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".

Publication Transparency

So, now I'm a couple months into this process, it's time to talk a little about what this process has been.

First of all, there was a big gap between me finding out that I had sold Thorn of Dentonhill and A Murder of Mages.  I learned mid-December, but with the full understanding that the process of putting together the contract coupled with the holiday break meant it would be about a month before everything was squared away and I could shout the news to the world.

Indeed, it took a month, though my experience in that regard should be considered atypical.  It was an aspect of the timing coinciding with the holidays.

Once I received the contracts, I printed them out on legal-sized paper*, signed them and shipped them back to the folks at DAW.  Once that was squared away, I could make the announcement.

So, what happened next?  For one, I decided that was cause enough to start work on Thorn II, which is now well underway.  My goal, on a writing level, is to keep myself ahead of the game.  Once books start to come out, I don't want to leave my readership hanging for too long.

Next, I had a long talk with my editor on Thorn, over the phone.  I took copious notes of things to address in the changes I needed to make.  I also put together my maps and sent those off.

Now, I have to confess-- if you've been following this blog for any amount of time, you know I'm a bit of a map geek and have done a fair amount of work along those lines.   But in sending my maps to my editor-- a woman whose career is centered on the publication of fantasy novels-- there was still a part of my brain that went into nerd-shame mode.  Like, "They're going to think you're such a dork when they look at this."  Crazy, no?  I suppose that stuff is pretty internalized.  Swallow it and move on.

So, got to work on edits, as well as sending a few miscellaneous documents: a two-paragraph description of Thorn (modified from my query letters of old), a bio and some descriptive guidelines for the cover artist, whoever that will be.

Once edits are done and sent in, I presume we'll get to work on the same process for Murder of Mages.

That's where we are right now.  Any questions?  I'll answer them as best as I can.



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*- Oddly enough, for no real reason, I had legal sized paper on hand.  I don't think it had been used for years, but that's how our home office is.

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. 

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.

THORN OF DENTONHILL and A MURDER OF MAGES purchased by DAW Books

Big news.

That's really the only way to say it.

Big, huge, life-changing news.

I've sold Thorn of Dentonhill and A Murder of Mages (which, if you've been reading this blog for a while, I had been calling Maradaine Constabulary) to DAW Books, who are distributed by Penguin.  As you can imagine, this is a huge deal for me.

If you've been following this blog for a while, then you probably know that I've been sticking to my guns about going the route of traditional publishing.  People kept trying to sell me on the idea that you can't get an agent, that you can't break through and be signed by a major publisher, unless you already know someone or have an in.  That it was impossible and in this day and age you should just forget it.  Don't bother, it can't happen.

Yes it can.

If all goes according to plan, Thorn should be out before the end of 2014, and Mages by mid-2015.  

I am beyond overjoyed.  It's been a long path to reach this point, where the journey can truly begin.

A New Year and a New Horizon

At this point I usually like to talk about What's To Come in my intended year.  But first, let's look at what my goals were last year at this time:

1. Book deals for Thorn of Dentonhill, Holver Alley Crew, and Maradaine Constabulary. Well, I did not get book deals for all three.  So the highest goal I set did not come to pass.  But who knows what tomorrow will bring?

2. Finish Rough Draft of Way of the Shield.  Done.

3. Finish Rough Draft of Banshee.  About 2/3 to 3/4 done.  Not too shabby.

4. Attend my first Worldcon.   Which I did, and in being part of the presentation for Rayguns, I had a good reason to be there.  So: Done.

5. Have a good reason to start second books of Thorn, Holver Alley or Constabulary.  See point 1, as before. I do have them well planned, should that good reason arise in the near future.

6. Hash out some of these random ideas into usable outlines.   I actually have done this.  I've parsed out characters, worldbuilding, and structure for a piece-- as well as knocking out a few thousand words to start it out-- of a potential future project. 

7. Never give up.  Yup. 

So for 2014?  Everything about that isn't done, keep doing.

Also: I'll be running the Writer's Workshop for ArmadilloCon this year.  Expect me to be talking more about that in the coming days.

Happy New Year!  Good luck in the word mines!

Jump the Black- 2013 in Review, Part One

On January 1st, 2013, I sold Jump the Black to Rick Klaw's Texas-themed sci-fi anthology Rayguns Over Texas, which was my first pro-level genre sale.*

I haven't ever really talked about the story itself, as it didn't seem appropriate when I first sold it. 
When it was coming out, it made more sense to talk about the anthology as a whole. 

