You can't edit a blank screen

Writing your novel is the hard part, right?

Uh, no.

Let's not confuse 'hard' and 'work'. Writing a novel requires a lot of work. A LOT. Endless hours by yourself in front of some sort of writing device, delving into your mind and shaping characters who will never live unless you give them life. Thus do many writers have a God complex. 

Not me, of course, just everybody else.

Fiction writers know the act of creation, although by no means easy, has the redeeming effect of being invigorating and rewarding. After all, how many people have ever finished writing a novel? In terms of sheer numbers, more than you might think, but as a percentage of the population, very few. This is why so many non-writers stand in silent awe of those who start and finish a novel, it is something they could never imagine doing. If you conjured a unicorn they would be no less impressed...okay, maybe the unicorn thing would trump writing a book, but not by as much as you think. And, they believe, if they ever could find a way to write an entire book, once finished the hard part would be done.

Au contraire.

Editing is far harder than writing. See, most people write their first draft just to get the story down in some form or fashion. It doesn't really matter if the grammar is proper or words are misspelled or any of that stuff. Think about it, when you tell a story, do you use words like 'was' or 'were', or say things like "she miraculously survived a potentially bad situation." I do. I think everybody does. And when you're writing your story you can do it, too.

It's AFTER you've written your book those things become mortal sins. Passive voice, adverbs, too many adjectives, there are as many rules for writing as there are writers. And the time to worry about that stuff is in the editing process, which comes after you're done writing a first draft. That's when you can boil down your job as a writer to three words: edit, revise, repeat. Edit, revise, repeat. You do that, over and over and over again, for as many times as you can stand doing it.

How do you know when you're finished? When the thought of doing it again sends you to the bathroom with a feeling of getting sick.

No more No's!

I didn't make it to 200, folks.

Truth is, I really only made it to about 5 before a wonderful publisher made me an offer. They were exceedingly patient, and I am forever grateful for that patience. Maybe we can work together one day, but there were three issues on which we could not agree. This happens in business, even when both parties want it otherwise.

I did make it to 57 No's before that thing happened which all writers sweat and pray for: an offer from a great publisher with the terms you need to conclude an agreement. In my mind, we were a match from the word go.

Yep, I am now a signed author with Dingbat Publishing, who also publishes that tornado of energy, Gunnar Grey. Standing The Final Watch  is scheduled for release on July 18th and I am damned proud. It's like waiting for a child to be born.

There's about 20 people to thank in my journey, actually more, but first I want to give a shoutout to #pit2pub , the twitter event that brought this about. If you don't think twitter pitch events work, you're wrong. From that event I got requests for 3 fulls and a partial, and Dingbat was one of them. The lesson here, for me and everyone else, is that Twitter Events Work!

That's not to say other methods don't work as well or better, but I know a lot of my friends get frustrated with the lack of results. All I can counsel is patience, because it worked for me and it can work for you, too.

July 18th is like my new birthday! Bring on the cake! 

To 'was' or not to 'was', that is the question.

Should you avoid using the verb 'to be' in your fiction?

Rules for writing...how many can there possibly be? You want to appear as professional as possible for that agent or editor who is going to be looking for any reason to toss your hard-written manuscript on the trash heap, so you keep every rule that you've ever heard or been taught in mind as you write. And if you're an aspiring novelist, you've at least heard some of them and gotten bogged down trying to follow them as you work.

Show, don't tell.
Don't change Point of View (POV).
Never, ever, ever...ever, use adverbs. They are Satanic and will doom your soul to the fires of eternal damnation. No less an icon than Stephen King says so, and he should know.

But as bad as those may be, and if you stick around long enough you'll have it drilled into your skull that all adverbs are BAD, there is one thing you must never do. It's even worse than using an adverb. If an adverb creeps into your work, Satan himself might notice. Using Passive Voice, however, guarantees that not only will he notice, he will have God's permission to do terrible things to you.

Like filling your inbox with countless rejection emails, because agents and editors hate passive voice more than anything else. And the most common form this mortal sin takes is the use of the verb 'to be', in all of its conjugations. Am, are, were, was...these will absolutely, 100% assure that an agent or editor will see your manuscript as that of an amateur, thereby making it rejection bait, and gleefully cackle as they hit 'delete' on your query.

