Rick Cook's Notebook

Oh God! Not Another Learning Experience!

2011-07-25T21:30:00.001-07:00

One thing about this month, it's been educational. I'm learning about scanning internet domains, WordPress and several other things and I'm learning it the hard way.

The latest volley of folly concerns registering domains and setting up web pages and blogs. It's been a long, hard slog.

Right now I'm trying to deal with three domains I originally registered with JumpDomain. If you've never heard of JumpDomain consider yourself lucky. It was a shoestring operation in the midwest that outgrew its one-man operating style about 10 years ago. They kept adding customers but they didn't grow their staff. As a result their support and management operations were abysmal. You could never get emails returned -- and I mean never! -- and they never answered their phone. As long as you didn't need to contact them they were okay service-wise, but Jeez Louise! If you needed to talk to someone you were out of luck.

Due to a peculiarity in their billing system, I couldn't use their regular procedure to transfer these domains. I needed to talk to someone but of course I never could.
Since the domains were merely parked I didn't worry about it too much. The only domain I really cared about was thekeep.com because it was intended as my web site for my fiction.

Then JumpDomain went out of business in early 2010. Now there was a whole new complication in trying to get those domains back to host on GoDaddy, my current preferred ISP.

It turns out that JumpDomain was reselling domains from a company call Enom, which still existed. The domains had reverted to them and so I got to start the process over again. So I emailed Enom to try to get something going. At least I got a prompt response from them. So we'll see.

This is on top of stuff with scanning, WordPress, and getting various domains set up to my satisfaction. Very educational, but not soothing.

What a week!

2011-07-23T23:47:00.000-07:00

The next time I publish a book (later this summer, I hope)I'm going to schedule it better. "Shift Happens" came out at the end of the month. That's the time I'm under the most deadline pressure and releasing the book just added to the craziness.

As a result, some my articles were late and I've done a sloppy job on the release marketing. I'll have to do better next week.

Blogging

2011-07-23T23:33:00.000-07:00

Had lunch today with Joseph McDaniel, long time friend and blogger extraordinaire. Boy did I learn a lot!

Joe is one of Arizona's leading bankruptcy attorneys and he blogs like a crazed animal to support his practice and for private projects like the Shotokan karate dojo where he holds a black belt. He has a keen analytical mind and he's applied it to carefully studying blogging and working out techniques and have boosted him to the top of the search engine lists.

Two of Joe's main techniques are targeting and consistency. Joe has several blogs with each one targeted at a different audience. This precise targeting helps him hold readers' interest and keeps them coming back. He assures they'll come back by giving them fresh,meaningful, content at least twice a week.

A lot of work? Yep, but it's paid off for him. He figures he gets about twice the daily visits by potential customers as most bankruptcy attorneys similarly situated. He also finds that people who come in often already know him from his blogs and he already has the beginnings of a positive relationship before they walk in the door.

We spent two hours talking -- mostly Joe talking and me listening. We covered a lot of ground and agreed to do it again soon. Next time I'll take better notes.

The URL for Shift Happens

2011-07-21T18:10:00.000-07:00

Several people have asked me for the URL for "Shift Happens", so here it is.

http://www.amazon.com/SHIFT-HAPPENS-Publishing-Paradigm-ebook/product-reviews/B005CX94YI/ref=sr_cr_hist_5?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&filterBy=addFiveStar

I think you don't need any of the stuff after the word "ebook" but I don't have time to experiment now.

Still the scanning saga continues. . .

2011-07-20T09:44:00.000-07:00

Now I'm looking into scanning service for Obsidian Harvest. And boy, what a long strange trip that is.

So far I haven't found anyone who will scan my document (pages cut from a magazine) and give me a .txt or .doc file of the results. My last hope is Office Max. They won't give me a text file but they will provide a .pdf of the pages. I'm pretty sure I can use Omnipage to OCR the file.

The first problem I ran into is that scanning services either weren't interested or couldn't do it. My lousy 28 pages is just too small for them to mess with. As one of them put it: "Now if you had 2800 pages. . ." The mind boggles. It's not just that my job is small, the pages are physically small -- digest size, which is about half a regular sheet of typing paper. Scanning services are mostly set up to scan letter or legal size pages and running a small page through the scanner runs the risk of jamming the document feeder.

Finally, after several turn downs, I thought of OfficeMax. They could do it for 25 cents a page, which is quite reasonable, and would give me a .pdf of the scanned file for further work.

So in theory this new approach should work. But in theory scanning the story in with the OCR software on my HP printer should have worked as well.

Oh well, at least I'm accumulating a lot of information for my next book.

Experimenting with press releases

2011-07-19T21:02:00.000-07:00

I'm trying the tack of promoting my ebook "Shift Happens" by using press releases. So far I've sent out three and we'll have to see what kind of response I get.

Press releases to promote book is tricky. Generally it doesn't work for fiction, but in theory a well prepared press release should help sales of non-fiction books. We'll see.

Besides, it gives me an opportunity to use a skill from my time in PR.

SHIFT HAPPENS IS OUT!

2011-07-16T07:22:00.000-07:00

"Shift Happens: The New E-Publishing Paradigm And What It Means For Writers" has been published and is now available as a Kindle ebook on Amazon.

In the book I outline the earthquake changes to publishing in the wake of the growing popularity of ebooks and ebook readers. Perhaps most significantly for authors, ebooks turn the dynamics of publishing upside down by putting the author in the drivers seat rather than the publishers. Now authors can choose what and when to publish without having to get a publisher's approval.

The result is a new freedom for writers as well as the opportunity to make significant amounts of money from epublishing.

To see how this can work for you, order "Shift Happens"

Scanners Live Not So Vainly

2011-07-15T09:29:00.000-07:00

Well, I finally got Omnipage installed.

Nuance customer support still sucks, but after messing around the web site for a half hour I called the main number at Nuance and finally got transferred to tech support.

The tech support call was a story in itself. The line was bad and the guy on the other end was in India. Cultural differences reared their head in that I had trouble figuring out the question he was really asking. But we got it to work.

Why do these companies think that just because someone is fluent in English they're equipped to handle tech support? The guy was fluent, fortunately, but we kept missing each other's cues and the result was a "Who's On First" scenario.

Oh well, at least I get to check out how well Omnipage works.

--RC

Scanners Live In Vain

2011-07-15T07:50:00.000-07:00

For the latest chapter in my scanning saga, I purchased Nuance Omnipage 18, a highly recommended OCR product.

So far this has worked about as well as everything else I've done to try to scan in documents. That is to say, not at all.

Here my problems are simpler, and seemingly insoluble.

First problem: I can't install the software. It goes through the involved installation procedure, tells me it has installed successfully, then nothing. No icon on the desktop, no entry on the list of installed programs, zero.

There's more to the story, of course, including a blown install, a messed up email address (mine, mea culpa) and much fooling with the stuff. All to no avail.

Okay, time to call tech support == and that leads me to the next problem. After playing ring-around-the-rosy on the web site several times, I still can't find the tech support number. Everything seems to indicate there is one, but I can find no trace of it on Nuance's pretty but seemingly useless web site.

As I say Nuance comes highly recommended, but if you can't install the program it's useless.

Now all I've got to do is figure out how to send the damn thing back for a refund. And I'm still without OCR software.

--RC

First Web Page Up

2011-07-14T22:34:00.000-07:00

The first in my new series of web pages is submitted and should be up by Friday (July 15) It's for rickcook.biz (which also happens to be the URL) and just now it is a single, extremely basic page for displaying my work.

This will be expanded over the next couple of weeks as I get around to adding more content.

Help In Publishing For The Kindle

2011-07-13T22:36:00.000-07:00

The final stage in publishing an ebook is formatting it. This used to be a pretty simple deal. Essentially you converted your file to HTML added a couple of tweaks and the cover art, all zipped into a single file.

Amazon's Kindle is no longer that simple. Amazon now insists that book submitters use the .ncx file format to submit the table of contents. Ncx is an XHTML format for tables of contents, so it's sorta HTML, but not quite.

This has the advantage that it allows things like a hyperlinked table of contents for the talking book version. It has the disadvantage of being so arcane there's little information on how to do it available.

Fortunately someone stepped up to the challenge. April K. Hamilton, author of "The Indie Author Guide to Publishing" (good book) has come out with "The Indie Author Guide For Publishing For The Kindle With Amazon's Digital Text Platform, Mobipocket Creator And MS Word 2003 Or Higher." In it she walks you through the steps involved in taking your book from a text file to a ready-to-submit zip file.

Hamilton is owed a vote of thanks by everyone in the e-authoring community for untangling this tangled tale. Be warned: The process still isn't easy, but at least you can more-or-less understand it.

"Shift Happens" is almost out

2011-07-12T14:05:00.001-07:00

"Shift Happens" my new ebook on the revolution in publishing is at the formatter and should be published in two or three days.

Another long slog done.

I will say the process of publishing an e-book is a lot easier, and a lot faster, than a conventional paper book. Now that royalties on ebooks are hitting 70 percent from Amazon I have to wonder how much longer paper books will remain the preferred way to publish popular fiction. The advantages for both author and reader just keep piling up.

--RC

Scanning -- again

2011-07-10T23:38:00.000-07:00

Still the scanning saga continues.

I finally got the document scanned and OCRed and started on the corrections. I quickly discovered I'd been two optimistic when I said that one error in 200 was acceptable. It's not really.

In an 18,000 word story that amounts to several thousand errors and some of them are things like substituting an "l" for an "I" which are hard to spot.

What's worse, several sections of the story didn't scan so I've got holes I've got to refill by retyping several pages at a stretch.

Now I am not a proofreader, I'm a writer. I don't have the kind of detail-oriented mind it takes to ferret errors like this and fix them.

And then there's the other problem.

This one I can't blame on the OCR software. It seems that the magazine ended each line with a hard line break. Ducky, except that the story was set two columns to a page so to get the copy prepared I've got to go through and take out all those hard line breaks.

I won't bore you with a long, technical explanation of why that's a problem, except to say that very few word processors allow you to find and replace hard line breaks the way you can other characters. To do it you need to delve into regular expressions -- which are their own brand of magic -- and the regular expressions in LibreOffice are unusually arcane.

