I have a confession:

I really dislike sales.

Well, the sales ‘role’. Let me explain:

For the last several years, I’ve worked as a software engineer. I’m normally sheltered from customers: A person from one department will outline new features and pass them on to me to design and build, where I’ll implement them and pass them out to another department for testing and distribution. There have been a few occasions in the past where I’ve had customer exposure, participated in sales or marketing or trade fairs, and where it’s all ended rather badly.

See, the problem is, I think like an engineer. If a customer asks me a random question like “does your product work with Skype?” I switch into design mode. Even if our product already does work with Skype, I’ll mentally list all the ways it doesn’t, or the issues with different versions of Skype, or the cases where interfacing with MSN might be preferable, and provide probably the most confusing answer he’s ever heard.

If the same customer asks the sales guy, he says Yes, and then goes on to sell copies to all his friends.

While there are mechanisms to help me do so, as an engineer it’s still a little unnatural for me to step outside the technical minutiae of my work and see my product from the perspective of my users.

Needless to say, I have the same problem with writing and so, I suspect, do a lot of new writers.

It’s Not Really All That Mystical

When I’m between writing tasks I’m often trolling aspirant forums or blogs, where I’ll regularly encounter discussions or observations such as

• Writers of the Future will automatically reject dragon stories.
• Well, I don’t want to have a character arc, and any publication that requires one is stupid.
• I should be able to submit in whatever font I choose.

The funny thing is, all of the above are completely valid perspectives for a writer – one who is operating in isolation from the rest of humanity.

Because yes, WotF may have published precious little dragon stories, or zombies. And yes, that stream of consciousness ramble you just wrote may say something to you personally. And sure, we’ve come a long way in word processing since Courier New.

But let’s take a step back a second. Who are we writing for? If we’re submitting our stories, then we’re writing for readers. Whose? Ours?

Not as much as you might think.

We’re writing for our publisher’s readers. Our editor’s. Business people with a very clear mandate: To sell – whether it’s copies of books, hits on a website or subscriptions to a magazine. Maybe they’re selling advertising space and reading is free, but it all comes down to maintaining and/or building a large readership, something which is only achieved by selling the best stories they can procure.

So maybe there’s some good reasons for the above:

WotF wants readers to pick any story in the anthology and say Wow, I’m so glad I bought this book – I’m going to recommend it to friends, or enter the competition myself. A lot of its readers read other fiction too – other dragon, zombie stories – so originality is going to help. And originality is going to be a little harder with dragons and zombies.

The same principle applies to character arcs: they let a reader experience drama through change, and change is what makes the drama meaningful – a story and not just another worn-out plot. Or even font: when you know a single editor is reading five thousand manuscripts a year (plus all the other reading and writing he or she has to do) then first impressions are going to get your foot in the door.

So Write a Hugo Winner
Wha?

Like you, I have only so many hours in the day I can spend reading. I try and read a lot, and as widely as possible: I want to absorb Dosteovsky as much as Hemingway, I want to see what makes Paulo Bacigalupi’s stories tick as much as Khaled Hosseini’s. But with limited reading time and such a wide range of reading interests I have to be selective: What am I going to read? Well, for what it’s worth, I try to read award winners, best sellers and other books and stories I might consider pivotal to their genre. And why?

Sure, maybe that touching romance or the harsh reality of life at sea or the unrelenting tension of a family at war will inform my fiction and reach my readers. But the real reason is far more mundane: I’m a beginning writer.

I don’t have millions of words of published fiction under my belt. Or even one percent of that much: I’m just starting out. So writing publishable fiction is, at this stage, a hard thing. I have to push myself hard. At the day job I write in C++ – another ‘language’ entirely, and as a result some days I find it hard to even string a sentence together in spoken communication. But, by gum, I do love writing. So what’s an aspiring writer to do?

