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The Traditional Screwing

Author: June 14, 2017 0 Comments

This topic was suggested by Jon Gawne.

Internet Lawyers will give you a lot of vaguely troubling advice around the publishing business, mainly obsessing over all the many ways that you will be screwed over by the companies that publish you. If you listen to Internet Lawyers, of course, you’ll find yourself more or less not doing anything out of sheer terror, or doing a lot of ridiculous and useless stuff like mailing yourself your manuscripts so you can prove authorship timelines and such (or maybe, like me, you’re just lonely and like mailing yourself stuff).

But how prevalent is being screwed over by a publisher? In my narrow experience, not very.

Commence Screwage

Now, I should note in very firm language that this is my personal experience as a writer; I’m not saying people have not been and will not ever be screwed over by publishers. That shit does happen, and when it happens to a writer it can be anything from mildly annoying to outright devastating, depending on how much money is involved and how it impacts their career otherwise.

All I’m saying is that in my personal experience most publishers aren’t out to screw you. Sure, they will send you a contract that’s weighted in their favor. And by design publishing endeavors to avoid paying the author monies owed for as long as possible. But if you’re working with a legit publisher and have someone like an agent advising you on the contract, generally speaking you’re good.

The closest I’ve come to being screwed, in fact, was with my first novel, Lifers. My deal there hit the trifecta of asking for trouble:

  1. It was a very small publisher.
  2. I didn’t have an agent or a lawyer review the contract.
  3. I wasn’t terribly proactive.

I was offered a $1,000 advance for Lifers, payable in three installments—upon signing the contract, upon delivering the manuscript, and upon publication. I got the first installment just fine. When I handed in the book, I expected a check for $333 but never got it. When the book published I expected a check for $666 and never got it. This while going through the humiliating motions of filling out sales slips when I hand-sold a copy, because this was 2001 and the Internet was still a work of science fiction according to most publishers.

Long story short, I’d ordered a bunch of author copies of my novel, which the publisher charged against my account, meaning I ate up much of my advance that way. Still, years later my wife spent an inordinate amount of time on the phone battling for royalties and whatever else might be owed, and three years later I did indeed get a check for $255.

How can you avoid getting screwed over? You can’t, not totally, but you can minimize the risk by following some basics:

1. Always have you contracts reviewed by someone knowledgeable—an agent, a review specialist, an attorney who specializes in publishing deals.

2. Follow up on payments. The second they’re late, get on the phone and hit the email. Often when companies are going down there’s a limited amount of dosh to plug holes with, and the first person to complain gets the check.

3. Be wary of Kickstarter projects or similarly funded projects. Everyone might mean well, but if you don’t have the money to set up your publishing empire properly, the chances your writers get paid is exponentially lower.

4. Remind yourself that your work has value and you deserve to be paid.

The bottom line is, publishing is not some complex confidence game designed to scam you out of your hard-won money, so don’t get paranoid. On the other hand, publishing is often run by the same incompetent types who run everything else, so do be careful. Plus, as I can attest, there is a lot of drinking in the publishing world. A lot.

career, Writing

Tyspo Sunt Undique

Author: June 13, 2017 0 Comments

This topic was suggested by Jon Gawne.

There’s a prevalent theory among some folks that typos—those tiny mistakes you make while typing your genius fictions or your skillful cover letters and queries—are dealbreakers, in the sense that any self-respecting agent or publisher will immediately direct your work to the trash if they note a single instance. The general idea being that a level of superhuman competence is required if you want to be a writer.

This is not true. I know it’s not true because I am one of the least competent people in the world, and my work tends to be riddled with mistakes and typos.

The Riddler (See What I Did There)

The first novel I technically sold (though there was no money and it never actually published, but contracts were signed) was sent out lacking a half dozen pages, and yet still managed to gain someone’s interest. Even today, when I am a Titan of the literary world, my agent mocks me on a regular basis for the typos in my manuscripts, letters, emails, and social media. And yet it hasn’t slowed me down a bit, because there are these wonderful people called Copy Editors. And yes, you need one.

What it boils down to is simple: You as the writer don’t need to be perfect. You need to have a manuscript and communications that don’t look like a drunk illiterate wrote them—but they don’t have to be perfect. Using “its” when you mean “it’s” once in a 500-page manuscript isn’t going to disqualify you. Heck, having dozens of typos won’t disqualify you, as long as they’re clearly oversights and not representative of a writer whose language skills are theoretical at best.

