Yesterday, I finished the first draft of a test story for a new setting I am developing.  Wow, that was a vague sentence, but it sounded like I really said something didn’t it.

I liked it.  I haven’t written an Urban Dark (Gothic) Fantasy since 1996.  I blame Emerian for my return to Horror writing.  I love the genre, abandoning it only after I felt trapped in the rules and requirements it puts on fiction.

After my near breakdown in November, and the many months of recovery, I realized that I am tired of playing by everyone else’s rules.  I have always been bound to one system or expectations.  The world I grew up in is gone, and there is little to nothing I can do to bring it back.  I have to just pick up from the mess that exists now and move forward.

If I can be allowed a cliché: “Be the change you want to see.”

A couple weeks ago, I started working on an idea.  It was strange and scared me a bit.  Unlike anything I have ever written, I didn’t have a model, or genre to define it.  I am not claiming that it is original.  I am sure somewhere someone has written something like it, but it is mine.  It is the type of story I want to read.

Form

My biggest hurdle has been getting beyond the structures of the novel and the short story.  I agree with H P Lovecraft that the best fiction is pulled off with the same craft as a well devised hoax.  So I started playing around with ways to tell a strory directly and from oblique angles.  I would love to share some of these stories, but they may be included in the final project, so I don’t want to release them early.

My biggest inspiration comes from comics.  I love the shared universe, and I would love to find some writers to help me out on this project.  The idea of the setting as hero mashed up with characters that readers will really care about excites me.  In the end I would like this story to spawn blogs, vlogs, and podcasts set in the world, expanding it holding to the canon.

I have never been accused of dreaming too small, LOL.

Test Everything!

If I had any advice for the writers out there it is this.  Test everything!  If you get an idea, no mater how outlandish, bizarre, or out of the mainstream.  Give it a try.  See how it comes out, then move forward based on the results.  I have found a new setting I love writing in.  Who knows what you will find.

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A new story is boiling in my mind.  It scrapes at the inside of my skull like Athena trying desperately to get out.  The cast of characters came to me quickly, but they needed names.

…names…

Sometimes, I feel like names are the bane of all authors.  They have to fit the character and the setting, and work well with each other.  That might sound simple, but for me it spirals into a series of questions just short of the Spanish Inquisition.

Eric’s First Rule of Naming

No character in the story can have the same name as a member of my immediate family.

That is hard.  In this particular story, there is a character that feels like a Christopher and another who feels like a Donna, but my sister’s name is Chris and my mother-in-law’s name is Donna, so both of those names are out.

I made this rule when I was really young, when family thought characters with the same name were really ways to talk about them.  (sigh)

There is a practical reason for this too.  Writers can be sued if people think characters in their stories are based on them.  It makes naming a bit challenging for me, but it is a wise thing to do.

Eric’s Second Rule of Naming

Names must flow together well.

Flow is a hard thing to talk about.  The easiest way to think of name flow is that the names need to sound like they belong together.  Families and regions have certain naming conventions, and as a Speculative Fiction writer, determining those conventions are important.

Older fiction didn’t bother with this, so we ended up with names like Blork, Gort, and Xanthon.  Names that sounded outlandish, but were just weird.

H. P. Lovecraft thought a lot about the names of the creatures in his fiction.  Cthulhu for example is based on the greek work Cthon which means underground, and he intentionally wanted something that was hard to pronounce and that would be pronounced differently by everyone.  He thought it helped to lend the character an unknowable and alien quality.

Eric’s Third Rule of Naming

Love the names you choose.

Writing a novel or series is akin to marriage.  You are going to spend every moment of every day with these characters rummaging around in your head.  It can take months or even years to write and edit a story.  It is a commitment.  Make sure you are committed to the names you choose so you don’t end up with a Dwigt in your manuscript.

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Paul Jessup thinks he knows why Science Fiction is dying:

Heinlien. Asimov.  At the latest, Orson Scott Card (but mostly just for Ender’s Game). I don’t see anyone ever looking for something new…

This is why SF is spiraling downward in sales. It’s fans just aren’t buying it anymore. I’ve got mixed feelings about this. I love Fantasy, Urban Fantasy, etc. so I don’t mind that it’s popular and selling. But some part of me wonders- is SF meant to be kept in the past? Is that why Steampunk is so popular right now, because it’s an emulation of the past? I’m not sure. But this is a problem (Paul Jessup).

