Author Interview: G. Wells Taylor

[G. Wells Taylor was the guy who got me started with self-published books. Years ago I knew such things existed, but I’d never had the incentive to try them out. All that changed when I stumbled across the site manybooks.net and downloaded a copy of Mr. Taylor’s book When Graveyards Yawn. In the pages of that book I met “PI in zombietown” character Wildclown; it blew my mind. Since then I’ve been addicted to the amazing and unfiltered weird that the channel of self-publishing opens up. Today’s it’s my great joy and pleasure to present to you my interview with the man who started it all…]

All of your books seem to feature the undead in one way or another. What is it that fascinates you about zombies and vampires? Is it simply the horror of imperfect immortality, or is there something more?

Zombies and vampires are fitting tools for exploring the horror of imperfect immortality, as you say; but I also see them as dire warnings against imperfect mortality, since they inhabit negative aspects of our own collective identity. Zombies fly in the face of the democratic ideal of safety in numbers and instead invoke the image of mob rule and soulless conformity. Vampires suggest the hypocrisy of individual superiority mocked by an utter dependence upon and envy for their inferior prey. These uncomfortable contradictions make these monsters so human and therefore, captivating to both readers and writers.

In my experience the journey to becoming a seasoned writer is more tangled and complicated than most readers will ever know, so what’s your story? When was the moment you realized, “I want to tell stories,” and how long did it take your dream to come to fruition?

In the early days, I used to illustrate and write stories for my own entertainment. I did well in art class, and thought painting and illustrating would be my way of figuring out my personal puzzles. However, during my first year of art college, I realized that I had many more than a thousand words to say about each picture I generated; so I began to suspect that I would find commercial or fine art to be lacking for me as a sole means of self-expression.

I dropped out of college to work for a few years before eventually returning to study journalism and English literature in university. In the meantime, I had been writing stories and banking manuscripts.

I did annual submissions to publishing houses with little success, but was not discouraged. I knew my stories did not fit the mold. Imagine pitching Wildclown to a publishing industry that was shifting to a more conservative and risk-averse business model.

I thought of myself as a writer despite the fact that people pointed out I wasn’t making any money at it. I didn’t get the point and kept writing anyway.

I mentioned before that you write fiction that primarily focuses on the undead —a topic which has gotten more than its share of attention in the past few years— and yet your stories put a fresh spin on the established tropes: the World of Change posits the question: what if every living thing became effectively unkillable? In Bent Steeple your villain is a pedophilic vampire. In the Variant Effect a wonder-drug makes certain people begin to crave human flesh. And my question is, what is it that drives you to take these tropes that everyone thinks they know backward and forward and say, “Fellas, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet”?

I yearn for something original when I read books. I want to be surprised and entertained by the experience, so I am obsessed with putting something new into the over-worked and overpopulated genres in which I write. I have to be passionate about a book before I can write it, so discovering something unique is essential to lighting that fire.

If you were given the power to imprint a unique monster of your own creation into the cultural consciousness what would it be?

I think my “skin eaters” from the Variant Effect are leaving a mark on readers. I sure have a lot of fun writing them, and I suspect their back story might be sufficiently believable and unsettling to leave a lasting impression. They give me the creeps.

[Albert here: ya’ll can meet the skin eaters for yourselves in Mr. Taylor’s books The Variant Effect and The Variant Effect: GreenMourning. They are super creepy. But don’t take my word for it. Go. Read.]

Conversely, if you were given the power to completely remove one single work of fiction from the pages of history and the minds of men, what would it be?

That’s a hard one. I’ve got too many favorites to focus on a single work of fiction that doesn’t turn my crank. It is a rare book that I will put down once I’ve started reading it. There is usually something of value in every piece of fiction.

From what I can tell, you’ve started self-publishing your books digitally before it was “cool”. What led you down that path? Were you rejected by the mainstream publishing world, or did you always know you wanted to be a solo act?

Historically, the Canadian government has subsidized Canadian publishers in an effort to mitigate the cultural impact of the much larger American publishing industry. Those subsidies went to Canadian publishers and fiction writers that focused on Canadian stories: culture, immigration and history.

So Canadian genre fiction writers were “solo acts” whether we liked it or not.

