Emerald Barnes over at Dreaming Awake has graciously allowed me to write a guest post on her blog. It's called "Anthony Lee Collins talks about Indie authors and Self-published authors."
So, check it out. I think I already know somebody who will disagree with me. 
2 comments January 27th, 2012
I was going to write about another of my non-guilty pleasures, but some interesting things have come up on some of my favorite blogs. Maybe I’ll do the other post in the middle of the week.
1. There was an interesting connection between Maggie’s post “Anonymity,” and Tiyana’s post, “Consistency.” People are different in different situations and contexts, and writers need to write their characters that way, too. Nobody is the same all the time (thank goodness), but when you’re writing it’s easy to forget that and give your characters an unrealistically narrow range of actions and reactions.
2. Stephen at The Undiscovered Author wrote a post called, “A Writer’s Ambitions.” It was very thorough and thoughtful, talking about different types of ambitions that writers can have (material, output, creative). I don’t really seem to have any of them (as I detailed in my comment to his post), which leads me to a question for any writers who read this.
If you were in some situation where you knew you’d never have any readers other than yourself (desert island, space capsule, last human survivor, etc.), would you write? I guess Output Ambition could still apply, Material Ambition definitely wouldn’t, and what about Creative Ambition? Would it matter if you were breaking new creative ground if you were the only writer left?
So, anyway, that’s the question for this week. [Addendum: or you can answer the less apocalyptic and more reality-based version of the question in the Comments below.]
3. Oh, and T.S. Bazelli over at Ink Stained wrote a post called “Stir Fried Thoughts,” where she talked what it takes to interest agents and publishers these days, and how you have to be able to identify other (successful) novels that your novel is like. So, sort of like a Hollywood pitch meeting (“It’s like Harry Potter meets Twilight!”).
Unfortunately, this would seem to indicate that too much Creative Ambition might not be a good thing these days.
And it also indicates that my assessment (in my comment on Stephen’s blog) of the commercial potential of my stuff is probably right. If somebody asked me what my books are like, what successful books they’re similar to, or even exactly what commercial genre I work in, I’d be a bit stumped.
It probably also relates to my question about whether Henry James or Thomas Pynchon would get a contract if they were starting now.
12 comments January 22nd, 2012
The phrase "guilty pleasure" has always puzzled me. If it gives you pleasure, why be guilty? Of course, it's one thing if your "guilty pleasure" involves clubbing baby seals or tying girls to railroad tracks, but mostly when people say they have a guilty pleasure, it turns out to be that they really like Journey or Foreigner, or maybe Two and a Half Men.
Stephen Watkins just did a post called "Why Yes, I AM a Fan of the Old Rankin & Bass Hobbit Movie, And I’m Not Afraid To Admit It" and so I thought I'd write a post about my particular enthusiasms, about which I am not guilty in the least.
Dark Shadows
A late 1960s soap opera, it ran for 1,225 episodes (which is a very short run for a soap opera, though it's more episodes than all of the Star Trek series put together – daily broadcasting every week of the year will do that). It started out in Jane Eyre/Turn of the Screw territory, with a new governess showing up to serve a mysterious family. The family secrets might have supernatural elements, but they might not. Ghosts are seen, but are they real, or in the imaginations of the other characters?
But then, with ratings falling and the series in danger of cancellation, the writers decided to go all out, and they introduced a vampire. Barnabas Collins. And he became a cultural phenomenon, almost like a rock and roll star.
Meanwhile, although now much more successful, the show continued to be produced in the same way: shot in a few sets, in real time, on video, all of the special effects (and there were a lot) done in-camera. No post-production, and no retakes, so there were occasional flubs. Actors blew their lines and called each other the wrong names (especially unsurprising since each actor played multiple characters in different time periods and alternate dimensions). Eternal flames blew out at the wrong time. "Outdoor" scenes were obviously shot on a very small sound stage with a few fake trees standing around and a lot of darkness. Stage hands were occasionally seen walking past the windows, or even sleeping on the sets.
Was it good? It was sort of great without actually being good in the usual sense. But, seeing it at an impressionable age (every day after school at 4:00pm), it bored its way into my brain and it's never left. As I talked about here, I saw an episode after at least 25 years, and immediately recognized the head of Judah Zachary when I saw it. Johnny Depp was infected in the same way, which is why there will be a Dark Shadows movie in a few months. It has been his lifelong dream to play Barnabas Collins, and I can understand that.
(I was never a Barnabas fanatic, actually. Barnabas, like the original cast of characters, was pretty much all suffering and gloom. I preferred the later characters Quentin Collins and Professor Stokes, who had a rather sardonic humor about all the goings-on.)
Big Finish has been doing audio plays, new stories based on the existing history of the series, including many of the original cast members. There was even one where they lured Jonathan Frid, the original Barnabas Collins, out of retirement to play the character again. He's in his 80s, and he nailed the character as nobody has since his original performances back in the 1960s. Johnny Depp has a lot to live up to.
