CONaraderie

Went to my first convention the other weekend - CONfusion in Novi, Michigan. I've considered going for the last couple years but somehow always found an excuse not to, despite the con always being held less than an hour from where I live.

I had an incredible time.

Aside from the fact that the panels I attended were excellent and I was able to meet up with several people whom I've long wanted to meet face-to-face, the con experience filled a notable void in my life. I don't know a lot of other SFF writers personally. I know plenty of other writers, but they often write in wildly different genres, modes, and mediums than I do. There is plenty we can share, but plenty also that we cannot. Thus, when I want to talk about writing in a manner more specific to what I do myself, I turn to the internet. Good enough in a pinch, but nothing beats a real-time, meatspace conversation. Time to plan the next trip!

Square Grid vs. Hexagons

The more I play tile-based strategy games, the more enamored I am of hexagons. Both from the player perspective and the design side. Player-wise, they're awesome because they retain visual distance correctly. Some grid based games try to even up moving diagonally by making it more expensive, and some don't. Sometimes you forget which is true in a game you're playing.

From the design perspective, hexagons are awesome because there's very little work that needs to be done, data-wise, to implement hexes. In the simplest case, a simple conversion rule lets you use a normal 2d array and you just "ignore" the data points that don't fit into a hexagonal grid. Hexes make range calculations much more simple, from ranged attacks to movement to area-of-effect.

So, being that I prefer one so heavily, what's the problem? Other people, naturally. As I'm finishing up the prototype for Conquer the Castle, I'm toying with the idea of switching to hexagons when I move into the creation of the final product. But I have this anecdotally-supported idea in my head that the average player finds hexagons confusing, and prefers a square-tile grid. I'm wary of "aiming for the largest possible audience," but that doesn't mean I want to shoot myself in the foot by discounting a lot of players who might otherwise try the game.

Guess it's audience research time.

Strategy Games and Morale

For several years now, I've had the opinion in the back of my head that "serious" strategy games incorporate several mechanisms that more casual games do away with. Morale is one of the primary ones. When the various dudes who do your fighting in these games value their own e-lives, it vastly complicates things.

When it comes to games, I prefer things on the complicated side. Games like Starcraft or Supreme Commander (or just about any other popular strategy game) allow you to treat your units as disposable cannon fodder. The continued existence of any single unit counts for practically nothing in the grand scheme of things, greatly simplifying the playing experience (this also allows the games to play faster, which is a benefit).

I identify two general approaches to making an individual unit's "life" matter more: Unit-side and Player-side. The latter is about making the Player care about that unit's ability to live or die. This usually involves mechanisms like gaining experience (and thus combat effectiveness) over time, but can be as simple as giving units individual names. Even when they differ only cosmetically from the rest of their ilk, this allows the player to invest some sort of emotion  in them (but only works on players so inclined to do so).

On the other hand, you can make the unit care about it's OWN life: thus, morale. I think this has historically been one of the mechanisms designers are quickest to ditch. By necessity it implies developing some kind of AI for those instances in which morale "breaks" and the unit no longer obeys the players actions, but rather starts behaving according to some other directive (usually being, "run away!"). This can not only be frustrating for a player (it lessens their control over the game, always a risky thing especially with more casual players) but time-consuming for the developer to implement effectively. If a routing unit doesn't behave at least somewhat intelligently, it only aggravates the player further.

In my current project I'm developing the morale system right now. The actual numerical book-keeping is relatively easy, though there are quite a few factors to consider (should the unit gain morale by killing enemies?). The hard part is fleshing out the behavior a unit takes when it's morale is broken and it routes. Currently, I'm aiming to satisfy a simple three-step decision process:

1. If enemies are nearby, retreat along the path which will put maximum distance between you and them.
2. If no enemies are nearby, retreat towards the nearest board edge.
3. If multiple board edges are nearby, bias towards the one near your player's start zone.

So, first a unit runs away from the enemy. After that, it tries to get off the map, preferring to get off the map near where it started (retreating back the way it came). But how far away will it look for enemies? What if a unit breaks near to the enemy start zone and there is a clear path off that edge, but some enemies are somewhat nearby? Generally speaking, units fleeing in panic should behave "intelligently" for a given small set of information, but planning far ahead isn't a requirement.

