If you run into any trouble, let me know.  Consider the shop in “beta” for the moment.

If you prefer to shop on Amazon, the story’s going through their approval process and should be ready for purchase in a day or so.

I was on two panels, both of which I think went relatively well.  The first was on New Marketing for Writers–specifically regarding social networking.  I’ll talk more about that in a minute.  The second panel was on “Urban, Suburban, and Rural Fantasy.”  I had no idea what the hell we were talking about (as typically used, the term ‘urban fantasy’ has little to do with urban settings) and mostly just cracked wise about vampires and werewolves “doin’ it.”  Also, I mocked Kansas a bunch, because that’s pretty much what I do when I’m at a loss for anything else to say.  I’m told it went over fairly well, though.  Mario Acevedo is one funny guy.

During the marketing panel, I realized that for a while now, I’ve been striving to develop my own notions of “ethical” internet marketing for writers, although I’m not certain I’ve ever tried to say as such.  This hit men when one of the other panelists talked about using a Twitter bot to identify and automatically follow potential fans, which then de-followed anyone who didn’t follow back in three days.  I was repulsed by this idea, although I don’t think I articulated clearly why I think that it’s wrong.

I think my entire approach to social media marketing can be summed up in two bullet points.  They are:

• be a real human being, not a marketbot spewing out demands to buy your stuff
• don’t be a jerk (unless you’re a funny jerk).

Social networking in particular, and the whole internet to a lesser extent, is about connecting with other human beings.  It is not your low cost broadcast medium for advertising your book.   I do advocate that authors and creatives share their passion for their work via the medium, but not to the exclusion of everything else.  Engage with other human beings.  Social networking is not a broadcast medium.  Twitter actually has a surprising number of examples of marketing people who get this, and engage with their clients/customers/readers as human beings, rather than as walking bags of money to be hit with the twitstick.

The reason I can’t support the idea of using a bot to do your following and unfollowing is it’s taking a cold, methodical  approach to the very human work of initiating social interactions.  It’s like trying to make friends with a junk mailer sent around town.  It’s treating those you follow as potential money bags, not as people with thoughts and feelings and interesting opinions.  They are targets. Potential “subscribers,” not conversational partners.

I don’t think there is strong evidence that this tactic of being a carnival barker on social media even works.  Anecdotally, I think people spot these broadcasters early on and drop them unless they _really_ like their products in the first place.

The fundamental marketing strategies are: be loud, or be clever.  And online, I find that clever wins out–especially with readers.  Novelty accounts like ShitMyDadSays and DrunkHulk demonstrate this with their huge followings.  The local carpet company posting nothing but sales notices doesn’t have a whole hell of a lot of followers and probably won’t.

My approach may not squeeze every last potential dime out of the marketplace, but I think there are some things more important than making money– being a decent person, for one.  And I don’t care if it means I never get rich, because I’d rather be seen as decent than a wealthy jerk willing to do anything to make a buck.  Hopefully there are authors who are more inclined to hire a web designer who advocates this moderate approach to online shilling. If you’re looking for someone who thinks there is no marketing technique too low, no method too inhumane in the pursuit of gaining readers, then I’m probably not your guy. I can live with that.

God knows there are times we think we’re geniuses, but I think most of us spend a lot more time convinced of our own unworthiness. That can fill the mind with a killing ice. What you have to do is nearly impossible. You have to write anyway. You have to have faith that you’re wrong.

Go read it.

I blinked in the sudden bright light, and so did the three mole men who were slumped at drunken angles on my futon. Frozen pizza boxes and empties littered the floor. One of them hiccupped. A second barfed all over my throw rug with a loud spattering sound. The third, and most familiar-looking, made a groaning sound like the gate of an old abandoned churchyard and waved a paw weakly in my direction.

I stared at the scene for a few seconds longer. Worked my jaw a little to keep it from locking up. “Screw it,” I finally said, and stomped back up stairs. It was more than I could deal with right after a sixteen hour shift.

You can read that here over at Giganotosaurus, which has run some amazing fiction so far.  I’m really proud to be part of the experiment in publishing longer works online.  Fun fact:  this is by far the longest thing I have ever written at about 12,000 words.  I hope you enjoy it.  Don’t say a word to nobody if you don’t, or the molemen will get you…

Second, if you buy the ebook edition, you can read my fun article “Five Animals That Will Take Over the World After We Eradicate Ourselves,” in the January issue of Lightspeed Magazine.  If you aren’t hip to the ereader thing or can’t afford the issue, you can wait until the 25th to read it on the website!

