Storytellers Unplugged

What I Learned From Blogging About the Kindle

2009-11-10T12:12:17Z

Last month, when I finally decided to “come out” about owning a Kindle, I learned two things. One, after reading some of the comments about my blog entry, I realized that I have always written about “safe” topics, ones that are least likely to stir up controversy, and heaven forbid, make readers think less of me.

Maybe that’s why I was drawn to children’s picture books. Of course, there are some dark picture books, but the majority of mine are definitely on the sunny side, sprinkled with light humor and less-than-deep situations. Writing the blog entry about the Kindle made me nervous. What would people think? What would people say? It turned out that people had a lot to say, and not all of it made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, like my children’s books do.

And you know what? Taking the risk of writing something that may not have endeared me to fellow readers and writers was good for me. And any writing worth its salt SHOULD evoke strong feelings in its readers. Writing outside of my comfort level was just the kick in the butt I needed.

The second thing I learned from blogging about the Kindle was that I wanted to learn more about why many authors – and most booksellers (save those at Barnes & Noble, which is ready to launch its own e-reader, the Nook) – are not big fans of the Kindle.

So this past weekend when I was at a children’s writers’ conference, I took the opportunity to sit down with one of my favorite independent booksellers. I asked her to help me understand just why the Kindle is a “bad guy.” My friend said that it’s not just the Kindle, it’s Amazon’s entire bookselling practices, as well as those of Walmart, Target, and apparently, now Sears. Barnes & Noble’s new Nook is also seen as a threat.

From what I understand, the aforementioned are all involved in “predatory pricing,” offering discounts that other bookstores can’t afford to match. And e-readers like the Kindle make it possible to download a new hardcover bestseller for just $9.99 in less than a minute, and without leaving home.

I continued the conversation with my husband, a former music director and disc jockey, that evening. It’s his opinion that what happened in the record industry is now happening in the book world. With Apple’s iTunes online store, customers could buy a CD that might retail for $17.99 at the local record store for $9.99. They also could purchase a single song – or several songs – without having to buy the whole CD. However, to do so meant they had to have an iPod, which is pretty much the same situation as Amazon and the Kindle, and the other e-readers that are bound to follow. Today, the big chain record stores are largely gone, but some really great independent record stores can be found throughout the country, and they’re still going strong. .

Although I enjoy browsing my local chain bookstores on occasion, in reality they are becoming more generic – kind of like a McDonald’s for the average book buyer, at least in the children’s book department. At the children’s writers’ conference this past weekend, a fellow picture-book author told me that when she recently paid a visit to a local “big box” bookstore, she was appalled to see the explosion of toys in the children’s section. Less space was devoted to books, and of these books, many were the mass-appeal series, and the small picture-book display featured primarily celebrity authors.

It’s obvious that the world of bookselling is changing. Just as Walmart has forced smaller mom-and-pop stores to close, there will be some casualties in the bookstore world. Survival depends on facing the inevitable growth of e-readers and online shopping head-on, and finding creative ways to work around these changes – and eventually, with the changes.

As long as there are people who love the bookstore experience, there will be people to support their local bookseller. There’s nothing quite like immersing yourself in a good independent bookstore. It’s like diving into a box of fine chocolates, and the assortment is often one you won’t find elsewhere.

But there’s also something to be said for having an e-reader, especially for people who travel, or who don’t have a bookstore nearby, or who can’t get out at all. For me, being able to browse my local bookstore – and buy books, as well as to click on my Kindle at any hour of the day or night and download a book, or a magazine, or even a blog, is the best of both worlds.

I think that there is space – and a place– for both brick-and-mortar booksellers and those requiring technology. I hope for a future where they can co-exist, “happily-ever-after” as we children’s writers like to say. I may be fooling myself, but time will tell.

Let’s Just Pretend The Last 8 Months Never Happened

2009-11-09T17:05:14Z

Looks like it was a sabbatical after all.

Last March, after close to a three-year tenure, I hung up my Storytellers U hat — the one with the Viking horns and a beer funnel — without knowing whether this would be permanent or temporary. Couldn’t help but notice, in the interim, that lords-of-the-manor Dave and Joe never filled that vacated slot for the ninth of each month, or even dropped my name from the active roster, maybe under the belief that, since nature abhors a vacuum, I would eventually slam back into place like an airline passenger into a fuselage crack at 30,000 feet.

Apparently this strategy of inaction worked. That thudding sound you hear…

And hang onto that word, inaction, if you will. It’s key today.

In the grand scheme, this monthly slot is not an especially demanding gig, although that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s immune to something resembling burnout. By last March I was feeling bereft of ideas to bring to the table here. Worse, maybe, I was feeling bereft of much desire to bring them.

And so it felt right to go for a long, meandering walk.

I’ve come to recognize in myself a restlessness that sometimes push-pulls me out one door and toward another, usually a less familiar one. At the same time, there’s a gravitational tug that sometimes pulls my orbit back around to those old, familiar rooms.

Except I come back not quite the same writer, not quite the same person. This is nearly always for the better. Because I’ve been rewired.

Hang onto that word rewired, too.

Nobody ever promised us that life in the creative lane would be a smooth ride. Oh, it has its moments of gliding across the glass-still sea. Days when the words bear you effortlessly up like thermal drafts beneath a falcon’s wings. But then there are the days, the many many days, when it’s all whirlpools, typhoons, and clipped feathers.

And there aren’t just days like that. There are novels like that. Stories like that. Screenplays and essays and poems like that.

There are times when, whatever your project may be, the two of you are just not right for each other.

Sometimes, in the face of a monumental creative incompatibility, be it a blocking wall or a yawning sinkhole, the best course of action really is none at all. Walking the other way. Heading the opposite direction, with an eye toward finding your way back again by some other route whose signposts you won’t know until you see them.

It’s more than just giving yourself time for a few fresh breezes to blow the musty funk and cobwebs from your head. You can accomplish that much in one indulgent afternoon off, and as the beneficiary of many such afternoons I’ll gladly admit they can work small miracles. Sometimes that’s all the honey-laced medicine you need.

But sometimes the challenge runs deeper. Think, in terms of degree, of the difference between a mood and a personality disorder.

Walking the other way — we don’t much like that here in the global West. It’s not the way we were taught. So there’s something shameful about it. While detouring down a path of lesser resistance has always struck me as being a perfectly acceptable strategy in the East, in the West we’re the amped-up spawn of different doctrinal DNA, in particular the hard-assed Calvinist work ethic which holds that if a thing is worth doing, then it’s worth doing with such grim, unrelenting insistence to bend it to your will that you make yourself miserable long before you’re finished and lose sight of why you ever wanted to do it in the first place.