Is classicism the problem?  Well, it is part of it, but it is only one of many.

Lessons Lost

The biggest problem SF has is that the industry didn’t learn from the New Wave SF of the 60’s and 70’s.  These authors, most notably Harlan Ellison and Ray Bradbury, didn’t allow themselves to be constrained by the limits of industry enforced genre.  There stories were a little bit science, a little bit fantasy, a little bit horror.  The incorporated whatever they thought they needed into their stories to make them good.

Genre has become increasingly rigid.  Publishers forgot that Speculative Fiction is the literature of the imagination.  It once explored the question, “What if” without any limits save those of the author’s imagination.  As the genres stiffened, sales have continued to go down.

Lack of Imagination

This genre lock is not the only problem facing SF.  Have you seen any of the marketing for new fiction?  No?  You are not alone.

If a new classic is published and no one knows about it, will it make any sales?  Yes, among the author’s friends and family.  That is about it.

Publishers and authors need to find new ways to generate excitement about new titles, but that is not enough.  Fans need to find better venues to share and spread the word about their favorite new books.

Bless me, for I have sinned

I have to admit that I really haven’t read any new books in a long time.  With the exception of Night’s Knights, Brave Men Run, and Burning Skies.  These don’t count because I read them after meeting the authors.  I also don’t count the Harry Potter books or franchise fiction.  Personally, I find it too hard to find new books to read.

As a writer, I feel like I am confessing a mortal sin.  I want to read more, but I am not sure where to find new books.

I’ve thought about reviewing books myself, but I don’t feel like I have the time to wade through the weeds to find the books.

So, I ask you.  Where do you find out about new books?  How can we promote SF books better?

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Is this really a reason to celebrate?

The Booklocker suit was in response to a decision by Amazon to make all print-on-demand publishers use its BookSurge (now CreateSpace) division if they want to sell their titles directly on the Amazon Web site or face the removal of their buy button. Under the agreement, Amazon agreed to not remove Booklocker books from its Web site or to remove the “Add to Shopping Cart” button. Amazon, which admitted to no wrongdoing, also agreed to pay $300,000 in attorney’s fees (Publishers Weekly).

I don’t think so.

Amazon gets to admit no wrongdoing, and pay what for them is a tiniest of tiny fractions of what they make an hour…

This maybe good news for Booklocker, but what about the other Print-on-demand providers?  I assume they are covered, and I hope to Uma Thurman that I am right.

The Publishing industry is changing, and we need new rules.

(via File 770)

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I think a lot about how to find and follow our dreams.  At times, I feel like a self-help writer, and I wonder if I am really saying anything that matters.

The Problem with Self-help

American society is rooted in the idea of picking ourselves up by our bootstraps and achieving impossible dreams.  We are a frontier nation, young enough to remember the struggles of our founders and frontiers men and women, but finally old enough to start grappling with some of the realities of forging a new world out of one that existed long before we got here.

Our real problem is the stories we grew up with about people who set out on their own to create a life for themselves.  It was all a lie.  None of these people did anything alone.  They only accomplished what they did with the help and support of their community.

Unfortunately, this self-made person myth infiltrated every part of our cultural psyche to the point where we have entire industries built on the lie that if you get your act together, then you will be able to do anything.  The truth is, only when we build a community around ourselves will be we able to accomplish anything.

Dreams Unify

While many of us believe we are alone in our dreams or that we have to achieve our dreams on our own, we are never really alone.
Thousands of people want to write a book, or make a movie.  The trick is to find other people who share your specific dream.

Blogs and podcasts have helped a many people, but the means is not important.  What is important is the connections we make to keep our spirits up, share our knowledge, and support us through the lows and the highs.

Without a strong connection with like minded people, it is difficult to navigate the treacherous waters between us and our goal.

Never Alone

The path to our dream starts with us sharing:

1. What do you want to accomplish?
2. What steps do you see between where you are to where you want to be?
3. What mistakes have you made, and what have you learned from them?
4. What are you doing right now to achieve your goals.

When you start to share, you will find others willing to share with you their experiences.

Following your dream

Now, you need to make you steps know, continue to share your experience, and work with others to achieve your goals.

Start a Blog over at Project: Shadow, and let’s get the community together.  As a group, nothing can stand in our way!

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Life is not easy.  From time to time the question arises: “Is it time to move on?”

Out of energy, and the end of our rope, it feels to hard to keep going, and we ask ourselves:

“Should I just give up?”