That left me sending manuscripts to American publishing slush piles. As you know, just prior to the eBook Revolution there were few traditional publishers who accepted unsolicited manuscripts. So the search was on for an agent. When I read that few literary agents were accepting unsolicited manuscripts, I began to think that my books would end up in an attic to be discovered by a relative long after I was dead. While an imperfect outcome, it would have to do.

However, a friend in IT and now business partner, Richard Van Dyk had assured me over the years that developments in technology would eventually push the old publishing industry model to the wayside, and opportunity would come for independent writers through digital content, electronic reading devices and the Internet. He used the rapidly changing music industry model of the time as an example.

While I had my doubts, I soldiered on and started publishing my work online, then after a few missteps with the under-utilized print-on-demand technology, the eBook came into being. That eBook publishing technology validated independent writers, and allowed me to connect directly to the reader.

Compared to many of the people I know in self-publishing you’re substantially…more mature. Do you feel that your age and experience gives a leg up on your younger competition? Or does the generational gap cause more problems than good?

I think Indie publishing is moving onto a relatively even playing field where talent is free to trump all other factors. Age and experience have just made me more disciplined. I’m better at committing my time and doing the work.

I’m gonna geek out for a minute here and say, that I absolutely LOVE your “P.I. in Zombietown” character Wildclown. Where did the idea for a hardboiled private investigator who happens to dress in full clown regalia come from?

Years ago I was working at a psychiatric hospital in a northern Canadian city that was also home to a doomsday cult. Its members dressed up as zombies and the Grim Reaper. They seemed to do this randomly, appearing Monday morning, Wednesday afternoon or Friday night, at any time of year.

Needless to say, after the initial amusement wore off, they became a little depressing. Imagine strolling down the street on a sunny day and passing a gang of fake zombies chanting about the end of the world. I had at that time developed a voracious appetite for hard-boiled detective fiction, a genre I wanted to try my hand at writing. So one day as I passed the zombie horde, I heard a wisecracking voice inside my head that I soon recognized as Wildclown. Mix in a few late nights, a typewriter and Canadian Club whiskey and you’ve got a P.I. in Zombietown.

The doomsday cult’s costumes may have inspired Wildclown’s need to disguise his true identity. The fact that he chose a gothic clown might have had something to do with my interest in Shakespearean tragedies in which insightful “fools” are always popping up at the worst of times.

Speaking of hard-boiled private investigators, a lot of your leading men tend to be hard-drinking, fast-living, loners. What is it about that kind of character that speaks to you?

I find the hard-boiled perspective an excellent way of viewing our world where the gray area has bled into the black and white. It is a practical mindset soaked in defiance, humor and skepticism. The first-person narrative of Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe or Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op was an echo of the inner monologue I was already hearing on the long nights I spent writing.

Shoot us some sage words of writing wisdom. What can the rest of us struggling writers do to up our fiction game?

Just do the work and add something to it every day. Take lots of notes and organize them. Be prepared and trust the process. Get someone to edit, and someone to read. If you feel anxious, depressed or grumpy, you should probably be writing.

In Defense of “Free”

Last week I came across an interesting post by social media maven Kristen Lamb about the dangers of authors making ebooks available for free. You should read the full post for yourself, but the general theme of the post was that because the ebook market is flooded with free stuff and most of it is worth less than a barrel of turds (because, hey, at least turds make good fertilizer) so making your book available for free could do more harm than good merely through the power of negative association.

As some of you may know, I’ve had some experience with the free side of the ebook market in the past, both as a seller and a buyer. And while I’ll concede that there are dangers in offering your ebook for free, in my experience there are also some advantages.

Last year Amazon made my ebook Derelict available for free without my prior knowledge or consent. It hit me as a shock, but it was perfectly within Amazon’s rights to make the change, and rather than gripe and moan about what was happening to my book, I decided to take a positive outlook on the situation. After all, it wasn’t like I was burning up the internet with that story before it was offered for free, and at least now people were READING it. And more than just reading it, some people responded with generally positive reviews.

Fast forward to a couple of months ago when Amazon took the book back to its original price. Of course it didn’t move in the same numbers as it did when it was free, but it still outsold the rest of my fiction by a factor of a thousand percent (that’s a multiple of ten for those of you who ain’t so swuft with the math stuff.) Today it continues to sell just as well.

