Is live.

Click here to go ask me questions.

Anything at all! Er, hence the name. AMA.

Ask. Me. Anything.

I’ll pop back in later to answer them.

Er, at Reddit, not here.

Because, y’know.

Reddit.

AMA.

And so forth.

Now fly, you fools!

I think I bummed some folks out last week with my “hard truths about writing and publishing” post. The goal, of course, was not to send you under your desk, blubbering into a bottle of cheap vodka while warming yourself by the fires of your burning manuscript, but rather, to present the sometimes harsh realities that you will need to overcome.

Or, as I am wont to put it, it was to teach you to harden the fuck up, Care Bear.

Just the same, I’d like to now apply the ice pack to your bruised cheek.

For all the seeming hopelessness of the publishing industry and one’s entry into (or around) it, it’s actually not at all hopeless. Difficult is not the same thing as hopeless, nor should we assume that “difficult” translates to “so hard it’s not worth doing.”

If you want to be a writer, fuck anybody who tells you differently:

It’s worth doing.

Not just because of some namby-pamby selfish “Waah it’s what I want” tantrum but rather, because stories make the world go around. Because stories can change us — both the reader and the writer. Because writing is everywhere: nearly anything that’s ever happened has happened because someone wrote some shit down. And also —

BECAUSE FUCK YEAH, WRITERS.

So, that being said, I’d like to note that (in the voice of the get-rich-quick infomercial), you too can make money at writing. No, seriously. I’m not fucking around. We writers like to go on and on about how it’s a poor man’s game and writing is a thankless job and here we are eating ramen noodles out of a hobo’s codpiece and we have the same hourly rate as those poor bastards who built the Pyramids, blah blah blah. But that’s just melodrama because, hey, we writers trend toward it like drunks veering toward the nearest bar. (Conflict is our bread and butter, after all.)

In terms of making money as a writer, I do all right. In fact, I’m doing better every year.

And I think you can, too.

And so, I figure, it’s time for some general tips on not just being a writer but, rather, being a professional writer. Further, being a professional writer who can do more than just buy an annual steak dinner with your earnings.

Here we go.

Speed: Learn to write with some zip in your fingers. A thousand words per hour is a good base level and not at all difficult to achieve.

Competency: It should go without saying that being a professional writer requires being a writer and storyteller of some competency. Some “full-time” jobs allow you to train a skill whilst on the job, whether we’re talking about mastering Excel or artificially inseminating cranky ostriches. Writing is unfortunately not like that. Which then leads to…

Time: Learning to write well and with some speed means this takes time. Do not expect to be one of those “overnight successes,” a creature as rare as a Bigfoot riding a unicorn on a saddle made of leprechaun leather. A writer’s so-called “overnight success” is just the tip of the iceberg exposed, while the rest of the writer’s time and effort and narrative R&D exist in a massive glacial mountain beneath the darkened waters. Just because the writer appeared on the world’s radar doesn’t mean that poor fucker hasn’t been working his fingers bloody for quite some time.

No, Really, I Mean It: This can be a slow process. It was about a ten year journey to go from “freshly-minted, ruddy-cheeked penmonkey” to “battle-hardened full-timer with stories wound into his bloody beard-tangle.” Be ready to invest the time and effort.

Per Word: The base level professional rate for a writer is five cents a word. This number hasn’t changed for the last twenty years — a troubling lack of  development there, but it is what it is and we’re just going to have to work with it.

Average Novel Advance: That’s around $5000. If we are to assume that the average novel length is around 80,000 words, then a novel earns at a slighter higher rate than what I noted above — a bit over $0.06 / word.

Hourly Rate: If you combine all the above, what you find is that writing 1000 competent words per hour at that base level rate earns you around $50-60 per hour before editing. (Editing dings that a little, though the more competent a writer you are, the less editing will cut into your time. Though no matter how competent you become, editing should never equal zero-percent of your time. You are not perfect. Good editors are like gold. Shut up and take your medicine.)

$41,600: That is your magic number. It is an annual salary. It is not a rich person’s annual salary. But it’s comfortable enough. At fifty dollars an hour, that requires you to work 16 hours a week. This is, of course, overly simplistic. It does not factor in editing, marketing, blogging, tweeting, drinking, flagellating yourself, masturbating, or general pantsless mayhem. But, given that the average workweek is 40 hours, devoting 16 hours to only writing leaves you with 24 hours in the week that can go toward all that other authorial twaddle.

