AUSTRALIA, YOU ARE IN ME.

Wait, I think I got that backward.

Which is appropriate, given how I’m on the other side of the world. Where they drive on the other side of the street! And cookies are called biscuits! AND WOMBATS RULE MAN WITH AN IRON GLOVE.

Sorry, I’m a bit punchy.

You see, I’ve been up for — *checks watch* — four billion hours.

If anyone ever says to you, “Hey, here’s a flight, and it’s 16 hours,” do not fall for their ruse.

A flight that long is a trip into madness. Like, the flight itself was fine — I had an exit row, lots of leg room, plenty of space above my head. An empty seat next to me, too. But we took off at 10PM. When it had already been dark for hours. And then began sixteen hours of darkness. Just bleak black nothing. A seemingly eternal night. You know how you sleep eight hours at night and then you wake up and — hey, magic, the sun is coming up? Imagine sleeping for eight hours then learning it’ll still be dark for another eight hours.

And sleeping on a plane, yeah, no. Uncomfortable seats. People milling about. Chatty flight attendants. Turbulence. Frigid air. Any time I managed to doze off it was like — HEY WAKE UP, JERK, YOUR SPINE HURTS AND NOW IT’S COLD AND SOMEONE IS EATING GOULASH NOISILY BEHIND YOU.

So, by the end, I felt hungover.

But then I got off the plane and saw Brisbane sun and got a flat white and felt a lot better.

By the way, a “flat white” is the best coffee thing ever. They don’t drink drip coffee here. It’s all mostly espresso — and a flat white is an almost-latte. It is phenomenal. I’ve had two already today. *twitches*

I also had a Tim-Tam (okay, multiple Tim-Tams) thanks to the folks from the writing center.

A Tim-Tim is not, as it turns out, some strange Australian sex move, but rather, a cookie (“biscuit”) so delicious it elicits a nearly erotic sensation.

Enjoying Brisbane so far. Everything here is like a left-of-center version of what I’m used to in America. Similar or same brands with products I’ve never heard of before. Known car brands but unknown models. Burger King seems to be Hungry Jack’s? McDonald’s is Macca’s? Everyone speaks and walks backward. TIME RUNS IN REVERSE.

Or, at least, that’s how it feels. Jet lag is seriously creeping in, now, like rain rot in old wood. It’s 3:30PM and I’m writing this blog to stay awake. I’ve already traipsed about the city for four or five hours. It’s hot. I’m sore. I’ve killed and eaten three koalas. The catch-22 is that to combat the tiredness of jet lag I have to remain active but remaining active just makes me more tired AHHHH so instead here I am blogging to you people.

Anyway. Tomorrow: GenreCon begins.

More, eventually, from me.

Recently Thomas Pluck — tommysalami on Twitter — released a book called Blade of Dishonor, and he chose to forego submitting it to agents or publishers in favor of releasing it himself as a bonafide author-publisher. Here he stops by to talk about why he did that, and how.

When I was a kid, I loved the Choose Your Own Adventure books. You know the ones, where you chose what the character did next. With the catchy tagline YOU are the star of the story. Choose from 38 possible endings! it was hard to resist, especially back when home video games all looked like Tamagotchi spiders having a pixelated orgy on your little TV screen. The books were very popular, but they weren’t for everyone. Enjoying them didn’t make you a smarter reader or a less creative one. They were just a new kind of book on the spinner rack.

And that is what indie publishing is like. Just one more choice for authors to make. And let’s not divide ourselves by saying “trad author” or “indie author” or “indie/trad genetically spliced hybrid lizard-monkey author.” We’re authors. That’s what we do. We auth. Some of us will be published by Hachette, others by Carina Press, others by Angry Robot, and others will do it themselves. It’s a business decision, like whether you hire a power-player real estate agent or sell your house yourself.

DIY is the choice I made for my debut novel BLADE OF DISHONOR, a pulp thriller starring Rage Cage Reeves, an MMA fighter who comes home from Afghanistan to find his grandfather embroiled in a battle between ninja and samurai over sword lost in World War II. I chose indie for a number of reasons, one of which is that the action-adventure section of the bookstore is meager. My used bookstore has one, but in Barnes & Noble and my favorite local, Watchung Booksellers, there are a few books stuck in Fiction/Lit or in the Suspense section, usually a subset of mystery, and they are Industries like Clive Cussler who need no introduction. It would have been a tough sell as a debut novelist, especially what one reader calls “an updated ’80s action movie written by Raymond Chandler and Robert E. Howard.”