Which is probably a great success formula for cutting down acres of trees or making little rocks out of big ones; but for creative work, personally I’ve always found that approach counterproductive for getting over anything more than a minor hump. Maybe because it doesn’t allow much room for reflection.

But here’s the thing about walking the other way. It really isn’t a path of inaction at all, or shouldn’t be. Not when there are so many other things, new things, to try. A different novel, story, screenplay, essay, poem. A different creative outlet altogether. Or something that may not even be traditionally regarded as “creative” at all.

Do it. Do it with heart, do it with dedication, do it with more commitment than you’d give some simple fleeting diversion, and it will leave its mark on you. Do it, and it will leave you rewired.

This is due to something I’ve found increasingly fascinating lately: neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to reorganize its neurons and their networks in response to new experiences. It’s not a new concept — it was initially theorized in the late 19^th century, but had to overcome half a century of being ignored before it made much headway, and even then seemed to take a few more decades to filter into general understanding. Pretty much every biology class I ever had likened the brain to a blob of Jello that reached its developmental apex a few years after it jiggled free of the mold, then spent the next several decades declining into rotting Swiss cheese.

Yeah, and physicians used to bleed out evil humors, too.

Instead, my favorite metaphor for neurons so far is a passage comparing each one to a waving forest whose branches are constantly breaking old connections and making new ones.

Now, what does that have to do with walking away from a challenge and coming back to it later? Only everything. Because if you’re lucky — or intuitively prone to seeking out what you need — then just maybe this tweaked version of you is the one better equipped to meet the challenge you walked away from.

New paths of thought, expanded ways of seeing, deepened understandings … these are a writer’s bags of gold to foot the bill for that next trip into terra incognita.

Or at least bags of fertilizer to grow what you plant once you’re there.

Here are a few things I did since last March, things I’d never done before.

Received a torn biceps tendon during Krav Maga training.
Researched and self-rehabbed a torn biceps tendon.
Planned, planted, and tended a vegetable garden.
Discovered a love for refinishing furniture.
Took up soldering so I can make my own audio cables.
Learned and practiced a few rudiments of parkour.

I’m trying to stick to things that have a physical element of doing about them, where mind and body are both involved, and where they denote some kind of ongoing activity. Then there’s the life of pure mind: the books read, the words written, the subjects explored.

You have your own list. Do tell, please.

How will mine impact my work? In most cases, I can’t concretely say. Not yet. Although there’s one, which I’ll get into next month, because for now this is running long.

But I feel different, changed by them all, and as a starting point — or restarting point — it’s all good.

AND NOW, OUR … LOSER!

2009-11-08T14:18:18Z

The Chicago Tribune ran “The Great Chicago Ghost Story” contest for Halloween.

The rules: A Chicago site must be mentioned in the story. No more than 750 words.

I wrote a story. Entered.

Lost.

Here’s the loser.

THE GHOSTS OF CHICAGO, I SET THEM FREE

I see the ghosts of Chicago.

I set them free.

This is a mission statement.

Mine.

###

How is it that I see Chicago’s ghosts?

I don’t know.

How is it that you see those Magic Eye images?

I don’t.

You see what you see.

I see what I see.

I see the ghosts of Chicago.

###

No, I do not see Chicago’s ghosts all the time.

A year can go by.

Two years.

Longer.

I’m not sure, really.

But then I see.

Ghosts are inevitable.

###

Ghosts look like …

A free ghost is beautiful.

Shimmering. Translucent. Made of cloud dream.

A liquid going to steam shape.

Imagine an ethereal jellyfish.

No tentacles. No poison.

Late in humid summer night. Free-floating and vaguely luminous. Hovering above the head of one of the Kemeys’s bronze lions at the Art Institute.

Might it be they are here to acknowledge the commonality of beauty?

Sometimes in early morning fog swirl around the legs of the 106 giant headless statues of Grant Park’s Agora. Mockery? You earthbound. You unthinking.

I am a ghost.

I am free.

###

What is a ghost?

Spirit. Soul.

So say some. So believe.

It dwells within.

I know.

###

This cold October night.

This alley.

This darkness.

Clatter-groan of El above.

He sits and begs.

Sees me.

Talks madness.

Nonsense.

I look at his face.

See behind it.

Behind life trenched lines on face.

Behind eyes fierce crazy and hopeless.

Behind mindless brute insistence to go on.

I look at him.

See what lurks behind the flesh.

I see a ghost.

I take my knife.

I set free the ghost.

###

If you want to see the winner, it’s at

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-091027-ghost-story-clark,0,6561998.story

Q&A the Second

2009-11-07T19:39:39Z

Q: How does it feel to walk away? You’ve just complete a ginormous four book cycle (well, you finished it a while ago). Is it refreshing to turn back to other things, or do you light-headed?

A: The answer, of course, is yes. I am tremendously grateful to be done with the Doctrine of Labyrinths, but I’m also a little bewildered and finding it difficult to settle down to work on anything else. On the third hand, I know, down to the very bottom of my soul, that this story is done. Unlike with the previous three books, there’s nothing leftover, for me, at the end of Corambis. I have no desire, temptation, inclination, or other impulse to keep telling Felix, Mildmay, and Kay’s stories. I love them dearly, don’t get me wrong, and I hope I’ve made it clear that their lives continue past the end of the book, but the story is over–just as, for me, the stories of most of the characters in The Mirador are over at the end of that book, even though many readers seem to feel that there are a lot of loose ends. I don’t want my characters’ lives to end with the end of the story, so I actually go to a good deal of trouble to make it clear that everything isn’t tied up neatly with a big red bow. Their lives go on, and they have more problems to solve and consequences to deal with, but the story I am telling is over. And I am grateful for the chance to move on to different stories in different worlds.

Q: Do you ever find it difficult to accurately and sympathetically portray trauma/PTSD in fiction without getting too dramatic? It’s a pretty delicate balance, and one I think you manage well.

A: Thank you. And, yes, it is difficult. I generally end up writing a very cathartic emo draft and then going back and taking out all the melodrama–letting the characters tell me how they react instead of moving them around like puppets of Angst, Despair, and Woe. The difference is frequently remarkable, so I suppose if I have anything resembling advice on the subject, that would be it. Each character is going to react to trauma differently, based on personality and experience and cultural expectations–and the particulars of the situation. It’s never one-size-fits-all.

Q: How do you turn ideas into short stories?

A: The same way you get to Carnegie Hall.

