Thorn of Dentonhill Available for Pre-order on Amazon

So, I wasn't sure what I was going to write about today.  There's a lot on my plate right now, including finishing edits to Murder of Mages, as well as finalizing other details for that (street map, acknowledgements, cover notes for artist), and on top of that ArmadilloCon and the Writers Workshop is in less that three weeks.

And that's on top of the things I have to do to keep the mortgage paid and the lights on.

But then, I discovered* something pretty amazing that I had to share:

Thorn Of Dentonhill is available for pre-order on Amazon! And it also has a Goodreads page! 

I'll admit, I completely geeked out when I saw an ISBN number.  Again, it's the little things like that which bring it home: this is a really real thing that is happening.

So that more or less made my week.

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*- By "discovered" I mean "ego-surfed and checked my Amazon author page".

The Path To Publication: The Journey Always Goes On

So, I have to confess something: I'm not very pedantic.  In fact, I frequently use the phrase "begging the question" in the "wrong" way.  If you're not familiar with this particular bit of pedantry, here is the "wrong" use:

"So the job went without a hitch?"
"It did, but it shouldn't have.  Jake went through before Stark was able to disable the alarms."
"But the alarms didn't go off." 
"Exactly.  Because the alarms were already disabled.  Which begs the question: who disabled them?"

This is wrong, but I use it this way all the time.  And I think it's fine, because while being "wrong", it makes perfect sense.  That something happens, or an argument is raised, that makes the follow-up question so obvious that it begs for it to be asked.

The "right" use, on the other hand, makes little sense to me.  To be clear, what it means makes sense to me as a logical fallacy-- namely, to form an argument in which the conclusion is assumed as evidence of itself.  The idea that this concept is a logical fallacy makes sense, and that it should exist as a typical logical fallacy isn't something I have an argument with.  I just don't get how the phrase "begging the question" breaks down to mean that, and I've yet to see a discussion of this correct use that adequately addresses why it should.  Though from what I've seen it involves taking the original Ancient Greek phrase and translating it English.  But that's really not important.

This is all my very long-winded way of saying that the typical arguments I see for self-publishing-- but more specifically against traditional publishing-- beg the question in the "correct" sense of the term.

Namely, the argument is that one ought to self-publish because it's a given that getting through the gatekeepers of traditional publishing is impossible.  Since it can't be done, why do it that way, when you can go around it?*

Except it can be done.  It isn't easy, but it can be done. 

Other arguments are similarly flawed.

As I've said in the past, I've nothing against self-publishing in and of itself, but I don't think it's some sort of panacea or revolution.  And more to the point, it's not for me.  It never was, because it involved different fights and struggles that I wasn't interested in.  I had plenty that I wanted to fight, I didn't need more.

More to the point, now that I'm here, with two books that will be published, will be actual physical books that you can buy in bookstores, as well as e-books that you can get on your kindle, and who knows what else in the future... I'm glad I didn't take the other route.  This was my path, and it wasn't an easy one, but it was the one that I needed to take.  The one I'm still on, and will continue to walk as I write more and more.

But, as with all things, your mileage may vary.   Walk the way you need to in order to get where you need to go.

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*- The other big "begging the question" argument I've seen involves statistics of sales from self-published e-books, where it takes the sales figures of best-selling self-published e-books to demonstrate that best-selling books make money.  I don't doubt that, but that's still using Olympic running times to prove that everyone can be an Olympic runner.

Path to Publication, Part VIII: The Art of Patience

This process involves a lot of waiting.  And doing more while waiting.  The waiting is not a bug, it's a feature.  The slowness of the industry gives you time to work and get better.

When I rail against self-publishing, it's not because self-publishing is, by definition, bad.  It's because most people do it out of impatience, and thus do it badly.  This series has been loaded with stories of doing work that wasn't good enough and striving to do better.

A friend from my theatre days would say, "Any problem can be solved with money or time."  Time is your friend in this business.  Use it. 