I prefer indie publishing to “self-publishing” because at least five people worked on Blade of Dishonor. I hired pro designer Jaye Manus to format the e-book. She’s designed books for Lawrence Block and Chuck Dixon. She also edited the book. Chad Eagleton, Holly West, Neliza Drew, Josh Stallings and David Cranmer all contributed as first readers, proofreaders, and creative consultants. The cover was painted by Roxanne Patruznick to look like the garish pulp novels of the ’70s and ’80s like BLACK SAMURAI and THE RAT BASTARDS and BROWN SUGAR BROOKDALE #17: TITTY TITTY BANG BANG*.

I’m lucky enough to be friends with Suzanne Dell’Orto, who designs print books for a living and jumped at the chance to design a flashy pulp novel. Suzanne designed the cover and interior of the print book.

None of this was done for free; some was done for barter, some for a cut of the sales. Writing is a business. You can trade first reading, story editing, and proofreading with fellow authors whose work blows you away. You can hire Jaye, or another designer, for about $150 for a full novel. Editing is more expensive, but the best money you will ever spend. Not all readers are good editors. Some people just love a story that flies and overlook plot holes and convoluted developments, ignore clumsy sentences, and so on. You need a pro with experience who will tell you what you don’t want to hear, stuff like “how many cops are gonna be jerks in this book?” and “Which severed limb did he use as a club, and which did he throw like a boomerang?”

Traditionally published authors tell you that they end up reading and editing their book so many times before publication that it feels like they were caught smoking a page of it and got locked in the closet, forced to smoke the entire book as punishment. You will know your book’s smell. And if your book misses a few spots with the washcloth, when it bothers to shower at all, you will know it. And you will have to fix it yourself.

The other thing authors will tell you is that they have to do more promotion now than ever. This is the same whether you publish yourself or not. My friend Jenny Milchman took six months off to tour her novel COVER OF SNOW, published by Ballantine books. She hired a publicist herself, she drove her entire family across country to bookstores, making friends with booksellers, offering sweet wine and scrumptious hummus and crackers (which I devoured at her local book signing). Jenny is a mover and a shaker. She wanted a traditional deal and fought for one for ten years, with a book that publishing handles well–a regional murder mystery–but she took the publicity bull by its publicity balls and roped that SOB up tighter than a crab’s ass (which is waterproof).

Some chafe at this, but I loved it. Imagine getting to know all those bookstores! I can’t take that kind of time off, but I have a signing at Watchung Booksellers on Sunday, November 3rd at 4pm. There will be sake and pocky and chop-socky. There may be pie (It may be stolen by ninjas. Arrive early). I have books on consignment in Austin at BookPeople, a fantastic store, especially for crime fiction readers. They will be for sale at the Mysterious Bookshop in NYC. How did I do this? With a courteous email to people who work there. They love books, see. They don’t love prima donnas with chips on their shoulders. You have to act like a publisher, because that is what you are now. Publishers essentially sell on consignment: they take returns. Most bookstores buy at a 40% or 45% discount, which leaves you 55% or 60% of cover price. A steep cut, but you reach readers you’ll never touch otherwise. And you’ll make friends with awesome people who love books.

I’m making this sound too easy, and it isn’t. It took 6 months to write, revise, and edit Blade of Dishonor, a 95,000 word book. During that time I published two story collections, wrote several stories, blogged weekly for a local foodie zine, and a lot more. And held down a full time job where I am on call 24/7. I researched, read, and asked successful authors for advice. I politely contacted book bloggers, review sites, and like-minded weirdos who love samurai films and MMA fights for guest spots, or offered review copies. I made a special page for the book with blurbs from established writers, the snazzy cover, and a tight pitch to show people before the book was published. I carried 20 copies uphill in Albany at Bouchercon, both ways, and sold out of them without pushing one book at friends or strangers. I did however print out posters of the cover and my wife made postcards with Vistaprint, and those were everywhere book promotion was allowed. People came and asked me for copies of the book. (No offense to the bigger publishers, but no one else had sweet book cover posters. Remedy this.) Other writers asked who did my publicity. Yours truly, baby.