Okay, now that I’ve got the flip answer out of my system . . . unfortunately, I don’t have anything better to take its place. It depends on the idea and the story. Sometimes it’s very straightforward: my short story “Straw” was a dream. I turned it into a rational narrative mostly by unpacking things the dream compressed and compressing things the dream overelaborated. It took me most of a Sunday morning, and what I had when I’d finished is almost word for word what Strange Horizons published. That is, however, simple and painless and lovely, is not even remotely the norm. The other story of mine that Strange Horizons has published, “Draco campestris,” is a story that accreted, grain by grain, over the course of several years–actually, it must be more than a decade, since the idea of the Centre and the arcs of the Circumference is from Emily Dickinson, and I think it’s from reading Dickinson in high school, rather than in graduate school. Another part of the story, including the title, comes from a necklace made by Elise Matthesen, which I admired for two or three years before I found the story in it–and then it took me another two years to get the story out of it. Which happened by writing all those disconnected fragments and then figuring out which order they belonged in and why. Accretion is much more typical for me, and I’m always, honestly, a little surprised when what emerges from it is recognizably a story.

The other way I write stories is pastiche. The Kyle Murchison Booth stories are all M. R. James and H. P. Lovecraft pastiche, with a side of Arthur Conan Doyle and some Edward Gorey as a palate cleanser. In essence, they’re mysteries, which is a little like the prose equivalent of a sonnet, and there it’s just a matter of fitting what I want to say into that mold. (This is not always as easy as I’m making it sound.) The ideas behind those stories tend to be simpler, and thus they’re also simpler in form. No weird chopped up narratives (like “Letter from a Teddy Bear on Veterans’ Day“) or stories like “Draco campestris” where there’s barely any narrative at all. I can also get ideas for Booth stories from dreams; “The Yellow Dressing Gown” was nearly as simple to write as “Straw,” although the two stories could not otherwise be more different.

And sometimes I can’t manage the trick at all. I have half a dozen short stories languishing on my hard drive because I cannot figure out how to turn the idea into a story.

So maybe my most honest answer would be “I don’t have a clue.”

There’s one more question for this month, but as the question itself is a spoiler for Corambis, it and my answer are on my blog, so that everyone can choose whether they want to read it or not.

When I Wish I Wasn’t a Writer

2009-11-05T19:25:49Z

When people ask me what I do for a living, I am always at a bit of a loss as to how to answer. It sounds a little too highfaluting to announce, “I am an author.” You just can’t say that sentence without sounding like you graduated from Oxford, or that you have something large that needs to be pulled out from your backside. My preference is to say, “I’m a storyteller,” but that involves too long an explanation. Usually I say, “I’m a writer.”

As all of you know, that answer never suffices. You have to explain what kind of a writer you are, and then you are expected to talk about your books. Some writers have business cards listing their books. I am always saying I should have those kinds of calling cards, but that I have never been organized enough to get them speaks volumes.

Other professions don’t require the explanations that ours does. It surprises me when people actually say, “Do you really make a living at that?” To date I have not answered, “Are you really stupid enough to have asked that?”

As writers we need to remember that two percent of the population buys more than 90% of the fiction that is sold. I have yet to figure out why it is that I never seem to get into a conversation with that elusive two percent of the population.

There is a certain danger that comes with others knowing about our profession, and because of that I think the official headgear of writers is the same as that worn by court jesters. I have been approached to read manuscripts by more “friend of a friend of friends” than I care to remember. Need a newsletter written? Need a paper edited? Need a business letter crafted? For some reason because we work with words, others seem to think we would love to be involved with their endeavors. What we want to say is, “Frankly, Scarlet, I don’t give a damn.” What we usually say is, “Okay.”

Invariably, those requests come without an offer of remuneration. “It’s just a page or two,” we are told. I don’t ever remember telling a plumber, “It’s just a leak or two.” I mean, plumbers love to work with pipes, don’t they?

As for speaking engagements, beware those that tell you, “We don’t pay an honorarium, but you can sell as many books as you like.” Those are usually organizations that even Ron Popeil couldn’t sell to.

There is a difference between writing full-time, and writing fool-time. When you are too often side-tracked by writing that is not your own, you are a fool-time writer. Guilty as charged. I am glad that I am in good company, though (Thomas Sullivan, come on down.)

I am proud of being a writer, but November is not a good month to remind others of that fact, especially if they have high school kids. In years past I have been hit up by friends and acquaintances to “take a look” at their children’s college essays. I have been encouraged by those parents to “spruce it up a little.” Talk about trying to make a silk purse out of a cow’s ear.

Now I am getting an education as to why these parents were so desperate. Maybe the thought of their child’s staying at home while attending a J.C. for the next two years drove them to seek out “that writer guy.” Yes, the birds have come home to roost. My 17 year old boy is in the midst of filling out college applications.

You would think by now I would be ready for this, as I have been through the process one time before. Four years ago my oldest boy wrote his college essay and then asked me to look at it. When I finished reading it I asked him, “When you wrote this were you trying to give the admissions people every possible reason to turn you down, or just most of them?” We revised the essay. It is a process where you should not have any sharp instruments nearby.

Now I am going through that process again, but it’s even worse. My middle child has decided he should apply to schools like Swarthmore, Rice, Cornell, the Naval Academy, and Brown. Naturally, all the schools want different essays, and many of them want multiple essays. There are six supplemental essays alone for Brown.

You know Munk’s painting The Scream? This month it bears an amazing resemblance to me.

In another week or so, assuming the two of us survive our collaboration, my son’s college essays will be done. Until that time, though, I really wish I wasn’t a writer.

Pax,

Alan Russell

November 5, 2009

Dream Versus Time, Life, the World, And All The Really Important Things

2009-11-04T15:12:43Z

The holidays are coming. We’re arriving at an intersection of worlds – the real and the imagined, outer and inner, concrete and symbolic, the past and the now.

What must be done, what needs to be done.

Kids dressed up as monsters expect candy offerings. Blood-bonded friends and enemies gather for the ritual slaughter and consumption of a flightless bird. Parents plot the delivery of gifts under the guise of a night-time visit by a big man in a red suit.

Rev up the planner. Break out the color markers. There are responsibilities and commitments to be met. Shopping to be done, money spent, joy and love packaged and mailed or hidden away from loved ones until the fateful day of deliverance.

Who’s going where, what’s for dinner, which metallic red foil wrapped box is for who, again?

There is fun in playing dress-up, celebrating friends and family, offering gifts, re-connecting with ongoing traditions.

