What If You Could Not Fail

Second Thoughts on E-books

Some interesting stuff coming out of Publishers Weekly about e-books and dead-tree publishing. They reported (click here) that e-book sales are off from last year, which Publisher Weekly sees as a trend towards a “hybrid market” of print books and electronic versions.

If you do the math, the number of folks who purchase exclusively e-books was down more than 14% from last year. I’m guessing there are a couple of reasons for this, and this is not based on science—just my armchair analysis.

The newness of the technology has worn off. When you first get a toy that’s all you want to do. Now folks have 150 books on their e-readers and they have read three of them. Let’s hold off buying books until we read a few more of these. Meanwhile we can pump the extra money back into our Starbucks allowance.

E-Books are pricing themselves out of the market. The average new-release novel is $12.99 for the electronic version on Amazon. You can find the same novel on the book table at CostCo for less than ten dollars. That’s enough of a price difference to make somebody think twice, especially in this economy.

E-Readers are morphing into e-toys. Publishers Weekly touched on this: “… multifunction devices are taking an increasingly large slice of the digital reading market.” Mrs. WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com and I got the sixth grader in our house a Kindle Fire last Christmas, hoping that would encourage more reading. Yeah, right. It’s a hell of a gaming toy, though.

Of course, the self-published market is pricing themselves much lower than the $12.99 threshold. PW didn’t have much to say about that.

Here is the conundrum for me, and a lot of other authors. If we are self-publishing, do we put all our effort into e-books? I mentioned a few blog posts ago that I think my current novel will be best served in the traditional publishing market, but my next novel, now in the outlining stage, might be better off as a self-published piece, especially if it is marketed correctly. I was thinking I’d print up a thousand trade-size paperbacks for the non-e-book crowd and make it available in an electronic version for the masses.

Now I am rethinking that strategy. E-book sales might not be what I first thought. I need to watch this market closer.

See ya’ later.

WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

 

 

You Need This for a Good Story

One of the best pieces of writing advice I ever received was from Arman Khodaei, a member of my weekly critique group. After listening to a particularly dull draft of an early chapter from my novel Rules for Giving, Arman scribbled in the margin, “Conflict! Conflict! Conflict!”

It was true, too. That chapter put some of the group members to sleep. It was a transition chapter, taking the reader from one crisis to another, but even transitions need to have some meat to them. This one was dull. Dull. Dull. Dull.

I needed to spice up the plot. I went back and looked at it again and made some changes. I had one of the yet-to-be-introduced characters (we’d only talked about her up to this point) threaten to make an early entrance. This was a problem that needed to be solved and gave you insight into her character and those around her. The protagonist also had an encounter with a police officer when he forgot the alarm code to his building. More conflict.

Conflict is needed to move the story forward, but the trick is to make sure the conflict relates to the plot, and is not there just for the sake of conflict. The alarm code incident creates conflict, but it is also symptomatic of the toll events are taking on the character. Stress makes people forget the simple everyday things, such as passwords. The reader gets a better insight to the pressure on the hero.

Armed with this new tool of conflict, I went back and looked at earlier scenes. There was an exchange between the protagonist and his wife at a restaurant. They were discussing one of his former girlfriends. It so happened that the table they were sitting at was wobbly, one of his pet peeves. He went so far as to wait until the waiter left and moved to another table.

I looked at the scene as a way to illustrate that the hero sometimes had no patience and resorted to taking matters into his own hands. I related this story at a writers’ conference, however, and before I could finish, another guest at my table said she saw the wobbly table as a symbol of the couple’s relationship—shaky and unsteady.

Duh.    

So remember the words of Arman Khodaei: “Conflict! Conflict! Conflict!”

See ya’ later.

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Ready--Aim--Write

As I have mentioned in previous blog posts (clear here, here and here), I am outlining The Orange and the Black, my next novel. I am doing this for two reasons. First, to see if I can make the process any easier and quicker. Second, to see if the process helps me write better. I am impressed with what I am learning.

Jonathan Evison authored the Word Craft column in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, dealing with point-of-view. Evison is a fan of using multiple, third person, limited point-of-view in fiction and making the reader work to understand what’s going on. Evison doesn’t say this, but my interpretation is that if the reader is more vested in figuring out what’s going on, then they have a greater stake in the novel.  Vested readers are happy readers and we all want that.

I told Rules for Giving in the first person. I liked it because I always knew whose perspective I was writing from. The next time around, though, I am evaluating a limited third person point-of-view. The Orange and the Black involves three protagonists of near-equal footing, and the multiple POV will allow me to give them near-equal time.