It is a lot of work, but it is work that replenishes your enthusiasm for this whole writing thing. And it is the same work that I’ll do when my next book is published traditionally. BURY THE HATCHET, a hardboiled crime thriller, will be pitched to agents soon. In it, Jay Desmarteaux gets out of prison 25 years after taking the fall for the murder of a vicious high school bully, and goes looking for payback and answers with his two bare-knuckled fists. It has no ninjas. It would still make a good movie starring Joe Manganiello (yum yum, amirite ladies?) raising hell in a quiet suburb in a banged-up Challenger, but crime fiction fans are a bigger audience than people who would dig an MMA fighter taking on ninja and samurai and getting dragged into the Kumite deathmatch. Crime fiction fans go to bookstores. Ninja fans tend to collect on internet forums, Facebook groups, and reddit. Easier for an indie publisher to find.

Just remember, if you do it yourself, you have no one to blame but yourself. Never settle for “good enough.” You get one chance to make a good impression on the reader. You earn them with every word, every line, every page. Whether you publish yourself, or team with an editor at a publisher of any size.

YOU are the star of the story.

*an actual story I wrote for Blood & Tacos

Wonderbook deserves its name.

It’s a guide to writing and storytelling so amazing, I have a hard time conjuring words to even describe it. Mostly what comes out of me are sputtering guhs and wuhs with the occasional drawn out whoooooooa. It’s easy to be wowed and cowed by the list of contributors (including folks like Lauren Beukes, Joe Abercrombie, Cat Valente, George R.R. Martin, and oh, that one guy, Neil Gaiman). But to look just at the list of names is like marveling at a fancy brand of chocolate bar without ever taking a bite.

This book is chockablock with sublime bites.

It is a smorgasbord of authorial value — and what’s great is, it doesn’t just take you down the bog-standard here’s how you create compelling characters, here’s how you outline, here’s how you drink yourself into a shame-spiral stupor. It covers that stuff, sure. But this tackles the countless shapes that story can take. This offers an utterly unparalleled look at the elements of character, plot, theme, style, and story. It explores genre and worldbuilding and editing and, and, and. Loaded for bear with examples. (And hey, tiny brag: Blackbirds warrants an itty-bitty mention…)

Endless essays. I’ll be chewing through this dude for a long while, revisiting again and again. And if you pick it up, so will you.

It’s beautiful: a piece of art all on its own.

It’s dense, like baklava.

Oh, and it’s heavy. Like, you could bludgeon a horse with this thing.

Vandermeer and Zerfoss — sounding like a malevolent Vaudeville team — have put together a storytelling guide for the ages.

I am in awe.

You need it.

It’s coming out next week.

In the meantime, though, here’s Jeff to talk more about the book:

1) Where’d the idea for Wonderbook come from?

Ever since Booklife, I’d been thinking about moving from career advice to a book on the craft and art of writing. Then my editor at the time at Abrams Image, Caitlin Kenney, told me they had wanted to publish a writing guide for a while, and so I pitched Wonderbook to them as a follow up to The Steampunk Bible. It seemed like an incredible opportunity to do something unique. Also, Abrams had been really good to me to that point about creative control, so it seemed like a no-brainer. And that held true throughout the entire project. Basically, they gave me the finances to go off and hire my own designers and artists and come back to them with a camera-ready book. They did offer edits on the text and copy-editing/proofing, of course, but they really did just let me bring it to them camera-ready, exactly as I’d envisioned it. In fact, we came in almost 100 pages over our intended page count and I expected to have to cut something but David Cashion, who took over as editor when Kenney left Abrams, made that go smoothly, too.

2) This must’ve been an epic undertaking, so I gotta know: how the hell did you wrangle this thing into existence?

Without a Las Vegas artist named Jeremy Zerfoss I don’t know if it could’ve happened. He has a playful pop art sensibility that’s flexible enough to do a variety of things, and he was willing to collaborate with me for over two years on the project, working from my crude rough sketches. Having World Fantasy Award winning artist John Coulthart as a design consultant to stabilize and bring structure to the layout was also essential. Then I knew I wanted the book to be layered—to make use of the margins for notes and extras, to include sidebar essays by other writers like Neil Gaiman and Ursula K. Le Guin, to weave in a running commentary by little cartoon characters (Jeremy’s invention), and for the images to be a mix of functional diagrams, functional art, and decorative art—with some diagrams pushing beyond beginner/intermediate level. So, it was imperative to have the ability to make adjustments throughout the layout stage so main text, image, and subsidiary text matched up. It was also a process of delaying at times to let ideas mature, to think about the text you’ve written—and to run it by my first readers and my dear friend Matthew Cheney, who is extraordinary when it comes to thinking about creative writing, and many other things. I also got to test parts of it at Shared Worlds, the teen SF/F writing camp I help run, even though the book’s not specifically for teens. But it’s true Jeremy and I began to joke about the process through a series of images on facebook, to relieve stress and because I think subconsciously we were afraid the project would never end.

