Q.  How can the book publishing industry justify a price of $9.99 for an ebook version as well as $9.99 for the printed paperback?  Why can’t they cut us readers a slack and offer the ebooks for cheaper?

A.  The tl;dr version of my reply is this:  It’s because book publishers actually do care about their authors, and know just how little money we authors actually make.

Here’s the long reply:

In many ways, you’re quite right about the costs of ebooks seeming a bit high.  But please remember that there are a few things going on in the background.  First, the system is still new, and standards are only just now starting to be developed and adhered to.  Second, things move slowly in the publishing industry.  What might take months or a year or two elsewhere can take two or four or more years in publishing circles to settle.

Third…they’re finally giving authors 25% of ebook sales, instead of the 8%-10% found in paperback royalties, because the publisher can indeed cut out the printer portion of those book sales (and printing is very expensive).  But there are still a lot of people handling each ebook: copy-editors, publishing editors, the art department still has to come up with a cover that’s ebook-reader compatible, plus the addition of coders for six or more different ebook-reader languages, and the usual PR agents.  They all still need to be paid for the work they’re doing on the author’s behalf.  The costs have gone down a little, but there are still plenty of expenses left, and the publishers have chosen to pass that extra cash on to the author.

Of course, that may seem like a cheat to you:  Why should an author get 25% instead of 8%-10% like usual?  Shouldn’t the reader get the discount on the price?  Let’s look at the sales prices of various books versus the actual amount of money the author receives per book.  On a $15.00 trade paperback (the slightly larger format), I receive approximately $1.15.  On a $8.99 mass market (that’s the normal size) paperback…I receive approximately $0.85.  If you average it out, I get $1 per book.  That’s it.

Now let’s look at how long it takes me to write a novel:  Approximately 4.5 months…but let’s short-sheet it and call it an even 100 days…and I don’t work 9-to-5, Monday through Friday only.  But if I did, and did that for 100 days…minimum wage in Washington state is $9.19.  (It is expensive to live anywhere near Seattle.)  So I’d make about $7,352 in 100 days of minimum wage working, say as a stock clerk for my local grocery store.

That was slightly less than my entire last royalty cheque for an accounting period of 6 months.  More than 100 days, even including the fact that we’re talking about only working 5 days a week when in fact it’s more like 27 days out of ever single month.  And that, my dear reader, includes the 25% in ebook sales, which would be a bit more than $1 average per book.  More like $2.50 for a $9.99 book.

Now, I am not a flash-in-the-pan author.  I have 15 books out, most of which have been bestsellers, plus 2 single-author anthologies (a bit of a coup in the writing world), plus I have short stories in multi-author anthologies…which almost never pay out royalties because the number of books bought just barely cover the printing and initial advance cheque costs.

Yet I am making less than minimum wage.  The only things keeping my finances afloat are if I can keep at least 3 books under contract at all times, and the fact that I had to take in roommates so I wouldn’t lose my house.  (Luckily the 3 of us get along great.  Can’t say the same for our 3 cats. *sigh*)

Then again, my next 3 books under contract will be ebooks…and my advance on each one will be less than 1/3 what I normally get for a paperback advance as a multiple best-selling author, simply because it’s going straight to ebook and not print.  That is not enough to keep me from losing my house.  I am therefore also taking up contracts to write more printed books as well.

This means I am double-booked on work from now until January 31, 2014, when my current run of print-based manuscripts is due…and when I get that next contract for print books, I will be double-booked through to October 31st of next year, not this year, because I will be writing stories for ebooks and writing stories for print books at the same time.  I have kissed outside-the-house activities goodbye, and I have seen exactly 2 movies in the last 6 months out of the 15+ I wanted to go see in the theater.  (The Hobbit, and Iron Man 3, both of which I recommend.)

So no, I am not giving up that 15% extra found in the difference between paperback and ebook royalty prices.  Every.  Penny.  Counts.  In my budget.  If I could handle all the work the publishing house does, the promotions and the networking and the costs of all the coding, I’d go self-published and get 50%.  But all I know how to do is write stories.  Thankfully ones which people enjoy.

…I can understand if for financial reasons you have to buy used copies.  I’ve been there.  I lived for years on $35 a month plus cooking and cleaning in exchange for room and board and the occasional bit of new clothes while living at my parents’ house…because I could not get a job thanks to the Catch-22 of not already having that job.  I would carefully reserve just enough money for one new book in a month, or 2-3 used books, and I’d have to save the rest of that tiny bit of money because I’d have to pay for bus fare to get to a bookstore in the first place, plus save up money to buy anything else I needed that wasn’t food or clothing.  I actively encourage people to read my books via their local library, because that was where I got most of my book-reading habit sated, even if I couldn’t keep those books forever, as I often wanted.

I am now a multiple-times-over bestselling author…and I still don’t make minimum wage, even combining the advance cheques with the royalties I get.  (Oh, and the “advance cheque” is just that, it’s an advance on the royalties, so I have to make more in book sales than the advance amount, before I see a single dime of royalty money.  If the advance is $2,000…I have to sell 2,001 books to receive $1 in royalties, or sell 2,035 novels to receive $35.)

So, I am going to ask you for a little favor:

If you like my books, then please encourage others to buy and read them.  Don’t talk about the price, just talk about the fact that you enjoyed them, and how much you’d recommend them, whether that’s recommending a particular book just a little, or a whole lot.  I am very glad you’re enjoying my novels, too, and I hope a lot of other people will get the chance to enjoy them, too.

Let them decide if the price is worth scraping together enough money over the course of a month, if it’s worth forgoing 2-3 cups of coffee at Starbucks, a pleasure that would last them an hour or so at most all told, in exchange for buying a book they can enjoy for hours on end, over and over and over.  Please don’t sour their opinions and make them prejudge whether or not it’s worth “zomg that awful high price!”  Someone else may decide that it’s worth the price, or they may decide that it’s not, but it all depends upon their financial situation, and not yours.

Just tell them that you liked it, how much you may have liked it, why you’d recommend they read it, too…and that’s all I’ll ask you to do.

At a rough estimate, for every 30-40 people you tell, a couple of them might actually go out and buy 2-3 of my books.  That’s another $2-$3 in my pocket for the paperbacks, presuming they buy new, not used.  That’s not much, and at this point in time, paperbacks are still outselling ebooks, so that’s maybe 1 ebook sale for every 30-40 people chatted to, for roughly $2.50 of income for me, off a $9.99 mass market paperback/ebook price…and my mass market books actually sell for $8.99, so technically it’s a little less than $2.50 an ebook being sold at the same $8.99 paperback price.

Ironically, word-of-mouth advertising, this exact sort of advertising, telling people about something you enjoyed?  That is the single most effective form of advertising out there.  People wonder why I hesitate to shell out $300 or more for website ads that might be seen by 3,000 people.  To recoup that money, I’d have to nail at least 1 book sale out of every 10 people who looked at that ad.  (I could barely get 1 out of 10 relatives to buy my books, and they’re family.  I know where they live!)

But if you complain about the cost to anyone but me (and I do honestly sympathize), then they’ll prejudge the book, looking at it with the thought of “this is going to be too expensive for me, too.”  That’ll sour their first impression, and I won’t get 2-3 book sales out of 30-40 people you talk to.  I might get 1 in 50.  That doesn’t seem like much:  $1 in book sales versus $2-$3 in book sales…but when you add it all up, if 7,000 people who buy my books in the span of 6 months only buy 1 book apiece, that’s $7,000.  If they each buy 2 books apiece, or if it’s 14,000 people who decide instead of just 7,000, that’s $14,000.

That is a huge difference.  Every.  Penny.  Counts.  And good publishing houses, big and small, know this.  They honestly do care about how much we authors are making, but they have to balance all the other hidden costs the readers never see, versus how much the readers are willing to shell out for a story.  So they’re going to take that roughly 15% in “savings” found by not printing a book and pass it to the author for every electronic sale made.

Most of us aren’t JK Rowling or Stephen King.  We’re not the 60-foot-tall Cthulhu-tentacled-with-frikkin-laser-beam-eyes mutant giant cockroaches of the publishing world.  (This parody-style comparison is made in a loving way, simply because I find the concept an amusing visual…and it helps me get over my frustration of not yet hitting the right combination of viral-ness in order to mutate and join them, myself.  Though I think I’d rather be a giant 60-foot-tall Cthulhu-tentacled fire-breathing laughter-devouring immortal butterfly, myself.)

The economy has already hit all of us hard enough.  Every little bit helps, so please, be positive when talking to others.  If you inadvertently talk them out of buying my books by complaining about the price, sure they may save $9 or $15 or whatever…but they’ll lose out on maybe, just maybe, having a really good, enjoyable read that they can re-read whenever they need a pick-me-up.  A story which they can keep reading for the rest of their lives.

I hope you continue enjoying the rest of my stories, new or used.  That’s why I write ‘em.  If I was in this for the money, I’d have moved on to any other job by now… so every single penny counts, because I am not making minimum wage without your help…and if you don’t like one of my books in particular, which is perfectly fine, as it’s your opinion and no single book is ever going to satisfy every single person on Earth 100% of the time, then as I like to tell everyone (in a fake Jersey accent, because it sounds funnier that way) “Eh, just keep yer mouth shut, an’ let it die a quite death.”

I do this simply and purely because I love what I do.  I’d like to make a livable wage at it, too.

Wouldn’t you, if you love what you do?

Or “A really long-winded explanation of why I chose ‘them’ over ‘he or she’ as a writer”

…Or  “We really haven’t formally codified this stuff yet, so please bear with us while we work it out!”

As a writer, one of the important steps in polishing up a story before presenting it to the world is the editing process…and by editing, I mean someone else with some serious English skills looking over your work and marking down their corrections, comments, and queries for you to review and consider.  On one of my most recent manuscripts, the use of gender-neutral pronouns came up in a side-document for “Queries to the Author” regarding things they didn’t understand or wanted to clarify, or whatever.

This particular query came in regards to this phrase, culled from my forthcoming novel, Theirs Not to Reason Why: HELLFIRE.

“To a Salik, it means the prey they’ve been pursuing has turned out to be utterly unworthy of the time and energy spent on them.”

This is the copy-editor’s query:

Change “them” to “it” if “prey” is meant to be singular? Or change “has” to “have” if the prey is meant to be plural?

Here is my carefully explained reply…which I ended up thinking would make a good Tumblr post on using gender pronouns in writing:

****

…Let’s be honest.  As much as we love it (or we wouldn’t be in this industry), English is a half-arsed Frankensteinian construct that lacks proper gender-neutral pronouns.  However, with the growing transgender/transsexual movement, feminism/masculism/equality movements, and politically-correct-ness invading our ever-growing, ever-changing language, something has to be done…and something is being done.

Of all the many versions writers and activists and people in general have tried to come up with to address this problem in a fair-handed way, the most commonly used one is to use “they” instead of “he” or “she” when referring to a nebulous third person whose gender is unknown and utterly irrelevant to the question at hand.  (Some authors such as Jo Clayton have come up with “himmer” “hisser” and “heesh,” but I prefer “they.”)  “They,” “them,” and variants thereof are the leading contenders in our modern need for gender-neutral pronouns.

In this case, I am using the singular/gender-free version of “they” and “them” in place of the cumbersome he/she, him/her model.  (Can’t be done, you say?  Ahh…but am I referring to “you” in that “you say” as in a single person, or “you” as in a whole bunch of you?  As you can see, precedent for this sort of use has already been set within the English language.)

To parse this sentence correctly, each phrase must be dealt with separately.  “To a Salik” means we’re talking with a third person (singular)…but with the gender unknown.  With the Salik species, individuals can literally turn from male to female if they so wish (or if biology compels them to do so)…so to refer to one strictly as a “he” or a “she” is inaccurate. 

In using “they” in place of “he or she,” the phrase “they have been” is grammatically correct, with the verb agreeing with the pronoun.  (There is no difference between “you” plural and “you” singular when getting the verb to agree with it.).  Technically, this is also is a sentence in and of its own, structure-wise.

By removing that phrase from the sentence (and dropping the prepositional phrase that starts it) the sentence then reads, “[T]he prey has turned out to be utterly unworthy of the time and energy spent on them.”

“Prey” in this case refers to a single target.  This reflects back upon the singular Salik chasing it/her/him/them as found in the prepositional phrase starting the sentence, “To a Salik…”  Plus, by using “them” as the pronoun object, it subtly references the fact that we’re talking about a sentient being, a person, as the prey…and not a more easily dismissed dumb-animal “it.”

When I originally wrote this sentence, I had to think long and hard about whether or not the grammar was indeed correct.  This was doubly important as the character doing the speaking (Lieutenant Rico) is a polyglot, a natural linguist.  He has mastered many languages, and would be aware, even if only subconsciously, of the impact which the slightest change can have to a sentence’s meaning when one word is used instead of another.  So I had to put myself into the head of a man living hundreds of years into the future, long after the “they vs. cumbersome he-or-she” debate would have been settled.

…That, and it’s dialogue, where all the rules can be defenestrated out the nearest window if need be.  But I did give it quite a bit of thought.

The only remaining confusion then lies in the use of “they” to mean the Salik and “them” to mean the prey, but there’s no easy way to get around that.  *headdesk*  I can only take comfort in the fact that I’d still have that problem even if I used “he or she” instead of “they.”