I might be exaggerating just a bit, but I have never seen a bar so packed with convention goers.  This was a bit early in the evening actually, and there’s considerably more people than I could get with the iPhone.

2. I can only take the presence of so many people for so long before I go crazy.

It should probably not shock you to know that I’m a bit introverted.  However, I don’t get to see SF/F types in person but once every couple of years if that, so when I go to these things, I start out in a manic “must see EVERYONE” phase.  The first day is a flurry of me meeting new people, greeting old friends and clients, and generally just being very not like me.  Some people have said that I seem at ease with people, but it’s REALLY not the case.  I’m scared and anxious almost the entire time I’m in these situations unless I’m with people I’ve known for a long time.  I don’t like being the first person to speak up in a conversation, and in large crowds, I tend to hide in a corner where no one can sneak up on me.

As the weekend grinds on, I become more and more drained by it all, and I basically struggle with mini depressive episodes.  The easiest way, I’ve finally learned, of dealing with this is to go to my room and spend some time alone. 

This results in me getting angry with myself for not taking better advantage of the time I have to soak up all that social wonderfulness while I have a chance.  I spend a lot of time moaning to myself about how I don’t have that many friends locally to me, and almost no SF/F community.   When I’m sitting in my room while a huge party is going on 4 stories below me, I start to get angry with myself, which just causes a crazy feedback loop.

I still need to figure out a way to deal with it.  Accepting that I won’t be able to make use of every single moment of my time at a convention is probably the first step.

3. I really need to get my ass in gear.

I’ve struggled with whether or not I want to be a writer, and how hard I really want to work at it.  But being around so many successful, amazing people clarifies my purpose.  I really do want to write, and to write well, and to grow my career in that department.  I often feel like I’m behind my “peer group’ of writers who I started out with because I lost so many years to an absence of productivity after my Dad.  It’s time to buck up, buckle down, and get to work.  I have goals, and it’s going to take regular, hard work to meet them.

4.  There are total strangers paying attention to what I say.

It turns out that more people than just my friends and family are following my progress.  For that, I am thankful.  When strangers come up to me and tell me that they love my tweets or my blog, it almost always shocks me.  There’s a big difference from looking at analytics numbers of follower count, and actually meeting someone who’s reading your work. 

And autographs!  I’m still not used to being asked to sign books.  And this year, I signed copies of Way of the Wizard for people who I didn’t personally know!

A guy could get used to that kind of attention.

All in all, a great experience

So that’s just a few things I’ve been digesting on the long drive back to Kansas.  I’m likely to have more thoughts later as I’ve had more time to mull it all over.  I was going to hold over for a day here in Kansas to recover, but I’m anxious to get home and get back to work, so I think Monday will be a driving day and I’ll be back to work on the freelance and writing full time on Tuesday.  I miss my dual monitors.

Thanks again to each of you who came up to me and chatted during World Con.  I didn’t meet a single person who wasn’t kind and wonderful and the kind of person I would love hanging out with regularly.  You’re all an amazing bunch and I hope to see you again in the future.

This post is going up on Sunday night, but I’m counting it as Monday.  Regularly scheduled blogging will resume Tuesday morning!

The best way to prepare for being a writer is to live a rich life.  Also, read everything you can get your hands on.

Remember, it’s those little details that bring fiction to life.  The false memories.  To plant them in the first place, you’ve got to have had them yourself.

So what’s the weirdest personal experience you’ve ever cannibalized for use in a story?  Mine has to be taking the way my grandparents were always lending money to my aunts and uncles and using that relationship as the foundation for a kind of redneck mafia family. That’s in my novelette “Work, With Occasional Mole Men” that comes out later this year from Gigantonotosaurus.

The only print books I buy are books I really want but aren’t available in the Kindle store, or technical manuals with lots of illustrations or where careful line formatting really matters to understanding code examples.  And that’s only if I can’t get a PDF of those. As far as fiction goes, I have converted 100% over to Kindle, and my purchases are on track to match or exceed what I was buying in print.

My wife is slightly slower to make the change, but the availability of classic fiction for free in the iBookstore has changed her reading habits as well.  I see from looking at iTunes that she’s downloaded a couple dozen books that are in the public domain.  She hasn’t been big on the Kindle yet, but I suspect this is more related to her being in graduate school than because she’s not making the jump to e-books.

