I received The Indigo King from a good friend for my birthday. It is sitting on a shelf, begging me to read it. Squint your ears really hard and you’ll hear it.

“Andrew… read me. You know you want to. I’m waiting for you.”

It’s a challenge to put it off at all. I’m so ready to read more in the world of the Imaginarium Geographica. James A Owen’s first two books have been well paced, creative, and left me wanting more. Having more and delaying the partaking thereof is, honestly, a real lesson in self control. But I feel like I owe it to the book I had just started. I can’t just abandon it mid-book. Unless I get desperate.

I’ll let you know how I do. I can’t hardly wait. Maybe you should check out book one.

As the world gets smaller–thanks to the so-called “new media,”–artists need an established community of supporters now more than ever.

There are great stories arising every day — Andrew Osenga’s Letters to the Editor projects (link). Eric Peters fundraising for his next album (link). The Brite Revolution.

Of course, those examples (chosen because they’re ones I’m familiar with) are music-related. But, I think there are a lot of similarities between the music industry 10 years ago and the challenges the publishing industry faces today. The traditional means of distribution are not as effective. Fans are seeking out more specialized material. They are less likely to browse and buy at a traditional retail store. It’s up to the artist to develop a connection with their appreciators (and hopefully to network through that connection).

Of course, (confession time), I hope that this blog will help me to start down the path to developing a community of people who care about what I’m trying to accomplish with writing. I want you to connect, I want you to care.

The question is, how do I best facilitate that connection? I can’t throw cash at you… the truckloads haven’t started rolling in yet. So, I’ll take your suggestions that don’t involve truckloads of cash. If they do roll in, we’ll take suggestions then. Anyone? Bueller?

I greatly enjoyed this blogpost by Brandon Sanderson about the function of a journey in fantasy writing.

My favorite part:

Oddly, when I first tried to write fantasy books, during my unpublished days, I found myself bored by the concept of yet another book that took place mostly in the wilderness or on a roadway visiting little towns along the way toward a destination.  I wanted to write stories that took place AT the destination.  That was what excited me.

I know exactly how he feels. I have felt that way about various “classic” fantasy plot traditions. For example, in my current story, it would’ve been easy to make the main character’s parents antagonize him. Simple. Too simple. It would’ve given him an easy motivator to push for change. It would’ve given him something to push against.

The thing is, the vast majority of times in the real world, parents are not their children’s primary antagonists. What’s more, I don’t want to communicate to my young adult readers that they can expect their parents to antagonize them.

So, some of those “classic” plot points are good to throw to the wayside. Also, by reading this post, you waive your rights to quote it when I do write a story with evil, aggravating parents.

I was reminded yesterday, after gathering as the church, of an important truth. A brother told me that the reason his wife is so good at what she does is simple: she is passionate about it. She was passionate about it before she started doing it as a job. A great reminder as far as both doing a good job at what I find myself doing and also about the direction I should be oriented toward.

The Pens have just taken the ice… it’s game seven in the Stanley Cup finals. After months of hockey, it all comes down to one game for the championship. You couldn’t ask for more pressure than the situation that these two teams have played themselves into.

And me? I love it. This will be a hard fought game. Unless it’s not. It’s entirely possible that one team could get the best of the other early and keep it that way. If that happens, I’m not naive, I know it’ll likely be the other team winning. I won’t even mention that team’s name. I detest them fairly strongly.

Either way, I’m in for a solid three hours. When you’re reading this, it’s already settled. I either went to sleep disappointed or elated. Either way, I got to watch some great hockey.

And that… that’s hockey.

There’s a tendency to over hype everything these days. I realized this as I watched Headline News from the check out line at Walmart. If I recall correctly, the breaking news was something about the President pardoning a twelve year old girl… from her last day of school.

Seriously? That’s breaking news? Maybe in the sense that it just took place, but it’s certainly not highly significant.

And of course, I tied it back to writing. Every time I see “breaking news” lately, it seems to mark an over-promise/under-deliver scenario. Roughly the equivalent of saying “I have the most important piece of information you will ever hear: shoes have laces.” Wow. Talk about underwhelming. It’s so underwhelming, it might leave me just plain whelmed.

I want to be careful not to do that to my readers. It’s hard too, because I have a tendency to feel like things are more important than they actually are. But, if I can’t deliver on the promise that my headline makes, or my intro makes, or whatever it happens to be, I probably shouldn’t be writing it anyway.