****
…Normally replies to a copy-editor’s queries are nowhere near this long. (Honest!)  But as I wrote out the long-version explanation of why I’d chosen to word that sentence in that particular way, it occurred to me that this is something that should be addressed, or at least discussed.

The English language (or as it’s called in my story, Terranglo) is a living language.  It is constantly being used, tweaked, prodded, twisted, subtracted from as words fall into disuse…and added to as new words are either imported from other languages to clarify an idea (such as schadenfreude, German for the joy you experience in witnessing someone else’s misery), or made-up on the spot to define a new term (such as blogging).

As a living language, it is actually okay to add new terms.  Or even to redefine old ones  Shakespeare did it back at the turn of the 1600s, and we’re still doing it, with our cell phones and tablets, which are now computers instead of blocks of stone or paper, so on and so forth.  Of course, whether or not they will stick and be used by everyone depends on a whole host of factors outside the writer’s control.

One of these is indeed the use of gender-neutral pronouns.  In the above example, the author Jo Clayton invented “heesh”, “himmer” and “hisser” to describe an hermaphroditic god, a deity containing both male and female gender characteristics.  Part of me really likes the sound of those words, while part of the rabid-equalist-and-thus-a-feminist corner of my brain wants to harrumph and say, “They still sound overly male!”

In many languages, the masculine plural pronoun is often used to indicate both a group of all-males, and a group of males-and-females, while a feminine plural pronoun is reserved for all-female groups.  French is the most widely-known example.  The singular words “il” and “elle” are used for male and female single persons respectively, and “il” (French for “he”) is used for neutral-gender items, too.  “Ils” and “elles” are therefore used for masculine/mixed/neutral plurals and for female plurals respectively.

But,  “Awmigawww, it’s still maaaale!” the feminists might cry.  Or the politically correct might cry that, too, though they’d probably say something along the lines of, “I’m trying to talk about a transgender person without offending anyone, so how the *bleep* do I refer to them in third-person without getting their gender wrong?”  And what about those cases where you honestly don’t know which gender is going to be doing an action you’re trying to reference, and you need to make sure that either gender—and thus both—are included…but don’t want to constantly be doing the whole clunky “he or she,” “him or her” crap every single time?

This is where gender-neutral is really, really handy.  Now, you can use “they” and “them” and be valid.  Or you can be a Jo Clayton and invent a word set for yourself by combining them in a portmanteau (hisser = his/her, heesh = he/sh(e), himmer = him/(h)er).  Or you can literally come up with entirely new words, as C.J Cherryh did in her Chanur series.

In that universe, Cherryh actually had an alien race with three genders, and had to invent words for those three genders, and then tap-dance around which one stood which gender.  Gtst was the gender-neutral version applied to all three genders, since it was very hard for a non-member of that race to tell the three sexes apart.  Gtsto was one gender, gtsta another, and gtste was the third.

These things didn’t come up often in most of her books, as apparently one gender “was rarely ever seen outside of their homeworld” and “gender was never really discussed with outsiders” anyway, according to the universe’s lore, so she simply used gtst most of the time.  This allowed her to not have to keep track of all three genders in the course of most of the stories…aka, tap-dance around the subject.

This is valid, too, but it cannot always be done in every single situation.  Sometimes you just have to discuss gender.  Or sometimes you just have to use a pronoun, but don’t want to assign a gender.

So what do you do as a writer?  I’ll tell you what to do.  Be Consistent Within That Particular Universe.

Doesn’t sound too helpful, does it?  Well, think about it.  If Cherryh ever comes up with another alien race, or writes a story in a fantasy world instead of that particular science fiction universe, she cannot use gtst as a gender-neutral pronoun for them as well, because that’s a word from that one particular race in that one particular sci-fi universe.  But if she ever mentions that race in another book, you bet she’ll be using gtst and gtsto and whatever for that race and that race alone, every single time.  (I also like the sound of gtst for a gender-neutral pronoun, even more than “himmer.”)

Play around a little behind the scenes, figure out what you like, put it into a story for a particular universe/world/culture/species, and then be consistent.

You can also use this for things like forms of address.  How do you properly and politely call someone by name if you cannot use Mister or Miss?  This is another case where gender-neutral forms of address can come in handy.  I had to come up with something appropriate for the multiple sentient species in my military science fiction universe, because a spider-like K’Katta might not be able to tell the difference between the males and females of the reptilian Tlassian race, or vice versa.

So I invented a word (like Cherryh did) and gave it a meaning:  Meioa (may-OH-ah) which means “Honored One.”  Very gender-neutral, isn’t it?  There are suffixes, of course:  meioa-e means “Honored Female” and meioa-o means “Honored Male”…but it is considered more of an honor (and less informal/familiar) to simply address someone as “Meioa (Name).”

But that’s in that one universe.  I cannot turn around and use “meioa” in my fantasy romance Sons of Destiny universe.  So…I’m going to continue to use “they,” “them,” and “themselves” wherever possible…because just like using “you,” it can be used to address a single person with the gender unspecified, or used to address a whole group of people with the genders left unspecified.

I don’t want to go through the tedious political correctness of naming both genders, or using he/she, or even s/he or whatever, and thankfully I don’t have to.  Using “they” isn’t completely widespread just yet, but more and more people these days understand what you mean when you use it in the singular.  (Shakespeare might get confused, but if he’s here in the 21st century, the man probably has far bigger worries on his mind than gender-neutral pronoun use.)

Because if you love what you…sorry…  If they love what they do, a writer will find it worth their effort and time to get things just right for that particular story.

Let’s talk about POV, or Point Of View.  Hate it or love it, it’s gotta be done…and it needs to be done well.  Particularly when it is multiple Points Of View.  Let’s look at the different ways it can be done:

Two Separate Stories:

THE CAT (book 5 in my Sons of Destiny series) and THE STORM (book 6) took place at the same time in the same location with the same ensemble cast…but while each story started out the same, they quickly diverged into two separate plot-lines following two different couples, each of which faced different troubles that had to be overcome.  At several points in the story, the characters all interacted with each other (Same place, same location, same cast; it’s going to happen regardless), so I had to write a handful of the same scenes from different perspectives.

As it said in the foreword of each book, if you ask two different people to describe a conversation they’d just had with each other, or to describe a car crash they’d both seen, you’re going to get two slightly different tales.  Part of this is simply due to memory, part is due to what they were able to see/their perspective/viewpoints, and part from what they were forcusing on (which comes in part from internal/mental dialogue).  So for the two different book viewpoints, I knew in advance there were going to be differences, which I then worked to incorporate.

In book, one of the identical twin sisters is focused on talking about her favorite subject, the organization of a properly run city.  There are other things that happen in that scene, but because it was important to her character, that book covered the city-details.  In the other book, the other sister wasn’t interested in it, so I brushed off the scene with the other twin not really paying attention to what was going on, and instead focused on her internal thoughts and her ruminations upon her own problems…until the overall discussion of everyone at the dining table came around to something that piqued her interest.

For the technical side of writing the two scenes in two different books, I literally had THE CAT .doc (book 5) open on the left side of my screen (ALWAYS the left side; I was very careful about that), and THE STORM .doc (book 6) open on the right side.  In plotting out both stories, I figured out where in each day the two stories might have the characters interacting.  I’d write a bit in THE CAT until I got to a shared scene, wrote partway into it, then switched over to THE STORM and wrote up that book’s story until it caught up with that shared scene, write a bit more in book 6, then switched back to book 5, caught up to that bit, wrote a bit further, switched back to book 6, and so forth until I could get the characters out of that shared scene, then wrote their different scenes in whatever order I was inspired, until I caught up to another point in the day where they’d interact again.

There was also a third story perspective which the reader got to see in snippets of book 5 and/or book 6.  When both were put together, it wove a complete (if short) third story between the two; I did this because the youngest of the brothers (not the hero of either book) was acting as matchmaker to all his other brothers…and caused a serious problem in book 6 for the hero and heroine that spilled over into the action of book 5, because the heroine of book 5 was very protective of her sister, the heroine of book 6.

This third interwoven story helped further tie the books together, yet kept itself as its own story, because it was from the perspective of the youngest brother, who was not the hero-protagonist of either book 5 or 6.  I made sure that the snippets in book 5 made sense as part of the book 5 story, and that the snippets in book 6 were intrinsic to book 6, and thus not confusing…but the full mini-tale is best appreciated when both books’ snippets are read.
…Yes, I am this insane.  Notice how I haven’t done it since.  XD  (lmao)  I probably could, especially since this plotted-at-the-same-time, visibly placed side-by-side, playing-catch-up-as-each-story-progresses method worked really well, but I don’t have any plans at this time to repeat it.

Two Viewpoints In The Same Story/Scene:

Now the above example was for two separate books and not just two perspectives of the same scene…but the method I used worked well, since both stories had book-length plots.  The other alternative is to use two perspectives or Points Of View within the same scene.

Most editors these days don’t like it when writers attempt it, but that is mostly because most writers these days have not been taught how to do it correctly.  I have been reassured repeatedly by my editor that I do know how to do it correctly (and I was taught properly, way back when), and it is because I follow a few simple but vital rules for combining multiple POVs within a single scene.

1.  Make it VERY CLEAR whose perspective the scene is being viewed from; this must be done within the first 2 sentences of a perspective change, and preferably within the first sentence.

2. ONE Point Of View per paragraph.  One person’s perspective, one person’s thoughts, one person speaking*, and because you are already following Rule 1, it’ll be clear whose perspective that is.  This is not a license to constantly switch perspectives every single paragraph (dialogue has its own rules*), nor should it force you to switch constantly every single paragraph.  You just refrain from adding in other perspectives.

3.  No more than 2, maaaaybe 3 perspectives* in any given scene, and by preference for ease of reading, try to do no more than 2 Points Of View per scene unless you absolutely have to toss in a third.

4.  POVs should always be from main characters, or at most the secondary “side-kick” style characters; it should NEVER be from John Doe the Restaurant Waiter if John Doe is not important to the whole story and only appears in one scene.  We want to know the thoughts of Batman/Bruce Wayne, and perhaps the thoughts of Robin or Alfred, Bruce’s butler, but we don’t need to know the thoughts of the thug Batman beats up in scene #3 if that’s the only time the thug shows up in the overall story. John (or Jane) Doe’s thoughts will have virtually no impact on the story, and will not be around long enough for the reader to form a connection.  Readers need to form those connections with the main characters or important secondary characters instead.

5.  Is it NECESSARY to switch Points Of View between characters in this scene?  This is the most important thing to consider, even if it isn’t the most important rule (being Rule 1).  If it is, go for it, and be careful to follow all the rules.  If it isn’t, figure out whose viewpoint will best tell the story, and rewrite the scene to include only that.

6.  Consider the flow of the story.  Can the first POV person exit stage left directly after the shared screen, and can the second POV person enter stage right just before it starts, then take up the narrative of the story afterward?  If so, you may want to write two separate scenes instead, each from one person’s Point Of View…but make it clear that each scene is from that particular person’s point of view; have the character focus on a different aspect of what happened, allow them to think their unique perspective thoughts on what they witnessed or said, and then move on. 

If not…put the two perspectives into the same scene using the POV rules listed above.  If you’re only going to use the second person’s POV once…it falls under Rule 4, so either don’t do it and move on, or figure out how to get that second person’s POV expressed in at least 2-3 other points in the story, if that second person is important to the story.

In my third Sons of Destiny book, THE MASTER, there was a lot of confusion between what one person was saying and thinking, and what the second person was hearing and thinking, which influenced what they said, which in turn influenced what the first person heard, based upon the first person’s thoughts…which were not the same as the second person’s thoughts.  The confusion and miscommunication between the two main characters was central to the overall story plot. There was no way I was going to double up and write every single scene twice to keep just one POV per scene…but by following these rules, I was able to pull off the “he said, she thought, then she said, he thought” confusion, by allowing the reader to see both their perspectives and thoughts as well as hear the words being exchanged.

7.  *Here’s the fiddly bit rules:  If you have a crowd scene and want to convey its chaos, that the perspective for a brief moment is from many people instead of just one—or at least that what’s happening is happening to a sea of people—this is usually done through a jumble of dialogue within one paragraph (and only one).  I’m sure you’ve seen these moments before, and they tend to look something like this:

“I can’t believe he did that!”  “Burn him!” “Hang him!”  “Kill the bastard!”  “I want my money back!”  “No, don’t burn him there! You’ll set my store on fire!” “—Stop throwing rocks at me! Throw them at him!”  “Let’s string him up over there!”  “Get a rope!”

A scene with a jumble of people shouting or talking at nearly the same time is written in this style to convey the confusion, the chaos, and the difficulty in picking out any one voice from the crowd.  However, you will note that this is done strictly through dialogue, and not narrative. 

The very next paragraph is usually of the main (or current) character’s reaction to the chaos and the actions they themselves take, whether it’s to run from the mob trying to kill them, to try to stop the mob from killing the mob’s victim, or to run get a rope to help out.  Whatever it may be, the POV goes right back to the character observing the chaos.