What it comes down to is I've got to go through the story and reinsert the paragraph breaks that were left after I got rid of the hard line breaks. By hand.

As a result I've got a headache and I'm still not done with this.

I've come to several conclusions here. The first is that I need better OCR software. FreeOCR just isn't accurate enough for long documents. So I'm getting Omnipage from Nuance, which is $150 but comes highly recommended. The second conclusion is I may need more than that if I'm going to scan in all my stories for my collection "Cooks Book".

I'll try OCRing with Omnipage, but if that doesn't work I'll either have to get a better scanner or farm the job out to a service bureau.

Which reminds me of something John W. Campbell told me once: "Always use the right tool for the job. The right tool to fix a television set is a television repairman."

More on the world changing

2011-07-10T00:11:00.000-07:00

Ran across a fascinating post by Robin Sullivan at
http://publishingperspectives.com/2011/06/self-published-ebook-authors-earn-living/

dealing with the changes in epublishing. Sullivan (whose husband is Michael J. Sullivan, a fantasy author) keeps records of her husband's sales and also tracks the Writers Cafe forum on the Kindle Boards. And she documented the change.

Basically it happened a lot faster and more sharply than I thought. According to Sullivan, the change started with an increase in sales in November-December in 2010 and accelerated from there. Michael Sullivan, for example, went from sales of about $1,500 a month for the self-published and ebook versions of his novels to making just over $100,000 in the first five months in 2011. Almost all the increase came in ebooks.

In her blog post Sullivan then analyzes the reports from Writer's Cafe. Of the authors reporting, the number of writers selling more than 800 copies a month of their books went from about 30 a month to around 80 a month in the same period. By the end of the period, the top ten writers were making between $3900 a month and $16,000 a month from their ebooks.

To which I can only say: "Write on dudes and dudettes!"

Roots of Revolution, Part 2: The Day The World Changed

2011-07-07T15:49:00.000-07:00

Americans love fixed dates for any important event. Thus, we celebrate the 4th of July to mark American independence and we mourn Sept. 11 as the beginning of the war on terror.

Of course most such dates don't mark when the real event happened. Both the American Revolution and the War on Terror started considerably before those dates, but we like the comfort of having a nice solid date we can quote like a mantra.

The change that's taking place in publishing has a special date as well. January 20, 2010. Like the others, the tidal wave didn't start then, but it is significant. In future years I wouldn't be surprised if authors get together to raise their glasses and party on that day.

(Not so much because most authors will remember the date, but because authors love an excuse to slack off and party.)

What's so special about January 20, 2010? That's the day that Amazon kickstarted the epublishing revolution by announcing they would be raising the royalties on their ebooks to 70 percent of list prices. (Amazon actually raised rates on Jun 30, so you can celebrate that date too.) That makes it a convenient date to mark as the day the Revolution began.

The higher royalties were actually the second step in the events starting the revolution. The first one was the ebook readers took off. Today something like 12-15 percent of all American readers own an ebook reader and Amazon sells more ebooks than it does conventional books. Between them, those facts set off the explosion in publishing.

There is a third factor leading to the revolution as well. Ebook publishers do an absolute minimum of gatekeeping. If you write an ebook, Amazon or Smashwords or whoever is just about sure to publish it, no matter what the subject. (I will admit I've had a little trouble selling the concepts for The Serial Killers' Handbook and The Official Hannibal Lechter Fan Club Guide And Recipe Book, but those are about the only limits.)

So, anyone gets to publish anything they want, charge between $2.99 and $9.99 for it and collect a royalty of 70 percent of the price. That's a minimum of $2.10 per book.

Both buyers and sellers were energized by the changes. Buyers responded by buying more ebooks readers than even the most sanguine marketers imagined -- and they're still buying them. Sellers started cranking out books so the buyers would have a large choice of reading material at very low prices. The cycle rapidly became self-perpetuating and it shows no sign of slowing down.

We'll leave the quality of the new books for another post. Here we'll simply observe that there is a huge amount of dreck being published. Illiterate dreck, mostly. However there are also some gems that rival the best printed books being published (never mind the stuff that makes the best seller lists)

So the next time January 20 rolls around, buy a writer a drink and raise your glasses to the Revolution.

Scanning: The saga continues

2011-07-06T18:02:00.000-07:00

When last we left our hero he was trying to scan in one of his stories from a science fiction magazine so he'd have a text file to edit to reprint the story. You know, the job that people always tell you is "easy".

In a pig's eye, said the little bird.

The scanning itself went fine. I've been scanning contracts and such for long enough I pretty much know the drill. The fun began when I tried to put the .pdf file from the scan through the OCR software to get a text file.

The first problem was I couldn't get the program to start. Every time I gave it a file name to upload the text copy to the program rejected it a message saying there was an error in the path name. Finally I called HP tech support. It cost me $20 because the printer was out of warranty, and a lot of time on the phone, but the tech was able to locate the problem. It turned out I couldn't enter a path name without hitting the "browse" button. Talk about counter-intuitive and no hint in the documentation.

Okay, problem solved. Now to let the OCR software create the text file. Tell it to go and it starts scanning -- and then stops halfway into the first page. The system hangs, eventually crashes and does something bad to the system that requires a power-off re-start to fix.

Rinse and repeat a couple of times.

The obvious diagnosis is that the software stubbed its toe on something, wandered off into the weeds and did something funky somewhere where it shouldn't. But what do I know? So another call to HP tech support. This time t hey don't charge me $20, but it takes an inordinate amount of time messing with settings and such. Finally in the course of this I repeat (for the second or third time) casually to the tech that this is a really big file.

How big? he asks not so casually. 40 pages or so, I tell him. Aha! A quick check of task manager reveals that the file is about 20 MB. Way too big for the program to handle. After a little messing the tech determines that there's no way the software will read a file that size. So its either re-scan the file in smaller chunks (ugh!) or find other software that can handle it (less ugh, but expensive).

I decide to see what I can find in the way of new software. After looking, I come across a recommendation for an Open Source program called "FreeOCR", which is, guess what?, free.
What the heck. I'm on deadline and I need something NOW. So I download FreeOCR and try it.

And it works. Not perfectly. There are a couple of annoying little details, like having to select each column on the page separately to input, but it's fast and it will read a file that size without even breathing hard. (The trick is that FreeOCR operates on a page at a time, no matter how large the file is. So instead of choking on 20 MB of stuff, it takes it in smaller bites.) True, it doesn't do as good a job at character recognition, missing maybe one character in 200, but even at 40 pages that's good enough for me.

So a 'simple' job of scanning ended up taking two days of clock time because scanning isn't so simple at all. A few years ago I was talking to Eric Flint, who is head of the Baen Free Library. The Library is a program to provide free Baen e-books online. (Usually the first book in a series, which hooks you nicely and then they sell you the other books.) He was talking about how difficult it was to get books up for the library, especially the ones that were printed before delivering books as word processor files became popular.

Someone suggested that Eric use volunteers to scan in the books. Eric reacted negatively -- overly so, I thought.

However after this week's experiences, I think I owe Eric an apology.

--RC

Writers: Image versus reality

2011-07-06T11:15:00.000-07:00

First, the image. A PR photo taken several years ago.

Then a picture of me as I really am

The Sea Change In Publishing -- Pt 2

2011-07-06T10:26:00.001-07:00

Of course book prices reflect a lot more than the cost of physically producing a book. We'll look as some of the sheer craziness in the business later.

In the meantime you have to ask why, if book prices are so inflated, someone doesn't come along and publish books for something closer to the actual production costs? That is what is supposed to happen in a free market, right? The cost of goods should shrink toward the cost of production.

In a word: Distribution. Conventional publishers have a lock on distribution through conventional channels. You either play by their rules or you face a long, hard road with little chance of success.

A modern publisher of the conventional sort today really owns only one thing and that is a distribution network. Almost all of them sold off their presses years ago because of the cost of running them, they may or may not own their own warehouses, most of their low level editorial work is probably farmed out. What's left is essentially a few key editors and such and a network which is specialized in getting books into conventional book stores or the paperback rack at your local supermarket.

The key part of that distribution operation are the sales reps who constantly visit bookstores, buyers, wholesalers, etc. to convince them to stock their publisher's books. (I say "stock" because typically publishers offer book sellers a return policy. If the book doesn't sell it goes back to the publisher for credit.

The big publishers have very large distribution networks and the little publishers usually work a deal with one of the biggies to have them distribute their books. For example Baen books has such an arrangement with Simon and Schuster (or did -- since Jim Baen died I don't have an inside source on the industry.)

Of course the little guy who's trying to do it without a big publisher is basically screwed. No matter how hard he or she (girls can be guys these days) the self-published author simply can't get the reach to get a book into bookstores. In fact most booksellers hate to see self-published authors at all, deeming them a nuisance.

It is this lock on the distribution channel that keeps conventional publishers in business. No distribution, no sales, at least under the conventional model.

Which is where e-publishing breaks the cycle.

E-publishing allows authors to avoid the big publishers and their distribution networks altogether. There's still often a big company, like Amazon, involved, but they're acting as a bookseller more than a publisher. In e-publishing the jobs like editing, which are done by conventional publishers, are the responsibility of the author.

The thing that makes this work is that the distribution potential of e-publishers is literally world wide. Anyone with a computer can sign on to their web sites and order a book. In fact the distribution network of an e-publisher is bigger than the network of any conventional publisher. It also bypasses the conventional bookseller entirely and goes direct to the customer.

In effect it's disintermediation at work because the supply chain reduces to three: The author, the e-publisher and the bookseller. What's even better is that because the cost of producing an e-book is so low for the e-publisher the e-publisher doesn't have to act as a gatekeeper. There is little or no barrier between the author and the customer.

The result is, if you want to write a book, you can easily and cheaply e-publish it. Of course you can also e-publish it no matter how bad, illiterate or just plain wacko the book is. This leads to the conventional publisher's claim that e-books are all crap.

There's enough truth in that to make it sting badly. That's why it's going to be the topic of the next post in this series.