I should preface this by saying I'm really not a short-story writer.  It's just not a format I have a lot of affinity for, and I don't tend to write them without a specific purpose or plan.  However, "invited to submit to this anthology" works very well as a specific purpose or plan. 

So, I received the invite and remembered a nugget of an idea that I had had for a sci-fi story.  It was little more than this: A sci-fi future with a large interstellar, multi-alien community, but Earth isn't a part of it.  Earth is the place you leave to have opportunity.  Earth is Mexico.

I did some research into border crossings, the lengths people go to in order to get in the States.  I thought about "coyotes"-- those who "help" others get across the border, and the methods they use to do it.  The conditions people will submit themselves to, the trust they will place on those bringing them, and the hope that when they emerge on the other side that an opportunity will be there that will make it all worth it.





And I wanted something in there that could be a direct allegory to swimming across the Rio Grande. Thus "jumping the black"-- where the smuggled humans, freshly awoken from the paralytic "sleep" they were put in to avoid getting noticed by the scans-- have to leap through empty space from the smuggler's cargo hold to a port left open on the space station, so that they're off the smuggler's ship before his cargo gets inspected.  If the humans jumping don't make it safely... that's their problem.  Also, if they get caught right when they get in the station, their problem. 

I really enjoyed writing this, and it definitely clicked one big button for me: I could write a lot more of it.  I kept it at 4000 words to make it fit easily in the anthology, but I could easily expand the story to novella length, building out what happens next once the humans make it off the rock.

But, as I said, selling that on January 1st was an excellent way to start 2013, and I was quite pleased to see it in print in September.

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*- My story for The Norton Anthology of Hint Fiction was paid at over a dollar per word, but it was only 21 words long.  Twenty-two with the title.  But it wasn't genre.

WorldCon Bound and other milestones

WorldCon / LoneStarCon starts today.  I won't be going down until tomorrow afternoon, unfortunately, but I'm very excited.  A little nervous, as this is my first "big" con, but I think it's important to keep stepping things up.  I made myself a little pledge a few years ago to keep doing new things-- convention and career-wise-- that scare me a little.  Two years ago that was being on panels and a Writers' Workshop teacher at ArmadilloCon.  Last year it was giving a reading.  This year, I think WorldCon, in and of itself, is sufficient. 

I'm not an official participant, which is fine, given my current status as a writer.  I will be an unofficial participant in one thing, however:

Rayguns Over Texas Group Reading/Signing
Saturday 1700-1900
007A (Convention Center)

Even though I've mentioned it before, it bears repeating that I am immensely pleased to be included in Rayguns.  From what I've seen of the preview excerpts, everything in it is great.

Furthermore, with Rayguns now released, I believe my eligibility for the Campbell Award starts today.  If I'm wrong about that, someone let me know.

In other news, I've now sent a polished draft of Way of the Shield to my esteemed agent.  I've also updated the excerpt over on my webpage, so go and check that out.  This novel was particularly challenging to write, certainly more so than the other three books set in Maradaine.  It definitely was the one where the original outline survived the least in the writing process.  My original concept was more of a mystery/thriller, with a plot involving figuring out who was killing members of Parliament.  That didn't really fit the themes I was working with, and also made things feel a bit too close to what I had already done with Maradaine Constabulary.  The end result is much stronger, I think.  We'll see if the agent agrees.

Perils of the Science-Fiction Writer: Avoiding Obsolescence

I'll admit I'm not a big short story reader, nor am I as versed in the classics as I ought to be.  That said, I have a certain fondness for Ray Bradbury's All Summer In A Day, and to a lesser extent, The Martian Chronicles.  Both are very human stories that take place on Venus and Mars, respectively.  But they were very much the Venus and Mars of imagination, the Venus and Mars that couldn't be written about after the 1950s.

It's easy to see how, when all that was known about Venus was its cloud cover, a writer might imagine a Venus where the rain almost never stops.  Now we know that isn't even remotely close to the truth.  We know that All Summer In A Day is an impossible story.  It's still a great story, and it holds up in the sense that you can willfully ignore real-Venus in favor of its pulp-Venus setting.  You allow yourself that willful suspension of disbelief because you know the context.*

We live in an exciting time, in terms of astronomical news.  We are constantly hearing news of another planet being discovered in orbit of a distant star.  We've just learned of an Earth-sized planet in orbit of Alpha Centauri B.