The other fiddly bit rule for POV overlaps onto dialogue.  Dialogue should never be embedded in the middle of a narrative paragraph unless it is a snippet of overheard conversation, or a jumble of chaos as written above.  Dialogue should always either start a paragraph or end a paragraph…and if the person continues speaking, if dialogue is the last sentence of the first paragraph, it MUST be the first sentence of the second paragraph, and have no closing quote at the end of the first paragraph, to indicate to the reader it is still the same speaker.

Example:

Sharon looked at John.  He’d been an idiot, but then he wasn’t a local.  She knew he was a nice guy, and could forgive him for it, but she had to explain why he’d nearly been killed.  “I’m sorry they tried to hang you…and stone you, and burn you.  But you really shouldn’t have defaced the statue of the town’s founding dog.  They really loved that dog, John.  Brutus found the nugget of gold by nosing around in the mud at the riverbank’s edge, and that’s where the settlers set up the town, right there on that spot.

“I don’t think you really know just how upset you’ve made these people,”  she continued, looking across the river at the lights of Nugget Bank, shimmering in the heat that lingered even though night had finally fallen.  This was her town, filled with her family and friends.  “You’re going to have to work hard to make amends.”

“I know that,”  John murmured.  He wiped at the sweat beading on his face, partly from the muggy heat, partly from his close brush with death.  He could feel the bruises on his face with each stroke of his fingers, and winced.  “But I don’t know how I’ll do it just yet.”

“Well, figure it out,”  she told him.  She’d seen that wince, knew he was hurting, and was impatient to make sure he didn’t get hurt again.  But that was up to him.

…As you can see, when Sharon is still taking, each bit of dialogue starts with a ” opening quote-mark to let the reader know she’s still talking, but between paragraphs, there is no closing quote, to clue the reader that it’s still Sharon doing the talking.  There is an end-quote when she is finished (as there always should be when someone is done talking), and John’s words are started with a fresh quote-mark set.  We’re also very clear who is thinking what, because each character has been named.  Further, they’re different genders, so the use of pronouns helps immensely in differentiating who is thinking/speaking in a given paragraph.

If it were instead two men having this dialogue, it would look like this:

Chad looked at his friend.  John had been an idiot, but then he wasn’t a local.  Chad knew he was a nice guy, and could forgive him for it, but the farmhand had to explain why the city boy had nearly been killed.  “I’m sorry they tried to hang you…and stone you, and burn you.  But you really shouldn’t have defaced the statue of the town’s founding dog.  They really loved that dog, John.  Brutus found the nugget of gold by nosing around in the mud at the riverbank’s edge, and that’s where the settlers set up the town, right there on that spot.

“I don’t think you really know just how upset you’ve made these people,”  he continued, looking across the river at the lights of Nugget Bank, shimmering in the heat that lingered even though night had finally fallen.  This was his town, filled with his family and friends.  “You’re going to have to work hard to make amends.”

“I know that,”  John murmured.  He wiped at the sweat beading on his face, partly from the muggy heat, partly from his close brush with death.  He could feel the bruises on his face with each stroke of his fingers, and winced.  “But I don’t know how I’ll do it just yet.”

“Well, figure it out,”  Chad told him.  He’d seen that wince, knew John was hurting, and was impatient to make sure he didn’t get hurt again.  But that was up to John.

…

…When the POV characters are the same gender, the writer has to be even more careful to give clues to the reader about who is thinking what, and what is related to whom.  You’ll notice I added in a few more details in this version to make that clearer.  A lot of writers don’t know how to do this, and a lot of writers don’t practice it.  This sort of Point Of View switching has simple rules, yes, but it is not easy to pull off.  The only way to get it to flow smoothly is through lots of practice, lots of paying attention, and lots of dissecting who is saying or thinking or doing what.

If it isn’t important, put it into one person’s Point Of View per scene.  If it’s important to the plot, and will happen with that other character more than once, put it in, following these rules.  And remember, when you’re in doubt whether or not you’ve pulled it off, run the scene past another person.

Let your beta-reader read it and ask them if they knew who was doing or saying what and when they were doing/saying it, or if there were any points of confusion.  If you’ve followed these rules, there (hopefully) shouldn’t be that much confusion.  If not, you have the list of rules on how to fix them.

If you love what you do, the effort is totally worth it.

~Jean

P.S.  Tumblr has been frustrating me a lot in the last year due to the extreme difficulties I have had in trying to post long blog entries like this one; its scrolling mechanism is completely broken and will not allow me to paste-and-format easily.  Between that and the scramble to get a lot of stories written and shipped off to various editors, I haven’t had a lot of time to sit and think about these things.  I apologize for the lack of frequent updates.

…Here, have a plot-bunny.  I’m not sure what this one does; it just hopped onto the rest of the pile mobbing me.  Maybe you can figure it out?

Spelling, punctuation, grammar, and formatting actually do still count.

Slush pile readers, agents, and editors will discard stories filled with errors, inconsistancies, and a blatant lack of care for the craft of the written word.  Even if your name is Stephen King, they will be looking at the manuscript for how good it is as a story, and how well crafted it is as a piece of writing.  It may seem unfair, but if they see a lot of technical errors in the way words are spelled, how sentences are structured and punctuated, so on and so forth, they’re not going to want to give you a publishing contract because they will not believe you are professional enough to handle the demands of a contract.

In fact, most literary agencies and publishing houses have a standard “X number of errors in Y number of pages = toss it in the rejection pile” policy.  Whether it’s a written, official policy or not, they have too many other manuscripts to wade through to waste time on something that makes their eyes cross and their brains hurt..  Yes, you may have written a story, and you can be proud of that.  Yes, you may believe that it’s a good story, good enough to be published, and there’s nothing wrong with believing in yourself and your work.  However, that does not entitle you to carelessness, arrogance, or anything else which would suggest an unprofessional attitude.  This includes an unprofessional presentation of your written works.

There are points where you can stand up for the formatting you want, or the spelling of a specific word, particularly in genre fiction, but understand that most editors and publishers will want your novel to look its best in the eyes of your future readers.  Cooperate beforehand by getting your manuscript beta-edited by someone with good literary skills.  Cooperate during the review and editing process by carefully considering the changes suggested.  Strive diligently to look for and eliminate errors during the copy-editing and draft-editing stages.

Cultivate and cherish a reputation for producing clean manuscripts as well as the good stories we know you have inside of you.  Editors, agents, and especially your future readers will love you for it.

If you love what you do, it’s not nearly as tedious as you’d think to do it.

What The Heck Is Canon, & Why Is It So Important?

Please note I’m not talking about cannons (see the 2 Ns in the middle?), which is an oblong oversized gun thingy used to fire cannonballs, most commonly remembered as what pirates and merchant ships lobbed at each other in various movie scenes of ship-to-ship battles on the high seas.  I’m talking canon.  (1 N in the middle.)  The original definition referred to rules and regulations developed by a church’s governing members (usually the Catholic Church), but since this is a blog about writing, obviously I don’t mean that definition.

Instead, I’m talking about the definition of “canon” as it applies to authors and their writings:  the body of information outlining, delineating, or otherwise codifying how a particular fictional universe/world and its various systems work, as expressed in a consistent manner throughout each story set in that fictional world/universe.

I had to bold-text the important bit there, because it’s an unfortunate fact that a number of authors violate their own canon.  For many of us—and yes, I’ve discovered I have occasionally done this, too—it’s usually a minor infraction, the sort due to simple derpage over a small point.  For some, however, it instead emerges as a huge violation of established, story-pivotal facts.

Why Should Authors Care About Canon?

Because your readers will.  Allow me to introduce you to two terms which will explain why canon is so important to establish, remember, and adhere to in fiction writing:

Audience-Friendly

Suspension of Disbelief

Audience Friendly is how much your audience (aka your readers) will remain friendly to whatever you are telling them; once you take them past a certain point, however, they stop being willing to accept whatever you’re writing.

Suspension of Disbelief is what allows them to do this…up to a certain point.  If you’re writing about green-skinned people when we know there are no such things in the real world, then your audience has to suspend their disbelief in leafy-hued humans in order to continue reading.  If you make it a good, engaging story…your readers will be willing to suspend that disbelief.  If it’s a boring, absurd, or terrible story, you’ll stretch that suspension toward the snapping point.

When that happens, your audience will no longer be friendly toward what you write.

How does this all work?

Let’s take a handful of scenarios to explain how these three things work together, Canon, Audience Friendly, & Suspension of Disbelief:

1.  You’re writing a contemporary romance. (Just pretend you are, even if you aren’t.)  It’s about a gentleman barista who meets and falls in love with a high-powered executive lady over the lattés he prepares for her.

Canon in this instance is really easy to maintain, because a contemporary romance’s setting is more or less the real world.  It uses the same laws of physics, the same everyday terminology, and is in general a location and situation familiar to a lot of people.  If not personally as either a barista coffee-maker or a company executive, then at least through observation of others being those things and working those jobs.

It is very, very easy for people to Suspend their Disbelief over a story like this, because there’s virtually nothing out of the ordinary that needs the reader to be willing to believe.  High-powered execs tend to love fancy coffees made by baristas, and it’s quite possible a spark of attraction might bloom over a properly prepared brew.

Audience Friendly comes into play, however, if you have coffeehouse-savy readers who are going to spot every single mistake you make regarding coffee based terminology.  So, you’ll want to brush up on your coffeology and label that wonkapercolator contraption correctly…or your audience won’t be so friendly by the time they’re done reading about it.

2.  You’re writing a Cinderella story.  (Even if you aren’t, again just roll with it.)  We all know the storyline: impoverished young lady is denied her big chance by her cruel stepfamily at going to the grand ball to catch the prince’s eye, but her fairy godmother gives her that chance, along with a spiffy ballgown and ride, all of which will disappear at midnight if she doesn’t hotfoot it out of there in time.

Canon in this instance is still somewhat easy to maintain, because most English-speaking readers are familiar with the storyline.  Authors can deviate from it a little (such as swapping the gender roles, setting it in a modern era instead of a medieval or regency one, so on and so forth), but it still follows the same general format.  However, because you’ll want to make your version of Cinderella—or Cinderfella or whatever—different from all the others, you’ll need to establish and maintain your differences in a consistent manner.

Let’s say you’ve set the story in 800s France, around the time of Charlemagne.  Your Audience will remain Friendly because the story trope is familiar to your audiences, and a much-loved one.  Suspension of Disbelief will be relatively easy here, too, because it’s still set in a familiar Earth-type setting.  You will, however, want to research the clothing worn, the kinds of transportation available—they did not have carriages like the ones we normally associate with Cinderella, for example, but they did have wagons and so forth—and other such details to give the story a realistic feel for its setting.

But let’s say you’ve decided to go out on a limb and set it in an interstellar planet-hopping kingdom of some far-flung future universe.  Audience Friendly isn’t going to be as much of a problem in this scenario, because having established that it’s set in the twenty-eigth century, you can come up with all sorts of weird technology to explain interstellar travel from planet to planet, so on and so forth.

3.  So, Cinderella has to get from planet Zarkon to the prince’s homeworld of planet Denebulax, and her fairy godmother is actually a spaceship with Artificial Intelligence and some sort of clothing-manufacturing equipment on board.

If you’re still sticking with the Cinderella story trope, your Audience will continue to be Friendly toward it, however weird things may deviate from the original pre-twentieth century versions of the storyline.  That is, so long as they receive the love-story they’re expecting to read, they’ll remain friendly toward your writing.

Suspension of Disbelief starts to come into play once you take it out of the familiar universe/world of Earth As We Know And/Or Knew It.  Your readers have to suspend any disbelief they may have in life on other worlds, the ability to travel in a quick, safe, and timely manner between star systems, starships with Artifical Intelligence & fantastic tailoring sensibilities, so on and so forth.

People who already love science fiction (or fantasy) are usually already willing to suspend their disbelief, and are thus willing to be audience friendly toward these types of stories.  People who love romance are willing to cut you some slack if you deliver a good romance, and so they’re also willing to suspend disbelief and be a friendly audience.  Those who love both will love you if you write a good story.

…The moment you forget that Cinderella hails from the planet Zarkon, however, your readers are going to want to smack you over the head with your own book when they read how she’s suddenly from the planet Nerknon in Chapters 7 onward instead.  That’s a violation of canon.  If, however, you have a typo saying she’s from the planet Zakon instead of Zarkon, that’s just a typo, and a competent editor will catch that sort of thing…and beat you over your head with your manuscript for it.

4. Gibbula of Tersinchor is on a quest to fribbulang the Darsing Chalix, and needs the help of the dashing perogastator, Melulick the Magnificent and the zilgergeist raygun loaded with a thousand different plings!

Reader:  “…bwuh?”

Writer:  “It’s a high concept story!  You’ll love it!”

Nope.  You have completely lost your audience.  Too much bizarre terminology, too few reader-friendly concepts.  You’ve completely snapped the bungee cords on their ability to suspend disbelief, and have rendered your readers audience confused instead of audience friendly.  With a story like this, rather than being easy in making up stuff, it will be extremely difficult to maintain canon, because there are no common references in your terminology.

If a pling is supposed to be some type of ammunition, you’ll need to keep track of a thousand different kinds of it, or at least the several dozen used in the story, and you’ll need to make sure your zilgergeist raygun fires each pling in a manner consistent with every other pling type it fires.  And that’s just the one example in a story undoubtedly set with a hundred such things.

