News and Notices from the Writing Trenches #62…
#346: Aristocrats and Assassins. This fourth novel in the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series” is in final edit and will soon be ready for my illustrious formatting and cover team of Donna Carrick (of Carrick Publishing) and Sara Carrick (graphics artist). I hope to release it by the end of this month—if not, in early March. (In this blog, I put out a pre-release excerpt some weeks ago.) I was tempted to call this tale Castilblanco’s European Vacation, but that can imply comedy. This thriller is definitely not a comedy. It hops around Europe as my detective duo thwarts the plot of a terrorist who is kidnapping members of European royal families—not your Daddy’s Frommer’s, to say the least. Like all novels in this series, you can read it independently of the previous ones, but they’re loads of fun too!
#347: The missing links. An FYI for my readers: in case you didn’t realize it, The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan and Soldiers of God are two important links between three of my series. The first connects the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series” to the “Clones and Mutants Series”; the second connects the “Clones and Mutants Series” to “The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy.” You have an ebook version of The Golden Years (now back on Smashwords for those with non-Kindle ereaders, although that free Kindle app allows you to read .mobi files on most any device). I’m working on an ebook version of Soldiers—it will be a second edition.
#348: New stand-alone novel. While the above alludes to the one big mega-series representing my opus so far, I’m putting finishing touches on a new stand-alone, a thriller with a new kickass female protagonist who also does a bit of traveling of her own. Her name’s Mary Jo Melendez and she’s an ex-Navy Master at Arms down on her luck. (Please don’t think female Jack Reacher—Mary Jo could probably kick his ass!) I’m giving this one a lot of Hispanic flavor too, harking back to my days in Colombia and my personal knowledge of the country. There’s also a bit of romantic ennui and inadequacy issues. I love Mary Jo; you will too.
#349: Telepathy—I think not. Time-Warner Cable (aka TWC) broadcasts a commercial featuring a psychic. This is potentially more interesting than any other TWC commercial featuring Coach Cower that they bludgeon us with, but sci-fi aficionados might notice they have it all wrong. At the end, the psychic says “You’re thinking whether it’s going to rain” to the coach and offers an umbrella. Now, that might be what the coach is thinking because of the umbrella the psychic holds, but, as far as I know, telepathy can’t be used in weather forecasting. (“Know” is too strong a word, I suppose; I’m not acquainted with any sci-fi stories where telepathy is used in weather forecasting.) Whose thoughts would he read? Certainly not our hit-or-miss local weather forecasters in the tri-state area whose track records on weather details are all over the board! Maybe Neptune, the Greek god responsible for the weather? Anyone else notice this, or am I just picking nits (and maybe looking for something to make the commercial a wee bit palatable)?
#350: Frontal attack. Joe Konrath and Barry Eisler just commented on a recent Donald Maass post where the latter extols the virtues of legacy publishing and the Big Five. He’s the emeritus dean of sycophant gatekeepers (back in my naive days, I never received a direct rejection from him, but I certainly did from his agencies) who also sells how-to books to naïve writers who believe he knows something about writing fiction (he even pushes these in his rejection letters). I won’t go into more of a summary here. I will mention that Maass manages to insult all indie writers, calling us a herd that needs to be culled before we can ascend to the hallowed halls of Big Five stardom. Among all the lame necessary conditions for publishing success I’ve heard, culling seems to the lamest. Who culls? Why, the gatekeepers, because they know so damn much! I recommend this analysis to all writers, not just indie writers. These two great thriller writers, Eisler and Konrath, have long championed the indie life. They know what they’re talking about—listen to them.
#351: Contests and the Big Five’s nefarious influence. Someone (maybe in a newsletter?) recommended that I check out usaregionalexcellencebookawards.com. (If you can type that URL, you’re a true touch typist!) I did. I thought my book The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan was perfect for the contest—its setting is the tri-state area (NY, NJ, and Connecticut). Well, forget about it, folks, and pox on their house. Like so many contests in general, and the WD (that’s Writer’s Digest) contests in particular, this is yet another scheme to make money off naïve authors. Dan Poynter has one or two also. Don’t participate in contests. Why?