Other than some names I've used, I don't think DS has had a huge influence on my writing, with one exception. I do have a character who pretty definitely has Angelique Bouchard in her DNA, along with the comic book characters Emma Frost and Jeannette (both of whom also have elements of Angelique). She's in the project I'm writing now, so I don't want to say any more than that.
Oh, and in addition to Johnny Depp, it would seem that Thomas Pynchon was also a DS fanatic. Inherent Vice refers to DS three times, and a couple of peculiar events in the novel can be explained by assuming that Doc, the detective, has wandered into DS-type "parallel time" for a while, as I talked about here.
I was going to write about some other of my non-guilty pleasures, but I think this is long enough already. Maybe this will be the beginning of a series.
3 comments January 15th, 2012
When I was young, I was really into the mystery novels of Ellery Queen. There was one book in particular that always stuck in my mind. In it, a famous novelist was murdered, and the detectives discovered a locked room in her house, adjoining the room where she wrote. Another woman had lived in that room, in secret, apparently as a prisoner, and she had actually written the books which had made the novelist rich and famous.
This setup stayed in my mind for years (decades, really), but I didn’t know the title of the book. I didn’t remember anything else about it, and I wasn’t even 100% sure that it had been written by Ellery Queen. In the pre-web days, it was a lot harder to find out the answers to these sort of questions, and in any case Ellery Queen books are not much talked about these days (and there are a lot of them – quite a few of the later ones ghostwritten – and most of them are usually out of print).
But then I found it, I think from a summary on Amazon. It’s called The Door Between. I immediately bought it and read it, of course, and I quickly realized two things.
One was that I had remembered those few details accurately. The other was that it was badly written.
The early Queen novels were pretty classicly cerebral, but this one appears to reflect a desire to be more muscular. All the male characters seem to yell all the time, and mostly they seem to be about to punch each other. There’s a hard-boiled detective character who’s a pileup of cliches. He’s apparently there as a foil and contrast to Ellery Queen, who’s so unmuscular that he’s still wearing his pince-nez glasses (they would be done away with soon after).
There are some cringe-worthy Asian stereotypes, too (both Japanese and Chinese). And I don’t accept the argument that this is just a reflection of the times (the book was written in 1936), since the Philo Vance books – which were earlier and which were a big influence on the Queen books – are almost completely free of this sort of thing. In fact, Vance often earns the scorn of the official police by treating people of other races, including servants, the same way he treats white people.
The main character in The Door Between, a teenage girl, spends most of the early pages being unaccountably grumpy (after an early life which is reported as being entirely sunny). Then she realizes that she Needs To Be Marrried. She pursues and catches a fiance (this whole part of the book is pretty painful), and then she spends the rest of the book being accused of murder, repeatedly. She reacts to each accusation by weeping, usually clutching the lapels of some man’s jacket, and feebly protesting her innocence. All the man around her seem to fall in love with her, for no apparent reason, even to the point of fiddling with the evidence to keep her from being accused again. Which never works, of course.
But, that being said, the story is great. The cental premise (the prisoner who actually writes the books) is powerful and plausible. The solutions are clever and well set up (it was a standard trope in Queen books that there would be a series of solutions revealed, each one completely airtight but each one then exploded by new evidence being discovered). And the book ends as some of the Queen books from this period did, with a public reveal of the “solution,” and then a scene where Ellery confronts the actual murderer with the final explanation, which will never be made public.
This was the great theme in the middle-period Queen books, that revealing the truth behind a murder can often cause more harm than good. Quite a few of the books in these years explored different aspects of this idea. I haven’t really used this yet in the Jan Sleet mystery stories, but I’m sure I will. I’m quite influenced by Ellery Queen, as I’ve talked about here and here and here.
But there’s a reason I’m writing about this here, which is that, as I re-read The Door Between now, I wonder how’d react if I was reading it for the first time now. I’m a lot more discriminating than I was when I was a kid, after all. Would I stick it out, getting past the bad writing, to find how how good the story was? Maybe not.
I was thinking about that when reading an indie novel recently. Within a few paragraphs, two words were used incorrectly, one sentence was very badly constructed, and one word was misspelled. I was tempted to chuck it. No matter how good your story is, if people get turned off by your words and your sentences, they may not finish your book, and in any case they’re much less likely to buy your next one.
As we’ve talked about before, here and elswhere, indie books don’t get the benefit of the doubt. So, my point is that indie writers need to be sure everything is correct, particularly things which really only require a dictionary.
“Ellery Queen” was actually two men. One did the plots and the other wrote the words. With The Door Between, one was firing on all cylinders and one wasn’t. For those of us who do both (which is most writers, of course), we need to be sure our words live up to our ideas (and vice versa – I’ve read blogs for example where every word is used perfectly and every sentence is a thing of beauty, but the writer has absolutely nothing to say).
Anyway, there’s my point. The Door Between has given me a lot of pleasure, but only because I read it for the first time when I was very young. Otherwise, I would have missed out on all it had to offer me.
5 comments January 8th, 2012
Happy New Year!
fweeeeeeppppp!!!
In my last post, I talked about some ideas about what I might work on during 2012.