This is one of those situations where you design with a few simple rules and hope that the emergent behavior seems to make sense...

Expanding Subjects and Switching Gears

Well, the stories that are become Echoes And Memories have all passed the initial draft phase. Now I send them off to beta readers for outside opinions while simultaneously working on something else so I get some mental distance, all the better for whipping them into shape for final publication this summer. (*Note to self: work on the book blurbs BEFORE the day of publication!)

However, I'm switching to work primarily on something not writing or publishing related. As I mention every now and again I do a lot of hobbyist game design, and much as with my writing I'm hoping that will eventually turn into a professional pursuit. This next month will be occupied with finishing up a prototype of a game I've been creating for a few months.

In that light, I'm officially making this blog a Writing/Publishing blog as well as a Game Design/Creation blog. I imagine there is enough overlap in the fandom that I won't annoy my handful of readers too much, and it beats having to start up a whole other blog that no one reads. I can always split them up later if need be.

So, expect my rants, rambles, and raves for at least the next month to be on game topics!

The Myth of Talent

There was a thread over on Mythic Scribes recently (can't find it to link just at the moment, sadly) which once again got me thinking about talent. I used to be a believer in the concept - there just seemed to be things which came so naturally to me, and which others seemed unable to grasp well on a very basic level. Naturally, the opposite was true in certain fields. So I believed that each person has within them some few "talents" or natural dispositions that were inborn and unalterable. They'd always have advantages in certain tasks, and disadvantages in others.

I guess you could say I still believe in talent, though I no longer believe in talent as a single phenomenon. Rather, I see talent now as something of a derived composite of certain other characteristics. These may be truly basic, some the result of nature and others of nurture, and they are probably most likely to change early in life - our formative years, but they are by no means static after that.



Puncturing the myth of talent is important, I think, because of how often I see people say "well, I'm just good at X activity. It's not something I can teach." To which I think "Bullshit. Damn near everything can be taught." And learning what truly lies at the root of our talents can help us develop them even further.

That's not to say that teaching it will be easy. When I think of writing talent I always consider empathy as its predominant component. It seems to me (though I am ready to be argued with) that the ability to understand and share a wide range of emotions - even to be able to experience them at will - is the most important tool for an artist. Furthermore, I'm of the opinion that the primary purpose of the arts is in growing human empathy, the better for helping us all be a little less of an asshole to each other from time to time.

But I digress.

The point is, empathy can be taught. Likewise for any other of talent's components - for writing or for any activity (because the components  of talent change as the task does, of course). Dramatic and comedic timing, for instance. Hard to teach, but possible.

That part - hard to teach - is the real reason why people like to think of talent as some insurmountable static trait. It's just easier to think "they've got it, I don't." We like to do what we're already good at, after all. There aren't a whole lot of people in the world prepared to put in the work required to learn talent.

I Made a Top Five List! and other things

I managed to rate a mention over at the Fantasy Review Barn with their 5 Self-Published Gems of 2013 list. Yay for the Wandering Tale!

There should be more of the Wandering Tale published next year as well - I'm hoping to finish at least two additional novellas, and one of those will be continuing the saga of the malevolent blade, Peace.

On the immediate writing plate I have a story I'm writing for a contest submission (alternate history) as well as the ongoing effort to gather enough SciFi shorts for the anthology I mentioned in the last post. Following that, I intend to make it a priority to get the first Wandering Tale collection and Twixt Heaven and Hell out in paperback. I've been dragging my feet on those for too long.

Speaking of the Science Fiction anthology, if you happen to know of any good scifi artists, please put me in contact with them! Browsing DeviantArt is fun, but a lot of those guys are hard to get a hold of...

Back From Another Blogging Sabbatical

Forced sabbatical, really. Another semester down, and finally the degree is within reach. That should be the last time I can accuse school of pulling me away from other things. I'll need to find different excuses in the future.