Reach for the sky. If you’re submitting to, say, Writers of the Future, don’t ‘just’ write a contest entry. Try and write a Nebula winner. Can you tweak it some more? Might it win a Hugo if you could just do that, there, and this here? Push yourself harder and further than you’ve ever gone before. You’re the composer, the conductor, the orchestra, the soloist, and you’re going to be judged by your readers on the performance of each.

And if, after you submit, you don’t win a Hugo or Nebula, well, you might just win Writers of the Future, or get published in whatever market you submitted to.

Because, unlike the software engineer whiling away his hours in the dim light of a lab’s monitor, or a composer jotting away notes at the piano, you’re the writer who just wrote the story that will sell their next publication.

Welcome to Sales.

Writing is for the most part a solitary endeavour. We spend most of our time ‘writing’ with our collective butts in the chair, hands on the keyboard. It isn’t necessarily the best career match for the particularly extroverted personality. And alongside a little introversion comes for most of us more than a little insecurity. We’re used to thinking character motivation and cause-and-effect: We open our mouths to say say ‘Hey check out my latest work’ and we stop, the message stillborn, to think why would she be interested in that?

This evening I have to give an acceptance speech at this year’s Writers of the Future and I find at some level the same question going through my head. Why would anyone be interested? And it’s a fatal precipice to step off.

Networking
In business there’s a lot of talk about Networking. Folks talk about going to conventions to network, meet editors and agents, other writers, interject themselves into conversations with established authors and ‘get noticed’. And if you’re an insecure, introverted type, the very notion makes you break out in hives.

Which is just as well.

I spent zero time this last week Networking. There may have been new writers, established authors, editors and publishers present, but in some ways I’ve only the vaguest notion of that. Instead, I spent the last week making friends – friends with fun people with interesting stories, stories about work, people, industries, science. Great people who I hope to be friends with for a long time to come.

About a week ago Juliet Marillier posted on The Flip Side of Self Promotion at Writer Unboxed:
Like it or not, we have to blow our own trumpets these days, and I don’t enjoy that.

I can relate.

And if I’ve learned anything this week about Self Promotion it’s the same thing I’ve learned about Networking: It’s what other people call it.

So when I step up to the podium tonight, it won’t be to give an acceptance speech. It’ll be to talk to friends.

A speech is what others will call it.

Just a quick note to say that there’s less than a week to go until Yours Truly finds himself in LA attending the Writers of the Future workshop. To say that I’m a little anxious with the anticipation of it all would be an understatement.

I’m planning on providing some information on the workshop experience here in the near future, so if you’re at all interested, stay tuned.

Editing of the latest novel has been a little slow lately due to the distractions of preparation for the event (as well as trying to be sympathetic to, yet simultaneously avoiding the family so I don’t catch the cold they’re all sharing this last two weeks). Still new writing is managing to happen: I spent a bit of time at the cafe this morning sketching out the starting elements of Novel The Next, so it looks like I’ll be keeping my hands full these coming months.

When it comes to the terminology we use in the technology business, I seem to be on a roll. Recently I blogged about the misuse of ‘Share’ when we talk about Sharing files or, in the case of ebooks, sharing books. Away from the blog, I’ve also been getting a little steamed up about the whole ‘Cloud’ terminology because of the way it abstracts us away from the underlying technology and, with it, some serious security implications of placing data with potential monetary value in the hands of an anonymous third party.

But, that’s not what I’m getting steamed up about today.

I just recently created an Author profile on facebook (you can blame Nathan Bransford for this), and placed a “Like” button on my blog. And then, with all that done, stepped back and thought about that a bit.

At some level, I am a bit of a facebook junkie – I enjoy seeing the updates from acquaintances (many of whom I haven’t seen in person for decades) and gettingt he feeling that somehow, though we’re on opposite sides of the globe, we’re keeping ‘in touch’. But really, what are the functions of facebook’s “Like” button?

1. It creates an RSS feed entry that any subscribed listener will log.
2. It adds the target facebook data to your profile so you can find it again later.

