GENREALITY

I’m watching the Olympics tonight (this wasn’t my original post for today) and women’s figure skater Mao Asada from Japan just landed two triple axels in her long program, the first women in Olympic history to land one, let alone two in the same program. (And three in the same competition, since she’d done one in her short program.)

The thing is, her program came on the heels of the ovation that her main competitor, Kim Yun-na of South Korea, received for achieving a record Olympic score under the new scoring system. So, no pressure or anything.

The commentators had been talking during the warm up about whether Asada would do both triple axles. One was definite, the other an option. But the thing is, at that point, she had no reason not to go for it. Her best chance was to hold nothing back.

One of the things I’ve always done–and it’s one of the reasons that I had so many unfinished books before Prom Dates From Hell–is struggled with holding something back. If I have some big, huge idea, I have a tendency to hold back from it, to “save” it. For when I’m a better writer. For when I’m more established/famous/best-selling. For later in a series, for later in the book…

All those hypotheticals are about fear. Fear I’ll peak too soon, or leave myself nowhere to go, or no way to top it. But the biggest fear of all, of course, is that I’ll blow it somehow. That I won’t execute it properly, that it will seem hokey/stupid/silly/over the top. Or that my skills aren’t up to the task.

But when it comes to writing, the stakes have to be high. For your characters, and for yourself as a writer. You’re always trying to achieve that next step up on the figurative podium, whether it’s your first sale, your first award, or your first best seller. So commit to the big ideas, and throw your heart into them.

When I say “go big or go home” I mean within the scale of your story.  “Big” can mean the scale of your fantasy battle, your villain’s villainy, or your heroine’s heartbreak.  You have nothing to lose by committing fully.  You should never hold back from your readers, or from your best writing–it’s not fair to your readers, or to yourself. Write every book as if you have nothing to lose.

And somehow, you’ll always think of something just as big for the next one. That’s what we writers do.

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I just bought a speech recognition program, and you guys are my guinea pigs. So far I have to say, so far if I thought sitting in my office having imaginary conversations with fictional people in my head was strange, having imaginary conversations with fictional people out loud feels even weirder.

It’s easier to imagine myself on the radio or recording a podcast and knowing that a real audience is at the other end of some sort of tin can phone. (Ha! First error. Dragon put cancan for 10 can… I mean, tin can. Now I’m trying to picture what a cancan phone would look like.)

Rather than be completely self-serving with my experiment, I’ll use this opportunity to talk about the hazards of writing.

Carpal tunnel syndrome is the most obvious. When you type as much as we do — and when we are on deadline we’re talking marathon sessions — ergonomics are vital. Repetitive stress injuries aren’t just for tennis players. Who knew that writing was such a physical sport. I think there should be something called writer’s elbow. Or maybe writer’s  — Okay, that’s funny. Instead of writer’s wrist, it put writers breasts, which is not what I meant at all.

However, it brings me to my next health hazard, which I could call writer’s butt. We sit for long periods of time, exercising nothing but our brains, drinking lots of coke, coffee, red bull, or what ever keeps us going. I don’t think my last book would have been finished without the help of Smarties candy. So when we go to deadline mode, we’re not so much working our tails off as working our butts on.

I could go into other boring things like blood circulation and other hazards of sedentary jobs, but let’s just leave those unspoken. Basically, for every 45 minutes you spend in the chair, you should really be getting up and walking around 10 to 15 minutes. Unfortunately, when I do take these breaks, it’s usually to go get a snack from the kitchen.

Then there are the psychological dangers. I joke about writers being eccentric, but sometimes we do get a little isolated. We dig into our caves and get comfortable. After a while, it takes dynamite to get me out of my house for anything other than a grocery store run for dog food and toilet paper. If there were any place in the suburbs that delivered these things, I might never see the sunshine.

So another health precaution for writers is to remember to get out of the house now and then and interact with other people. And by interact I mean face-to-face and not on the Internet, which counts, but only for so long. Role-playing as somebody else… well I guess that counts as social interaction.

As for me, I got my requisite face time with real people last night at critique group, so I’m good for a week. Which leaves me free to sit in my office and talk out loud to people not really here.

