S. K. Dunstall

GenreCon 2012 was a conference for Australian genre writers. Sherylyn and I both went along. It was loud, it was fun, it was energetic.

Here are our impressions of it. Mine first, Sherylyn’s next blog.

First rule of GenreCon. Pack light. GenreCon is for writers of genre fiction, and what is genre fiction but books? Lots and lots of books.

There was a book included in our convention bag when we collected it on Friday night, another book placed on our seat at the banquet and, of course, books for sale. Lots of genre books. Some by authors I had never heard of. Yet most of these authors were here, at GenreCon.

I felt more optimistic about Australian genre writing than I had in a long time.

But—I had to buy an extra bag to carry back all the books, and I was extremely glad we had chosen to take the train home rather than the plane, because books are heavy, and I think the airline would have slugged me a fortune in extra luggage.

Second rule of GenreCon. We are all writers there. It doesn’t matter whether you are a published author with ten books to your name, or whether you are still aspiring to be published. GenreCon has something for you. I spoke to a couple of people who admitted to feeling overwhelmed, and a bit of a fraud being at a conference like this where so many people were published. Me too. But if GenreCon was only for professional writers they wouldn’t have eleven (count it, eleven) publishers and agents along to take pitches.

Third rule of GenreCon. Have fun. Writing is a solitary occupation, and it’s not often you can go out and meet people and the third or fourth sentence will be, “What do you write?” and know that if you don’t ask it, the other person will. You’re among like-minded people here. Here to learn, here to share, here to connect.

I have to commend the organisers—Peter Ball, Meg Vann and everyone else at QWC/Australian Writer’s Marketplace who was involved in GenreCon Australia 2012. They did a great job and their choice of presenters and panels worked well. Some of my own personal favourites were:

Writing effective fight scenes. Simon Higgins—novelist, martial arts master, former policeman and former private eye—entertained us with anecdotes and slides while giving us a good grounding in fight scenes and how realistic they are. Like, did you know that if you hit someone hard enough to force their head back as far as they do in the movies, you have probably killed them? Especially when you get that crunching sound that goes with it; you’ve probably smashed in half their face. Likewise the ninja schoolgirl in the cartoon who kicks out at her protagonist and sends him halfway down the street block. The force it would require to send him back that far is a killing force. Our ninja schoolgirl would have stoved in his chest. You’re watching murder here, people.

It was absolutely fascinating. At question time we got onto topics such as the Vulcan nerve pinch? There is no such thing, not where Mr Spock pinches, but there is another place on the neck where you can apply pressure which can shock the body and disrupt it enough to fall unconscious (and maybe do even more damage). All good fun.

Three stages of the writer’s career. In a session chaired by Kate Eltham, Daniel O’Malley (one book), Helene Young (mid-career) and Joe Abercrobmie (six books) talked about how they sold their first book, what they expected from selling that first book, how life has (or hasn’t) changed for them since, the difference between writing that first book and the next books and their publishers’ online requirements and more.

It was interesting to hear the different ways each writer went through to be where they are, the things they didn’t know and the good and bad things that come out of being a published writer.

Author platform 101, presented by Sarah Wendell. I wasn’t sure how much value this session would give me, as I expected it to be a very basic ‘get a website, get on Facebook, get on Twitter’ session, but it was much, much more. We talked about things like how to ensure that everyone who has ‘liked’ you on Facebook sees what you post—pay to push the message through. Or the best times to post on Facebook and Twitter, when more people are on. Thursday afternoons for Facebook, pretty much any afternoon for Twitter, but especially early in the week. Afternoon US time, not Australian time.

Every author must have a website. Blogging, tweeting or being on Facebook are optional—although if you’re not you are reducing the number of fans you are likely to get—but a website is an absolute must-have. Oh, and a dead blog is worse than no blog at all. If you’re not posting regularly on your blog, don’t bother blogging at all.

I could go on. Ginger Clark on the changing role of the agent, Joe Abercrombie in conversation, and more. There were three streams of workshops/panels. I wanted to see almost all of them.

One thing I have to mention though, is the closing debate. Plotters vs Pantsers. Well done to Team Plotter: Kim Wilkins, LA Larkin, Narelle Harris; Team Pantser: Anna Campbell, Lisa Heidke and Daniel O’Malley; and to moderator Kate Eltham. Guys, I don’t know how much planning (plotting?) went into this debate but bravo. What a wonderful way to end a conference.

NaNoWriMo starts on the 1st November.

While both Sherylyn and I would love to do another NaNo, neither of us will be doing it this year.  We’re in the middle of Linesman II, and can’t break in the middle to write a new story.  Plus we need to re-look at Linesman I.