This is all my way of saying that my re-write of Thorn didn't immediately lead to my agent signing me on.  It took him a while to get back to it, and he waived his claim to exclusivity in the process.  I explored other agents, had a few other full-requests, and walked pretty far down the road with one before she passed.

I even went to a conference to pitch to agents.  This was a great experience, which I recommend if you can swing it, and here's why: just about everyone attending is in the same place as you.  At a lot of genre conventions, you've got fans who are there to be fans, and pros who are there to promote... and there's not a lot for the aspiring writer.  Pitch conferences are for the aspiring writer, so you find a lot of camaraderie. 

In fact-- at this point I was querying both Thorn and Holver Alley, and had finished a draft of Murder of Mages.  Like I said, use the time, keep working.  My scheduled pitch was for Sunday morning, and after some vacillating I had decided to pitch Thorn.  Saturday at around 5pm, I checked my email and saw I had received a form-letter rejection to my query for Holver Alley.

From the very agent I was pitching to the next morning.

Needless to say, I was a mess.  And this is where the camaraderie comes into play.  One of the volunteers, who was also pitching her own project, spotted me and immediately realized Something Is Very Wrong.  She more or less dragged me over to her table, pried the problem out of me, and then proceeded to shove me in a secluded corner with another agent.

Now, neither said corner shoving nor the following morning's perfectly fine scheduled pitch resulted in me getting signed-- that happened a couple months later with Mike, so it all worked out well in the end-- but in that moment, it was exactly what I needed.

And, hey, two months later I had an agent.  So that meant I had made it, right?

Yeah... still a ways to go.

IF I HAD SELF-PUBLISHED AT THIS POINT: Both Thorn and Holver Alley would have been decent, even moderately successful books on the growing Amazon-Kindle market, I bet.  But would that have really given me what I wanted?  Especially since I would have had to have paid for an artist to make a good cover or something.  At this point it wouldn't have been bad, but it wouldn't have been right.

BUT DID I LEARN ANYTHING BY NOW?: To ride it out, because good things did come with patience. 

Path to Publication, Part VII: Buckling Down and Working

So, as I approached the end of 2009, I had a "polished" 70K draft of Thorn of Dentonhill that I was querying.  I had a rough draft of Holver Alley Crew.  I still had a delusion that any given project I was working on, I would be able to finish "next month".  I had now gone to the ArmadilloCon Writers' Workshop two more times, using the opening chapters of those two projects. 

In 2008, the opening chapter of Thorn prompted the pro writer I worked with to tell me, "You're really close with this."

In 2009, the opening chapter of Holver Alley prompted an editor from Tor to tell me, "You have a lot of real talent."  Yeah, I floated on that for a while.

Queries for Thorn were getting some hits, but nothing sticking.

And I sold a short story.  A REALLY short story.  Specifically, to the Norton Anthology of Hint Fiction, and my story was only 21 words long.  But it was a sale, in a real book that was going to be in bookstores.

And then I got an email from the man who would, eventually, become my agent.  He had read Thorn, and loved it, BUT at 70K, it was too short to sell. I needed to beef it up to the 90-100K zone.  You know, novel length.  Something I had missed in my process.

I wonder how many agents quickly dismissed my query letter because of the word count.

So, I dove back into Thorn.

IF I HAD SELF-PUBLISHED AT THIS POINT: It would have been a welter-weight version of Thorn, which might have gotten some attention on the Amazon self-pubbed Kindle market.  But it wouldn't be the stronger, better book that sold now.  And it certainly wouldn't have benefited from the editorial insight that it's getting before being released.  That is a priceless benefit.

BUT DID I LEARN ANYTHING BY NOW?: You mean, besides the "novels really should be closer to 100K?"  But that was crucial to learn, because I had gotten the idea in my head that 70K was good enough.  Also, it taught me something crucial about editing, that it's possible to add depth without sacrificing pacing.   Adding more story, muscle and bone, rather than just padding. 

Path to Publication, Part VI: Structure and Plan

It's taken this long to get past the "flailing around and talking about writing something and actually writing" phase of things.  But even though I had gotten through the darkest part of this journey (so far), I was far from out of the woods.

