Writing and the Inspiration Dilemma

There are whole schools of thought about writers and inspiration and waiting for inspiration and when to write and where inspiration comes from and whether it's even necessary. As with most things, there's a spectrum here, with people who believe you should never sit down to write unless you're feeling inspired on one side, and those, on the other side, who believe you should treat writing like a job and sit down and do the work whether you're inspired or not.

Let's take a practical look at this.

But before we go on, let me just say that I have nothing against inspiration. I like it. It's great to be inspired and have lovely (or terrifying) ideas to sit down and play with. But I can almost never sit down to do the writing when I have those ideas. I think most of my ideas these days happen when I'm in the car. You can ask my wife; I make her send me notes when I have ideas and we're not home, so she would probably know best whether that most frequently happens in the car or not. I mean, the car is not the best place to write, not if you want to live through your trip.

I used to know this guy. A "writer." He strongly believed in the waiting-for-inspiration-to-strike-before-doing-any-writing model. He talked about it a lot, actually, about how he would lean back in his chair at his desk and wait for the inspiration to come to him. Wait for the universe to open and flood his head with ideas and words. He'd sit that way for hours. If no inspiration came, he didn't do any writing. As time went on, more and more often, his posts about his writing life were only about how he was never inspired and couldn't find any inspiration and was, as a consequence, never writing.

He's not a writer anymore. I'm not sure he could ever have been called a "writer" since he has no completed work to show for his time as a "writer."

The problem is that I know a lot of people like that, people who quit writing because they relied heavily on being inspired and never did any of the work of writing. It's like this:
Writing is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
And, well, inspiration doesn't come unless you're doing the work.

So you can probably guess which side of the spectrum I'm on.
The truth is that if you look at successful writers, the writers who make a living from their writing, with few exceptions, these are the people who sit down to do the work of writing whether they're "feeling inspired" or not.

"Writers" who wait for the inspiration to happen first lead lives of not writing and, thus, never have anything to show for being a "writer." Sure, they may have a few pages of this or a few pages of that, but you can't legitimately call yourself a writer if you can't finish anything. You can be a writer without ever publishing anything, but you can't be a writer without work to show for it.

Which brings me to my actual point.

The other day, I heard a bit of an interview with a "voter" about why he hadn't voted in an election. He said it was because none of the candidates had inspired him...
Wait, what?
Yes, he said he didn't vote because he hadn't felt inspired by any of the candidates to get out and vote.

Which I realized is what has bothered me so much about last November's presidential election, people complaining that they didn't like either candidate so they hadn't bothered to vote at all. These people are "voters" in much the same way as a writer waiting for inspiration is a writer, which is to say not at all.

Look, it's not a candidates job to be inspirational. It's not the campaign's job to inspire you. Sure, I get that it can help. Like I said, I have nothing against inspiration. It's great.
But that's not what voting is about!
As a voter, it's your job to make the best decision from the available candidates and to go out and vote!

For example, if you have two candidates and you've rated them on a scale of 1-10 and one of them is a 0 (because Trump didn't even make the scale) and the other is a 2 or, even, a 1, you go out and vote for the better one (not that I thought that Clinton was so low as a 1 or a 2, but I know a lot of people felt that way). You don't wait for a 7 or higher to come along and inspire you before going out and doing your job, because it is your job. If you have two candidates whom you don't like and one of them is an authoritarian fascist asshole, you go out and cost your ballot for the other candidate.

Period.

You want to know how I know? Because France just did just that! FRANCE! Dudes... if France can do it, if France can do the right thing, certainly we here in the United States of goddamn fucking America ought to be able to do the same thing. Ought to be able to.
Because, obviously, we're not capable of that, as the even more recent election of Greg Gianforte kind of demonstrates.
Seriously, what the fuck?
And you call yourselves Americans?
If the people of France can get themselves out to vote for Emmanuel Macron, a guy no one really liked, for the sole purpose of keeping Marine Le Pen out of office, then no one in the United States has any excuse.

When the choice is between the lesser of two evils, you fucking vote for the lesser of two evils.

So all of you people who didn't vote need to own up to your lack of doing your fucking jobs as citizens of the United States and get up off your asses now and register your protest against the fascist asshole "running" the country.
Running it into the ground.

Sorry (not sorry), fuck inspiration. And that goes to you "writers," too.
Do the work.
If you do the work, the inspiration will eventually come.

Stand Your Ground (but not with a gun)

Back when I was in middle school, I had to take a law class. Seriously, it was a requirement because of the program I was in. It was titled something like "Introduction to Law" and was meant as a government-type course with an emphasis on the legal system and how it works. Toward the end of the course, one of the things we had to do was re-enact court cases, the idea being that if we had learned what we were being taught, we would come away from those re-enactments with the same decisions as the courts did.

Here's the summation of the case I want to talk about:
Two men go into a convenience store to rob it. Man #1 has a gun; Man #2 doesn't know Man #1 has the gun. The robbery doesn't quite go as planned, and Man #1 pulls out his gun and shoots the clerk. The clerk dies. Generally speaking, this is first degree murder because the man willfully took the gun into the store; basically, he planned to use it if necessary. The question was whether Man #2 was guilty of the same crime. Remember, he didn't know about the gun.

I'll pause for a moment to give you a chance to consider. Pretend the Jeopardy music is playing. Or something. In fact, here you go:


So... Once we had re-enacted the case, which resulted in a "not guilty" verdict, we were asked to give our own opinions on what the outcome should have been. All of the class said the outcome should have been "not guilty." All of the class but me, that is. First, all of my classmates started giving me a hard time; I was the only one who said the man was guilty so I must be wrong. How could I be the only one with the correct answer, as it were? Then, my teacher started pressuring me: "Are you sure you don't want to change your mind?" And here was the hard part; she had everyone that believed "guilty" stand on one side of the room (that would be me) and everyone that believed "not guilty" go stand on the other (that would be the 35 or so other students in the class). I'm not sure I can adequately relate what it's like to be in that circumstance. To be the only one standing up for something against a wall of your peers telling you that you're wrong.

But here's the thing:
Their decision was based on what they felt was fair. Basically, it wouldn't be fair for the man to be found "guilty" since he hadn't known about the gun. They were having an emotional response to the situation.
My decision was based on this law that said, in short, that the man was guilty of the same crime as Man #1, whether he knew about the gun or not, because he had participated in the crime.

As it turned out, Man #2 had been found guilty just as Man #1 had been because of the law. I was the only one in the room that had looked at the facts and made an objective decision based on those facts. And, as it turned out, my teacher had pressured me because, as she said, that's sometimes what happens on juries, especially if deliberations have been going on a long time and the jurors just want everything to be over. Basically, she wanted to see if I would cave under the pressure (and she allowed it to be a lot of pressure, almost two full class periods).

But I stood my ground, because I had actual facts sitting in front of me, so to speak. And that's not the only time I've been in that position in my life. By a lot. But that is one of the best examples of having to stand on your own against everyone else that I have ever experienced or seen. Man, I hated middle school.

So what am I saying here? That you should always just demand that you are right no matter how many people stand up against you and tell you that you're wrong? Well, no. But I am saying that you shouldn't back down just because everyone else is saying that you're wrong. Mostly, I'm saying to look at the facts, the data, all of the information. Make a decision based on those facts, not with your emotions. If you've made the best decision you can based on the information at hand (not how you feel about that information), you shouldn't change your mind just because everyone else says you should. Especially if they are appealing to you on an emotional level (and let me tell you, appealing on the basis of what is "fair" is about as emotional as you can get: "fairness" is rarely objective). Now, if someone comes to you with actual fact, data, whatever, you should certainly look at it, evaluate it, and, maybe, revise your thinking. But just remember: Being the only one on a side, does not make you wrong.