All it took to finally push me to complete eBook purchasing was a store where most everything I wanted was available and a large color screen capable of doing more than just e-books.  Its so convenient to be able to pop into Amazon any time I hear about a book I want, find out if it’s available, and buy it with one-click shopping.  I’ve always got a few books on deck.  Something about the iPad means I read more and more quickly lately as well, but I can’t place exactly what about it does that.  Sheer novelty, maybe. 

Also, I’m really tired of the huge boxes of books every time we move.

I don’t think I could have done it with the Kindle device itself, or any e-paper device really.  I understand why most of the e-paper aficionados go that route, but it’s slowness of refresh was the deal breaker for me.

There’s this definite feeling in the air that things are changing rapidly, tipping past the tipping point.  More and more of the work I do as a web designer involves setting up places to help market or sell e-books.  It’s really great to see this new electronic renaissance happening in publishing.  The web brought one big wave of change, and lower-cost e-readers is bringing yet another.

How do you feel about this shift?  Are you making the change as well, or are you sticking to paper?

When the story starts falling, that’s when a lot of angst kicks in.  Hold on a second.  Today, I’d like you to think about what you’ve accomplished before that.

You just wrote a story, the most important unit of knowledge of our species.   You knitted something into existence out of thought and experience.  You made up entire people.  Sometimes,  you have made up an entire world, or worlds, or even universes, with strokes of the keys.   It has a plot, composed of rising action, climax, denouement, and maybe some even fancier parts.  You said something you needed to say, whether you meant it or not.  Creating a story is the synthesis of a dozen different ideas and concepts. There are more moving parts in a story than there are in an antique watch.   

Regardless of quality, or success, what you did was amazing.  Nobody else can do what you did, exactly the way you did it, even if they set out to deliberately do so.  Right or wrong, you added something to the world that wasn’t there before.  It has value simply by existing.  Immeasurable value. 

Who cares if it doesn’t tell the time right yet?  You just made a tiny little pocketwatch out of words, sentences, and paragraphs. 

Celebrate the magnitude of that, just for a little bit.

Sometimes, the odds of getting published seem daunting, especially when it feels like everyone around you wants to be a writer.  Thanks to the internet, writing skills are more important than ever.  Nobody really wants to dig ditches for a living, and writing seems like easy work from the outside. And when you look at how many professional short story slots there are in a given year, or how many novels each publishing house buys, it can make you wonder, “what makes me any different?” 

What makes you different, among other things, is you’re actively pursuing your goal. The odds are against the people who say “I’d like to write a novel some day,” not you.  You’ve learned your manuscript format, and you’re submitting your work regularly.  You’ve learned how to write (or not write) a cover letter.  You’re practicing craft, you’re reading anything you can get your hands on.  Each active step you take, your odds get better.  Eventually, the odds end up tilting in your favor.  

Behind every story of a writer’s “over night success,” there’s a writer who spent 5, 10, 20 years banging their head against the wall, falling down, and getting back up.  It’s not a game of chance. Just like heart disease, you can take steps to prevent or encourage the probability of it happening.

As my friend Charlie Finlay once told me, “there’s always room at the top.”

So hang in there.  Your greatest asset is stubbornness, and if you’re reading this, you’ve most likely got that in spades.  And I’ve never met a successful writer who wasn’t as stubborn as a god damned mule. 

Yah, mule!

Since my days of proto-writerhood, about 8 years ago, I’ve discovered that writer’s block is real enough, and not only that, it comes from a variety of causes. Because writing is a damned boring thing to talk about literally, I’m going to flog this naval metaphor as I explore the forms of block I have encountered in my years at sea.  (The irony of me relying on this—me, the kid who didn’t see the ocean for the first time until he was 19—is not lost.)

No wind

The most common block to my writing is a lack of wind in my sails.  The driving force behind my work goes away, and leaves me in the Sargasso Sea of the blank page.  Why does the wind abandon me?  Why does the wind do anything?  The factors are too complex to pick apart.   The wind of my inspiration can come from a lot of different places, mostly deep internal aspects of my self that I don’t really feel comfortable examining too closely.  It feels like fragile machinery that would be too easy to disturb when it’s working right, and when it’s not, I never want to risk tinkering for fear of breaking something completely.

