Posts Tagged ‘My Writing’

This Week’s Editoral Advice: Do Not Reply to Rejection Letters

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

This is still hap­pen­ing from time to time with my work for Escape Pod. I had kind of thought by now that argu­ing with an edi­tor over their com­ments in a rejec­tion let­ter was com­monly con­sid­ered a bad idea to be avoided at all costs, but I’m still get­ting these at Escape Pod. Let me put it to you all straight.

Nothing makes me more dis­in­clined to pur­chase your work than you argu­ing with me about me not buy­ing a story.

There are a lot of minor mis­takes you can make as a slush writer. I over­look most of them. For instance, we get sent things as attach­ments when our guide­lines call for them to be in the body of an email. I might men­tion it briefly to the sub­mit­ter, but I don’t hold it against them much. There are so many dif­fer­ing e-​​submissions sys­tems that I can under­stand why this hap­pens. No big deal.

But when you decide to quib­ble with an edi­tor over the points of his or her rejec­tion let­ter, you’re cross­ing a pro­fes­sional line. You are enti­tled to your opin­ion. It’s a good thing if you have enough faith in your story that you will con­tinue to send it out, because one editor’s opin­ion doesn’t amount to much, which is why I say my edi­to­r­ial com­ments are not intended as writ­ing advice.

The main thing it will lead to is an edi­tor not pro­vid­ing you any detailed feed­back at all. We will sim­ply write form rejec­tions for your work from then on out. Because noth­ing is more annoy­ing to me, at least, than some­one decid­ing to bicker over a rejec­tion. It’s not going to change our minds. It’s only going to make you look worse. So we’ll stop giv­ing you points to quib­ble with. This is not good for you. We don’t want to do this.

It is a no-​​win sit­u­a­tion for the writer.

So just don’t do it. Stick to cre­at­ing your edi­tor voodoo dolls and slag­ging us off to your cats. Take out your frus­tra­tions another way, even if the edi­tor is dead wrong. It doesn’t matter.

And another thing– I would rather not see replies, even short thank yous, at all. It clut­ters up my inbox, which I work very hard to keep orga­nized, and your con­tin­u­ing sub­mis­sions with us is thanks enough. Tack what you want to say on to the cover let­ter of your next sub­mis­sion. I would pre­fer that.

Also, Machine Gun Submissions

Oh, and finally, one last thing– it does you no good to send me story after story after story when I’m read­ing them quickly, when you get rejected every time. You should cool it and wait a bit between sub­mis­sions. Probably want to wait and let me for­get about how I rejected 3 sto­ries in an hour. Because I do notice, and I know other edi­tors do too, espe­cially with e-​​submissions at ‘zines with rel­a­tively fast turn­around times. Nick Mamatas even had a sub­mis­sions limit. I’m con­sid­er­ing imple­ment­ing one if this keeps up. At the very least, you’ll stop get­ting such rapid replies.

An Editor’s Perspective on Rejection

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Since I’ve taken on the gig of man­ag­ing edi­tor at Escape Pod, I’ve been relearn­ing a lot of things about being an edi­tor that I had for­got­ten in the time since clos­ing th Fortean Bureau. I’ve been think­ing a lot about rejec­tion let­ters, and rejec­tion in gen­eral, but not from my usual per­spec­tive as a writer, but now as an edi­tor. It’s inform­ing the way I think about rejec­tions as a writer as well.

It’s Not Personal

Rejection let­ters aren’t per­sonal. I find it very hard not to take them per­son­ally because by god, I wrote the story, I poured my self onto the page, and so it hurts to see that rejec­tion come in most of the time. My sto­ries are like the mind-​​prosthesies I never really asked for. And they trans­mit pain like any real limb. Er, so to speak.

Doling out rejec­tions, many to fine writ­ers whose work I love in a gen­eral sense, it’s really hit home. The rejec­tion is always for the story at hand, and it’s not about you. Great writ­ers get rejected. You will too.

I walk a very fine line in try­ing to avoid offense with my rejec­tion let­ters. How much detail does a Hugo-​​nominated writer need when you bounce his or her story? Do they need a rea­son other than, just didn’t sync up with my inven­tory needs at this time? I don’t want to be in the busi­ness of hand­ing out writ­ing advice in my rejec­tion let­ters. I tend to err on the side of less, rather than more, infor­ma­tion. Which brings me to my next point.

My Rejection is not Writing Advice

Most of the time, my rejec­tion let­ter says the same sim­ple line: “didn’t grab me.” I stole this one from F&SF, because it’s suc­cinct and a polite way of putting the truth. When I write this, it means that I did not fin­ish your story because I got bored with it. Sorry, but that’s the truth. And that’s why I don’t write what I lit­er­ally mean in the rejec­tion let­ter, because I am not a cal­lous mon­ster. When I do pro­vide feed­back as to why I am not buy­ing a story, it’s just based on my per­sonal expe­ri­ence of read­ing the story. Every edi­tor brings their own pecu­liar biases and inter­ests to the table. There are some ideas that always grab me more than oth­ers. Biological SF will win out over aster­oid min­ing every time, until you write that aster­oid min­ing story that proves me wrong.

New writ­ers should most def­i­nitely not be look­ing for writ­ing advice in their rejec­tion let­ters. Other writ­ers, and a cri­tique group, are the best way to gain this insight. It’s not the (short fic­tion) editor’s job, espe­cially not today, to cul­ti­vate the writer’s tal­ent. We sup­port your tal­ent, but we don’t have the time to fer­til­ize it. You need to turn to other sources for advice.