Which is why, when I recently released another short story, The Fisherman’s Nightmare, I chose to make it available for free on Smashwords. Of course the free book selection on Smashwords is even worse than what it is on Amazon, and the traffic there isn’t nearly as heavy which means I didn’t have terribly high hopes for the story, but not only did it move at a reasonable rate, it also drove a few sales for my other paid books as well.

Now this is only anecdotal evidence, and I’m not trying to say that everything Kristen said in her post was wrong, but I do feel like there’s a little more to the story.

We all want to get people talking about our writing, and as an unknown author it can be easy to feel overwhelmed, lost in a sea of other authors of varying ability, all them trying to break through to become the next Amanda Hocking. There are lots of ways to get the message about your books out to the world, but the core of the equation remains: are they any good?

And whether you choose to spread the word via social media, or making your books free, or hiring out a plane to do skywriting, people aren’t going to respond if they don’t like your work.

Remember, there is plenty of bad self published fiction out there, and at whatever price it makes the rest of us look bad.

Do your part. Don’t make it worse.

My Dad vs. The Talkative But Paranoid Barber

[The following is a mostly true story. Whatever that means.]

My dad says that the important skill a barber possesses is not his ability to cut hair. The ability to cut hair is important of course, but it comes in a very close second to the ability to talk. Because basically you’re this guy’s prisoner for fifteen minutes, sitting in his weird chair while he does things with sharp objects very close to your head. Hmm. Come to think of it there may be a story in that somewhere.

But this story, like I said before, is true. Or at least as true as a story can be after two retellings and being processed by a writers imagination.

The story goes like this. My dad goes to the barber a couple of weeks ago, this barber, like all good barbers (and good hairdressers too for those of you who might accuse me of sexism) strikes up a conversation.

And somewhere in the conversation it comes out that I am a writer. I would be lying if that part of the story didn’t make me a little proud, to know that my father is willing to talk about his son’s prospective writing career with complete strangers. Anyway so somewhere in there my dad mentions that I’m a writer and the barber says, “Oh is that so? You know, I do some writing myself.”

My dad, a little surprised by this says, “Really? I didn’t know that.”

“Oh yes,” says the barber. “Yes indeed.”

“Have you been published anywhere?”

The barber shakes his head. Dad glances up at his reflection in the big mirror that covers the wall of the barber shop and sees that the guy looks just a little nervous.

“What I do,” the barber explains, “is I type out all my stories on the computer. When I’m done for the day I print out what I’ve written and close out the file without saving.”

“I don’t understand,” my dad says. “Why go to all that trouble?”

“That’s the only way I can be sure,” says the barber. “Don’t you see?”

My dad doesn’t see, and he says so.

“They can see that stuff if they want to. They can get right onto you computer and see all your files. This is the only way I can be sure, see?”

My dad, realizing that logic has become something of a rare commodity in this situation does not ask who “they” are or why “they” would be so anxious to read the writings of a small town barber. Instead he asks, “Well do you ever plan to get any of them published?”

The barber shakes his head. “Not me, Albert” (My dad’s name is also Albert. But I’m NOT a junior. Clear as mud?) “I’m putting them all in a safe place. Somewhere where no one will find them until after I’m dead. Then…well we’ll see.”

“I don’t understand. Why not send it off to some publisher somewhere? Who knows? Maybe you’ll get published, get rich.”

The barber shakes his head looking a little sad. “I can’t do that,” he says.

“Why not?”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” says the barber. “When I was a young man I had my palm read, my fortune told. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but over the years every single one of the predictions that fortune-teller made came true. I met my wife on a train. She conceived within the first year of our marriage. And then my dad died in a car accident three days before my thirty-fifth birthday. All of this she told me, understand?”

My dad says he does, but that he doesn’t know what any of that has to do with the barber’s hidden manuscript.

“Well,” the barber answers, “I’ll tell you. That fortune-teller said one more thing to me. She said, ‘You’ll be a bestselling author. But not until after you’re dead.’ And you know what? I’m not in any great hurry to die.”

[This has been a mostly true story. Had this been a story I made up, there would likely have been some twist at the end where the barber took off his face to reveal a mass of quivering alien flesh underneath, and my dad would have melted him away with that gel stuff barbers keep all their combs in. But this story was true, apart from the things I made up, so none of that stuff happened. You’ll have to settle for this.]