The Humorless

Will you possibly run into an editor, agent, or other literary personage who will reject you for a typo? Sure, and fuck ?em. While everyone has a right to run their shop along any standards they wish—and while I will stipulate that there’s a difference between the occasional typo and a manuscript that’s obviously not worth reading because of the lack of care or understanding involved in its writing—if you’re going to reject my work because of a misplaced comma, or a misspelled word, or that time I passed out while revising and didn’t notice I’d pasted in 6,000 words of a non-fiction article I was working on, then I probably don’t want to work with you anyway. Because I will have typos, and make mistakes, and accidentally send you a version of the story that’s 3 years old.

I want partners. Publishing a novel or a short story isn’t like accepting a minimum-wage job or something, it’s a collaboration. Part of that is copy-editing and proofreading to clean up my rough edges, and I want to work with people who have a sense of humor—and perspective.

General, Writing

What to Do When a Vengeful Universe Robs You

Author: June 12, 2017 0 Comments

This topic was suggested by Jon Gawne.

Writers, by and large, are simple creatures who live their lives according to a collection of old wives’ tales and myths, including a firm belief that you can turn magical thinking into a paying career and a firm belief that writing is a paying career. Ah, such innocence!

Another cherished belief many writers have is that their ideas are somehow wholly unique and original. I am reminded, ironically, of Paul McCartney’s story about writing the famous song Yesterday. He says the melody came to him and he was convinced he must have heard it somewhere else and nicked it unconsciously (something that would bite bandmate George Harrison in the ass years later) because it was too good. Only after spending months humming it to people and asking if they could identify it did he finally accept that he’d come up with it.

Writers should never do that with novel ideas, because if you’re looking for prior work that has more or less the same idea, you will almost certainly find it. Because there are no new ideas.

The President’s Dead!

A few years ago I wrote a novel about the designated survivor during the State of the Union Address—the member of the cabinet who is secured someplace just in case the entire line of succession is murdered in a terrorist attack or something. It was called Designated Survivor, which is also the title—and premise—of a TV show. To be fair, it wasn’t exactly a new idea when I wrote the novel, and my treatment of the premise went in a weirdo SF direction.

Still, the TV show kind of kills any hope I might have had of publishing the novel. This stuff happens, though, because ideas are constantly being recycled, and half the battle in publishing is timing. What do you do if you’ve been working on a novel and suddenly someone else publishes something with a similar premise? Here are your steps to work through:

  1. DON’T imagine they somehow stole your idea. Put down your phone and step away from the lawyers, because your idea just isn’t that unique. Trust me on this.
  2. DO keep working on the story if you’re still excited about it. You might find ways to twist things and set it apart from your new competition, and even if you don’t, you’ll enjoy finishing the story and maybe learn something.
  3. DON’T start pestering the other party on social media about stealing your ideas. Also, don’t mention how you had the same idea years earlier at every goddamn party and gathering, because trust me: No one cares.
  4. DO chalk it up to the fundamental perversion of the universe, hit control-N, and start writing something new.

That’s it. This shit happens, there’s no defense, and you can’t do anything about it. Well, that’s not 100% true—if you write a version of that idea that is so wildly better done than any other version, you might yet sell it. Accept that challenge or move on to your next idea. It’s that simple.

ideas, Novels, Writing

The Work-Work Balance: Freelancing and Fiction

Author: June 9, 2017 0 Comments

A lot of writers dream of writing full-time. Some writers, of course, dream of other things, like getting paid to taste-test hamburgers, or whiskey. But an awful lot of us dream about being able to walk away from the Day Job and earn a living with nothing but our rapier wit and understanding of pathetic fallacy.

Usually, this dream involves our fiction, and usually it is in the form of a hell of a lot of book sales. Sometimes life throws you a curve and your dream of making a living writing comes true in the bizarro way: You launch a freelance writing career in parallel with your fiction endeavors. On the plus side, you are, technically, writing for a living. On the negative side, some of your writing energy and brain power will be dumped into freelance instead of awesome books. On the plus side, you were going to put that brain energy into a Day Job anyway.