Having said all of that, for you writers out there, this is the same way you need to approach your manuscripts. The hardest part of that is to remove as much of your own emotion as you can so that you can evaluate your work as objectively as possible, then put your emotion back in and ask yourself the question, "Do I like this? Is it something I would want to read if someone else wrote it?" If you can say yes to those questions, it doesn't really matter what anyone else says about your work. And, if you can say yes to those questions, it can give you the strength to stand alone through the rejections and the pressure to change.

"Risk"ing Your Feelings

I have, as long as I can remember, always liked games. Seriously, as far back as I can remember. Like, when I was less than five, my cousin, who was three years older than me, and I walked three miles from my great-grandmother's house to her (mostly unused) house to get Mouse Trap ("You roll your dice, you move your mice; nobody gets hurt."), because that's what we wanted to play. I'm not sure anyone knew where we went, and I'm not sure anyone knew we were gone. But, you know, it was the East Texas countryside, and we were rarely where anyone knew where we were most of any given day.

As it turned out, though, when we got there, we discovered that about half of the pieces to the trap were missing and all of the cheese. So, yeah, we got to walk back empty-handed.

At any rate, well before the age of ten, I began having... issues... finding anyone willing to play anything with me. Except, maybe, Battle. Or War. Or whatever you call it. You know, the card game where you just flip over the top card and the player with the high card wins. That one was pure chance, so I could still get people to play that one with me. Then I discovered Risk.

I was in middle school. I'm not really sure how I got introduced to the game, though it may have been at school or, maybe, it was just a present or something I got for a birthday. At any rate, Risk became the game that people were willing to play with me. My brother and my friends and his friends and such. The reason? They could team up against me. Seriously.

Of course, it didn't just start out that way, but it didn't take long for them to realize that that is what it would take for them to have a chance to beat me, and it became the way every game started. Every game. It was just accepted that everyone started out with the goal of beating me and they would worry about each other later. Actually, it was not uncommon for them to just quit playing once they'd defeated me.

I lost a lot of games that way. BUT I still won games, too. Probably something like 1/3 of them. Sometimes, it was upsetting, the whole thing with having everyone always set against me. It's tough when you're 12 to deal with the fact that everyone wants to see you lose. Actually, it's difficult to deal with that at any age, but middle school is already the worst, and always having everyone team up against me made it the worst of the worst.

And it didn't stop there. I started getting into other strategy games in high school and carried that on into college and, pretty much, that became the routine I had to deal with in any group game. Everyone's goal was always to take me out as quickly as possible. The catch was, and I had known this since middle school, if I wanted to play, I just had to deal with it. And I wanted to play.

And that's the way a lot of things in life are. Not the having everyone team up against you but the balancing of the potential of having your feelings hurt against doing the thing you want to do. That's especially true in writing. You have to know going in that you're going to get your feelings hurt at some point. The question is, "Is it worth the Risk to get to do that thing you want to do?" (Look, another version of Risk!)

So I'm going to focus on the writing part since that's what I do, but you can apply this to, well, anything.

When you set out to be a writer, a published one, you really need to go into it with the mindset of having everyone teamed up against you, everyone wanting to see you lose. Which is not to say that everyone actually wants to see you lose, but everyone is playing their own game, and they are all trying to win, so it's not like anyone is on your side, not in any real sense. You're not part of a team like the guys who always teamed up to make sure that I didn't win. You are on your own.

And, then, there are the reviews. Mostly, it's the lack of reviews, but it's also the negative reviews, and you have to go into it knowing that that's going to happen, so you have to go into it willing to put your feelings aside in exchange for getting to do the thing you want to do: writing. You have to put your feelings at Risk.
(Look! Another version of Risk!)

There was one time in college where we were playing a game of Risk down in the lobby of the dorm, five or six of us. One of the guys was really exhorting everyone to go after me. He started in on it as soon as we were setting up. It's not like anyone needed that much convincing, but he just wouldn't stop going on about it, so I decided I would make sure that he, at least, went out before me and started working on his armies. As I got pushed back, I pushed into his territory and slowly took him out of the game. The more he started to lose, the louder he got about everyone taking me out of the game, right up until I broke his last major stronghold, at which point he flipped out, flipped the board up into the air, thew the table over, and stormed out of the room. Unfortunately, it's not uncommon for authors to act the same way over a bad review.
(And look again, another version of Risk!)

When you act like that, no one will want to play with you anymore. I have to tell you, it pissed me off, because it was my Risk board that he sent flying all over the room, and it took hours to find all of the little army counters. Oh, no, wait a minute, I didn't find all of the army tokens. I never asked him to join a game again and, guess what, no else ever asked him to play any other game with us again. Ever. All it took was that one moment of poor sportsmanship and no one wanted to Risk another explosion on his part.

You make your choices going in, but you have to be willing to take the consequences. You put your feelings aside in order to get to play the game or you explode to find that no one wants to play with you. Or work with you. Or be around you. Or all they want to do is push the big giant button you've shown yourself to have and they spend their time provoking you just because it's fun.

Personally, I wan to play the game, and I've had, I suppose, pretty good training in dealing with situations where I have to fight the odds to win. Of course, when you do win, it makes victory so much better.

By the way, I still love Risk. I don't get to play it very often, but I love the game.

The multiple versions could be a giveaway, I don't know. This isn't even all the versions I own; these were just the ones conveniently accessed. Right now, my kids are lobbying for this one:

Maybe Christmas...

Lies Writers Tell... To Other Writers (Part One) (an IWM post)

Being a writer's a tough gig. Okay, no, wait: Being a published writer is a tough gig. It's the difference between sitting around in your house and playing guitar merely for your own pleasure – or, maybe, the pleasure of a few friends – and playing on stage in front of an audience. An audience which may or may not have actual people in it and an audience which may or may not even be listening. So you go up on stage and play your heart out and no one responds and you don't really have any idea of how good you were. It's a tough gig.

Because it's so tough, we've come up with little lies to tell ourselves to make the seeming rejection less hurtful, and these lies would be okay if we only told them to ourselves...

And that's your teaser. You'll have to hop right over to Indie Writers Monthly to find out what we do with these lies and what they have to do with math. Copernicus and Galileo put in guest appearances as well. So click the link for the post.

BUT!

Don't forget that we are also accepting your submissions of Time Travel stories for our first ever annual!

Click this link for all of the details about that!

What Your Blog Says About You: Part Three -- Frequency, Consistency, and Participation

Just as personality and content go together, so do frequency, consistency, and participation. Really, these things could be clumped together into how active you are, but each needs to be dealt with individually, too, so we're gonna do that. Activeness, though, is critical if you want your blog to be successful, especially at first. Unless you're famous that is. Most of us, though, are not famous, so how active we are can be a determining factor in whether anyone pays any attention to what we're doing.

This is something my cat knows pretty well. When my cat wants attention, he knows exactly what kinds of things he needs to do to make sure I'm paying attention to him. This is especially useful in the middle of the night. For him, not for me.

He plays music. Or he scratches on doors. Or, well, any number of things. And, yes, we do keep the piano closed, now.

So... let's talk, first, about frequency.

