Tag: adventures in the writing life

Tales from the Before Time: Springtime Surprise

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Today’s mail brought us the spring royalties on the Mageworlds e-books (available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other e-book retailers.) The pleasant glow this cast over the morning brought to mind another springtime royalty period, some time ago — and thereby, as they say, hangs a tale.

The first thing you need to know is that the book in question was an anthology of short stories, Bruce Coville’s Book of Monsters.  We’d contributed a story to the anthology — “Uncle Joshua and the Grooglemen” — and had been paid a good rate-per-word for it; and that, we thought, was that.  Because the second thing you need to know is that most of the time, the on-acceptance payment for a short story, whether in a magazine or in an anthology, is the only money you’re going to see from it.  Every once in a while, though, a particular story will turn into one of its author’s good children, and continue generating revenue, sometimes in unexpected ways.

The next thing you need to know is that Book of Monsters came out at the peak of the early-nineties middle-grade and young adult horror boom, when the Goosebumps and Are You Afraid of the Dark series were filling up the bookstores and selling like very scary hotcakes.  Not only that, it hit the shelves in October of that year, just in time for Halloween.  It also had some really good stories in it, which probably helped a little bit as well.  At any rate, the anthology not only sold, it sold in sufficiently large numbers that it earned back its advance in the first royalty period.  (This is a thing that never happens — except, of course, for the one time when it does.)

Fast-forward to the following May.  By that time, we’d forgotten all about the anthology and our short story in it.  The money we got for the story had gone to gasoline and groceries long before, and we knew better than to expect anything more from that direction.  Meanwhile, our elder son, whose birthday was coming up, had been agitating for some time for a mountain bike, and we in turn had been pointing to the bloodless turnip that was the family budget and saying, “Think again.”

Then an envelope arrived in the mail, and in that envelope was a royalty check for roughly ten times what we’d been paid for the short story in the  first place.  Our eyes bugged out like a Tex Avery ‘toon’s, and the next thing we did, after carefully replacing the check in the envelope, was call Bruce Coville and ask him if that royalty payment was for real — because, as we said to him, we’d hate to deposit it and then have it turn out that somebody in the publisher’s accounting department had slipped a decimal point.

Bruce assured us that the check was real; and we, in turn, said to our elder son, “Happy birthday — let’s go down to the bicycle shop.”

That story continued to be one of our good children.  The anthology generated royalties for some time thereafter; there was an audiobook edition, for which we got an additional payment; and we later expanded and reworked the short story into a middle-grades novel for Harcourt, which in turn had a French edition from Hachette.

The thing is, though (and I suppose that it’s the moral of this tale) — you never can tell in advance which of your stories is going to be the good child.  All you can do is give each one of them your best shot, and then wait to see what happens.

More Cooking for People who are Thinking about Other Things

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Sometimes it’s fun to tackle a complex recipe with many steps and lots of ingredients. Then there are the other times, when most of your brain’s processing power is tied up with something else, and you can only default to frozen pizza and take-out Chinese so often before the rest of the family — not to mention the family budget — start revolting.  At that point, you need something simple but tasty, like this:

Beef with Garlic and Three Peppers

  •   1 eye round of beef (about 2-3 pounds)
  •   about 5 cloves of garlic
  •   1 teaspoon Szechuan peppercorns
  •   several brisk grindings (coarse) of Tellicherry black pepper
  •   liberal pinch of cayenne pepper

Preheat the oven to about 350 degrees F.

Peel the cloves of garlic and cut them lengthwise into slivers.

Heat the Szechuan peppercorns in a cast-iron pan with a scant  pinch of salt until the peppercorns go from grey-brown to brown-black and start smelling wonderful.  Then grind them in a mortar and pestle.

Take the eye round and put it on a rack in a large roasting pan.  Stab the roast repeatedly all over with a sharp knife (a Fairbairn commando dagger or a Gerber survival knife works best, because of the diamond-shaped cross-section, but any kitchen knife will do.)

Put a sliver of garlic into each stab wound, pressing down so that the beef closes over the garlic.  Meditate upon efficient weapons design.  (This is perhaps the only socially acceptable use of a commando dagger.)

Sprinkle the roast with the cayenne pepper, and then with the ground Szechuan pepper.  Then take the pepper grinder with the Tellicherry black pepper and grind it over the roast until the top looks crusty.

Cook, uncovered, until a meat thermometer at the thickest part reads 160 degrees F.  (About 30 minutes per pound, depending upon the roast and your oven.)

Take out of the oven, and let stand for about ten minutes while you make rice or instant potatoes or thick slices of toast or whatever your personal code of roastbeef says should round out the meal.  Slice thin, across the grain.