The Long Run

You know what I like? Money.

Really I do. I think it’s likely that some of you do too. But it’s hard to come out and say it sometimes isn’t it? Because we want people to believe that our motives are pure, untarnished by such a vulgar thing as money.

So we beat around the bush. We say things like, “Money isn’t everything in life,” and “I would rather be happy than rich,” and while there isn’t anything wrong with these statements I think in some small way they’re really our way of saying, “I’m not rich, and so I’m going to justify my relative poverty through moral superiority.”

But let me tell you, I get kinda sick of shopping the discount bread rack at the grocery store, or doing the math in my head to see if I can afford to fill my gas tank all the way up. I’m not telling you this because I want you to feel sorry for me. I have a house, two cars, two televisions (that I’m currently trying to convince my wife we should really get rid of) and I eat well enough that I’ve started back into exercising to shed those extra pounds. I’m not hurting.

But I wouldn’t say no to more.

Which is why, when someone commented on this blog yesterday, asking how many self-published authors made a profit, it got me to thinking and thinking hard. Because while I can honestly say I write because I love it, and would continue to do it whether I got paid or not, you had better believe that one day, I’d like to make some money with this writing thing.

Here’s what I think about the prospects of making money as a self-published author: it can be done, but it won’t be fast (or easy).

I’ve been reading Bob Mayer’s blog on and off recently, and one of the things he loves to hate on is the fact that Amazon’s sales tracker lets self-published authors check their numbers in real time. In his eyes, this is symptomatic of a get-rich-quick, show-me-the-money-now kind of mentality that plagues the majority of the self-published authors out there in the world.

And while I mentioned yesterday, that I myself check my sales numbers far too often for Mr. Mayer’s taste, I agree with the general assertion he’s making about the industry.

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating. Self-publishing is not a get-rich-quick scheme. I’ve been following several authors who have released self published books recently, hard working people who I admire as writers and who seem to be doing everything right.

But the numbers just aren’t there. The general pattern is: sales start pretty well at first, but as the author reaches the outer limits of his internet audience, those sales start to drop off pretty quickly. Because let’s be real, the odds of some stranger finding your work at random amidst the piles and piles of other self-published books out there and buying it are way lower than we’d like to think about.

Bummer right? Well, yes and no. Like I said, this isn’t a short term game. These lackluster numbers are coming from authors still working to establish a presence in this crazy world of digital publishing.  And that takes time. Amanda Hocking, the personified holy grail of self-publishing, wrote seventeen books before she started self-publishing them. That’s a lot of hours spent in front of a screen leading up to what seemed like an “overnight success.”

So here’s my advice to you authors hoping to someday may a profit. Don’t think about next week or next month, or even next year. Think about where you’ll be a decade from now. Are you willing to stick with it for that long? Are you willing to keep writing, and keep putting your work out there even when it seems like it’s going nowhere?

Because that’s what it’s going to take. I’m not saying you’ll get rich like Amanda Hocking, but if you stick with it for the long haul and give it your all, I believe it is possible to make this writing thing profitable. That’s my plan anyway, and I’m sticking with it.

Bizzaro Book Review: Scoop by Kit Frazier

We’re in dangerous waters with today’s review folks. I’ve left the safe harbour of nerdy dude fiction and ventured out over the deep and shark infested seas of…Chick Lit.

Why am I reviewing this book again? Two reasons:

1. I’m a sucker for obscure authors with a great voice.

2. I’m an even bigger sucker for ebooks with a 99 cent price point.

So, without further ado lets get on with the show.

Scoop is a book about a reporter named Cauley McKinnon who has made some…less than stellar choices in her love life which in a roundabout way has led to her working at the obituary desk of the smallest of Austin’s newspapers. And that would be Austin as in Austin, TX, a town so clearly realized in this novel that it comes to feel like a character in and of itself. In this and other things Scoop is a clear example of the old mantra, Write what you know. It was clear to me when reading the author was drawing many of the details of her fictional surroundings from real life, and that realism of setting made the story all the more believable.

The author’s writing style is both clear and compelling, which was really one of the first things that made me want to buy the book. The second reason is that from the first page the characters seem to leap off the page and into your mind.