On the negative side, writing all the time can sometimes get a little draining.

Finding Balance

Now, if your goal is to write for a living, this isn’t a bad thing, it’s just something to keep in mind. And if you’re writing to pay the bills, your number one priority is going to be getting enough work to pay those bills. And it’s not like there’s a finite number of words you’ll get to write before death takes you in its icy grip.

So how do you attain balance between writing-for-the-filthy-lucre and writing for your passion? You don’t.

Balance is a bad word here, and writers should be ashamed of using it. Balance implies that an equitable share is desirable, that an even split in your time and energies is the ideal. This is, as scientists say, bullshit. What you want is coordination between your work-writing and your fiction. And, frankly, you should be looking to dial down the time you spend on freelance or other paid writing as much as possible while making enough money to survive. This is accomplished through a very simple maneuver known as raising your rates. The goal should be getting paid $100,000 per word so you can write one tweet and retire.

Stop trying to balance things, and start pressing your thumb on the scale in favor of your fiction.

career, freelance, time management, Writing

The Ladder

Author: June 8, 2017 0 Comments

One of the best pieces of writing career advice I can offer is the simple observation that everything is relative. This includes your level of success in this business; no matter what you’ve achieved, you’re somewhere on a ladder of success whose rungs are defined by your own perception. And as a result you’re never wholly satisfied, and you always feel like you’ve got a ways to go—or at least I do.

The first rung was finishing a story, any story. That moment when you realize you’ve actually created a narrative with recognizable characters, plot, and resolution is pretty thrilling. Then you think, gosh, it would be nice to see some of my work in print. And then you get a story published in some non-paying zine or something and you’re thrilled!

And then you think it would be nice to be paid for a story. And then you get a few dollars for a story, and you realize you’re now a working writer, even if you just got less than a penny a word and might not be able to buy a coffee with the check. And so on—you get your first pro-rate paycheck, you publish a novel, you sign a contract, you get an advance, you sit on a panel, you’re invited to an anthology—all of these are rungs on that ladder. You ascend to one and realize you’ve achieved something not every author manages.

Perspective

It’s easy to look up at all the rungs above you and the writers hanging out there and get wound up about it. Your book sales are middling. Your awards shelf is empty. You didn’t have that genius twist that everyone is talking about. You don’t have that many Twitter followers, your book wasn’t adapted into a film—there’s always a rung above you. Usually a few dozen rungs.

But, and this is important, you have to look back and realize how many writers never finish that first story. Never sell—or, sometimes, even try to sell—that first novel. You might feel like your career isn’t going so well or as well as it could or should be, but to someone further down that ladder you look like an incredible success, you with your many publishing credits, your actual checks for actual money, your award nominations and name recognition.

The point is, if you’re even on the damn ladder someone is jealous of you.

None of this means you shouldn’t be jealous and ambitious. By all means, scheme to become as rich and powerful in the writing business as possible so you can crush

career, Writing

The Ads Not to Answer

Author: June 7, 2017 0 Comments

Writing is a hard gig to make into a living, and freelance writing is the hardest path to follow in some ways. If you ever want a sense of how much people in general value writing as a skill, try your luck at freelancing; while there are plenty of well-paying gigs out there and plenty of people who do value the writer, there is a vast army of people who think writing is essentially worthless.

These folks generally believe they could do all the writing for their project themselves if only they had the time. Therefore they approach hiring someone to write it with an irritated, vengeful attitude from the get-go, and are a nightmare to work for. If you get sucked into their project, you will have regrets, so it’s best to avoid them from the very beginning.

Deciphering the Ads

So how can you avoid working for idiots who regard what you do as essentially worthless? You can look for the secret code they all use in their advertising. When they post an ad looking for writers, look for the following things:

  • No mention whatsoever of compensation. If the advertisement doesn’t even acknowledge that you might need to be paid for your work, move on.
  • A lengthy list of your responsibilities, which, in combination with the first bullet tells you exactly what they think of your position in life.
  • The words copyscape or plagiarism, which are sure signs that the person hiring regards writing as a scam of some sort and not, you know, a valuable service. I’m not saying people haven’t been ripped off by writers serving up steaming piles of plagiarized material, but this tends to happen more often to you when you lowball your pay and don’t value writers to begin with.
  • A stern, angry tone. If they’re already treating you like a Time Thief stealing from them before you’ve even answered the ad, move along.