I am outlining the novel scene by scene, and with each scene, based on the Word Craft Column, I plan to note who has the point-of-view. This way, when it comes to writing, those decisions are already made.

The outlining process has also made me re-think some other issues. Each of the protagonists has, in addition to the overall goal of the story, a personal mission. One of the characters is in remission from leukemia. This morning I realized that I might have given that mission to the wrong character. For various reasons, it will be better off with one of the other members of the trio.

Had I bypassed the outline and dove right into the writing of the novel, I would have gotten a third of the way through and come upon the same realization—and found myself looking at massive rewrites. By outlining, I was able to see the miscalculation early on and rectify it.

In military circles there is a saying—no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. The same can be said for outlining. By developing an outline, however, I have the advantage of already having looked at the other options. Better now than in the thick of the battle.  

See ya’ later.

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When Will You Get Published?

I was surfing through some of the writing blogs yesterday and came across C.S. Lakin on Live Write Thrive. She was talking about the Malcom Gladwell book The Outliers (a book on my list of those to read, along with hundreds of others). In it Gladwell puts forth the theory that you need to spend about 10,000 hours in your field or craft before you attain the level of expert.

That’s all it takes? I’m figuring that in the last four years I have put in 1,000 hours writing and working on writing each year—twenty hours a week. In the last year I am going to push that to 1,500 hours. I also spent ten years from 1982 to 1992 working as a freelance writer, although it was all non-fiction stuff—magazine and newspaper articles, newsletters, etc. I am way past 10,000.

But if I look at it in terms of fiction, then I am closer to 4,500. Factor in the time I read, though, and we are way past 10,000 hours.

This 10,000 number, according to Lakin, is based on the input of several experts (I wonder if they put in the requisite number of hours) who looked at the lives of people such as Bill Gates, Robert Oppenheimer and The Beatles—people we respect as masters in their respective fields.

The average was about 10,000 hours.

So here is the next question for writers. Is the traditional publishing industry our way of ensuring that we all pay our dues? You hear about people taking five or ten years to get published. There are also those people that get published overnight (by the way, I hate those people), but for the most part, it is the 10,000-hour rule.

Does this mean that some of those folks who are self-publishing are shortcutting that 10,000-hour threshold?  Notice that I way “some” and not “all.” There is some good self-published stuff out there. There is also a lot of mediocre stuff, and a lot of bad stuff.

Do not misunderstand me. I am not throwing a dirty diaper on self-publishing. It gives us writers more options and a lot of power. But I want to make sure that we all think twice before we do publish.

I am a good example. I have decided that traditional publishing is the best route for Rules for Giving—the best way for that story to reach its true potential. My next novel, however, is a bit of a different story. The most I will tell you about it right now is that the working title is “The Orange and the Black.” It is more of a regional story and with the right marketing it can very well regionally. If, when it is time to publish The Orange and the Black, I don’t have a relationship with a publisher, then self-publishing will be the first option.

It’s part of a plan, not because I want to see my words in print, but because it is the best way for this novel to be presented to the reading public.

By the way, if everything goes as scheduled and you do not count my reading time, I won’t yet have reached the 10,000-hour mark in fiction writing when I publish The Orange and the Black, but I will be closer.

See ya' later.

WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Searching for Ideas

Lot’s happening today, so here are a few short pieces, both inspired by a former client (I had to fire them) from my day job—marketing and advertising.

As part of my research for them, I subscribed to an electronic newsletter called Homeland Security Insider. The mission of this publication is to keep manufacturers and product developers updated on the kinds of products the government is sourcing.

According to a recent issue, the editors of the publication have seen a few memos and requests for proposal that lead them to the conclusion that the Secret Service is looking for “dim-on-demand” tinted window glass for the presidential limo, or “The Beast” as it is purportedly nicknamed. The tint-on-demand product has to be compatible with the bulletproof capabilities of the window glass, which is an inch thick.

There is a story there. What if they did not check to see what effect the tinting had on the bulletproof properties? If it causes deterioration, it could make a presidential kidnap a possibility. Tom Clancy used a similar story line to this in Patriot Games. Some bulletproof windows lose their capabilities over time, mostly due to exposure to the sun. This enabled terrorists to almost pull of a kidnapping of the Prince of Wales. I don’t write thrillers—yet—but if I were a thriller writer, this would be interesting information.

The second news item is also interesting, and I can see some story possibilities. The Coast Guard has deemed the Grand Strand Beach area of South Carolina “very high risk” after aircraft from that agency have repeatedly been illuminated by lasers emanating from the area. This is not a new problem. It has been happening more and more with the availability of the hand-help devices. One of my sons has a green laser that puts out a very strong beam. He uses it for when he is talking about constellations (he is a geologist, but he knows a bit about astrology).