You can still write this weird story…but expect to include a huge glossary of terms, or your readers will be zilgergeisting their own various plings at your dunkerhelmet out of sheer frustration.

5.  In your 6 book fantasy action series, you established in books 1, 2, and 3 that your hero can transmute common wheat straw into gold, and only wheat straw.  This is how he makes his money as he travels around from continent to continent on the fantasy world of Tarman…and when he’s in the eastern kingdoms in book 4 where they grow only rice grains, he rapidly runs out of wheat stalks to make his money.  But then in book 5, he’s suddenly able to transmute regular grass stalks into gold, too, and is thus able to survive.  …Wait, bwuh?

In this example, there is no explanation of how your hero, Rumpy, is able to suddenly do something he could not do before.  But even if you explain it in a very good way, you’re still asking your readers to suspend their disbelief in your previously established facts—aka, wheat stalks only + spinning wheel = gold—so that they can continue on with the story.

The explanation has to be really good to get over the fact you just violated your own canon.   “The Fairy Council has said we need to diversify and look at new biogold resource materials.  We want you to experiment with sedge and other wild/margin grasses not found on farmable croplands, Rumpy, *sparklywandswish*, so we’re now letting you transmute grass into gold, too!”

And if you don’t explain it in a believable way?  Boom!  You’ve just fired a cannon shot at your readers’ heads, instead of a canon shot.

So How Do I Maintain Canon Consistently?

Take notes.  Lots of them.  Do your research on things like 800s Carolingian era clothing, food, vehicles, technology, et cetera, and write down what you uncovered, plus where you found it.

If you’re making up stuff about the planets Zarkon and Denebulax, write that all down in a seperate .doc file or on paper so you’ll be able to find and reread it quickly whenever needed, and reference it.  Repeatedly.  If your hero can spin wheat straw into gold, does that include the stalks of the closely related cousin-grain spelt, or just common wheat?

It may seem tedious and redundant, but I have seen canon mistakes in stories that were only 2,000 words long.  Single-shot stories, only 2,000 words in length, and they still had mistakes in them.  You’d think that an author would be able to keep track of details in such a short tale, but mistakes still happen.

A Note On Canon vs. Continuity

Continuity does overlap with canon, and vice versa.  However, continuity tends to focus more on the fiddly details of things like,  “Okay, on this page in this scene, he’s wearing blue jeans and a black shirt…but two pages later, still the same scene with no mention of a change of clothes, he’s now wearing black jeans and a black shirt.”  That’s a continuity error.  A canon error would be more like the straw = gold thing.

Continuity & canon error: The heroine recognizes the prince at the ball because supposedly only the prince is allowed to wear a gold sash over his clothes…and the ambassador from the next kingdom over is described as wearing a gold sash as well.  Maybe it was meant to be gold belt instead of a baldric sash in the author’s mind, but it didn’t get described right on the page, leading to the error.

This gold sash vs. gold sash moment is also a good example of a minor error which doesn’t impact the story all that much…but which some readers will still pick up on and snort over, which is where you start clashing against Suspension of Disbelief and Audience Friendly-ness.

Anything that makes your readers snort and roll their eyes, that’s a point where you’re starting to lose your readership’s interest.  That’s why you need to care about these things.

At least, if you love what you do, and you want others to love your stories, too…

Why The Heck Do We Write?

The most important reason to write fiction is because you like telling stories.  If you don’t like telling stories, the lack of enthusiasm will show, and your readers will lose interest and stop following you.  In contrast, if you love telling stories, your readers will enjoy your enthusiasm and follow you with equal interest, even if your spleling skills are trrebile.

If you love what you do, then do it.  (Provided it harms no one else and breaks no laws, of course, but that’s a given.)

But…after you’ve acknowledged the need to write, most authors feel another need, to share them with others.  To share our stories, inflict them on family and friends, offer them like free samples to strangers, and hopefully even get to dangle them like meat over a hungry lion once some of our readers are addicted to the fresh, yummy taste of our prose. 

Of course, this analogy brings up the possibility of said lions attempting to bite our arms off in the hunger for more, more, more!  Which brings us to the topic of how to behave, both as an author and as a reader.

…By the way, this is a LONG post.  I’d break it up into two sections, but it’s all important, and most of it can be applied to online or in person etiquette, so here we go!

Readers & Etiquette

Yep, I’m going after you guys, first. Mainly because all authors are readers, too.  We all started out as readers, and we still are readers.  Even if the only thing we read that we haven’t written ourselves are the comments posted by other readers, we’re readers.  But in specific, I’m talking about what readers should and should not do when posting feedback after having read a story.

You have the right to hold your own opinion.  You also have the right to share that opinion in a peaceful discussion.  You do not, however, have the right to wield that opinion like a chainsaw, brutally chopping your way through the bodies of the books and the authors in your path.  Texas Chainsaw Massacre was only a good idea for an entertaining horror story.  It should not be how you live your life.

If you did not like something in a story; that’s alright.  It’s your opinion and you are entitled to hold it.  You can even share it with friends and family.  But if you want your opinion to be respected (even if not everyone will agree with it, which not everyone will), then you need to present it in a way that doesn’t make you look like the back end of a donkey.

Ask yourself why you didn’t like the story?  What specific details did you not like? What didn’t work for you?  What did work for you?  Was there anything you did like, and why did you like it?  These specific details about what you did and did not like in a story are the sorts of things you not only could post, but should post.  Most good authors will want to read those details, because it will help them as writers to know which areas are weak and need more work.

Do not apply a gallon of gasoline to your commentary prose and set it alight with a bazooka.  (I’m speaking figuratively here, but it should also be pretty obvious that doing so literally is also A Very Bad Idea.  Don’t try this at home, folks!)  Flaming is bad.

What Do You Mean, Flaming?

I mean, writing anything that is inflammatory, derogatory, vituperative, vicious, abusive…so on and so forth.  Particularly when you shift your commentary from the story itself to a generalization of all an author’s works, or worse, when you start attacking the author directly.

This applies to private correspondences as well as to the things you post online via social media such as Facebook and Twitter, or via reviewer/commentary boxes on Barnes & Noble or Amazon.com.  In this day and age, there is very little that is actually private, because emails can be shared—again and again—with just the click of a mouse button.

Readers, one of the things you must keep in mind at all times is that the actions and opinions of characters in a story you didn’t like are just that:  actions and opinions of characters in a story.  Please do not make the mistake of thinking these actions and opinions are the same as the author’s own words and deeds.  Seriously, don’t assume that.

If you go after an author for such things, then you have to go after Stephen King first and foremost for being a perverted sick bastard who murders people and makes little kids find their bodies alongside railroad tracks…which we ALL know is patently absurd and untrue.

He’s just writing those kinds of stories; he’s not actually a serial killer.  We’re all just writing these stories as authors; we’re not acting them out ourselves.  (Remember, I’m talking about fiction stories here, not the autobiographies of serial killers.)

Another example of this, drawn from my own life:  An editor who contacted me for a short story in an anthology (all of which shall remain unnamed) asked me to write a short story.  I asked what level of movie-rating it should have, and the editor said I could write whatever level I wanted.  So I took them at their word.

I sent in the story, then a short while later received an email back.  An email accusing me of having the foulest disposition in existence, disparaging my morals, self-control, and sense of personal etiquette, and accusing me more or less of being the sort of person who would engage in drunken bar brawls at the drop of a hat, with the implication that I would endanger the health and well-being of said editor (NOT my editor at Berkley/Ace, I want to make that perfectly clear)…and that I’d do so in a bout of random violence with the implication that such random bouts are part and parcel of my nature.

…Bwuh?  o.0

Based on a story I wrote?  A fiction story?  …I’d like to point out at this moment that I almost never drink alcohol, and my personal policy as a practical pacifist is that I prefer not to start fights.  I may know how to end them, and am capable of ending them, but I prefer not to fight.  I also have not been in a bar in over half a decade…so long as one doesn’t count situations where the bar portion of a restaurant was the only location with seating available.  In short, I don’t drink, and I don’t fight.

Of course, I’ll allow that this particular editor who had contacted me for a freelance project didn’t know me that well, and so couldn’t have known whether or not I did the things they were accusing me of.  Maybe I was actually the sort of person who would get inebriated and start swinging and swearing like a stereotypical sailor.  How could they know?  …But then, that’s the point, isn’t it?  This reader (editors are readers, too; they’re just pre-readers with a say in the story) was making a personal attack on me, the writer, based on a story I had written, with no knowledge whatsoever of whether or not I personally was indeed capable of such behavior.

I am human; I know I have my flaws and I have buttons which can be pushed.  I will admit to being highly offended by this unwarranted personal attack.  I still am indignant over the fact that it was a personal attack, though this whole thing took place a few years ago.  I wanted to strike back at this perceived attack on my good character.

Who wouldn’t want to defend themselves with such an unjust and utterly wrong accusation being flung at them in an email which looked like it itself had been written in a drunken ranting rage?  (Whether or not said editor was inebriated, I have no idea; this is just an analogy of my reaction to it, since I was having a hard time accepting that a professional editor would make such baseless accusations.)

Well, I will admit I rewrote my reply email to said editor a good dozen times before actually hitting Send, striving to find a note between my indignant “oh no you di’n’t!” immediate reaction, and proper professional politeness.  What I finally sent, therefore, was far closer to professional politeness than indignation—however righteous it might have been—and I received an email of apology from said freelance work editor…but the damage to that editor’s reputation had already been done in my eyes.

Never make personal attacks against an author…or an editor, or another reviewer, or whoever.  It only makes you look like the bad guy.

On the other hand, if you did not like a story, and can express in polite terms the reasons why you did not like a particular story, you do have the right to do so.  In polite terms.  How an author—or even another reader—responds to that dislike is the other side of the coin.

Authors & Etiquette

Your reputation as a writer is worth your weight in gold.  This is because you are selling yourself as a brand.  You are like Johnson & Johnson, which is a brand of first aid supplies here in the U.S.

Any old Johnson, singular, would make an American go “meh” and maybe even shrug, not knowing who or what it referenced—especially as there are a lot of us Johnsons running around out there—but put it together with an ampersand, and “Oh, Johnson & Johnson—the bandaid people!”  The lightbulb of recognition has popped on, and voila, they know exactly who you’re talking about.  (They actually make a lot more than bandaids, but that’s their most famous product.)

The same goes for books, not just commercial products.  “Philip K. Dick? Ohhh, Bladerunner!  I loved that movie!”  “J. K. Rowling? Harry Potter, awesome!”  “Stephen King, uhhh, what did he write, again?”  (Just teasing.)

By producing a story, you are linking your name to it.  Or by producing many stories in a particular genre, you are linking your name to that.  This linking brings along a responsibility to link your name carefully.  Remember, you are promoting a brand.

With that in mind, the ONLY time an author should ever be rude to an audience or readership is if they are a Shock Jock like Howard Stern, where the audience expects the author to be rude to them.  In all other instances, authors should be polite to their readers, critics, reviewers, publishers, editors, agents, copy-editors, so on and so forth.  But there really is only one Howard Stern (thank goodness), so let’s remove him and his genre from the equation. With him removed, allow me to restate the above warning:

Authors should be polite to everyone in all instances.  Particularly in print, whether via paper or electronic media.  Doubly so with electronic media, since print usually goes through some sort of editorial process, whereas Twitter and the like are pretty much instantaneous, from foot-in-mouth to world-wide-web in the click of a mouse button.

In recent history, a handful of authors have…well, flipped and gone off the deep end with posts attacking reviewers, readers, editors, whatever.  Most were made in reply to opinions which were posted online, usually posts casting the author’s works in an unfavorable light.

I repeat: These were opinions posted online.

Authors, please remember than an opinion is simply one person’s viewpoint on a subject.  That one person does not represent the entire world’s opinion (even if the person posting said opinion claims this, it isn’t true), and there will always be at least one other person who holds the opposite view.  Mind you, the ratio of dislikes to likes could be 100 to 1, but that isn’t the thing to look at when considering how to respond to these “I really disliked Author Z’s story, X Goes to Y” posts.

No matter how searingly hot a commenter’s flames may get, do not respond in kind.  Do not flame them back.  You will trash your reputation faster than you can say, “Hey, there’s a recycle bin!” in the Pacific Northwest.  (A mouse click posting a reply takes considerably less time than saying, “Hey, there’s a recycle bin!”, however long it may have taken you to write out your flaming retort.)

You can, of course, write out your retort.  I don’t deny it can be cathartic sometimes to get snarky and horrible right back.  We are human beings, or at least are pretending to be human beings, so we do occasionally get the urge to sass right back.  Just don’t post it.

Even The President Wouldn’t Post That Online!

Abraham Lincoln was a bit of a hothead in his youth, and posted a series of letters to the editor of certain newspapers; the end result was that he was called out in a duel.  Instead of being killed at the theater in later life, he could have been killed (and very luckily was not) on a misty morning somewhere in a patch of wilderness.  Realizing this was the wrong way to go about expressing his opinions, he changed his methods.

He didn’t stop writing vituperative retorts…but he did stop mailing them, or sending them in to newspapers.  Instead, he wrote out his angry feelings as a letter, then set that letter aside for several days, until he knew he could think rationally and calmly.  Then he wrote a much different letter, a polite one, and sent that one, either as an actual letter, or to the newspaper as an editorial commentary, or whatever.  (This example can be read in more detail in a marvelous book which everyone should read, How To Win Friends And Influence People by Dale Carnegie.  Get it, read it, incorporate it into how you live your life.  It works.)