--RC

Here's the Japanese cover

2011-07-06T09:39:00.000-07:00

Just a quickie scan

The Roots Of Revolution Pt 1

2011-07-05T14:32:00.000-07:00

It's fine to talk about a sea change and paradigm shift in publishing because of e-books. It's better to talk about how a lot of people are going to make huge amounts of money. But exactly what changed and how does it open opportunities for authors?

Actually there are several changes coming together. Let's start with the most basic.

The Marginal Cost To Produce
The Next Copy Of An E book Is About Zero

In other words, once you've got your book written, copy edited and set up on the web site, the cost to provide a customer with a copy is very nearly zero. Oh, there's the cost of storing the book on the system and servicing the order, but it's so small as to be negligible.

This is very different from the situation with printed books. At the least, such books have to be printed, paper and ink purchased, and the product packed and trucked to bookstores. Just printing and binding a typical book costs $2. So the absolute cost of a book can't go below $2 (plus shipping, etc.) or the publisher loses money on every copy.

Two dollars versus zero is a pretty big difference, but wait (the announcer says) there's more. In fact there's a lot more. In the next blog post I'll look at some of the built-in costs of printed books that aren't necessary to produce the book but are built into the system.

And on a more fun subject

2011-07-05T11:38:00.000-07:00

My review copies of the Japanese reprint of my first novel arrived today. Yippee, now I can annoy people with bad puns in two languages. I wonder how computer humor translates into Japanese?
--RC

New Japanese Edition of Wizards Bane

2011-07-05T11:34:00.000-07:00

Just got my review copies today from the Japanese edition of Wizard's Bane, the first novel I ever sold.

Interesting to see the differences in the cover. The American edition, from Baen, featured dragons. The Japanese edition features a redhead.

I also like the way my name transliterates. In Japanese I'm "Riku Kuku".

Scanning

2011-07-04T21:59:00.000-07:00

Well, I expected trouble and I got it.

I think the document scanned in correctly. At least the first of the .pdf looks good. However I've got a hangup in running OCR on the document to give me a text file. After screwing with it for an hour and getting nowhere, I've put that aside and I'll call HP tech support tomorrow.

Fortunately I don't have a tight deadline on this.

--RC

Yet another project: Fiction This Time!

2011-07-04T14:29:00.000-07:00

I just started the process of scanning in a story that appeared in Analog in 2000.

My co-author, Earnest Hogan, and I have decided to take the story, titled Obsidian Harvest, and turn it into a separate item for the Kindle store. Unfortunately, I don't have an electronic copy of the story since that was about two computers back. (Note to self: Rewritable DVDs are your friends). So while Ernie does some illustrations in his unique pseudo-glyphic, pseudo-tagger style, I've got to get a copy of the story in machine readable form so we can work with it in preparation for uploading to Kindle.

Fortunately I have worked on this some, although not on this story. Scanning in a magazine story isn't as easy as it should be. One unexpected problem was that the scanner left hard carriage returns at the end of each line. After three or four days of futzing with it, I finally found the secret: A multi-step process that involves the (simple) use of regular expressions. To say it is counter-intuitive as hell is putting it nicely -- a lot nicer than my comments while I was fighting the process.

To add to the fun, the OpenOffice documentation is completely silent on how to do this. LibreOffice, the recent fork of the OpenOffice project, does it exactly the same unobvious way. However LibreOffice's documentation includes an appendix on how to do the trick. Have I mentioned I really like LibreOffice?

Then, of course, I'm expecting the usual hassles in scanning, from paper jams to pages out of order, misread and all kinds of little weirdnesses. But that's okay. It beats retyping the whole thing.

Which reminds me of all the people who will airily tell you that it's no problem to get something in to machine format. All you've got to do is scan it in. Riiiggghhhtt! says I in my best Bill Cosby voice. All I can say is the people who talk like this have either never tried it or they had the devil's own luck.

In my experience scanning is like voice recognition. Which is to say it's a nifty technology and it's getting better and better, but it really isn't here yet for home office use.

Ah, well, I'll keep you up to date on how it works out.

--RC

Moving Off Dead Center

2011-07-03T19:45:00.000-07:00

Since they changed my drugs again, I'm feeling better and I'm able to be more active.
This is a Good Thing.

The most interesting news I've got to share is that I'm getting ready to publish an e book on Kindle. Titled "Shift Happens", it's about the changes in the publishing industry and how they benefit the writers who are willing to take advantage of them. Short form: self-publishing by e book is no longer necessarily a marginal enterprise.

The other thing is a sequel to "Obsidian Harvest", my "dinosaur Aztec detective story noir". Earnest Hogan and I have been working on this off and on (mostly off) over the last couple of years and I think the thing is near enough done to warrant a death march to finish it this week.

The good news about my health is that I'm not in any pain. The bad news is that the clogged arteries severely reduce what I can do. The other problem is that my balance is shot and unless I'm very careful I tend to fall over when doing anything even moderately strenuous. But I can cope with that by being careful and limiting what I try to do.

Meanwhile the weather in Phoenix has turned full-bore ugly. Which is to say that it's been over 110 for most of the last week and Fourth of July looks like it will be nosing 118. I can pretty well stand anything up to 110, but over that, I don't care how dry the heat is, it's HOT!

However as a friend of mine who moved here from Boston liked to observe: No matter how hot it gets, you never have to shovel heat.

Nor do we have a season called "mud".

More as I know more.

--RC

Where Have I Been -- Redux

2011-01-23T19:34:00.000-08:00

In the immortal words of Roseanne Rosanna Deanna "There's always something."

The latest "something" was a stay in the hospital to have a stent put into one of my coronary
arteries. This turned out to be a good-news/bad-news situation. The good news is that the stent
has improved my quality of life and I'm no longer having angina attacks. The bad news is that three of the five arterial grafts I received in 1999 are completely and irreparably blocked. The one that was stented was 90+ percent closed. Only one of the five is still clear.

This means a new round of drugs and restrictions. OTOH I'm alive and feel fine and probably will remain that way for a few more years.

The artery problems have been affecting me for about a year, although I didn't really recognize what was happening until about three months ago when I started having regular chest pains.

The moral of the story: Pay attention when you start to feel a persistent listlessness or find that you're losing the ability to tolerate exercise.

Meanwhile, I've got a couple of projects I'm working on, including some e-publishing stuff through Amazon Kindle. I really think that's the future for genre fiction.

--RC

Where have I been?

2010-08-27T17:52:00.000-07:00

A reader wrote to ask me what I've been doing for the last 18 months.

That's a good question. The answer is: Nothing spectacular, just trying to keep my head above water. That's proven to be more of a challenge than I anticipated.

My mother's death hit me harder than I expected and I've spent months in a semi-depression. I'm just climbing out of that now, as evidenced by this post.

One positive thing is that I had a short story published in Analog (May issue) which represents the first fiction I've completed and sold since my heart surgery in 1999.

So I guess I'm on the upswing. Watch this space.

--RC

WarBots game

2009-01-31T11:12:00.001-08:00

Someone asked if the game Warbots, which is referenced in "The Wizardry Cursed" actually exists.

The answer is "yes and no".

There's no such game as Warbots, but the fictional game is patterned closely on RoboTech, the popular tabletop and computer wargame that a wide variety of robots to fight battles hundredss of years in the future.

--RC

Next Section Up

2009-01-31T11:05:00.000-08:00

After way too long, I'm back to posting the bits of Wiz 6. I hope to post one section a week until I have it all up.

That's the good news.

The bad news is that from here on out you're going to have to work to follow what's going on. What I've been posting so far is the section I completed and sent to Baen as an advance sample. It's all pretty complete, modulo some copy editing and editor's input. What follows is a series of scenes and fragments strung together more or less by subplot. The first part, for example, are the scenes of the children in captivity and the dragon who is guarding them.

All of this stuff is in more-or-less chronologial order within the subplot, but it was meant to be intercut with other plot lines in the finished novel.

As usual, blank lines indicate breaks, either between scenes or bits I hadn't written when I went into the hospital.

Anyway, enjoy

==RC

Problems and copy protection

2008-11-15T17:16:00.000-08:00

A little more on my problem.
The hard disk itself is fine. The motherboard is toast. The logical solution is to replace the motherboard and go to work.

Unfortunately that runs square into Microsoft's copy protection fetish. If you replace the motherboard the operating system thinks its been loaded on a new computer, so it won't work until it is reauthorized by Microsoft. To get it reauthorized you need the OS serial number -- which I didn't get with the computer (remanufactured). So I'm stuck.

This has been very frustrating.

PROBLEMS

2008-11-15T08:01:00.000-08:00

Thanks to computer problems posting "The Wizardry Recapitalized" has been serious disrupted.

In the last month I've had not one but two computers turn into expensive doorstops and discovered that my backups weren't recoverable. Wiz 6 is safely sitting on a hard drive on a dead computer.

It's going to take a fairly elaborate recovery process to get the novel back -- essentially I've got to take the hard drive out of the system, connect it temporarily to another box and download the data. One complication is that the drive is IDE and the box is probably going to use SATA. The other complication is Windows copy protection.

My tech says he can do it, but it's going to take time. In part because all this has put me seriously behind on my paying work and I'm just getting caught up on that.

Oh well. If it was easy everyone would do it.

--RC

Chapters 10 and 11 are up

2008-10-15T04:38:00.000-07:00

Okay, I just posted Chapters 10 and 11 of Wiz 6.

That's the good news. The bad news is that after this you're going to have to work. I had this first part of the novel pretty well done as an excerpt for the Baen Free Library (Note I said "pretty well" it still needs work). The rest of the book is a lot more fragmentary and organized by sub plots rather than in a continious narrative flow.

I'll start getting that up in a day or two.

Meanwhile, thanks for sticking with this.

--RC

Chapters 3-6 up

2008-09-09T06:59:00.000-07:00

As promised, I'm now posting several chapters at a time. I just put up 3-6.
Enjoy.

--RC

Feedback on Wiz 6

2008-09-06T00:31:00.000-07:00

I'm beginning to get feedback on Wiz 6 and I'm going to modify some things in light of it.

First, of course, the postings, from the choice of web sites to the way things are arranged is at best crude. My initial efforts having fallen through, I wanted to get something up that would be fast and foolproof.

However I am going to try to make it better by providing links from chapter to chapter. That will be in the next week -- I hope.