My immediate thought is that local aviators, and maybe even the Coast Guard, develop a fondness for buzzing a local nude beach in the evening for a free show campfire show. The nudists discourage them with hand-held lasers. Better yet, maybe the devices are being used by a drug cartel to ward off DEA air surveillance.

News items like these are what keep me from cancelling my subscription. You never know when a story will jump out at you.

See ya’ later. 

 

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Sometime's You Have to Keep Walking and Ignore It

Used with permission from Debbie Ridpath Ohi at Inkygirl.com. Click here for use policy. 

Do You Talk Tech in Your Fiction?

If you can envision it, then technologically it is possible within five years.—Anonymous

Think of it this way: in most cases, a bowel movement will not move the plot forward; an email will.—Allison K. Gibson in an essay on TheMillions.com

Yesterday I posted a blog about stretching the truth in fiction, and how thin can you stretch it. One of the areas I touched on was technology. Can a character use an undescribed technology that may or may not exist to help them accomplish a goal, as long as that technology is within the realm of believability?

The first quote at the top of this blog post answers that question. Yeah, you can do it. However, after a little bit of research yesterday, I was able to come up with at least two other solutions to that technology challenge, both of them feasible with current technology that is decades old.

This moring there was an article by Allison K. Gibson on TheMillions.com entitled He Hit Send: On the Awkward but Necessary Role of Technology in Fiction. It deals with how a lot of today's writers ignore technology in their fiction. Texting and email and social media are pervasive in our lives today. Well over 100 million of us have web-enabled cell phones that allow us to do all this stuff from wherever we might be--in front of the television, in a bathroom in a restaurant, or sitting in church on Sunday (I've done every one of these). 

Why doesn't this stuff show up in our fiction?

I'm proud to say this I used texting and emails quite a bit in Rules for Giving. Some of the plot was unraveled by what the potagonist was able to determine from an email. Things really started to pop in an exchange of text messages. Then more evidence became apparent from the hard disk on a copy machine. (NOTE TO READERS: If you reporoduced your naked ass on the office copy machine in the last ten years, there is a good chance it is on a hard disk somewhere.)

Here is my concern, however, when it comes to using technology in fiction--things are changing quickly. Read Congo by Michael Crichton. By the time the book was published in paperback the technolgy in it was outdated. Disclosure is a little better. That technology is still in use for the most part. I quit reading Michael Crichton mostly because I was tired of dealing with the old technology. I had already forgotten it.

(I take that back. I read Prey, which is a great novel about nanotechnology. Even now it is still current--I think.)

Think of it another way. There are novels out there written in the early seventies that talk about eight-track tapes. How embarrassing is that? I dare venture than in ten years when you say, "Facebook," junior high school kids are going to say, "Huh."

This is presumptuous, but here is the question I often ask mtyself: If I were so lucky as to have one of my novels become standard high school reading fifty or 100 years from now, I want the readers to understand the things I am talking about.

That being said, it is still important to use technology in our writing when it is part of who the character is and what they do.

See ya' later. 

WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

How Important is it to be Accurate?

When it comes to pizza, I’m a thick-crust type of guy.  Mrs. WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com likes thin crust. We compromise a lot, which is husband-speak for letting the wife have her way because you are never going to win in these situations. But as I start to outline my next novel, I am wondering how thin I can roll out the truth dough.

How much can I stretch the truth dough so my characters accomplish their goals, and still have the reader accept the plausibility of the story.

I came up against this in Rules for Giving, too. That novel took place in the suburbs of Los Angeles, from Rancho Cucamonga to Covina to Pasadena, with a brief side trip to Laguna Beach. Action occurred in restaurants and golf courses and parks that really exist. I did create one restaurant for purposes of the plot, and of course the business owned by the protagonist was made up, as were his clients.

I felt as if I was well within my bounds in creating these things.

In my next novel I am dealing with the theft of a famous local landmark from its resting place in a well-known location. How much can I stretch the truth?  I need to change how the landmark was built—some internal specifications that only a few people know. I might also need to change some architectural specifications of the building where it is located. I will need to move around some rooms and perhaps upgrade the electrical system of the building.  

Then I get into the mechanics of how they do it. The protagonists are going to use some edgy technology to remove this three-ton monument. I’ve checked with a physicist who told me that what I want to do is possible “in principal,” although in reality it would present some challenges. There also might be some technical issues that are flat-out insurmountable, but what if one of the characters came up with a vaguely described innovation that let them work around this?

Am I stretching the truth dough too thin?