It’s a pity. I had my NaNo story decided months ago.  A light science fiction, a little bit corny but hopefully amusing in parts. I’m not great on humor, but I was going to see what I could do without the humor being too forced. One of the great things about writing so fast is that even if it’s not working, you have only spent a month on it, not six.

Maybe I’ll do my own personal NaNo early next year.

 

We are both taking time out to go to GenreCon Australia.  It’s on the 2-4 November.  If you’re coming along, we look forward to seeing you there.

Last month I wrote about how I frustrated I was that the screenwriters for the movie Invincibles 2 forced the characters into an ending simply because viewers expected it, rather than remaining true to the characters they had created.

I’ve had a month to think about, and realise that maybe I’m the one forcing my expectations on the film, rather than the other way around.

What made me change my mind?

One of my current favourite authors decided to write a Christmas short story based around his two most popular characters.  On his Facebook page he asked his readers to suggest ideas for the story.  The ideas came thick and fast.

I didn’t like a single one of them.

To me, many of the things these readers suggested were totally inappropriate for the characters as I knew and loved them.

Sound familiar?

I thought so too.

All I can do is cross my fingers and hope, please Dear Author, do not listen to these people. I love your ideas. Write the story you want to write, not the one we want you to.

And maybe stop trying to force my version of the Invincibles 2 onto the world.

Today I tried to ring my insurance company.  I dug out last year’s policy. Yes, it had the policy number on it.  Yes it had all the details I needed.  Then I tried to ring them and couldn’t.

Because I couldn’t work out the phone number.

SMS messaging on phones was introduced in the 1990s. Back in those days, and on some phones even now, you typed in a message by pressing a number key once or more times.  For example, if you wanted to type an A you pressed the number 2. If you wanted a B, you pressed 2 twice. For C you pressed 2 three times quickly.  If you wanted a D you pressed 3 once.

I don’t know how much later it was that some advertising guru had a bright idea.  Numbers are hard to remember.  Words aren’t.  I do know the practise has been around in Australia since the early 00’s.

My insurance company didn’t provide me with a phone number, they provided me with a word, INSURANCE, to phone.  (It wasn’t insurance, it was the company name, but I’m making it generic.)  The only trouble was, I was Skyping.  I wanted a number I could type into a field.

So I had to hunt for a phone with the number/letter combination, translate the letters back into numbers, then go back to my computer and finally make the call.

With the advent of smart phones you no longer need to use the number pad on the phone to type letters.  Thus nowadays, the letters on the keypad are there for historical reasons only.  I can foresee a future when they drop off altogether.   What happens to all those clever text phone numbers then?

Replacing numbers with text to make the number easier to read was a good idea, but technology has surpassed it, and in less than 20 years.  If you wrote a book set in the first decade of the 2000’s someone might conceivably type INSURANCE into their phone to ring their insurance company.  I don’t think they’ll be doing it in the second decade.  By the 2020s you probably wouldn’t even understand what it meant.

Technology and science change the world faster than it sometimes seems possible.

Any time you write about technology of the day there’s a good chance it will be obsolete before you are published.  Even songs.  In 1972 pop group Dr Hook and the Medicine Show had a hit with a song called Sylvia’s Mother.  As part of the lyrics the operator keeps chiming in saying, “40 cents more for the next three minutes”.  Even back then subscriber trunk dialling had been around for ten years. How many people born in the last 20 years would understand that line? Not many.

If you can’t even catch the technology changes when writing about the present time, think how difficult it is for the science fiction writer who not only has to extrapolate current technology—what’s going to last, what’s not—but think up new ones as well. Sometimes it’s the little bits of technology that trip us up.

One of my favourite examples of this is Ivan Southall’s Simon Black series.  Southall wrote them over a period of ten years.  The first was written in 1950.  The stories were based around the Firefly, a vertical take-off and landing aircraft (VTOL).  VTOL-type aircraft started being designed in the mid-fifties but their use only took off a decade later.   Southall, a pilot himself, made a good call on this one.

Something he made a bad call on was transistors.  Back in the 1950s they didn’t have transistors, they had big, clunky glass valves that had to be warmed up before you could use them.  He put those into the book too.

So he has a plane that’s the equivalent of, say, a Harrier jet, and they spend a few minutes before every flight warming up the valves before they can go anywhere.

I love Simon Black, but every time I read about him and Alan warming up the valves I remember just how wrong you can be about where science is going, even in the near future.

We cooked lamb roast last night.  As it cooked the scent of the meat and fresh spices wafted around the house, making our mouths water and our stomachs gurgle in anticipation, so that we could hardly wait for dinner.

This morning it was a different story.

The house smells of old meat, of fat, and of brussel sprouts (one of the vegetables we served with the roast) and it’s not at all pleasant.