I can under­stand the impulse to seek feed­back from edi­tors. Writing is a soli­tary game, and it’s hard to find meth­ods with which to mea­sure your progress. How do you know if you’re get­ting close?

Again, time to be blunt. You’ll know you’re get­ting close because the edi­tor will tell you. When your rejec­tion let­ter asks for more of your work, that’s not just being polite. That’s because we think you have the chops and we’re just look­ing for the right story. When rejec­tion let­ters turn from “didn’t grab” to “didn’t work for me, for the fol­low­ing rea­sons” that’s a step up.

Trust me, the pain is only begin­ning when you’ve made those first cou­ple of sales. You’ll want more, and if light­ing has struck a lit­tle early, it can be painful to go quite a while afterwards.

At the same time, if you go from encour­ag­ing rejec­tions to a non-​​encouraging one, it doesn’t mean you’ve back­slid. It prob­a­bly just means the edi­tor has got­ten a bit too busy to give you spe­cial attention.

I Liked It, but I Didn’t Love It

I get to buy 52-​​ish sto­ries a year, and I prob­a­bly select those from ten times that many at least. This means I am not only look­ing for good sto­ries, but I’m look­ing for sto­ries that leave an impact on me. I reject a decent num­ber of good sto­ries, because I can’t use up all my slots buy­ing just good sto­ries. They have to be good, plus some. That spark is the most elu­sive thing you’ll seek as you develop as a writer.

I per­son­ally haven’t bro­ken past this phase. My rejec­tions are very often in the “this is a good story, but I didn’t like it enough to buy it” vari­ety. I sell oca­sion­ally, but this is my career wall at the moment. I think I’m close to under­stand­ing why, but I may never know, and I may never take the step for­ward. Especially if I don’t write more than I have been these past few years.

Doesn’t Fit My Needs at This Time

This is very sim­il­iar to the “like it, didn’t love it” rejec­tion let­ter. Under dif­fer­ent cir­cum­stances, I might have, prob­a­bly would have, bought this story. But maybe it’s a bit dark in tone, and I’ve been buy­ing way too many of those lately. Maybe at the moment, I need more light-​​hearted pieces. Maybe I bought an aster­oid min­ing story shortly before you sub­mit­ted yours, and they’re too sim­i­lar in sub­ject matter.

This is the “shit hap­pens” rejec­tion let­ter. I find they’re the hard­est and eas­i­est to take at the same time. They’re frus­trat­ing, but at least you can put these to the capri­cious­ness of fate, rather than your own per­sonal skills. It helps.

So that’s a lit­tle bit of the think­ing I’ve been explor­ing regard­ing rejec­tion as I work to select sto­ries for Escape Pod. It’s def­i­nitely given me a bet­ter per­spec­tive on my own rejec­tions. If it were pos­si­ble, I would rec­om­mend every seri­ous writer find a way to read slush some day. Not only do you learn to spot the most com­mon mis­takes, you start to get a lit­tle empa­thy for that poor soul on the other side of the transom.

On Writing Motivation

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Quaero_​verum asks:

You’ve prob­a­bly already writ­ten about 1,000 posts on it already, but moti­va­tion is my sore spot at the moment. As in, “sit thy butt down and just write!”

Also, when I do write, I sit and stare at the blank white screen for a lonnnng time. I am find­ing it hard to even churn out “free-​​writes”.…

My advice to you is sim­ple. Don’t force it. If you’re going through a period of low moti­va­tion, you may need to recharge your cre­ative bat­ter­ies. This is some­thing that I’ve had to learn the hard way.

Creative energy is a very poorly under­stood topic in my expe­ri­ence. Some man­age it very well and are able to be con­sis­tently, highly pro­duc­tive. See Jay Lake write a novel in a hand­ful of weeks. Others strug­gle for a decade. The prod­uct isn’t nec­es­sar­ily bet­ter in either case.

It’s very impor­tant to give your self oppor­tu­nity to write. But if you don’t write, it’s not nec­es­sar­ily because you’re lazy. Your energy could be low. You might not have any­thing to say right now. Maybe you’d rather draw, or take a pho­to­graph to express what you’re feel­ing. Who knows. The impor­tant thing is not to beat your­self up.

Lastly, I’d like you to go watch this pre­sen­ta­tion by Amy Tan from the TED Talks recently. She talks about how we per­cieve cre­ativ­ity, and she makes some very inter­est­ing points.

Watch the Amy Tan talk here.

Do any of you have any fur­ther advice on the sub­ject? I’m really curi­ous to hear what oth­ers think about cre­ative energy. It’s a topic that I’m only just start­ing to develop some the­o­ries about, espe­cially as it per­tains to my own work.

Reader Questions: How Do I Decide How Much Work to (Self) Publish Online?

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Let’s kick off reader ques­tion answer week with a real doozy. CDThomas asks:

I don’t have a web­site or blog. And I don’t know if I want one.

I under­stand if I’d cre­ate a blog for nat­ter­ing on, but most of that itch gets scratched by Twitter. I’m not much of an essay writer, because I think I find oth­ers who say what I’m think­ing bet­ter than I would.

That leaves self-​​promotion, pos­si­bly, of my fic­tion (plays, poems, short sto­ries). If I don’t want to go the full Doctorow and Creative-​​Commons license every­thing, then how do I decide how much of my work to pub­lish online?

I’m not going to be the type of writer who obses­sively searches for online theft, but I need to find a way of talk­ing about what I’m doing before I’m pub­lished reg­u­larly by mag­a­zines, online or oth­er­wise — learn­ing how to be part of a writ­ing SF/​F/​H com­mu­nity, I guess, but with­out my ques­tions get­ting lost on web boards.