The books characters are both its greatest strength and greatest weakness. On the one hand the main cast is strong and well developed, filled with well rounded villains and subtle flawed heroes. On the down side the supporting cast of characters, mainly represented by Cauley’s friends and family, are also fully developed. You may be wondering why I’ve put this down as a negative. The essential problem is that while this cast of miscellaneous characters are both colorful and interesting, they do almost nothing to move the plot forward. Occasionally they provide support to our heroine in her times of trouble (and Cauley McKinnon has loads of trouble on her plate) but they do very little to push the story forward which by the end of the book leaves the lot of them looking decidedly superfluous.

As to the story itself it was compelling enough as both a mystery and a romance, keeping me turning the pages till the very end. Unfortunately once I got to the end I found the resolution to both threads to be slightly underwhelming. On the one hand Cauley solves the mystery and ostensibly finds the right man for her but her happy ending feels somehow shallow and tacked on.

And of course since this book is partially a romance its time for my to insert my obligatory rant about such things here. Cauley McKinnon suffers from what I will call Bella Swan syndrome. Bella Swan syndrome is when a female character downplays her own attractiveness and then every single unattached guy she meets wants to jump her bones. And I know I’ve complained about the double standard before but I’m gonna hit it again here:

Ladies, don’t tell me you want me to love you for who you are and not what you look like and then write stories in which your heroine has guys drooling all over her because of what she looks like. Your desire to be desired is practically omnipresent in the books you write for other gals.

If you really meant what you said you would write characters that are truly unattractive, that don’t get noticed by guys, that have to prove their inner beauty over time to win the heart of the man they love. Or better yet, write a guy character who isn’t superficially handsome. If what’s the inside is so much more important than what is on the outside then why aren’t there ever any nerdy, balding, overweight male love interests in your books? (wrote the nerdy, balding, overweight male)

Okay I think that’s all the soapboxing you can handle.

In the summation Scoop is fun book with great writing and believable characters. The plot tapers off a little toward the end, but on the plus side this book has a sequel so hopefully the intrepid Cauley McKinnon will get a more satisfactory resolution in that one.

I already mentioned the 99 cent price point and Scoop is more than worth that. If you like romantic mysteries or mysterious romances this book has got you covered. You can get it for your eReader type devices here.

A Short Story for the Long Tail

Tomorrow is the big day!

Those of you who read my blog and Twitter feed regularly know what I’m talking about. Yes ladies and gentlemen, tomorrow marks the midpoint of the series of “How Not To Be A Terrible Foster Parent” classes my wife and I are taking. And also, there’s some little thing about me publishing a book?

In all seriousness though, I’m super excited about this. Not really because I think this is going to be the magical day that changes everything and makes me rich, but it’s the start of something new, and in some ways, the end of something old.

See, for the longest time I looked down on the idea of self-publishing. My philosophy was basically this: if your work isn’t crap someone will publish it; if you’ve decided to self-publish it’s because your ego is too big to admit that your writing stinks.

I’ve…mellowed on that position quite a bit over the years. It’s true that there is a lot of garbage out there in the electronic publishing universe, but that only makes sense. If you create a system where anyone can publish their work, your really shouldn’t be surprised if when you get a fair amount of sub par submissions. But there are plenty of legitimately good authors who have put good work out there on the electronic marketplace, and when you get right down to it, it’s not that difficult to sort the good from the bad.

So I’m self-publishing. That doesn’t mean I’ve given up on the traditional marketplace altogether, but I’ve come to realize a couple of things that help me to understand the divide between traditional publishing and self-publishing that informed my decision to go the electronic route, at least for now.

First, traditional publishers are looking for traditional books. I know there are some rare exceptions out there. The fact that House of Leaves ever saw the light of day at all is  testament to the fact that some publishers are still willing to take a risk on something radical and different. But what people forget is that big publishers exist for one reason and one reason only. It’s not to promote young authors. It’s not to bring a new and exciting creative vision into the world. It’s to make money.

Some people look down on this, but these people are, frankly, stupid. If you’ve got a company, the whole point is making money. Which means that you focus on the things you know people are going to buy, like thrillers, mysteries and romances. And yes, I know that I’ve done my share of whining about genres, but the truth is the casual reader isn’t interested in experimental literature and ergodic fiction. They want to buy what they’ve always bought and big publishers would be fools not to deliver that kind of fiction to them.