3)  I know this is like choosing a favorite child, pet, or ice cream flavor, but what’s your favorite page from this book?

The lifecycle of a story two-pager is definitely a favorite. You can see from this image that we went through a process to get from cartoonish but gross to something…cuter. And I like how it ties in with the Resurrected Story diagram near the end of the book, which turned out, I think, just gorgeous. But it is tough—I kinda like the nutso page of Action in Dialogue, with its variations on “Halt, thief!” And then for stuff that came to us from other people, Michael Cisco’s The Zero’s Relapse, taking the piss out of Joseph Campbell’s Mono Myth still makes me laugh out loud.

4)  Can you give us a taste from the book? A paragraph you love, or a random paragraph, or however you care to choose it.

In general, one thing I like is how Facebook affected the text. Like, I posted a paragraph about description on fb, and Margo Lanagan pointed out another option, so I just included her quote about it in that section. So, that aspect of the text acquiring depth and layering in unique ways is kind of cool. In terms of a specific paragraph, I like this one quite a bit because it is part of a running story within the narrative involving a talking penguin, who also appears in the images at times, so the reader gets this kind of embedded meta-story that instructional but fun too. The art accompanying this, by Jeremy Zerfoss of course, is, in this case, mostly decorative.

Scene time blossoms within the reader, triggered by your level of control over your material. A fistfight (wingfight?) between our friend the talking penguin (let’s call him Fred) and his nemesis Danger Duck might play out in seconds in real, objective time but seem to take long, fascinating minutes in the context of your story, as you draw out every detail of every slapping blow and every bead of feather-sweat knocked off in the process. You might slow things down even further by opening up the fight scene to show us a glimpse of Fred’s first wingfight as a chick. Or, sped up, the scene might be dismissed in a couple of lines, depending on your purpose in telling us about the fight. Perhaps it’s the aftermath you need the reader to fully understand. The important thing is that, in going back over your first draft, you know what you wanted to accomplish.

5) Anything get left on the cutting room floor for a Wonderbook Two: Fantasy Boogaloo?

We couldn’t fit an editor roundtable dissecting a promising story by a new writer, with participants including Ellen Datlow, Asimov’s editor Sheila Williams, Nick Mamatas, Gardner Dozois, James Patrick Kelly, Liz Gorinsky, Paula Guran, and my wife Ann VanderMeer. It was a case of the visual aspect making it take up over 30 or 40 pages, which we just didn’t have if we wanted the book to breathe. So that’ll run in a more basic form onWonderbooknow.com when it goes live on October 15 and then in a more visual form once Jeremy Zerfoss gets finished with it, that’s a bit like this example.

…Now you do a rain dance.

Or, and stick with me now, you can do something far more productive to pass that time. If we’re talking me, I vote for that, but if you’re really into superstition and deific intervention, I’m not going to judge you. Out loud. Where you can hear me.

If you’re not so into wild gesticulation, salt over the shoulder, and sacrifice (human or otherwise)—or even if you are but want options—here’s a few suggestions to get you through that eternal period after the book is pitched and sent out.

Write Another Book

This is advice primarily for those authors who intend to have more than one book out a year. This may not apply to you. If you are one of those Richard Castle types, then I suggest you ignore this, kick back with a glass of something that burns going down (not gasoline, though), and practice looking smug.

For the rest of you, ask yourself this: once your book is out (think positive!), do you intend for that book to be the only book you put out that year? Or ever? No? You want more books, right?

When did you intend to write it?

I find that the point when I submit a book to an editor or to my agent—and yes, this is a habit going all the way back to when I first submitted Blood of the Wicked, my first (publishable, I won’t lie) book, to my queried agents—is the perfect point to work on a new book. This is my default choice.