Fortunately, despite not blogging over the last few months, I was still doing plenty of writing. 13th Night is not complete - I and the professor decided to amend our goals to three completed acts rather than an entire five-act play, which turned out to be a bit too ambitious given both of our schedules. So, yes, I have about half of a play. It needs a lot of work, but it was definitely cool to be able to get credit for a creative project. I wish I'd clued in to the possibilities of Independent Studies ages ago.

I've also completed a couple of short stories and made beginnings to several more, in anticipation of publishing the SciFi shorts anthology sometime next year. I still don't have quite enough finished material to round out the entire anthology in the theme that I originally intended. I may decide to loosen up the theme itself, or simply work on writing more stories that belong within it.

Consciously attempting to think up stories that conform to a certain theme, or feeling, is an interesting experience. I've never lacked for a pile of story ideas to start my next project with, even after discarding many as simplistic, unworkable, or more fit to include as subthreads within another story (a planned fantasy series of mine has absorbed a lot of stories into itself over the years). Now I find myself actively trying to create concepts that revolve around this unifying idea, and it is... more difficult than I expected. A lot of the ideas end up being too similar, derivative. I'm okay with a certain amount of subject bleed - there's no harm in revisiting topics more than once, so long as each story stands on its own feet. Too much repetition, though, will just harm the entire group.

So, can't really say when the anthology will be published. Once I have most of the stories written I'll start putting them out individually to some beta readers, and then I'll start thinking about getting feedback on story order and other formatting issues. I'm already thinking about the book cover - artwork always weighs heavily on my mind as it's the one part of a publication where I'm not much use.

Hatching Old Eggs

It's pretty common for  me to incubate story ideas for quite awhile before actually writing them. I'll pound out a beginning - a couple of chapters or a few thousand words - and write up an accompanying outline of where I think the story might go, who the principal characters are, etc. Then I'll find that the idea hasn't formed enough in my head to be really confident writing it yet. Thus, it rests in a file somewhere until I'm perusing old ideas looking for the next project to finish.

I've got dozens of those, but there are always the principal ones which tend to be often on my mind. One such that I've mentioned here before is a play called ThirteenthNight. It is a sequel to Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, dealing with a revenge plot hatched by the wronged Malvolio.

I wrote the opening pair of scenes to 13th Night almost two years ago. A couple days ago I added the first new words since then. It always feels good to take up an old project - especially when new ideas come rolling in more easily than they had when you began.

I don't really intend to become a playwright. The stories I like to tell, by and large, wouldn't translate well to the medium of the stage. Still, there are certain elements to any form of creative writing that are transferable. Attempting to mimic the style and quality of Shakespeare is a formidable task (some would say I'm guilty of hubris for even trying) but I'm confident that in this case, even failing to do it well ought to be pretty damned hilarious.

Weeding the Garden of my Mind

Vis a vis that last post: I think a lot about biases and faulty judgement, because I'm of the opinion that all human beings possess them. Some will, once revealed, cling to them and deny evidence that there is anything faulty about them in the first place. Having seen this several times, I resolved to always try and rid myself of them without regard for my own pride. Even assuming that I'm able to do that in each case, I first need to be made aware of them in order to excise them from my thinking.

This always leads me to wonder what sort of biases still lurk in my mind, completely unknown to me...

How Will My Writing Age?

I've been reading some Heinlein, lately. He's one of my favorite Science Fiction writers and I realized that there is still far too much of his portfolio I have yet to experience, and set out to fix that.

He's the sort of writer who, even for his less well-received works, I'm likely to come away glad I read it. He dwells upon many of the issues I find interesting, he was extremely smart, and did not seem to hold any ideals to absolutism (though there are many who would argue otherwise), so even when things get a little clunky in the execution I enjoy his work.

While reading Methuselah's Children, though, I find myself noting how the customs of his time have made their way into the future in a way that I would now find laughable. For instance, language that betrays the far more standardized gender roles of fifty or so years ago persists, even in a society he seems to be positing as possessing greater equality.

All this makes me wonder how my writing will eventually show the differences between my time and whenever the reader is from (assuming - with cheerful and unwarranted optimism - that people will be interested in reading my books after any significant span of time). What mores will it reveal that I myself don't even consciously know about? What assumptions? What biases?