Behold, The Novelist: That 16 hours a week translates roughly to 16,000 words per week. Which translates to five weeks worth of work to get the first draft of an 80,000 word novel complete. (Yes, this is easier said than done. We’re talking perfect world scenario, here, but one that becomes more achievable with an increase in those two fundamentals mentioned earlier: time and competency.) This translates to ten novels a year. Which is ridiculous and you’re not going to do it. You probably can’t write that many a year, and you almost certainly cannot sell that many a year. Which puts our annual salary in a bit of a bind, doesn’t it?

The Language Of Investments: A bit of a sidetrack, for a moment, so bear with me. It’s a little stodgy to use the word investment, but fuck it, it works, and we use the words that work because WE ARE WRITER, HEAR US ROAR OR MAYBE WATCH US WRITE I DUNNO YOU SHUT YOUR GODDAMN WORD-FACE. One’s writing career — the efforts, the time, the stories themselves, and the writer that culminates through all of that — should be seen as an investment. Pay in early, it yields bigger as time goes on. You will earn more as time goes on and as you become more capable — and as you produce more work and gain more audience and garner new contacts in your industry. It’s like a role-playing game. You eventually level up and gain weapons like THE BATTLE-SCYTHE OF STRUNK-WHITE (+2 against stylistic errors).

Diversify Your Portfolio: Okay, back to the problem at hand, which is that writing ten novels a year is not sustainable, nor particularly marketable — but, by the same token, that old-school “write one book a year” is problematic in that it doesn’t get us to our target salary. What this means is you should be prepared to write across a variety of media and platforms. Train yourself to write comics, games, television shows, films, articles, VCR repair manuals, whatever. The value here is that income arrives from multiple sources and that should any one source dry up, you have others on which you may depend.

The Danger of Self-Publishing: Self-publishing is all risk. You put something “out there,” it may earn you anywhere from, ohh, zero dollars to eleven-billionty dollars. Publishing through a traditional publisher offers a reduced royalty but a stable advance — meaning, you’ll earn your five grand or more regardless of whether you ever sell a single copy. Certainly you’ll find those who have made serious bank off of self-publishing, but the nature of the risk (i.e. the chance to earn very little at all) means it’s not a stable path toward the annual salary. This is a “slow and steady win the race” post, not a “fingers crossed let’s jump out of the plane and build our parachute on the way down” post.

The Self-Pub Numbers: Self-pub advocates speak of the Amazon 70/30 royalty split (70% to the author) as the golden reason to self-publish. That rate is notable, considering traditional publishing royalties are less than the reverse of that (meaning, sub-30%). But, that percentage isn’t everything: 70% of $100 is worse than 25% of $1000. E-books as your only vector of sales is doable, but risky — physical books are still over half the sales. Trad-pub gets you there and on bookshelves, and as such, royalty isn’t everything. I can keep 100% of my royalties if I sell out of my garage, but one assumes I’m only going to end up selling to squirrels and hobos that way.

And Yet, Here I Am Telling You To Self-Publish: Behold, the hybrid approach that I often tout as being the best way forward for the average penmonkey: yes, I think you should try traditional publishing first (for a number of reasons). But I also think you should self-publish on the side. Self-publishing is great for stories too risky to entice a traditional publisher. Short story collection? Novella? Serialized content? Insane manifesto? Transmedia smut pamphlets? Living memes that can reprogram the human brain with but the push of a button? Point is, that royalty rate I note is indeed still a good one, so this will let you take advantage of it without relying entirely upon it. Use the self-pub environment as an experimental laboratory.

On Writing For Free: Writers, like hikers, can die from exposure. Writing for free has value but you have to have to be able to see that value and ensure that it’s not a meaningless risk: anyone who asks you to work for them and promises exposure is whistling lies through their asshole. As I have said before, if you’re going to be exposed, expose yourself: control the message and the release. When in doubt: don’t write for free.

Attitude: It’s worth noting that your attitude through all this is very important. Writer’s block doesn’t exist, but general malaise and depression and disinterest do, and those must be combated. Further, you gotta treat this like work. Meaning, like a job. Few people let life get in the way of their work and yet so many wannabe professional writers let life get in the way of their writing — treat it like a career, not a hobby, not a creative pursuit, not an obsession. If you treat it like a career, it will eventually yield the fruits of a career.