There is also pain in the feeling once more the loss of what once was, empty chairs around the dinner table, phone calls that will never be made, again, doors that can never open to the same smiling faces.

Blood seeps from old wounds. Empty spaces push out from within. Darkness closes in.

These days, broken finances haunt the empty windows of mall stores, office buildings and condos. Work, if you’re lucky enough to have any, is probably insane. The house, well, let’s hope you still have one, never mind the money to keep it up. Writers are living the freelancer’s nightmare of changing and diminishing markets, cranky editors who are themselves crumbling under corporate pressures, vanishing secondary jobs to get through the time between contracts and checks.

Writers belong to the class or workers who don’t get paid personal or sick days, holidays, or vacations. There is very little in the way of a safety net or escape route for writers who don’t have a partner with a job, benefits, and the capacity to step in to take a little pressure off.

Even without the holiday pressure, responsibilities accumulate, along with scars, routines, stuff, and things to do. We’re busy folk, for the most part, with big open pipes full of more things to do flowing fast at us. Health. The job. The kids. The parents.

Change happens, faster and more violently. Even the damn weather is kicking butt. Hang on as the rollercoaster dips and flips. What happened to the safety belts?

The real world is happening, baby.

And if somehow the big stressors have passed you by, and the usual ones are not so tough, there are still the people close by who are hurting, and that still hurts. Distracts.

How do you get anything done? More to the point of SU, how do you keep the imagination alive and kicking when the real world is bearing down from every direction? Can you really afford to trip and fall, in these times, lost in your own private dream world as you try to survive in the real one?

I’m always impressed by the multi-taskers. Envious, really. Efficient, compartmentalized, energetic, eating and exercising right while handling home and business. Great packagers of reality. But so often, there are holes in the product line of that kind of life. Some go missing as priorities take them elsewhere/elsewhen. Things get done in order of importance, in the order of the choices one makes based on the value assigned to them. Their importance, all too often, in the real world.

Sometimes the multitaskers forget you. Or someone/thing else. There’s always a price. Always damage. Maybe to the dreaming.

I may be envious, but I’m not entirely sold on the multi-tasking product pitch.

I suppose I’m nostalgic for the summer days when I could lay down in parents’ backyard and lose myself in some Jack Vance or Ray Bradbury. Or, more recently, just spend a Sunday morning with the Times on the front porch.

I find it harder every day to escape the real world. Forgetting about it too often hurts more than keeping a very close eye on it. Life is not quite what it was when I first started taking on the dream quests.

Sometimes there’s no fun in waking up to an inner or outer Katrina after slipping into that same childhood state of mind that made the world in your head the world’s reality, even if only in the privacy of room or basement or lonely stretches of country road.

That real world pounds on walls of discipline, drains the strength to keep the dream alive day to day so you have something to go back to when the time comes to sit before the keyboard.

If you can dream, no matter what, and deliver that dream to the world every day, then more power to you. If you can handle the price life collects for that focus, go for it.

But if its the dreaming that’s a struggle, and the dream is more than just about being a “writer,” whatever that may mean, but about the heart in the work of stories and characters, then what do you do when the world’s closing in?

Finding space in the day to dream can be part of the problem. Life’s dead zones, like waiting rooms, commuting trips, lunch hours, are vital. Bev Vincent and others create their space by getting up early. Stay-at-home parents mine nap times and school hours. Of course, the lists of other things to be done have to be put away. That’s why being trapped, with no other options for real world engagement, are so valuable.

Here’s a result to read and weep over:

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/brooklyn/2009/04/22/2009-04-22_train_of_thought_bklyn_writer_found_muse__wrote_first_novel_while_commuting_on_t.html

400 words at 8Am and 5PM on the F train, between Manhattan and Brooklyn. On a smartphone. With his thumbs. For two years.

Elizabeth Massie’s entry a while back about doing the things you need to do to be published struck me, because everything she listed required spending time on the quest.

And people don’t want to spend time.

They don’t have enough, or they’d rather do other things. That’s the way it is. But if you’ve managed so far and produced work even with life’s everyday distractions, the message is, there’s still always time. Somewhere. Even the storm. Not necessarily long periods of it. Maybe not for the kind of writing you’re used to doing, or prefer. Perhaps the material needs to change (more on that later). But there’s time to tap the art. To perform. To create.

I personally appreciate early morning writing, especially coming after some sleepy, sloppy late night work. Letting sleep handle some of the work of making connections and opening up the imagination makes slipping back into the writing “dream” easier.

As for popping into a “dream state” in those dead zones, I find the task frankly challenging. Noise, distractions, frustrations over real world issues do seep into the rhythm of coming up with lines, situations, conflict. However, in talking to other writers, it seems a bit of preparation goes a long way – I understand it as making writing one of the “problems” you have to handle during the course of the day. So there’s an outline for a scene, or revision work to be done – in short, a bit of preparatory dreaming has already occurred.

Another strategy is to pour that real world right into the work. If the real world has overwhelmed your dreaming, don’t work so hard at making stuff up. If you’re one of those people who can use writing to escape the real world, or transform the real world into a fantasy world on the fly, then, as with the multi-taskers, more power to you.

For the rest of us, writing often balances personal obsessions, themes, fantasies, types of stories we want or need to tell, with a healthy draw from personal experience. If you’re stuck, if the creative juices just aren’t flowing and the dreaming side of you is walled up, make the wall, the problems, people, issues you’re dealing with more of the story.

There are risks of exposure, of course, mostly to people “in the know” about your life. Normally, you’d have to edit, mix and match personalities, switch up settings, play with atmosphere. Camouflage. But if the world gives you nails and broken glass, and that’s all that fills your imagination, use that raw material. Let it rip. There’s plenty of time later for editing. Censoring. Digging deeper into the personal hell of the life you’re going through and reining in the pain. Building bridges of empathy and compassion to a wider audience than yourself.

Later is the time for making sure you’ve displayed the strength of those who helped you get through tough times and giving them their proper due, and for lingering over the sweet vengeance of using carefully chosen characteristics from the people who made your miserable in your villains or victims.

What I’m trying to say is if the usual routines and tricks don’t seem to work, try to be in the moment.

Being “in the moment” and free associating to whatever is happening around you may not be highly productive to a specific project. But concentrating on the present may help to filter the burden of real world problems. Putting down the experience, letting it roll out of the mind, playing with whatever is happening at the moment may feel almost like dreaming. No past, no future, no lists and shedules, just the problem happening right now. You might come up with some interesting character sketches, dialogue (love overheard conversations), or descriptions to use later.