How frequently you blog will have a lot to do with the amount of traffic you get to your blog. Of course, the obvious reason is that the more often you blog, the more often people that want to read your blog will have to stop by to read what you have to say. But it's more than that. How often you blog keeps you in the minds of your readers. It helps them to remember who you are, and that's important. When you're starting out, if you blog less than once a week, it's quite possible for a "follower" to see your post in their feed or reader or whatever and say, "Who the heck is that?" You don't want a "who the heck is that?" response to your posts. Here's a good example of how this kind of thing works:

Let's say you participated in the April a-to-z challenge, which is just that, a challenge. I won't argue that. So you did a pretty good job during April, maybe even completed the challenge but, at least, did, say, four posts a week. Then, in May, because you're feeling rundown or overwhelmed or whatever with all the blogging you'd been doing, you take a break. I know, many people do. But you'd picked up all of these new followers who don't know anything at all about your actual blogging style and, then, you don't post...

Until June. And the response is, "What the heck blog is that?" [And you probably even start with an apology about how you haven't been posting, which is a completely separate reason for people to roll their eyes (but we'll get to that next time).] Yes, some of them won't even click through to find out what the heck blog that is. Or, maybe, said person added so many new blogs during April, people that kept up posting frequently, that he's, now, uninterested in your blog. The amount of posts a person can read in a day is, after all, finite. [Unless you are Alex, but I'm beginning to believe he actually lives outside of time.]

Which leads us to consistency. Even if you can't post with great frequency, being consistent can be just as important. Let's say you're going to make 24 posts in the next year: It's much better to post twice a month than to post seven times the first month, five times the second month, skip the next two months, then post seven more times... Unless you have some exceptional content, people just won't take you seriously with that kind of routine. Which is why all of this is important, anyway. When and how you post tells people about the kind of person you are.

So, wait... let's go back to the whole having a successful blog thing. This is an important consideration and it goes back to that whole "what is the goal of your blog?" question I mentioned in an earlier post. If your goal is to just have a blog and you're really doing it for yourself (or whatever) none of this matters, BUT, if you're goal is to have a "successful" blog--and by successful I mean a blog that gains followers, gets comments, and people want to follow--then these things are important. Vitally important.

And, now, let me address just the writers out there, because I know a lot of you have blogs with the goal of building a platform. If your goal is to gain readers, your readers need to have a certain level of trust. Trust in you and trust in your writing. If your blog exists to say to readers, "hey, look at me; I have a cool blog with lots of interesting stuff; come see how I write so that you'll want to buy my book" [There's nothing wrong with having that blog, by the way. It's completely valid to want people to know who you are so that they will want to buy your book.], then your blog needs to reflect your writing ethic. If you blog inconsistently (either in frequency OR content), people will view your writing that way, too. If your content is inconsistent, people will think your writing is inconsistent. If your frequency is inconsistent, it won't matter how good a writer you are, because people won't trust that you can deliver the material. [And let me just add, if, on your sidebar, you have listed about eight WiPs AND you can't manage to blog more than every three or four months, people will completely dismiss you as a serious writer. Well, I will, anyway, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one affected that way.] The point here is that your blog is a reflection of you. You as a person and you as a writer. So, if you're going to have a blog, you have to take it seriously.

If you're a writer.

All of that brings us to participation. And, oh, man, what a sticky one this is. When you're starting out, especially, it doesn't matter how good your content is, how frequently you blog, or how consistent you are if you don't participate in the blogging world. It's only by visiting other blogs and commenting that people even know you exist. And you can't just run around saying "come visit my blog" on every blog you run across, because that is a sure way to keep people away. Participation comes in three ways:

1. Your posts.

2. Commenting on other blogs.

3. Responding to comments on your blog.

The thing is, you are, by putting your blog out there, asking people to come in and listen to what you have to say. And, really, why should anyone do that? Unless you're going to do the same, that is. No one wants to hang around the guy that just talks all the time, you know, and never listens. People start to avoid that person. And they'll avoid your blog, too, if that's the way you handle it. And commenting on a blog is not the same as being the one talking; it's a way to demonstrate that you've been listening. So is responding to comments. I'm sorry, but, if you're not Stephen King, you can't expect people to just walk in and pick up the bread crumbs you're sprinkling on the ground.

So here's a personal peeve:

I really hate it when people complain about how they don't seem to be gaining any followers, and I say, "Well, do you spend any time reading other blogs and commenting?" and I get the response, "Oh, no, I don't have time for that." Well, then, that's your answer. If you can't make time for that, why should anyone make time for you? Seriously. Unless you're words are literal gold falling to the ground (that will also pop out of my monitor as I read your blog), why should I spare the time for you that you will not spare for me? That's just how that works. And I don't mean this in any "let's trade back scratches" kind of way; this is how you form a relationship. A relationship is not me showing up to "listen" to you for half an hour every few days while you ignore my existence.

But, then again, it's all about the goals for your blog. If your blog is just for you, and you don't care about followers or readers or anything, then none of this matters, but, if you do want a "successful" blog, you can't do it in a vacuum. You  have to participate.

What Your Blog Says About You: Part Two -- Content

Closely related to the personality of your blog, is the content. One informs the other to a certain extent. I mean, if you want the personality of your blog to be humorous, you don't want your content to be about death or terminal illness or human trafficking or climate change or... I'm sure you get the idea. Although, now that I think about it, a humor blog about death could be, well, funny.
Don't eat the salmon mousse, right?

Your choice of content is the biggest factor in determining who's going to read your blog. In that respect, choosing a topic like "writing" is going to significantly decrease your potential audience. Sure, there may be lots of people out there that think they can write a book and many people with some scribblings, but most people don't want to spend a lot of time reading about how to write. And if your specific topic is grammar... well, good luck with that. No matter how funny you are [See, grammar is one of those topics that most people don't relate to humor, like history. Or quantum physics.], you are not likely to be attracting the masses.

So, then, it's important to look at whom you want your audience to be before you settle on what you want the content of your blog to be. When I started my blog, I knew I didn't want to just talk about writing, because I didn't want to just have other writers reading my blog. Again, as many people as there are out there writing, it's still a small audience, relatively speaking, especially since most people who are out there trying to be writers do it without bothering to really know anything about how to write. (The overall quality of self-published works wouldn't be so piss poor if that were not the case.) And, well, there are so many bloggers that will tell you in excruciating detail the way to be successful as a writer that I didn't want to get mired in all of that.

Which brings us to goals. You have to know the goal for your blog before you can figure out what the content should be. Who is it you want reading your blog? Do you just want other writers? Fine, focus your blog on writing related topics. Do you want your blog to be informational? Focus on the data and post links. Do you want to moms to read your blog? Talk about kids and how to make your house function more efficiently. [Yes, I know that that is somewhat sexist, but it's also mostly true. Hey, it is what it is.] Do you want Republicans? Or Democrats? Talk issues and bash the opposing party. As often as possible. Do you want the whole universe reading your blog? Post silly pictures of cats.
Oh, wait, look!

Jack-in-the-Box

No, I do not know what went down the drain.

And if you're trying to get readers? Well, one thing you shouldn't do is spend nearly every post you write badmouthing readers. Seriously, this one guy I follow (and, no, I don't know why I still follow him other than that it was a subscription thing and comes into my email and I haven't taken the time to make it stop (Make it stop!)) spends almost every post (and thank goodness he doesn't post frequently (which is another reason why I haven't gotten around to unsubscribing)) complaining about how readers are just bunch of cheapskates that can't even spend the price of a mocha to buy his books. Or, like in his latest post, he published an email from a reader (I'm assuming without permission, because I can not imagine anyone giving permission for this) and went on to "defend" himself against the allegations the writer of the email had put forth against him. I'm not thinking this is going to help win him any new readers.

So, yeah... What is your goal for your blog, and do you have content to match it?

For example, one of the things I believe (and from comments I've received from people, I'm pretty sure I'm correct) is that people that like Star Wars will like The House on the Corner, so I talk about Star Wars. A lot. Not posts and posts about Star Wars, but I make sure it comes up in conversation. So to speak. See what I just did there?