Still Flirting With Validation

For a time, just after I made the decision to treat self-publishing as my main avenue, I wondered if I'd even bother to submit things to any traditional venue. I was pretty much done with the large publishers and the agents that basically enabled one to pursue them, but what about smaller publications - in other words, the magazines?

Well, apparently I'm not done with them yet. I've decided to rack up a few more rejections and have been sending some short work off to such prestigious rejectors (shut up, it's a word now) as Asimov's and Clarkesworld. I'll probably stick to a smaller number of reliable and successful magazines. Researching the others bulk of the sector, with many magazines which tend to rise and fall pretty quickly, takes more time than I'm willing to give it. And each one will have separate formatting preferences. If there's one thing the industry needs to standardize...

In any case, I'm aiming for maximum efficiency in time, even if the trade off is minimum likelihood of acceptance. Now that I've relegated traditional channels to the backburner, I can afford to keep my standards high. The time I'd otherwise spend researching and sending off story after story can be better spent writing.

There is one other project I'm looking at submitting to, though. Antimatter press is running a little novelette pitch contest, and given the (relative) success of my Wandering Tale series I think dabbling a little more in the short-form pool couldn't hurt. Only problem is, now I have to look through my catalog of "stories-to-tell" and figure out which one would work best as a series of novelettes, rather than as a novel. Though as I found with the Wandering Tale, switching the format can be rather invigorating to the story, so I'm looking forward to the experiment.

Why Not? Let's Make Some Dick Jokes

I don't really believe in so-called Writer's Block.

I think that anybody who sits down at a computer really wanting to write can put words on the page. Perhaps they won't be great words. Perhaps they'll need to be changed or cut later. Still, they'll get out of you and onto the page, and you'll have written something.

Most of the time I feel that Writer's Block is really just a lack of motivation to do the work of writing. It's a person - who fancies themself a writer - sitting down not to write, but to be brilliant. We can write whenever we want to. We can't always write well whenever we want to. However, if you aren't prepared to write badly every now and again you're going to have a hard time making steady progress.

I know this. I believe this. And yet, I often find myself unwilling to write badly. It is a holdover element of my old perfectionism that if I let a word remain on the page for very long it needs to be good. It can't just be serviceable. It can't be "I'll replace it later." It can't be "Let's just get through this portion and come back to it, when the rest of the book can inform it better."

It's a bad habit, and I need to break myself of it if I ever want to get all these stories out of my head. I've decided that I will first start with renaming the problem. I don't like Writer's Block.

I'm going to call it E-write-tile Dysfunction (EWD). Yes, I am basically writing this post for the sake of that joke alone. Sue me.

I've had a bad case of EWD for awhile now, but I think I'm getting through it. My commitment is firming up, you might say. I'm ready to go at it hard and fast. Once I've covered the page, I'll take a second look and see what sticks. But rest assured, at the end of it all I'll make sure my audience is satisfied.

Yeah, I'm done now.

Short Stories: Complete Arc vs. Slice of Life

Personally, my definition of what constitutes a "short story" is pretty loose. Observe:

A short story is A) Short and B) ... nope, that's it.

By which I mean, I don't really have any expectation that a short story will give me a complete character arc or a complete "story" in the traditional sense. Many of my favorite short works serve largely to enunciate some idea, or to sketch a picture of an interaction that is more or less fully sensible without further context.

This means that a lot of my favorite short stories can easily be pieces of a larger work - which is A-OK by me. In fact, my first introduction to Ender's Game was through an excerpt included in the anthology There Will Be War. It stood perfectly well on its own.

My freely-available short "Le Morte d'Arthur" has garnered a number of reviews, most fairly positive. The most common negative mentioned, though, is that it is "too short." Now, I'm fine with this - first of all because nobody ever says a terrible story is "too short" so at least I know they wanted to read more. Second of all because most of the elaborations mention they don't think it constituted a full story - that it read more like the first chapter of a book.

To which I usually respond (silently): "Sometimes that's what a short story is - the first chapter to a book that hasn't been written."