Since then, I've read a couple of good posts about New Year's plans and resolutions. Maggie at Maggie Madly Writing talked about her goals, and Laura Stanfill talked about hers (and said some very nice things about Maggie's post and mine).
As I said in a comment on Laura's post:
My one definite goal for next year (I think) is to publish some sort of e-book. I’ve been reading up on all the formats and conversions and so on, and I’d rather start with something that doesn’t have illustrations (my mystery book has floors plans and other illustrated clues). Emerald gave me the idea of publishing a novella, as opposed to a full-length novel. I’ve always thought of publishing as being just for book-length works, but with e-books obviously that doesn’t apply.
But we’ll see. I could always do an e-book of A Sane Woman, but I’d really rather start out with something newer.
I've been reading up on the various formats and so on – in between blowing my noisemaker and brushing all the confetti off my keyboard – and I've learned some things.
The big complication in the e-publishing world is that Amazon uses one format for the Kindle, and the rest of the world uses the EPUB format. So, to publish an e-book, you really have to publish twice. (There is a rumor going around that Amazon may soon support the EPUB format, which would make everybody's lives easier – including theirs – but who knows if that will happen.)
I know a lot of people use Smashwords for e-publishing, but there were some things about their instructions that I found annoying. They not only insist in Word format for submission, they really insist on Word itself, saying that files produced with other programs will probably not convert properly even if they are saved in Word format. This is annoying, particularly since Microsoft is unlikely to release a version of Word for Linux.
Lulu (the company that published A Sane Woman) also does EPUB conversion, but apparently their conversion process is somewhat more sophisticated because they can take RTF files from OpenOffice (the program I used to create A Sane Woman). The only annoying part of the Lulu instructions (and it's not their fault) is that apparently the EPUB format includes a mandatory navigable table of contents. This may be a problem with the mystery story book (which is not going to be published in 2012, but I'm thinking ahead), since it's possible that I will not want to have a TOC with links. Although it is a book of mystery stories, I do want people to read it in order.
The most encouraging guide I've read so far is the one from Amazon for Kindle Direct Publishing. They take HTML, and they don't require a TOC. If your book isn't formatted correctly when it's converted, you just fix the HTML and try again. Since I'm very comfortable working with HTML, this seems ideal for me.
So, no immediate plans, but I do have two questions.
1) For those who have published an e-book, how did you do it? Amazon and EPUB, or just one, and who did the conversion?
2) For those who read e-books, how do you read them? On a Kindle, or on another device, or on your computer (and if the last, using what software)?
Oh, and Happy New Year.
fweeeeeeeeeeppppp!!!
9 comments January 1st, 2012
I always read Stephen Watkins’ Monday “Writing Progress” posts on his blog The Undiscovered Author, where he describes what he got done the week before, and then he asks how everybody else’s writing week was. I always post my answer, and that’s become part of my regular schedule.
This week, though, because of the holidays, he’s taking the week off, thereby throwing off my rhythm. So, I will post my own writing progress post instead.
My big accomplishment this week was sending off the mystery story book to some wonderful beta readers. This is the first stage; I anticipate a second round of beta reading later this year, depending on how this goes. I was going to send the file on New Year’s Eve, symbolizing my decision to leave it alone for 2012, but the problem was that I kept on fiddling with it (punctuation, mostly), and so I sent it early, because now I can’t touch it.
So, now I have three other projects to work on, and I will give each a little time until I figure out which should be the priority right now.
One is my third novel. I wrote six chapters back a few months ago, just enough to confirm that it would work at all, but now I could pursue that project. My reluctance is mostly because it’s not a mystery, and I really feel like writing mysteries these days.
Another is a mystery story that never quite worked, but which I think has real potential. It’s not going to be in the book, but it’s part of the same series. This is the closest to being done (it’s the only one which is anywhere near being done, in fact; the others are barely started), but if I’m taking a year off from the book, maybe I should take a year off from the whole series.
Another is the idea I had a couple of week ago for a new novel. I’ve done about 25 handwritten pages so far. I think this has the most momentum right now, though I have no idea where it’s going (which is pretty standard for me).
I also had the idea for a real Jan Sleet mystery novel. Not one word of that one is written so far.
So, we’ll see. (And, looking back, I guess that’s four, not three.)
Oh, there was an interesting article in Wired magazine (it’s not online, or at least I couldn’t find it). It’s about how, yes, Water for Elephants was started as a NaNoWriMo novel and now it’s really successful and there’s a movie and so on, but sometimes novels which were written very quickly can be a bad thing.
They mention A Clockwork Orange, which Anthony Burgess wrote in three weeks because he needed money. It was hugely successful, of course, and he’s grumpy about it because it’s the main (or only) book of his that most people know, and he doesn’t like it.
Ray Bradbury wrote Farenheit 451 in nine days (he was renting a typewriter by the hour, so he wrote as fast as he could), and apparently it’s a bit raggedy (I’ve never read it).
I guess the moral is, whatever you write, and however you wrote it, if you’re putting it out there with your name on it, you should be sure you can be proud of it.
7 comments December 26th, 2011