If you can get a little more focused, rely on whatever strengths you have as a writer (dialogue, atmosphere, etc) and your “dead zone” environment to sketch scenes or notes for a scene. Basically, it’s about trying to stay balanced between real world pressures and skill strengths to be productive on a project.

Or, if you can hold on to an overall vision of a longer work in the middle of the madness, get specific by maneuvering a character from a to b, filling out a description, doing whatever’s needed in a small piece of a story. Like paying a bill, or picking something up from the grocery store, setting up a task for a piece while in one of your stolen moments helps get the imagination focused, even if the task is editing what’s already down.

But if the chaos is just too all-consuming, changing the the kind of writing you’re used to doing may help keep you in the writing game. Pulling back from a novel to work short stories or even flash fiction, poetry, flat out character or setting sketches, journal writing, non-fiction, blogging, tweets, or other outlets can be productive from a marketing perspective, or even produce usable material for later projects.

Finally, if you’re able, a burst of physical activity, from a brisk walk to cleaning the bathroom to dusting those bookshelves, can temporarily clear the mind and leave room for dreaming.

The world is tough on dreaming. Responsibilities bear down hard on our creative lives. These are just some of my thoughts as I struggle my own choices and commitments. I hope some of you out there have your own ideas, techniques, routines to keep working you can offer to the rest of us – I’m sure everyone from working writers to single mothers have a lot of experience in managing stress, crises, and creativity and might have some tips. I know I’m eager to hear them.

Long-Term Relationships With Your Characters

2009-11-01T02:35:50Z

One of the things authors decide when they sit down to write is how long and drawn out their relationship will be with particular characters. There are short stories, novellas, novels, and then – at the far end of the spectrum, you find trilogies and the continuing series. Each of these involves a level of commitment a little deeper than the last. I’ve written about this before, and since I’m involved in a project that depends on my getting it right, I’m going to write about it again. The series character.

As a reader, one of the biggest problems I have with a series of novels that features the same character is that, after a while, it seems to go stale. Plot starts to be subjugated by the side-stories and the things people expect to see. Authors take the lazy way out by spending time rehashing things their old readers know, and synopsizing things their new readers need to know – and it all falls apart. People still follow and read, but after a while the creativity begins to grow pale and melt into the familiar. I hate that – particularly when it involves a character that was very alive for me – and important.

So here I am – this post will go live on November 1^st, the day that Nanowrimo begins. I will be starting a new novel – Heart of a Dragon – and it is book II in a series. Actually, I don’t know if it will be book II in the end – it doesn’t follow chronologically after the story I wrote in “Vintage Soul,” which has been sub-titled Book I – and I have a plot / synopsis for a book that does fill that slot in time. It will no doubt become a headache later on, but I’m writing the book that seems right at this time – the second story of Donovan DeChance.

I have decided to be proactive about the series itself. I have someone who reads along and gathers up details – the town, the players, anything that might need to be revisited with accuracy. A bible is being created that will help me build a world, and a life for the characters who inhabit that world. It’s like an uber-outline, tying the books together with threads of hair-color and location. There is Club Chaos, which borders the daytime and nighttime worlds of San Valencez and has doors opening to many places. There are alleys that appear to end in brick walls, but actually lead to shortcuts through the city. There is Santini Park, the Barrio – and there are many, many types of citizens. The day and the night are fully populated, and it’s up to me to keep them that way – and to keep it interesting.

There is no reason that a series can’t remain fresh – that each book can’t stand alone and carry the reader along to new places and new surprises. People lead extraordinary lives – and other people lead mundane, boring lives. Sometimes the former becomes the latter over time, but you can’t allow it to happen to your characters, or it’s time to move on and let them find a nice suburban bookshelf to gather dust on. In other words, like any other relationship, if you want to keep things fresh it’s a matter of work, compromise, and attention to detail. Characters will usually respond if given proper attention, and just because you’ve known them a very long time it doesn’t mean you can take them for granted.

With this in mind, I am determined to attack the books in this series plot first. I want to be sure what I have is a solid book, and then figure out during the outlining process how it integrates with my “world” – and my characters. I also want to investigate the past of my main characters. Each of them should provide a good tale or two – Donovan in particular, as he’s lived a bit longer than is natural…well, quite a bit longer. “Heart of a Dragon” is a novel I had conceived earlier, based on a short story I had published long ago – “In His Heart Live Dragons”. It never felt right…but when I added Donovan into the mix and fleshed it out – it came to life. Novel first, series character later. For me, I think that will work best.

I am a big fan of the supernatural in fiction, so there will be vampire novels in the series – there are vampires in Vintage Soul. There will be magic, and voodoo. There will be ancient texts and computer files – familiars and ghouls. I want to try taking a completely different direction with each book, while still building on the personality and character of the protagonist and his “posse”. It’s a tough business. I think it’s hard, sometimes, to keep characters interesting both for myself and readers for the length of a single book. I know I worked hard on my first trilogy, “The Grails Covenant,” to be sure that the vampire Montrovant was as powerful and intriguing in book III as he was at the beginning of book I. I gauge this sort of thing over time. I still love that character, and could still write about him – if White Wolf didn’t own him, and another author hadn’t killed him off …

I believe Donovan DeChance, and the DeChance Chronicles will be around for some time to come. They won’t be the only books that I write – that might be another key – but I want them to remain among my favorites. Selfishly – I want them to be your favorites too.

That is, after all, why I write the stories. I like to share.

On to Nanowrimo!

–DNW

Etched Deep – Halloween Story and Podcast

2009-10-31T17:27:31Z

I’ve put the podcast of this story up over at my website:

You can listen to me reading it here…comments welcome!

For Storytellers, as I do every Halloween, I’m offering the text here as a free story. This was written and published long ago, but for a long time I’d lost it. I ended up rewriting it from memory…so this is the new version of the old thing, as Aerosmith might say…

Etched Deep

By David Niall Wilson

Ethan sat back in his rocker and propped one booted foot on the porch rail. He watched the sunset dribble down behind the trees. Trails of color streaked the clouds. The steady creak of the rocker emphasized the silence. Now and then he heard one of the animals shuffle in the barn.

The shotgun lay across his knees, barrel angled out over the yard toward the tree line and the butt nestled close in to his waist. He reached down to the cooler at his side, lifted the rusty metal lid, and fished out a bottle of beer. It was cold. Ice water dripped onto his hand and his pants as he lifted it and twisted off the cap.