Once you've decided on your audience and your content, stick to it. People will come to your blog to deliver the type of content you've said you'll have. For instance, I tend to stay away from political stuff and religious stuff and sports stuff. Mostly, that type of content just causes controversy, and I carry enough controversy around with me to want to delve into topics already filled with the stuff. Which is not to say that you can't make the occasional exception, like I did back in this post, but, mostly, you need to keep your content pretty consistent. Do the kinds of posts you do and stay away from the kinds of posts you don't do.

Oh, let me just add that I don't stay away from any topic because I'm scared of controversy. Anyone that's been around here for any length of time ought to know that I have strong opinions, and I don't mind sharing them. However, I dislike getting involved in arguments that aren't (ever) going to go anywhere, and any time you start talking about politics or religion or, even, sports, people already have their minds made up and no amount of talking about it is going to change anyone's opinion, which I talked about back in this series. See, I'm a Cowboys fan--I have been since I was a kid--and no amount of arguing with me about it is going to get me to change my mind. Fortunately for you all, I don't really care about football, so saying that I'm a Cowboys fan really isn't saying much. But I'm still not changing my mind.

All of this talk about content has made me look up at my heading (you can look up at it, too). That's the stuff I decided I'd be talking about when I started up my blog. Yes, that hasn't changed since the blog started. That's still the stuff I talk about: writing, reading, movies, pop culture stuff. I've branched out just slightly from that in that I now talk about my pets and kids and whatever general kind of thing might come to mind, but the core of what I blog about is still that stuff at the top.

All of that to say, or to wrap up, or something: Your content is important. There are a lot of blogs that I have given up on because they never say anything. Wait, no, because the blog doesn't say what it says it's going to say. How many of you (those of you that do) would continue to follow Alex if he started talking about his guitar all the time. Every post. It was all about how great rehearsal was or how he'd learned some new song or whatever. He's established a particular type of content, and, if he morphed into only talking about guitar practice, people would quit stopping by. And what about Matthew? What if he quit doing his query letter thing and started talking about his love for ping pong? All the time. I'm guessing not many of you are that interested in a blog about ping pong.

Content may be more important than personality where blogging is concerned, and I almost used it as part one, but I'm gonna guess that most of you never thought specifically about the content of your blog and just let it develop from your personality, which is fine. As I said back at the beginning, the two things inform each other. I chose the topics I chose because I like those topics, so it makes it easy to have things to write about (as opposed to choosing grammar and trying to make gerunds funny (and I think there's a very in-poor-taste joke there about Richard Gere just waiting to happen, but I'm not going to try and figure out what it is)). So, if your content has flowed out of your personality, it may be worth giving it a think, figuring out what your goals are, who you want your target audience to be, and making some adjustments to your content. Or not. It's just one of those things you should at least think about.

The Danger of Desperation (an Indie Life post)

For those of you who haven't noticed, there's been a big to-do in the publishing world in the last week or so. But, before that...

It can be difficult to be involved in artistic fields. There's so much angst over whether you're good enough, whether people will like your work, whether people will like you. It creates a huge drive for recognition. Confirmation. Validation. The desire for validation can be... distracting. The desire to be validated, to be told, "yes, you are good," can become the goal rather than doing the art. The need for an agent, for a publisher, more important than doing the writing and just making it available.

This need, this desperate grasp for someone unconnected to you to tell you that you're good, that you do good work, that your writing (art, music, whatever) deserves to be seen can make us do, well, stupid things. It can make us agree to things that our sane, rational minds would have us run away from. But, in that moment, that moment of someone saying to you, "we want you," you can forget to look at the situation and, instead, just say "yes! yes! yes!"

I've kind of lost track of the number of authors I've seen that have signed with some small publisher that said "we want you" but, then, left them to do all the work (editing, cover, marketing) only to keep a large part of any money that was made. And all of that with no advance. But the validation has been so important that many of them don't care. Or they do end up caring and regret the decision to go with the small publisher. It's a hard thing to deal with. And many small publishers count on that. Some of them even demand money from you.

But, then, most of us are at least somewhat aware of vanity presses and know to stay away from them, right? Right? Well, let's just be safe: if any publisher ever asks you for money to publish your book, don't just say "no;" run away as fast as you can, too.

Which brings us to the whole "to-do."

Just recently, Random House has established some new digital-only imprints. These imprints have been designed to take advantage of the new digital era but, from all appearances, at the expense of the author. The imprints seem to be specifically targeting new authors and pre-published authors. Authors who don't know their way around the publishing world. See, the big publishers almost never take unsolicited manuscripts; that means you have to have an agent if you want to get published by someone like Random House. But these new imprints? No agent needed. Anyone can submit to them.

And that one thing is going to be a huge draw for unpublished authors -- the chance to be published by one of the "big 6" without the need of an agent.
And Random House is set up to accept as many takers as possible, because, why?, it's digital only, remember?

You know that saying about when something is too good to be true...?
Yes, there is a catch... actually, there are a lot of them. All of them designed to squeeze the unsuspecting author like a grape.

1. No advance.
2. They charge back to the author all of the production costs. No, you don't have to pay anything up front, but all of the costs of editing, cover design, marketing; it all comes out of the pocket of the author.
3. They get to own your soul. Seriously. They own all rights to your work in every possible format in place you can think of. Well, at least, any place on Earth. They own all licensing options. AND they own the crack at any sequel you may ever write.
4. If your book is successful enough that they decide they want to do a print version of it, you get charged for all of that, too.

The whole thing is horrendous. If you really want to know the whole story, I suggest you read the following posts by John Scalzi, who also happens to be the president of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America:
1. Hydra
2. Alibi
3. The direction?
4. The Letter
5. The Response
6. Why advance are important
7. You have more power than you think

Look, I understand that it can seem a small thing to take terms that don't include an advance or any of these other things when you're trying to get in the door. After all, you're already not making anything, right? What can it hurt, and, at least, this way you have a chance. Right? And with a big publisher, too! But don't let your desperation lead you down the path of foolishness. Don't feed the big parasitic organism that's seeking to drain you of all of your creativity. In the end, it's just not worth it, no matter how "necessary" it may seem at the time. Desperation... it's a dangerous thing.

I strongly suggest that you go read those posts by Scalzi. Yeah, that's a lot of reading, but you'll be glad you did.

Update:
Random House, due to the huge outcry against the terms they were offering through these new imprints, has responded by amending  the terms they're offering in their contracts. What they're offering is still not great, but it's better than it was. You can read about the changes here and Scalzi's thoughts on them here. Again, this is strongly suggested reading.

This post has been brought to you by Indie Life.

The Cat Came Back (part 3): The Cat Reader (and the Dog Writer)

I wish I had a picture of the cat with a book for this post, but the cat has proven to be very troublesome

when it comes to pictures. Anytime he hears the camera turn on, he immediately stops what he's doing. Just before the above picture, he was "hugging" the arm of the couch, but, as soon as the camera made a noise, he sat up like, "What? I wasn't doing anything."

Which brings me to my point. Readers are like cats.

Seriously, ask someone what they're reading, which is likely to be something "trashy," and they'll start making excuses as to why they're reading it. "It's for my reading group." "Someone gave it to me." "My best friend said I had to read it." "I don't really like this, but it's so popular I had to read it." Whatever. It's like people have to make excuses because they're not reading something "better." Sort of like the cat when I try to take a picture of it doing something insane. "What? No. That wasn't me. You have the wrong cat. That cat just ran out of the room."