Here’s why: say your book is out there, and it’s read, and the note comes back. Dear you— the market isn’t great for this/this has a lot of potential/I don’t rep this kind of book exactly, what else do you have? Love, agent/editor of choice.

What are you going to say? “Erm, nothing,” seems to be the default. “If you can give me six months, I can write something?”

The agent/editor shrugs, says to go ahead and pitch when you’ve got something, but who the hell knows what the market will be doing in six months, anyway?

Or you pitch that second book you’ve got half-way or completely written. (Some agents/editors get back within a few weeks, others within a few months, still others sometime in the next two quarters.) The agent/editor then sees that not only do you have the drive to write more than just the one break-out book, but you are treating the writing aspect as a discipline, and you have multiple ideas.

But What Book Should I Write Next?

As much as I’d love to treat this like there’s one solid answer to ease all your woes, there just isn’t. Every author will have different advice here. It really comes down to your speed of writing, your ideas, and an educated guess.

As a rule, I like to suggest that authors write something different than their submitted book. If you just sent out a science-fiction romance, why not give another genre a try? (This is best utilized when your chosen agent represents multiple genres, as a note.)

If you’re keen on writing romance, then pick your choice from the wide array of sub-genres: historical, contemporary, fantasy, urban fantasy, western, and so on. If you want to try something from a different genre or category entirely—Young Adult? New Adult? Speculative fiction? Mysteries?—then do it.

Another option is to write the second book in your series—if what you just submitted was series. This can be really nice for prospective agents/editors. It shows that you’re going somewhere with the series, that you can keep writing, that you’re dedicated, and it can allow them to make a marketing choice that includes quicker release days (you know, for when your book eventually sells).

It’s a gamble, but this career always is. What you need to decide is if you want to put all your wordeggs in one fragile basket, or if you choose to have options to pitch.

Karina Cooper’s School of Practical Experience

I was too busy to do a rain dance. Here’s what I did: the very instant I finished the manuscript that would become my first book, I plotted and began writing the second book. At the same time, I was lobbing query after query to prospective agents. I maintained 4 different queries out at any given time—but I kind of recommend 7, as a rule. I was lazy.

Choosing to write the second book was definitely a gamble, and it’s not a path that I would recommend for anyone who wants a safer alternative. In my case, I’m weirdly stubborn and a little bit inclined to think I’m invincible—don’t worry, this job knocks that out of you quick—and I did it anyway. What worked in my favor is that I write legitimately fast. My baseline is four books a year (not including novellas), and I’m generally content doing that. This meant that even if Blood of the Wicked never sold, leaving the second book in the lurch, it wasn’t a huge loss (except to my pride) because I could write another book fairly quickly.

I honestly believed I would sell. Fortunately, I was right.

But here’s how it works for me now, repeat published as I am and officially an award-winning author (so you have to listen to me, because I’m legit; you can tell by the ‘Fucking’ now placed between Karina and Cooper in all official correspondence*). I currently, as we speak, have a book out on submission. Here’s the steps I took:

1. Get the email agent has submitted book.
2. Freak the fuck out, and yes, do a rain dance. Shut up.
3. Plot and begin writing a whole new book in a completely different genre.

Number three is especially important, because for me, it passes the time while I wait to hear back from my agent about the progress of the book. If I didn’t focus on meeting my daily page count goal, I would be obsessing over each day as it slipped away. Some books sell very fast. Some don’t. During summer, all bets are off.

If this submission does not sell, it will sting, but it will not be the end of my career—or even more than a bit of a delay. At best, I’ll have a new project to send my agent. At worst, I’ll have excellent headway on said project, so that I can send it to her sooner rather than later.

If I waited for official word to come back, I’d find myself in one of two positions:

1. officially committed to a new series, which means I’d have to start work on book 2 right away, thereby holding any other projects on a delay until I can finish it; or,
2. stuck twiddling my thumbs until the reply comes back with a no, and have even more time between my last sale and a new one since I’ll have wasted these weeks/months and still have to write a new book.

No matter how you look at it, I’m too impatient for either. If I’m lucky enough to sell, not only will I have this new project mostly done by that time, clearing the way to send this one out on submission and write book #2 of the new sale after, but I’ll be looking forward to two contracts in the near future, rather than one for now and another sometime much later.

Win/win.