A loud, muffled thump sounded inside the house. Ethan paused, cocked his head to the side, and listened, but the sound wasn’t repeated. He took a pull off his beer. A few feet to his right Jake sprawled in a mass of wrinkles and fur. The dog watched Ethan sleepily. Ethan leaned back, closed his eyes and let the cool evening breeze brush him back through the years.

He couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t owned a dog. His father gave him a puppy for his second birthday. Casey, they’d called her. Ethan’s sharpest memories of that dog began with the warm, comfortable scent of her fur and the deep, trusting gleam in her eyes.

There were other memories as well. He remembered the scent of the forest in the early morning, when the dew still dusted the grass and the shrubbery that lined the trails. He remembered the sour smell of oiled gun metal, and the acrid tang of powder. He remembered Casey, baying and thrashing through the trees, his father’s heavy footsteps and slow, careful voice.

Ethan’s father lived and died in a cut and dried, black and white world of absolutes. There were no gray areas. There were no shades or demilitarized zones. A thing was what it was, a man did what he had to, and a boy listened to his father.

Casey grew faster than Ethan, and by the time he was six, she had given them three litters of fine dogs. Each grew to either hunt at their mother’s side, or to be sold in the town and hunt with another man’s family. It was what they were born to, and she dropped them like clockwork. She carried the small, furry bodies into the crates Ethan’s father prepared for her, lined with hay and scraps of cloth. She bathed them until they were glossy and when they were hungry she rolled onto her side and offered herself without question. When there were no puppies, she slept with Ethan, and his father allowed it.

When Ethan was eight, Casey was getting a little long in the tooth. She hadn’t had a litter of puppies in over a year, but then she got pregnant. Ethan worried over her, fussed with the crates himself, and waited. The dog grew nervous and restless, but they chalked it up to the coming litter. The days came, and went, and then the final litter was born.

Another loud thump drew Ethan from his daydream. He glanced at the house. No one appeared in the doorway. He heard muffled voices, but they died away. There was a third thump, and someone cried out sharply. He thought he heard a low wail after that, but the breeze kicked up and the sound was lost. He set the empty beer bottle on the porch floor carefully and extracted a second icy, dripping bottle.

Casey carried that last litter, only three pups, into the crate, just like she’d done all the times before. She washed their tiny heads until their fur shone bright and she nuzzled them close to her when they whined. She fed them and watched over them, and they grew, even the sickly, smaller one that Ethan had resigned himself to losing. They grew, and as they did their hunger followed suit. Their teeth sprouted white and sharp, and they grew insistent when it came time to eat.

Ethan had seen Casey wean her whelps again and again, nipping them and driving them away, rising to run off in a shiver of loose skin and swollen teats, nudging them toward the bowls of milk-soaked food his father provided. She had always been patient and careful. This time she snapped. One of the pups lingered too long when she growled at it, and her jaws closed over its tiny head in an instant. One flashing moment of blood and sound, and it was over.

Ethan remembered that moment with a clarity he’d seldom experienced. He still saw Casey, whining, nudging the dead puppy with the tip of her nose as if in apology, wanting it to stand and come to her, to feed and grow strong. Her eyes had been so full of misery and emotion – so human – that Ethan wanted to scream every time the memory surfaced.

His father took the other two puppies away after that. They were ready to eat solid food, and he kept them clear of Casey until they were old enough to take care of themselves. She never went after them again, but something inside her had snapped.

Two weeks later, Ethan’s younger sister, Jenny, walked too close to Casey’s tail. The dog turned like brown lightning. Her eyes were crazed with mad anger, and she snapped. She only caught the material of Jenny’s skirt; the girl was also quick, but it was enough. Ethan’s father beat Casey near to death that day, and everything in Ethan’s life shifted. Sometimes you grow up slowly and learn over years of trial and error. Sometimes it’s a snapshot in time, one moment a boy was young and the next as old as the hills.

A wail rose from the house and Ethan half turned in his seat. He saw Benjamin, his eldest, press his nose to the inside of the screen door, but the boy didn’t come out. He watched his father through that screen, followed the arc of the beer bottle as it was tipped back again, and then the boy disappeared. The sound of someone crying softly joined the eerie voice of the breeze.

Ethan drifted back one last time. Ethan always hunted with his father. They gathered the dogs, strode slowly off into the woods that lined their pasture, and walked together in silence. They hunted for food, and they shared the hunt for companionship. It was the strongest bond the two forged over many years, but the night after Casey snapped at Jenny, Ethan’s father went alone.

His father had spent extra care on his shotgun that night. The barrel was cleaned and oiled, the stock polished. Each load was pulled from the case and examined before disappearing into the many pockets of the old hunting vest Ethan knew so well. He knew the scent of that vest from sitting on his father’s lap. He knew the places it had been torn and mended. He knew where things had been spilled on it, and the exact point on the collar where a drop of blood from his own first kill had soaked in and stained the material a dark brown.

Ethan had carried his own gun to the porch that evening, but his father had just shaken his head.

“Not tonight, son,” he’d said.

No explanations were ever offered, or expected. As the sun set that night, his father headed off toward the woods. Ethan sat on the porch, watching. Casey trotted along at his father’s heels, and this was odd. She was old, and she rarely accompanied them. When she did, it was always with some of the others— faster, younger dogs that could run an animal down, or tree it. Casey had grown slower, and generally kept close to home. Ethan watched until both man and dog were out of sight.

He remembered the sunset glinting off the oiled barrel of his father’s gun. He remembered the way that same light shimmered off Casey’s fur. Hours later, when all hint of the sun had left the sky and the night breezes set tree branches dancing in the shadows, his father returned. Alone.

Ethan remembered that lined face, the vacant stare that presented itself in the pale light of that long-ago moon. His father walked up and sat on the porch. He didn’t say anything at first. Ethan wanted to scan the trees. He wanted to ask about the dog, but something hung in the air that clotted in his throat. He kept his silence, and eventually, his father spoke.

“Sometimes things change. There are things inside that guide us, and no matter how hard we work to keep them whole and safe – sometimes they break. They snap like dry twigs and even if you’re very quiet about it, people will hear that sound. Things you try to avoid come back to stare at you and to see what happened.

“Casey was old, son.” His father spun to him then, and held his gaze. “She was a good dog, but that last batch of puppies was too much. She was broken inside, and there’s nothing you can do to mend such a break. She killed that puppy – that was the start. She would have killed your sister if she hadn’t missed – or you – or taken a chunk out of my leg. She couldn’t help it – the thing that kept her steady was gone. The broken thing inside poked and prodded at her until she snapped, and it would have done it again.”