First of all, I don’t think every writer needs a web­site or a blog. Anyone who says they do is prob­a­bly sell­ing some­thing (to para­phrase The Princess Bride). Now, I sell web design ser­vices, but I would never try to sell a writer on a blog/​website if they didn’t have any inter­est in main­tain­ing or updat­ing it. It sounds like you know what you like, and that’s Twitter. That’s great! You can do a lot to build a rep­u­ta­tion and an audi­ence with just that ser­vice. I tend to rec­om­mend a more com­pre­hen­sive strat­egy. I think of it as being like fish­ing. You can fish all day in one spot if you want, and you’ll catch fish. You’ll catch fish if you change up your lure and move around too. Now, read­ers aren’t fish, but poten­tial readers/​fans can be found in a lot of dif­fer­ent places. Unlike fish­ing, you can be in mul­ti­ple places at one time. So it’s more like hav­ing a cou­ple of poles in the water.

Okay, that metaphor is stretched to the break­ing point. Moving on.

I used to blog rarely, think­ing basi­cally that I didn’t have any­thing unique to say. But I don’t think that’s true of any­one, espe­cially any­one who writes. Why do we write if we’re not com­pelled do to do so by a need to share some­thing we feel is unique? Everyone has some­thing unique to say. Maybe not on every topic or issue, but every­one has within them, in my opin­ion, the poten­tial to write a great and grip­ping blog. Sometimes this involves liv­ing a very pub­lic life, shar­ing your deep­est embar­rass­ments. Sometimes, it means shar­ing the lit­tle bit of knowl­edge about writ­ing you’ve gar­nered. But if you’re sure, no big deal. You don’t need to have one. Nobody’s going to order you to have one.

Now, how do you decide what fic­tion to release online if you don’t want to go the full Creative Commons route and release absolutely every­thing? My opin­ion is, unless you’re really, really cer­tain of it, don’t release it online unless it’s been pub­lished some­where. I’ve writ­ten pos­si­bly a hun­dred short sto­ries. But only about a dozen are avail­able for any­one to read out­side of my close friends and fam­ily, and only one of those was self-​​published online.

It’s hard to build authen­tic­ity as a self-​​publisher. It’s not impos­si­ble, but the thing is, there is a lot of stuff to read online. People are look­ing for rea­sons to key in on things to read, and just throw­ing your writ­ing out there all on its own can be a very hard way of build­ing authen­tic­ity. I’m not say­ing it’s impos­si­ble, but I per­son­ally wouldn’t want to go that route.

Now, say you’ve sold a cou­ple of sto­ries. You might want to release some of them online, but let’s back­track and remem­ber that we don’t have a web­site. How do we release fic­tion online and get it out there to be read if we don’t have a web­site? Well, you can throw up a quick free web­site with a ser­vice like Blogger or LiveJournal. Or you can sell your fic­tion as down­loads with Fictionwise. Or you could upload it to Scribd and take your chances. There are a lot of ways to put your work out there with­out hav­ing a web­site, but you take your chances with each one of them. It’s really, really hard to get peo­ple to pay atten­tion to you online.

I find that it’s best to try online reprint sales first.  Might as well get some money from it, right?  That’s more respectabil­ity than just pub­lish­ing it online your­self.  Most sites will archive it for a long time.  The pod­casts like Escape Pod, Drabblecast, and Starship Sofa  are another great way to get your fic­tion online in basi­cally a per­ma­nent fash­ion.  The main dif­fer­ence here is that some­one else is lend­ing cred­i­bil­ity to your work by select­ing it for their pub­li­ca­tion, as opposed to you putting it up on your per­sonal web­site.  If one place lik­ing a story gives cred, imag­ine that two places means even more cred.  Same prin­ci­ple behind the Year’s Best antholo­gies, I think.

As to how much of your work should you get online?  That’s up to you and I can’t give you a sat­is­fac­tory answer.  I per­son­ally try to get every sin­gle story online via the ways I’ve listed above.  If I can’t sell some­thing as a reprint or pod­cast, I’ll for­mat it nicely on my web­site and throw it up myself.  Especially if I want to do a cool illus­tra­tion to go along with it.  Once you’ve made all the money you can from a story, why not put it out there for free?  Stories are dis­pos­able most of the time.  If you write a story so great that you can resell it dozens of times, then, well, some­one will post it online for you whether you want them to or not.  Try Googling the title of a clas­sic SF short story, and you’re likely to find a boot­leg copy online on some poorly policed .edu site as much as any­thing else.  Might as well be the per­son to be in con­trol of it, right?

The last aspect of the ques­tion above deals with how to become a part of the com­mu­nity and take part in a con­ver­sa­tion with­out being lost amongst the noise. This is very easy. I’ll break it out in bul­let points.

  • Pick four or five blogs or forums and haunt them. Check them every day if you can.
  • Provide help­ful answers to ques­tions. Key word here is help­ful. Don’t be neg­a­tive or crit­i­cal unless it’s asked for. Talk about your­self and your work only if it relates directly to the topic at hand. Be pos­i­tive. Try to find a unique per­spec­tive on the posts you com­ment on.
  • Do that over and over again. You’ll get a rep­u­ta­tion quickly.