But that also makes it a... challenging time to be a sci-fi writer, especially one that does the kind of in-depth worldbuilding that I do.  Any day I expect the news of a discovery to come that invalidates a major element of my work.  And I can only imagine if, say, such news comes in between finishing a work and it being published.  Would that be embarrassing?  Will it be embarrassing in 60 years?  Or will readers shrug and say, "Hey, that was the 2010s.  They hadn't even met the Helari** yet." 

This is probably why some of the better sci-fi gives themselves some breathing room-- putting a few centuries between now and the story.  Therefore the minor or major discoveries in the near future can be handwaved away.  Write too close to the day-after-tomorrow, and the work seems very dated.  I love Snow Crash, for example, and it's still a highly regarded work... but it's set in a 1998 that was a nigh-absurd extrapolation when it was written, let alone in retrospect.

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For some other news: Rayguns Over Texas now has a cover!  I'm absurdly excited for this book, especially since I'm being printed with such good company. 


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*- And, of course, one can write something in a deliberate retro-pulp style, but then you're almost writing fantasy instead of sci-fi. 
**- The Helari, of course, would find it amusingly quaint.

Story Sale and other Small Victories

So, to start, I got excellent news on New Year's Day.  Namely, I sold a short story, "Jump the Black", to Rick Klaw's upcoming anthology "Rayguns Over Texas".  Rayguns is an anthology of original science fiction by TX authors, is scheduled for release at LoneStarCon 3 (aka the 2013 Science Fiction Worldcon in San Antonio, TX).  It'll also have stories from Michael Moorcock, Neal Barrett, Jr., Joe Lansdale, Aaron Allston, Don Webb, Stina Leicht, and many other people who are far cooler than me.  Seriously, if it was Ocean's 11, I'd be the Matt Damon of the group. 

Obviously, I'm thrilled.  This literally happened on January 1st, and I'm taking it as a sign for the year to come. 

Here's one thing I've learned in the process of cutting my teeth in this business: take every small victory.  This particular one is a great one, and it's an easy one to crow about.  It has a tangibility I can point to: there will be a book with a story I wrote in it.  Other victories, other little milestones I have passed, don't have that same sense of accomplishment.  At least, not the way you can really explain to people who aren't/haven't done the same things. 

Back when I was still querying, for example.  Getting a full-request was a pretty big deal, something that puts me in the top 0.1% of everyone who says, "I'm gonna write a book."  But it doesn't actually put a book in bookstores or money in my pocket.  At the time, I was pretty proud of that milestone, but it wasn't something I felt I could make a big deal out of.  However, around that time, I ran into an actor friend I hadn't seen in a while, and when I mentioned it-- as well as that feeling that it wasn't really much of a victory-- he said, "I know exactly what you mean.  It's like getting a 3rd Callback, where you know the part is down to you and a couple other guys.  It gives you some validation, that you have talent... but it still isn't a job booked."

Still, I savor these moments.  The big one is coming.  I feel it in my marrow. 

In which I channel my madness

So I had reached the point where the floodwaters of my creative process couldn't take further damming, and the levees were going to break.  This would have probably resulted in full-on madness.  It would not have been productive. 

So I channeled it, knowing that I should go with that urge to make a Wall of Crazy to help figure out Way of the Shield, in a way I can visualize, get my hands on it in a tactile way.  If I actually went true WALL of crazy, my wife would probably not approve.  So I dug through the garage and found a large board.

And now it all makes perfect sense.

OK, not really, but it makes more sense to me, and that's what matters.  It also helped me see why I was having such challenges making things work. 

Every project, of course, has a different process to midwife it, and this one has been especially trying.  Sometimes it's about figuring out the flaw in the center of the second act.  Sometimes it's just about finding the right music to work to.

I once wrote a short story once that would not come out until I was listening to a mix of Madonna, Britney, Pink and Lady Gaga.  This is not what I normally listen to, but it was what made that story come together.  I honestly do not understand it.  I just accepted it.

And, hey, you can read that story, if you're so inclined, since it's in the anthology The Protectors, now available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Now available on Amazon...

Hint Fiction Anthology, featuring yours truly, is now available for pre-order on Amazon. The Amazon page doesn't show the cover yet, but I hear that it will in the near future.

As seen in the list here, I am one of the authors chosen for an upcoming anthology of "Hint Fiction", which will be published by WW Norton in Fall 2010.

"Hint Fiction" is a story of 25 words or less, which suggests a larger story. It was, for me, a very interesting exercise. With every word representing 4% of the total piece, there's no filler, no room for error. No opportunity to warm up the audience, get them sucked in. It's got to be a pure, hit hard and sink the eight-ball on the break sort of piece.

I can't wait to see the book and see everything else in there.