So functionally the button allows me to track the target data and also let other people know I’m tracking it. I’m ‘sharing’ with people my interests and in the context of facebook I think that’s pretty cool.

Only, I’m not sure about the whole “Like” thing.

When we write, we have to choose our words carefully. If we were hypothesising this button in fiction twenty years ago, we’d probably have called it something else – maybe simply the “Promote” button.

But in the context of ‘social media’ a “Promote” button is in your face. If my acquaintances are all “Promoting” information that appears in my feed, well, I’m going to feel that others are trying to ‘tell me’ what to like. It’s just advertising. So a little semantic change and voila: They’re doing the same thing, but now it’s couched in the uber-personal preferential word “Like”.

It makes sense from a viral-marketing point of view. It seems a user is unlikely to complain about another user’s “Like” for fear that people will start judging them on their own personal preferences.

Ultimately then, I think using a tool like facebook requires maintaining a sort of conceptual interpreter in our brains. One that takes the English-language “marketing talk” of social media sites and separates it into its functional meaning (what the Like button does) and the social meaning (how the Like button is perceived).

All of which can still be a bit odd. For example, say Jane comes across a facebook page for keeping track of escaped criminals. The page title is Criminals. So all her subscribers (‘friends’) end up seeing:

• Jane Citizen likes Criminals

I’m guessing that’s probably not what Jane wants.

So in case this seems like the worst ever “hey I put a Like button on my page” kind of post, well, you could be right. I’ll try and, therefore, be clear: Social media sites like facebook are great tools and I love using them. In the writing business however, we try to be aware of the implications, of the nuance, of the vocabulary we employ.

Therefore, I’d love to have you follow the updates on my author page.

I’m just not sure you’ll Like it until you try.

Time, she is a marching on: earlier this week I finished the first draft of the SF novel I’ve been working on since the end of December. The draft took almost exactly four months to complete and currently sits at a little over 130,000 words. Words which are not without their issues, either – an occasional lack of focus, some missing foreshadowing, shaky character arcs (including a main character who is, even still, a little too 2-dimensional). And among them all, big, gaping holes that await proper research.

Hang on, Ben – how can you write a SF novel without researching everything ahead of time?

Well, I’ve a couple of answers to that.

*

1. Research the big things first. If the story is set in Siberia, it helps to know a little about Siberia – you don’t want to write yourself into a situation where your plot hinges on, say, balmy warm evenings in Siberia watching coconut trees.

Arguably, this is a shortcut. I often outline extensively before I start writing, and I’ll research a fair chunk of my milieu before I start, using the outline as a guide as to what to look up. But even so, the outline provides a lot of motivation to write. Once I’m excited about the outline – once I want to start living the story I’m describing – it becomes a motivation I can’t ignore. When it’s at this stage I have to start writing.

And often, the research isn’t done, and the first draft ends up, at some point, a little underwritten.

*

2. Research the small things later. I’m writing and I encounter some aspect of setting or technology or science or culture that I don’t know. I could choose to stop and research it right now, or I could choose to keep writing.

When I’m writing, often it’s to the beat of the theatre in my head – the characters are standing, delivering their lines, the tension is building, and stopping is only going to break the rhythm of the moment. I have to keep going, and so I have to employ some placeholder prop in their hands, or have them reference some clearly wrong science so as to continue on their journey and for the story to continue to unfold around them.

Later then, I have to come back to the story with a couple of hilighters and a red pen and bleed all over the page, finding the parts that don’t make sense or that I’m unsure of, and make a hefty list of research topics.

*

It’s a method which works for me now, because research I can deal with – it’s the writing I find hard.

At some level, I wonder if this is a symptom of being a new writer. Perhaps after I have the proverbial million words under my belt the first draft will be more focused, everything will be foreshadowed properly, the character arcs will be perfectly formed. And perhaps I’ll have done all the research ahead of time.

But then again, maybe it’s a legitimate method of writing – as legitimate as any. Some time ago I took a lot of comfort from an old interview by The Agony Column’s Rick Kleffel with Laurie R King, in which she discussed revision and the idea of doing research while revising.