ABW, Always Be Writing: All of this only works if you write a whole lot. Like, all the fucking time. And when you’re not writing you’re performing tasks that are in support of your writing (which is the basis of the entire career). You descend every day into the word-arena and kick a whole lotta ass while you’re in there. Some days you lose the battle, but over time, you win more and more. You’re painting with shotguns. You’re taking multiple-shots-at-goal.

Always. Be. Writing.

…

And that’s it. Time, effort, competency, instinct, diversity. Not easy to do, but also not as impossible as many would have you believe. You want to be a paid professional writer — full-time, not starving or pooping in a tin-pail like some weirdo in a barn — then it’s totally doable.

Now get back to work, penmonkey.

Asking for blurbs is, for me anyway, a very uncomfortable thing. You’re often asking peers or even your own authorial heroes to carve out precious time to write you what amounts to marketing copy. I have to blacken my Shame Sensors with the heel of a heavy boot just to get up the gumption to ask another author for a blurb. (Further, I’ll be asking for blurbs very very soon on my YA book, which is already making me itchy because I always feel like such an ass.)

I am now in the weird position of having authors ask me for blurbs.

This is totally fine and further, a totally awesome problem to have.

I have blurbed books gleefully and will continue to do so because YAY BOOKS.

Just the same, here are a few tips. Ready? Here we go.

When you email someone, be polite.

Use words like, “please,” and “thank you.”

Do not write an email that sounds like it assumes the blurb is forthcoming.

Or, worse, like they owe it to you.

That’s not to say you have to slather up the potential blurber’s nether-anatomy.

Just be polite.

Understand it is a favor of time and effort and act accordingly.

Do not be a human spam-bot. Be a fountain, not a drain.

Mass mails are not a good way to ask. Neither are public social media channels.

Finally, when the potential blurber gets back to you and says, I can’t or won’t do that, sorry, good luck, your response shouldn’t be a two-word:

“Why not?”

Because when you ask that, you’re going to get a less-than-pleasant response.

I don’t mean to put anyone off of asking me or asking any author.

But a modicum of politeness and grace goes a long, long way in this industry.

PLEASE THANKS BYEBYE.

*runs off to psyche self up to send out mails that ask for blurbs aaaauuugh*

As noted, I heard about new Star Wars and I was originally a little bit “meh.” That is, until I realized that the new film is going to be coming into my son’s life at around the same time that the original film did for me. Suddenly I envisioned some kind of crazy father-son generational sharing thing where we can both high-five over our own respective trilogies and, I dunno, frown at that weird “prequel” trilogy that keeps hanging out in the corner and throwing up in a potted plant. Right? Right. HA HA HA STUPID JAR-JAR HIGH-FIVE, SON.

Anyway.

So. Disney has the films. Michael Arndt is writing.

And, until proven otherwise, J.J. Abrams is directing.

This is not a post about J.J. Abrams directing. (For the record, I think it’s a good fit. He appreciates the magic and mystery of storytelling, and to me any weakness he may have had has leaned toward the script side of things, and that shouldn’t a problem here.)

What I want to talk about is what you or I would do with the new Star Wars film. A pontification, if you will, of what direction to send the new films. This is always dangerous territory because you set up expectations and then when a thing doesn’t meet your needlessly elevated expectations, you get mad (“I bought this dog but I wanted a duck, ZERO STARS”).

Still, fuck it. I am geek, hear me yawp.

Here’s what I’d do with the new Star Wars films, should anybody let me near them.

• The films must continue the generational advancement of the Skywalker clan. Which means: Luke or Leia’s gotta have kids and this film has to be about one or several of them.

• Let’s see a female protagonist all up in here. A Skywalker daughter.

• Doubly interesting if it’s Leia’s daughter. Luke more in the background. Hey, why not?

• Since we’re getting all progressive up in here, I think it’s time to banish the racist miasma that hangs over the films (particularly from the prequels) and cut all the white-washing. White-washing is a big thing in film (“Hey, that character’s black but in the film we can make them white for no other reason except we’re all white and yay whiteys!”), and if Star Wars proudly does no such thing, maybe it’ll lead by example.