The bottom line is that writing is content that has value, whether its entertaining fiction moving book-shaped units or web copy or blog posts drawing eyeballs. Not only should the writer always be paid, they should also always be paid fairly, and the first step is not even bothering with crappy jobs. Consistently, the best freelance gigs I’ve gotten via answering ads have had ad copy that was fun, that was up-front about payment, and that made me feel excited to join a team and not lucky to get a penny a word.

freelance, Writing

Slang: Don’t Overdo It

Author: June 6, 2017 0 Comments

Friends, I am not a young man any more. Some might argue I have never been a young man, that I was born with a tumbler of whiskey in one hand a complaint about the Designated Hitter Rule cued up. Let it drift: However young I once was, I am no longer, and it almost doesn’t matter because I’ve never been much of a Youth Culture guy.

When I was a young’n my sainted Mother once got very annoyed with me when I went through a phase of ending every sentence with the word “man.” As in, hey, is dinner ready, man? or why do I have to do homework when people are starving somewhere on this planet, man? Like, she got really annoyed and launched a campaign to stop me. Which was devastatingly successful, because you did not mess with my Mom on the rare occasions she felt strongly about things.

Anyway, that might explain why I’ve always been slow to pick up on slang and the hot new speak of the kids, even when I was a kid. Which of course complicates things with the writing.

Things With the Writing

Slang is tough when you’re writing fiction. On the one hand, if handled well it adds oodles of what literary scientists call verisimilitude. Not to mention flavor and a naturalistic rhythm to your work. But, if handled poorly it all backfires and you are Steve Buscemi in a meme.

<MEME>

The hardest part for writers is the fact that we’re writers, which means we’re linguistically curious by nature. So when we hear some bit of slang, we’re intrigued, and sort of naturally pick it up and start playing with it, because words and the evolution of language is fucking fascinating. This does run the risk of appearing ridiculous, say by being a middle-aged white man who suddenly starts referring to his wife as bae or fam all the time.

You have to keep this in mind while writing, especially if you’re trying to make a young character feel hip and contemporary (ed. note: if this is your goal do not use the word “hip”). Using some slang you’ve gleaned from overheard conversations and Internet forums might seem like a great idea, unless you use them incorrectly—or if you stumble over cultural lines and wind up in Appropriation Land, or pick up slang without the necessary context and get into serious trouble.

So, your best practice with slang is to resist. Resist until you absolutely can’t resist any more, until the temptation is too powerful, then give in just enough to scratch that itch. Then back away rapidly and go back to using language the way it was intended, you filthy animal.

General, Writing

“Fargo” and The Relativity of Evil

Author: June 5, 2017 0 Comments

One of the best tricks I get asked about when I talk to aspiring writers is how to make a despicable, perhaps even an evil character likable. This is usually in reference to Avery Cates, who is an assassin and a guy who uses casual violence, even against his friends, to assert himself. Cates is sometimes charming, or funny, or sympathetic, but he’s also always an asshole, so it can be challenging to make readers like him.

There are two main ways to accomplish this. One is to punish the character. Avery is a Bad Actor, but he gets tortured, imprisoned, beaten, and screwed over so often his violence never actually gets him anything aside from short-lived triumph. This makes him a little more sympathetic.

The other way is a slower burn, and it’s something that Noah Hawley is doing in the third season of Fargo on FX: Make everyone else worse. Spoilers be comin’.

The Relativity of Evil

In Fargo, Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays Nikki Swango, a hard-edged ex-con who takes a practical approach to getting by. Nikki has genuine love for her Parole Officer, Ray Stussy (Ewan MacGregor), and she isn’t such a terrible person. But she does encourage Ray to commit several crimes in pursuit of some stake money, setting in motion some awful events—and when one of Ray’s plots brings a dimwitted, violent man into their lives, she doesn’t hesitate for even a second to murder him via air conditioner.

You read that right.

Death by Air Conditioner is No Way to Go.

Nikki’s not a nice person. She’s a schemer and a murderer and a bit of a grifter. But by episode 7 of the season, Nikki is a character you feel sympathy for. She’s been brutally beaten. Her fiancé is (SPOILERS) dead. She’s been falsely accused of the murder and an attempt was made to assassinate her. All of this helps you to put aside the fact that she dropped a fucking air conditioner on someone.