When faced with a lack of inspiration, I shut down almost entirely as a writer.  I sit in mySargasso Sea and pass the time as best I can.  Read, watch TV. Sometimes, I draw.

When I’m clever, I remember the goddamned boat has oars, and I heave to as best I can.

Right now, I can’t even find where I put the oars, but that’s another story entirely.

Wrecked on the rocks

Oops, steered this one wrong.  Now I’m stuck in the muck, marooned on the rocks.  I write myself into a corner often, especially when I don’t have a clear idea of where I’m headed—when I’m writing for the fun of the journey and not the destination.

The best way for me to avoid this is to know where I’m going ahead of time.  For a while there, after conceiving of a story, the very next thing I attempted to do was envision the point or the finale.  What would it build to?  With that in mind, I could set sail.  And if I saw a better destination along the way, there was no reason I couldn’t change course!  My plans or outlines are never set in stone.  They’re there just to keep me from the rocks.

There’s a leak

Sometimes you set sail with a story made of little more than a vague idea and a half-sketched out character concept.  And it isn’t until you’re in deep waters that you discover your initial concept is full of holes (made by the wormrot of the implausibilitus, inconsistentia, or been-there-done-that-allia species).  Now you find yourself sinking, maybe bailing for your life with a little hand waving, but the boat’s taking on the waters of disbelief and some of your passengers aren’t going to see the journey to the end.  “No thanks,” they say as they dive off and swim back to shore. “We’ll take the next one.”

I scuttle a lot of story boats this way deliberately.  The initial rush of an idea, those hard fast winds that come early; too often, I would set sail immediately without any planning at all, buoyed by the excitement of the freshness of it in my mind.   More often than not, when I discover the flaws in my half-assed idea, I would sink the whole thing and move on.  I’ve probably abandoned five times as many story ideas as I’ve ever finished.  I was a strong swimmer in those days, but now I would just as soon arrive in a leaky boat and start work on patching.

I try to never patch-edit while I’m working on the first draft. That’s a sure fire way to end up completely bogged down.

Listening to the Crew

When things aren’t going well, the crew, made up of internal-editors, voices of self-doubt, and so on, they tend to get rowdy.  Sometimes, even when things are going well, they’re a noisy bunch, and it’s tempting to give in and listen to the nasty bunch of swine.

If I had my way, I’d make them all walk to plank at the start of a voyage, but they’re not completely worthless.  Best to gag them, tie them up, and throw them into the hull until you’re done with your maiden voyage, I say.

NOT Listening to the 1^st Mate

My friend Jay Lake calls his subconscious Bob, but I tend to call my subconcious “Potatohead,” because he’s really not too bright.  Sure, he’s creative and all, but he doesn’t have any concept of the realities of being a human being.  Impractical, is what I’m saying.

But when it comes to sailing, Commander Potatohead was born into a life at sea.  He may not know how to balance a checkbook or even earn a decent living, but the bastard knows how to sail better than I ever will.

I don’t always give him his due.  Me, Captain Ego, I want to be right all the time, want to be in charge.  I don’t like listening to the seasoned advice of Mr. Potatohead who really knows these waters better than anyone.  When you fail to listen,  you often end up  with a mutiny on your hands, marooned, or stuck in a Sargasso Sea.  Again.

That’s not even taking into consideration the difficulty of communication! While I speak the Queen’s English, Commander Potatohead speaks some patois that I’ve never even heard of before.  I’m pretty sure he originates from somewhere in Polynesia—some obscure island nobody has ever heard of.  So we can’t really talk.  We resort to drawing vague pictures, gesturing wildly in some ridiculous game of conscious/subconscious Charades.  And worse, we don’t keep the same sleep schedules, so we have to leave messages for one another on scraps of paper, rope, whatever we can find.

Frankly, it’s amazing we have ever completed a voyage together at all.

* * *

But we have. And I’ll be damned if I am going to let any of these things get in my way to completing my journeys in the future.  I don’t care if I make it to the other side leaking like a sieve, tied up and held hostage by the crew,  being slowly inched over the edge by a Commander Potatohead wearing an eye-patch—I’m going to make it.

When I look at creative block in the abstract, it’s much more intimidating.  Abstract concepts aren’t easily defeated, but when I concretize the idea into a giant tuber wearing an eye-patch, it suddenly seems so much easier to overcome.

Maybe that will work for you too.  Yarr.