There are other ways, but I think this is the eas­i­est way. It involves putting in a lot of time, but being a part of a com­mu­nity isn’t easy. I have a really hard time keep­ing up with all the writer blogs and forums I would like to read in an ideal world. I try to stay on top of a few spe­cific ones as best I can. I’m not very good about my sec­ond point of advice, so bear that in mind, but I think if I could do things over again, that’s how I would approach it.

I hope some of these answers prove help­ful. If any­one else has any advice for CDThomas, please share it in the comments.

The Dancing Guy Stands For All That We Do

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

There’s a video mak­ing the rounds.  It’s not shot very well, and it might even make you a lit­tle motion sick, but if you can make it through it, I think it’s really worth it.   Try to get at least halfway through.  Here’s the video.  More after you watch it.

Here’s my expe­ri­ence of watch­ing this in a nut shell:

For me at least, the guy looked like a fool!  What a crazy way of danc­ing, and danc­ing all by your­self like that?  How embarass­ing!  I could never do tha–oh wow, some­one joined in. Hey,  here comes another.  Holy Shit.

I felt a shiver run down my spine when I real­ized what I was watch­ing.  Then I started to grin.  And I’m still grin­ning about it.  This is one of the more uplift­ing things I have seen in a long time.  I’ve been pon­der­ing why that is.

It feels like a metaphor for every cre­ative endeav­our.   Writing espe­cially, or blog­ging.  You’re on your own at first.  Dancing all by your­self in front of an indif­fer­ent crowd.   It’s harder than hell to get over the feel­ing that what you’re doing could be just a lit­tle ridicu­lous.  You keep doing it though, because it feels good.

Then some­one starts pay­ing atten­tion.  Your friends, maybe.  Then their friends.  You accrete fans, or fol­low­ers, or read­ers, what­ever.  The next thing you know, you’ve started that.  It’s a brave damned thing to do, and it’s never struck me until watch­ing this just now.

I hope this moti­vates you like it has me.  Keep danc­ing.  Just keep danc­ing,  no mat­ter what.

Expedition Update

Wow, I have some amaz­ing friends.  We’ve raised $160 towards my pho­to­graphic expe­di­tion to Yellowstone.  Proving that I am the AntiChrist or some­thing, I now only need to raise $666.   Please con­sider throw­ing a few bucks in the pot. The pic­tures are SO going to be worth it.

5 Writing Lessons Learned from Land of the Lost

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

This past week­end, I spent my hard-​​earned money to see the new Land of the Lost movie. In terms of enter­tain­ment, I do not feel that I got my money’s worth out of it. So here I sit, try­ing milk­ing a blog post out of the film in order to get some writ­ing lessons from the thing. I’ll be damned if I am going to actu­ally waste money in these hard eco­nomic times!

I guess my child­hood appre­ci­a­tion of the orig­i­nal series col­ored my expec­ta­tions for the film. No wor­ries, it won’t hap­pen again. At least, until G.I. Joe comes out. And Transformers 2. Ahem.

This post is going to be rife with spoil­ers, but hey, if you don’t want to see the film (which you shouldn’t), or god for­bid, saw it already, then those won’t bother you. Lessons behind the cut. Oh, and yes. I’m dis­card­ing my usual “don’t say it if you can’t say some­thing nice” ethos here, because, well, some­times you wake up on Monday morn­ing and want to tear apart a bad film. Onward!

Continue read­ing ›

5 Writing Lessons I Learned from Pixar

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

It’s my per­sonal opin­ion that some of the absolute best sto­ry­tellers on the planet today work for Pixar. Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant is eas­ily my favorite tra­di­tion­ally ani­mated film. And now, I think Up, the lat­est Pixar mas­ter­piece, has man­aged to top all the films that came before it.

I’m rarely as touched and thrilled by an expe­ri­ence as I am by watch­ing their movies.

  1. Writing doesn’t have to be YA, or for Adults. It can be both.

    The book world may have sto­ries divided down lines based on age and level of matu­rity, but the line between enter­tain­ment for adults and enter­tain­ment for younger chil­dren has never been as blurred as it has been by Pixar’s films. It’s indis­putable that their films are pop­u­lar with chil­dren. The sheer vol­ume of Nemo mer­chan­dise I see to this day backs up that asser­tion. At the aquar­ium, no kid could see the fish from that film with­out shout­ing out their names. “Look mommy, Dory!” I lis­tend to vari­a­tions of this for two hours.

    I think Pixar is the very model of fam­ily entertainment–films that can be enjoyed by every­one. And the more I think about it, the more I real­ize that much of chil­dren or YA lit­er­a­ture is the same way. There’s a kind of sub­con­cious stigma for adults read­ing YA fic­tion in my expe­ri­ence. I saw this often when Harry Potter was pop­u­lar. Some could not get past the idea that “Harry Potter is for kids.” It’s not. It’s for peo­ple who enjoy sto­ries. Just like Pixar’s films. I have a lot of respect for some­one who can tell a story so broadly appeal­ing, and per­son­ally, I want to learn how to do it too.

  2. Don’t Be Afraid to Put Heavy Stuff in a Light-​​Hearted Story

    This les­son has never been dri­ven home so well as by Up. The pro­tag­o­nist is a wid­ower, and we spend the first 20 min­utes get­ting to know his free-​​spirited wife. We see their lives pass before our eyes, and when she passes, we feel it deeply. I had a hard time keep­ing my eyes dry, I admit it.

    Funny with­out bite is like a fluffy cake. It lacks sub­stance and grav­ity. The under­tones cre­ated by the loss of a loved one, absen­tee fathers, and lifes not lived, those are the things that take an enjoy­able story from being fun but for­get­table to being great and unfor­get­table. Make us laugh. Make us cry. Make us laugh and cry in the same breath. If Pixar can do it, we can do it in our sto­ries and nov­els too.