When this happens we do what most people do, I imagine.  Open the windows and doors, ensure everything is as clean and degreased as it can be, spray air freshener around and wait for the smell to go away.

As I sprayed I couldn’t help but wonder—if someone wrote about my house as it was this morning, in a book, what would they write?

Detective Anders leaned on the doorbell until a woman finally unlocked the door.  She peered out between the door and the chain with one washed-out-blue eye.

I know, she’s a stereotype already, but you don’t get ‘nice’ or attractive people in smelly houses, do you.

“What do you want?” she demanded.

Anders showed her his badge, then waited an interminable age while she unclipped the chain and allowed him in.  Up close she was middle-aged, short but stout, easily half as wide around as she was tall.  Her severely-cut hair was a greasy grey bowl, while her body sagged under her own weight, her jowls seemingly pulled down by gravity.  She turned and stumped her way along the passage to the kitchen.  Anders followed.

The house smelled of fat and old meat, and of boiled cabbages.

I don’t know why, but in the books where a house smells of boiled cabbages, or any cooking smells for that matter, you always know the woman is a slatternly good-for-nothing, a mean landlady, or just generally unpleasant.  She is seldom criminal, just never nice.

While writers love to write, there are two things many of us dread. Query letters and synopses.

Enough said about query letters already. See Query Shark, Evil Editor, Kristin Nelson and lots of other sites on the internet for good advice about writing them. It doesn’t make them any easier but we all know the principles, even if we struggle to write them.

As for the synopsis. Argh.

We’ve just finished writing the synopsis for a story we have completed and for another we haven’t even written yet. It was interesting to compare the two.

Dot points don’t work

We used to write the synopsis by going through the story and listing every major event. Then we’d join the dots together with words. The result was anything up to 20 pages long and it read like something out of badly written user manual. Worse, it made the book sound boring and didn’t capture the essence of the story at all.

One problem with the dot point approach is that even if you can avoid making it a clinical list, you can’t distinguish between what should be in the story and what shouldn’t.

Let’s use an example from one of our own stories. Spits Acid, Breathes Fire dot-pointed would be:

• 18 y.o. Daniel (POV character) sees a dragon. His friend, Gibbo, can’t see it, even though it’s hanging around Gibbo
• Two strangers do see it. They come over to ask about it
• Strangers are a bit scary. One of them has just come out of the tank
• Gibbo thinks they’re all joking about the dragon
• Laird (older, POV character) sends spell after the kids so he can find them again
• Laird goes off to meet local agent
• Talks to agent about incident that brought him to this world and learn a bit about local culture
• Meanwhile, Daniel keeps seeing the dragon. At school, when they’re with their friends. No-one else sees it
• Flashback to how Laird discovers Fionulla has gone rogue. More about the tank.

This is one dot point per couple of pages so far, and it’s boring, boring, boring. Who’d want to read about it? Worse, dot points like this make you start at the start of the story, but a synopsis doesn’t usually start there, it simply has to include salient points.

In the end, even though Daniel is the main POV character, in the synopsis we told the secondary POV character’s story because that was actually the plot.

Fionulla Mees, a mage on the ruling Council of Seven, has gone rogue. Her boss, Fintain Laird, investigates. Is it a plot against the Seven, or is she targeting Laird himself? The betrayal is even more bitter because Fionulla was once Laird’s apprentice. He taught her everything he knew and sponsored her onto the council when one of the seats became vacant.

Laird follows Fionulla to Earth.

He knows he is on the right trail when he discovers a baby Federee dragon—Federee dragons are attracted to power—following two Earth younglings around.

The rest of it, the kids, the dragon, are really just colour.

Get some distance

Sherylyn usually writes our synopses. She waits at least six months since we last touched a story, then dashes off around three pages of what she remembers of it. After that I get out my metaphorical red pen (track changes in Word) and rewrite what she has written.

If we had written our synopsis for Spits Acid, Breathes Fire immediately after we had finished the novel it would have been all about Danny.

18 year-old Daniel Ciocci can see dragons. There’s one sniffing around his friend Gibbo, but Gibbo can’t see it, nor can any of their friends. The only other people who can see the dragon are two strangers.

Ho hum. It’s a bit ordinary. And it’s not even what the story is about. It’s about a woman who comes to earth to steal power so that she can kill her boss. But we didn’t see that until quite a few months after the book was done.

It’s easier to write a synopsis for a book you haven’t written

You can’t use dot points on a story you haven’t written. Not only that, if you’re writing the synopsis first you only have the big picture, not all the little details get in the way of what the story is actually about.

Thus it’s a lot easier and more fun to write.  More like a story.

But there are other issues.