As I was finishing Crown, I started to come up with the core ideas that would eventually evolve into Thorn of Dentonhill and Murder of Mages  (as well as Holver Alley Crew and Way of the Shield).  Now, these were especially rough core ideas.  A sense of the characters, and what kind of stories they would be.  I had now figured out that I needed an outline to break a story down before I got started with really writing it.  So my next step was figuring out how to properly outline a whole novel.

Frankly, a lot of advice out there on the subject is not a big help.  I've railed on the flaw in "three act structure" before, and will do so again, but core of it is "Act Two" is usually left to "rising action", which tends to boil down to "more stuff happens" and it's not particularly helpful. 

So I got to work, instead of looking for advice on outlines or analysis of stories*, analyzing stories myself and figuring out how they were structured, and applying that to developing a structure for myself.  I used novels, of course, but also TV series and comic books.  These two were actually quite useful in thinking about how to keep hooks in an audience, how to use episodic events in service of a greater story. 

And with that, I designed my Twelve-Part Outline Structure**. And from that, I was able to put together a rough draft of Thorn of Dentonhill. 



IF I HAD SELF-PUBLISHED AT THIS POINT: I had a "cleaned up" version of Crown by now, and still hadn't given up on it.  It would have been a better thing to self publish than the one from a year before, but still not good.  And the version of Thorn that I had at that point was a long way off from the version that was sold.  For one, it was easily a third shorter, as the "novel length" target I was going for was just too short.

BUT DID I LEARN ANYTHING BY NOW?:  Plot structure, finally.  Thorn wasn't ready, but it actually was a story, as opposed to "hanging out with some characters while stuff happens."  And I had used that knowledge, that structure, to plan out Murder, Holver Alley and Way of the Shield as well.


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*- Here's the problem I've found with using story analysis-- like the Hero's Journey, for example-- as an outline structure: they tend to skip the step of converting the tools of analysis into a tool of structure building.  As a simile: it's as if an architect, instead of studying other buildings as a process of learning how to draw blueprints, decides that simply using photographs of buildings is an acceptable substitute for blueprints.  The tools for analysis are not the tools for construction.
**- Structure.  NOT "FORMULA".  Crucial distinction.

Path to Publication, Part V: Crash and Epiphany

By 2007, I had attended the ArmadilloCon Writers' Workshop twice.   I have my "finished" novel The Fifty Year War, and a handful of fits and starts, including Crown of Druthal, which had been moving forward with a snail-like pace.

Because I wasn't working with diligence.  Hell, there were many days in which even the act of opening the Word document was more than I could manage.

I was miserable.

I won't go so far as to say I was clinically or chemically depressed.  I don't think I was, in any sort of official diagnosis.  But I was unhappy, mostly with the fact that I was working a job that felt utterly pointless, and couldn't muster up the energy to do something more pointy with myself.

I had to make a change.

I made some investigations about changing jobs, but I began to realize that was really just trying to put a band-aid over a gaping chest wound.  Something more radical needed to be done, and I had to really interrogate myself of what I wanted and what I was going to do to make it happen. 

So I quit the job.

Radical.  And fortunately I have a wife who, after her initial shock, was very supportive of working out a new plan. You know how most acknowledgements in books thank their spouses?  Truth to the infinite power in my case. She backed me then and continues to back me out of a faith that this was something I really could do. But part of that meant I had to stop being a dilettante about the idea of writing and treat it like real work that I was striving to be better at. 

This involved really starting to investigate how I wrote.  I realized I couldn't just sit and jot out whatever came to mind and see where it went.  That might work for some writers, and if it does for you, great, but it definitely does not work for me.  So I sat down and really worked out the outline of where Crown of Druthal was supposed to go. 

My last day of work at that job was August 2nd, 2007.  The rough draft of Crown was finished by the end of that month. 

And it was a hot mess, of course, but I was fired up now.  I was going to clean it up and sell this, no matter what.