Second, some of you have complained that the chapters are very short. And they are. The manuscript was divided to highlight the key scenes with the idea they would all appear at once. Posting a chapter at a time on the web divides the book into snippets that are just too small. So from now on I'm going to post larger sections -- probably several chapters at once.

The first batch will go up this weekend.
--RC

Payment

2008-09-02T12:52:00.000-07:00

A couple of folks have suggested that I accept donations for Wiz 6 The Wizardry Capitalized now that I've actually started posting it.

I appreciate the compliment, but I don't feel right taking money for something that isn't finished. However I do have another idea.

I've recently opened a CafePress store called Wiz Zumwalt Enterprises (http://www.cafepress.com/wizzumwalt )where I'm selling T shirts, caps and stuff with sayings from the Wiz books, including some from Wiz 6. It's small so far. I've only got about a dozen items up, but it's going to grow as I coordinate with artists and others.

If you'd like to contribute something to the cause, visit http://www.cafepress.com/wizzumwalt and if anything strikes your fancy, purchase it.

--RC

And Chapter 3 is up!

2008-08-30T16:17:00.000-07:00

Just posted chapter 3 of the Wizardry Capitalized.

As I said, the first 20,000 words -- eight or 10 chapters -- are in pretty good shape. Then the fun begins.

--RC

Chapter 2 is up

2008-08-27T17:19:00.000-07:00

Whew.
A little more time now so I posted the second chapter.

The first 20,000 words or so are pretty coherent. After that things get rockier. Total words are about 72,000 and I'll post one or two chapters every few days to a week for right now. Later, if I have to do more work before posting, it may slow down.

Feel free to let people know the site is finally, at last up at a temporary home.

--Rick Cook

SUCCESS! (I Hope)

2008-08-27T08:05:00.000-07:00

Well, it's finally up.
The first chapter of "The Wizardry Capitalized" is finally up. The temporary URL is
http://sites.google.com/site/thewizardrycapitalized/Home

I say temporary because I still intend to move this to my home page on Hostmonster as soon as I work out some more details.

Even as temporary it's unfinished. There are two copies of Chapter 1 on the site now and I don't have time to figure out how to delete one of them. That will come in the next day or so.

Meanwhile, you can start reading. I'll be posting new chapters every few days.

Oh yeah, be sure to read the Apology.

And thanks for your patience

--Rick Cook

Back to work

2008-08-02T23:59:00.000-07:00

Well, I got the medical problem cleared up and I'm back to work on the Duke.
This chapter is taking a little longer because it's harder to write. The characters have an emotional problem and I'm having to slog through it.

But soon. Soon...

Hanging Fire

2008-07-31T10:58:00.000-07:00

I've run into a strange little problem -- health related -- that has slowed things down for a few days. It should be resovled this week and then I'll get on with posting Wiz 6

Yet Another Progress (or lack of it) Report

2008-07-27T20:53:00.000-07:00

I'm moving ahead on this, but I've run into some annoying problems which are delaying things for a few days. I hope to have the first stuff up in a week or so.

Plot vs Structure

2008-07-21T07:00:00.000-07:00

Plot and structure are similar but very different at the same time. Both have a vital role to play in a work of fiction.

Basically, plot is what happens, structure is how you tell the reader about it.

Plot is linear. Structure isn't, or doesn't have to be. Structure should be chosen to reinforce plot. In other words you decide how to tell your story (structure) to get maximum impact from the sequence of events (plot).

Because structure is non linear you can use devices like flashbacks to tell your story out of order. This is very handy if you want to shoot the sheriff on the first page but you have a lot leading up to the shooting that the reader has to understand.

Structure also involves such things as viewpoint (who's telling the story). Different viewpoints have different effects on the impact on the reader. Viewpoint is an important way of controlling the pace of your story. By intercutting scenes from different plot threads you can build excitement, fill in background the hero may not know, and move your story along.

For a good example of this see Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising, an alternate history account of a Soviet invasion of Europe. Clancy's story spreads from Iceland to Moscow and he cuts back and forth between the characters (usually on chapter boundaries) to build suspense and keep the story rolling in spite of the amount of background material involved. James Clavell also made excellent use of shifting viewpoints in Shogun a novel of feudal Japan. The technique is especially helpful in long books -- which both "Red Storm" and "Shogun" are.

First person ("I did this...") is generally the most powerful, but the hardest to do throughout an entire work because you're limited to what your character knows at the time. That's why it is often mixed with either multiple first persons (hard to keep straight for the reader sometime), or first person and third person where the main part of the story is told through the protagonist's eyes and the supporting material, such as what other characters do when the protagonist isn't present.

Structure deserves careful consideration when you're plotting (actually plotting and structuring) your fiction, especially novels.

Almost there

2008-07-19T22:09:00.000-07:00

I know this is dragging on to a silly extent, but we've almost got something. I've got to get a couple of more things unscrewed and then you'll be able to start reading.

(Why does this remind me of the first computer program I ever wrote? It took me about 12 or 14 iterations to get it to run and I was getting pretty frustrated by the end.

The Mountain Is Still In Labor...

2008-07-15T18:57:00.000-07:00

Well, I continue to make progress on getting The Wizardry Capitalized up. However to no one's surprise, there are a few little glitches along the way.

Right now I've got memory problems. Not my computer's, mine.

Although I deal with web design, usability and such constantly as a tech journalist, it's been years since I've actually had to put a site up. I have done it. I used to be able to do it. But I don't remember all the grubby little details.

This is almost as frustrating as not being able to write fiction. I know pretty clearly what I want to do, and it's a simple site. But getting the stuff in the right place is just not happening.

It doesn't help that the native web building application on HostMonster is quite literally unusable for me. The morons who designed the program didn't make provision for moving the window around on t he screen. It's fixed at the bottom of the screen where the last few lines -- including the boxes you have to click on to make things happen -- are unreachable.

Instead I'm using KompoZer, a Mozillafied version of NVU. It's free and a decent WYSIWYG page builder (modulo all that "WYSIWYG page builder implies). So far I like it for what I'm doing, but since its not the standard Hostmonster page builder app, I can't get much help from HostMonster's support staff. So I'm stuck trying to find other sources of help.

(BTW: The HostMonster support people, with whom I have developed a close personal relationship, are quite good, in my experience. They not only speak excellent English, they're patient and they know their stuff. A win for HostMonster, IMHO)

Normally I'd get by with some help from my friends. Unfortunately, one of my best friends for this purpose -- the model for Jerry in the Wiz books -- is in a rehabilitation center recovering from a serious traffic accident. (When you weigh as much as he does, even a broken leg is life threatening.) Another of my friends is in the middle of the long, hard grind to take the next series of MSCE exams. Others are tied up with projects personal and professional and so it goes.

However someone has suggested a friend of theirs who is apparently pretty good. I'll contact her tomorrow and see if we can get something going.

Well, hell. If it was easy anyone could do it.

--RC

And Some More New Stuff -- Coming Soon

2008-07-14T23:42:00.000-07:00

While Wiz 6 moves ahead, I've got another project in the works. No, not another novel, but something I think at least some of you will find interesting.

Let's just say it is an attempt to capitalize on my somewhat warped worldview in an entertaining fashion.

I'll tell you about it here once I'm ready to launch. That should be not too long after the first chapters of Wiz 6 go up.

--RC

THE MOUNTAIN LABORS LONG...

2008-07-14T17:34:00.000-07:00

and the ridiculous mouse comes into view.

I am finally getting ready to start posting Wiz 6 -- The Wizardry Capitalized.
When I say getting ready, I mean I've got a web site (wiz6.com) with HostMonster, I've got the (very crude) page designs worked out and the front matter written.

Now all I've got to do is link the pages and upload them. (I think that's all I've got to do.) If so, I'll probably do it tonight or tomorrow.

Ah, the valor of ignorance. But I'll keep you posted.

--RC

DOES THE STORY GRAB YOU

2008-05-30T22:37:00.000-07:00

Commercial fiction writing today is a hybrid because it is both a money-making endeavor (I refuse to call it a "business") and a means of creative expression. When professional fiction writers get together they tend to talk a lot about things like marketing.
I've been talking with fellow writers a lot recently about changes in the market and how to respond to them.

Quite simply, if you're going to write for money you can't ignore the marketing and commercial aspects of your work. However no matter how commercial you are you've got to complete what you write in order to get paid for it.

If you're not really, truly interested in what you're writing you're unlikely to complete it. If you don't finish it you can't sell it.

This, incidentally, is one of the problems with writing pornography for money. Back in the days when there was still a booming market for "stroke books" nearly every writer considered writing them and not a few tried. After all, the money was almost decent and how hard could it be?

For most writers it was very hard indeed. The problem is that very few of us are than interested in pornography (at least to write) and it quickly tends to become a death market. Writers who tried it found that porn was excruciating boring to write. Some managed to get through one book. Very, very few managed two or more.

The market, fortunately or unfortunately, is no more; killed by the amateur porn on the internet. (Which, be it noted, is often of higher quality than the average stroke book.) However the principle applies. You can see it today in the occasional writer from other genres to decides to try his or her hand at writing romances. The ones who aren't really, truly interested in romances can't stick it out. And because they don't have the interest they produce lousy romances.

Which leads to a critical question for any writer contemplating a book-length project: Will this hold my interest? If the answer is no, don't try it. No matter how commercial the project is and no matter how mercenary you are.

This isn't just a matter of a burst of enthusiasm in the beginning. That's easy and will get you through maybe 10,000 words. It's keeping your interest in what you're doing over the long haul.

Nearly every writer goes through a stage in a book -- usually about 60 percent through -- where the enthusiasm has evaporated and the thing becomes a slog. It can be a real death march, worse than any programming marathon. You've got to have the internal resources to get through that period and if the story and the characters don't grab you you're not going to make it..

Wiz 6 Update

2008-05-30T22:26:00.000-07:00

Well, the project is definitely still on. But it's taking a little longer than I thought it would.

For one thing the manuscript is a bigger mess than I remembered. The first 20,000 words or so are pretty much in rough draft form, basically clean and narratively connected, but the rest is pretty bad. I'm not really writing any more but I am trying to clean things up.