If you’re pantsers like us, you often don’t know what the story is about until you’ve finished it. You definitely don’t know where it will take you.

For this synopsis—the one we just wrote—we knew where the story was going and how it got there, so it wasn’t such an issue. This made it a little more detailed than we would have liked, however; and a bit too long.

A detailed synopsis can turn into a de-facto outline, which is fine if you can write to an outline. It can also turn a potentially good story into a clinical retelling of plot points if you can’t. Then it becomes the dot-point novel driven by the synopsis.

Let’s hope we don’t fall into that trap.

I don’t know if it this is a true story or not, but I heard that when Assassin’s Apprentice came out Robin Hobb was nominated for a best new writer award (I think it was the John W. Campbell award). Her editor had to quickly contact the award organisers to tell them she was ineligible, given that she was already published under the name Megan Lindholm.

Like I say, I don’t know if the story is true, but as a myth I like it anyway.

A lot of authors change their name mid-way through their writing careers. Some do it because they want to write a in a different genre. Others do it because they’re prolific writers and they want to write more books than they think the market can bear.

Still other writers change their name because they can no longer sell books under their current name. Sales are modest and their publisher refuses to buy any more books. If you trawl the internet and read the articles on how book sales work, you will soon realise that low sales of one book almost automatically lead to lower sales of the next because the buyers who put the books into the stores order less copies of your next book, and so on in a downward spiral. Some of my favourite authors, whose books I automatically buy, have had their careers stymied this way.

I was hoping that eBooks would fix this problem. After all, an eBook never goes out of print and the cost of keeping an eBook on the shelf is relatively small compared to the cost of keeping physical books.

It might still, but I can see another disturbing book-selling trend coming for eBooks.

In her article, Your E-Book is Reading You, Alexandra Alter, from the online Wall Street Journal talks about the analytical data that is being collected by booksellers such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble when readers read e-books on the Kindle and Nook. They can already tell you, for example, that the first thing most readers do when they finish reading Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games is order the next one.

Data mining is big business, especially for companies who are trying to change your buying habits, and it can lead to some disturbing trends. Charles Duhigg, from The New York Times, explains how Target worked out a teenage girl was pregnant before her father did in How Companies Learn Your Secrets.

Publishers are no different. They’re in the business of selling books, and they want you to buy their books.

Like it or not, the acquisition of analytical data will almost certainly change how publishers acquire new titles. In Your E-Book is Reading You, Jim Hilt, vice President of eBooks for Barnes and Noble, says

“Publishers might be able to determine when interest in a fiction series is flagging if readers who bought and finished the first two books quickly suddenly slow down or quit reading later books in the series.”

Your E-Book is Reading You, Alexandra Alter, Wall Street Journal

Imagine what that could do to your ability to sell a new book.

Sometimes this will work. Some series, particularly long ones, do lose readers as the books pile up. Even as a writer I can see advantages with not having to continue to write a series long after readers have given up on it.

The real problem I forsee is that in their search for higher ‘ratings’, book publishers will go the way of the major television networks, where they kill a promising show mid-season because it hasn’t got enough of a following, without giving it enough time to build up that following in the first place.

While self-publishing no longer has quite the same stigma it used to have, there is more you need to think about than how much more money you can make.

After years of being published by other publishers (a lot of it ePublished) author Josh Lanyon recently decided to self-publish his own novels, both his back stock and any future novels.

Lanyon is a successful writer in a niche genre.  Over on his blog, Lanyon talks about the ‘busyness’ of writing.

… surprising to me … how much time I am spending on the business — the busyness – of writing, even though I’m not writing.

…

Last week I was coordinating getting cover art for three titles [coming out] in June … coordinating the different files and formats I would need for titles [coming out] in May … there were signed books to send out, the question of Japanese translation rights …

Confessions of a small business owner, Josh Lanyon

And lots more.  As Lanyon says:

I’m running a small but thriving business and I can’t just go on an indefinite holiday and hope it all works out.  Even if I never write another word again, there is still this business to run.

Confessions of a small business owner, Josh Lanyon 

He sums it up well.  Self-publishing is a business.  You can’t ignore it or your business will fail.

I think that many people rush into self-publishing thinking that all they have to worry about is a little bit of marketing and promotion.  As they delve into it deeper, they also realise that there is a lot more to editing a story by themself as well.  When a book is published by a publisher the publisher usually organises things like editing.

What most writers—self-published or traditionally published—want is success. Yet the more successful you are as an author, the more work there is managing and selling your books.

As an author I want to write books.  I accept that I need to do some marketing as well.  But as much of the ‘managing my sales’ part that I can give off to someone else the better.  For me, this has to be the biggest argument for the traditional publishing route–agents and publishers–and against self-publishing that I know.