A month or so ago in this blog I told of a short story a friend of mine wrote in college many years ago. A king has a premonition dream in which one of his warriors overthrows him. The king imprisons the warrior, sentencing him to death. On the eve of the execution a local maiden, curious about the warrior, comes to the wall of his cell outside the prison and finds and removes a loose brick from the wall. But alas, the rest of the bricks hold fast. Unable to facilitate escape, the maiden does the next best thing. She bares herself against the opening in the wall, allowing the doomed warrior to have sex with her. The next morning the warrior is executed.

Nine months later the maiden gives birth to a boychild. That child begets another, and that child begets another, and the great-grandson of the executed warrior overthrows the great-grandson of the king—establishing a new dynasty.

Great story, but when it came to the warrior and the maiden making love through an opening in the brick wall, you had to roll the truth dough a little thin.

These are the questions I am dealing with. Anybody got any suggestions?

See ya’ later. 

 

... for a Few Extra Dollars

This morning I am dispensing with my usual rants about the writing life or reporting on writing-related stories in the media. I am getting on my soapbox to tell you how we can all make a difference in the world.

The short version of this blog post is to go to this website and donate $25. You will be able to donate this same money over and over and over. Mention my name when you fill out the online form.

Here is the long version.

Some years ago I came across Kiva.org. Kiva was founded by a couple of college kids who, armed with a little more than a laptop computer and some knowledge of the web (in some hands this alone is a recipe for disaster), launched a third-world micro-fiance operation. The idea was and still is simple. Third-word entrepreneurs are posted on Kiva.org, with a description of their idea for a business and their need for money, or businesspeople already in operation in these countries post their need for a loan for business expansion.  The sums they need range from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. Kiva helps bundle the loans to fill these needs.

Potential lenders go onto Kiva.org and look through the applications. You can sort by gender, country, continent. If you want to loan to a woman, you can. If you want to loan in a specific country, you can. You make your loan—a minimum of $25—through PayPal. The money is channeled by Kiva.org to that entrepreneur, often times through a third-party agency who administrates the loan and handles the repayment. Loans are funded quickly. Kiva keeps you informed of the payback status. When the loan is repaid to your PayPal account, you loan it out again.

I joined Kiva.org in 2008. Since then I have lent the same $25 out six times to businesspeople from Mongolia to Africa to Central Europe. I have purchased a cow, built a dance hall, and helped a cobbler buy a sewing machine that allowed him to do his job better. I checked my balance this morning and it is time to make another loan.

Kiva is such a great idea that it has been recognized and mentioned by Oprah Winfrey, Time Magazine and countless other media outlets. Spurred on by some news article on the web, there have been times when folks were so inspired to give that the resulting traffic crashed the Kiva website. Bill Clinton profiled Kiva in his book Giving. The group has received millions of dollars in private grants as it spreads throughout the world.  

Since its founding in 2005, Kiva has lent out $336 million. That is more than a third of a billion dollars. Their repayment rate is almost 99%.

Now quit listening to me and go to this website and deposit $25. It is your weekly Starbucks allowance. Make a difference in the world.

See ya’ later.  

 

Anticipating Things Ahead of Time in My Next Novel

I am learning something about outlining a novel. Just because I am outlining does not mean that the creative process of plotting a novel is any easier. It is still a struggle to define scenes, determine what order they follow each other, and all the other details of writing a novel.

That good part is that once I have completed the outline, I can proceed to the writing unhindered. Much of the hard work has been done. Instead of plotting as I write, I plot, then I write.

Based on Story Engineering by Larry Brooks, I am dividing the novel into a beginning, two middle sections, and the end—equal quarters of about 15 scenes each. Each quarter is divided by a significant development in the plot. This is a pivotal moment which propels the story forward in a new direction or with new momentum.

I can see the benefits of outlining:

• An outline lets me see if I have achieved what I need to achieve in each section of the story—foreshadowing, character development, introduction of the villain, key moments, etc.  
• I can monitor word count. I lean towards the verbose in my writing. Based on a 90,000-word novel, however, at the first plot point, my word count should be right at 22,500. At the halfway point, 45,000. Editing for length is exhausting, painful work. This will help me avoid a lot of it.
• An outline lets me see areas where I need to do some research. My characters are moving a heavy object. I am considering having them use maglev technology. Maglev, short for magnetic levitation, is based on the principal that when magnets are introduced to each other with opposing poles, they propel each other way. Using magnetic levitation, you can do some trick stuff (look at this video, and this one). I need to do my research, however.

It will take me about a month to finish the outline, but from it I will have a definitive guide to writing my novel. It should not take me the three years it took to write the last one. If this is my next career, I need to be more prolific and productive.  

See ya’ later.