Aunt Noony's Inside Look at Publishing

It’s funny, I don’t really think of myself as being “inside publishing,” or inside the ebook publishing industry, but since I have a book out with a major digital-first press I suppose to others that I might be considered at least “published,” if not on the “inside track.”

So how’s the view from here?

The more I know, the more I learn that I need to know. As much as I know about writing (active voice, action tags, story craft), I find I still have more to practice. Each time I go through a manuscript to edit, I think, “This is the time, it’ll be so clean I won’t have to touch a thing.”

I’m wrong. Routinely.

Humbling experience, that.

Each time I think I “know about the ebook publishing industry,” someone will mention a new-to-me publisher that’s been in business for years. It’s not that they’re so small I’ve never heard of them, it’s that I’m not well versed enough on the businesses playing in the industry yet.

So here’s what I do know:

Concentrate on the basics and on what you can control.

1. Write daily or as often as you can. There are many prompts available on the internet (type “writing prompts” into Google and poke around). Experiment with a new one every day for a month. Write with a pen and write on the computer, see how the different mechanics work with your creative process.

2. Practice your writing skills. Get a book on grammar from the library or buy yourself a copy of Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss. Wrestle with comma usage and the dreaded semicolon; become an expert in verb tenses. Learn about the “story arc” and the seven traditional plots. Get yourself a copy of Fiction Writers Workshop by Josip Novakovich or take a fiction class through a local writing group.

3. Meet other writers. Find writing friends online through magazines like Writer’s Digest or The Writer, and make local connections using your local newspaper or Meetup. Exposure to others working on the same things you are is helpful for the learning process and can also inspire you to try new things.

4. Attend regional writing conferences or even a national one. My own writing organization, Evanston Writers Workshop, holds our annual conference very year during the third weekend of August. We bring in authors, publishers, agents, and have an awesome time learning and playing with words for three days.  There's a lot you can learn about traditional publishing and the ebook publishing industry, and how the interrelate and augment each other from the authors' perspective.  It's no longer enough to ignore ebooks; we as authors need to understand it because that's how a lot of newer authors are being published.

5. Stay humble. No matter how much you know or learn, remember there’s always someone out there that can teach you something. Be teachable.

6. Keep writing. Through it all, remember to keep writing. This is surprisingly easy to forget, in fact. I meet writers through Evanston Writers Workshop who have all sorts of dearly-held opinions about publishing and writing, but when asked what they’re working on, the answers “oh, this manuscript I’ve been writing for twenty years.” One manuscript for twenty years is not a good track record for knowing the publishing industry. One of our speakers, author Jody Lynn Nye, has published over forty books and over a hundred short stories.  I think THAT is the track record of someone who knows the publishing industry, don't you?  Everyone has opinions, and it’s easy to forget that our job description is “writer,” not “pontificator” or “prognosticator.” If you have the urge to do either of the latter two things, DO IT ON THE PAGE! Whatever you do, write.

Lots.

Write on!

Why I Love Fan Mail

A long time ago in a small apartment far, far away (okay, in Toronto) I sat and watched the first episode of this quirky odd television show. It grabbed me because of the characters, the paranormal angle and the relationship between the main characters.

That show was the X-Files.

It might seem odd to newer television viewers to say that this was a milestone show, which broke all the rules and then some, but it did. It pushed the concept of paranormal phenomena out into the public eye like no other, not since Kolchak: The Night Stalker brought vampires and werewolves into the family living room and grabbed you by the throat, demanding you sit and think.

And it had two darned great characters. Mulder and Scully soon fell into our lingo and still exist today where you can talk about them and everyone knows instantly who and what you're referring to.

But I don't want to talk only about Moose and Squirrel. I want to talk about how the X-Files changed lives.

Specifically, mine.

I was working at a hospital at that time as a security guard, wrestling drunks in the emergency room in the wee hours of the morning and coming home to the apartment I shared with my mother and a second-hand Mac.

And the internet. And user groups where I found fans who loved the X-Files as much as I did, if not more.

And fan fiction.

Now I can see you laughing, you younglings, at the idea of newsgroups and people posting their fan fiction through a long complicated process of cutting and pasting into messages posted up in public for anyone to see, battling not only the horrors of a dial-up modem but the follies of newsgroups where you could lose a post at any time for any reason.

I loved to read the stories but, as many a fan fiction author has, that I could do better.

So I did.

It's been said that an author needs to write a million words of crap before he/she hones their craft to the point of being publishable. I'm not ashamed to say that I'm sure most of that first million in my case was spent on XF fan fiction.

