Author: Karen

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.

Dear Author

Please do not preach to me.

I know your character is nice to dogs and little old ladies. I know he helps everyone in his apartment building. He’s the go-to man for all things plumbing and carpentry and even loans until payday. I know he’s kind to homeless old Pete and slips him money once a week so Pete can buy himself a decent dinner.

I know your character had a hard life; the youngest child of a father who was head of a gang that dealt mayhem in the streets. His childhood was spent avoiding the inevitable all-out gang wars that erupted frequently. I know he was ashamed of his family and all they stood for. That he couldn’t wait to leave home and now he’s a self-made man who is proud to look at himself in the mirror every morning.

I know all this and I don’t care.

In fact, I’m hanging out for the younger child who wants to take over the gang. He’d be a lot more interesting to read about. And maybe Pete as one of those junkie beggars always asking for money who spits at your character when he offers Pete the sandwich he has just bought himself for lunch.

I know, too, that there genuinely are people who have picked themselves up out of bad situations and done well for themselves. They are kind to little old ladies, and little old men (and not so old people), and to animals and a whole lot of other things.

But I don’t want you to tell me that.

I especially don’t want you to tell me that in a two paragraph info dump close to the start of the book.

Evan stared into the mirror as he knotted his tie. This interview today was important. He’d come a long way since he’d cowered behind the rubbish bins in the meanest part of town while his father and his gang fought another turf war. He couldn’t wait to escape, and as soon as he’d turned eighteen he was off.

(It’s interesting that these people always wait until they’re eighteen to leave, by the way. If he hated it that much surely he’d have gone a lot earlier. Eighteen is a very middle-class age to leave home.) Then, a few paragraphs later.

Irene, from apartment two, knocked at the door. She wore an old dressing gown that came to her knees. It was saturated. “Evan, thank goodness you’re here. My kitchen taps have gone crazy. I can’t turn them off, there’s water spurting up to the ceiling.”

Our hero Evan good-naturedly goes to help her, even though he has an important interview, which he’s now going to be late for. After he’s changed his suit—he’s sopping wet by now—he goes out into the sunshine where homeless Pete has set up a cardboard box in the alley beside the apartment block.

Evan was always conscious of those who had less than him and tried to help them where he could. He handed over ten dollars. “Why don’t you get yourself some breakfast, Pete. You look as if you could do with some.”

“Bless you, Evan. You’re always so kind.”

You know Evan’s problem(s)? (He’s got lots of them.)

• He’s the author’s soapbox—this man must be good because he’s had such a hard life but still managed to rise above it
• He’s the author’s guilt trip—my main character must be a ‘good’ man
• He’s a lazy way to build character—a stereotype who ticks all the right boxes. Hard life, yes. Kind heart, yes. Against the odds, yes.
• He’s got no personality. He’s a nothing man
• Decent traits do not automatically make decent characters. Even Hannibal Lecter was charming.
• He has no redeeming features. I don’t like him.

“But,” you say from your authorial distance. “He’s good, he’s kind. I just told you he was.”

That’s right. You told me, and you know what they say to writers. Show, don’t tell. Think how much better that first paragraph would be if you put some more colour into it and took out some of the telling.

Evan knotted his tie with care. This interview today was important.

He was a long way from the boy who’d cowered behind the rubbish bins in the meanest part of town while his father and his gang fought another turf war. Not that he remembered the gang wars as much as he did the aftermath, when his father, all smiles, pulled out hundred dollar bills and sent Evan and his next older brother down to the pizza shop to buy pizzas and beer, while at home Dad added the new notches to his gun.

He’d left the day he got his license. He told people his father and mother were dead.

Suddenly Evan’s getting a personality. I like him better already.

So please don’t give me a sanitised cardboard cutout who I know is a ‘good person’ because he has all these redeeming features (and because you told me he was). ‘Good people’ like this make terrible characters.

Yours
Your no-longer-so-devoted reader

I recently read Daniel Abraham’s A private letter from genre to literature over at SF Signal.  I enjoyed the article, and the comments with–I love it when the commenters comment in the spirit of the writing.

I hadn’t read any books by Daniel Abraham before.  But based on that one article I’m definitely going to.

One thing writers are told is is in order to be a writer they must have an online presence. And most of them do. They have a website, and a Facebook account, and maybe a Twitter account.

But there are other places online where people see your work.

One place is guest posts on other blogs, like Abraham’s.

Another place is the forums.

I get a lot of my ‘to read’ authors from comments they post in reply to other works.  I’m a member of (not very active) some of the GoodReads groups, for example.  GoodReads has a surprising number of authors in their lists.  Or maybe that’s not surprising, given that authors are also readers.  I’ve picked up a lot of new authors from there, mostly because I like the comments they make in the group.

Another place was the old Harper Collins Voyager Online site. It gets very little traffic nowadays, but before I arrived there I didn’t realise many Australian (and New Zealand) authors actually wrote fantasy. I’d pick through the comments in the forums–most of whom were authors, and a goodly proportion of them published–and choose the ones I liked based on the comments they made.

Of course, you can hide yourself under a different name and never the twain — the author and the commentor — shall meet, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. These comments are another another way for you to get your name out there.

If people know you are a writer and like your comments, they will look you up.

I do.