Work On Your Platform

I hate, loathe and abominate this option. I always feel like it’s so disingenuous to go out with the express purpose of gathering an audience—a veritable Pied Piper melody of wordbitchery and personal opinions. However, no matter which way you slice it, this has to be done. You can’t really release a book into a vacuum. Or, well, you can but why would you?

My two favorite ways to work on any sort of “hi, I exist!” effort are through a personal (or group) blog and through Twitter. These work best for me because I’m chatty as whoa, damn. Your platform of choice might vary: Facebook, if you ask me, is made of Satan’s tears and soured whiskey gone bad, but if you like it, get on with your bad self.

As we all know, Herr Wendig created a hell of a platform with this here blog, Terribleminds. Obviously, he spent years doing so, and you won’t reach the same amount of people if you’re only just starting and in limited time, but a blog is a viable method to get your name, your voice and your sense of self out there.

Problem is, this requires more words be shuffled along from your brain through your fingers, into your recording device of choice, and lobbed into the great, wide world that is the trackless waste of the web.

If you’re at all like me, this is a slow process with not enough pay off in a fast enough manner. Like writing pages every day, it requires discipline, perseverance, and some modicum of wit—without trollskinning yourself by relying on rage, mockery or bullying to do it.

Still, you’ve got to exist on the net. Readers, these days, expect a certain amount of personal investment of your time. They like to know that you exist, that you’re a real human being, and that you’re more or less in touch with the world. While I don’t recommend setting up cameras in every room of your house and parading around semi-nude—do a rain dance! a rain dance!—I do find that reader investment really does alter when you make an effort to walk among them. Like normal people.

No, we aren’t normal. That’s not the point. Sometimes, you have to wear the hat.

It’s hard to be introverted in an extroverted business, and most authors are—at least in varying degrees—introverted. We’re all some level of hermit, but the key is in behaving like we aren’t. It’s not all acting. After all, we genuinely do enjoy our readers (or at least that we are read), so it really does behoove us to reach out now and again. If it means having to play a part, then play it to the hilt.

And they said all those years hanging out with actors wouldn’t give me anything but herpes**. Show what they know!

Commit Seppuku****

I understand that you need a friend to hold a blade over your head to ensure you die quickly. I also gather that said blade needs to be wicked sharp, and said friend wicked skilled, or else you get to sit there and bleed in excruciating pain while your unskilled friend with the dull blade hacks your head off after a few tries.

I don’t recommend this option. Nobody likes a one-book-wonder. Write more books instead.

Make Friends

Confession: I have excellent author friends.

Second confession: I befriended them mostly by finding them online on various social platforms and reaching out in my usual balls-out way (which is to say, without overt fear, not with my pants down about my ankles—although I remain a strong proponent of pantslessness as a rule) and striking up conversations with those who weren’t bothered by said balls-outness.

See Work On Your Platform above.

It’s really very hard to survive in this world without friends. While I’m not encouraging anyone to go out and cultivate fake friendships just to get people to talk about you, I am talking about finding like-minded individuals who will understand you when you blog about depression, who will cheer for you when your book comes out, and who will be made happy when you cheer for their book release days.

This job gets hard at times. Socially, mentally, even physically when your wrist starts exhibiting RSI symptoms or your back compacts from too many hours with ass in chair. Have you ever experience chair-ass? You will. You will.

Friends who Get It™ are invaluable. They will goad you when you need to be goaded, cheer you up when you need cheering, keep you informed about changes in the industry simply be doing what they do best—which is the same thing you should be doing best, which is working hard and paying attention and making friends. They will remind you, through their own foibles and neurosis, that you are not alone.

Sometimes, they have whole months of absence from their blogs and they will call you a friend and let you write a blog post on their multi-bajillion readership blog platform.

Look, I’m not saying that you should find friends you can use. What I’m trying to say here is that nobody can operate in a vacuum anymore. Writers have a hard job—living in other peoples’ heads for so long is taxing, to say nothing of the rest of the business (which is, I am convinced, intent on fracturing my soul).  We get tapped for energy, we lose steam, and we need help. We all lean on each other.

Chuck needed a hand filling some guest slots, and I had stuff to say. It nets me views—how you doin’?—as well as allows me to share some bits of wisdom for you. I could offer Chuck a space on my blog in exchange, but that really wouldn’t serve him—instead, I make it a point to talk about his new books when I tweet, because I luuuuurve Chuck and want him to succeed.