  3. A character’s first inter­ac­tions can often tell you every­thing you need to know about them.

    In Wall-​​E, the first inter­ac­tions with another crea­ture we see are between the robot and a cock­roach. Does Wall-​​E smash the bug, dis­gusted? Of course not. He befriends it. The essence of his char­ac­ter is revealed in that sim­ple scene, and we fall for him.

    Pixar’s char­ac­ters appear­ances often reflect their per­son­al­ity, some­thing that can­not so eas­ily be done in fic­tion itself. But it’s not just their appear­ance. Watch each one of the films. In a few brief moments, we learn that Marlin will do any­thing for Nemo, that Woody is a leader and likes help­ing other toys, that Mr. Incredible is a bit full of him­self and dis­mis­sive of oth­ers, but loves his wife, and then, his fam­ily, very much, and that Remy loves food. Often, the cen­tral con­flict of the story arises from this char­ac­ter­i­za­tion as well. Wall-​​E needs to love some­one, and fol­lows EVE into space itself. Woody butts heads with Buzz. Mr. Incredible makes his own arch-​​nemesis because of his rude­ness. And so on.

  4. The work is found in the process of rewrit­ing. Also, write for yourself.

    In this inter­view with some of Pixar’s writ­ers, a cou­ple of com­ments really struck home with me, align­ing with things I had noticed from watch­ing the Behind-​​the-​​Scenes extras on their DVDs. Pixar doesn’t do focus groups. They write what they love. And they rewrite and rewrite until they get it the way they want. The story often changes dra­mat­i­cally in the course of revi­sions. Sometimes, we get obsessed with our first drafts, and our hopes rise or sink with the rel­a­tive suc­cess of it. I am par­tic­u­larly guilty of giv­ing up on sto­ries when the first draft doesn’t turn out as well as I imag­ined it.

  5. Amazing char­ac­ters can be born from the sim­plest of ideas.

    The gen­e­sis of the pro­tag­o­nist Walter in Up was a sim­ple sketch of a grumpy old man hold­ing a bal­loon. “Grumpy old man” is a hoary stereo­type, but stereo­types in and of them­selves aren’t wrong. It’s stop­ping with a stereo­type is a mis­take. From that sim­ple sketch, Pixar build a fully real­ized and appeal­ing char­ac­ter. They took some­one and made him both unpleas­ant and lov­able at the same time.

    Russell, seen right, is designed as a char­ac­ter to coun­ter­point every­thing about Walter. He’s round where Walter is angles. He’s kind and inno­cent and youth­ful. The con­tra­dic­tion of the essence of these two char­ac­ters gen­er­ates much of the humor and the con­flict to drive the story.

an Interview with Greg van Eekhout, author of Norse Code

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Greg van Eekhout is one of the fun­ni­est con atten­dees I have had the plea­sure of being around. On top of that, he’s a damned good writer with sto­ries like “The Osteomancer’s Son” and “Will You Be An Astronaut?” (appear­ing at EscapePod soon, read by Christiana Ellis).  Greg’s first novel was recently released.  I’ve watched the progress of Greg writ­ing this book on his blog, and so I’ve really been look­ing for­ward to read­ing it.

A Quick Review of Norse Code

Norse Code is Greg’s debut novel, and it’s a fun one. The book focuses on two char­ac­ters pri­mar­ily. The first is Mist, a recently recruited Valkyrie who is work­ing for the Norse Code project. The goal of the Norse Code project is to find and recruit the descen­dants of Odin to pre­pare for the com­ing Ragnarok. The sec­ond is the iten­er­ant Norse god Hermod, the only liv­ing entity to ever travel to Helheim and return.

It’ll come as no sur­prise to you that the paths of these two pro­tag­o­nists cross in the inevitable run-​​up to Ragnarok. Along the way, we meet a cast of char­ac­ters both drawn from Norse mythol­ogy and not, but all are  imbued with a pecu­liar van Eekhout sense of humor. This is not a comedic story exactly, but aspects of it are very funny.

Norse Code does feel at times like a first novel in that you sense the author feels a bit uncer­tain about the plot in places, but van Eekhout’s will­ing­ness to take what you know about Norse mythol­ogy and twist it for his needs makes this a hell of a lot of fun to read. Mist and Hermod are heroes in an older sense, not ter­ri­bly flawed, but sim­ply decent peo­ple with rocky pasts deter­mined to do the right thing despite that.

It’s a short read, one I man­aged to burn through in an after­noon, so you really have no excuse for not pick­ing it up and giv­ing it a try. While the novel didn’t pack the same punch for me as some of Greg’s short sto­ries, it’s a fine first out­ing and demon­strates that he’s an author to keep Odin’s eye on in the future.

The Interview

Can you share with me a lit­tle bit about the day-​​to-​​day nuts-​​and-​​bolts of your writ­ing process? How did you make time to write the book? How long did it take you to write the book from first con­ceiv­ing the idea to fin­ish­ing the book and sub­mit­ting it for publication?

I used to be able to talk about mak­ing time to write with at least some small degree of cred­i­bil­ity, because I had a job that often took up way more than forty hours a week, and I still found time to write sim­ply by mak­ing sure I started each day with an hour of writ­ing. For me, that kind of con­sis­tency was the key. But I don’t have a day job right now and I have the lux­ury of more writ­ing time, and I don’t blame peo­ple if they don’t want to lis­ten to me talk about carv­ing out time and ded­i­ca­tion and all that. That being said, peo­ple who really want to write find the time, some­how. Maybe by giv­ing up TV or games or what­ever. Maybe by devot­ing one hour before work to writ­ing, as I did. Maybe by writ­ing on their lunch break or on the bus. Maybe by just get­ting ten min­utes here, five min­utes there. It adds up. Really, it does.