We may not be Abraham Lincoln, but we can learn from what he chose to do.  So, while I’m not denying you the right to vent your feelings as an offended or hurt human, I am strongly advising you to not post those ventings.  Remember, anything you post online or in print will represent the brand image you are trying to promote.  As the vast majority of us want people to like us, we need to expose our likeable qualities, not dislikeable ones.

Because of this, authors have a particularly high responsibility to be polite in public formats.  If you torpedo your career by being someone who put their head where the sun doesn’t shine, you will find it extremely difficult to restore the reputation you will have shattered via your careless disdain, arrogance, or rage.

Word-of-mouth will spread bad news three times as fast as good news, so you need to be four times as careful about what sort of reputation you have.

Getting back to what I was saying above about flipping out, in the last half-year, word-of-mouth has spread news of a couple of authors responding very badly to unfavorable reviews of their works.  Now, there are tens of thousands of fiction writers in the U.S. alone, and these were just a small handful of authors who were reacting badly, but it cast a bad light on the whole community where author/reviewer relationships were concerned.

In one of the more recent of these incidents, the reviewer posted a bad review of a particular book.  In their opinion, it was simply a poorly written story, and they gave the details as to why they thought it was so.  The author attacked the reviewer personally…and within a matter of hours of the author’s retort being posted, people all across the country were chatting about it on Twitter.

Admittedly a few people will have picked up copies of the book to see if it really was “all that bad”…but many more people will now be avoiding that book and particularly that author, whereas before they might have given author and stories a fair try.  In that one act of indignation, righteous or otherwise, that author has lost many more potential book sales than they gained through morbid curiosity.

Maybe the reviewer was wrong; reviews and comments are opinions, after all.  But the author still torpedoed their reputation with their flaming response, and torpedoed it soundly when he or she attacked the reviewer personally.  It wasn’t a case of the reader accusing the author of being a drunken bar brawler, but the attack by the author on the reviewer was still just as inappropriate as it would have been the other way around.  Author or Reader, don’t do it.

Bad publicity may still be publicity, but it’s a single splash in a small bucket compared to the bathtub filled to the brim that you can get from polite actions.  That bathtub will take a lot longer to fill than the splash-in-the-bucket, true, but if you’re an author and you love what you do, you’re not in this for a splash-in-the-bucket moment.  You’re in this for the long haul.

One Big Caveat About Written Comments

Be very careful of what you accuse another person of doing or being.  It’s not just your own reputation on the line, but theirs.  And yes, you should be concerned about how you treat someone else’s reputation.  Not just because it’ll reflect back on your own, or because they may actually not have done what you accuse them of doing, and you shouldn’t be mean to people anyway, yadda yadda…but because of the risk of Defamation, aka Slander and Libel.  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation)

And yes, posting defamatory comments in social media counts as a potential case of Libel.  It’s in print, it’s being broadcast, it’s posted in a tangible form that doesn’t require someone actually on hand to hear it come out of your own mouth in person…so it counts.

Now, most cases of defamatory comments can be brushed off as opinions.  “I don’t like her hair, she looks like a freaking pomeranian, ugly as sin!” is one example of a defamatory opinion.  Does it offend the target?  Probably.  Will it offend anyone else reading those comments?  Probably, and particularly if they like pomeranian dogs and think they’re adorable.

But is it bad enough to justify a legal suit?  Probably not.  Most people won’t experience grievous mental and emotional anguish over such things.  The problem comes when someone repeatedly harasses and vilifies a target.  Whatever reason you may think you have for doing so, it’s not good enough.  It’s never a good enough reason to try to ruin someone’s reputation, mental health, and life.

People will flock to support someone who is being attacked, because we like coming to the defense and/or rescue of others.  If you really want people to stop reading it, if you want interest in a particular book to die down, then just keep your mouth shut and let it die a quiet death.

You’ll be a lot closer to your goal if you handle the matter that way, and keep your own reputation healthy enough to be worth your weight in gold.

Etiquette In Person

Needless to say, ALL of this applies to encounters in person.  This is doubly vital because you don’t have the anonymity of a computer screen protecting others from seeing your face.  Readers, be polite around authors, even if you don’t like their writing.  In the U.S., the Parody Law means we can tell you “be careful, or you’ll end up in my novel!” because we do have the right to write parody, lampooning someone in many creatively indirect ways.  (Authors, try to resist doing this as it can backfire unless you really know what you’re doing…but the threat is still there.)

Authors, be very polite to your readers; they now have a face and a personality to attach to their mental images of your books, and they will talk about you after they’ve meet you.  They’ll talk about having “met Author Z at Convention ABC” for years to come.  It’s up to you as to whether or not that meeting is a pleasant memory or a horrible nightmare to be told and retold over the years.

Readers, I’m one of you.  I know how much you want to gush over your favorite author(s).  I WAS one of you just recently at a convention where the Guest of Honor was my absolute favorite author, Alan Dean Foster, where I had the distinct honor and pleasure of serving alongside him on 3 panels—squee!!  This was an incredible thrill for me.  Like a skier meeting former Olympics champion Picabo Street, or an actor meeting Tom Cruise.  Big.  Huge.  Thrill.  Zomg, Squee!

…However, I confined my squeeing and gushing to the months before and after the convention, and did very little gushing in person.  Why?  Two reasons.  One, because I didn’t want to make Mr. Foster feel uncomfortable.  And two, I wanted to present myself as a professional at all times during the convention.

As a reader, when you encounter your favorite author (or actor, sports celebrity, whatever), remember that they’re human beings.  They have flaws, they need to visit the bathroom, and they can feel crowded or overwhelmed.  Authors are often a bit introverted compared to, say, actors, and their best work is often done for hours and days at end all alone, so crowding them with enthusiasm can often invoke feelings of panic or distaste.  Not every author is going to be a “huggy type” either, so be careful with the displays of affection.  Some will, some won’t.

The worst way to approach an author?  Screaming, cursing, yelling, flailing, throwing things at them.  Second worst?  When your choice of moment is very, very awkward.  If your target is forced to say something like,  “Um…I’m trying to get to the restroom, here.  Can it please wait until I get out?  Thank you,” …then you really should be polite and wait, and don’t chase them up and down the aisle between stalls while they’re frantically trying not to burst their bladder.

The best ways to approach an author is with a smile, maybe offer a hand to shake, and offer them a direct, polite,  “You’re Author Z, right?  I’ve really enjoyed your books, thank you!”

Caveat:  Don’t grab their hand yourself and squeeze if they don’t clasp it when offered; they may have arthritis and are trying to preserve their fingers for typing, or they may have a cold they don’t want to share.  (How selfish of them; but still, it’s their right not to share.)

You can, if there seems to be a little bit of time, go into some detail,  “I liked the scene where the cat rode the dog, in your book X Goes To Y!”  but bear in mind that most places you meet authors, they’re at a convention where they’re on several panels and their time is therefore not entirely their own.  But we authors love hearing when we’ve pleased our readers, and particularly why we pleased you.

As for things that displeased you in an author’s works, remember that flames spoken in person are much more dangerous than ones printed in papers or posted online.  Libel (printed) is easier to prove than Slander (spoken), but the problem with ranting at someone in person is that it will most often be perceived as an attack, and the person you are attacking will defend themselves…most often with the same level of heat or more.

Verbal arguments can also escalate into physical ones, and attacking someone physically is never appropriate.  You can defend yourself, but don’t start any fights.  This means being smart enough to not start verbal fights, too.

So how do you express distaste appropriately?  It’s simple.  Keep it simple.  Keep it your opinion, too.  An excellent example of this which I can pull from my own works is from my first and second fantasy romance novels, The Sword and The Wolf.  I had numerous readers posting how they didn’t like the first heroine, Kelly, but loved the second heroine, Alys…and then other readers spoke up saying they hated Alys but loved Kelly!

Which side was right, in that argument?  Both sides were right.  Because these are personal opinions.  So, to give you a good example of how to express dislike properly when meeting an author in person (or even online), here’s a little exercise:

Reader Says: “I read your book, X Goes To Y.  Some of it was okay, but I didn’t like (cite specific sample here) because I personally thought (calm reason stating why you didn’t like it).”

Author Responds:  “Thank you for your thoughts on the matter.  I’ll take that into consideration with my next story.”  …Whether or not the author changes anything in the next story is irrelevant; they have at least given consideration in that moment, and that counts.  They’ll also probably think about it later, when they’re not feeling on-the-spot pressure, which can often lead them into a defensive posture.

Or an author can say:  “I’m sorry that upset you.  My reasons for writing it that way were (fill-in-the-blank in a calm and rational way…but keep it short and simple.)”

Or, if it’s a matter of errors, or a bad cover:  “I’m sorry for all the (whatever) that slipped through the editing and review process.  Unfortunately, once the book goes to print, there’s nothing an author can do to change things.”

Reader’s response to the author’s response to their comments:  “Thank you for listening to me.”

Author’s response to the reader’s response to the author’s response to…:  “You’re welcome; I do appreciate hearing from my readers, whatever their thoughts.”

Authors, the reason why you should appreciate hearing from them, and let them know you appreciate it even when they don’t have nice things to say, is because they actually got off their butts and talked to you.  In text or in person, they are taking a precious bit of time—irretrievable time, which they have chosen to spend on you—out of their day just to communicate with you.  Not more than one in a hundred readers will bother to do that…and I’m probably being optimistic when I say that.

Even if a reader doesn’t like your story, if you treat their opinions with respect, they will remember YOU gave them that respect in spite of their negative views of whatever it was they didn’t like in your stories.  If nothing else, that reader or critic or whoever will walk away thinking,  “Well, okay, X Goes to Y was a crappy novel, but that author was actually really nice!  I wouldn’t mind talking with him/her again!”  …Which can translate to,  “Maybe I’ll give their next book a chance?”

Whether you’re an author or a reader, your reputation is worth your weight in gold.  Treasure it and treat it as such.  If you love what you do, it’s worth the effort, trust me.

Stalled on the prose highway?  Here are some handy-dandy tricks that’ll work even better than AAA.  (Because AAA doesn’t fix flat plot-bunnies, just tires.  Sorry.)

We all get this.  Maybe not as a direct response to the ending of National Novel Writing Month, but we all get to this point in our writing, where the steam in our engine just peters out.  Maybe it’s just the post-rush feel you got when you were banging out a really intense, fantastic scene…and…now you don’t know what else to write, or you just don’t know how to get from point H to point K in your plotlines.  Maybe you honestly have no idea what those letters in between should be, or you may have all or most of the intervening letter-scenes lined up in your mind, but…the motivation is gone.

This is a very common problem.

I have grown to dislike the term “writer’s block” for a very good reason.  I have a very vivid imagination, and when I think writer’s block, I think of a big ol’ toy block or chunk of stone masonry thumping down on the path in front of me, literally blocking my way.  Thick trees and bushes obscure the sides of the trail, and I get mentally stuck with no easy way forward.  The more I focus on the fact that I’m stuck, the bigger and broader that block-wall grows.

As writers, most of us write visually.  We imagine in our heads how the scene goes, and we try to describe what we see.  So this “block” visualization, imagined consciously or unconsciously, becomes a serious stumbling block.

Instead, let’s consider calling it something else.  Lots of something elses.  Anything to get the mind off that huge wall blocking our mind’s way.  One example would be:

Go Without NaNo.

(For those of you still not sure what NaNo is, or WriMo as some people call it, it’s the shortened version of NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month.  Usually it takes place from November 1st to November 30th; you sit down and start writing, and try to write 50,000 words by the end of the month, with the goal of just writing.  This goes back to the biggest stumbling block in any writer’s life, Starting The Damn Book…which I covered in a much earlier post.)

If we call it that, then it focuses our minds on the word ”go” in a very positive way.  The path is open and clear when we think about going forward.  It’s a way to remind ourselves that we can write, if we just start moving our mental feet.  A single step forward, a single sentence or a single paragraph, is all that it takes to put ourselves in motion.

Visualize yourself traveling along that path from point H to point K.  Go back over your notes.  Figure out what you need to add to the end of the last scene to make that transition to the next one, and Go for it.  We don’t have to have a formal contract with ourselves to keep writing once November or whatever-month-you-picked has come to an end.  It can help out a lot, yes, but it isn’t necessary.  All you need to do is tell yourself you can do it, and can keep doing it.  Several times, if need be.

With that in mind, let’s discuss the next possible block-breaking way to look at your writing….

WriMo, You Foo’!

(It helps to imagine saying this one in a Mr. T accent, I think…)  The acronym variation WriMo kind of sounds like someone saying Write More.  This is a very positive way of thinking about it.  It’s also a pledge to continue the spirit of National Novel Writing Month.

Now, if you haven’t done NaNo this last November, do not despair!  Sure, December is a holiday-choked month filled with distractions, but make your New Year’s pledge to turn January into your next Novel Writing Month. (Much easier than pledging to lose 30 pounds, imho.)  Just promise yourself you’ll carve out time in your daily routine to write 1,700 words each day, and then do it from January 1st to January 31st.  And then do it again for February, or for March, and maybe for April, and…

NaNoWriMo was conceived as a way to break down the Start The Damned Book barrier.  And technically the rules say you should be working on a brand-new project when you start NaNo.  But lots of us have used it to break down the writer’s block issues keeping us from the goal of Finish The Damn Book, too, the second biggest hurdle in writing.  I myself tend to use it to get through a piece I’m already working on.  That’s why I call this segment of block-breaking the WriMo way…because Ah pity the foo’ who don’t use it to Write Mo’!