You notice how my announced sale is not for Crown of Druthal?  And how that was almost seven years ago?  Yeah, this is a story of patience, persistence and self-awareness.

Crown of Druthal has some really good bits to it.  It shows a certain degree of burgeoning talent that, in the John-Campbell-at-Astounding era of SF writing, might have found a mentor figure to shepherd it-- or me as a writer-- to the next level. 

I did do my research on agents and publishers, and despite it not being ready (which I didn't realize at the time), I started querying Crown.  My query letter was probably as not-ready, as I didn't get a single response.

But I was fired up, and not about to stop.  Because already at this point, I had realized I needed to think long game.  I needed to think with breadth.

IF I HAD SELF-PUBLISHED AT THIS POINT:  I would have put Crown directly to market.  I was even tempted, looking at services like Lulu or Xlibris.  And given that the responses of both my query attempts at the beta-readers I sought were so tepid, it's best that I did nothing of the sort.  Crown has some good bits, but it's mostly a plotless meander, a travelogue novel where what happens is dictated by where I wanted to take the characters on their tour of the worldbuilding work I did.  A self-published Crown of Druthal would have been a disaster, and I'm glad I trusted those voices (internal and external) that told me not to do it.

BUT DID I LEARN ANYTHING BY NOW?: I was finally getting a handle on how I wrote.  I had dropped any romantic notions of "just sit and write and see where it takes me."  It took me nowhere.  I learned that I needed to come up with an outline, and more than that, started to get the idea that a novel structure with a plot was crucial to writing something dynamic.

Path to Publication, Part IV: Further Flailing And False Starts

All right, so, NaNo 2003 proved one thing: I can finish a novel, right?  So I'm all set and can just charge forth with this novel-writing thing.  Right?

Yeah, not so much.  The next few years were dire.

I attempted to throw a lot of stuff at the wall, and have a handful of failed manuscript beginnings based on that. A big manuscript graveyard. There was, for example, Long Night of the Pieman, a non-genre attempt to turn my experiences as a late-night pizza delivery guy into a kind of shaggy-dog novel.  Because, I mean, I have stories from those nights, and that would totally work as a novel.  Right?

Never quite came together. Attempting that as a NaNo was a failure as well.

So I also decided to really move forward with the fantasy stuff.  I had Fifty Year War after all, right?  So I kept editing that, and then reworked that diplomatic-outpost idea to a traveling ship.   Some of the same characters, but I was so pleased with myself because I was making them active, having them go places instead of having stuff happen in their orbit.  This was the real start of Crown of Druthal. 

But yet it wasn't coming together.

So I tried to force myself, this time with my Space Opera idea.  I set up a website (that doesn't exist anymore, and was so off-road in terms of traffic, I doubt it was even archived), with the idea that every week I would post up 3,000-5,000 words worth of a serialized USS Banshee.  After all, if I'm doing that, and there's an audience expecting it, I can't let them down, can I?

Of course, the audience never came, and that was a hot mess of a story.  Those two things are likely connected.

Then in 2005 I went to the ArmadilloCon Writers' Workshop, using the first chapter of Crown as my submission.

Friends, I was so damn cocky about that first chapter.  I honestly felt I would go in and get solid notes, but essentially praise, thumbs up, and pats on the back.  That is not what happened.  AT ALL.

And it totally deserved that.  Because it was a mess.  My writing was a mess, flat out.  I needed to get it together.

IF I HAD SELF-PUBLISHED AT THIS POINT:  Well, in a way, I kind of did try with the USS Banshee project.  I mean, I just put it out there, no gatekeepers, and let the people find it, with word of mouth and stuff?  Right?  Yeah, except it was a mess.  No one found it, or if they did, they certainly didn't talk about it.  And why would they?  The most charitable thing you could say about it was that it was a charming hang-out story with a handful of lower-deck characters on a starship, and the only thing that separate it from being mediocre Star Trek fanfiction was that it wasn't actually set in the Trek universe.  So there you have it: mediocre fanfiction of a setting no one else knew but me.  Yeah. 