Well, that depends on what you are thinking about giving up?

• Should I give up on my dream?  NEVER!
• Should I give up on my passion?  Not in a million years!
• Should I give up on following my bliss?  Not for anything!

When we hit a low point, there is often something we do need to give up, but it isn’t any of those things.

Attachments

Often, we are holding on to things so hard we are smothering them.  Our emotional attachments blind us to opportunities before our very eyes.  They allow us to feel slighted by the smallest circumstances.

I consider myself lucky that I never set out to be a “major writer.”  I can’t imagine the pressure to sell books and make everyone like what I am doing.

I write stories for me.  If anyone else likes them, that is a blessing.  I want to tell a good story, not be the next Stephen King.  I can control the quality of my stories, not the whims of the market.  It is hard for me be disappointed by the reception any of my stories gets.

I have some friends who really want to be a top shelf writer, selling hundreds of thousands if not millions of copies.  That is a difficult goal to achieve, and I see their disappointment.

False Hopes

What most people don’t understand is that a false hope is one what you have no power to accomplish.

I would love to sell millions of books, but all I can do is write the best I can, and promote them to the best of my ability.
Almost anything is achievable if we set our mind to it.

Your Turn

Can you think of any other false hope?  What can we do to make our dreams more attainable?

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The tale of supernatural horror provides an interesting field.  THE OLDEST and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.  It is the literature of cosmic fear in its purest sense.  There is here involved a psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind.

A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain.  The more completely and unifiedly a story conveys this atmosphere the better it is as a work of art in the given medium.

• The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow
• It demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life.
• Atmosphere is the all-important thing

Why is Supernatural Horror Effective

The thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood invades an obscure corner of the very hardest head; so that no amount of rationalization, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill.

This tendency, too, is naturally enhanced by the fact that uncertainty and danger are always closely allied; thus making any kind of an unknown world a world of peril and evil possibilities. When to this sense of fear and evil the inevitable fascination of wonder and curiosity is superadded, there is born a composite body of keen emotion and imaginative provocation.

Supernatural Horror Plays with

• fear of the unknown
• psychology
• the sensitive
• curious streak of fancy
• more maleficent side of cosmic mystery
• A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread

What Supernatural Horror is Not.

The literature of mere physical fear and the mundanely gruesome.  This type externally similar but psychologically widely different.  The true tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains.

Such writing, to be sure, has its place, as has the conventional or even whimsical or humorous ghost story where formalism or the author’s knowing wink removes the true sense of the morbidly unnatural.  These things are not the literature of cosmic fear in its purest sense.

For more read Supernatural Horror in Literature by H. P. Lovecraft

• Buy it here

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Mark Coker over at the Huffington Post wrote an interesting post calling for Publishers and Authors to move to a $4.00 eBook.

Here in the U.S., most consumers already think twice before shelling out $7.50, $15.00 or $30.00 for a good read. If a book at the current prices represents a big purchase for citizens of the world’s most affluent economy, imagine the cost burden for the vast majority of the world’s literate people (Mark Coker).

It is not hard to agree with the idea that books cost too much.  $5-$10 seems to be the sweet spot for books.  When Liquid Sky first came out, the book cost $20, and it was not easy to sell.

Imagine how hard it is to walk up to people and say, “Hi, you don’t know me, but could you give me $20 to know me better?”  Try it some time and be prepared for rejection.

After we split the book up, each volume is now around $8, and they sold well.  The lower price point really helped sell the book.  I am curious about the idea of $4 books, but I think that price point is more of a macguffin than a real price.

Affordable Access = Smaller Books

By offering customers a cheaper, smaller and less expensive format, publishers expanded the available market for their books and enabled a larger number of readers to gain access to affordable reads (Mark Coker).

That is the key.  Smaller and cheaper formats.  Lower the cost of a book would require shrinking the size of the book.

The industry started looking for smaller books a little while ago.  Personally, I have focused on serializing my work so I can still tell the complex stories I love and still keep the word count down.  I am not sure there is another way to lower costs.

eBooks require readers

Ebooks also hold the promise to expand the worldwide market for books. Hundreds of millions of new middle class and literate consumers have come online outside the US, especially in developing countries.

…

Since it costs the author or publisher next to nil to “print” each copy of an ebook, ebooks are extremely profitable on a per-unit basis, even at a low selling price (Mark Coker).