(Okay, so I can’t do a decent Mr. T accent.  Oh well…)

The Bartering System

Okay, you’ve been writing for many days now.  The plot-bunnies have been hopping about madly, biting your ankles and demanding that you write, write write…but now they’re exhausted.  They’ve flopped all over your office floor like the dirty clothes in your bedroom.  You may have neglected a few household chores and such for NaNo or whatever had you writing so hard for so long…and you reeeeeally need to do household chorse.  But that doesn’t mean you should completely neglect your writing for doing them.

Just barter with yourself,  “I have a craptonne of laundry to do.  I’ll either position the doors so I can hear the buzzer, or set myself a timer, or take my laptop to the laundromat, and do a load or three and write while they’re washing and drying.  I’ll write while I’m waiting for the next load to be processed through.”

Or maybe, “Ugh, I have to sweep and mop the kitchen floor…  I’ll do it, and while I’m waiting to dry, I’ll write 300 words.  As soon as I hit 300, I’ll put everything back in the kitchen where it should be, then write 300 more.  As soon as I write 300, I’ll get up and vacuum the living room and hallway.  As soon as that’s done, I’ll write 200 words, or until it’s 6pm, because then I’ll have to make dinner.  Once I’ve made dinner and the dinner dishes are handled, then I’ll write…”

When the writing block wall is huge and awful, sometimes you have to barter-promise yourself,  “If I write 300 words, I can have a nice treat.”  Watch a sitcom, watch a favorite YouTube video, listen to a song (though you can listen to favorite songs while writing; just try to match the mood of the song to the mood of your story), have a single cookie… Make sure it’s just a single cookie, though; writing is already a sedentary job, so you don’t want to add calories you’re not burning off.  This version is the “reward yourself for doing your work” scenario.

When the neglected chore is huge and awful, use the writing as a way to treat yourself, instead of that t.v. show or that cookie.  “Ugh, if I scrub the toilet and wipe down the counters and mirror, I can write 150 words before I have to sweep and mop the bathroom floor…and when it’s mopped, I can sit down and write 200 words while it dries, yay!”

Bartering gets your brain moving in the right direction for actual writing, associating it with treats and pleasantness.

Wordmongering, Go!

This is a phenomenon I encountered on Twitter.  It’s like a tiny seed of NaNoWriMo inserted into the soil of your day.  Usually starting on the hour and ending on the half-hour, you sit down at, say 5:00pm sharp, and write write write write write until 5:30pm.  Like WriMo, the important thing is to write.  If you get only 3 words done…well, it was a crappy effort, but at least it was an effort.  If you get 300 words done, wow!  If you get 3,000 words done…I’d suspect you of cheating, lol.  Either that, or of drinking waaaay too much caffeine for health’s sake.  (My average has been 600-900 words in the past; I have yet to break 1,000, though I’ll try to achieve that goal this coming month.)

Wordmongering is best done on an instant-text service like Twitter, because you can use the hashtag #wordmongering to find other people doing it, or to get them interested in doing it.  (You can also use #wordwar, which I’ll discuss in a moment.)  Wordmongering is a form of Bartering.  You barter half an hour of time for writing in exchange for half an hour of doing other things.

The nice thing about this one?  It reminds you to get up, stretch, look away from the computer, go do a couple chores, so on and so forth.  And if you do it properly, you can literally be stopped mid-sentence by the timer going off, so that when the next start of the hour comes around, you’ll be eager and raring to finish that sentence and start on the next, and the next, and the…

If you’re not sure what to write next?  Use the non-writing half hour to go back over your plot notes and figure out what you need to do next.  This is a very good system.

WordWar!  Huah!  What is it good for?

Heheh, couldn’t resist…  Wordwars are not only good for writing, they’re fantastic motivators.  You can use them via email, LiveJournal, Twitter (hashtag #wordwar), Facebook, whatever—and on Twitter, it’s such a commonly sought thing, you can search the hashtag list for a random stranger and challenge them or accept their challenge.  That means you can usually find someone within a single day for a good wordwar partner.  But you can still ask your writer friends.  And sometimes, they’ll ask you.

Several years back, I got stuck behind not just one but two writer’s block barriers, because I was writing both THE CAT and THE STORM at the same time, books 5 and 6 of my bestselling Sons of Destiny series.  I had to write them at the same time because while they were two different stories diverging to follow two different pairs of main characters, they did take place at the same time, in the same place, with the same ensemble cast of characters.

My dear friend Bart, chief editor for Crossed Genres, a former online anthology turned small press publishing house, had a 3 day weekend where his wife and son were going to be out of town.  So that he wouldn’t pine too much in their absence (it’s good to keep busy when your loved ones are elsewhere), and so that he could take advantage of the peace and quiet (hehe), he challenged me to a Wordwar.

That single act of friendly, encouraging, healthy competition broke down both stumbling blocks.  We raced neck and neck through all three days, posting our word counts at the end of each day, and he put forth an herculean effort…to the point where I barely beat him by less than 300 words, when each of us had easily written 25,000 words in just 3 days.  (That’d be like cramming NaNo into just 6 days instead of a nice, leisurely 30.)

And we’ll be doing it again, too.  I consider this method a very healthy form of competition, because you’re not just supposed to be trying to beat the other person’s wordcount, you’re also supposed to be encouraging them to try to beat you.  You’re encouraging each other to write, write, and write some more, and that’s always good.

One caveat: Confine your wordwars to a specific timeframe.  “The most number of words in 30 minutes,” rather than “whoever gets to 300 words first!”  The former one encourages your writing to actually involve thought concerning your main plot and current scene’s needs.  The second one just encourages you to write “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” 30 times to achieve that 300 word goal…and we all know how that turned out, yes?  Not such a good way to break through the writer’s block barrier, no.

Re-Read The Damned Book

This one is so intuitively simple, a lot of us writers derp and miss doing it.  Yes, myself included.  You get so focused on a particular scene deep into the middle of the book, you forget to look up from the road you’re paving to make sure it’s being paved in the right direction.  And then, when the steam runs out of your steampunk plot-bunnies or you’re out of Mountain Dew, you discover you can’t figure out where to go next or what to do.

The simplest solution is to go back to the start of the story and read it.  Resist the temptation to edit, though!  This is very important at this stage, because otherwise you’ll get bogged down in petty details.  Just reread it from the beginning to the point where you stopped at the mental roadblock of what-do-I-write-next, and read it for the overall story.  Then you can go back and make edits or corrections, but permit yourself to do that only once you have the whole forest refreshed in your mind’s eye, so that you can see how it all needs to fit together.

Reread the book you’re writing again a second time if you need to, or even a third.  Go over your notes.  Try to visualize the whole book in its plot arc from beginning to end.  It’s like reminding yourself of the proper order of the alphabet.  Sure, the song is silly and you might feel kinda stupid and kindergarten-ish for reviewing something so simple…but often, you’ll find that you suddenly remember that H is followed by I, and J, and…voila!  You now know how to get to K, yay!  It wasn’t going to take the 5 or 6 letters you were fearing—you only needed 2 letters, woo-hoo!  The plot-bunny is refreshed and is now nipping at your heels once more.

It’s not working!! *panicpanicpanic*  WhatDoIWriteNow??

Whoa, whoa!  Slow down there!  If you’re lucky and don’t have an appointed-by-contract deadline*, then there is a very simple solution for this one, too.  Work on something else.

Seriously.  If you want to be a writer, then you know you have more than one good story within you.  Start a new one.  Change the mood, change the genre, change the universe or the timeframe or whatever.  If you’re working on Steampunk, start a Space Cowboy adventure.  If you’re working on Romance, try writing a Murder Mystery or a Theft Caper.

Don’t want to leave the world you’re writing in, for fear you’ll never get back to the book you’re trying to write?  NOT a problem!  Write a backstory.  Grab a character out of your novel (not usually the main character) and write up a short story from their past.  Flesh them out, give them depth, personality, quirks, and a bit of history to explain it all.

Take them off on a side-quest.  Run them through a typical day that turns atypical for whatever reason.  Plop them down in an Alternate Universe (caveat: for experienced writers only, since you don’t want to mess up your Main Universe characters’ actions and reactions) and have the villain be the hero and the hero be the villain.  Or instead of traipsing off to Mount Doom to destroy the One Ring, parody the story by having them sneak into Mordor to bake The Ultimate Pie of Destiny, the One Pie To Satisfy Them All, muaaAAHAHAHAHAHAA!

Have fun with it.  No, really, have fun.  When your brain struggles against the absurdity or the non-canon-ness of whatever it is you’re alternatively writing about your world and plot and characters, then you’ll know your plot-bunnies are ready to go back to work in earnest.  If not…?  Hey, maybe your strength lies in parody/comedy, and not the serious space opera you originally had in mind.

*If you DO have an appointed-by-contract deadline, write anyway.  This is what separates the pros from the amateurs, and if you have a contract, you are legally obligated to fulfill it.  Keep in mind that your reputation for professionalism is worth your weight in gold, and just push through.  If you love writing, then it’s worth the effort.  But really, just go back over these steps, review your story notes, and you’ll know that H is followed by I, J, and then you can get to K, the scene you do want to write.

I got to the end of my story—yay!—but what do I write now??

Go back up a couple paragraphs and reread what I just wrote.  It’s all right there.

Figuring out side stories and secondary characters’ quests is a great way of spinning off your urge to keep writing into new, fresh, exciting directions.  You don’t want to beat a series to death, or even a particular universe, but usually you can find good plots and expandable side-stories if you just look for them.

And if you’re tired of writing in that steampunk space cowboy stories?  Switch genres or cross genres, and go write a theft-caper romance.  You may not be as good at the new genre as you were at the old, but there was a point where you weren’t so good at combining steampunk aesthetics with space cowboy panache.  Keep writing mo’, keep trying, and you’ll get there.

That looming stone wall of writer’s block will soon develop a grand, gilded, iron-wrought gate set in a beautiful gothic-point arch.  And, with practice, you’ll learn how to let yourself through that gate to the new adventures lying in wait beyond it.

If you love what you do, it’s worth the effort it sometimes takes to keep doing it.

“Dear Jean Johnson, I have question about the german book because I read it and I find it good but the problem because there are only 2 books and in the books there are 8 brothers and my question is must I read it in English or can I read in german and how long must I wait?  ~Anonymous”

This is a very good question.

You’re not the only person who has asked this question—and it can apply to several authors and their works, so I’m answering it openly here.  (For other authors’ works, insert the appropriate name of the publishing companies, books, etc.)

RandomHouse.de bought the translation rights from The Berkley Group for the first two novels, THE SWORD, which became DIE SÖHNE DER INSEL, and THE WOLF, which became DER KUSS DES WOLFES.  As far as I’ve been told, both books have sold well in Germany, and it looks like their translator, Nina Bader, did a good job converting the story.

At this time, RandomHouse.de has stated that it does not have the intent to purchase more translation rights for the remaining 6 books.  However, most publishers are willing to change their minds if they get enough interest expressed from the readers for further translations.

If enough readers are interested in future translations of the Sons of Destiny series, they can contact RandomHouse.de and request further translations.  If enough requests are made, the publisher will know that there is a large group of people who will actually purchase the book, making the effort of translating and printing the books in another language (German in this case) worth their time, because there will be enough purchasers buying the translations to offset the costs, plus make a profit for the publisher.

Once they get enough petitions from readers interested in German translations of the remaining books…how soon those books get to bookstore shelves depends on several factors:  the number of other translation books in their production queue, the average length of time it takes for their translation department to work on translating a book, the length of time it takes for the editing process to cycle through (which has to be double-checked against the English original, adding to the difficulty and time involved), and of course, the length of the queue for getting it actually printed and distributed.

The English versions, through Berkley, take approximately eleven months from handing in the manuscript to seeing the book on bookstore shelves, but that’s with The Berkley Group, and that’s working strictly within the original language.  Random House in Germany may have a similar timeframe for its translation department, or it may differ by several months.  And that’s not counting how long it takes for the publisher to receive a high enough number of requests.

I don’t know what the “magic number” of requests to be sent in is; that’s an internal matter at the publishing house.  I also have no control over getting them to change their minds; it’s entirely up to the readership to see if they want to put forth that kind of effort.  So far, there have been several similar requests.  Each one, I have directed to RandomHouse.de.  If you’d like to see a German translation of the other books (as would I!), then please do contact them and let them know there’s another person out there willing to buy the translated versions.

In the meantime, my books are all available in English, mostly in ebooks and trade paperback (the larger format).  Nearly every book in the Sons of Destiny series is also available at this point in time (October 2011) in mass market (the normal sized format).  The eighth book, THE MAGE, is currently available only in the larger trade format, though it will be re-released in mass market June 2012.

…I’d offer to translate them myself, but my knowledge of German is rather pitiful.

Danke for your question,

~Jean

First off:  What the heck is a Con?