• Fuck politics. Listen, I give the prequels credit for actually being unusually on-point in terms of our own political situation here in the country, particularly post 9-11. Good job. Except, it was really, really boring. Listen, politics make for a great Extended Universe thing. I’ll read your Star Wars novel/comic/pamphlet about galactic politics (okay I won’t), but in the films? Cut it out.

• Let’s make it about adventure. The original trilogy has a great sense of adventure to it — dire, suspenseful adventure, but adventure. The same kind of adventure you feel in the Indiana Jones movies. The kind you don’t feel in the prequels. I want that back. Like, the first trilogy has the vibe of a D&D group coming together — cleric, rogue, paladin, whatever. MORE OF THIS PLEASE.

• No Mara Jade. Actually, let’s ditch the Zahn prequels. I love them. I do. But, yeah, no.

• Fuck that green-screen. Okay, listen, I’m not an idiot: while I think the new Evil Dead film should be given big bloody high-fives for (apparently) filming without any CGI at all, I know in a film like Star Wars you’re can’t escape CGI. But what’s on film is nearly always more effective when the CGI compliments a real set with real objects and real people. No more “actor talking to a tennis ball on a stick that will eventually be replaced with some jabbering alien.”

• Plus, you’ve seen that “photos of impossible places” post, right? Pick three of these places, and film some awesome shit there. You don’t need to invent whole new places with CGI. The real world is full of alien landscapes. Tatooine = Tunisia, remember?

• Also, the style shouldn’t be all glitzy-shiny. Keep the trashed-junk motif of the first three. It felt more real. You can polish it up a little, but it’s been a generation — still okay to showcase a galaxy climbing out of the hole dug by an oppressive Empire.

• Minimal Jedi. The original trilogy highlights the power of the Jedi by minimizing their presence — hell, Anakin Skywalker really did “balance the Force,” because  he basically left the world with two light-side dudes and two dark-side dudes. Then the prequels come along and it’s like EEEE JEDIGASM but before too long it just looks like a bunch of cosplayers running around with glowy boners. Let’s not fast-forward to a time where suddenly it’s Jedi-palooza.

• Write it like a young adult story. Coming of age, whatever. Teens with teen problems.

• I don’t see how you can’t have the Sith as the enemy in some capacity — Sith and the Dark Side are inescapable. But what else? Is this about a resurgent Empire? I feel like we’ve been there, done that. They’re not going to be building a third goddamn Death Star, I mean, c’mon. So, who’s the enemy? What’s the conflict? Emperor’s dead. Vader’s dead. Death Star went kaflooey. The Empire felt pretty gone to me. But evil never dies. The Dark Side remains. So…

• To go back to the teens thing — value in a Jedi Academy story? In the Harry Potter mode? The drama of young Jedi soon compounded by a sinister conspiracy?

• If anyone in the film says “Midichlorians,” I’ll karate kick a theater usher. That poor guy.

• You need all the old actors and characters, but keep all but one to the sidelines. One of them can serve in an Obi-Wan like capacity — the old mentor, Gandalf coming into the world to help save it. The obvious choice is Luke, but damn if I don’t wanna see a cantankerous Han Solo fill that role, instead. But but but — if Luke is sidelined and this is about Leia’s kids then Luke can be the “crazy uncle,” ala Ben Kenobi. Hmm.

So, with all that said —

What would you want to see in the new films?

What would you do, if you were in charge?

I adore loving a book I shouldn’t have any business liking. On paper, The Explorer really isn’t a book for me. But it just proves that good story and strong writing transcend genre, so when the very-wise Kim Curran said, “Try it!” I recognized that she was smarter than I am and I did as she suggested. It’s a brilliant book — funny, desperate, desolate, sad, all in equal measure. Here’s Mister Smythe to tell you all about it — 

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?

I’m James Smythe. I write books, the latest of which is an SF thing called The Explorer. I’ve also worked on video games (doing story, narrative design and level design) and I teach Creative Writing at a university in London.

GIVE US THE 140-CHARACTER STORY PITCH:

Cormac Easton is the first journalist to travel to space. The crew he’s with all die, and he’s left alone, slowly dying. Unless, of course, he can find out how to stop it…

WHERE DOES THIS STORY COME FROM?

A few things. One was me thinking about loneliness and quiet, and wanting to write something set in the loneliest place that I could contemplate. That place turned out to be space (though it could have been the bottom of the ocean – I’ll save that for another time.) The lonely-theme tied in with a life-long love of SF, and a desire to write something that felt like the books I read when I was a kid – or, at least, the way that I remember them.