Do you know how many authors climbed out of the woodwork to send me messages of love and support when my depression hit somewhere near the bottom? Do you know how many tweets I send to authors who are feeling angry, frustrated, depressed or scared about the world and their place in it? (We are all basket cases, don’t even try to lie).

Authors understand authors. The sooner you find yourself part of a healthy author community, that happier you will be. Take my word on that.

Don’t Forget Your Other Life

You know, family. Friends. Food. Whiskey.

It might not take the sting from waiting, but don’t forget they’re there and hopefully waiting for you to succeed, too. Give them hugs. It helps.

Submission is scary. It’s a long, long, eternal, forever silence from your agent/editor, and no amount of rational thinking will make that easier. All you can do is busy yourself with more work, with the family waiting for you to feed them, with social interaction.

Before you’ll know it, you’ll get the response you’re waiting for.

Dear you— I love your work. Let’s do magic. Love, the agent/editor who wants to sign you.

Footnotes:

* … Not really.

** … They totally didn’t say that. Well, I mean, some people said that, but it wasn’t about you, high school theater friends. They meant Hollywood***.

*** … Sorry, Hollywood. I love you, Tom Hiddleston/Benedict Cumberbatch/Olivia Wilde/Emma Stone/Robert Downey, Jr.

**** … Please don’t commit seppuku. Seriously.

Author Stuff

After writing happily ever afters for all of her friends in school, Karina Cooper eventually grew up (sort of), went to work in the real world (kind of), where she decided that making stuff up was way more fun (true!). She is the author of dark and sexy paranormal romances, steampunk adventures, crossover urban fantasy, and writes across multiple genres with mad glee. Her award winning series, The St. Croix Chronicles, is the RT Reviewers Choice Awards recipient for Best Steampunk Novel 2012.

One part glamour, one part dork and all imagination, Karina is also a gamer, an avid reader, a borderline hermit and an activist. She co-exists with a husband, a menagerie and a severe coffee habit. Visit her at www.karinacooper.com, because she says so.

If you like what she has to say—or if you just want to do a good deed—then sally forth and acquire The Mysterious Case of Mr. Strangeway, the prequel to her award-winning steampunk series. Half of her proceeds from the novella will be donated to the Make a Wish Foundation.

This is worth a read.

It’s a NY Times article.

Suggests that the government shutdown was orchestrated by forces inside and outside the government. Koch Brothers, so-called “grassroots” organizations, and so forth.

It’s also worth spreading around.

Because these people don’t care about you.

They don’t care about the country.

They care about their bottom line. This is a faux-populist movement controlled by corporate interests who are on par with the mine barons — they are comfortable exploiting you, denying you health care, and kicking this country in the gut until it coughs up the results they want.

I don’t know that any of this is actionable in a legal way — I mean, I’m a little tickled at the thought that this is treasonous behavior and punishable as such, though I suspect I’m being woefully naive on that front. I do know that we all can take action.

For one thing, we can boycott Koch Brothers products.

We can also vote (though gerrymandering and other nasty tricks have helped ensure that Tea Party members are almost preternaturally safe). Just the same — peeling away their politicians one by one is a value-add. If this is a game of inches, so be it.

We can write to our moderate Republican politicians and demand they excise this tapeworm from within the bowels of their party.

We can keep up the pressure and spread stuff like this around.

The ACA has already saved lives: Author Jay Lake talks about it here.

Author Kameron Hurley talks about the horror novel you’ll never have to live:

Going without health care.

Anyway.

I’m heading out of the country soon — so, you know, let’s try to keep it together until I get back. I don’t want to fly home to find a dystopian novel made real, jeez.

National Novel Writing Month — aka the gibbered Lovecraftian utterance, “Nanowrimo.”

It fast approaches.

You may be partaking in this epic endeavor which asks that you write a novel-length work of fiction of 50,000 words (or more!) during the month of November. (I suspect I will inadvertently be partaking, actually. I’ll need to get 50,000 words down that month, too!)

If you are partaking, I’ll be here all November, and I think I’ll keep the blog posts during that time shorter and sweeter — a month’s worth of motivational boots-in-your-boothole to keep you on track and slugging away at the word count.

(Worth noting that NaNoWriMo is not for everyone. Everyone has a process unique to them, a way to get things done that is particularly and peculiarly their own. If NaNoWriMo feels like hammering a circle peg in a square hole, don’t sweat it — find another way forward.)