Cons are short for Conventions, as in large organized gatherings of people who not only have something in common, they want to share tips, tricks of their trades, sell each other neat gizmos and gadgets, discuss concerns, and in general just chat with people who are like-minded about whatever-it-is that brings them together.  Plumbers have conventions, astrophysicists have conventions…and fans of fiction books have conventions.  Usually these things take place once a year, but there are many subtle variations, which in turn lead to many possible conventions throughout a year.

Plumbers can attend a variety of conventions on plumbing, which can be ones for residential plumbing, commercial plumbing, shipboard plumbing, a trade show for the various equipment required—even clean water symposiums, septic systems and sewage treatment topics can be considered an offshoot of plumbing.  Astrophysicists might attend stellar cartography conventions, stellar exploration ones, a symposium on comets and other near-stellar debris, so on and so forth.

And, of course, there are a gazillion types of fan conventions, each one either trying to appeal to a wide varity of fen, or catering to a specific fandom.  (Fen is the plural of “fan” and can substitute for “fans” in a pinch, though I’ve personally found it being used more commonly to refer to different types of fans.  In this usage, it refers specifically to the people, so you’d say,  “The fen who attended Worldcon came from a wide variety of interests and fandoms.”  Or it could be used as,  “Doctor Who has a lot of fans, and Star Trek has a lot of fans, with a large number of fen who like both genres.”)

Since this is a blog about fiction writing, we’ll leave the plumbers and the astrophysicists to party on their own (though they’re more than welcome to join us as fellow fen), and discuss Fan Conventions.  These can range from the very general, i.e. WorldCon (Reno, NV, USA just hosted WorldCon #69) which covers all manner of science fiction & fantasy, though with more emphasis on the scifi, down to Anglicon (a convention in the Pacific Northwest that used to honor all things English Entertainment, from BBC productions through British authors & musicians), down to the very, very specific, The Con That Shall Not Be Named, which was a celebration of Harry Potter Slash Fanfiction.

…I’ll give you a few moments to scrub your brains, if you like.  But yes, there are plenty of normal, happy, well-adjusted people who like something that specific, and that specifically oddball.  Conventions on all manner of topics exist, and it’s important to know that these Cons exist.

Okay, so why are you discussing the existence of Cons in a blog about writing?  Why should they be considered so all-fired important?

Well, this is a blog about writing fiction, and usually it’s about writing genre fiction.  Tips, reasons, techinques, skills, sayings, and advice of all kinds can be found in this blog…but you’ll find more at a convention.  Some are specifically for writing, some are for the genres in which one writes.  Most of them will be very good for you to attend.

Why?  Writing doesn’t happen in a vacuum.  You cannot spontaneously learn how to write well; it requires instruction, feedback, suggestions, and interactions with competent editors, fellow writers, and your all-important readers.

The greatest problem is getting all these different types together for conversation that will cover all of these things.  (Okay, okay, a competent English Teacher—or teacher of whatever your primary writing language may be—will cover most of the general instruction stuff, but then I’m presuming you’ve already undergone enough schooling to be able to read and write at least somewhat competently.)  How conventient for you that Cons tend to bring together these different things, plus sometimes even agents and publishers, too.  How convenient, indeed!

You also need to know the tricks of the writing business.  Con-goers will happily tell you to avoid any so-called publisher who demands that you pay them money for services they should be including in their package—reputable publishers do not charge authors; they pay authors.  (If a publisher charges you money, they’re a scam artist.)  Your fellow Con-goers will commiserate with you over the horrors of trying to juggle home life, “real” jobs, and manuscript deadlines.  They’ll tell you what to look for in a good contract, or in a good agent, or in a good beta-editor…or even in a good story, a good villain, a good setting…

You may not always agree with what they have to say, but in listening to the opinions and experiences of others, your mind will be expanded, your pool of knowledge deepened, and your enthusiasm for writing will almost always be rekindled.  Genre Cons are almost always an encouraging environment—mostly because we’re a group of geeks banding together in the solidarity of our common fannish interests.

But I don’t wanna be a geek!

*sigh*  There is nothing wrong with being a geek.  Besides, it’s too late; you’re a writer of genre fiction, so you’re already part of the educated elite.  G is for Genre, E & E are for Educated Elite, and K is for…um…Kewl?  (Help me out, here; I’m doing the best I can.)  Anyway, it’s too late; accept it with pride and happiness, because it is your fellow geeks who are your target reader audience.

So it is very important for you to interact with your fellow geeks and future readers in a positive way.  In this business, you do want to stay on top of your readership’s likes, dislikes, preferences, interests, so on and so forth, because all of these things can have a positive (if you pay attention) or negative (if you don’t) impact on how well your stories are received.

This is not to say that, should you run across a pack of scarf-dangling Dr. Who fans, you should immediately ditch your original story and write Dr. Who fanfic.  Nor should you probably write anything involving Timelords, Blue Police Call Boxes, or immortal gits who refuse to tell you their name.  (I say “immortal git” in a loving way, because I have been a Dr. Who fan myself, but it’s still gitty of him not to tell us his actual name.)  But you can take elements from their love of British humor, science fiction, time travel paradoxes, and the constant encountering and reinventing of new worlds, old histories, and so forth, and infuse your own story with that kind of enthusiasm for funny yet serious, adventure-based science fiction.

Embrace your geekdom, go forth, and enjoy the conventions that are out there.

Okay, fine.  You’ve convinced me.  So what kind of conventions should I look for?

Picking the right convention actually depends upon a number of factors.  The first thing you should consider is what kind of a convention do you want to attend?  For example, writing workshops/conventions, whose sole focus is on the aspects of writing, will be a lot more serious than a genre fiction convention.

Are you more interested in writing Westerns?  Romance?  Steampunk?  Or are you into the hard science side of Science Fiction?  Do you like faeries and elves from some faraway world in your Fantasy, or are you more into vampires and werewolves who live down the street?  Are you hardcore Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or casual Star Wars?  Do you want serious, intensive help on your original manuscript, or are you looking for people who can write songs to complement your space opera concepts?  Do you just want a few tips or tricks to get you started?

If you’ve never been to a Con and want to dabble your toes first, I’d suggest picking something that covers a broader range of topics rather than a very specific sub-set—many genre fiction Cons will have a panel or two on writing fiction, or sometimes a whole track, aka many panels, dedicated to the craft of writing this stuff.  It could be screenplay/script writing, it could be filk music writing, it could be short story or novelette or novel writing, it doesn’t matter; most will have some sort of discussion related to storytelling, and that’s where you want to look to get instruction, information, education, opinion, so on and so forth.

If you have problems with large crowds, I’d suggest avoiding Worldcon or one of the big regional conventions like Westercon, Eastercon, Norwescon, so on and so forth.  Instead, pick something smaller and most likely local or close to local, such as—if you’re in the Pacific Northwest like me—VCon, Orycon or Rustycon.  You can always work your way up to Worldcon later.  Now, things like VCon and Orycon are not exactly small—we’re talking several hundred people—but I find the middle-sized conventions are actually quite good for an introduction to Cons.  They have a good variety of activities, panels, vendors/dealers, subjects, and so forth, without being overwhelming.

Huge conventions are, well, overwhelming.  And feet-sore-ing.  (I know, because I just got back from Renovation, aka Worldcon 69, and my feet are still sore from all the walking I did.  I didn’t get to see every panel I wanted to see, and I certainly didn’t get to chat with every single one of the 3,000+ people who were in attendance.)  Oh, for those of you who have problems with large crowds, Worldcon is actually easier to endure than you’d think, because usually these conventions are spread out over large convention centers, so it doesn’t usually look like there are 3000+ people in attendance…as opposed to something like Norwescon, which has 2000-3000 people crammed into a single (if large) hotel.

Small conventions, where they have maaaybe 50-150 people, are very small.  There will only be a few panels and some keynote speaker speeches, so you won’t have as many things to choose from, nor will you learn quite as much…but the sheer smallness of the size will allow you a chance to speak with a lot of the attendees, and get to know your fellow fans, readers, writers, whatever.  You can make connections, make friends, and make an impact this way.  Which brings me to…

How the heck should I behave at a convention? (If I do actually go to one; I’m still deciding whether or not I should actually bother.)

Your reputation is worth its weight in gold, so treat it with that much value and respect.  I cannot stress this enough.

If you act rude, condescending, superior, grumpy, mean, insulting, overbearing, self-centered, or even just over the top silly, absurd, or if you try to pull pranks, etc, people will remember it.  Usually in a negative light.  So try to be polite, respectful, listen as much or more as you speak, and be willing to accept that some people will just hold different viewpoints than your own.

When I do disagree with someone, either I’ll just keep my opinion to myself, or use some variant on this lovely phrase,  “Well, personally I’d disagree, but I can understand where you’re coming from,” and/or “I can respect your point of view,” instead of calling them an idiot to the Nth degree.  The point of conventions, after all, is to celebrate our similar interests.  Not to get into horrid verbal catfights over nitpicky little points, which would only make those involved in the fight look like an overbearing rude idiot.

Besides…the other person may actually *gasp* be right about something.  There have been times where people, including myself, have gone away from a discussion disagreeing about something, but then have given it a few days’ thought and decided the other person actually had a good point.  Later, we may have incorporated some of these changed world-views into our writing, making it stronger and better.  (Remember, it’s not just our characters on the page who need to do a little growing to make our stories better; we the writers need to stretch our boundaries and horizons from time to time, too.)

So, the important thing to remember throughout all of this is that you want to be a well-educated, well-rounded person so that the stories you tell are made even better because of your wealth of experiences and exposures to new ideas and differeing opinions.  These things you will find most conveniently located at conventions.  It’s like the one-stop-shopping store for writers, readers, genres, editors, tricks of the trade and general fandom for whatever-it-is the Con is about.

But, since fen all talk to each other—because so many of these people go to several conventions each year—you’ll want to keep in mind that the way you behave at the outset will encourage, or discourage, everyone else when it comes to helping you further your abilities, your connections, and your career.

Conventions, you see, are very important for networking.  The single most powerful form of advertising is a magical process we like to call Word Of Mouth Advertising.  That means someone likes your work so much (or heaven forbid, dislikes it so much) that they use their own mouth to spread the word of their own opinion to everyone they can get to stop and listen.

It’s one thing for a public relations maven or an ad executive to come up with a catchy slogan and then paste it all over billboards and such, but it’s another thing entirely when someone you know—and presumably trust—gives you their opinion on a particular writer’s works, based upon their own experience in reading the stories, or interacting with the author.  We tend to trust the people who have actually experienced whichever version it is over the slick ads posted everywhere.

So make sure you’re polite, kind, attentive about listening as well as speaking, open-minded, and in general fun to be around.

(Oh, and bathe/wear clean clothes.  Yes, I’m actually addressing this problem, because it has been a problem at certain times with certain people at certain conventions.  “Con funk,” also known as ”gamer funk,” contains odors you do not wish to inflict upon the masses.  Fandom and fens have actually created songs covering this malodorous malaise, poking fun at it, decrying it, and in general warning everyone not to be that person at a convention.  You don’t have to don a fancy costume if you don’t want to, but you should at least be mindful that you may one day be stuck in an elevator with a prospective editor, agent, publisher, or even a fandom reader whose Word Of Mouth advertising powers are well-known and well-respected throughout the genre fiction Con communities.)

Okay, okay, so you may have a point about going to conventions.  Why shouldn’t I just stay home, save money, and just write?  I mean, we have the internet if we want to chat with people, right?

The internet has a drawback, and it’s the same drawback as phonecalls, snail-mail letters, emails, texting, tweeting, and whatever.  You can only interact with a few people at a time.  Well, okay, tweeting you can skim a whole bunch of conversations at once…but you still have to go find it, and you may have to do a lot of searching in disparate corners of cyberspace to find most of what you want or need.  Conventions conveniently gather it into one place.  PLUS, they have the bonus of getting you away from your computer.

Yes, insert a *gaspofhorror* here, if you so desire, but I’m serious.  Getting away from the computer is a good thing.  Going to a convention focuses your attention on the learning/exploring/discussing.  You can find articles on writing online, yes, but your attention will be diverted by the cat demanding pettings, by the laundry needing to be folded, by the fact that it’s 10pm at night and you forgot to take out the garbage earlier in the day.  Going to a convention sets aside all these mundane distractions, allowing you to focus on the things which will improve your craft as a writer.

Not to mention, your cat, your laundry, and your garbage are all terrible at encouraging your efforts as a writer.  Or your dog, your vacuum, your boss…the list goes on and on.

You need fresh perspectives and fresh ideas, new tricks and new tips, to infuse new, fresh energy into your work…well, once you recover from the traveling, the staying up until the late hours of the night chatting, and all that walking.  (Oy, all that walking…)

Still, you’ll come away with new ideas, new or renewed enthusiasm, and the reassurance that you’re not alone in liking Whatever It Is You’re Writing About.  Because for every story you want to tell, somewhere out there is another person who wants to hear it, or read it, or see it, and the easiest place to find that person is at an organized gathering of like-minded fans.

Alright, you’ve convinced me.  I’m ready to pack some clean clothes, my laptop/notepad, and go.  Um…go where?  How do I find these genre conventions?