It took me years and years and years to write Norse Code if you count all the false starts, words that got tossed out (at one point, 30,000 of them in one fell swoop), time squan­dered think­ing about writ­ing the book instead of writ­ing it, and time spent writ­ing short sto­ries and other things because I was stuck on the book. I’m going to say maybe ten years want­ing to write Norse Code, and maybe two years actu­ally work­ing on it. Fortunately, the book I wrote after Norse Code went much more quickly and smoothly.

I noticed quite a few L.A. cof­fee shops men­tioned. Are these all real places that you know from grow­ing up in L.A.? We’ve seen the pho­tos you take for each writ­ing ses­sion of your empty cups. How many cups of cof­fee did you drink in the process of writ­ing Norse Code?

I did grow up in L.A., but there really weren’t many cof­fee joints back then. Instead, we had “spooky houses,” where you were given a pot of a thick, pudding-​​like bev­er­age, an open flame with which to soften it, and sort of a com­bi­na­tion of spoon, fork, and hook, which we called a “spook.” Nonetheless, the cof­fee houses in Norse Code are real places. I think a con­ser­v­a­tive esti­mate for the num­ber of cups of cof­fee con­sumed dur­ing the com­po­si­tion of Norse Code would be 1,000. It takes a mil­lion bad words, 10,000 hours of prac­tice, or 1,000 cups of cof­fee before you can begin to say you’ve passed out of your appren­tice­ship. Really, the point of all those pic­tures of cof­fee cups next to my com­puter weren’t to show how much cof­fee I drink, but just a way of mark­ing the fact that, on the day each photo was posted to my blog, I worked on the book. Just some­thing dif­fer­ent than post­ing a word count.

What kind of research did you do to write the book–it’s clear that you famil­iar­ized your­self with Norse mythol­ogy. Can you talk about your research process and how it led to the plot you came up with for the book?

The pri­mary mate­ri­als that give us most of Norse mythol­ogy are short and finite: The Elder, or poetic, Edda, and the Younger, or prose, Edda. We’re only talk­ing a few hun­dred pages here, and they were my chief research mate­ri­als. H.R. Ellis Davidson also has some good books on Norse mythol­ogy, and I used wikipedia and pan​theon​.org some­times as well. My method was to read the Eddas and just sort of keep track of things that seemed par­tic­u­larly cool, like wolves eat­ing the moon and stuff like that. Sometimes it just led me to think through the impli­ca­tions of the myth, which made the plot obvi­ous to me. For instance, when you’ve got a story about the end of the world, and the myth tells you some gods are des­tined to sur­vive it and pre­side over the world that comes after­wards, you apply a basic what-​​if to that sit­u­a­tion. What if I were a god des­tined to sur­vive the end of the world and take over ruler­ship? Would I just wait for the end of the world to hap­pen? Would I encour­age it along? How would I do that? And so forth.

Some parts of the book seemed a bit trun­cated, like the Norse Code aspect itself. Did the Norse Code project play a larger part in the book in ear­lier drafts, and if so, what led to its role being reduced?

I think when you have a book titled Norse Code, peo­ple are right to expect a big part of the book to be devoted to Norse Code (which in the book is a genomics oper­a­tion run by Valkyries). But I never intended that par­tic­u­lar aspect of the book to play a huge role. What hap­pened was, the book was called “Greg’s Damn Norse Novel” for most of the time I was writ­ing it. When it came time to sub­mit it, it needed a real title. Norse Code is all I could come up with. I sort of expected the pub­lisher to give me a “real” title, but I guess they were happy with it, so it stuck.

What’s next from Greg in terms of books? It seems that Norse Code is a stand-​​alone book, which is sur­pris­ing given all the tril­ogy deals genre writ­ers seem to be get­ting lately.

I actu­ally can’t talk about what’s next! I’m not con­tracted to write any­thing else for the pub­lisher of Norse Code, though they get first look at the next book I write for adults. But the next thing out from me won’t be a book for adults, and when I’m free to talk about it, you can believe I’ll be Mr. Blabby McInterHype wher­ever I can.

Is Norse Code your writ­ten first novel in addi­tion to being your first pub­lished one, or did you write oth­ers before sell­ing Norse Code?

Norse Code is actu­ally the sec­ond book I’ve fin­ished. Somewhere in the mid­dle of that stalled-​​out time I men­tioned ear­lier, I wrote a whole other book. That one’s trunked for now, but you never know. Another whack or two at it, and it could pos­si­bly be decent enough to try to sell. If not, though, that’s okay. My goal with the cur­rently trunked novel was just to fin­ish a book, so I con­sider it a suc­cess even if it never leaves my hard drive. Writing it gave me the con­fi­dence to fin­ish Norse Code, and fin­ish­ing and sell­ing Norse Code gave me the con­fi­dence to write other books, so that first, unsold novel will always be impor­tant to me.

Thanks for answer­ing my ques­tions, Greg!  So have any of you read Norse Code? What did you think?

A Writing Observation from the Glee Pilot

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Hulu has the pilot up for a new tele­vi­sion show, Glee, that I noticed some buzz about on Twitter. This past week, Sarah and I gave it a watch and really enjoyed it. Despite the fact that I’m not that inter­ested in musi­cals usu­ally, the show man­aged to grab me with its really unusual cast of characters.