The second and possible more important factor in my decision to self-pub my work was this: no one publishes novellas any more. Again, I know there are a few exceptions, but generally those exceptions are all from previously published authors with name recognition. There’s probably a fascinating discussion we could have as to why this is, but I’d imagine we’d find that the bottom line is money again.

My book fails both of the previously mentioned standards. First, it’s a story told through the voice of a dog who is facing the zombie apocalypse. I don’t even begin to know how to classify it as a genre. It’s got zombies in it, so you might say it’s horror, but the truth is there’s just as much humor woven in there as there is horror.

Second, it’s short. About 20,000 words to be precise.

But in spite of these things, I think it can find an audience. Perhaps not an audience large enough to justify a publisher’s interest, but there are enough people out there on the long tail of readership who are looking for something fresh and interesting for me to believe that this little book might actually go somewhere.

If you think you might be one of these people then I invite you to join me tomorrow for the launch of A Prairie Home Apocalypse or: What the Dog Saw. Together we’ll see how far a strange little story like this can go.

[Oh, and please don’t comment and tell me how I’m using the terms “self-publishing” or “traditional publishing” incorrectly. I’ve read all the petty arguments about semantics, and…it just doesn’t matter people. Let it go.]

A Problem of Perspective

Yesterday, I told you about my experience with my editor and how wonderful it was. I extolled the experience of being edited as something uplifting and refreshing. And my conclusion was simple:

You should do it too.

But maybe you’re still skeptical. Maybe you’re thinking, “That’s all well and good for Albert, but really what does he know? Just because he needs an editor doesn’t mean that I do.”

But you’re wrong my friend, horribly wrong. And here is why:

1. You haven’t explained enough.

You know your story backwards and forwards. You know exactly what is happening and why. But nobody else does. Which is really why you’re writing that book in the first place right? Because you want to tell people the story in your head. But sometimes you don’t get it all out.

So you’ll get your editor saying things like “Why is the dog thinking about eating the brains of this zombie. Is he in the habit of eating purifying grey matter? Is this the kind of thing his owners leave lying around the house? This makes no sense.”

At which point you realized that maybe including the detail that the dog is ravenously hungry might be somewhat enlightening to your readers.

2. Hey Bub back off on the explanation!

What’s that you say? This is the exact oposite thing of what we just discussed? Why, how astute of you.

But it’s still a problem. Because clearly you’re not trying to be obscure. You want your readers to understand what’s going on. And sometimes you tend to include to much detail, just in case they don’t quite get it.

The line between too much detail and not enough is razor thin. So you need an editor to say, “You don’t have to say ‘She reached for the can.’ Anyone over the age of four is capable of understanding that if the can was in the cupboard in one sentence and being opened in the next that it did not in fact magically teleport itself through the aether. Cans are not in the habit of doing that.”

3. Everything else

Because, lets face it, there’s way more than three things wrong with your manuscript. An editor can help you with everything from structure to weak verbs.

And please don’t misunderstand. It’s not because you’re a bad writer. You’re just too close to see everything that needs fixing.

You’re a little like the woman I met yesterday who was looking for a way to lock her daughter’s bedroom window shut so that she couldn’t get out in the middle of the night and go out galavanting with her boyfriends. (And by “galavanting” I mean “having sex”.) She looked me straight in the eye and said “When I was her age my parents screwed my windows shut, but my boyfriend just took out the screws.”

You know, on second thought you’re nothing like that woman. But you have a similar problem, which is that you can’t see the absurdity of what is literally right in front of your face. You’re too close. Too involved. You need someone who’s not involved with the situation who can step back and say, “If your daughter’s doing exactly the same thing you did at her age maybe your husband shouldn’t be calling her a whore. And exactly how did you two get to know each other anyway?”

Before I close, I wanted to give a quick caveat that all the edits I included, even though they were inspired by problems in my actual manuscript, were my own wording. My editor, the lovely and talented Ellie Soderstrom is far too nice to say things so harshly. Which was one of the wonderful things about working with her. She was able to tell me what needed changing without making me feel like a douche for getting it wrong.

I’ve already thanked her privately, but I wanted say it here where everyone could see. Thank you, thank you, thank you Ellie. You don’t know how much you encouraged me.

