:IMHO!: Wow, my first thought was that it was another of your books but I couldn't find anything on amazon. Now I see why. I had no idea. I just found the book in a thrift store and since it had your name on it I snatched it right up. Thanks for the info.
^I posted that whole rant here a while back, before the changes. My goal is to let every Star Trek fan know...one reader at a time.
What if you wrote a book along the lines of Notes from Underground or Memoirs of a Madman? Like, a book with no plot per se, just the musings of a seriously misanthropic character and the various situations he finds himself in. Basically, what are the chances of an off-beat book with odd structure getting published? Which publishers would like something like that. It seems if your stuff does not fit into a certain identifiable genre, it will go nowhere. How do you get weird stuff read?
In mainstream publishing, the odds are slim to none. As you've observed, today's editors want cookie-cutter stuff so they don't have to actually read it. They're a bunch of spoiled children who've picked up Hollywood's bad habits. "Give me the TV Guide version," they'll sigh on the rare occasion you're actually allowed into their offices. "Tell it to me in one sentence or less." Unless, of course, you happen to be a Star Fucker. If you're sleeping with someone who's important on the New York Scene and you go to all the right parties, then your work will be scooped up and oohed and aahed over. Your best bet - check into the online publishers. (iUniverse is one I know is reputable. You'll have to judge the others on your own.) And be prepared to do your own marketing, because no publisher does a lick of marketing for anyone other than the Names these days. Good luck!
Yep, but I sort of told it in snippets over there. At the time I was negotiating with the Pocket folks to get back into the franchise, so I didn't want to give the impression I was still angry. I wasn't. What goes around comes around, and here I am.
Okay, you outlined the process of getting an agent, then getting the advance to write a book. What if you write the book first? Or, what if you get the advance, but write too slow and get only a third of the way through, or write a crappy book? Do you gotta give the money back? And what if you spent it all? Are you in as deep doo doo as I suspect? And how deep is the doo doo? IRS troubles? Jail? What are we looking at here?
Thank you very much. I am going to check out iUniverse right now. The Star Fucker thing is quite depressing. What worth can be found in the writing of someone who is able to socialize and meet people? One other thing. What if I copyright my book, but make no mention of it anywhere in the actual book. Is that allowed. I know what you are saying about ideas, I tend to agree, but shouldn't you protect yourself somehow? By the way, I am very envious of you!
I don't think they're stupid. Disingenuous, maybe, but not stupid. Maybe they're his way of bumping the thread so people will notice you. Guess we should ask Baba.
That's actually a good idea for your first sale. Because if you sell the book on the outline and the first three chapters, your editor's going to ask you "What else have you got?" Then you can hand him an outline and three chapters for your next book and get a head start on that, because you've already written the first one. A lot of people don't want to take that chance, because their attitude is "But what if I don't sell the first one?" To which my answer is: If you didn't have fun writing the first one, you're only in it for the money, and there are much easier ways to make money. Another good reason to write the entire book before you submit that three-and-and-outline sample. If you go over deadline, you might be able to wheedle an extension, but if you get into the habit of going over deadline, editors will start avoiding you. In the old days, if you wrote a crappy book, an editor would work with you to make it better (you know, actually edit the book). These days they're more apt to throw it back at you with what's known as a "kill fee," which can be all or part of the rest of the contract money. But they'll also blackball you - i.e. never accept another submission from you, and badmouth you to other editors. So, again, another reason to write the whole book first. Because if you know it's crappy, there's no point in wasting everybody's time. But if you're not on a deadline and you haven't gotten paid, you can rewrite it until it's no longer crappy, and everyone benefits. I'm not personally aware of an instance of a writer having to give money back. I've known of a fairly big name writer who got himself into a jam a few years ago and delivered a really bad manuscript, which his editor pushed through anyway, just because this writer has a following and there are people who will buy his stuff just on the basis of his name. Well, the book did worse than anyone expected, and didn't come close to earning the big fat advance, and the editor was about to cut this guy adrift. But he had alimony problems and substance abuse problems and blah-blah-blah, so he cut a deal with the editor to take a teeny-tiny advance on his next book and not see any royalties until it had earned enough to make up the money lost on the previous book. The subsequent book sold very well (a month at Betty Ford probably helped), and he's back on track. But speaking of the IRS: When you're paid by a publishing company, you're paid as an independent contractor. I.e., no taxes or SSI are taken out for you. You're responsible for paying taxes quarterly, the way you would with any freelance or self-employment income, including a nasty little thing called self-employment tax, with is double what you'd have taken out in FICA if this were a paycheck. So where you can really get yourself into a jam, if you don't watch yourself, is in not paying enough estimated taxes and getting reamed on April 15th.