I find it wonderful that so many people have expressed desire for an extension to that story. I'll gladly write it (I aim to please. If there's an audience for a story, I'm going to give it to them). However, I disagree that it needs it in order to be complete. The idea has been enunciated. The picture has been formed. As a short, I don't think it requires a complete character or story arc in order to stand alone.

This has come up a lot with me lately as I write additional short stories for a planned collection. Some of them are complete stories in the traditional sense, but many of them aren't. I keep wondering whether or not to address this issue within the collection itself through some kind of authors note. I suppose it must be a consequence of being an indie publisher that makes me want to prepare the reader's expectations so much...

Overcompetance

There is an old concept in SFF called the "Mary Sue/Gary Stu." These are characters which act as self-insertion and wish-fulfillment vehicles for the author. The phenomenon is originally named for a common element of Star Trek fanfiction.

But of course, this sort of thing is not limited to fan fiction. To a certain extent, a lot of main characters are vehicles of wish-fulfillment. Indeed, I use the obviousness of the self-insertion of the author as a sort of unofficial barometer of the "maturity" of a work of fiction. The more I get the feeling that a character is living out the author's personal fantasies, the lower the story falls on the rating system (this does not necessarily indicate displeasure with the story itself, though it certainly corresponds strongly).

However, the primary problem behind the Mary Sue/Gary Stu is getting muddied. We're now seeing it applied to all sorts of characters who have a variety of talents and seem generally all-round awesome. My problem with this conceptual drift is that the problem now seems to apply to just about every protagonist ever written.

We like to read about exceptional people. They feature as the main character in a helluva lot of stories. Even the quintessential "everyman" character generally has some extraordinary skill or manages to save the day due to a sudden (and often unlikely) stroke of genius. None of these necessarily merit the label of self-insertion.

In order to restore the trope to its original meaning (or perhaps to do away with that version of it altogether, due to some stick sexism-related issues) I've come up with the concept of Overcompetance.

This is meant to do away with the discussion on self-insertion. I don't really care about it, as I assume self-insertion is happening in some ways (the good authors just disguise it well). Thus all I care about is whether the range of skills and talents displayed by any particular character feels real. At the point where it begins feeling artificial, there begins a display of overcompetance.

Obviously this is a highly subjective assessment (as is everything else in literature). I generally ascribe it to characters who manage to miraculously "discover" several new talents during the course of a book. Encounter magic for the first time and you're already really good at it? Okay. Wait, you only just started riding horses and you do it as if born in the saddle? Hrm. Hold on, you've never held a weapon in your life and after a month with a sword you can best experienced soldiers? Sorry, that's one too many. You fail the test.

Concerning That Whole "Rewriting" Thing

I've never been much of a rewriter.

I'm usually the sort of writer who obsesses over each word before it hits the the page. Thus I I rewrite less than other whose first drafts might have been a little breezier in the making. For me, completing the first draft represents the bulk of the work. I'm thinking about a lot of stuff during its creation that a lot of writers leave for the latter part of the process.

I never planned it that way. It's just the way my writing habits evolved. Polish the first draft as much as possible - fix problems that arise along the way, including going back and rewriting chapters as needed to resolve continuity issues and the like. It takes a lot longer to get a finished story, but then you only need to iterate over the writing to bring the rough parts up to the level of the good parts. Major problems should be mostly taken care of by that point.

With Clanless I'm trying something else, as I believe I've mentioned in the past. I'm attempting to focus on getting the story onto the page faster and trusting in my ability to rewrite it up to quality. I don't know if this method will be faster in the end (and to be honest, the patchy amounts of time I'm able to devote to writing make it harder to judge) but I do want to give it a try.


So far, progress has been... odd. I've skipped entire element of the story to fill in later. I have a myriad of bolded passages telling myself what needs to be added, or what will need to be reconciled if I end up going a certain direction later. I also have a number of passages emphatically marked for replacement because even as I finished them I was cringing at how bad they were. Normally, that kind of thing wouldn't stand with me, even in a first draft. All in all, I estimate I've left a good 15k-20k words to be "filled in later." That's out of 35k words written so far.