BUT DID I LEARN ANYTHING BY NOW?:  Yes.  Characters at the center.  For better or worse, with both Banshee and Crown, I had gotten the core idea of coming up with having characters to anchor the story, and writing unique voices for those characters.  I still hadn't come up with things for them to do, or refrained from pointless worldbuilding or historical tangents.  For real, that first chapter I brought to the workshop?  In less than 5,000 words, I not only had extraneous paragraphs about wine or mustard, there is a nearly 2,000 word side-story about how and why the main character's uncle was elected to Parliament.  An Uncle who, I should point out, wasn't going to appear in the story beyond that first chapter of putting the main character on the ship.  So, with the workshop, I was starting to get the idea that not every bit of backstory needed to be told.

Path to Publication, Part III: The Terrible Dread of NaNoWriMo

OK, so, I've knocked on NaNoWriMo before.  I honestly think it's a good exercise, a way to learn your writing habits, figure out how to write a novel, and understand the way you work.

I don't think it's a good way to get great work.

This, of course, took first-hand learning.

The three years after the failed project fell apart involved several false starts for novels, most of which were connected to the worldbuilding work I had done in the fantasy setting.  I had done tons of detail work and history work-- work that still stands, as it is the world that Thorn and Mages is set in.  And I think a big part of the challenge I had to get over was understanding that just because I had done all that worldbuilding work, it didn't mean I had to share it all.

What I had kind of settled on was the idea of writing a series that was the proto-Crown of Druthal, though it was set in an embassy instead of a ship.  But the "Explain All The Things" part of my brain felt I had to properly set things up.  That readers would need to know the WHOLE STORY to make sense of things. 

I think this is a trap fantasy writers often fall into. 

Anyhow, this became the central idea behind what I would make my 2003 NaNoWriMo project: The Fifty Year War.  A novel which would flesh out the history of the war between Druthal and Poasia.  You know, the stuff that readers would be dying to know.

Now, I did succeed as a NaNoWriMo, writing around 53,000 words in November.  And the "finished" first draft was around 60K. 

But it was horrible.

It was a novel in which I had clearly absorbed all the wrong lessons from Isaac Asimov and David Weber.   It was a novel by the way of interconnected novellas, like Foundation, but unlike Foundation, there was no central theme or core to carry it through.  And certainly no core characters.  The closest thing to a central character wasn't a character, but a series of descendents in the same family who serve in the war.     It was a novel in which, like Weber's Honor Harrington books there are several meetings, in which people you never met before and won't meet again tell each other things that you don't care about. 

Fifty Year War was a book with no heart, no soul, and certainly nothing resembling a proper plot.   It comes across as a bad prequel to a thing that didn't exist yet, hitting the notes to set things up in a perfunctory way, without any sense that those set-ups existed for any organic reason beyond "set things where they needed to be".

IF I HAD SELF-PUBLISHED AT THIS POINT:  At the time I really believed in Fifty Year War, though for the life of me I don't know why I thought that.  It isn't an interesting work, but if the means had been a bit more convenient at the time, I might have convinced myself it should be self-published.  And I would have been wrong, because it is awful.  Further revisions made it less awful, but it is such a mess at its core, no amount of editing could save the patient.  So, if I had put it out there, it would have failed, and it would have felt like a toxic albatross on my name and the world I had built. 

BUT DID I LEARN ANYTHING BY NOW?: At this point, the main thing I had learned was-- roughly-- the discipline behind writing a novel, the level of planning that needed to go into getting it done.  But even then, I was still untempered.  I needed to figure out what a novel was beyond "a whole lot of writing".  But reaching the point of sitting down and writing a novel-like-object to completion was something of a milestone.

Path to Publication, Part II: Early Days Of Writing Garbage

So, way back in 2000, I was talking a certain amount of talk about the idea of writing novels, and had a number of little snippets of stories.  Fits and starts.  I also had the starts of worldbuilding-- more broad brushstrokes stuff than real details.  A world with a handful of nations that could mostly be described with a couple of sentences.  But I certainly didn't have anything concrete that I could consider real writing work, or even anything that was properly on its way to being real something acceptably novel-like.