Ethan remembered the burn of tears in his eyes. He remembered the cold clutch of invisible fingers around his heart, and the way his breath caught in his chest and couldn’t get free. He said nothing. His father turned away, and fell silent, staring out over the distant trees. His gun rested beside him, barrel leaned on the porch rail. Ethan remembered it as a giant finger, pointing somewhere he’d never go again. He thought of Casey’s warm fur, and her huge, soulful eyes. He’d seen the lines in his father’s face differently for the first time, recognized them for what they were. Pain had etched those lines, deep pain held inside for too long. It was a lesson, the sort left unspoken, yet never forgotten.

The screen door creaked, and Ethan drained his beer, half-turning toward the sound. Rebecca pushed the door open just far enough to slip out, and let it close behind her. She stood, staring at the interlocking boards of the porch floor. After a moment of silence, she spoke.

“Jimmy’s arm is hurt. He…”

Ethan held up a hand, and she fell silent. He lifted the lid of the cooler, drew out two more bottles, opened the first, and offered it to her. She stepped forward slowly, as if dazed, and took the bottle from his hand. He opened the second bottle and took a long pull. He still heard the quiet sobbing from inside, and he felt the press of Benjamin’s face to the screen, though he didn’t turn to look.

“Beautiful night,” he said.

Rebecca turned and stared at the blood red drip of the sun as it melted beyond the trees. She nodded and sipped her beer. It was warm, but she trembled. Ethan reached out and touched her arm, remembering other nights – other times. She was still beautiful. He watched the dying daylight play over the dulled highlights of her hair. She still had the old defiance in her stance, the spark that had won his heart, but now it was cockeyed. She stood just a little off balance, as though waiting for some unseen thing she kept in the periphery of her sight to strike.

They drank in silence. When the bottles were empty, Ethan rose. He turned to her, gave her a quick hug, and leaned in close.

“Walk with me?” he said. Not really a question.

She nodded again, setting her still half-full beer bottle on the porch rail. Ethan slid his arm around her shoulders, and they stepped off the porch together. He kept the barrel of the shotgun angled down and away, the weight comfortable in his hand.

Benjamin stepped onto the porch. He held the screen half open.

“Papa?” he said softly.

Ethan stopped and turned.

“You want me to come?”

Ethan shook his head. “Not tonight, son,” he said.

Benjamin stood on the porch and watched them go. He saw the sunset glinting off the oiled barrel of his father’s gun. He remembered the way that same light sometimes shimmered off his mother’s hair. He watched until they were out of sight, then watched a bit longer, then turned back to soothe his brother’s tears.

LITTLE MIRACLES

2009-10-30T16:10:46Z

While it is absolutely true that a writer, any writer, is the worst possible judge of his or her own work – especially after the third rewrite, when you’re no longer sure about anything at all and you start doubting every word on that page to the extent that you cannot conceive why on EARTH anybody else who didn’t have to read this stuff might possibly actually WANT to – there is a sort of instinct that you develop about things, especially if you’ve been doing this sort of thing for a while and you have some experience under your belt.

A while ago I wrote a couple of pages of New Novel, and even before I printed them out to get a second opinion from my first editor (who is married to me, but who doesn’t let that fact interfere with the sometimes brutal honesty of his reactions to my work) I knew that they were not good enough. What I had written down was so dense, so condensed, it was four scenes of story stuffed into six paragraphs – it was a synopsis of what I needed to write. I had written this particular piece of work as a narrative which was supposed to take its place in the book itself – but it wasn’t going to happen. It needed unpacking first, heavily.

My instinct was spot-on. My first editor told me the exact thing I had been thinking, without my having said a word about it.

I don’t do this kind of thing all that often – I usually have the opposite problem, writing too much, giving too much detail, because I’ve got it all in my mind’s eye and it’s a rich vision and in trying to put it across I fall into the trap of describing a Victorian attic, with every doily and tchochke in the picture. I have to rein myself back, study the vision, figure out which tchotchkes need to stay in and which doilies I need to whip away out of sight. But that’s what first drafts are for, exploring attics.

But the opposite of knowing that something is inadequate is knowing that it is good. And every now and then something is good enough to be nothing less than a gift from the Gods.

Often it’s my characters who will come up with these things, stuff I SWEAR I have never thought, or said, or intended to put into a book, until I see myself typing it and it appears on the computer screen as though by magic and then I can only sit back and stare at it and wonder where it had come from… because not a syllable of it came, at least not consciously, from me.

I’ll give you two examples.

The first is something of a small spoiler, so if you haven’t read “The Secrets of Jin Shei” and want to do so without knowing this particular tale, please do skip ahead to the asterisks…

When I wrote “The Secrets of Jin Shei”, there was a scene that I wrote early on which served a couple of purposes in the narrative – one was to establish the character of Xaforn, my warrior girl, and her absolute devotion to the concept of honour, and to living her life with that as her guiding star; the other was to begin a relationship between two people who would make unlikely friends, even unlikely allies, because of how very different, on the face of it, they were from one another.

Xaforn led a life of honour and austerity, was a foundling who had adopted the Imperial Guard as her family and would be willing to die to protect that family and uphold its traditions. Qiaan was a child of a Guard Captain and so knew those traditions from the inside – but she was (from Xaforn’s point of view, at least) soft, and weak; Qiaan lived protected while Xaforn did the protecting, Qiaan had the hearth and the family and Xaforn would be standing guard on the ramparts in the storm in order to keep that hearth and family safe.

These two girls bonded over the fate of a tiny feral kitten which Xaforn found a handful of bully-boys torturing – and could not allow them to continue, because some of them were of the Guard, her chosen family, the family which held honour sacred, which would never condone wanton cruelty like this.

Xaforn, still a slight child and a female to boot, took on three boys older and bigger than herself on the kitten’s behalf. But if it had ended there, the boys might as well have killed the little animal – because Xaforn had not the necessary skills or instincts to ensure the kitten’s survival. It was Qiaan who stepped in and provided that.

Xaforn won the kitten’s freedom. Qiaan won its life.

She gets into trouble over the incident, but also gains a reputation – and the justifications she gives for her actions finally settle on two simple reasons: one, the torturing was being done by Guards and Guards have more honour than that, and two, there was at least one outsider involved in the matter and it was “our cat”.

Later in the book, much later, Qiaan finds herself being used as a puppet figurehead “leading” a revolution against the crown – something that Xaforn, as one of the Imperial Guard, is sworn to prevent. The revolution goes badly awry and Qiann is deemed expendable – and is almost murdered.