Yeah. Not my normal MO. I guess we'll have to wait for the final product to see how it the process helps or hinders - and even then, it's rather hard to control for the effect of any single variable in the writing process. Just too many to account for and "life" is not the most stable experimental environment.

Hero Gender Bender

I undertook a fun little mental exercise the other day. The ongoing discussions concerning gender equality in the SciFi/Fantasy community (for instance, this excellent thread on Mythic Scribes) got me thinking about some of my own characters. Personally I do tend to default characters to male - that is to say, unless there is a reason for a character to be female they are written as males. This has resulted in what even I can admit is a noticeable deficit of female characters thus far. Whether this is because I myself am male or because of cultural programming, I leave to others. It is a situation that I intend to change, though.

Anyways, back to that exercise: I went through a few of the stories I have in my head and flipped the gender of some of the main characters, trying to imagine the difference it would make in the story.

By and large, in many of my works of fantasy it makes quite a difference (though not all). This was usually attributable to the societies in which these characters exist having strongly defined gender roles. So, that's a predictable and fairly boring finding.

The fun part came in when I specifically took a look at the main characters where A) the society had enough gender equality to shrug at the flip and B) the character was dear to me, personally, for some reason. There exists a particular fantasy doorstopper series I eventually want to write with a pair of main characters whose character arcs complement and comment on each other. I took the one I liked best and tried this little game.

It definitely caused some differences. Various characters interactions would need to change, and at least one would be probably more complicated. At least two romantic subplots would change because the significant other of those relationships would have to be flipped (well, I guess I could make the MC bisexual or homosexual, which choice would have additional consequences).

The end result of all this was my realization (which will no doubt seem rather banal to most people) that pretty much every consequence of changing these details about a character sprang from how their society would view it.  There is, of course, nothing intrinsic about a woman that makes her less fit for practically any task. The only possible exception is melee combat, when having a great deal of muscle mass comes in handy - but of course, there are plenty of very strong women (and plenty of martial roles which don't place so much emphasis on brute strength), so that's out as well. Same goes for homosexuals, especially concerning the romantic involvements. I've seen nothing to suggest there is some intrinsic difference, emotion-wise, between heterosexual and homosexual relationships.

What does all this mean? Well, it means that ideally a reader should identify no less with a hero of the opposite gender or a different sexuality than they would with a hero who is "like them" in these respects. The range of human reaction and emotion has no such boundaries.

That is, in an ideal world. In more realistic terms, given two heroes A and B of which A is a woman and B a man (and sure, a third hero C which is transgender), a male reader might identify more with a male character simply because he assumes the female experience is different - even if every other aspect of their story is identical.

I suppose that could be one of the benefits of well-written fiction that is aware of such issues - it will instill such awareness in the readers. Does that mean I have the guts to actually change the gender or sexuality of any of these characters? I suppose that remains to be seen.

Investing In a Book is Not the Same as Buying One

A lot of authors are kickstarting (or, I can only assume, Indiegogo-ing) novels these days, essentially doing what established writers have been telling wannabe's not to do for years: attempting to sell the idea of a novel before having the novel itself.

Obviously, this was advice mostly given to those who had written very little in their lives and thought that a great novel idea was somehow a ticket to stardom - as if they actual work of writing the novel were trivial rather than the actually valuable part of the whole package. Same went for making videogames, in case you were wondering. I see that same trends and same advice repeated ad infinitum in both spheres to the hopeful masses.

I have to admit that this irked me at first with novels where it did not with games. I have proudly backed several games on Kickstarter and intend to continue doing so, as creating a videogame often requires investments beyond the bounds of a single creator laboring away lonely in their basement. Multiple team members, proprietary technology, art and sound resources, etc etc.

But novels? Generally the only thing standing in the way of their completion is the author finding the time to write them - a problem which would seem to be nonexistant for authors who have already "gone professional" and assumedly spend a fair deal of their time writing. Thus I scoffed, at first, at the idea of professional authors kickstarting novels they hadn't written yet. Most of the ones I looked at didn't even have so much as an opening chapter - just some concept art and, indeed, a fairly bare "concept" of the plot.