You've heard this, right? If you're a serious writer, you've had it happen to you.

But is it true? Does this rule actually apply to anybody, or is it an initiation prank they play on new writers? Because a cursory glance at some favorite authors during a trip to the local bookstore yesterday makes me wonder.

'Was' is usually the word that brings editors and agents swooping down on your manuscript like hungry raptors pouncing on the hapless writer. So I took a quick survey to see if this holds true in real life. Let me clue you in to the results ahead of time: it does not.

Keep in mind, these are mostly authors I read, enjoy and follow. In short, I want them to be great. I am NOT criticizing them, I want to read these books. More to the point, all of these people get paid serious cash for their work.

In his new book, Make Me, Lee Child's first sentence is 'Moving a guy as big as Keever wasn't easy."
Michael Connelly's 4th word in The Crossing is 'were'.
Mark Greaney uses 'was' on the first page of Back Blast.
Jeffrey Deaver and Ace Atkins both use 'was' on the first page of recent novels.
In Sacred Time, Ursula Hegi uses 'was' in the first sentence, as Cynthia Harrod Eagles does in Hard Going.
Lois McMaster Bujold starts The Sharing Knife with "Dag was riding."
Michael Parker began All I Have In This World writing "The town was small."
The first 'was' shows up in sentence two of John Ringo's Emerald Sea and in sentence three of Simon Brett's The Strangling On The Stage.
Joe R. Lansdale kicks off Devil Red with "We were parked."
Harlan Coben puts it in the first paragraph of Fool Me Once with "...she wasn't listening."
The second sentence of James W. Huston's The Blood Flag is "There was no moon."
And finally, Harper Lee uses 'was' on the first page of Go Set A Watchman.

Does this mean that all of the editors involved in these books, and all of the agents selling them and all of the publishing houses spending all of that money to print them, do so to promote inferior works? No, of course not.

Clearly, sometimes using 'to be' or one of its forms is fine. However, the point of this quick survey seems to indicate that 'was' might be okay for some writers, but not for others. Can this be true? And if it is, is it because they're bestsellers? I can't believe that, because wouldn't their books get more attention? Are big bucks authors allowed to be sloppy or lazy? I don't think so, even if they were so inclined, which I also doubt.

So what's the point? I'm not sure, really, but certainly I'm going to be a little kinder to my first drafts in the future. If 'was' shows up, not shooting the computer screen anymore seems like a good start.

Now, about those adverbs... 

Picking your poison - how do you choose what to write?

To those keeping track, I'm up to 53 'No's.' I preemptively wrote off 8 agents who were nearing their expiration date, because why fool yourself? Only one seemed like a potential match, anyway. So today's entry is more like a window into what it's like being a novelist marketing your work.

I'm curious how other authors choose to write what they write. Does the muse strike them and they can't NOT write it? I've heard that many times before, and honestly, I don't believe it. Here's why:

The same thing happened to me. One day I wrote a scene that had been bothering me for years. Once done with that, I wrote another scene that had been floating in my imagination, and connected the two. This totaled maybe 20 or 25 pages.

Done. Now that itch had been scratched.

See, like most writers (I think), I've got dozens of book ideas waiting to be written, some plotted out in my head all the way to the end. I've even started a few of them, just as I did the one above. I wrote out the parts that demanded attention, and then...ah, it's the 'and then' that led me to this blog post. But the blood, toil, tears and sweat necessary to write any novel cannot happen on a whim. There must be an ongoing conscious decision to do the work, and for me, doing work without knowing there's a market for it makes no sense. Maybe it works for other, but not for me.

For The Last Brigade I consciously did market research, just as I have my other projects. My career to date has been varied, from uber-successful salesman, to National Employee of the Year as a Sales Trainer (Major electronics company I'll guarantee you've heard of), to paid author, to very successful Network Marketer to all kinds of other interesting job choices. I know what success looks like and I know how to get there. Counting all of my accolades put together, I've been awarded more than one hundred sales or marketing awards.

But this book is NOT pursuing a current trend. That rarely succeeds, because its the trend-setters who make the most money. See, I'm in this for the long haul. Here's an example of what I mean.