But it's more than that. As I said in my last cat post, science believes that cats adopt their owners, not the other way around. That is certainly true of readers. As a reader, I've done this myself. When I was in middle school, I adopted Piers Anthony as "my writer" and kept him around for six or seven years at least. Right now, I have two that I've adopted: Neil Gaiman and Mary Doria Russel.Gaiman is good in a way that Anthony never was in that he doesn't always write the same old stuff over and over again. Russel is good in another way in that her writing is just so magnificent. And deeply human. As a writer, the best thing we can hope for is get adopted by a reader and, hopefully, a lot of readers.

But the thing is, cats are finicky. It might be a cliche, but it's a cliche because it's true. You can feed a cat something one day, something the cat barely stops to breathe for while choking it down, but give that same thing to the cat the next day, and it's "blech! Why are giving me that crap? I hate that!" Actually, that sounds kind of like my daughter, too. At any rate, it's hard to know what a reader will want at any given time. Yesterday, it was vampires, today it might be zombies, and who knows what it might be tomorrow: anthropomorphic frogs, maybe.

To make it worse, they're demanding. "We don't know what we want, but we want it right now!" Okay, sometimes readers do know what they want, but it often goes like this:
The cat demands food. The cat demands food again. The cat demands food very loudly. The cat demands food loudly and constantly. You finally get up and give the cat some food, which may or may not be what you gave the cat the day before. The cat looks at the food, takes a bite, and turns his tail on it while giving you that look. If you've never been given that look by a cat, you won't know what I'm talking about, but it loosely translates into "You suck. I hope you choke on a hairball. How could you give me this crap?"

I haven't read The Casual Vacancy yet, but I kind of think Rowling is going through this right now from what I've read of reader reaction to the book. Finicky.

On the other hand, I think young readers tend to be more like dogs; they'll eat anything you throw at them.

Cats also want to get all up in your personal space, but not in a friendly way like a dog does. I mean, a dog just wants to cuddle and be with you, but a cat... well, the cat wants the space. You are no longer you, you are just a pillow. They pop out those claws and start kneading you and molding you and trying to get you to move around into a shape they want. Who cares about whether that's comfortable for you or not, right? And, even when a reader likes what you've written, many of them will tell you how you could have changed it to make it better for them. With those little claws, working you over. Of course, the reader next to that one has completely different suggestions, and that one is working you over with his claws, too.

But writers are much more like dogs. Have you ever been to the animal shelter and seen the little doggies just waiting for someone to love them? Really, they'll take anyone. They're back there like Donkey (from Shrek), jumping up and down and yelling, "Me! Me! Pick me! Pick me!" And, even though readers are cats, writers are still back there saying, "Read me! Read me! Like me! Like me!" There may be less jumping up and down, but, then again, there may not be. And, really, writers will just take anyone. The only thought in a writer's head at that moment is, "Someone to love me!"

Of course, then, you don't want to make writers mad or mistreat them on an ongoing basis, because, then, they become that grumpy, old dog down the street that doesn't like anyone and just growls at anyone that gets near, "I don't care if you like my stuff! Get away from me before I bite your hand off!" I'm not sure if that's any less literal with a writer than with that dog.

But, mostly, dogs are just lovable and want to be loved. They want someone to play catch with and to scratch them behind the ears. They want someone to tell them "good dog." Yeah, that's writer equivalent of buying your book and leaving a positive review.

And, honestly, dogs are so much easier to feed than cats. They'll eat almost anything.
Except my dog, of course; she's picky. Unless the cat is around, then she'll eat anything.

And don't forget: Go sign up for the Oh, How I Miss You blogfest! It's this Friday; that's just two days away. Go now! Don't miss out!

Garage Sales and Self-publishing

I am not a garage sale person. Not in any kind of way. I don't really feel like it's worth my time to go poking around in other people's junk looking for the rare gem lost in there amongst the trash, and I'm not really for throwing my own junk out in the yard and trying to convince people to buy it. Either it's something I want, or it's something I'm not willing to let go of at a price someone shopping at a garage sale is willing to pay.

When I was a kid, though, my mom would, sometimes, take me to garage sales. I don't really remember if she ever bought stuff at them, though it wouldn't surprise me, but I do know she never bought stuff for me at them. Not toys and, especially, not comic books. There was always the "you have enough toys" and there was never a reason for not getting comic books. My aunt, though, always bought us (my cousins and me) comic books at garage sales, but they had to stay down at the farm where all of us had access to them. And, when I was older, a different aunt and my uncle would always give me books they bought at garage sales for Christmas. I hated it. Crappy copies (as in beat the hell up) of books I didn't want to read. But they just assumed that because they were books and I read books that I would want to read them. Never did they give me anything I wanted to read, not even the trashed copy of The Clan of the Cave Bear I got one year that I might actually have read if it hadn't been completely destroyed already. I'm not even sure what happened to all of those books, because they never made it into my room.

At any rate, none of that has ever endeared me to garage sales.

Having said all of that, we had a garage sale this weekend. It wasn't my idea. It wasn't even my wife's idea. Evidently, it's an annual event that our HOA "hosts" and does all of the advertising for, so my wife said that we may as well participate. We didn't really do a good job of it, though. As we were setting up our paltry items, because we didn't take the time to go through the boxes of stuff we haven't unpacked like we should have, on Saturday morning prior to the 9:00am starting time of the event, we watched some people a few houses down setting up a rather spectacular event that included their entire driveway and the interior of their garage. It almost made us decide to just put our stuff away.

The most interesting thing was all the people driving by early in the morning before 9am. Of course, the people down the street had enough stuff out by 8am that they already had people wandering around, but we didn't even start setting up until, like, 8:15 or something. The heaviest traffic all happened before 9:00 even thought the event was scheduled from 9:00-2:00. People out looking for bargains. Looking for lost gems amidst trash.

And I get it. I do. I think it was just last summer I read about a guy that bought a box of comics, a couple hundred loose comics in a brown box, for $5, and it had in it some very rare Silver Age editions in pretty decent condition, stuff he ended up making over $35,000 on. The guy who sold it to him got pissed and tried to claim that the sale wasn't legal or something because he hadn't known what he was selling. I think the judge called him an idiot. No, I'm just kidding, but they did tell him he had no case, and it was his own fault. Also in the last year, some guy sold a safe that he got at an estate sale. He never bothered to open it. The guy who bought it (for a very good price) found $75,000 inside it. The seller was trying to force the buyer to give him half the money. And you have to understand that that guy was the second guy that sold that safe without bothering to open it. So I get the whole allure of garage sales and flea markets (which we also frequented when I was a kid (and I do remember my mom buying stuff at those)).

But what struck me on Saturday morning as I watched the faces peering out of car windows as they rolled slowly by was that this whole garage sale business is rather like self-publishing. It's like looking for those few good books amongst heaps of trash and drivel. Of course, then, there are the people that like that stuff, as I witnessed on Saturday. Some people just looking for a good deal, "I'll read it because it's cheap." Some people looking for lost gems, "I'll read it because this one might be good." Some people just enjoying the hunt and looking at what other people have out (a surprising number of people, actually, that you could tell were really just there to look (unless, maybe, they would have been willing to buy something that they felt was "worth it;" although, it's hard to tell), "I'm just browsing the titles just in case something catches my eye, but I don't expect anything to." And a few people actually looking for things they could use, "I'll read this because it's got some good reviews or someone I trust told me it's good."

Mostly, though, people just don't go to garage sales. And, mostly, people don't buy self-published books. Unfortunately, looking at my own view toward shopping at garage sales, I completely understand why most people don't want to take a chance on self-published books. And this extends to people that review books. If you go around and look at sites that focus on doing book reviews, they pretty much universally say that they don't review self-published works. The one site I did find that said "I do" changed that to "I don't" between me finding the site and me sending in a request (which happened within the week). And it sucks, but I get it.