And then came the strange offer.

Through a friend-of-a-friend, I was brought into a project involving a fledgling gaming company.  They were gearing up to release a new RPG system, and a series of rulebooks to go along with it.  The game was supposed to be a sort of universal-system, usable in any fantasy setting, but they wanted there to be a "house setting" that they could present, and the worldbuilding I had done was the setting they wanted.  And they wanted some tie-in novels to support the setting.

I really was not ready for this.

For one, I needed to get the worldbuilding to a level that was sufficiently organized and comprehensible to someone who wasn't me.  For another, I needed to have something that could at least be a start to these tie-in novels that they wanted.

Except, of course, part of the problem was they weren't really sure what they wanted.  I'm not in any way going to say that I was writing great stuff that they ought to have run with... but they were never able to articulate what it was they were looking for.  I never even quite got a straight answer of whether they really wanted novels or something else. 

What I did know is that they had 100 ISBNs.  I'm not sure if anything ever came about.  The project didn't so much fall apart as peter out.  I don't even know what happened to the people behind it.   Communication just stopped after a certain point, and nothing more came of it.


As part of the process of this, I ended up with the beginning of something, a beginning that was for all intents a travelogue-in-discussion.  Really.  While things happened, what happened was more or less a thing excuse for the main characters to be able to discuss each nation in the world in broad brushstrokes.  While it was very rough, a lot of what was in this bit were the beginning seeds of what would eventually become the (deservedly trunked) Crown of Druthal.  But that was a long way off.

The only other thing I had done of substance was about six chapters of a thing I was calling A Convergence of Angels on the I-35, which was more or less a sort-of-urban-fantasy-by-way-of-Tom-Robbins. 

IF I HAD SELF-PUBLISHED AT THIS POINT:  The big question behind that would have been what, exactly?  Now, it wasn't so much an option in the way it is now... but if it had been, I might have convinced myself that the travelogueish start was the first entry in something to be serialized.  But really it was an amateurish mess with snippets of amusing dialogue.  It would have, deservedly, gone nowhere.

BUT DID I LEARN ANYTHING BY NOW?: I might argue that I was starting to get an idea of dialogue, and differentiating characters with that.  I was starting to get an idea of what the scope of writing a novel might entail, much like a guy who ran a little track in high school would start to understand there was more to running a marathon than "keep running until it's 26 miles". 

The Path To Publication

I've been asked, especially recently, why I chose the path of traditional publishing over trying one of the avenues of self-publication.  Frequently in the past, I was more or less told I was making the wrong choice. 

Once I was even told, "You just want to see your book in bookstores." 

I found this a fascinating rebuke.  Of course I want to see my books in bookstores.  That's where people buy books.  I mean, yes, the digital models have made the methods of distribution more diverse, but they haven't eradicated the old ones.  The old ones are still pretty vibrant.  The old ones are still how quite a few readers acquire their books.  Why would I want to deliberately exclude those readers?

Now, I won't say that self-publishing is wrong in a vacuum, in that every person's situation is unique. There can be really good reasons to do it.  However, I think there are also very wrong reasons to do it.  This is the sorts of argument I see:

"Unfortunately there are thousands of us out there who can't even get a publisher to look at our work so it's self-publish or nothing!"

I find this either/or look at it interesting.  "Self-publish or nothing!"  Why is "Try to write better" not a consideration?   I wonder how many of these people declared defeat before really trying.  They bought into the myth that it can't be done, so they didn't bother.




It isn't easy.  John Scalzi just recently compared it to playing in major league baseball, and I think that's pretty apt.  It's long, hard work, and it takes patience and perseverance.  

So over the next few entries, I'm going to talk about my path to this point.  As part of that, I'm going to include "If I had self-published at this point" along each step of the journey.  Because, as I said, I don't think self-publishing is definitively the wrong path to take... but it would have been the wrong path for me.