Ayn Rand remains a controversial author to this day. Some love her work, some hate her work, but for those familiar with it, there are few without an opinion. That's the kind of enduring legacy I aspire to. (Not to infer the politics are the same)

I know that my work is fun to read, the dialogue is really, really good (that's the one thing everybody who has read it, agents included, can agree on), the diversity is over the top (just as its understated), the action is off the charts...in short, I think I've produced one hell of a good work, that is not for everybody. For those who like these things, however, I think it will be recommended to their friends.

And then there's me. Once the book is published we enter the world where I shine the most, sales and marketing. Nobody has ever outworked me, and I assign this a very high value.

(What? No, my head is no bigger than the next guy's, why do you ask?)

The only question for me was, to which idea do I devote the time and effort needed to produce a first-rate novel? When my research was done, The Last Brigade became a reality, and I am delighted with the results.

Now, on to the next research. Does an agent exist that is a good fit for me? Or a publisher? That process is well underway, but in the past week I have made a major change in the business plan based on experience. Always be flexible.

And since I'm kind of worse for wear, stiff and creaky, it might be time to take up yoga.

It only took me 30 years to realize...

Before we get into what a dunce I can be, which is always a favorite topic for my readers, let me apologize in advance for a second blog entry so close to the last one. I know, I know, too much of a good  an irritating thing, but since yesterday's entry is guaranteed to PO a bunch of people, I figured I can use today's rambling to make everyone question my intelligence and soften the blow of the previous entry. Now, for all those who read yesterday's blog and thought 'what a dumbass', I provide proof.

Okay, so what did it take me 30 years to realize? The simplest of writing rules. Maybe it was too simple, since I over-analyze anything and everything you can imagine.

I majored in Creative Writing. I think that's what got me my first agent, back in the 80's you didn't see many CW majors and she (and the editor who recommended me to her) assumed I was some sort of hotshot. (To be fair, so did I) But I digress.

One of my favorite professors...okay, actually the only writing professor (Hi Tom!)  I could stand to be around for more than five minutes (again, this was the 70's and 80's, they're all long gone now) once explained the difference in a short story and a novel. It is brilliant stuff, but I only understood it's full meaning this very morning, more than 30 years later.

"Bill," Tom said. "The difference between a novel and a short story is that short stories have a lot fewer words."

My reaction at the time: 'well, duh.'

My reaction now: "damn."

It's not like I didn't know the rules. I've written more than 100 short stories in my day, but none, NOT ONE, for more than 30 years. And then one pops up out of nowhere, unbidden, and what's more, it's part of the canon of The Last Brigade saga. Hell, it's the beginning of whole thing. I didn't even know there was a beginning.

Nor did I understand what Tom meant until I was rounding third and heading for home this morning. A short story has a beginning, middle and end, just like a novel. It has a protagonist and an antagonist. It has conflict and resolution. And it needs to move!

My writing style has changed radically in the past thirty years, but until I worked on this project (thanks to Rambling Rambunctious Press Inc., RRPI, for launching their short story contest based on Legends) to enter a contest, I had not finished a short in decades.

Then I find out that Tom was right. Again. It's thrilling and galling at the same time. Why didn't he tell me this 30 years ago?

Oh, yeah, that's right...he did.

Even if it hurts

I promised honesty and that's what you're going to get. It won't win me any friends, but that's just how it goes. If I filter things, then I'm self-censoring and how is that honest?

Sometimes, life just moves along without any big events to write about, and that's pretty much how the last week unfolded. Not to say nothing happened, it did. I wrote a lot (working on two books and a short story all at the same time), started cleaning my office (which is a disaster), had awesome input from a VIP on the book, and got 11 more 'No's.'

Now, some of those 'No's' were me being pro-active. I came to the realization that finding an agent for what I write will be tough, really tough. My books are very diverse, very LGBT friendly and pretty much treat differences the way Heinlein taught me to treat them: what matters is performance, not who or what you are. And you don't beat people over the head with it.

So I'm not overt about it, because that's not life. In my world certain things are assumed, and merit based assignments are part of them, just like RAH would have done it. My MC, Nick Angriff, doesn't care about anything except how well you can do your job. However, since I'm not in your face about this, I realized it's working against me.

The most common word used by beta readers and editors to describe my work is 'fun.' It's a strange word to use about a novel where the western world is pretty much wiped out, but I get the idea. It's fast, I hope it's compelling, I think the dialogue is first rate and in places it's damned funny. Just like life. But none of that matters if you can't get past the gatekeeper.

