GENREALITY

Howdy folks!  Happy Saturday!

It’s hard to believe that 2011 is behind me and 2012 is stretching out.  What a year…a mixed bag for sure.

2011 saw me safely out of the PTSD woods thanks to Dr. Lipov and his fine crew back in Chicago…a huge win to be sure.  But 2011 was also the year we said goodbye to Jen’s grandmother and father in the darkest October I’ve ever known.

I saw no new books out here in the US but several came out overseas and one even picked up the Prix Imaginales in France for best translated novel.  The writing itself struggled back to life with about 80k of new words (far less than my normal capacity) but throughout the year, kind words rolled in from all over the world about the words I’d already written.  And though I cut my appearances WAY back this year, I still managed to co-host the Hugo Awards Ceremony with my best pal.  And I got out to do some teaching and speaking both in my dayjob and in my writing life.  My highlight there was a few middle and high school classes I got to work with.

And because of the hit in my productivity, we saw a pretty sizeable hit in our finances.  But 2011 marked the end of my wife’s position with one company and 2012 starts with her in a brand new, much better (and better paying) position.

And then there are the brighter patches in my garden of relationships.  Jen and I hurtle towards 9 years of partnership and 3 years of parenting…and we’re amazing together.  And this year, I’ve picked up some new friends met in various and sundry places, some old friends coming back into my life, and of course the constancy of Team 3J and the rest of my posse of pals.  And the brightest patches of all:  My amazing daughters.  Watching them grow and stretch and learn and be the little people they are has been the high point not just of 2011 but of my life overall.  But gosh-wow twins are hard.

Next week, I hit my birthday.  I call it the Season of Kenika and I always get introspective as that day approaches.  How am I doing?  Am I living my own life or someone else’s?  Do I have any regrets or course corrections to deal with?  Etc.  And I also do my goal setting for the next year (which I’ll share NEXT week).  So in that inventory, I see 2011 as a year that I’m grateful came and went.

So with 2011 behind me and 2012 ahead, I turn now to YOU and ask:  What would you like to see more or less of here in my Saturday posts?

Just so you know, I’m considering a series of posts on dealing with writer’s block and a series on writing short stories.  I’m also going to participate in some monthly themes here at Genreality with my blog-mates.  But what else?  I hate presuming and assuming.  So tell me below in comments what you’d like to hear about…or not hear about…and I’ll put it into my processing  kettle for the upcoming year.

I was moved by one of the quotes in Carrie Vaughn’s post earlier this week:

“How physical the sense of triumph and relief is!  Whether good or bad, it’s done.”

–Virginia Woolf

A few days ago, I turned in the final proofs for my June book, FOR DARKNESS SHOWS THE STARS. It’s the only full-length new release I have out this year, and my first since 2010. I’ve been working on this novel since January of 2010. I worked on it before I had a baby, before I was even pregnant. It was a huge relief to know that it’s finished at last.

And then I think about how long a wait I have left until the book hits the stands. Six more months. Kill me now.

The lead time — the period of production between when an author turns in the final, edited version of their manuscript and when it appears on the bookshelves — can vary enormously depending on the genre, the publisher’s schedule, and any number of other factors. This is the time during which the book is copyedited, typeset, proofed, put into galleys, marketed to booksellers and sent out for professional reviews and blurbs.

Factors that lead to a longer lead times might be the format your book is in (hardcover novels tend to have longer lead times than mass market paperback originals, because of the emphasis on reviews and blurbs), or the genre (children’s fiction has notoriously longer lead times than adult fiction — it’s rumored this is due to the emphasis on sell-in to library markets). A shorter lead time might be because the book isn’t getting a pre-publication marketing buzz (like ARCs) — either because it’s a small book, or because it’s so big it has a built-in audience. (For instance, when readers are dying for the next book in a big series or by a big bestseller, publishers are likely to rush it through production and into readers’ hands.)

