News and Notices from the Writing Trenches #40…
#227: New sci-fi thriller goes into final editing. The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan, a novel starring DHS agent Ashley Scott, is in its final editing stages. I hope to release it sometime in this first quarter of 2013. Readers will recall that Agent Scott is a friend of NYPD detectives Chen and Castilblanco, but she has been hounding me to feature her in her very own novel. As the title hints, this one is related to Boomers dealing with retirement. I hope your retirements will be more peaceful and quiet than Virginia’s!
The story is set in the tri-state area, mostly eastern New Jersey. I wrote most of the book before hurricane Sandy, so I had to make some fast changes to include references to that once-in-a-hundred-years event. One of the subthemes is gun control. Some of that material reflected a personal worry that became reality with the Newtown massacre. How can I write about guns and death and be for gun control? Ask a cop, especially first responders in Newtown. They often live in real life events similar to what I write about in fiction. Most cops are still for stricter gun controls. Maybe they’ve seen too many innocent victims?
#228: List of indie books, anyone? Indies Unlimited offers an announcement service. I used it to announce the glowing review by Pulitzer prize nominated author David Menefee of my sci-fi thriller Survivors of the Chaos, the first book in “The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy” (other books in this series are Sing a Samba Galactica and Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand!). While I’ve announced this review here before, I just want to point out that the book will be featured in the Indies Unlimited Store, which provides a list of quality indie books for your reading enjoyment.
#229: Is publishing broken? David Vinjamuri, an NYU media and advertising expert, has written “Publishing is Broken, We’re Drowning in Indie Books—and That’s a Good Thing,” a long analysis appearing on Forbes’ online magazine. (My fellow thriller writer, Gina Fava, who wrote a couple of guest blogs here and whom I also interviewed, pointed this article out to me on Facebook—thank you, Gina.) I agree with many things in this article, in particular, Mr. Vinjamuri’s comments that writing a bestseller is like winning the lottery, whether you’re traditionally published or indie published.
I also agree with 2.5 of his three predictions. #3 is: mainstream publishers will use indie publishing as a minor league…and find a new profit model. The logic here is questionable, at best. The implication is that legacy publishing needs to find a new profit model (that’s the half I agree with), but treating indie publishing as a minor league will not solve that problem. Publishing is not baseball. The main thing wrong with legacy publishing is that there is too much deadwood standing between writers and readers—agents, slushpile editors, copywriters, and marketing and PR people, to name a few.
Legacy publishers have to learn the lesson: no matter what they or their authors do, they cannot predict who is going to win that lottery. Corollary #1: their business model has to focus on midlist authors who slog away, writing book after book, and slowly develop fans who like their writing. A few lottery winners are NOT enough to be profitable in this new age of publishing where a book can stay in the e-racks of online bookstores forever. Corollary #2: their business model has to keep track of the production of those midlist authors. Vinjamuri even gives examples of authors who were far ahead of their time (an even better example is Phillip K. Dick, the sci-fi writer). Today that means people might not “discover” one of my books for years, but on the other hand, if a niche for it suddenly appears, the legacy publisher will jump in and promote it.
#230: eBook kids? The NY Times has shared some interesting statistics from Scholastic’s Kids and Family Reading Report. One worry I had in focusing exclusively on eBooks was whether kids are into digital reading as much as they are into everything else digital (my niece calls all her gizmos “essential technology”). According to this report, 46% of kids 6 to 17 have read an eBook since 2010 (cutoff 2011?). That age range covers middle grades and young adults. On the other hand, the number of girls in this age group who claim they are frequent readers went down in that same period from 42% to 36%.
These are mixed results. My perception is that gender differences might not be significant. I often hear that girls read more than boys and boys play more video games than girls. Unfortunately, any stats supporting any of these points are dated by the time they are made public, so it’s difficult determining what the present situation is. At any rate, young adults and adults who are young-at-heart may rest assured that my YA sci-fi thriller The Secret Lab is a bargain. You have exciting suspense in a full novel for only $0.99, available in all eBook formats at your favorite online retailer!