The Jacqueline Howett Guide to Becoming a Better Buzzard

A week or so back (I honestly can’t remember; time’s fun when you’re having flies) everyone, and I mean everyone in the writing community was talking about Jacqueline Howett and her angry tirade on the Books and Pals Blog review of her book The Greek Seaman (no I’m not doing any puns. All the good ones have been used up anyway.)

It was like the rotting corpse of some animal bringing the buzzards far and wide to feast upon its stinking goodness. And before you go off mad, I’m one of those buzzards too. It’s not an insult. They’re an important necessary part of our ecological system. Fascinating creatures. For instance, did you know that the buzzard’s head lacks feathers because-

[Tangent Alert! Tangent Alert! Tangent Alert!]

Okay, okay! Keep your britches on! Anyway. The Great Jacqueline Howett Meltdown got me to thinking: Jacqueline Howett is a person.

Which hopefully everyone knows. I mean no one thinks she’s some kind of alien robot sent to sow discord on the internet or anything like that. But sometimes even though we know we don’t really know.

There’s something about distance that keeps us from seeing other people as real people. I still remember the moment when as a child we were driving down the road and I looked out at all the other cars and realized that each and every one of those people had a life every bit as real and full and complex as mine. But I also realized it was easy for us to ignore that fact because each of us was encapsulated in our own little climate controlled pod on wheels with the radio on, drowning out the our thoughts, letting us think we were the only real people in the world.

The internet is a lot like that too. Each of us sitting here at our own glowing screen interacting with others, but not really grasping the fullness of the truth that all those other words represent living, breathing, hoping individuals just like us.

I’m not here to defend Ms. Howett. I’m just here to remind you that she’s a person. She is more than the sum of her words.

Writing a book, even a bad one full of mistakes and errors is a lot of work. If you don’t believe me you should try it some time. And especially that first book…that sucker is like pulling teeth and giving birth at the same time.

Worst. Dentist appointment. Ever.

And when you’re finally done you print it all out and look at it in all of its grandeur and you think, “This is possibly the greatest thing I have ever done.” And you know what? For most of it, it probably is the greatest thing we’ve ever done.

And then someone comes along and shoots it full of holes.

It’s easy to make that person into the enemy. Because that criticism can hurt, especially at first. It doesn’t matter if it’s right or not. It doesn’t matter if the person giving the criticism is trying to help. It still takes a knife and shoves it right through our ego.

Like I said already, I’m not here to defend Ms. Howett. What she did was wrong on any number of levels.

But the next time something like this happens, think before you flame. Remember that the one on the other end of your criticism is a person too. It doesn’t mean you have to censor yourself. But maybe stop and think: “Would I be willing to say this to their face?”

Always remember to “speak the truth in love.”

How to Ignore Perfectly Good Advice in Three Easy Steps

You are not alone.

You ever notice how often that phrase pops up in commercials? Do you ever feel a little creeped out by it? Maybe you look around the house to make sure that there’s no one there with you. Well if you do, then you are not alone.

But all silliness aside, as a writer you really aren’t alone. There are hundreds and thousands of other writers out there, from all different levels of the skill spectrum, and many of them are eager and willing to help you out on your journey toward the fun and lucrative world of being a published author.

This is a good thing. Sometimes.

But sometimes it can be overwhelming. There are lots of great people out there with tons of knowledge, and lots of great advice to give out. They’ve been there, they’ve done that, and they know all the mistakes you’re going to make if you’re not careful. You’d be a fool to ignore them.

Except.

Except sometimes their advice doesn’t work for you. And sometimes it might actually contradict other advice you’re getting from equally credible sources.

This is something I’ve thought about quite a bit recently because it happened to me in a big way. Let me explain.

I started blogging seriously solely because of the influence of one Kristen Lamb, media expert and all around awesome person. Her blog is an invaluable resource on how to leverage social media as an author, as well as having great tips on plotting and structure.

(Also she has a book entitled We Are Not Alone. How’s that for your freaky coincidence?)

She encourages writers to do things like start a regular blog, get on Twitter and Facebook, and for the love of Bob use your writing name wherever you can.

As you may be able to tell, I’ve taken most of her advice to heart. But one of her bits of social media wisdom is this: Blog about what you write about.

You may be noticing that I am in fact blogging about writing. I do not write about writing. Except now. Which doesn’t count.