First of all, they all too often reek of the Big Five’s influence. Whether a written rule or not, you must be published by a “real publisher,” because they still consider everything else vanity publishing—if you’re an indie author, forget it. Or, no ebooks allowed—they’re still living back in the seventies and haven’t heard of the digital revolution (or, they bury their heads in the sand). Or, you need N five-star reviews on Amazon, where N is any number hard to get nowadays without paying for them or having hundreds of family and friends willing to lie about you. Or, just send five copies of your book (paper copies, remember!) with $75 for each genre category in which you want to enter—again, they determine the genres like a bookstore from the seventies and cross-genre works are frowned upon.
These contests—every blessed one of them—make the promise that your book will somehow magically take off in sales and/or readers (they’re different) if you win. That last dependent clause is very important—if you win. No one regulates these contests. Poynter’s, one of the few contests for ebooks, actually recruits judges—I know, because I’ve been recruited (FTL move of email to trash). Many other contests do the same. You volunteer because you have all these wonderful books to read—it’s unpaid slave labor, folks.
Moreover, if the contest’s results aren’t predetermined (aka rigged), you’re at the very least being judged by the same people used by the Big Five “to cull the herd” (see above), the gatekeepers aka agents who never write a damn thing (well, maybe how-to books); or are recent MFA graduates who think they know how to write; or, like Donald Maass (see above), is so entangled with the Big Five, you have more chances being kicked into orbit by a cantankerous mule (Maass excepted only because that stubborn mule doesn’t have any kick left).
At the very worst, you’re being judged by readers who think they know good books (and want to read a few more for free, even if they aren’t paid)—you know, those people who write those reviews on Amazon that can be reduced to “I like (or dislike) this book” without any reasonable analysis of plot, characters, settings, etc (aka “an honest review” from family or friends). Real readers and real writers are too busy reading or writing to participate in this nonsense. (By the way, good reviewing is legitimate writing and will help the writer you’re reviewing, not just in review count.)
And that’s all winning a contest will mean in the final analysis—that you decided to participate in the nonsense! Don’t do it. The adage rings true: a fool and his money are soon parted.
#352: Writing backups. Someone (maybe in a newsletter?) recommended to me that I use a cloud backup for my writing. Sounds reasonable, right? I won’t name names because it’s probably not the company’s fault (although they never returned my money), but it didn’t work for me. Here’s why: Too many internet services screw you on bandwidth, often in many subtle ways. First, they generally treat uploads and downloads differently. Second, they set up little LANs—call them neighborhoods of users—and then tie these together locally, city-wide, and nationally. That means when workers arrive at the office between 8 and 9 a.m. and do their email and surfing before their morning coffee break, or when the kiddies arrive home from school between 3 and 4 p.m. and start uploading and downloading graphics or videos or playing online games, your cloud backup comes to a near standstill, and so does your ability to use your computer.
The best solution for me (and maybe you?) is to forget about cloud backups. Use an external hard drive, memory sticks, or DVDs (the latter is becoming more difficult—most new laptops don’t have them!). Your writing shouldn’t take too many megabytes unless you produce coffee table books heavy on graphics. I don’t even get fancy with incremental backups—I just copy my whole writing folder. I also feel safer that way. While I can imagine a scenario where a Big Five author with writer’s block breaks into my house to steal my WIPs, it’s probably less likely to happen than someone hacking into my cloud. Do I sound like a Luddite? Maybe. But it works for me—the cloud doesn’t.
#353: Facebook v. Google+. My personal jury formed by my muses is still out on this one. I’m new to Google+, so I can’t be fair about my evaluation. However, FB continues to piss me off. Even with the solution to the problem noted above, FB takes forever to load (well, 2-3 minutes) and then forever to share (up to another minute). I value my friends on FB, but I suspect all those new features (more photos, videos, etc) are overloading their servers. Of course, it might just be my internet service.
On the other hand, Google+ is still more of a mystery than anything useful, but it’s fast (better servers? or, because I use Chrome?) and I have no trouble with sharing. The fastest is LinkedIn, but I’ve yet to figure out how to really use it (don’t ask me for recommendations, please, when I don’t even know what you’re selling), although its groups are more interesting than FB’s. Goodreads still suffers from being unfriendly to users in the extreme, especially authors. It’s like one of those old inner-tubes with thousands of patches and nothing is intuitive. That’s my summary of social networking for the week!
In libris libertas….