This is taking time. More than I imagined. (You know how it is: The First 90 percent of a project takes 90 percent of the time and the last 10 percent takes the other 90 percent of the time.) However I'm pushing forward with it as I can and I will have it up -- as they say in fandom -- Real Soon Now.

I want to thank all of you who have taken the time to comment on this idea. Your enthusiasm has kept me going through a couple of rough patches. And I want to assure you that it will be rewarded.

UPDATE ON WIZ 6

2008-03-19T17:29:00.000-07:00

Well, it's going to happen.

The stillborn version of Wiz 6, "The Wizardry Capitalized" will be going up on my web site (still being established) sometime in the next 30 days.

It's taking me longer than expected in part because I've got a little work to do before this thing is ready to post even in an incomplete form. There were also some considerations in getting the web site hosted, but that's another story.

I'll keep everyone posted

--Rick Cook

THE WIZARDY UNCOMPLETED -- PT II

2008-02-20T23:34:00.000-08:00

Since a number of people are interested in seeing the last Wiz book -- Wiz 6, "The Wizardry Capitalized", I am going to post it. It will start going up in the next 30 days.

There are still some details to be worked out, notably where I'm going to post it. My original thought was to put it up as a blog, but several people pointed out that's not ideal. Currently I'm leaning to setting up its own web site or putting up on my still-to-be-completed personal/fiction web site. I'll let you know as I work out the details.

A couple of folks asked about how you have a medical condition that lets you write non-fiction and keeps you from writing fiction. The answer is depressingly simple.

For me fiction has always been a lot harder than non-fiction. It takes much more mental effort and I find I can't do it unless I'm at the peak of my game. And of course I'm no longer at the peak of my game because of the health problems.

This isn't universally true, please note. A lot of writers can write fiction, even very good fiction, when quite impaired. How in the world some of them write good stuff when drunk, drugged, etc. is utterly beyond me and I have a perverse admiration for anyone who can do it. But I can't. I keep trying but so far no luck.

It's worth noting that I had a long and successful career in nonfiction before I wrote my first piece of salable fiction and I've always been able to turn out roughly ten times as much nonfiction as fiction.

Does this mean my fiction career is forever and totally at an end? Well, I've learned never to say never, and I do keep trying. But so far no luck.

PASSING THE SMELL TEST

2008-01-13T01:34:00.000-08:00

Smell is one of the most powerful of all our senses. The pity is that most writers spend almost no time on the smells of their worlds.

While sight is far more important to humans than smell, smell has the ability to evoke emotions and memories like no other sense. If you can convey the smell of a thing to your readers you can make it come alive in their minds.

This isn't easy, which may be why it is so effective. Our vocabulary of smell words is limited and most of us have more trouble "visualizing" a smell than a sight or a sound.

And of course as with any sense impression the more concrete and specific the language the more vividly the impression is conveyed. In the case of smells this usually means a lot of hard work.

But then hard work is what makes good writing in general.

YOU HAVE TO SEE BEFORE YOU CAN WRITE

2007-12-29T15:03:00.000-08:00

In "The Jewel Hinged Jaw" Samuel R. Delany points out that the essence of being a visual artist is not in drawing or painting, but in seeing. If you can't see really see, he says, it doesn't matter how skilled you are with the brush or pen.

Delany makes the point because the same thing is true of writers. In order to write successfully you have to observe. You must look at what's around you and really, truly, see it.

Most of us, like Dr. Watson in Sherlock Holmes' famous phrase, see but we do not observe. If you want to be a successful writer you have to train yourself to go beyond seeing and into observing.

It's not easy, but it can be kind of fun.

Wiz 6: The Wizard Uncompleted?

2007-12-12T23:51:00.000-08:00

A reader asked when the next Wiz book was going to come out.

The answer, alas, is 'never', at least not in the conventional sense. But there may be an opportunity for readers to see most of it anyway.

In spring 2000 I was well into Wiz 6: The Wizardry Capitalized when I went into the hospital for emergency heart surgery. The surgery saved my life but a combination of medical problems and the effects of the drugs I take has pretty much ended my fiction career. (Non-fiction I still manage very nicely, thank you.)

Anyway, because I couldn't finish the book, and because I didn't understand the problem until it was too late, the publisher waited five years and then canceled the contract, taking his advance back out of royalties on my other books.

Not the least blame attaches to the publisher, the late Jim Baen, who was unbelievably patient through the entire experience. But I am not left with a 90 percent finished book which is not only uncontracted, it is unsalable. (And no, I am absolutely NOT interested in collaborating with anyone to try to finish it at this point.)

Now, because of the way I write, "90 percent finished" means that it is basically all there but there are great whacking gaps in the story. It has a beginning, a middle and and end, but there's a lot of the connecting tissue missing. What's more, the subplots haven't been inserted in their proper places. Each subplot is still a connected series of scenes.

A tolerant, patient reader can follow the story and probably even enjoy it, but there's stuff missing.

So here's the question: Some people have expressed interest in reading the novel in its uncompleted state. If there is enough interest I'll publish what I've got online -- in a blog or on a web page.

Anyone interested?

THAT'LL TEACH ME!

2007-10-24T23:31:00.001-07:00

This was the week I was supposed to be in Orlando to appear on a panel on project failure at a conference sponsored by project software vendor Primavera.

This was also another week when I was supposed to be at the Arizona State Fair every day I was in town demonstrating lapidary.

Last week was the week I not only demonstrated at the fair, I also attended Storage Networking World in Dallas.

I actually spent this week being deathly ill as a result of trying to do too much and a bug I picked up either at the fair or in Dallas.

One of the problems with a freelancer's life is that you don't get out much. As a result you're very susceptible to colds, flu and other nasties contracted from those around you.

In my case this is exacerbated by my health problems.

"Man's reach should exceed his grasp, else what's a heaven for."
-- Old Saying

"Not to mention projectile vomiting"
-- Rick Cook (who is feeling very old this week)

IRREGULAR SCHEDULE

2007-10-08T10:54:00.000-07:00

I'm not going to be posting regularly for October and possibly the first part of November.

A combination of work, travel and some rather arcane teaching is going to be eating a lot of my time, so posts will be catch as catch can.

For which my apologies. But I should be back, better than ever (?) after the first week in November.

--Rick Cook

WRITING AS REWRITING

2007-09-28T02:03:00.000-07:00

Writing fiction is almost always a process of successive approximation. In fact most of the goodness in most people's writing comes from rewriting.

One of the most valuable skills a writer can learn is how to rewrite aggressively. That is, how to go through a piece and make every word in every sentence in every paragraph justify its existence. If it's unnecessary, it comes out. If it doesn't convey exactly what you want to say, you need to change it. Write it and then rewrite it and rewrite it and rewrite it until it's as good as you can possibly make it.

This is a difficult concept for a lot of beginning writers. Our society teaches us to think of inspiration as golden and that we don't want to stifle our creativity. As is so often the case our society is, if not utterly wrong, then seriously misguided.

The hard fact is that we tend to try to substitute creativity for almost every other virtue in everything from art to business. However there are a lot of other factors which are at least as important as inspiration. One of them is the ability to work with that inspiration until it gives the very best results you can manage.

People who are overly concerned about stifling their creativity by reworking what they do are usually doomed to failure. In the case of writers they're typically not very creative either.

Of course the other, unstated, reason for the bias against rewriting is that rewriting is the pick-and-shovel labor of writing. It is unglamorous, hard work and often frustrating. It can ultimately be extremely satisfying, but that's frequently difficult to see at the time.

Now granted, some days it just flows. Everything that appears on your screen is golden and you wouldn't change a word of it. I'm here to tell you that such days are extremely rare. If you get one or two paragraphs like that in a day you're doing well.

The other characteristic of successful writers when is comes to rewriting is that they're ruthless about it, more ruthless than most other people are prepared to be in dealing with their prose.

Once, a number of years ago in an online discussion group, three of us edited a paragraph of fiction. One of us was a copy editor, one of us was a book editor and one of us (me) was a writer.

The book editor made a few changes that made the piece a little better. The copy writer made a few more changes and the result was even stronger.

As for the writer, I butchered it. I reduced the whole paragraph to two short sentences and it was a lot stronger for it.

The lesson is that as a writer you bear primary responsibility for writing and re-writing your work. You can't depend on other people to fix it for you.

People sometimes ask me how many rewrites I do. Depending on definition the answer is anything from 'none' to 'hundreds'. For me rewriting is an integral part of the process, not a separate step. Whenever I hit a flat spot, I stop creating prose and scroll back through what I've done so far, rewriting as I go. Similarly if I need to make major changes I tend to do them before I finish. I may not do a second draft as such, but by the time it leaves my hand every word in every pieces of fiction has been gone over multiple times.

Books on writing often warn beginning writers against the dangers of excessive rewriting. In my opinion such advice is misguided. First, the problem most writers have is that they don't rewrite enough. They leave their sculpture rough and unfinished because by the time they get to the end of the project they're so sick of it they just want it to be over.

The second reason is even more important. The problem with 'excessive' rewriting is not excess; it's quality. Bad rewriting is just as deadly as bad writing.

The mark of bad rewriting is change for the sake of change. In other words, the inability to critically evaluate what you're looking at and see what will make it better, as distinct from what will merely make it different.

Always, always, the question is "does this change make it better?" If you can't honestly say yes, then don't make the change. The exception is when you're taking things out. Because so much writing is overly verbose my instinct in considering a questionable cut is to make it. Similarly if the change makes the piece longer, I am very cautious about making it. I want to make sure that the added words will carry their weight in the piece.

This kind of critical thinking isn't always fun. In fact sometimes it smacks of strangling a baby in its cradle. But whether it's fun or not it's essential to produce a finished work of fiction.

ON SERIES -- AND ON, AND ON, AND ON, AND...

2007-09-20T01:31:00.000-07:00

As most of you probably know by now, Robert Jordan, author of the "Wheel of Time" series, died recently. The saga had stretched on through 11 books and Jordan was as work on the 12th and last in the series at the time of his death.

While it probably isn't important to Jordan's legion of fans, the question such a record raises for a would-be writer is "what possesses someone to write a 12-book series of novels?"