Longer lead times might be a factor of a publisher who is looking to thin out their schedule or take advantage of a bookseller promotion (I’ve had book release dates pushed back well after delivery for both these reasons), and a short lead time (called “crashing”) might be so the publisher can take advantage of a trend (“we want more dystopia NOW!”) or a timely season (“we need this Christmas book on the shelves by October!”)

The shortest time I ever dealt with was five months. That was in adult fiction. The longest has been fifteen. That one nearly did kill me. With For Darkness Shows the Stars, my usual lead time jitters are compounded by the fact that I spent 18 months writing the darn thing. This book now represents two and a half years of my life. Sure, I did other things with that time. I wrote another book, and a healthy handful of short stories. Oh, and there’s that baby, too.

But come on. Come out, already!

Long leads are painful to me. I have a book that I spent months (or years) living and breathing, and all I want to do is talk about it, but it’s kind of silly, as no one can get their hands on it yet. And by the time the book comes out, I’m already working two books down the line, so the nuances of the new release are not in the forefront of my mind. When the last book in my Secret Society Girl series came out in the summer of 2009, I had already written two over-100k fantasy novels about killer unicorns — the topic of Amy and her college graduation were far from my mind. (They’ll be even farther this summer, when the book is released in Brazil.) Few things are as embarrassing as talking to a reader at a signing who wants to discuss or rave about a scene while you’re consulting the text itself to jog your memory.

During this down time, when I’m waitingwaitingwaiting for the book to come out, I envy my more prolific friends who have release dates every three months, or the self-published who set their own release dates, unlimited by publisher schedules. I try to fill the time with other releases, like short story anthologies or my own self-publishing.

And I do giveaways. Like the one I’m doing right now.

That’s right. To celebrate my first ever post here at Genreality, I’m giving away a bright, shiny ARC of For Darkness Shows the Stars. This is the ONLY place I’m giving away a copy. This may, in fact, be the only chance you have to read it before June.

And June is so very, very far away…

Leave a comment here to enter. Contest is open until next Thursday, 11:59 PM eastern.

Do you plan on attending a writers conference in 2012?  Do you have a plan?

The excerpt below is from our Guide to Writers’ Conference: How to Get the Most Out of Your Time & Money, but it’s also a version of what’s in Write It Forward.

Strategy First: Know Your Goals

Understand Why You’re Going

The first thing you have to do, even before you look for a writing conference, is know what you want to achieve both with your writing and with your conference experience.  Every decision you make before, during and after the conference depends on what goals you set.

Let’s talk first about your strategic writing goal. It can be anything, but it’s important that you lock it down in one sentence. Here are some broad examples:

• I will be a NY Times best-selling thriller author in five years.
• I will write my memoir for my grandchildren in the next three months.
• I write part-time simply because it is a hobby and spend an hour a day on it.
• I want to be published within 2 years by a major, traditional press.
• I will have my book in print within 2 months via self-publishing.
• I will write a book that will help people with —– and spend the next three years using it to bolster and complement my speaking career.

The Importance of Your Strategic Goal:

• It starts your creative and practical process.
• It determines your supporting goals.
• Remembering it keeps you focused.
• It is the core of your work regime.
• It is the core of your marketing campaign.
• It determines what conference(s) you will attend and how you will plan for them.
• All supporting goals must align with it in the hierarchy.

Supporting Goals

Your supporting goals are designed to help you achieve your overall strategic goal. Thus, everyone’s path will be different based on having different strategic goals. What conference you pick to attend, what workshops you will go to, how you will socialize and network, who and how you will pitch, etc. all will be shaped by your goals.  Each of those decisions are based on the supporting goals for each one.

Everything is filtered through your specific strategic goal. When you go to a writers’ conference, everything you hear is also filtered through your strategic goal.  So two people attending the same session are going to walk out with two different impressions, each filtered through their point of view, which is shaped by their strategic goal.