#231: Are we losing the narrative voice? Steve Almond recently wrote an interesting article for the New York Times Magazine (p. 44, Sunday 1/13/12) titled “Once Upon a Time, There Was a Person Who Said, ‘Once Upon a Time’.” To summarize his thesis, modern writers are losing the narrative voice due to the onslaught of visual storytelling (TV and movies) and a rejection of 19th century storytelling style that was started by Hemingway (I probably summarized badly—read the whole article). On the other hand, we have to contrast this thesis with the advice of popular authors. For example, Tom Clancy has said, “Tell the damn story.”
The question can be restated as follows: Nowadays, what does it mean to tell a story? Many of you already know about my unpleasant experiences with agents. Generally speaking, they’re just average, hardworking, and nice people trying to make a living, but they do so by feeding the Big Six (Big Five? Big Four?) only those books they think will be the next Harry Potter or Christian Grey success stories. I received more than a thousand rejections (many different books, of course) and more than one agent who sat on a MS only to finally get back to me after several months to say, “Sorry, this just isn’t for me after all.” Ignoring the telling “isn’t for me” (who empowered this person?), Mr. Almond’s article brought back the not-particularly-fond memory of one of these latter people who added, “I’m just not that much into narrative.”
Huh? The MS under consideration was a sci-fi novel—with many revisions and additions, this material later became “The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy.” I’ll have to confess that the trilogy is probably an improvement over the simpler and longer novel, but I’ll also insist that this agent had no clue on how to write sci-fi, even though she accepted queries on sci-fi stories. These stories tend to be longer than your average novel. Lengthy narrative about world building is often a necessity. It was in mine, and still is an integral part of my trilogy.
As another example, Bowl of Heaven, the new Gregory Benford and Larry Niven sci-fi novel, is 416 pages long, and that’s only the first part of the proposed trilogy written by these sci-fi masters. The world building in their new book is similar to that found in Niven’s Ring World books—some people might argue that there’s too much world building going on (when I read it, I was too often reminded of Verne’s lengthy description of flora and fauna in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea), but setting a scene in sci-fi, especially for a strange, alien world represents a lot of narrative, even in short stories (see my short story “Rain World”).
My sci-fi books are a combination of conventional sci-fi (dystopia and space opera, if you will) as well as thriller writing. The books in my trilogy, for example, are shorter than your usual sci-fi novel as a consequence. I can’t and will not focus on strange flora and fauna as Benford and Niven have done. As usual, I found their new book a masterful piece of storytelling and also enjoyed the thriller aspects of the story, which received less emphasis. I couldn’t help thinking that they had worked harder on the setting, on the narrative that defines that strange habitat humans found in an even stranger starship. The book was an enjoyable read. However, the ending, a crass lead-in to the next book that leaves you hanging, violated my principle that every book you write should be able to stand alone. That’s a hard principle to enforce in your writing if you write a 1000-page book and divide it into three to obtain a trilogy. (Maybe Benford and Niven can get away with it—you shouldn’t try.)
Sci-fi aside, I’m inclined to agree with Mr. Almond. In modern storytelling, we are losing the important narrative component. While I can’t argue with Lee Child’s storytelling abilities in general, his Jack Reacher stories often seem scarce on narrative. Nevertheless, that barebones approach to the narrative matches well the barebones characterization and dialog. Mr. Child is very consistent—his voice is just barebones, and we love him for it (not Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher, though).
I think that’s the key nowadays. We don’t want to lose that narrative voice, those storytelling words that set the scene and define the characters. We must want to strike a balance. Setting, characterization, narrative, and dialog have to all be balanced, otherwise the modern reader will be bored or decide he’s better off reading the 19th century narratives of Dickens, Austen, and others, throwbacks to a different age when one’s only entertainment was reading.
In libris libertas….
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