I frequently struggle with what my goal for my first novel should be in terms of word count. I know that I need to focus on just telling a story and let the word count be what it is. I keep on picking up on a prevailing “If it’s longer than… it’s too long” attitude. As though to prove my point and make me think about it more, there’s this fascinating little article at Editorial Assistant about word count. He says:

I think you’ll find in a survey of successful literary debut novels, the average page count is between 250 and 400. Often, authors get really famous for longer opuses–but those aren’t their debuts. Those are their second or third books.

There are practical reasons for this rule! It’s not (entirely) that editors are close-minded pigs. The reason is 100,000 words casts off at about 480 typeset pages. That would make your book…well, a lot of pages–astronomically expensive to produce.

Now, he grants in the comments the you can get away with perhaps a little more if you’re writing genre fiction. But, the prevailing wisdom certainly seems to be that somewhere between 65,000 words on the low side and 90,000 words on the high side is ideal for a debut novel.

In a single day, I can go from being convinced that I’ll never hit 65k to being terrified that I’ll never keep it under 100k.

I guess I’ll just finish it and then edit it as necessary. Novel idea. Hehe… get it? Novel? Heh.

I thought about trying to pass this off as a review of keyboards with a view to finding the best one to write on.

That’s totally not it. Instead, I’m going to complain. My backspace key on this laptop I do the bulk of my writing on is not functioning correctly. As in, I’m having to hit it five times to delete two characters.

It makes me incredibly frustrated.  I usually edit while I write. If I make an obvious error, I like to fix it right then so that I can’t miss it later. (Full disclosure: my crack editorial team (sans editorial assistant to bring coffee) gets me corrections on this blog on an almost-daily basis–after I’ve already posted!) So, of course, when I can’t do that, it drives me crazy. It’s just not fun.

The scariest part? I think there’s a natural conclusion to draw from the fact that my backspace key is dying: clearly, the key I use most? The one that dies first. In this case, the backspace key. That’s right, I correct myself more often than I do anything else.

But maybe, as an attempted writer, that’s for the best.

I’ve spent the last two weeks editing a book. It’s a sub-contract deal, so the details are not mine to share, but it was one of the more challenging tasks I’ve undertaken in a while.

It’s been a good relearning experience too. I can promise you that, regardless the amount of attention you feel like you’ve paid to your manuscript, errors have crept it. Some funny, some that feel as though they should’ve been glaringly obvious, and some that will shock you. On top of that, a fresh set of eyes can help to find awkwardly worded sentences and lines that don’t seem to fit into the paragraphs they’re in.

So, here it is, and I say this not just because you can pay me to do it, if you are writing, you need an editor. You need multiple editors really–one to do line edits, one to keep track of the overall flow of the manuscript, one to proof the line edits, and one to keep everyone coordinated. I’m sure I’m missing a couple more. And of course, you need the editorial assistant to get coffee for the editors. Definite key to the whole shebang.

Seriously though, it was good for me to sharpen up again. I think it’ll help me to see some more errors in my work. But I’ll never catch them all. And that’s why I’ll endeavour to have professionals working with me to make my manuscript the best it possibly can be.

I read this article by way of Brandon Sanderson mentioning it in a Twitter post. It’s all about how royalties and advances work in the publishing industry, put together by an editorial assistant.

The most interesting part for me was the section on returns:

Reserve against returns: This is the reason you won’t have gotten every royalty dollar you were due during a period. Your publisher has a right to retain up to a certain percentage of your royalties–the actual percentage varies on your contract and on the situation–against future returns from booksellers. Returns are pretty complicated; we’ve talked about them before, but they’re always hard to wrap our heads around. These are big, corporate returns, not the kind of customer-by-customer returns (“My Aunt Wanda bought this cookbook for me but I don’t like Russian casseroles” etc). Basically, there are scenarios wherein a publisher may print and sell 10,000 requested copies of a book to book sellers, and, if expectation was wrong, receive all 10,000 copies back, for which they’d have to relinquish the entire dollar amount they originally earned for those books. Alas for returnable industries.

I just can’t understand how you can have a functioning business model where any day a product you thought was sold comes flying back into your warehouse, possibly in terrible condition (if my days in publishing are remembered correctly), and the “buyer” expects all their money back.

I’m with him, alas for returnable industries. One day we’ll have to dialog a little bit about various ways of getting content to readers without going through traditional bookstores — not that I want to cut them out. There just seems to be a multitude of opportunities to think differently about selling books with technology advancing the way it is.