So I'm sitting here, right now, realizing that I'm holding a big garage sale for my written work, and I don't know how I feel about that. Not that it makes me think that I don't want to self-publish, because I want to not be involved with traditional publishers a lot more than I don't want to be holding a garage sale, but it's making me, sort of, re-think my approach to what I'm doing. Well, it's made me think that I need to re-think my approach, because I'm not really having any new thoughts about it yet.

But here I am, sitting in my driveway with a stack of my books looking at all the other signs of people sitting in their driveways with their books, and everyone has up the same sign, "But my book really is good!" Or, to put it in garage sale terminology, "My junk is better than their junk." [And, yes, I know how that sounds, but really people... You just don't need to go there.] Small, independent publishers aren't much better; they're the guys with booths set up at the flea markets.

This is what it boils down to I guess:
If you do the whole self-publishing thing long enough and are able to build up a reputation, you can get the regulars to come by. I do know there are people that sort of have garage sales on a weekly basis. People that shop at garage sales come to know those places and go shop there on a regular basis. Developing that reputation is good, because getting the regulars to come buy your stuff is a good thing, right? Well, yeah, it is. But I don't think that's where I want to stop. I don't just want the people that shop self-published. So how do you get people that have the attitude about garage sales that I have to come shop at your garage sale?

I don't have an answer to that, but that's my new question.

Oh, and just to keep people from asking: $25.00.
And for those that didn't have that question, that's how much we made.

Moneyball and Why Writers Should Be Baseball Players

Okay, so not really... writers shouldn't really be baseball players, that is. At least, I shouldn't. I suck at baseball. I know; my dad used to make me play softball when I was in high school on the church team when they didn't have enough players to be a team. They would make me catcher, because the catcher doesn't really need to do anything in softball. That, or they would stick me out in right field, because the ball might come that way twice in a game. It was his fault I was no good, anyway, but that's a different story.

But back to Moneyball... Oh, wait, we weren't talking about that, yet, were we? Well, in that case, on to Moneyball!

As you might have figured out, I recently watched it. Yes, Moneyball! What do you think I'm talking about here? >sheesh!< Anyway...

Moneyball is really excellent. Brad Pitt is excellent. Jonah Hill is excellent. Surprisingly so, actually. As it turns out, he can actually act. I hope to see more of him in serious roles like this one. Beyond the fact that the movie is just good, it's very interesting. In case you don't know:

Moneyball is based on  the book about Billy Beane's revolutionary approach to building his 2002 Oakland A's team. Faced with a lack of funds and having just lost his best players to richer teams, Beane knew that a new approach was necessary. The story is fascinating.

But I don't really want to talk about it, because you can go watch it. And, if you're a writer, you should go watch it. And, if you're a writer and you've seen it and you didn't see the parallels to the publishing industry, you need to go watch it again. I will say this much about it, though:
There is a scene early on in which Beane is sitting in a room full of scouts, and they're discussing options on whom to replace their lost players with. There are comments like:

"This guy looks good."
"But he can't play <whatever position> well."
"But he looks good. The fans will love him."

"His girlfriend is ugly."
"What does that have to do with anything?"
"It means he lacks confidence."
"But he's a great player."
"His girlfriend is ugly."

And it went on and on and, mostly, the scouts never talked about the abilities of the players. They wanted stars, not good players.

And I couldn't stop thinking of literary agents. They want stars, and the writing doesn't matter at all.

In the end, Beane built the team based on the statistics without regard to the externals of the player.
Too old? Does he get on base? Yes. Take him.
Looks funny. Does he get on base? Yes. Take him.
He looked at the ability of the players. Their ability to perform. That was #1. Not just #1; it was the only thing.

The whole thing had a rocky beginning. The coach wouldn't get in line with what Beane was trying to do. They lost a lot of games. A lot. Even Beane didn't know if he was doing the right thing. It felt right, I guess, but it was a... it was a giant mess.

Then... it started working, and they won a record streak of games. 20 in a row. But, now, I'm talking about the movie, and that's not really the point.

The point is that it was hard. There were rough spots. Everyone ridiculed him. Everyone. And, in the end, they tried to say what he did failed. But today? Virtually every team in baseball has someone on staff that does what Beane did. In the end, sports is about money, and winning means money, so the owners of the teams want to win, so they went where the money is.

Publishers should take a look at that and start trying to go where the money is instead of spending their time talking about how bad self-publishing is and how bad e-publishing is and how bad Amazon is. Bookstores, too. I'll leave you with this quote; you can figure out how it relates (all emphasis is mine):

"You won the exact same number of games that the Yankees won, but the Yankees spent one point four million per win and you paid two hundred and sixty thousand. I know you've taken it in the teeth out there, but the first guy through the wall. It always gets bloody, always. It's the threat of not just the way of doing business, but in their minds it's threatening the game. But really what it's threatening is their livelihoods, it's threatening their jobs, it's threatening the way that they do things. And every time that happens, whether it's the government or a way of doing business or whatever it is, the people are holding the reins, have their hands on the switch. They go bat shit crazy. I mean, anybody who's not building a team right and rebuilding it using your model, they're dinosaurs."

Blogging A to Z: The A to Z of Fiction to Reality

A year ago, when the A to Z thing was going on, I had just started blogging. I hadn't even been at it two months when I found out about the challenge, and I only found out about it a couple of weeks before it started. I knew there was no way that I would be able to do that, post every day, in any kind of way that I would be happy with. I didn't want to be staring at my own posts thinking "how lame..." Save that for other people's posts, right? I knew that if I was going to ever do the A to Z challenge, it would have to be about something.

But that was a year ago, and, mostly, I just didn't think about it again. Well, that is until everyone started talking about it for this year. There's a certain amount of peer pressure involved in this whole thing which makes me want to avoid it. Everyone saying you should be involved and all of that. I'm fairly immune to peer pressure, so that didn't really sway me. And I knew that trying to post every day would, well, be impossible. That would mean a lot of planning. That would mean I would need something for my posts to be about. Not just a theme. Something they could be about.

And, still, there was everyone talking about it and talking about how they were going to do it and saying how everyone should do it and if everyone ate rocks, would you? Seriously? Because I think you would. And if everyone jumped off of a cliff, would you? Well, you probably would, because, really, you don't have a choice when everyone jumps off a cliff, because the ones at the front that can see the cliff coming can't stop because they're being pushed by the swarm of lemmings behind them, and the ones at the back can't see the cliff at all, so everyone goes over. It's just better not to get involved at all, wouldn't you say?

But, see, here's the thing. When everyone else goes and jumps off a cliff, you're left all alone, and, when you're talking about blogs, that's one thing you don't want to be. All alone. I kind of learned that last year. Everyone's busy with all the A to Z posts, and no one has time for anything else, so did I really want my blog to spend a month hibernating. Or, maybe, I should just take the month off? That didn't seem unreasonable.

Then... well, then, I opened my mouth. Sometimes, I say things that I don't intend to say. Okay, well, that's not exactly true. I never say anything I don't intend to say, but, sometimes, the things I say have effects that I don't anticipate. And so it was that I said something to my wife, just in passing, I thought, along the lines of, "hey, there's this big blog thing coming that lasts the whole month of April, and I'd kind of like to do it, but I'd need something really good for my posts to be about, and I'm not thinking of anything really good, so I'm thinking about, maybe, just taking the month off." Something like that, at any rate.