I agree that ebooks are cheaper to make, but the cost to the average reader is just too high for now.

Most people do not like read books on their laptop or desktop computer, so to sell to they need to get an ebook reader.  The Kindle costs between $300 and $490, while the Sony ebook reader costs $300.  For $300, you get the reader… that’s it… books are extra

Books are not music

The industry needs to realize that books are not music.  We were used to spending money for a discman to listen to our cds, so when Apple introduced the iPod and iTunes, it was natural for us to buy an iPod instead of a discman.  It was easier to use, and so we bought it.

We are use to just buying books and using them.  The psychological barrier to purchasing an ebook reader is much harder to get over.

For $300 ebook reader, we could buy:

• 40 books for $7.50
• 20 books for $15.00
• 10 books for $30.00

Lets just take the average of 23 books.  The reader asks themselves: “Should I buy 1 ebook reader or 23 books?”  Which would you do as a reader?

For ebooks to catch on, Amazon and Sony need to offer book credits with the purchase of their readers.  It is easier to spend $300 on an ebook reader if you get 20 free books.  The reader would be a loss leader, and they would make up the difference on the sales of books through the device.  If they implemented this solution, readers would go mainstream.

Until something like that happens, the iPhone, Courier Pad, and Android devices are the only hope for ebooks long term survival.

Range of Formats

Not all books should be priced at $4.00. Publishers should segment their markets to ensure they’re delivering a range of products and formats that offer the target customer value that exceeds each price point (Mark Coker).

Agreed.  For now, the best model appears to be:

• $ free ebook to promote the book. (American Gods sales increased 300% because of the free copy, Paul Krugman agrees)
• $ low ebook (so readers can show support, $0.10 per 1,000 words sounds fair)
• $ middle paperback
• $ premium hardcover

State of the industry

Some might argue book publishing isn’t in trouble, as evidenced by the industry’s continued growth. True, the industry has grown in recent years at 1.6 percent annually between 2002 and 2008, according the Association of American Publishers. Yet this growth is a mirage. Publishers are maintaining the illusion of growth by increasing prices. If we adjust for inflation, unit book sales have been in decline for many years (Mark Coker).

Writers, like myself, need to look to the future, and find a way to keep our industry alive.

(via Personanondata)

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The NJ Writers Society are putting on a weekend convention for writers, aspiring writers and those curious about writing.  This is a great opportunity not only to improve the art of writing but there are also panels covering the other important part of writing, making a living at it.  I really like the Sunday workshop which will take aspiring writers through the pitch process and the publishing process which can be a harrowing experience for writers.

The convention will be on Saturday September 12th and end on Sunday September 13th at the Clarion Hotel in Egg Harbor Township NJ.

A weekend pass will run $115 a very reasonable price for a writing convention.

For more on the Convention visit their website here.

Points of Interest

Image by *MizzEl*~Elly* via Flickr

Book Fair:  I love looking at what new books are out and just looking at the general trends in publishing.

Techniques to blend genres:  The genres was a great idea for it’s time but has moved to an extreme that publishing has to move away from.  I’m glad to see this topic being discussed and writers learning how to free them selves from artificial restrictions.

Using poetry as therapy:  This is a great panel for everyone.

The challenges for writing for a living:  This is a difficult challenge that writers face.  I’m curious what William Hudgins position is on the topic and what solutions he puts forth.

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Sonia Simone over at Copyblogger asked an interesting question: Is Writing Obsolete?

I have been asking the same question for a long time now.  I love to write and read, but as the amount of time I have dwindles, I find myself relying more and more on audio and video.

Blogs

I love text on blogs.  It is scanable and I can know right away if I want to read the rest, but there is something about unedited video that I find extremely compelling.

Some of my favorite blogs are little more than webcam videos of people talking about topics I find interesting.  They are personal, and the context clues the voice and face offers is matchless.

I’ve thought about doing more videos for dashPunk, but I am put off by the idea that no one would really want to watch me talk.

I like audio.  We post all of our podcasts to the site, and people spend more time than I thought they would listening through the site.

Books

My biggest problem writing lately is that I am not sure what the future of fiction should be.  I really enjoy writing novels.  I want them to be so much more.

I am working with an audio engineer to make full cast audio productions of my books., and I have thought about offering a version read my me.

Honestly, I would love to make a video series out of them, but I would have to find a filmmaker to help out.

What do you want?

Are you interested in Text, Audio, or Video?

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