Of course, being the "live and let not-give-a-fuck" sort of fellow that I am, my reaction to all this wasn't of the they shouldn't be doing this variety. It was more of the would I ever do this? sort, with a decisive lean towards no.

Having thought about it some more, I can't be so sure. I generally see Kickstarter used for novels by fairly niche authors, who have a small but devoted following. These authors aren't getting filthy rich on their books. They make a modest but livable income. They have a proven track record of providing quality products (this is the most important thing in crowdfunding, for me!). Only an utter idiot would throw that reputation away in a scheme to get quick 10 or 20 grand (or whatever the number) up front.

I haven't heard of any audiences being burned on kickstarting a novel, whereas I have heard sob stories from nearly every other sector. Furthermore, it does open up some rather exciting options - offering cool things like big, silk-screened maps to backers without worrying if it'll earn out the investment you made up front.

Of course, when I think of doing such things myself, I remember that I can kickstart extras-packages like that without kickstarting the novel itself. Somehow it seems more honest to do it that way. After all, I don't really intend to write anything I don't think there isn't paying audience for - nor do I intend to write anything just because there is a paying audience. That is to say, I won't write anything I wouldn't enjoy writing (what is the point of pursuing professional authorhood, after all, but to truly enjoy what we do for a living?).

Obviously, I'm a long ways from actually needing to make any decisions on the subject. My thinking, though, is constantly evolving, leading me to repeat something I've been saying a lot:

I'm so excited to be in the game now, while everything is changing.

Critics Burn Inferno. Nobody Cares.

The release of Dan Brown's new book Inferno was followed by its predictable trashing by the literary critics, which in turn was followed by the equally predictable sound of millions of readers not giving a fuck what literary critics think.

I have not read any of Brown's books, so I can't give a personal opinion over how good or bad his prose is. However, whatever the quality of his writing, I can say without a doubt that it is "good enough."

Same goes for Stephenie Meyer of Twilight fame, or EL James (50 Shades of Grey), or - to go back a ways - Christopher Paolini (Eragon).

Writing is the medium. The story is the message. So long as your message is compelling, and your writing is good enough to get it across, you'll do fine. (Sometimes much more than fine, as the above authors can attest). The message is more important than the medium. The story is more important than the prose. The toy is more important than the packaging.

Pseudonymception

As I crawl towards the halfway mark on the first draft of Clanless, I've begun to spare a bit of thought for thinks like cover art - and marketing. It seems the prevailing wisdom is to make sure your name is associated with one genre and one genre only - in which case I'd want to publish Clanless, and any future works of science fiction, under a different name than Tristan Gregory. Which is itself a pen name.

No doubt keeping things simple for my readers is worth making them confusing for me.

I'm still not sure I'll follow the prevailing wisdom in this case, though. Most of my very favorite authors have published work in several genres, and I like to think that readers are pretty smart. Certainly they can clue to the face that certain books  are unrelated to each other unless specified... right? I can always start including a "other books by" section in my front matter which breaks my titles down by fantasy and science fiction, I suppose...

Still, all the talk about "building brands" is fairly influential. I don't have a lot of marketing clout to leverage, and so any trick I can use to keep  my efforts focused on my most likely readers is a good thing. Then again, I kinda hope that even readers who find me through my fantasy novels might want to try out my science fiction. Personally I've always seen it as one and the same, as summarized by The Third Law and it's corollary.

I suppose it's comforting to know that I can always change my mind and switch the name on the cover. Unless of course I get successful enough that people would notice that kind of thing. In which case... mission freaking accomplished.

Forgot My Own Advice

I did it again.

I waited until the day of publication to write the cover copy for a book. I've given the advice to many many people to start writing it as soon as you start thinking about publication. It needs to be written and rewritten, polished and perfected by the time pub day comes. (Speaking of pub day, a happy St. Paddy's to everyone!).

This is one of those "Do as I say, not as I do" situations, kids.

Well, hopefully I'll be able to get something that I like down in time. Even if I do, there's a good chance I'll rewrite it a few times. Another of the wonderful parts of E-publishing - I can change it as often as I need to.