And here are the ideas that I'd already discarded when I said that to my wife:

1. Favorite words. That could be fun, right? Like for "A" I have adamant... and a whole bunch of others. And for "B" I have belligerent. But the idea didn't really grab me, and, for some letters, I'd have a lot of words and, for some letters, I'd only have one, so I really didn't like it for the whole inequality thing.

2. Star Wars. As many people can attest, there may be no better topic for me. I'm good at talking about Star Wars. I mean, I'm so good at talking about Star Wars that Briane Pagel is busy trying to think of ever more and more ways to make me lose points in his big Star Wars blogfest. Well, not lose points so much as let other people gain more points than me. Okay, well, he has, actually, come up with a way for me to lose points, too. Wow... So far, I've managed to keep my lead, but it is shortening. And that is why you should all go sign up for the blogfest. Because, if you do, you'll get 50 points, and I will, too, and, right now, I could use the point cushion! But, anyway... I thought about doing Star Wars, but, in the end, the topic was just too broad. Yeah, I know, that sounds weird, but I couldn't just talk about random things from Star Wars, so there'd have to be some way to decide between talking about, say, an A-wing fighter and Alderaan or, even, Admiral Akbar (and he's a double "A" topic!). Basically, I couldn't pick out a sub-theme I was interested in going with, so I had to discard Star Wars, too.

3. Well, there were any number of other ideas that flitted through this spot, but none of them took hold long enough to even stick as a third option. However, when you make a list, you must have 3 items for it to be considered a list, so #3 is for all of those other topics. The ones that weren't even good enough to be topics.

And that's where I was when I made that comment to my wife. Of course, she liked the idea of me taking a month off from blogging, because she thinks I spend too much time on the blog and not enough time on actual writing. Well, that doesn't sound right... Okay, more time on my actual book. How's that? She also thinks I spend too much time on Farmville, but that's a topic for another time. ANYWAY! (geez! would you people stop sidetracking me?) I think we were talking about the idea of taking a month off, but, then, she had an idea. Not an idea, the idea. Because my wife is good at ideas. And she said I must give her full credit for the idea or she would take it back. I'm not sure how that would work since I've written a bunch of posts already, but I suspect they would all poof out of existence, and I might well poof out of existence, too, for all I know. What I do know is that, at the very least, I'd be signed up for this crazy thing, and I'd have no posts to go with it, and that would really suck.

But the IDEA... and it's a really great idea, too. See, most of what I do on this blog is related to writing. Even the pop culture stuff, because the movies and all of that have to do with writing. And most of the other stuff I talk about I relate to writing in some way, too. Having a theme related to writing is, kind of, a no-brainer. Most of the A to Z blogs I saw last year that had a theme had some sort of theme that was related to writing in some way or another. And, well, I don't want to do some thing that everyone else is doing even if I'm participating in a big blogfest that everyone else is participating in. So it all has to go a step beyond. And that's what my wife's idea did.

So here you go... my more than a theme... it's more than a theme, because it's about how we are all affected by writers. And I don't mean we all as in us people that are writers being affected by other writers, because, of course, we are. No, I mean how we, all of us people everywhere, are affected by writers. Not just in what we read or watch or whatever but how writers affect our lives. But what does that mean?

Well, in my research for my individual topics, I discovered that there's this TV show by some physicist that is an ongoing exploration of current science fiction that could be reality some day. He has a book, too. No, I'm not going to tell you what it is, because you don't need to go look at that until May. But that's not what I'm going to talk about anyway. Not current science fiction. No, I'm going to talk about the ways that past fiction (not just science fiction) has become real and, to some extent, what that means to us. Okay, well, I'm  not going to talk about that part so much, because, really, there's just not time to do it within the confines of the blogfest, but I'm sure you'll be able to see how some of these things have changed our lives or will, soon, change our lives.

So... Starting on Sunday, what you'll be getting is 26 things that started out as fiction and are now real. That doesn't mean they're a part of everyday life, yet, but that the things work. Someone, somewhere, has these things now or is very close to producing them. Others are part of everyday life. But all of these things started out in the imagination of a writer. And, maybe, we'd have them anyway, but, maybe, we wouldn't. It's hard to say. The point is, though, is that writers are important. They have IDEAS, and ideas are... well, they are essential. Imagination is essential. And it's so often so easily dismissed.

And, if you've read my book, The House on the Corner, you might have an idea of how important I think imagination is.

At any rate, sit back, relax, and prepare to discover 26 things that you might not realize came from the pages of a book before it was something you could pick up and touch.

Not Just For Kids

One of the things I worry most about as a writer is being pegged as a writer of kids' books. Unless that's all you want to do, it can be a huge ball and chain. Once you get that label, if you try to break away and do something else, everyone gets mad at you. Like you can't possibly do anything else. My goal with The House on the Corner was not to write a book for kids but to write a book that was accessible to kids. Yes, I want kids to read it, but I also want adults to read it. In this, I was, actually, striving for something along the lines of Harry Potter or The Chronicles of Narnia (although, really, Lewis was writing for kids, but I think he surpassed himself).

In truth, what I was striving for was something more along the lines of Animaniacs (the greatest cartoon EVER!) or Looney Toons. Kids love that stuff, but you can't really appreciate them until you grow up and see the entire other level of humor. I'm not saying I achieved anything along the lines of either of these shows, but, still, it's the kind of thing I was going for.

So... if I don't want to get labeled an author of kids' books, why did I write a book that lends itself to that? Well, the answer is really simple, actually: I didn't want to have to tell my kids they couldn't read it. That can be a huge motivator. So what you get is The House on the Corner and, now, the Tib "stories."

But the truth is that the "real" stories in my head, the "big" ones, are not for kids at all. Not that I want to belittle what's going on in House or Tib, because I don't view those as "small" stories, but one of the things in my head would fall under epic fantasy (I think), and that makes me think "big." The other deals with... well, big issues, I guess. Not growing up type issue, like House, but society issues.

Anyway...

My original idea when I started all of this writing business was that I was going to start out by writing short stories. That idea didn't live very long as fell into House pretty soon after that. I did, however, start one short story (this is was nearly 3 years ago). Yes, I did say "start," because I never finished that first story. Well, that is, until now.

It's interesting to me in that that story started out as just this isolated little thing. It came out of the idea of what we can do with words to other people (but I don't want to say more than that, because, really, more than that would give the story away). Later, much later, I sat down and wrote "The Tunnel" (The Tunnel being part 1 of Tib, for those of you that haven't been following). As I was writing it, I realized that these two stories were linked, and a much larger world started growing in my head (yeah, it's kind of painful, and there are all sorts of operations (usually involving keyboards and the banging of heads) required to get things like that out once they've started growing).

The problem here is that that first short story, that one I started so long ago, well, it's not for kids. I will just happen to fail to mention it to my kids even though they're reading all about Tib. They'll just have to wait till they're older to find out how all of that came about. Okay, well, maybe my oldest will get to read it, but it's really going to depend upon his ability to keep his mouth shut to the other two. I don't think I would think about things like this at all if I mostly dealt with high schoolers (I was reading things much more mature than this when I was in high school), but, no, I teach creative writing to middle schoolers and spend lots of time in elementary school classes, and I have to worry about parents letting their kids read this story without looking at it first for no other reason than that I wrote it and their kids love The House on the Corner. [Yes, I'm going to be spending a lot of time telling parents at my kids' school "make sure you read this before you let your kids read it (because a lot of them have Kindles or access to one).]

And, now, finally, to the point:

This post was supposed to be the announcement of the release of a new story, but, alas, I'm not quite finished with it and getting it all set up on the Kindle. Things have just been too busy, lately, but I should have it ready by sometime early next week, so I'm going to go ahead and debut the cover today.