When you state your goals, they should be done in one sentence. The sentence should have a positive verb that indicates the action you’ll want to use to achieve your goal. The verb must indicate an action you control—to an extent. In publishing, you control the writing and the way you approach the business. Beyond that, the publishing gods are fickle. I will become a NY Times Bestselling author in five years seems a bit lofty. But here’s the bottom line: if that’s what you want to achieve, then state it. And then develop a plan to do it. This greatly increases your odds of achieving the goal than the hit-or-miss method.  Studies have shown the #1 key to success is setting a long-term strategic goal and doing whatever it takes in order to achieve it.  Once you have that strategic goal, it determines everything you do, because everything you do has to support that goal.

Your goal should have an external, visible outcome. Just as in your novel your character’s goal should be something concrete and external, so should yours.

You should have a time lock for achieving the goal, unless time is of no consequence to you. For most of us, time is the most valuable asset we have.

We can guarantee you one thing:  if you don’t state your goal and strive for it, you are guaranteed never to achieve it.

Write goals out.  Post them where you can see them every day.  Put your conference goal on the inside of your notebook where you can see it every time you open it up to take notes.

What do you fear doing? (Often this is exactly what we must do). We have often found that many writers are afraid of writing about the things closest to them. Which means they are afraid to write their passion. Most writers are introverts, so going to a conference is against our instincts. Socializing is difficult for us and we don’t like crowds.  We know many writers who go to conferences and hide in their rooms, rather than attending sessions.

Questions to ask Yourself

They key to answering these questions is the ability to do so in one sentence. This is important because it forces you to focus on what you really want.

• What do I want to do?
• Why do I want to do it?
• Why should anyone else want to do it? (History & Research)
• What is the most important thing I want to achieve?
• How will I know when I have achieved my goal? What will have happened?
• How have others defined it?
• How long did it take others to achieve this goal?
• What was your original goal when you began writing?  The good news is you had one. The bad news is you might well have forgotten it.  That original goal is key. It’s usually the spark of inspiration.  It is the foundation of you as a writer, the seed, from which all else comes. It is your Strategic Goal.

Strategic and Supporting Goals Worksheet

My strategic writing goal is:

My tactical writing goal regarding mode of publication is:

My tactical business goal/priority regarding agents is:

My tactical business goal/priority regarding editors is:

My tactical business goal/priority of attending conference is:

My tactical goal regarding priority of workshops is:

List all the things you intend to do to help ensure your goals are met:

I’ll be continuing these posts about writers conferences for the next couple of months.

That it’s all about me. Yes, Seriously it is.
Let me explain. When I first started out writing I had no support system, and had taken no writing classes, or workshops. Despite that I only had one rejection before I was published, and after that, everything I sent out was accepted, and published. In the 9 years that I’ve been writing I’ve had 4 rejections. The first 2 were within the first year of my starting, (and one was a revise and resubmit) the other 2 were in this past year.

There were no rejections in the 8 years in between. What does that tell me? That I need to go back to the beginning, when I didn’t worry about what was happening in the rest of the industry, or where I would submit something or what readers would think. I just wrote what I wanted, the way I wanted to. So what did I learn with all this thinking and planning I’ve been doing this past year? That it doesn’t really matter, what really matters is the writing, and in order for me to get motivated and be productive again, I need to trust myself. So, yes, it’s al about me…at least until after the story is finished, then there will be time to think, worry, edit and stress. *g*

This clip is 7 minutes long, but the first 2 minutes of it isn’t what I want you to see., the last minute is nothing special either. It’s the 4 minutes in the middle that are gold.

Enjoy, and remember.

“The first key to writing is to write… not to think.”

Happy New Year!

Happy 2012!  I hope your year is getting off to a good start.  Me, I have been perusing the words of wisdom of others:

“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”

–Emily Dickinson

“Technique alone is never enough.  You have to have passion.  Technique alone is just an embroidered pot holder.”

–Raymond Chandler

“How physical the sense of triumph and relief is!  Whether good or bad, it’s done.”

–Virginia Woolf

“Who would write, who had anything better to do?”

–Lord Byron

“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

–Winston Churchill

May your coming year be filled with passion and success.