Luckily for you, there are many ways to find conventions.  You can use search engines like Google to type in the word “convention” and the genre you want, such as “Urban Fantasy Convention” and then refine your search from there.  Add in the name of your state, province, or country if you want to refine it further.  Or even the month and the year.  You can haunt your local gaming supply shop, hobby shop, comic bookstore, regular bookstore, independent bookstore, and ask the staff and/or the regulars.  You can search for book clubs at your local store and ask them.

You can even search for societies and associations, such as RWA, Romance Writers of America, or WSFS, World Science Fiction Society.  Some of these are very large organizations, but they will often have smaller, more local affiliations.

This localization can be advantageous: the more local you can get, the more likely it is you’ll get off your butt and go.  Even with gasoline prices being the way they are, it’s easy to drive to a local convention, and cheaper than buying a plane ticket and paying for a hotel room in some far-flung location.  Being near Seattle as I am, Emerald City Writers’ Conference is part of the Greater Seattle Chapter of the RWA, so that’s a convention that I, as a romance writer, would want to attend.  (Note to self: Registration’s now open, so get registered, pronto!)

Your best bet is to combine all of these search methods.  Contact people on the association or society or convention committees and ask them if they know of further resources that can be plumbed for contacts and information, and make sure you flush out every possible lead—flush as in to hunt, not just flush as in to grab and use the plumber’s helper.  Reach for the stars like a good little astrophysicist, or if not an astrophysicist, then just reach for those stars like a writer who wants their writing to travel far, far beyond the confines of their notepad or computer.

The advice gained, the tricks of the trade learned, the friendships created, the memories made, and the renewal of enthusiasm for what you love to do—write great stories—will be worth it.

Oh, Look, It’s a Card Trick!

Wanna write a book?  Pick a genre, any genre!   Money, money, money!  Steampunk is hot, shapechangers are not, 3 in 1000 gets you a contract!  Lucky lucky writers turned into authors, alacazam, right before your very eyes!  Step right up to instant literary fame and fortune! 

…

Oh, how I wish it were that easy…  I’d be right there among the carnival barkers, donning a spangly vest and jacket, gesturing with a spiffy-looking cane, shilling my skills out for all the money people could possibly toss my way.  Alas, selling a story, any story, isn’t the least bit like that.

Far too many writers think,  “Well, hey, vampires are hot right now.  I’ll just write a vampire story and I’ll be an instant, famous bestseller!”  Or they think,  “Mutant furry caterpillars are hot; I’ll write my own twist on mutant furry caterpillars and make a million bucks, just like author Ima Butterfly did!”  Or whatever the current flavor of the year may be.

Much like a carnival fairway booth, the prizes look tempting, but winning them is a lot harder than you’d think.  Those milk bottles are filled with lead to make them difficult to knock down.  The rubber duckies are constantly on the move in that pond of water, and the rings have only a centimeter of clearance to fit around their heads and beaks.  Yeah, your odds of winning are definitely going to be closer to 3 in 1,000 than most people like to think.

The trick is, in writing a good story, to pick a genre that you actually know, like, enjoy, and respect.

What the heck is a Genre?

I’m so glad you asked.  First off, it’s pronounced “John-ruh” or “Zhohn-ruh” and not “Jean-reh” or “Jean-er” since the word was originally French.  (English has a delightful way of sidling up to other, unsuspecting languages, koshing them on the head with a sock full of prepositions, dragging them into back alleys, and rifling through their pockets for loose literary change before they can wake up again.  Everyone needs a hobby, right?)

So what does that funky word mean?  “Artistic Category.”  Yep, that’s pretty much it.  It can be applied to music, drama, paintings, scuplture…but I’m here to talk about fiction novels.  So.  In regards to fiction writing, it refers to Storytelling Categories.

Naturally, I’m sure you’ve all seen bookstores divided up into sections with labels such as Horror, Western, Romance (one of the biggest fiction sections of all, since it accounts for 30% of all booksales in the U.S. every month), or Science Fiction & Fantasy, often with the two sharing a segment.

…A brief digression:  Science Fiction & Fantasy may seem like two very different categories, but they were both originally considered to be speculative fiction, as in speculating about things that couldn’t possibly happen in the modern world in our current era.  Science Fiction tends to get sub-categorized out of speculative fiction as “things which aren’t possible now, but which might be possible at some point in our future, therefore we’re going to speculate on all the possibilities”…whereas Fantasy gets sub-categorized as “things which aren’t even remotely possible under our own universe’s current rules of physics and other laws, but which might be possible in some alternate universe, and are just plain cool to speculate about even if they’re not even remotely achievable.”  Anyhoo…

So, Genres in the writing world are categories of storytelling creativity.  Easy enough to grasp, yes?  Well, sorta.

Even within this general framework of categories, with the most common being things like Mystery, Horror, SciFi, Fantasy, Romance, Western, Historical and so forth, you will find further sub-categories.  Alternate History, Paranormal, Urban Fantasy, Military Science Fiction, Exploration Science Fiction (also sometimes known as Planetary Romance, despite having little to do with the genre of Romance itself), Historical Romance, Steampunk, Fantasy-Horror…and many more.  As you can see, there are plenty of crossovers.

A Steampunk adventure with heavy elements of romance as part of the story could be categorized under several genre labels (a.k.a. marketed) as Romance, Science Fiction, Alternate History, Paranormal, Fantasy…  You can see how quickly this mess will degenerate into chaos in trying to figure out where the story should be aimed for marketing purposes.  After all, the best way to sell the book is to aim it at a readership that will love and buy it, right?

So how do I pick a Genre for the story I want to write when trying to market the idea?

You don’t.  No, really, you don’t.  That would be like trying to drive your car backwards down the freeway.  In theory, on paper, in simulations, you’d think it might work…but in practice, it’s hazardous at best and just might crash your career before it even begins.

But…!

Nope.  And this is the reason why:  There are too many sub-category traps for you to fall into, if you start with the marketing angle first.

If you think you’re going to write a Paranormal Western and you start talking about Cowboys & Werewolves…but it starts veering off-course with increasingly important romantic elements…is it a Western, is it a Paranormal, or is it a Romance?

Stories will veer in the course of writing them.  Around half the time that hapens, these side-track veerings make the story better…but it can also utterly ruin the genre you thought you were aiming for.  So don’t start out labeling it for a specific niche market.  Just throw in the plot elements and go.  Try to steer just enough to keep the story on plot, and that’ll help take care of the genre question for you.

Okay, so what do I do about this Genre labeling thing, and when do I do it?

Just plot out and write out the story.  If you do need a guiding genre, pick one as a guideline, and use that like bumpers in the bowling lane to keep your story trundling in the right direction.  Don’t worry if you don’t hit a strike on your first draft; you can fix that 7-10 split later.  And if it jumps lanes and hits the pins in the neighboring sub-genre lane…you can fix that as well.  Or even work with it.

But for now, just plot and write.

Which brings me to one of my favorite quotes regarding what an author should write:  Mark Twain (aka Samuel Clemens) once said to a young Jack London,  “Write what you know.”  This, of course, sent Jack London careening off to the wilds of Alaska, where he wrote White Fang and other outstanding books on wolves, wilderness, and wild times on the wild frontier.

Luckily, these days you don’t actually have to pack up and head to Alaska, if you don’t want to move there, yet still want to write about it.  You can access documentaries, books, videos, blogs, journals, pictures, and more.  You could even find someone living in the area you want and email them questions in the hopes they’ll answer in enthusiastic detail, to give you and your writing a flavor of what it’s like to live all the way up near the roof of the world.

Well, maybe I don’t want to write about Alaska—nice place though it surely is.  Maybe I want to write about Cowboys and Werewolves in Montana.

That’s fine…but I do have to ask you this:  Are you at least familiar with both the Western and the Horror or Urban Fantasy genres?

…Yes?  No?

There are certain tropes (translation: recurring idea or plot genres) associated with each category.  If you’re going to write a story involving each of these, know what those tropes are.

Cowboys usually have a trusty steed, a weapon slung at their side, spend much of their time wandering the wilderness, and sometimes even have *gaspzomg* cattle or sheep or six-legged domesticated alien critters to herd.  They may have a strong, tough beloved waiting for them back home, or a beset temporary employer whose space-ranch is being plagued by a clutch of rustlers or unscrupulous land barons/alien invaders/pissed-off natives, and thus need rescuing or at least cover fire while retreating to less hostile territory.  And they’re sometimes forced to act as impromptu agents of the law because they’re on the edges of civilization, the sherriff’s just been shot, and there’s no one else around to pick up the slack and be the next hero.

Werewolves usually run around shapeshifting between human form and wolf form, sometimes only to about 50% physical conversion rate or so, sometimes all the way to 100% wolf (or 100% human, if your werewolves are unique enough to start out as wolves and then turn non-furry).  They’re often contagious, spreading lycanthropy at a bite, or more rarely an infected claw-swipe.  They can be heroes, villains, anti-heroes, love-interests (they have that much in common with cowboys), so on and so forth.

Now, you can break those tropes, making changes small or great—the latter would also be known as our space cowboy herding six-legged edible critters on some far-flung planet with 3 moons, instead of cattle here on Earth—but there will still be certain things that make the hero or heroine a cowboy archetype.

Can I learn all these things from that T.V. Tropes website?

That place is a black hole vortex of fascinating, time-sucking information.  If you go there, you will find three hours have flown past when you originally intended to spend only thirty minutes at most.  You can learn what you need to know that way…but I strongly suggest *gaspzomg again* reading stories set in the genres you want to write.

Yes, I had to emphasize that.  It’s that important.  Read lots of stories in the genre you intend to write.

At some point, you’ll want to break away and write your own Western-Horror stories, or whatever sub-genre something-or-other category, but you do truly want to “Write what you know” when it comes to genre writing.

Why bother reading in a specific genre category before writing in it?

Because it’ll help steer your story down the right path.  It may be your own unique twist on the matter, like jumping ski lanes while going down the mountain, but you really want to make sure your story is gliding down the correct side of the mountain throughout the story.  If you’ve written your plot so that it’s busy skiing down the western slopes, your reader is going to blink and go “…bwuh??” if suddenly they find you skiing down the southeast side of things, with no indication of how you got there.

If you promise your readers a trip down the western slopes, you’d better give them a trip down the western slopes, or have a very good, strong, carefully-plotted series of events that end up swerving your story toward the southwest, south, and finally southeast.  Or even detouring around the north side of the mountain.  Or taking an icy, winding tunnel through the heart of it.  Either way, show the reader how you’re getting the story from plot point A to plot point Z.  Oherwise, they’re going to be mad at you for abandoning them at the bottom of the snowline, in the middle of nowhere, with no tracks to follow back and a miles-long hike to return to the parking lot where they left their car.

So which genre do you recommend I start writing in?

Whichever one floats your boat, honey.  Seriously.  Write in the categories you personally love.

If you like a particular genre or genres, if you get utterly enthusiastic when it comes to both steampunk/mad science and murder mysteries…then by all means, try writing a story about a mad scientist serial killer flying around the world on his technologically laden airship, and the plucky, leather-bodiced cowgirl adventuress tracking down the varmint with the assistance of her lycanthropic lover, as she tries to solve and stop his gizmo-assisted, six-legged-critter murdering sprees.

If you don’t like any of that, then don’t write about it.  Pick something you do love, because your attitude toward the category in question, and your familiarity with the genre tropes, well…it will show.

It will show in your writing, and that will make or break your story, even more than the genre marketing choices.

Okay, alright; I’ll go write my favorite story.  But if it does turn out to be a Western/Horror/Romance…how do I market that to agents and publishers?

For those who already have an agent, give them a synopsis and let them decide.  These people read a craptonne of stories every week, so they’re pretty darned experienced at sorting out what elements are strongest.

However, if you don’t have an agent, or if you’re utterly nitpicky and you want to pitch it right the first time, I recommend this method:  Get together several friends who also know those genres, let them read the manuscript, and have them rate it on, say, a scale of 1 to 10 as to which of the categories in question feel like they’re the strongest elements in the story (10 being the absolute strongest, so on and so forth).

Have them do that for the beginning of the story, at three or four points during the rising action, at the climax, and even for the conclusion of your tale.  Once you’ve analyzed those comparisons, you’ll probably be able to say confidently to some editor or agent,  “My readers feel it’s mostly a Steampunk Adventure story with strong paranormal and murder mystery overtones.”  Or you could end up saying,  “It’s definitely a Western Paranormal Romance novel with some really cool steampunk elements.”

Or you could just find yourself throwing up your hands and going, “It has steampunk gadgets, cowboys, mad scientists, and werewolves in it, with a plucky female protagonist. I have no clue how to categorize it, but I feel it’s an absolutely fantastic story.  If you think it’s great, too, maybe we could market it in a couple of categories, and try to appeal to several different sides?  Genre crossover novels are rather hot, this year…”

Or it could turn out to be you’ve written a straightforward Western with no werewolves, gadgets, or six-legged critters nibbilng their way through the magenta shrubbery of Proxima Centauri III whatsoever, in which case, voila!  Picking the right genre for your story is as easy as shrugging into your calf-length leather duster on your way to hit the trail, ‘cause you gotta get them cattle to Carson City before the end of the month rolls around.

…Whatever you decide to write, pick the genre you enjoy reading, the one you understand well.  That way, when you sit down to write, you can easily tweak it into your own unique tale.