And then, suddenly, Xaforn is there, out of nowhere, dealing with Qiaan’s assailants, and realising that Qiaan herself is badly wounded. When they hear reinforcements come, Qiaan begs Xaforn to go and leave her there – but Xaforn will not. When Qiaan realises that the reinforcements are Imperial Guard, that Xaforn will be fighting her own (probably to the death) in order to protect her friend, Qiaan demands to know why she should be worth such a sacrifice.

“Because,” Xaforn says, simply and quietly, “you are my cat.”

I SWEAR those words did not come from me. I swear I did not know that Xaforn would say them, was even thinking this.

But it is perfect. Utterly perfect. It is completely in character. This phrase encapsulates and explains everything, and this is one of the emotional high-points of the entire book.

I have a character to thank for that piece of dialogue – gift from the Gods, from their spirit into my hand and my keyboard, I was a channel, nothing else. And all I could do was sit back and stare at the screen and shake my head in astonishment.

* * * * *

END OF SPOILER

That is how you know that you have written something good, possibly something great. When you sit there looking at it, having just written it, and you cannot believe that the words on that screen, freshly minted, have come, could POSSIBLY have come, from you.

I was given another such gift only the other day, writing my new novel.

Once again, I have a character who has taken a step away from being dead letters on a page and into being flesh-and-blood three-dimensionally real, with a personality larger than life, a sense of humour, an ability to articulate her own thoughts and responses over and above and beyond what I am capable of imparting to her.

She meets another character, in a scene of 3000 words or so which I wrote at a sitting and which needs practically no editing at all.

And I sat back and looked at a particular dialogue exchange, and it was the Gods speaking again – because I had certainly not planned to write anything of the sort. These were two real people, having a real conversation.

I love it when things come together like this. When occasionally there’s a blaze of… something… when the muse walks into the room and smiles.

The little miracle, right there on your computer screen.

In the back of my mind there is a tiny grotto of a temple where I retire every night to say my literary prayers. On nights like these, when the little miracles are spilled like diamond dust across the rest of the prose, the bits I know I have crafted from my own knowledge and experience and ability and my own conscious thinking, I light an extra little candle of gratitude in that temple – because I know I do not do this writing thing alone, and when the Gods come to visit, I am always humbled and thankful that I am still sometimes their favoured child.

I Am Not Afraid, Dammit

2009-10-29T16:43:21Z

Publishing is changing. And I am not afraid.

I’ll be the first to admit I can be myopic at times. I am often unable to see the ripple effects of something until the effect is fully cemented in place. So my lack of fear could simply be the cheerful blatherings of a fool. But I don’t care. I’m still not afraid.

As someone whose career is still in its larva stage, I’m watching with interest as publishing frets about the massive changes in the industry going on right now. Ebook pricing. Ebook piracy. Hardcover pricing. The death of the book. The death of publishing. The sneaking fear that maybe this Internet thing isn’t just a fad, and it will SPELL OUR DOOM.

I understand much of the worry. I’m sure someone else understands the rest of it. And still, I’m not afraid.

I don’t think books will go the way of the horse and carriage, as I’ve heard comparisons used. I also don’t think that treating the business the way “things have always been” is the wisest way to go. Things don’t have to die. Sure, some things die or become quaint, such as papyrus and horse-drawn carriages. Other things evolve–they get mighty and morphin’ and change with the times.

What really surprises me is when you hear publishing people say that they don’t know what to do, or that they refuse listen to Internet professionals. They seem to believe if they do what has worked in the past, eventually the storm will pass and the anchor of tradition will have kept them steady and safe. They look at the people who are succeeding by merging their digital plans with their traditional print plans and call them anomalies at best, or insane at worst. What they need to be doing is learning from them.

My career started when I began podcasting fiction, releasing in serialized audio format in 2006. Giving my work away has resulted in one small press deal, signing with an agent, and invitations to speak at several SF and new media events. At least three authors have gone from the unwashed unpublished masses directly to the elite authors with major book deals by giving away their work via audio serialization, building audiences first and then finding publishers. Many others have found publishing deals through small press houses.

A growing trend, started by Cory Doctorow, is to release a free PDF of a book when you launch the print version. Some, like Doctorow, release the whole book; others release a number of chapters. Still, it’s the concept of the free sample or teaser that works–check it out for free, if you like it, then buy. Sometimes recipients won’t like it. Sometimes they will like it, but just smile and move on. (I do this all the time in the grocery store.) Sometimes they will buy. Everyone I know who has given away free contents has said it increased sales. I’ve gotten more than one email from a consumer of my free content saying that they appreciated the free book and were buying several print copies to give away. It’s difficult to quantify, of course; you can’t say x people downloaded, and y of those people purchased, but there’s no arguing that getting your work in front of people reduces obscurity. People may or may not buy your book if they have heard of you. They will not buy your book if they don’t know it exists.

What’s to stop them from downloading the book, reading it, and never giving you a cent? Nothing. What’s to stop them from going to the library or borrowing it from a friend, reading it, and never giving you a cent? Nothing. Doctorow offers a “think like a dandelion” concept for growth of audience. Instead of nurturing your book in private and hoping it gets into the hands of a reader who will pet it and love it and call it George, you send it out in EVERY direction. Like dandelion seeds, your work will fall on some hard pavement or languish in an unread RSS feed. But some of it will get into the cracks in the sidewalk and find readers (who may become fans and paying customers) you never would have found otherwise.

The good thing is some agents and editors are getting wind of the power of online popularity, and thus they have developed the term “platform.” We all need this now–we need to come to publishing already proven that we can entertain an audience. The way you entertain an audience online is to give away content. When we bring along our audience, who loves us because we give them shiny trinkets, will publishers then refuse to let us give away anything else?

I’m quite aware it’s easy for me to talk about this — my career is still developing. I can afford to take chances and experiment. I have nothing to lose. More experienced people may be looking to be safe, to view giving things away as anathema. Experienced businesspeople think they can still herd the sheep where they want them to go. But the truth is, with the Internet, the sheep are running the show. They’re used to free content, and if made to pay, they will look elsewhere for the freebies.

I believe a successful merging of digital and print content is the way to keep publishing alive. I don’t believe in a kumbaya lifestyle that claims art is meant to be given away always; I want to make a living by writing. I am of the opinion that enticing people to consume my content for free will sell more copies. So I release stuff via audio, blog, PDF, and soon iPhone app, desktop widget, and any other way I can come up with. The more people I touch, the more people will buy my books.

So I’m not afraid. Publishing is changing. I’m ready to see what it turns into and change my expectations with it.