Several years ago I shared an autograph table with Jordan at a Southern California science fiction convention and I asked him how the "Wheel of Time" had come to encompass so many books. The reason, he told me, was that he simply wasn't able to wrap up the story he wanted to tell. The series had originally been intended to be much smaller, but it kept growing as the plot kept expanding and mutating. He expressed a certain amount of frustration at this, despite the series' popularity because it kept him from working on other projects.

The truth is that no sane person sets out to write a 12-book series. (How many writers are eliminated by that qualification, sane, I'll leave as an exercise to the reader.) You aren't so much possessed to write a bunch of books set in the same universe using the same characters, it just happens. And it isn't necessarily a good thing.

Broadly speaking a multi-book series comes about in two ways. One of them is to plan out a series of books from the beginning, which is what Jordan did. (I gather he was originally thinking of it as a trilogy, but that's only an impression.) The other is to write a single book and just have the damn thing grow.

In my case, the Wiz series, about a computer programmer stuck in a world of high fantasy and low puns, was originally intended to be a single book. When I planned out "Wizard's Bane", I had no intention of writing any sequels. In fact the third book in my three-book deal with Baen was originally intended to be a modern horror novel about the ghost of Dracula visiting Cleveland -- which was the most horrifying thing I could think of at the time. That book never happened. Instead I did the second Wiz book "The Wizardry Compiled" and a series was launched. However in the course of writing the first book, and afterwards, I discovered why so many books become series - and why some series seem to go on far too long.

The reason is that both publishers and fans like series. They let the publishers compound their marketing expenditures by spreading the benefits out over several books. Fans like series because they want to read more about the characters and situations they enjoy.

So a series is a win all the way around? Not hardly. There are a lot of problems with series for everyone involved, writer, fans and publisher. In my opinion the science fiction or fantasy series is something that needs to be approached with both caution and restraint, especially by the writer.

The first thing to understand is that the series will only continue for as long as the publisher finds it profitable. If sales start to fall, the series is going to end abruptly.

This can be pretty traumatic for the writer. One fantasy author of my acquaintance had her series summarily canceled by the publisher at about book six. She was especially bitter about this because up until about book four the publisher had been encouraging her to lengthen the series and they'd worked out a verbal agreement for the series to run to nine books.

Based on the (non-binding) understanding with her editor, she had started working ahead and actually started writing portions of the last three books in the series. She'd invested a good deal of time and energy and she hated the fact that her readers would be left hanging by the abrupt termination. She had also been counting on the income from the series, although she wasn't foolish enough to spend the money before it arrived.

This last point probably takes a little explanation. Because of the way fiction is published. An author doesn't see income beyond the advance for about three years after he or she starts on a new book. Needless to say, the advance is never enough to live on for three years or so.

A smart author who is actually trying to make a living writing fiction (Okay, so that's an oxymoron) tries to have two or three books in various stages of completion, collecting at least one advance a year for signing a contract for a new book. The exception is an author who is working on a series, where all the books in the works are part of the series. So my acquaintance not only lost the expected immediate income, but her entire work schedule for the next several years was disrupted.

The thing that really made her mad was the books were still profitable. Sales on the last one were down, but it was still on track to earn out its advance. However her long-time editor had left in an editorial shakeup and there was apparently a new direction at the publisher and her stuff just didn't fit any more. So with sales down, she was cut off.

While the situation can be bad from the writer's standpoint, it can be even worse for the readers. For the readers, the problem is quality. Even if you've got a story arc completely worked out for the series, it is extremely difficult to keep the quality consistently high. In fact most series go wandering off in the weeds after two or three books.

This isn't so much that the author runs out of ideas, although that can happen, as it is hard to keep working to a consistently high level when you're working the same ground over and over. The fire goes out of the concept, you find yourself starting to repeat and the series goes into exhaustion.

The other thing that happens is that editorial attention tends to slack off in a successful series. This is a problem because nearly every writer can benefit from good, tight editing. However as a writer becomes more popular, editors are less willing to ‘interfere’ with the writer’s work. No matter how desperately it needs it. To see what I mean, compare the latest Tom Clancy novel to “The Hunt for Red October” or “Red Storm Rising.” Both those novels taught me a good deal about action writing. The latest Clancy novels can’t even hold my interest. They are sprawling, loose and in desperate need of good editing and being cut by at least a third.

What is worse, a series is usually contracted for several books out. That means you're not only meeting a deadline for one book, you're committed to deadlines for two or more with not much break between them. In general publishers want to see one or two books a year in a series. That puts extra strain on the writer.

The slipping quality is usually what causes series sales to fall off, which leads to the publisher canceling in mid-series. But that has an even worse effect on the writer's career. Poor books damage the market for the writer's other work. Readers, not unreasonably, base their opinion of a writer's work on the last thing they read. If you lose readers it's awfully hard to get them back.

For all that, it's awfully difficult for a writer to turn down a series deal. For as long as it lasts it means a certainty that's hard to find in the often-chaotic life of a writer.

MATCHING YOUR DESCRIPTIONS TO YOUR CHARACTERS

2007-09-14T00:28:00.000-07:00

Okay, I'm a wine slob. My palette for wine is pretty hopelessly under developed. To me a burgundy tastes good, but in a sour, alcoholic sort of way. I can't detect the nuances and undertones a connoisseur finds in a good wine. In fact I can barely tell the difference between the plonk that comes in a box and a bottle of an excellent vintage.

This is true in fiction as well. Some characters are naturally keener observers than others. This is natural, but it's something you have to consider when you put words in a character's mouth. What a character sees and reports about the world around him/her/it (because this is SF and fantasy after all) says nearly as much about the character as it does about the world.

(And how do you know which characters are keener observers than others? If you don't you need to back up a couple of steps and work some more on character development.)

That's because what a character reports is an important way of defining the character to the reader. Authorial summation ('he was a thug') is the weakest method of establishing character. Reader experience, including what the character reports, is much stronger. If you call someone a thug and then go on for pages about his aesthetic tastes you're sending the reader a mixed message. Unless you're doing it intentionally, say for purposes of dramatic irony or to illuminate complexities of the character's society or personality, this is a bad thing.

Keep in mind character-reported observations, like any observations, divide into two classes. There are experiences and there are classifications.

Experiences are what characters notice in the around around them. They are sense impressions and summaries thereof. Often even crude and stupid people can observe closely. A psycho mountain man with an IQ of 90 who's spent years holed up in the hills may be a keen observer and sensitive reporter of the world around him. In fact a mountain man, no matter how stupid or how crazy, is likely to have an intimate awareness of the wilderness. To take another example, incarcerated mental patients and prisoners are often very keen observers of their keepers and even subtle differences in the world within their walls.

Classification is based primarily on knowledge and experience. Even very smart, sophisticated characters are likely to fall short where what's being described is outside their experience. A 13-year-old fan of whatever is being observed is likely to be able to classify much more clearly.

An unsophisticated character might say that another character is driving a "bright red car". Someone with more knowledge might recognize it as a "classic fire-engine red sports car. A buff might describe it as a "beautifully restored Mercedes 300 SL gullwing in the factory red paint job." (And guess what I lusted after in my youth.)

So what do you do if you've got a character who's a rough-and-ready type, or even a little stupid, and you want to convey a complex, sophisticated description?

This is where you switch to the omniscient narrator mode. You as the narrator don't have the limits on what you can perceive that hamper your characters. You can put a mindless animal in a breathtakingly beautiful setting and convey the beauty without breaking character.

Again, this is a small part of the thinking that goes into successful fiction. You not only create your world, decide how much of it to describe to your reader, choose how to describe it, but you also decide who will convey the information to the reader.

Hard? Yes. But anyone who says fiction is easy is a lair.

IN 25 WORDS OR LESS: FINGER EXERCISES FOR WRITERS

2007-09-06T03:31:00.000-07:00

Just as you can exercise to improve your muscles, you can exercise to improve your writing.

The point of writing exercises isn't the exercise, any more than the point of exercising your muscles is lifting weights. Like weight lifting, writing exercises increase your abilities and build capacity you need in real life.

While there are a lot of these exercises, games almost, that writers can do, only about half of them involve actually writing. That's because writing is, at best, only half about writing. The other part of effective writing is seeing. Like a painter, a writer has to be able to see before he or she can reproduce. Often the seeing is as hard as the writing. And like the writing you need to build your capacity to do so with exercises.

There's one exercise I'm particularly fond of builds skill in both seeing and writing. It doesn't take much time, it doesn't require equipment, not even a notebook and you can not only do it anywhere, it's actually better for being done anywhere.

The essence of the game is simple. Describe something or someone in just a sentence or two. It doesn't have to be less than 25 words, but capture the person or the thing in prose while it is in front of you.

This does two things. First, it teaches you to observe and second it tests your ability to put those observations into evocative prose. Additionally, it lets you check your observations while the thing or person you're describing is still in front of you.

Fiction writers are usually very close observers. They have to be. Even if the characters, places and situations are completely made up, they are stronger for being based in real observations.

You should try this game on everything: Objects, scenes, buildings, trees and most of all people.

Remember character counts. With people try for observations that capture something of the inner person. Do they seem happy, sad, preoccupied, self-satisfied, what? Now, what are the physical characteristics that give you that impression? Is there something about the set of the mouth, the slant of the eyes, the way they hold their bodies? What is it exactly?

After a while you'll find this gets a lot easier, often almost automatic. Then you can ring in changes. For example you can do a description of a person that's intended to convey a positive impression. Then you can turn around and create a description of the same person that's negative.

Above all, try for the particular and get away from generalizations. An 'old car' isn't as descriptive as a "dusty 76 Chevy with big patches of gray primer on the rear fender and a skirt of pink Bondo along the bottom."

The purpose isn't to capture these people or things for use in a story. Instead you're honing your skill to capture something and describe it concisely. It isn't easy, but like so many other things, you improve with practice.

And if happens that one day you can pull out bits and pieces of what you've seen and described and use them in your fiction, so much the better.

Proofread Your Stuff

2007-08-29T23:55:00.000-07:00

Let me say this again: Proofread your stuff!