But I didn’t make the choice to pass on that particular piece of advice at a whim. I went through a process of thought and introspection which I’ve boiled down into three steps.

If someone’s giving you advice you’re not sure about maybe this will help.

1. Listen

This is very important. Sometimes a piece of advice might not be for you, but if you dismiss it out-of-hand then you’re doing yourself a disservice. At least give the person the benefit of the doubt that they’re not just blowing smoke. They want to help you. Don’t ever ignore that.

When I first read Kristen Lamb’s advice, I didn’t just snort and say, “Well that’s stupid. I’m not doing that.” I listened. I gave the idea room to take root in my mind.

2. Think

Now that you’ve got the bit of advice in your head, mull it over, do your best to understand it. If you can, try to incorporate it into your process. Even if it doesn’t feel natural at first, give it a try. If it doesn’t work for you try to understand why it doesn’t work. There may be some deeper kernel of truth within the advice that may be able to benefit you.

“Blog about what you write about” is really a great piece of advice. Kristen’s deeper point is this: we need to connect with our potential readers not just other writers. And that’s something I’ve tried to keep in mind as I’ve slowly expanded my writer’s platform.

3. Decide

Because hey, you can really do whatever you want to do. Ignoring advice isn’t wrong. If it doesn’t work for you then fine. If it does work for you and improves your craft, even better.

Obviously, I decided not to follow Kristen’s advice. I made my decision mostly because it’s hard to blog on topic when your work-in-progress is a horror story about a monster mulch pile.

I’m gonna talk about what? Organic gardening?

But for someone writing a more conventional genre, say legal thrillers, blogging on topic could be a fantastic opportunity to connect with readers.

The bottom line is that one size does not fit all. You need balance. You shouldn’t reject advice simply because you don’t feel like doing it. But neither should you feel obligated to go on following advice that just isn’t working out for you. You have to use wisdom and discernment, and consider which path is best for you.

And that’s my advice. You know what to do with it.

The Marketability Monster

I have a problem people. See, the thing is I’m doing my best to build this whole “writer’s platform” thing so that I can grow my fanbase. I have to say that on the whole it’s a lot of fun interacting with all of you, and writing this blog every day has been a great experience.

There’s only one problem. I’m doing it wrong.

Well, not everything. Just the one thing mostly. But it’s something important. See, I’m supposed to be turning myself into a brand. I’m supposed to be building up the kind of persona online that will hopefully draw people to read my books.

It shouldn’t be that hard. When you think, Heinze you think catsup. When you think IBM you think computers. When you think Toyota you think dying in a horrible fireball of twisted metal that’s hurtling toward a group of unsuspecting preschoolers.

And when you think Albert Berg you think…well what exactly? This is the problem for me. I’m supposed to pick a genre and stick with it. And I know it’s good advice.

Stephen King writes horror. Michael Connelly writes mysteries. Simon Winchester writes non-fiction about smart people.

The problem is I do not want to be pinned down. Let me give you an example.

The story I’m working on currently is called The Mulch Pile. The Mulch Pile is a story about two brothers in a disfuntional family and what happens when the garden mulch pile comes to life and starts wreaking havoc in their already unbalanced lives. You could loosely classify it as Horror.

But the other day I was mulling some ideas over in my head, and I came up with a loose outline for a story about a goth dude who drives a Mary Kay pink Cadillac, a homeless woman, and an everyman sales clerk who all get in way over their heads when they face off with a group of drug-dealing grannies. I’m not sure where you classify that one, but I’m pretty sure its as far from Horror as you can get.

And I really want to write both of them. I know it’s wrong. I know it’s absolutely counterintuitive. I know people want to know what to expect when they pick up a book with my name on it.

But I can’t bring myself to commit. There are just so many wonderful stories out there to write, so many crazy things I want to try out. How am I supposed to narrow it down?

This is usually the part of the blog where I give you some kind of answer, some resolution to the problem presented. The problem is I don’t have one. Maybe I really should just buckle down and forget about my dreams of diversity.

Maybe you’ve got a better solution. Or maybe you’re facing the same problem. If you’ve got some advice for me, I’d love to hear it. If you’re in the same boat, I’d love to hear that too.

For now, all I can say is that I’m enjoying the ride. I may not be making much of a brand for myself, but I’m having a whole lot of fun along the way.