In a twitter contest some editor wondered why all SF is made up of middle-aged white guys. It was pretty obvious that I was the target of this comment, which (thankfully) betrayed my problem, namely, since I only name the race of ONE character in the whole book, my MC, the editor ASSUMED the rest were all white. The truth is the opposite. Indeed, the model for my MC's best friend is Dennis Haysbert.

I did this on purpose. When you make assumptions about things like a character's race, it betrays YOUR biases, not the author's. So what I would tell that editor is their comment reflected their prejudice, not mine. I did not do this to be mean, I did it to be instructive, to show that even the most open minded among us are biased. I would hope they take it in the spirit of open discussion...except the Emperor don't usually like bein' told he's naked.

So why write a blog post that X number of people are guaranteed to hate, and to be alienated by? It goes back to the honesty thing. This is my journey and I swore to give it to you straight. No ice, shaken, not stirred. It might be too strong and it might burn, but it ain't watered down. You get your money's worth in my bar.

Drink up.

On the road again

To all of you incredible people who read this blog, thank you! Knowing you're following my journey to publication makes a huge difference to me. For those of you who might be new, the purpose of this blog is currently to detail every aspect of my experiences publishing my first novel in 30 years, Standing The Final Watch: Book One of The Last Brigade.

As an introduction and/or refresher, my business plan calls for this book to be contracted for, represented or published by my deadline. That deadline is currently 9-30-2016, although I reserve the right to move that forward or backward. What could trigger an earlier deadline is if I reach 200 'No's' first, in which case I move to Plan B.

Current 'NO' count...37. One agent I had already counted out made it official.

Lest you get the wrong idea, I have had some successes along the way. 8 requests for the full manuscript, 15 partials and one very big YES. To that publisher, whom I will not identify without their permission, I owe a huge debt of gratitude. We disagree on several points, but I am moving  toward their point of view, and if we can get close enough that is one blog entry I would love to write.

This weekend is MidSouthCon here in Memphis. For those who have never been to a science fiction convention, they're a blast, and this one in particular. They might appear very strange, but aren't new experiences a writer's lifeblood? More to the point, there are some high-powered editors who will be there, several publishers and a whole writer's track. Should be a blast, if I get photos I'll post them next week.

'Yeah, yeah, all these pretty words...so, what's the deal Bill? Why all the 'No's'? Does the book suck or something?'

I'm probably the wrong guy to ask, because I think it's great, and I am usually my own worst critic. I was lucky enough to have beta readers who were close friends, and took my instructions to come up with every negative they could find quite seriously. These were not the 'make you feel good even if they hated it' type of readers, I asked them to bash anything and everything they could. I'm currently at 11 beta readers, which is quite a few, and their comments have helped shape the finished product. One of them reads 5-7 books every single week in my general genre, Military Thrillers/Military SF. He's my most enthusiastic supporter.

'Okay,' you say, 'if it's as good as you say-'

'As good as they say'.

'Fine. As good as they say, what's the trouble?'

Answer: hell if I know, although I think I know. The book is blatantly and overtly pro-American and pro-U.S. Armed Forces. My MC loves his God, family and country, he's not torn by doubts about his mission and he's not political. And therein, I believe, lies the problem.

It's just the reality of where we are today, and I knew this when I started the whole project. And I'm fine with it, even if a bit saddened. But with two books already finished, a prequel moving quickly and a fourth book 14,000 words long, as well as a short story in this same series, I'll be damned if I'm stopping any time soon.

So thanks for following me on this journey, cross your fingers for me! Or say a prayer if that's your inclination, I wouldn't mind God hearing something nice about me for a change.

Pursuing negativity?

Addendum! I'm putting it here for those who have already read the blog once. The publisher who I said pissed me off (below) should have been removed. It wasn't them, it was me being cranky. Thanks to him, the publisher, who brought this to my attention.  When you read it, shake your head and say 'Bill, Bill, Bill", just like that.

Start blog here ---I promised honesty in this ongoing saga of my safari to publication, so there you have it. Sometimes that's gonna be ugly, sometimes not. Either way, this is my true-to-life experiences in writing fiction in the 21st Century.

