HOMINES QUOD VOLUNT CREDUNT

"Men believe what they want."

You may have noticed I've been out of the blogging biz for nigh unto two weeks -- been busy.

ComicCon San Diego: A one-day adventure at 'the Nerd Prom,' as it is known; mostly I hung around with the great Kirk Thatcher, who directed the Muppet version of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody currently viral on the interworld, and got to meet all kinds of excellent folks, artists and writers alike.  Brian Froud is at least 50% hobbit.
Saw my editor, who was working the Simon & Schuster table there; I handed out some Rise Again bound galleys to deserving folks and zombie fans.  Got to meet the gang of maniacs that are reviving Famous Monsters of Filmland, Forrest J. Ackerman's old rag.  What an admirable labor of love that is.

My editor has agreed in principle to let me execute the cover art for the book, but we shall see.  The mechanicals were supposed to be finished today or yesterday, so he may have run the clock out on me.  I am a doubting type of guy these days.

The rest of what I've been doing is just typical American life in the End Times -- we spend our days in haste because they go by so quickly.

Here's news of another kind: my friend Jim is almost done with the first draft of his novel.  He adopted the "write like a bat out of hell" approach, and I couldn't be happier that he's made such mighty progress.  It's so much easier to rewrite than to stare at that empty page.  For here forward, Jim, it's a piece of cake.  Flaming barbwire guano cake, but still -- cake.

But don't go around thinking I don't have some pedantic monologues waiting in the wings.  Yes, soon there shall be more about writing on here.

Got to go -- my French Bulldog just farted and I can't stay here.

Bound Galleys

I had my sequence of events a little muddled: two boxes containing the bound galleys of Rise Again, in need of minor corrections, showed up today.  They look just like books!  I thought the galleys would follow these corrections, but no.

So now the process of distributing them among my peers begins, always attempting to get a copy in front of the right readers who can maximize the book's chances of recognition and positive 'buzz.'  And sales of the movie rights, of course.  Always with the movie rights.  If you happen to be Stephen King, or you're Jerry Bruckheimer's chief development executive, let me know.

The Height Of Words

Hey kids, aphorism of the day.

Think of it this way: if you're writing an email to a friend, it's no problem.  The words flow freely.  If you're writing a letter to the editor of a newspaper, the words are harder to find.  If you're writing a novel, it's as difficult as if language had never been invented.

Why is this?  There's no difference in the words, nor in the means by which we use them.  The only difference is the stakes: we think a novel is more important than an email.  If we can stop assigning arbitrary values to things, we are unburdened.  After that, the only obstacle is our skill at writing.  And skills improve with use, just as writing improves with drafts.

Look at it another way.  I'm working on my third novel.  It has been easier to write than my second novel, which was easier than my first novel.  Why is this?  Practice, of course.  But not just practice.  A novel is like a cliff: the first ascent, it looks so terrifyingly high up, even a quarter of the way through the climb, that the whole project doesn't seem worth the risk.  Once conquered, repeat ascents are less frightening.  One gets accustomed to the heights.

But every time you write, you're climbing.  Even emails and letters to the editor are like boulders to be climbed.  They can be just as challenging as novels (or screenplays, or short stories, or poems), but the effort is not as sustained.  Consider that the next time you don't think you can take on a big project: have you assigned an arbitrary value to it?  Have you decided a novel is more important for some reason than a note to a friend?  It's longer, certainly.  But you only write one word at a time in any case.  It is not, regardless of how we think of it, actually harder to write a novel than a letter.  Only a more sustained effort.  Don't think of the height, think of the next handhold.

That said, although I live by this idea, it hasn't altogether freed me from attaching different values to different kinds of project.  Rather, it means I may spend as much time composing an inconsequential email as I do writing a chapter for a book!

Facebook, A Place Where Everybody Has To Write

Thisn' here is an exchange between a long-time friend of mine, who is about to be published in an anthology, and myself:

She:

How do you keep the writing inspiration going? It comes to me in fits and starts, and then I go through severe dry spells.

Self:

I have two approaches. First, I write every day -- even if it's just a few notes about ideas or a couple of lines of dialogue or a short poem. That way it's a habit. The writing doesn't become a huge "thing" that needs doing. It's got a bit of the toothbrush about it: routine and unexceptional.


Second, I make a list of things to do, and then instead of doing them, I write.

O Culpa Mio

O constant reader, my apologies for not posting.  Bought a house, moved into it, tore out half the kitchen, lost half my day job -- it's been a trip, man.  Most of my writing activities have been restricted to finding another source of income.

Now here is where the World As It Is meets my writing commitments.  I can't afford a publicist for Rise Again.  This much is clear.  If we hadn't bought a house, the cash would be available, but then we might have had to keep moving every 9 months as landlords fall into foreclosure.  So I wouldn't be able to write effectively.  The publicists I've talked to can't do the job for less than $4k a month.  That's a hella big sum of money.  POW!

Unfortunately, Gallery Books, imprint of Simon & Schuster, can't afford a publicist either.  That is, there is one assigned to my book, but she doesn't have any actual money to spend.  She can recommend the thing, send a few copies around.  But no book tour, no posters or promos.  So it's up to me to start a word-of-mouth campaign.  Get some kind of guerilla buzz going.  I HAVE TIME FOR THIS?

Yes, I do, because my employer is about three weeks from bankruptcy himself (he should have been a landlord), so my hours have been scaled back dramatically.  Did I mention I bought a house?

This is why I so strongly recommend writing like a maniac when you have the chance.  It's often enough you won't have the chance.

This is all fascinating, I'm sure, as is what's happening with the book itself: I have today and tomorrow to finish making corrections to my unbound galley copy.  This is an interesting artifact.  It's on regular letter paper, but the type occupies a smaller area of the page, exactly equal to the eventual book page.  In other words, I'm looking at what appears to be a photocopy of the novel.  It's the correct font, layout, pagination, and so forth.

I'm looking for typos (mine or the publisher's -- usually mine), errors we may have missed such as grammar (none, of course), and what I call "draft legacies," references to character names that are no longer current, events that have been removed, descriptive changes ("she combed her auburn hair..." "...she tossed her black hair...") and anything else that is an artifact of an earlier version of the book. Of these, there are dozens.

After my markup is submitted, the book goes to bound galleys.  This is a preliminary version of the book, with cover (God help me, the cover design is another story for another blog), binding, and all pages and parts in place.  I'll get 50 copies of the bound galley.  These are distributed by my independent publicist to -- oh, wait.

You see the trouble here.  This is why best-selling novelists are famous -- they're so rare!