So now to print it out, get the pens ready, and sign into my favourite research websites.

Only, first, I have this other outline I want to start drawing up…

So today is one of those days you just wish… weren’t. Mondayitis? Maybe, but a rough night (I swear I don’t remember the sick 5yo jumping in bed with us) and the usual monday morning dramas (oh dear, the child seat’s in my car, drive home, drop it off) sometimes conspire against us. There’s plenty to be thankful for, of course – as well as even having a job, well, the work is going well. And the writing too; I managed to churn out my quota this morning before the office opened. Yay! Only a couple of chapters to go before The End.

Nevertheless, sometimes I find these little things put me in a state of mind in which I question the world around me. Like, say, why someone puts a wet spoon in the cafeteria’s sugar container. And then, the sugar container is empty (apart from crusty dregs) and left open, as usual (Hello, anybody? It’s hygroscopic? Can we keep it closed please?). And the bag of sugar is over there. And is it really that hard to clean it out?

Now don’t get me wrong – I’m not suggesting these are problems unique to my workplace. A touch of narcissistic entitlement culture can probably be found in just about every society the world over. That’s not really what I’m getting at.

It irks me because it’s not quite the world I want to live in. And yet, if I step up and change things for the better, won’t that just reinforce the notion amongst freeloaders that someone else will solve the problem for them?

The world is a complex place, and seldom do we have much opportunity to really change it, or to see the full consequences of our actions. We don’t really know whether a protest over poor government will result in better government, or just a change in which power is to be lorded over us next. We can try – and we do – but making sense of the big picture and getting it right is a hard ask for even the big thinkers among us.

Which is why, when it comes down to it, I love fiction. Reading it, writing it. Experiencing it in its various performed forms, in cinema, theatre, music.

Fiction loves a big problem: exploring it, expounding it, inverting it. It allows an author to take something that matters in his world, find how it influences him and then craft that influence into an experience to be shared with a reader. It allows a reader with a different world view, with different experiences, to take those words and be shaped by them – perhaps to different effect than the author’s intent, perhaps to see that theme the same way, perhaps not.

Maybe I can’t change the world directly. Maybe the sugar bowl will be knocked over in the cafeteria next time. But that’s not what really matters to me. What matters is exploring those possibilities, using them, finding the kernel that may well become the start of the next story.

And in the meantime, I really don’t mind cleaning the sugar bowl and filling it up again. Having the kitchen clean was just about as nice an experience as the coffee. And it gets me thinking about the next story while I’m at it.

(I’d also love to know why Blogger vaporised all my whitespace in this post originally)

So maybe you’ve heard. Amazon cut off Lendle’s access to its ebook services. Lendle, a company that allows you to network with other ebook owners and lend titles within Amazon’s own “lend once for 14 days” policy, was deemed to not “serve the principal purpose of driving sales of products and services on the Amazon site”. Of course, the internet is abuzz with the implications, and rightly so.

There’s a can of worms here that goes well beyond just the implications to the publishing industry, and it’s kind of interesting to take a look at.

For example, lets step back from the picture a little and define some ground rules. I have two young boys. They have a finite number of toys. Occasionally, they both want to play with the same toy, or one another’s toys. I want to teach them to get along with one another – not only for their wellbeing and my peace of mind right now, but also because those are important cultural and social skills they’ll need to employ in adulthood. And in so teaching them I might use terms like:

Share: Boys, share please. Take turns in playing with that toy.
Loan: How about you loan that toy to your brother for a bit? You can play with something else in the meantime.
Lend: Maybe if you lend him your Superman costume he’ll let you play with the Batman costume.

The funny thing is, we use these same terms with respect to software and ebooks, but we’re not talking about the same thing at all. Consider ‘sharing’ of software and data. It is not a finite resource at all. When people talk about file sharing, they’re talking about file copying: The person doing the sharing doesn’t give up their copy, and people who don’t quite understand have occasionally incurred rather stiff penalties.