What about you guys? What do you do to counteract the inherent dangers of our vocation? I’m always looking for tips, but not if they actually involve actual exercise. Or giving up Smarties.

[Over all, two embarrassing word choice errors, and less typos than I usually make myself. Not bad!]

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This will be a brief topic for me, because to be honest, I don’t deal with rejection very well. I know in my head that it’s just business, but my heart is on that page. While I know I should wear my big girl panties and suck it up, I take it all personally.

That said, I have found some tricks to get me through the rough times. As soon as I’m done with one project, I move on to the next. If I keep my momentum moving forward and always on the next thing, it’s easier to say, “whatever,” when those rejections come in.

When they do come in, I give myself one day to be bummed. I can cry, eat chocolate, whine to my friends and then I have to shove all those crappy feelings up on a shelf and be done with it. Honestly, it isn’t easy, but it’s necessary in my world, which moves like a speeding bullet. I don’t really have a lot of time to be miserable, there’s so much to do. (Smile)

My friends and I came up with a fun thing. We have a beautiful hat and in it we’ve placed slips of paper. When you get a rejection you have to pick a piece of paper. They say everything from go and buy and new pair of shoes to rent Pride and Prejudice (Your version of choice.) It’s a positive way of looking at what really is “just business.” We go to dinner once a week and if you have something sucky to deal with, you get to pull a fun thing from the hat. Some weeks you get to pull more than one. We all laugh and it takes the sting out of it. We actually haven’t done that in a while. It’s time to find the hat again.

Whatever happens, don’t let it get you down. This business is subjective, so just keep moving on to the next thing. And remember it is a business. One agent/editor may not like your work, but there may be six others who do.

I’ll give you a good example. Before I had an agent, I had a chance to meet with an editor at a conference. She was interested in my work and asked to see it. She rejected me. A year later, with the help of my agent, I sold to another editor at the same house. That editor didn’t want to change a single thing with the book except the title.

Flash forward two years. That original editor who had rejected me became my editor when mine left to become an agent. When we first chatted she said, at the time I sent in my manuscript that sort of thing wasn’t selling in the marketplace. I never said anything, but always wanted to. The same time I sent mine in was about the time Mary Janice Davidson and Charlaine Harris hit big, but I never did.

The truth is, you don’t know why someone is going to pick something up. That first editor was nine months pregnant and liked that I made her laugh on the second page. She got me. Some day, someone will get you.

But you have to persevere and keep moving forward. Always.

Tell me what you do to get past those evil rejections?

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We always talk about hard work and persistence.  Especially on this blog — we’re all working very hard, I think that’s clear.  Hard work breeds success.

So it seems a little odd to talk about luck.  But that’s what I’m going to do today.  Because I got lucky in two specific ways that I couldn’t have predicted or controlled.  This is also a good way to talk about how some parts of the publishing business work.

The first piece of luck:  I wrote the first Kitty short story in 1998 and the first novel in 2002-2003.  Urban fantasy in its current incarnation didn’t quite exist then.  In my query letter, I called the novel supernatural/dark fantasy.  In fact, one agent I queried told me he was turning it down because even though he liked it, he wouldn’t know how to sell a novel with a werewolf heroine.  This was December 2003.  Oh, what a difference a year or two makes.  Because within a couple of years, urban fantasy had become a bandwagon.  By the time Kitty and The Midnight Hour was released in late 2005, the urban fantasy bandwagon had turned into a nuclear-powered rocketship.  And the series was right there to take advantage of the trend.  I couldn’t have planned that if I tried.  I got really, really lucky.