Nearly every char­ac­ter has some­thing weird and unlik­able about them. No every­men or women in this show. Our teacher who restarts the Glee Club, osten­si­bly our main pro­tag­o­nist, is in a ter­ri­ble mar­riage, longs for the days when he was in Glee Club in high school, and in order to con­vince a teen to join the club, plants drugs in his locker and pre­tends to bust him, offer­ing him a choice of deten­tion or Glee Club. All of the teach­ers are sim­i­larly flawed, but with lik­able traits as well.

Some of the stu­dent cast are fairly two dimen­sional, but the two teen lead char­ac­ters are very mixed as well. The girl is lit­er­ally insane, but sym­pa­thetic for being picked on so badly by her class­mates (despite hav­ing accused the for­mer Glee Club teacher of being gay because he didn’t give her the part she wanted). The boy is a jock who par­tic­i­pates in tor­tur­ing the teens lower on the social hier­ar­chy of high school, includ­ing the other kids in the Glee Club.

As I watched the show, com­pletely riv­eted, I asked myself what was it about the show that had my atten­tion, and I decided it had to be these will­ing­ness to make its lead char­ac­ter com­plete ass­holes. Most sit­coms would never dare to make char­ac­ters so bor­der­line unlik­able. The last TV show I can remem­ber doing this well was Arrested Development. What is it about Fox that they’re will­ing to do this? Say what you will about these guys, but they gen­er­ally are will­ing to take risks on shows that none of the other net­works will?

I think it’s pos­si­ble that sim­ply unlik­able char­ac­ters would not be enough to get my atten­tion. It’s that com­bi­na­tion of sit­com with unlik­able char­ac­ters that seems to work here. The show plays with your expec­ta­tions about sit­com char­ac­ters, and while it’s obvi­ously not the first to do so, I thought it was inter­est­ing, and that I would share it with you all.

What do you think about this tech­nique? It seems like it would be much harder to pull off in a short story, where the pres­sure to have a sym­pa­thetic pro­tag­o­nist right away is fairly high. Do you know of any sto­ries or nov­els that suceeded with this tac­tic for you? Mentioning your own sto­ries if they’re pub­lished is cool too. I’d like to study the idea more.

I’ll be talk­ing quite a bit about writ­ing for the screen this week. Up later (no pun intended) will be some lessons about writ­ing that I’ve gleaned from watch­ing Pixar films, includ­ing the lat­est, er, Up. I con­sider Pixar to be some of the best sto­ry­tellers work­ing in any medium, and I think they have a lot to teach us about telling broadly acces­si­ble sto­ries.  If you’re won­der­ing if you should go see Up, and you liked ear­lier films, don’t even hes­i­tate.  See the next show you can make time for.  It’s that good.

5 More Ways for Writers to Market Themselves

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

There are two schools of thought on mar­ket­ing and writ­ing.  Some think that mar­ket­ing can lead to great suc­cess, or that mar­ket­ing alone is respon­si­ble for the suc­cess.   Dan Brown is some­one I hear this accu­sa­tion levied at from time to time.  Others will argue that no amount of mar­ket­ing will make a bad story good.  Bad in this case gen­er­ally being bland and bor­ing. I waf­fle back and forth between these opin­ions depend­ing on the writer and how jeal­ous I feel, but ulti­mately, I ascribe to a syn­the­sis of the two.

Talent and genius are not all that is required to suc­ceed in writ­ing.  Sure, they’ll take you places a lot of the time.  But there’s a prob­lem that doesn’t have any­thing to do with how good you are.

There are a lot of other tal­ented peo­ple out there doing work just as good, if not bet­ter.  And they’re all vying for the atten­tion of the same peo­ple you are.  Sure, you can seg­ment the mar­ket a bit, and nar­row your niche, but ulti­mately, we’re all look­ing for read­ers, and there are only so many (and appar­ently grow­ing fewer by the year).  Forget the national deficit, we’re run­ning one hell of an atten­tion deficit these days.   Luckily, there’s no short­age of appetite for good sto­ries.  Human being are vora­cious con­sumers of the stuff.  But each per­son is pre­sented with a ver­i­ta­ble buf­fet of choices, and until they try a dish, they have no idea if it will be any good.  It’s  such a big buf­fet that they might not even know your dish is down there, next to the green bean casse­role and the can­died yams.  They may fill up on bread.

Okay, I’ve stretched that metaphor as far as it will go.

Writers don’t want to be sales­peo­ple.  If we wanted to be sales­peo­ple, we wouldn’t be writ­ing. There are no short­age of jobs for sales­peo­ple.  Maybe you’ll win the pub­lisher jack­pot and get a great mar­ket­ing deal with your three book con­tract.  Or maybe your publisher’s inter­nal process will hic­cup and the book sell­ers won’t really know what your book is about, and will have a hard time push­ing it to the chains and you’re dead on arrival.   Or, maybe you’ll pub­lish in high qual­ity, but some­what obscure mar­kets that not nearly as many peo­ple read as you might wish.

A lot of the time, the work falls to the writer to mar­ket them­selves and their work.  You’ll have help along the way, from the edi­tors and pub­lish­ers who buy your work, but not always.  Then you need to step in, and mar­ket yourself.