If you are getting ready for the wordery-nerdey coming up —

I got some quick tips for you.

Ramp Up The Word Count

If you are not yet putting words down daily, you need to flex them penmonkey muscles, so that, come November, you can pop open your word processor and say, “TWO TICKETS TO THE PEN SHOW,” which will earn you weird looks because:

a) you’re saying this to the cat and b) are pen shows even a real thing?

Anyway.

You need to work out. You need to exercise.

You must practice writing every day.

And build on the quantity of words you put down.

Start with 100.

And add a 100 more words every day until you’re approaching 2000 per day.

Doesn’t matter what you write, though I’d advise you keep it in the “fiction” category — fiction writing is a discipline all its own, I find.

Build that muscle. Gain momentum.

Take Your Characters For A Test-Drive

NaNoWriMo doesn’t give you a lot of time to get to know your characters. As such, it’s time to take those bad motherfuckers out for a test drive.

Take a character and write them into fiction unrelated to the novel you plan to write. Plop them into conflicted, challenging situations. You’ll find the character’s voice, demeanor, you’ll get to see what kind of choices they make. Run them through fictional gauntlets.

It’s a good way to learn about your characters before you actually drop them into your proper novel. (And, hey, bonus points: you might find that you’ve written some dialogue or some description you might actually want to keep and use later.)

Prep Your Story In Whatever Way Tickles Your Pink Parts

(Related: 25 Ways To Plot, Plan, and Prep Your Story.)

No one perfect planning-and-plotting method exists when it comes to your novel. Outlines, mind maps, Pinterest boards, hallucinogenic dream journeys into the world of the machine elves — hey, whatever makes your grapefruit squirt. But find a way. NaNoWriMo requires working to a schedule and hammering out word count in a relatively compressed amount of time, and you’ll find that comes a lot easier when you have some kind of map — even if that map is just a series of cryptic Post-It notes Scotch-taped to the family dog.

(One thing I would suggest, however, is that when plotting a novel, let the characters lead the way. My oft-repeated refrain is that plot is Soylent Green — it’s made of people. Characters will do things and in their actions and dialogue will create the events and complications that build the plot of your story. Don’t fit characters into a plot. Characters are the plot.)

Pitch Your Story In A Single Tweet

One of the questions I ask in the Thursday interviews here at the blog is for the writers to describe their books in a single 140-character tweet.

And I actually think many have some up with some really cool loglines, this way.

You need to distill down your story to a single sniper’s bullet — this idea isn’t meant to be comprehensive or exhaustive or tell the entire story. It’s just a hook. That hook is ideal for selling the story later on — but right now, it’s also ideal for crystallizing the idea in your mind.

(You don’t need to be married to the 140-character limit, but I’d say to keep the description to 100 words or less. From a logline to a very short synopsis.)

Narrative Incubation Time

Take time to think about your story.

This is, for me, narrative incubation time where you let your brain off its leash to frolic in the meadow and roll around in whatever creative poop it can find.

How you accomplish this — the task it takes to unlock this Creative Mode — is on you. I like walking, running, showering, mowing the lawn. You might like chopping wood, lifting weights, and currying a horse. That guy over there might get in the right headspace during acts of vigorous masturbation, algorithmic hive-mind design, and hunting humans for sport HEY WAIT YOU’RE ONE OF THOSE FILTHY ROBOTS AGAIN OH SONOFABITCH.

(And yes, I’m suggesting that robots masturbate a lot. TRUE STORY LOOK IT UP.)

Some Posts To Lok At:

25 Things You Should Know About NaNoWriMo

25 Things To Do Before Starting Your Next Novel

25 Things You Should Know About Your Story’s Stakes

25 Things You Should Know About Outlining

25 Turns, Pivots, And Twists To Complicate Your Story

25 Questions To Ask As You Write

25 Reasons I Hate Your Main Character

The Grand Adventure To Find Your Voice

Fuck The Straight Line: How Story Rebels Against Expectation

The Hardest Writerly Truth Of All

And finally:

50 Rantypants Snidbits Of Writing And Storytelling Advice

Or, If You Don’t Have Time For NaNoWriMo…

How To Push Past The Bullshit And Write That Goddamn Novel: A Very Simple No Fuckery Writing Plan To Get Shit Done.

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