ugly. Really) Also, your new story may not be better than the original. You may have had a bad batch of No-Doze and your new storyline is nothing more than a bizarre caffeine-influenced sidebar. Know the difference. There's no real formula for success here other than:
Be flexible and know when to exploit success.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