It’s a bad word though, isn’t it?  I feel slimy just for even say­ing it.  I’ve had to come to terms with the notion that what I do isn’t really infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy any more so much as it is a form of mar­ket­ing.  I have the neg­a­tive stigma attached the idea as well.   But I’ve come to know some excel­lent and effort­less self-​​marketers in the writ­ing world, and it’s con­vinced me of the over­all value.   They had the tal­ent first, but even tal­ent can use some help.

I’ve talked at length about how to use your website/​blog to mar­ket your­self.  I’d like to dis­cuss some alter­na­tive meth­ods, or at least tan­gen­tial ones.  So with­out fur­ther wind-​​up, here are a few more off-​​the-​​wall mar­ket­ing ideas for writ­ers and aspir­ing writ­ers.  Use at your own risk.

  1. Get Em Young

    Volunteer as a speaker for your local school sys­tem.  This will prob­a­bly go over best when you’ve got some cred­its to your name that you can show to teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tion.  Offer your ser­vices, explain that you would love to talk to kids about writ­ing.  Bring along age-​​appropriate free sam­ples (ARCs, mag­a­zine issues, and so on), and give it away to the kids.    Hey, if you’re a genre writer, you’re not only doing your­self a bit of a favor, and help­ing kids, you’re also increas­ing the expo­sure of the genre as a whole.   So it’s good mar­ket­ing and it’s just good karma too.

  2. Twitter Away

    You already know about Twitter, right?  I’ve blath­ered on about it enough.  Here’s the thing… Twitter is infected with self-​​marketeers, mar­ket­ing gurus, and all man­ner of social snake-​​oil sales­folk.  The Twitterati can smell a mar­keter from a mil­lion miles away.  I can tell from a glance at someone’s stream whether or not they’ve basi­cally cre­ated a Twitter account to blare about their work, or prod­uct, or what­ever.  They’re not sub­tle.  You need to be sub­tle, and you do this by not being an ass­hole. Twitter’s for social­iz­ing.  This means you talk to other peo­ple, you lis­ten, you par­tic­i­pate.  You don’t use it as a broad­cast medium.   It’s cool if you plug things now and then, really.  But retweet stuff too.  Answer replies.  Tell peo­ple how cool they are.  Be a gen­uine human being. And stay the hell away from any­one telling you that they have the sure-​​fire method of gain­ing you 16,000 fol­low­ers in 24 hours.  That stuff has to be bogus.

  3. Become an Expert (or share your exist­ing expertise)

    This goes back to some­thing I wrote about yes­ter­day, which is that I believe writ­ers should have pas­sions out­side of writ­ing itself.  Few of us make a liv­ing at this, and I hope some of us have day jobs that we kind of like.  So, make your­self an expert on your pas­sion, and share it with oth­ers through online media.  An audi­ence mem­ber is an audi­ence mem­ber, and no, I don’t have any hard fig­ures to sup­port the notion that a blog reader turns into a book buyer, but a blog reader is one less per­son who has never heard of you.

    Call it becom­ing an expert, or estab­lish­ing author­ity.  Either way,  you do so by offer­ing some­thing of use­ful­ness to other peo­ple.  Like I have been so des­per­ately attempt­ing to do with this blog for the past sev­eral weeks.  You can do this by a blog, but you can also do this via find-​​an-​​expert sites.  Join a com­mu­nity around the sub­ject and be help­ful to oth­ers.  Project good energy out and it comes back to you, I have found.

  4. Manufacture a Controversy

    Tension sells in fic­tion and it sells in real life too.   And I’ll be damned if this doesn’t actu­ally work some­times.  Now, whether or not you do this depends on whether or not you think any pub­lic­ity is good pub­lic­ity.  Manufacturing a con­tro­versy, even if your out­rage is true and heart­felt, can back­fire.  Controversies inher­ently bring emo­tions to the table, and dis­cus­sions can turn into flame wars in a sec­ond when emo­tions are at the table.    I’ll be hon­est.  I wrote some of the things I wrote in yesterday’s post because I knew some peo­ple would take excep­tion to them, to the degree that they would be com­pelled to write a reac­tion.  That’s not to say I lied, because I believed what I wrote at the time.  But I knew that the “hook” of what I was writ­ing was that some peo­ple would dis­agree with me.

    In the end, I feel bad about it though, and I won’t be using it as a blog­ging tech­nique again unless I’ve put a lot of thought into my posi­tion.  Nick took me down yes­ter­day in about fif­teen min­utes, and gave me trou­ble, right­fully so, for not research­ing before I wrote.    So if you want to man­u­fac­ture a con­tro­versy, keep that in mind.  Do your research and make sure you feel strongly about your subject.

  5. Forget Everything I Just Said

    Sometimes, the best mar­ket­ing a writer can hope for is to be a nice, help­ful, gen­uinely inter­est­ing per­son.  Someone who gives as much as they receive, and who loves meet­ing and talk­ing things over with new peo­ple.  Those peo­ple do well because they earn it.

    I’m try­ing to be that kind of per­son, but I’m also twit­ter­ing, shar­ing my exper­tise (what lit­tle there is), and some­times, not nec­es­sar­ily by acci­dent, man­u­fac­tur­ing a con­tro­versy or two.  To the point where I don’t get nearly enough writ­ing done out­side of the blog.

    I hon­estly write these posts out of a desire to be help­ful, and to feel like I am engag­ing in the com­mu­nity around me.  If I’m try­ing to mar­ket any­thing, it’s my ser­vices as a free­lancer.  I don’t have a book and my short sto­ries are rare lately.  Maybe the best pol­icy for a writer regard­ing mar­ket­ing is hon­esty and authenticity.

So what do you think?