First, though, for those of you who have been following the adventures of Tib (if you can call them adventures), this is sort of a prologue to all of that. Or an origin story. But not really. At any rate, it is the story that gave birth (no pun intended (yes, you'll have to read it to understand that)) to the world that Tib lives in. The title is "The Evil That Men Do," and it will be available exclusively on the Kindle sometime soon.

The inestimable Rusty Webb is, once again, responsible for the cover, and I really love it.

And because I'm such a nice guy, I'm going to give you a look at some of the other designs that were part of the process.

My wife (and, I think, Rusty's wife) liked this one best, and, while I really like the silver, it doesn't evoke the moth and flame image the way the other cover does.

And because I think this next image is really cool, even if it doesn't work for what I was going for, here's one other "work in progress" piece:

If you don't already follow Rusty, click that link I left up there, and go do that!

Look for (actually, I'll tell you when) "The Evil That Men Do" to be available for the Kindle sometime in the coming for the LOW, LOW price of only $0.99!!!

Also, remember, the sale on The House on the Corner is ending today. Tomorrow, I'll set the prices back to what they're listed at on my House page, but, for today, you can still get it for the LOW, LOW price of only $0.99!!! And, hey, you can't beat 2-for-1 on signed copies of the physical book! Okay, well, that's not precisely true, because you could beat it, but I can't. Sorry, folks, that as low as I can make it go, so buy your copies while you have the chance, and give one as a gift!

forty-nine

Many, many weeks ago, Rusty over at The Blutonian Death Egg awarded me the 7x7 Link Award. I was just beginning to move at the time, so it's taken me  a while to get back to this one. If it was a normal award, I think I would have just conveniently forgotten about it, which I did anyway for a few weeks, but I kind of like this one, so I figured I'd honor it.
Not that I really understand the 7x7 part of it. I mean, I get the 7 links, but where does the x7 come in? It's like that "5x5" thing from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I looked that up once, and it doesn't really mean anything in the way they use it in the show, so I've always found that phrase curious and wondered about its origin. It's an interesting leap from the original meaning, the area of clearest reception from a radio station, to... well... I'm still not completely clear on the meaning in Buffy beyond "I'm cool." But I digress.

So I'm supposed to link to a bunch of my previous posts, so here goes:

1. Most Beautiful: I don't think I really do "beautiful" at this point. I generally don't go in for that kind of prose in the blog, although, maybe, I should. Actually, when I ever get around to talking about poetry, I might end up with some posts I think would qualify, but I'm not sure when I'll get to that. The closest I probably come to that is The Farm about the burning of where I grew up.

2. Most Helpful: I'm going to have to go with one of my earliest posts, which is one most of you probably haven't seen. It's called 400 Words and deals with part of my strategy that enabled me to sit down and make it through writing my first book.

3. Most Popular: I don't have a good answer for this one. How should I know, really? I'm going to divide it into categories:
a. most clicks: By far, my post with the most clicks (almost 3 times as many as the next most clicked) has been my review of the movie Hanna. I think it's the quote I used for the title of the post, because most of the click throughs to it have come from web searches on that quote. I have a secret experiment in the works to test this, but it's going to take a while before I know anything.
b. most comments (no restrictions): The Man With No Eyes has received more comments than any other post, but that's probably because it was involved in one of the campaign challenges for the Platform Building Campaign, so I don't think it's a good pick.
c. most comments (restricted to posts not involved in a blogfest): It looks like Writing in the Slow Lane takes the award for most popular just in and of itself. There are a couple of others that are probably close, but this one's not related to a blogfest of any kind and seemed to get a lot of meaningful comments.

4. Most Controversial: I'm going to have to go with my very last past, The Cliche Monster. I'm really surprised by this one, but I must have just fumbled the ball somewhere in there, because I got the feeling that most people just didn't get what I was really saying there. Yeah, I may be projecting somewhat because there was a huge drop in comments on that one and I lost followers for the first time ever after posting it. Really, I was just trying to say that writers shouldn't worry and obsess so much about whether or not someone has done a similar story, because, you know, someone out there has written a similar story. But it's the telling that matters, not the story itself. It seemed to make some people unhappy, though.

5. Most Surprisingly Successful: Again, I'm going to have to go with the review of Hanna. I'm still surprised at the steady stream of click throughs I get from that post. Not that it seems any of those people hang around, but who knows?

6. Most Underrated: That would have to be this post about zombies. I just expected it to get more response, but I feel like it really just flew right under the radar. It's also one of my favorite posts, because I think I had a real insight with that one. Oh, well...

7. Most Prideworthy: I have to say that the post I have the most pride in is the one annoucing that my book, The House on the Corner, is available for sale. Or for buying. For you to buy (and you should (ask Rusty Webb (hey, I have to plug the book sometime!))). However, there's nothing about that post in and of itself to really have pride in. So... a post I think is really well done that I would point out to people and say, "hey, I wrote that," that's a harder question, and I actually have a few. Some of them are already listed, so I've picked one more that's not previosuly listed: The Dream Vs the World. Okay, and one more: Publishing and the Real Estate Market.

Well, that's about it. It's interesting to look back at what I've done so far, especially since I'm approaching my 100th post. Interesting to see how the readership has grown and how the way I write posts has changed. I sort of assume that I present a more challenging blog than most people are interested in. I tend to be long (I'm very uncomfortable with anything less than around 1000-1200 words), and people (often) don't like long, so I appreciate you guys that do stop by and read what I have to say. I hope I tend to make people think. I do try to include humor in the blog, but I have to stop and remember to do it, really, because all of this is pretty serious stuff to me, and it's what I spend my time thinking about. Not that I don't laugh. I'm a big fan of comedy. And I don't use pretty pictures. Really, I just don't have time for it. After spending a couple of days (sometimes more) on a post (writing is a slow process for me, and, although, a blog post goes quicker then fiction, it isn't by much), I just don't have the necessary energy (or time) to spend many more hours looking for images to toss in.

As a special treat, though, and kind of because Matthew MacNish inspired me with his series on monsters, here's a short excert from The House on the Corner (just to prove that the humor does live inside me (it just may be a little closer to middle school humor than my wife would like)):

Mom opened the door to send us over to get Lewis and Carroll, because we were going trick-or-treating with them. Before we went out the door, I asked, “Mom, what's an imp?”

She frowned at me, “Where did you hear about imps, Sweetheart?”

“Elli said there would be imps outside tonight, and imps are mean because they've been constipated by demons from living too close to Hell.”

Everyone stared at me. I hate that. “What?” I said and made a frowny face.

“What did Elli say about the imps, Sweetie?”

“She said they're constipated.”

Sam started laughing, “Contaminated! Imps are contaminated.”

“Huh?” I said. “Oh, yeah! Contaminated! She said they're contaminated!”

Everyone started laughing. Everyone but me. “What's contaminated?”

Tom said, “Contaminated is like when something is polluted. Pollution contaminates the Earth.”

“What does that mean? Imps aren't the Earth.”

Mom knelt down next to me, “Contaminating something is making something that was good into something that's bad. Like when you leave food out and it gets mold on it.”

“Ohhh...,” I said. “Then, what's constipated?”

Tom and Sam started laughing harder.

That made more mad than when they were laughing before. “What! What does it mean?”

“Constipated is being full of poop,” Sam said and kept laughing.

“Maybe imps are constipated! Maybe that's what makes them so mean!” laughed Tom.

Sam fell on the floor laughing, “They're contaminated with constipation!”

Mom rolled her eyes and shook her head, “Boys... Just ignore them.” She opened the door and walked out with me.