Just pause and digest that for a second:

File sharing, isn’t.

And now let’s look again at Amazon’s book lending feature.

The Amazon feature allows another user to read that same content (being a copy thereof) once, for a maximum of 14 days. It doesn’t (if I’m reading it right) restrict the original owner at all. By my definition – and a few I looked up – it isn’t lending. It’s a copy with limited scope.

The problem I have with all this isn’t that I can’t really borrow a Kindle book. Now, I don’t read ebooks and so with respect to this limitation on my borrowing capability well, quite frankly, I don’t care. What bothers me is the slippery slope we’re on when we choose to redefine key ethical and social concepts based on the marketing hype of corporations.

There’s something quintessentially human about giving up a possession so another can enjoy it, about receiving such a loan from a friend and recognising their sacrifice in making it available to you. Perhaps it keeps us honest with each other, builds a sense of community, makes us better human beings. And perhaps, as we download another file share, or buy an ebook knowing that we can’t inherit it to our children or loan it to a friend, we do more than buy into a vapid e-culture that exists only so long as the power’s on. Perhaps we are also surrendering our sense of community, and with it, our sense of ourselves.

Last year was a struggle. I was burnt out from working on my Writers of the Future entry and feeling substantially uninspired by the amount of time it had consumed. Our one-year-old transitioned from a cot to a bed and had a hard time sleeping, not helped by a talkative four-year-old sleeping in the same room. Long hours paying off the mortgage and keeping the family fed via The Day Job seemed the better bet compared with the gamble of writing, and a number of seasonal health issues (which I blame only partly on the kids; cold dawn train rides with sick commuters were really unhelpful) didn’t help at all. All in all, these distractions made it hard to find the time to write and much easier to goof off.

And so I’m surprised that I seem to have turned it around a bit, having written around a hundred thousand words since the end of December.

Okay, I admit, there are some sections that probably stink. Bad. I can see a lot of rewriting ahead of me. But some of it seemed, at least at the time of writing, pretty decent for a first draft. The draft is still only 2/3rds complete, there are a lot of plot threads needing wrapping up, and it’s often hard to see the wood for the trees.

But it’s getting done, one or two thousand words a day.

I’ve learned a few lessons since last year, made a few changes.

I’m not catching the train and getting coughed on. Getting another car cost a few scarce pennies, but it freed up an hour a day. Add that to being diligent about getting enough sleep, and minor ailments have, so far, stayed minor.

But this year I have even more work keeping me busy at The Day Job between 7am and 5pm. I’m taking time to exercise more – which means I’m using up the lunch break I used to read in (and with that and no train ride, I haven’t read anywhere near the volume I had this time last year). The kids still get us up occasionally or, like this morning, it’s the dog running into an open drawer in the dark that wakes us up at 3am.

But, unlike last year, I’m not getting burned out. I’m making sure to take time to wind down at the end of the day, watch an episode of something, read, or blow stuff up in some stupidly violent online game. The pick-me-up availed by my Writers of the Future win has been a huge boon to my attitude. In some circles, it’s only a small thing, but it suggests that maybe there is a future in this writing gig after all.

Still, when I decided to write a 140K first draft the biggest problem facing me was the very notion of committing to it. How could I sit down and write so much when I got so burnt out last year writing less?

Well, on the one hand, the situation is different: we grow as writers, and certain aspects of the craft are getting easier. I’m probably a bit better at outlining plot than I was. And all that blood, sweat and tears chopping and reworking my horrendous WotF draft was a surefire way to teach some much needed lessons in craft. Plus, I decided on a rate of work which was designed to avoid the burnout problem (for example, at this rate I’d fail nanowrimo).

But mostly, I stopped trying to find the time to write.

Finding it implied it was already there.

I changed tactic, rearranged my schedule and made the time to write.

Only now I have to make the time to start editing in a month or so… and make the time to outline the next book… and write it…