Not everything about writing is fun. While some of what a writer does is grand and glorious bursts of creativity, or basking in the adulation of the readers who love the writer’s stuff, a lot of it just seat-to-the-chair hard work, and some of it is real drudgery.

One of the most drudgesome tasks a writer has to perform is proofreading. This is the business of going through your manuscript word by word, correcting spelling errors, fixing grammatical mistakes, making sure there are no omitted words, making sure the paragraphing is correct and seeing that opening and closing quotes match.

Proofreading is no fun. That is why beginning writers can come up with the most amazing ‘reasons’ not to do it.

Which is a deadly mistake. Proof your work. Proof it carefully. If you don’t, your chances of ever making a sale are just about zero.

Still, the excuses keep coming from beginners. Among my least favorites are:

● “Proofreading is the publisher’s job”

If you don’t do a careful job of proofreading your manuscript no publisher is going to consider it.

●”Proofreading is uncreative”

Proofreading is damned uncreative. It is about the least creative work I know. It is also a vital part of being a writer.

●”The editor will see past all that to be basic quality of my story.”

What the editor will see is that you’re either lazy or illiterate. Either condition promises trouble for the editor down the road. Editors hate authors who cause them trouble and authors who cause them unnecessary trouble are shunned.

●I’ve got a spellchecker, so my spelling is fine.

Like bloody hell! That attitude is why spellcheckers are one of the worst things to happen to basic literacy since Dick and Jane.

A spellchecker deals with strings of characters, not meanings. If a character string appears on its list, it will pass it without comment. That means it can’t distinguish between “to”, “two” and “too”, even though the differences jump out at readers.

There are worse examples and you see them all the time in amateur writing. “Horde” means a bunch of people, canonically Mongols. “Hoard” is a collection of something, usually treasure. And “Horded” means you desperately need to curl up with a nice, warm dictionary. “Principal” is the guy in charge of a school. “Principle” is a fundamental rule. “Capital” is a building. Capitol is the city where you find the building. And on, and on, and on.

If you’re not sure what the word means, look it up before you use it.

Sometimes a spellchecker can get you into trouble with more than just your editor. When I was working on the college paper, one of the reporters was assigned to do a story about a sociology professor who was just back from West Africa where he had been studying the problems created by educated Africans leaving their home countries for the West. Throughout the interview he kept talking about expatriate Africans.

Now this is a very sensitive issue in Africa because many Africans see expatriates as turning their back on their countries. So the professor was furious when the newspaper article kept referring to ‘ex-patriot’ Africans.

I don’t recall seeing that reporter around after that semester.

If you’re not a natural at proofreading, join the club. Almost no writer is. Most of the writers of my acquaintance are naturally lousy spellers. I didn’t learn to spell until I worked on a newspaper copy desk in college and even today I’m not good at it.

But you’d never know any of that from a professional writer’s manuscript. The worse you are at spelling and such, the more carefully you go over every word of every line on every page

Intelligence Amplifiers vs Amplified Intelligence

2007-08-21T00:53:00.000-07:00

One of the standard gimmicks of science fiction is the “intelligence amplifier”, a wonderful gadget that makes you smarter.

Great idea. But if we want to really build one, instead of creating it in fiction, we need to know more. For starters we need to know what we mean when we say intelligence.

Like most really simple concepts, intelligence turns out to be a real bear to define effectively. The obvious definition is that “intelligence is what makes you smart” – which is massively unhelpful. A more sophisticated definition is that “intelligence is what intelligence tests measure.” Which is tautologically true and again absolutely unhelpful.

So let”s take a look at the typical intelligence test. It contains questions on completing sentences, drawing analogies, matching patterns, inferring the next item in a sequence and, of course, mathematics. Given modern computer power, it is not that difficult to design software that will function as an electronic cheat sheet. That would undoubtedly increase anyone”s score on an intelligence test, but intelligence is supposed to measure a quality that is useful in the real world. How often do you have to complete sentences or decide what a box will look like when it is folded up?

To further complicate the picture, the current wisdom is that there are different kinds of intelligence. Not only is there the sort of intelligence measured by the grab bag of concepts on a conventional intelligence test, but there is also “emotional intelligence”, which measures how well we deal with others. Considering all the super-bright, super-maladapted social retards out there, I'd argue that emotional intelligence is about as important in life success as conventional intelligence.

This isn't getting us anywhere, so let”s look at a simpler question: What's an amplifier?

The obvious answer is “an amplifier is something that makes things louder.” Or in a slightly more sophisticated version an amplifier increases a signal of any sort.

However unlike “intelligence”, “amplifier” has an easily stated, but not-quite-obvious-definition. Technically an amplifier is a device that controls one power stream with another.

Since I”m of a certain age, let's start with a triode vacuum tube, the first real electronic amplifier. (A basic transistor works the same way.) A triode tube, for those of you who have never seen such a beast, is essentially a light bulb on steroids. You've got the glass envelope (the bulb) enclosing a filament (the thing that lights up and burns out in a light bulb) and two other components: the plate and the grid. The plate receives the electrons boiled off the filament and the grid, which can be charged, sits between the two.

When the tube is turned on electrons flow from the filament to the plate, passing through the grid. That produces a nice, strong flow of current (power) from the filament to the plate. But if you turn on the grid you interrupt the flow of current. Even a very small amount of energy applied to the grid can strongly reduce the filament-to-plate flow of energy and enough charge on the grid can completely shut off the flow, like flipping a light switch.

Now if you modulate the energy supplied to the tube”s grid in some way – say by speaking into a microphone – you also modulate the energy flowing through the tube, but on a much larger scale. Even a minuscule amount of energy from the microphone can produce an enormous change in the energy flowing through the triode. Enough to drive a bank of powerful loudspeakers say. Voila! The sound is amplified.

With that out of the way, let”s go back and look at the notion of intelligence again. All forms of intelligence seem to be made up of two components. There”s reasoning ability, or how well you can work with information, and there”s knowledge, or what you know about the world around you. In the case of a conventional intelligence test you have to be able to define words, know the basics of mathematics and understand such ideas a “car” and “miles per hour”. Even the folding box questions require knowledge of how objects fold. (There”s also memory, but for reasons that will become clear in a second, we”ll fold that into “knowledge.”)

So far no one has figured out a good way to increase the reasoning ability of a normal person, although there are some drugs that apparently have a small effect. We can teach logic and general semantics, and we can provide people with heuristics (rules of thumb) to help them analyze situations, but all those things only work if the person is able to reason in the first place. In other words, they are basically forms of knowledge.

If we can't increase reasoning ability, can we increase knowledge? The answer here is not only “yes”, but “hell yes!”. In fact the story of human civilization is in large part the story of increasing knowledge.

Until recently the difficult for the average person was getting hold of the knowledge. We spend enormous sums to impart that knowledge through schools and universities, with highly varying degrees of success. We have libraries packed with it, but unless you were able to visit those libraries that knowledge wasn't available to you.

A more fundamental difficulty is that we seldom want to know all, or even most, of what humanity knows about anything. We just need enough information, in an appropriate form, to solve specific problems or perform specific tasks. Our educational system is focused on providing a broad background on subjects, which may or may not answer our questions. To find the answer in a library requires knowing enough about the subject to know where to look.

I say “until recently” because computer networks, especially the Internet and its successors are changing all that. A few years ago Jerry Pournelle predicted that in a couple of decades we”d have all of human knowledge available through our personal computers. It looks like “all human knowledge” is stretching it, but certainly a good part of it is becoming available.

Already I can make a couple of mouse clicks and type a few words and get answers to most of the answerable questions I can think of. I can't discover the Secret of the Universe (and “42” doesn't qualify unless you know “base what and modulo what”?) but I can find out how to do anything from open-heart surgery to making fancy wooden boxes, I can communicate (or at least listen in on) experts discussing nearly any subject I can name, and I can ask them questions. (Which they may or may not answer.) If I want to learn a subject from quilting to tensor calculus there are tutorials available on the web to teach me – and usually if I can”t understand one tutorial there will be two or three others to choose from.

This is a long way from perfect. We still suffer bandwidth limitations that impede our access to that information. A bigger impediment is the old question of knowing how to find the information. Often this becomes a matter of spending a couple of hours trying to guess the magic words that specialists use to describe the things I'm interested in. The search and organizational features of the Internet are still pathetic. The signal-to-noise ratio is bad. In short it takes special skills in everything from critical thinking to search engine operation to get the most out of the system.

But all this is changing. Searches are getting better as more sophisticated search engines and completely new search methods are developed. Organization is improving. And bandwidth, processing power and accessibility are exploding.

For now most of us access this information sitting at a desk. If you want you can get a laptop with a wireless connection that lets you work just about anywhere. The next step is going to be an appliance we can always carry with us, with input and output devices that don't tie us down.

Suppose instead we had something that looked like a pair of sunglasses for a display and a microphone for voice input (or better yet something we could control with brainwaves). Let's also suppose that it had the bandwidth to maintain several high-capacity connections at once. Let's back this up with software that could monitor hundreds of channels of information and bring the stuff we might be interested in to our attention automatically. We could be accessing several sources of information, interacting with four or five people and monitoring a whole bunch of additional information, all while dealing with the real world.

At that point you”re using the relatively limited amount of brainpower possessed by a human being to control the enormous flow of information in a sophisticated computer network, the result is not an intelligence amplifier, but amplified intelligence – which is almost the same thing.

Almost, but not quite. The output of an amplified signal depends largely on the quality of the signal being amplified. In other words if you apply amplified intelligence to a moron you don”t get a smarter person, you get a more knowledgeable moron. This is easily demonstrated by a quick scan of Usenet news groups.

One of the problems you find in the news groups is that some of the morons have laid hands on a lot of knowledge. They don”t understand what they've read, they can”t really apply it, and because they are morons they don”t understand their output is not merely useless and annoying, it can be downright dangerous. (Check out some of the processes for making explosives circulating on the web.)

Traditionally one of the things that held people with severely impaired judgment in check has been their lack of knowledge. Most of the time they didn't know enough to be dangerous because the processes necessary to gain knowledge pretty effectively winnowed them out. (This wasn't an absolute protection, as the many examples of well-educated jackasses demonstrate, but it was some help.) Now the morons can find that knowledge on the Internet, but they still don”t have the reasoning ability to use it, or even really understand it in most cases.