Alternatively, you could change your name to Neil Gaiman and do very well for yourself. If you sell a book to a major publisher, part of the process will be that they will copyright the book for you. They'll pay the fees, do the paperwork, etc., but the copyright will be in your name. Your contract with the publisher, however, gives them the exclusive right to publish your work for a certain period of time. You couldn't sell the same book to another publisher, or self-publish it, for example, during that time. If, however, the publisher lets the book go out of print (which they do with ever-increasing rapidity these days), then you can request what is known as reversion of rights, which means you can republish the book with someone else, or on your own (for example, as an ebook or print-on-demand). Applying for the copyright on your own just complicates all that. It will at least raise eyebrows among the editorial staff ("Doesn't this guy know how we do things here?"). There's always a little twinge of fear about someone stealing your story but, believe me, it very rarely happens. Publishers get mountains of submissions every month; they don't have time to misappropriate writers' material. They also know they can get sued, so it really isn't worth it to them. In short, unless you intend to exclusively self-publish, don't copyright your own material. There is something gratifying about having slipped through the narrow end of the funnel and gotten published. May it happen to you as well.
To what extent do you pre-plan your books? Do you have a carefully constructed outline, work with a vague roadmap or endpoint in mind, or is it mostly spontaneous discovery? Does it vary with the type of book you're writing?
Okay, let me know what you think. My novel begins like this: "It was a dark and stormy night on the Holodeck."
OMG! I'm sorry, folks. Haven't been in here in weeks, and assumed this thread had dropped off into oblivion a long time ago. Darth, under the theory that there are no original ideas, I dare you to take that beginning and make something of it. Jean Prouvaire, first of all - welcome back! Where the heck ya been? To answer your question, I wrote my first two novels (the one that didn't sell, and the one that did) off the cuff. Which is to say I just sat down and wrote, and when I got to the end, I stopped. Two reasons why I don't do that anymore. One is that both of those novels were unusually structured. The first one was really eight individual stories about eight different characters, strung together and interconnected by those eight characters' interaction with a ninth character. *I* thought it worked, but 14 editors in NYC and two in Westchester thought it didn't. (There may have been more, but those 16 were the only ones who sent rejection letters.) And less than a year later, there was an ABC Movie of the Week whose plot was so close to mine it was alarming. Go figure. The second novel ultimately had the classic novel structure - beginning in exposition and character development, leading through a series of flashbacks and pivotal events to a defining climax, then a denouement, the End. Only I didn't write it that way. I started in the middle and wrote to the end, then went back and filled in the beginning - only to have a bitch of a time making the two halves of the middle intermesh. Couldn't have done that if I'd had an outline. Would have had to start at the beginning, and the beginning-to-middle was a lot harder to write than the middle-to-the-end. So, Reason #1 - weird writing style. Reason #2: once you sell a novel and you want to sell another one, you have to deal with an editor. An editor needs three chapters and an outline before s/he will offer to buy your book. So if you're going to write the outline for the editor (often the most difficult part of the whole process), and the editor's going to buy your book based on that outline, you sort of have to stick to that outline, or - depending on his/her level of maturity - your editor's going to be upset when you hand in the final ms. Most editors are flexible. If your narrative suddenly takes a wild offshoot that's not in the outline, they'll understand - as long as you ultimately end up where you said you woud. Others, unfortunately, need to have everything spelled out for them. But the chapters and outline are what sells. Unless you're a masochist, you don't want to write the entire novel and then try to sell it. Even if you did, you'd still have to pull an outline out of it, because no editor's going to read your entire ms. unless and until s/he's bought it. Once - exactly once - many, many years ago, I sold a novel on a two-page outline. Didn't even need a three-chapter sample. Of course, it helped that this editor sat me down and said "I'd like you to write a novel about..." and that was what I did. My characters didn't even have names until after the contract arrived. Ah, those were the days...
Um yeah, the outline. How detailed has that gotta be? Like, the description that you'd read on the back of the book, or a bit more rambly, like the mind wandering I write in my notes? Or somewhere in between? (...well, it'd pretty much have to be less rambly than my notes, I literally write down every single "Ahah! Then that means..", and "Yes, I've got it, this part goes over here, and then that's how they meet!". Am I typing this?? Oh damn.)
Should you write what you're best at, or write what inspires you? You guys know my comic stuff, but what really is my grand obsession is a trilogy I'm working on...but because comedy and politics comes so easy and the trilogy...well, doesn't...should I give up on the latter and concentrate on the former?