First things first: six more 'No's'.  The publisher who previously indicated interest won't return my emails. Who knows why, they're the one who told me to try Baen first and then said let them know if that did not work out. Loyalty is one of my defining characteristics, sometimes to my detriment, as it was in this case. Because of their generosity of spirit I wanted to try and discuss some way they could make money if Baen bought the book. I guess that crossed some line I don't know about.

As for the agents, one agent said no (form letter, of course),  and two other agents went past the two month period I allot for such things, which means 'not only don't I want to represent this, I'm too busy to even send a form email.' That's a cold reality you'd better get used to quick: whether they are truly too busy or just don't care, most agents don't let you know they've rejected you. And if that leads you to believe that you are beneath their notice, just one of the squirming beetles they have to navigate through to find a jewel in the mound of dung, well, that's your problem, not theirs.

Some do, at least, send a rejection form, and that helps a lot. At least you know somebody glanced at it and you weren't summarily rejected because some hungover slush pile reader stayed out too late the night before, or had to get through 50 queries before they could knock off work for a hot date. A second publisher, with whom I had been talking and, frankly, was moving toward trying to sign with, really irritated me the other day. I don't think they meant to, but the damage is done.

Finally, there were two more twitter contest 'No's'. Honestly, none of this surprises me. I'm writing fast-paced, action-packed thrillers with (so everybody tells me) terrific dialogue, but that suffers from a fatal flaw: it's overtly pro-American and pro-Armed Forces. This immediately shuts out a huge section of the literary world.

The book has an incredibly diverse cast with every race, color and creed represented. It has every sexual identity you can think of (inspired by Robert A. Heinlein's fabulous Time Enough For Love) and the MC allows no bias whatsoever. In these respects it is as PC as you can get. The problem is that these people are not persecuted for these traits, they are accepted, and accepted in a pro-USA setting, no less. This is not supposed to happen, but in my future world, where the only law is the US Constitution, my MC is not going to allow any American citizen to be mistreated. Conversely, he is not going to allow the USA to be a whipping boy any more, and therein lies the problem.

Will writing this stuff cost me friends? Maybe. Will it piss of agents or publishers? Probably, if they read it. So the question has come up why I'm sharing the pursuit of publication with the world...and the answer is, I'm not sure. Why pour this out for all to read? Sour grapes? A raging lunatic with a keyboard? (Don't answer that.) I'll try to explain it.

Mostly, it's cathartic. The more you hold rejection in your heart, the more it burns. Is there an embarrassment factor?

Not for me. I've already done something (thrice!) that most people cannot and would not even attempt: I've written a novel. Finished. Might need an edit, might need some revisions, but I have a manuscript that is ready for a publisher to accept and work on.

But the bigger picture is that once you've thrown the rejections out to the world, they have no more power over you. It's like if someone knows a secret about you, and you're afraid that secret will come out, the fastest way to rob that secret of it's corrosive power is to expose it yourself. Your fear is always worse than simply facing it. I mean, what are people gonna do, point and laugh? Yuck, yuck, you didn't sell your book.

"Oh yeah? Well, if you wrote one it would be one adverb after another."

"What's an adverb?"

See my point? For me, sharing it means you already know the worst part. And at the end of the day, I have a business plan that kicks in once the 200 mark is reached, OR when my drop-dead deadline hits. So this is all just part of the plan.

But since I'm going the whole Honest John schtick with you guys, let's be clear about this: I'd still like the big 'yes.'

What's it like to write 3 books at once?

"So, dude, you're working on 3 books simultaneously? Why?"

Uh, yeah. Good question. It's just how I work, although I can't imagine anyone else doing it the way I do.

The first book is a prequel for Standing The Final Watch. It came about this way:

When I finished the first draft of the book, it was 170k words. Max for a debut author should be around 90,000. Yikes! However, a story line had been floating around in my mind for the first part that I rejected because it interrupted the flow of the original concept. When I created two halves, the previously set aside plot was a perfect fit.

Honestly, I think it was intended this way. Maybe God, maybe my sub-conscious, I don't know, but the new plot was ideal and I fell in love with the new characters, especially the psychotic (?) young woman who likes hurting (mostly bad) people.