I bashed out thousands of words in short stories, in novels, in serials that went on from season to season, filling in the gaps between episodes and during those long summer months between seasons. I wrote when I was at work, between dealing with loud obnoxious drunks who never lost a fight (or so they said) and a social life that only existed online due to my work situation.

I got plenty of fan mail, I'm rather proud to say. Someone sent me a copy of the Rolling Stone issue from Australia where Mulder and Scully are on the cover, naked and in each other arms. I loved getting fan mail and still love to get feedback on those older stories along with my original fiction.

But the real X-File happened one day in 1993 when I opened up a specific email. It was from a nice American boy down in Pennsylvania and detailed how he enjoyed my writing, specifically my Dragon series with my original character, Jackie St. George.

A bit of a backtrack here – I used an original character to be a Greek chorus for the audience in some of my stories, voicing what we the fans thought about the relationship between Mulder and Scully and how we wanted them to get together. She was Canadian, a CSIS agent and owner of a berserker curse. Not quite a Mary Sue by definition but darned close. (I will confess that I did apply to CSIS and came *this* close to being accepted. Talk about your life turns…)

Anyway this fan loved St. George and urged me to write more. I didn't need much encouragement and kept on writing. He kept on writing emails and eventually we moved up to phone calls. I think it's fair to say that we alone kept Bell Canada afloat for many months.

Finally he gets the courage up to come to Canada and see me. By then we'd both realized this relationship was moving far beyond the "I love your work!" phase and into the "I love you!" area.

I won't bore you with the details but I moved from Canada to the United States in 2000 and married my Wookie, the man who first found me through X-Files fan fiction. We've been very happily married for over a decade and I don't see that changing anytime soon. I write all day and he reads it before I send it off to publishers. He loves to see my books on the shelves and brags to his friends about marrying two women, myself and St. George.

I've never loved a show as much as I've loved the X-Files, though many have come close. We're both enjoying "Haven" on the Syfy channel and watch "Fringe", laughing at all the XF references. But I think our first true love of the X-Files will never be replaced.

I love to tell people this story because it not only illustrates what I call Twu Luv but also the importance of answering fan mail. If I had deleted that email without reading it or never responded… well, I'd probably still be wrestling drunks on the midnight shift.

Now I wrestle with story ideas and other things at night.

*winks*

The Deal

Shortly before we all flipped our calendars over to the first day of 2011, I mentioned to my teenaged son that I would love to write at least two books a year for the rest of my career.

He shrugged. “That’s easy to say, but can you do it? Say, for the next five years?”

“Is that a challenge?” I asked, raising my eyebrows.

“That’s ten books, Mom.”

I crossed my arms. “I may be old and feeble, but I can still count.”

“Ten,” he repeated. “In five years.”

“Easy peasy.” But maybe it wasn’t. I’d written many books over the years but never on a deadline. I had no idea how fast I could write under the gun. Oh, and edit. I might have forgotten about the editing ten books part.

He put out his hand. “Wanna shake on it?”

Who was this kid? I slid my hand into his. “Deal!”

And so in a fit of insanity, (I blame the eggnog) the deal was done. Could I do it with a day job, kids, and the usual daily life stuff?

I figured it out mathematically. If I wrote 2-3 pages a day times six days a week (I don’t work on Sundays), I’d end up with 12- 18 pages each week. Let’s call it 15 pages a week. In five months, I’d have written a 300-page draft.

I set to work on the first book to see how closely reality matched the figures in my head.

The beginning was a little slow. Lots of fits and starts, stopping to research, watching videos on my chosen locale, looking up words, and translating a foreign language. I did manage to get my 2 pages a day in.

Once I got into the story, however, the words started flowing and 2 quickly jumped to 10 pages a day. On one particularly glorious day, I completed 25 pages before I fell into bed that night. My mind was humming and I was a little delirious, but it felt good to accomplish so much.

In six weeks, I’d written 300 pages. I can honestly say that the first draft of the first book is done!

And I learned a couple of things as I went. To be honest, I’m not a great plotter, but I do a rough sketch of the scenes I know have to be in the book before I begin. The more scenes I sketch out, the easier it is to write faster. I also have to know my characters strengths, weaknesses, motivations and goals before I can begin. And the conflict must be sharp and growing in my mind before I put those first words on the page. After that, it’s all butt-in-the seat time.

It’s doable. It really is.

So what’s stopping you?

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