And I’m getting older. I know it’s a cliché, but I think a lot about age, about what’s happening to my body. I became interested in how the body collapses, and how this thing we generally try to look after only becomes our worst enemy. There’s some of that in the book as well: the nature of time, and how it works with our body to betray us.

HOW IS THIS A STORY ONLY YOU COULD’VE WRITTEN?

I think there’s a lot of me in Cormac. A lot of his dreams and hopes and fears, they were things that I felt when I was younger; and a lot of how he looks back on his life feels true to my own considerations of who I am and what I have done with my life. I know it’s not the be-all and end-all, but he makes up a lot of who this novel is, and I think that maybe only I could have written him the way that he is.

Also: his obsession with teeth. I have good teeth. All of them, nice a straight, blah blah. I am absolutely fucking terrified of them, and dentist, and of anybody touching my teeth. Or looking at them, even. If I’ve written this book right, there’s teeth-related stuff in there that should make anybody with a similarly odontophobic nature (the fancy word justifies my stupid fear) feel exactly the same. Honestly, I shuddered when I was writing those bits.

WHAT WAS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING THE EXPLORER?

Getting inside Cormac’s head. He goes to some much darker places than I do, and he contemplates things that – touch wood – I hope I never have to contemplate. Trying to see my way into his situation was tough at times, especially because I did feel a sense of empathy with him. He’s an asshole at times (as we can all be, I think) but he wants to be better. He wants to do what’s right. And when you throw nasty stuff at a person like that, sometimes it’s hard to see how they’ll react. And sometimes, their reactions are the hardest part of all.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN WRITING THE EXPLORER?

A lot about space and physics and science that I subsequently ignored. I wanted to write something where the science wasn’t necessarily real science. Instead, it had to serve the narrative. That’s what I remember pre-Space Race SF novels doing: they went to Mars in ships with gravity, and they bounced around on the planet and then they jumped over a mountain. The Explorer never gets to those extremes, but every decision made was informed by a) the reality of the situation and then b) whether that worked with what I wanted to put Cormac through in service to the story.

WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT THE EXPLORER?

I love the rest of the crew. I tried to make them so that it didn’t matter who they were, where they came from, what they did: everybody is equal, and everybody (unfortunately) meets the same fate. How they deal with it is different, of course. We’re all broken, and what I put them through breaks them all further and in different ways. I hope that The Explorer is like novels I love to read most, regardless of genre: a story about people, about humanity, just dressed up on a spaceship to nowhere.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY NEXT TIME?

Well, the nature of the story means that I can sort of explore that in another book. Short answer: everything. (And nothing.)

Process-wise? I would almost definitely make the science correct, or at least explained my decision better through the narrative. A few readers haven’t liked what I did with it – or have thought I just got it wrong – so maybe I didn’t make that clear enough. For most readers, they’ve gone with it. Somebody has described the book as science-fantasy (as Star Trek is) and that’s a label that I absolutely embrace.

GIVE US YOUR FAVORITE PARAGRAPH FROM THE STORY:

“I always said that the thing I was saddest about, when they had pretty much stopped printing paper books, was that I couldn’t tell how long was left until the end. I could find out, but that feel, that sensation of always knowing was gone. I used to love the way that the cluster of pages grew thinner in my hand, how I could squeeze it and guess the time it would take until it ended. I loved endings, when they were done well: I loved knowing that it was finished, because that was how it was meant to be. An ending is a completion: it’s a satisfaction all in itself. “

WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOU AS A STORYTELLER?

My next novel is a very different beast: called The Machine, it’s about a woman whose husband has his mind wiped by the titular Machine, and how she tries to rebuild who he is. The Explorer taught me a valuable lesson when writing it: if you embrace the darkness in your story, it hopefully never feels overwhelming. When I began writing it, I was almost afraid of it, tentative in how I dealt with the darker aspects of the story. But the darkness can be used, and it can enhance, and hopefully I’ve used that lesson in The Machine.

And then, after that, the sequel to The Explorer, this time next year. I love it when a sequel subverts what you expect from a story and takes it to a different place entirely. Hopefully this will do exactly that.

The Explorer: Amazon/ B&N / Indiebound

james-smythe.com

@jpsmythe