The second piece of luck:  The publisher got behind the book in a big way.  Here’s some behind-the-scenes publisher neepery.  General-interest mass market book publishers have a monthly schedule.  Each month has slots to fill:  a lead title (usually the paperback release of last year’s big hardcover blockbuster), a second lead title (this might be a big paperback original), and then new titles in various categories:  a couple of titles in nonfiction, and a couple of titles each in mystery, romance, and science fiction and fantasy.  Kitty and The Midnight Hour was acquired to fill one of the science fiction and fantasy slots.  It was going to be a basic, normal book, and I got a basic, normal advance ($7500, for those keeping score).  Books in these slots will get print runs of something like 20,000, unless they’re a big title with a big name author.  Then something weird happened.  I got word that ARC’s of the book were given away at BookExpo, the American Booksellers Association’s big annual conference and trade show.  The publisher had decided to promote the book and give it a huge push.  (I’m sure this has something to do with my first point, and signs that this genre was about to get big.)  In the end, Kitty and The Midnight Hour appeared in the catalog as the second lead title for that month, and got an initial print run of something like 50,000 copies.  This meant that the book didn’t just go to a lot of stores — it got stacks in the new release racks up front.  Under normal circumstances that never would have happened.  Again, I got really, really lucky.  (More neepery:  If you look on the spine of one of those ARC’s of the first Kitty book, it has the logo for Aspect, Warner Books’ SF&F imprint.  But the actual published book has the logo for Warner Books — now Grand Central.  That goes along with how the book was bumped from one section of the catalog to the other.)

Other ways people get lucky:  We’ve all heard stories about the writers who landed a big, prestige publisher or agent right out of the gate, on a query or an elevator pitch.  They had exactly the right project on the right day to get attention.  The first Oprah Book Club book was a first novel by an unknown author — The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard.  That selection made the book hugely successful, and no one could have predicted that.

So how do we get lightning to strike?

There’s a saying, that luck is the intersection of preparation and opportunity.  Preparation is what you have control over, and the reason preparation is so important is that you never know when those moments of opportunity are going to arrive.  Be prepared.  Write the best book you can.  Meet your deadlines and continue writing the best books you can.  Behave professionally.  Have more pitches ready to go when the publisher makes another offer.  Have a plan.

It’s now five years after my first novel release, and I’m trying to keep these things in mind.  I have no idea what’s going to happen next, but I want to be prepared for anything.

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Those of us who have access to writers’ workshops/conventions/critique groups sometimes forget that not everyone is so lucky. Those first two can be expensive and it’s sometimes difficult to find a good critique group. That’s one of the reasons I started the Write_Workshop yahoo group was to give free access to writers all over the world to tool that would help them be successful.

It’s worked. We have over 1500 members on the workshop and 200 of those have gone on to be published by major houses. That’s something I’m proud of and it makes me feel like we’re doing something right. The idea for the workshop came about when I had success with my first book “Charmed & Dangerous.” I’m a fairly nice person and people were coming out the woodwork asking me to read their manuscripts. I couldn’t do it and stay sane.

But I wanted to help in some way.

I’d had some amazing mentors, which is why I had found success so fast. I wanted to do the same for other people. To give them an inside look at the business, and to give them those all-important tools I talked about. The Write_Workshop was born in August of 2006. The Workshop provides craft classes, and I also bring in editors and agents.

I tell you all of this because as a writer, no matter what level you are at, sometimes you need some help. That’s one of the many reasons the Internet is such an amazing tool for writers.Need to know how to write a synopsis? You can find a multitude of resources online. The same goes for how to get an agent or finding out specifics about certain publishers. I can’t think of a single question that can’t be answered online. Though, you do need to be careful about the people giving the advice. ALWAYS check their credentials.

There are so many online classes these days it can make your head spin. Some of them cost a lot of money, and you should be careful where you spend your funds. RWA (Romance Writers of America) has hundreds of chapters all over the place. They can be a great resource even if you don’t write romance. Many of the classes they sponsor are good for all writers, and they usually strive to get the best instructors. For example I’m teaching my FAST DRAFT and REVISION HELL classes for the OCCRWA (http://www.occrwa.org/onlineclassFeb10.html). Those are an inexpensive way to give yourself a kick in the pants if you’ve been dragging your feet with your latest manuscript. But there are tons of classes like that given by various chapters. You just need to check online.

Blogs can also be helpful. I learn stuff from THIS blog all the time from my fellow writers. The same goes for the http://witchychicks.blogspot.com/

If you’re interested in joining the Write_Workshop you can subscribe here: Write_Workshop-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. That’s a free resources, and on the separate chat loop you can ask questions and there are 800 people there to help you.

Best of luck on your journey. Remember, even though you may feel alone, you aren’t. We’re out there and we want to help.

p.s. Take Me If You Dare is out this month. Please pick up a copy and help a writer out.

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