Torrent is a story I wish someone else wrote for me, and it's been a friggin bitch. But I can write a billion of these dumbass posts on this freakin board. I'd say go for what you're best at.
The wonders of the Sticky and Unashamed Bump! Thank you 1. Living life in its ups and downs. 2. Crawling under a rock to contemplate my navel. 3. Work. 3a. Paying off my home (huzzah!). 4. Taking a break from the sometimes-all-too-aggravating atmosphere of The Red Room. 5. Abandoning attempts at creativity due to lack of discipline and talent and in doing so running away from modship responsibilities. (And in the vein of that last, going overseas for a week in 10 hours. ) That's interesting. I would have thought that an unusual structure was all the more incentive to outline first. Hmm... so the reason for the rejection was the unusual structure? If so, that's disappointing as the format sounds more than workable to me (and those ABC telemovie producers obviously agreeed). I mean, the structure sounds positively cool... especially if (as I assume) the result is actually unified in terms of plot and/or theme and the linked character not just a device. For example, I can see this structure working if it becomes clear that the "main character" is actually that ninth character all the others interact with. (But heck, even if there was no unifying theme, if the stories stood alone well enough as short stories, just market the damn thing as a collection!) Maybe I'm just more open to innovative structures than most - possibly because I love the theatre which seems to thrive on such devices. In the play La Ronde (for those who don't know) for instance a series of two characters meet in a "pass the baton" structure. Ie, scene 1 - Fred and Sally meet; scene 2 - Sally and Joe; scene 3 - Joe and Dolores etc. (La Ronde has recently been adapted as The Blue Moon and the musical Hello Again.) The play and musical Merrily We Roll Along travels backwards in time from the "end" of the story to the beginning to achieve a retrospective poignancy which wouldn't work if the temporal flow was in the normal direction. Interesting structures are cool and can help achieve results more mundane forms can't. So I don't consider the "inter-connected short story" format to be inherently flawed. Still, your story reminds me a bit of something that Orson Scott Card (now there's a rant straining to be unleashed) said about his first novel Hot Sleep: That at the time he didn't know how to write a novel and that as a result the book was actually a series of interlinked novellas. Re-reading it, I have to agree but, ironically, I much prefer Hot Sleep to The Worthing Chronicle, which was his attempt to pull the whole story into a more cohesive, mature, "proper novel" form. I mis-read that at first; I thought you meant that the finished novel flashed back at the middle of the book to the beginning... (ie page 1 = day 50 of the plot; page 100 = day 100 and the end of the plot; page 101 = day 1 of the plot; page 200 = day 49 of the plot and end of the book). That would also be an interesting device; one where (similarly to the "moving backward in time" structure above) what we find out in the second half of the book (but first half of the story) forces the reader to revise the meaning of what they learned in the first half of the book (but the second half of the story). But now I know what you really meant. My follow-up question then is - why did you start in the middle of the story? Did you know that you would have to go back to the beginning of the plot when you started writing? Or did you think that the (eventual) middle was the best place to start, based on that screen writing principle of "start the story as late as possible and finish it as soon as possible". Did you have to go back to flesh out character and incidents so that the events in the (eventual) second half made sense? Or did you do it to bump word count cause 150 page novels don't sell? That's interesting. I would have thought that the editor wouldn't care what happens in the finished manuscript as long as the writing was good (and the book sellable). Ie, would they really say "I'm sorry you need to rewrite this because you were going to end with Harry becoming the tragic hero of the empire and here he is a farming turnips in the mountains with his girlfriend Jolene" even if the novel is a ripsnorter anyway? Sounds like the treatment/pitch in the film world... Love openings for more follow-ups. Names. How do you come with them? Do you change your mind a lot? Do names in novels (and short stories) have to be "cleared" like they do for screenplays?
Not that detailed, no. But say somewhere around 4,000-10,000 words, depending on how big you want the novel to be and how much detail the editor wants. Or think of it as one paragraph in the outline = one chapter in the manuscript.
Depends on your goal. Do you want to write something down and dirty solely to try to sell it? Or do you want to write something that nurtures your soul? Or do you want to make yourself crazy and do both? You know you're going to have to write the trilogy, because it won't let you sleep if you don't. But writing the comic stuff in between keeps the brain sharp and makes that blank screen less daunting every time you face it.
Tolkien started page 1 of the lord of the rings with no clear idea of what was going to happen in the book. Dunno why i mentioned that, it just always amazes me
Yeah, that's right. Did they give him a pass on the outline, or did he bring it in finished, and wrote the outline after? Cuz that's bugging me, I'm more of a make it up as I go person.