If you wanted to, you could use the knowledge on the Internet to build anything from a web page to an airliner. Fortunately, AFIK none of the morons have tried to build an airliner yet, but the number of absolutely awful web pages out there gives you some hint of the magnitude of the potential problem.

Or try a more nightmarish case. The information on gene splicing is widely available. It”s also pretty well known that there is probably a way to create a strain of smallpox that is not only resistant to vaccines, but can re-infect the same person multiple times. Suppose some moron decides to try it out?

The good news is the same amplified intelligence will make it possible to find a cure for such a super-bug a lot faster. The other good news is that even simple gene splicing requires not only knowledge, it requires experience as well. The techniques aren't all that complicated, but making them work requires a fair amount of hands-on laboratory experience. The web doesn't amplify experience, except indirectly. (There”s also the fact that the remaining stocks of smallpox virus are carefully controlled.)

Are we doomed? Will we wind up surrounded by morons with megaphones? Not necessarily. Certainly the morons we will have with us, but we can build much more complex amplifiers than the simple triode example described above. We can take the input energy stream and modify as we amplify it by the use of things like filters. We can amplify only part of the energy stream and suppress the rest.

In principle we can do exactly the same thing with amplified intelligence. Through good design and “smart” software we can suppress some of the noise and amplify the real signal – the information we truly want.

Where does amplified intelligence lead us? Darned if I know. One of the things not even amplified intelligence can do is predict the future.

Not yet, anyway,

Why Pros Won't Read Your Stuff

2007-08-20T02:01:00.000-07:00

One common complaint from beginning writers is that they can't get professional writers to read their work for comment and criticism.

In general, they’re absolutely right. Most pros have a horror of reading stuff by amateurs and will only do it under special circumstances. This frustrates and angers a lot of beginning writers who don't understand why pros act this way.

Speaking as a professional, I'll tell you, first, that there are some very good reasons why we act this way; second, it’s not going to change any time soon; and third, getting a pro to read and critique your stuff isn't nearly as important as a lot of beginning writers think.

The pros’ attitude is the result of a combination of bad experiences on the part of the writers and a whole series of common misunderstandings on the part of the would-be authors. Taken together they mean that most writers have scars from previous experiences and damn few of them are willing to undertake the project again.

For a professional writer, reading an unpublished writer's work is usually an exercise in frustration. Most pros did it a few times when they were young and innocent and at least one of the resulting experiences was so bad they never want to do it again.

Remember pros usually don’t even read each other's work in progress, except under special circumstances. Most writers have a horror of leaving their fight in the gym and don't want to expose their work to others before its time. It’s also true that for almost every writer, much of the goodness in the work comes from the final stage of reworking, rewriting and polishing. Until that’s done it's very hard to judge a piece of fiction. And of course once that’s done it’s ready to be submitted.

You will occasionally find a published author who is a member of a writers group that reads and critiques each others work. (The other kind of writers’ group, such as the Full Moon Club, of which I am a member, meets for a combination group therapy and bull session. This is much more common among professionals.) Usually these are pros who made their first sales while members of the group and remain with it out of friendship, loyalty and because they feel they benefit from that particular group. However this isn't exactly common and such professionals are usually just as reluctant to read “outsiders” work as any other author.

Pros also have a much more realistic appreciation what you can get from having others read your work -- which is pity damn little, unless it’s being read by an editor, publisher or your agent.

There are exceptions, of course. Sometimes if a pro is stuck, he or she will share part of a work with a trusted colleague to help decide where the piece went wrong. I have a select group of friends who, if bribed with pizza and beer, will review my novels before I send them off to my publisher. However this is for the limited purpose of finding continuity problems and similar contradictions. They all know better than to mess with the prose.

There are also times and places when a pro will read an amateur’s work. These are usually situations with very well-defined boundaries. For example, some authors will agree to critique one or more manuscripts as part of being a guest of a science fiction convention. Others will teach courses in fiction writing that involve reading and critiquing students’ work.

However even those exceptions are limited and can be unpleasant. When I taught science fiction writing at the local junior college I would have the occasional student who simply wanted me to read what they had already written -- typically a novel -- and critique it. They weren't interested in the class work, or the exercises, or the lectures, they wanted me to plow into their masterpiece. This is at best insulting and usually schizophrenic. The student is saying, in effect, that he or she doesn't need the material you as a teacher have worked to put together, but they want your opinion of what they have written.

It is also a sad fact is that a lot of the people who ask authors to read their work don’t want a critique at all. As Sharyn McCrumb put it in her send-up of science fiction conventions Bimbos of the Death Sun, what they want is effusive praise and the name of your agent. The members of this group are particularly likely to be insulted if you give them an honest opinion of their work.

Critiquing a non-professional’s work is as dicey as criticizing a mother's baby. Even more than mothers, writers are sensitive about their productions and easily offended. Of course pros are sensitive about their work as well. The difference is that part of becoming a professional writer is learning to deal with criticism. Beginners usually haven't developed those calluses on their egos yet and they get obviously and often vocally offended.

Critiquing fiction is also not easy. In fact, the better the pro is, the harder it is. Analyzing a piece of fiction is laborious work. It's not the same as reading it for pleasure and if you're going to do an honest job of the critique, it requires careful, word-by-word analysis of the piece. Please note that my reading parties, with their very limited goals, typically last between 10 and 12 hours for a complete novel and most of that time is spent hunched over copies of the manuscripts, red pencils in one hand and beer or pizza in the other.

The second-worst problem is that in general, amateurs have completely unrealistic expectations from the professional reading their work. Most of them think the pro can tell them how to fix whatever is wrong with their work.

In fact neither the pro, nor anyone else, can do any such thing. The most a perceptive professional can tell you is what is wrong with the piece in general terms. It's up to the writer to figure out how to fix it.

Now if I wanted to go through someone else’s work line by line, I could tell them precisely how to write a second-rate Rick Cook novel. But publishers don't want second-rate Rick Cook novels, even from Rick Cook. (Trust me on this one!)

What I can’t tell someone is how to make the work both publishable and authentically theirs. That requires practice and experience on the part of the author and no amount of critiquing can provide that.

But the worst problem is that amateurs want to argue with you. This is utterly futile, wearing for the pro and demonstrates conclusively that the wanna-be writer has utterly missed the point of the exercise.

First, it’s rude. Look, if you ask someone for advice, the appropriate thing to do is listen politely, thank the adviser for his or her time and then do what you think is best. Arguing with someone not only gets you nowhere it irritates the person who did you the favor of giving you the advice you asked for.

It may be appropriate to ask the adviser's reasoning for the advice he or she gives, but that’s a different thing from arguing about it.

Second, and much more importantly, the desire to argue also attaches vastly too much importance to the person who is critiquing the work. The hard fact is that is doesn't matter what the pro thinks. The pro isn't going to be buying it. In this business there are only three opinions that count: The writer’s, the publisher's, and, ultimately, the readers’. What another writer thinks of your work doesn't amount to the proverbial hill of beans.

Good Advice, Badly Taken

2007-08-20T01:49:00.000-07:00

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

In general, writing advice is a series guidelines rather than Received Word from On High. While there are some things that you never do, most advice is given in the nature of suggestions and must be applied appropriately.

Unfortunately beginning writers all too often take advice as Holy Writ. The result can be pretty damaging to a writer.

The classic example is AE Van Vogt, an immensely popular writer of science fiction's Golden Age. Early in his career Van Vogt read a book titled "The Only Two Ways to Write a Story", by John W. Gallishaw that included a number of rules for fiction writing. One of those rules was that scenes should be about 800 words long and the author should introduce a new plot twist or surprise in every scene.

As advice, that's not bad. It's on par with the admonition to "shoot the sheriff on the first page" when writing adventure fiction. Unfortunately Van Vogt took it not as advice but as a command. He tried to use it in every scene in every book he ever wrote.

The result was an unholy mess. It resulted in bizarrely complicated plots with more loose ends than a poorly knit afghan. To see what I mean, try to read, say, "The World of Null-A". (The problem wasn't helped because Van Vogt was an enthusiast for just about every movement that roiled through science fiction in that era, from General Semantics to Dianetics, and some, such as eye exercises, that never made it into the mainstream.)

In an essay titled The Cosmic Jerrybuilder in his book of criticism "In Search of Wonder" fellow author and SF critic Damon Knight attempted to analyze the plot of The World of Null-A and its sequel The Players of Null-A. The result made painfully obvious what an utter mess the books were.

In an interview late in his life Van Vogt claimed that Knight had misunderstood his use of the 800-word scene. Personally I suspect that Van Vogt misunderstood what Knight had said, since he referred to it from a second-hand source and his paraphrase differs significantly from Knight's actual point.

In a sense it doesn't really matter. The system Van Vogt described in the interview of dividing each scene into five steps and using fictional sentences', each containing a hang-up' is sufficiently rigid to produce pretty bad fiction.

It's important to note that what's wrong here isn't so much the advice as the rigidity with which it is followed.

Believe it or not, it's possible to rise above such handicaps. Van Vogt was such an outstanding natural storyteller that he was able to carry the reader along in spite of his method B at least the relatively unsophisticated reader of the 1940s. It's significant that when Van Vogt returned to SF in the 1970s he was much less successful.

Far too many beginning writers commit the same sin of literalism. Unlike Van Vogt most of them don't have the natural talent to carry it off.

Almost every single rule or aphorism or piece of advice has counter-examples. Even something as important as >show, don't tell' doesn't always apply. Taken literally it produces large sections of prose which don't add to the story and do it in minute detail. Summarization and abstraction are important tools of the writer.

Fundamentally, it comes down to judgment. A writer must have the judgment to select the appropriate tool from her toolbox and apply it to the situation at hand in an appropriate. Eight hundred words is not a bad length to shoot for in a scene, but other considerations are much more important to writing a good scene than length.

How do you develop the judgment? Practice, practice, practice. You write and rewrite. You study authors to like to see what works. Above all, you think about what you're doing.

This isn't nearly as easy as internalizing a rulebook and following it to the letter. But anyone who thinks this racket is easy is severely mistaken.