I had no idea these characters had their own backstory, and, as it turns out, they have become a pivotal part of the entire canon. Thus, the prequel. This is their story, how they came to be who they are now and a direct lead-in to STFW.

So that's what will eventually be Book One of The Last Brigade, with STFW as book two. Book Three, as yet untitled but possibly The Blood of Patriots, is finished and has had two edits. Book Four, untitled, is 14,000 words long so far.

"Why do it this way? Doesn't it hurt the books?"

I follow plot threads, and sometimes these transcend a book. Everything in book four will be a direct result of what happened in the first three, with lots of Easter Eggs scattered around, BUT, to finish the subplot, I write it out in the following book even before plotting that novel. Same with the prequel. As I visualize scenes I put them where I think they belong. After that has gone on for a while, I start connecting them. For me, this makes everything better, because I can put in all sorts of hints and cool little things for the reader to discover and have an 'aha' moment. I love that stuff.

This is NOT how I wrote 30 years ago, when I plotted everything out, and edited while I went, and over thought everything and hated dialogue. Now, I don't plot anything formally, I edited when I'm done, I have taught myself to disconnect from my fingers (my thoughts are typed before I realize it) and dialogue not only comes easily for me, I'm damned good at it. In fact, most of the scenes I write out first are nothing but dialogue...I would write an entire novel of nothing except dialogue if I thought that I could pull it off.

I cannot always remember scenes I want to write and I cannot use a scratch pad...don't ask me why, I don't know, it just doesn't work for me. So if a scene (or a snippet or a line of dialogue) pops up in my mind, I have to get in in the computer then, not later. And yes, I've rolled out of bed at 3 am to write down a dream before I forget it.

Every writer does it different and I don't know if there are any lessons to be learned here. It's my simple attempt to share a peculiar methodology, and to answer the question why I'm writing 3 books at once.

Oh, yeah, the third book, I forgot about that...it's a fantasy novel totally unrelated to the others. Go figure.

Update: I had no sooner written the first draft of this blog when something triggered me to look up an actual part of Memphis history, a legendary place called Voodoo Village. It did and does exist. This led to an entire 700 word scene for the prequel, now finished in about 45 minutes. And THAT led to a short story idea for a contest, using the same characters and involving an incident I refer to in the prequel. Damn, I love this! And that's why my way works for me.

FIVE more, five to score...every 'No' puts money in my pocket

'No's' are worth money, that's what a man I highly respect, Matt Morris, says, and I think he's right. He did not say it about writing, but so what? The same principle applies. So I should be rich now, right? That's another 'No'.

Twitter was kind enough to deliver up 4 'No's' in various contests this week (I could, technically, stretch that to 6 if I wanted, but that might be cheating). I love twitter, by the way. I never thought I would, I expected to hate it, but dammit! I don't. So the No total stands at 29.

Lest you think I'm taking this all a bit too lightly, I'm not. Every single 'No' hurts. They all represent rejection in some form or fashion, and nobody likes being rejected. Yet you can't let them stop you, either, so taking Matt's lesson a step further, 'No' means 'not right now'. If I had five good selling novels under my belt, which I will at some point, most of those 'No's' would be 'Hell Yesses'!

Since I'm a military history guy, I'll put it this way. Battleships were built to withstand multiple hits from large weapons, yet a lot of them were sunk anyway. Enough damage will sink anything, including a writer's aspirations, so actively courting negative responses might sound squirrely. That's because it is. Sticking with the battleship analogy, however, the trick was for the ship's armor to be so thick that hits bounced off. Then the battleship could survive even the worst enemy fire and still fight back. And that's what a writer has to develop, an armored shield so thick that it can't be penetrated.

Matt's logic works, too. Depending on how you classify 'No' and 'Yes', I've had at least two 'Yesses.' (More if you count manuscript full requests, which I don't, but that would push it to a whopping 7) That's pretty damned good. And in writing, it's not the number of 'Yesses' that matters, because you only need the right ONE. As Matt Morris has also said (paraphrasing), what if you are on #199 and are so depressed you quit, but #200 is the Yes you've been looking for?

Winston Churchill summed it up this way: "Never, never, never, never give up."

Wow, can I pontificate or what?

LATE EDIT: Just after I posted this, an English agency gave it a pass, although they did say it was close and they had to debate it. I guess that counts for something.