But what really works to put Nikki’s crimes into perspective are the other villains on the show. Mr. Varga and his henchmen are truly evil, terrifying people who have very little empathy or value for human life. Compared to them, Nikki Vango is not so bad. Her violence is only unleashed to protect herself or her lover, and while I would not, say, want to be in business with Nikki (or living next door to her) she’s not an inhuman monster (or a force of nature, a concept Fargo likes to play with) like the others.

So, air conditioner or not, Nikki has become one of the people you wish survive the story—a feat any writer ought to be able to pull off.

Bullshit, Someone Else's Writing

Fuck Grammar

Author: June 5, 2017 0 Comments

You learn grammar so you can break the rules with purpose and intent, but boy howdy you should break those rules. Every novelist should have that failed novel where they tried to go Full Joyce and break all the rules—and yes, that novel will be failed, but what fun. And if it isn’t a Fail, you certainly don’t need this blog or my grimy thoughts.

I’ve always had the vaguest and most primitive grasp of grammar, because I’m a lazy man who relies on instinct instead of book-learnin’ as a rule. Writing has always come easily for me, and I’ve always regarded grammar as a collection of loose guidelines instead of, you know, rules. When you show a novel or story around to enough people, someone will note your grammarly failings—the dubious overuse of commas, perhaps, or the clear evidence you don’t really know how to use the semi-colon (the most mysterious of the colons). And humorless people will correct your grammar, no doubt.

Ignore ?em.

Going Full Cormac

Look, no one’s telling you that you can pull off a Full Cormac McCarthy and just ignore whole swaths of our delicate, glorious language; not many people can go Full Cormac (and some would argue not even Cormac himself is pulling it off) without falling off a cliff into incomprehensibility. But you shouldn’t feel like you’re a prisoner of grammar rules handed out in school. Use those commas freely. Abuse verb tense, write glorious, overlong run-on sentences.

Just do it with purpose. That’s the key. If your grammar is muddled because your grasp of it is muddled, then all the grammar bluenoses have a point, kid. If you’re doing it on purpose and you like the effect, then ignore all of them and don’t ever look back.

Uncategorized

Submissions: Don’t Think So Much

Author: June 2, 2017 0 Comments

You’ve written a novel! Or a short story, or an epic poem, or a confessional memoir that’s 350,000 words about your sexual exploits, drinking binges, crying jags, and occasional abduction by aliens. As one does.

As hard as that might have seemed, many writers find the next step to be much more difficult: Submitting that sucker. Whether it’s to an agent, a publisher, a magazine, or some other market, the moment you decide you’re done with a story and you want to sell it is terrifying, because you’re saying it’s done, you can’t improve it any more, and you’re about to voluntarily invite people to pass judgment on it. It can be paralyzing. Once you start reading the guidelines it gets easier and easier to think your story doesn’t fit, or it’s not good enough, so why bother?

I just sent off three story submissions to magazines, and one is probably a ridiculously inappropriate submissions. Wrong market, and I’m not 100% certain the story is actually any good. I submitted it anyway, because that’s the secret: Don’t read the guidelines. Don’t give the editor an opportunity to talk you out of it. Just send in the sub.

Like a Drunken Sailor

Submitting fiction like a drunken sailor may not make for the most efficient of submission processes. It may not make you any friends among editors, or result in any more sales than a more focused approach. But what skipping the guidelines—and the thought process over the appropriateness and quality of your work—gets you is peace of mind. Sure, you might still get that rejection, but better to be rejected and have had a chance at a sale than to talk yourself out of submitting in the first place.

I’ve certainly had the experience of submitting a story to a market that I think has no chance of selling, and, then selling it. The thing is that editors will always tell you how picky they are—you should only send them your absolute best work and then only when the moon is full and you have recently bathed in the blood of virgin goats, after spending decades in a cave contemplating your story. The more you read the guidelines, the easier it is to be talked out of any shred of confidence you might have in your work.

Just click submit. Your worst case scenario is a quick rejection. If you’re smart, you’ll do what I do and turn rejections into a slow-motion, long-term drinking game.

rejection, Writing