Serve.

Say a regretful goodbye to your plans for the leftover roast and tomorrow night’s supper.

Good Tech, Better Tech, Really Good Tech

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I’m as fond of toys as the next she-geek, but Really Good Tech — as in, the stuff that gets replaced at once, no question, if and when it ever dies — is something else again. In my book, to qualify for that title, the piece of technology involved has to:

1. be better than I am
2. at something I really hate doing
3. that nevertheless is usually my job to get done anyway.

This rules out my e-book reader, much as I adore it, because it just facilitates something that I’d enjoy doing regardless of the tech involved. The same goes for my crockpot, no matter how much I rely on it, because I could always fall back on the dutch oven if I had to. In fact, there are only four items, at the moment, that make my Really Good Tech list:

  • The computer/word processor/printer combination. Not for writing, but for turning what I write into a submittable electronic or paper MS. I’m enough of a dinosaur to remember the bad old days, when it would take me half an hour and an unconscionable amount of White-Out to produce a single page of submission-quality typescript. There’s a reason I didn’t start getting published until we got our first computer, the Atari 800 of blessed memory.
  • The GPS for our auto. Because it used to be me riding shotgun with my lap full of maps and triptiks, frantically doing arithmetic (at which I suck) in order to answer urgent questions like “How many minutes until our next exit?” and “What’s our current projected arrival time?”
  • The dishwasher. Because it maintains the fragile barrier between us and total (as opposed to merely partial) household disarray, and without it I would fall behind in the dishwashing and never catch up again.
  • The rice cooker. Because while it only does one thing, it does that one thing right every single time, whereas rice cookery by any other method, for me, is a project with only about a 50% chance of success.

I’ve been giving considerable thought to adding the electric wok to the shortlist, but I’m still on the fence about that one.  I could fake stir-frying in a different pan, or I could adjust my meal plans to make up for the loss if I had to, and besides, I kind of enjoy cooking and I’m not all that bad at it . . . on the other hand, I really like having a proper wok.

The observant reader will have noticed that only one of the items on the Really Good Tech list has anything to do with writing, and the one that does, has more to do with the mechanical end of the job than the creative end.  All you really need for the creative end are the contents of your own head and some means — pencil and paper, typewriter, dictaphone, computer, whatever you’ve got handy — of getting them fixed in permanent form.

For the mechanical end, there’s no magic in either retro or cutting-edge technology.  Use whatever tech you like and can afford and are comfortable with, so long as it can get your material to the marketplace in a form that the marketplace can handle.

The More Things Change

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I’ve said for a long time that the generic publishing-industry headline is “Big Changes Ahead for Publishers; Writers to be Adversely Affected.” Most working writers — like self-employed freelancers in other fields — have by necessity got their strategies fine-tuned to meet the current conditions.  Any change in those conditions is going to make their strategies unstable or unworkable, and they’re going to have to devote time and thought to changing them, instead of spending that time and thought on writing.

Understandably, this does not make writers happy.  It’s hard to concentrate on long-term strategy when you’re dealing with the fact that a previously-reliable part of your income stream has suddenly dried up or gone wonky. The body and brain have this inconvenient habit of insisting on “Food — now!” without caring whether or not there’s money in the bank to pay for it.

Thought for the Day

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There’s a reason why writers are almost as superstitious as sailors and baseball players — they’re all in businesses where you can do the best you can, and have your best actually be pretty damned good, and still get sabotaged by random events beyond your control.

A Sad Fact

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Years ago, for my sins, I was a grad student teaching freshman composition† at a large university. One day, I was cornered after class by a student to whom I had given a B+ on her most recent essay. She wanted to know why, if I hadn’t marked off any errors on the essay, I hadn’t given it an A. I explained that as far as I was concerned, an essay required something more than just technical proficiency to lift it out of the “B” range and up to an “A”.

A stricken expression came over her face. “You mean I have to be interesting, too?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m afraid you do.”

Needless to say, for fiction writing at the publishable level, this truth is not just doubled, it’s squared.  Maybe even cubed.

†I forget exactly what they were calling the freshman English writing class that year — Introduction to Rhetoric, it may have been. The name of the course changes from year to year and school to school, but when you lift up the hood and look at what’s inside, it’s still freshman composition underneath.

Stet

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Stet is Latin for “let it stand.”  It’s also a word of power for dealing with copyeditors who have — in the author’s opinion — overstepped the limits of their job.

A good copyeditor is the author’s friend.  He or she will do things like keeping track of a whole extended family of fictional characters across a multi-volume series, with accompanying fictional place-names and scraps of invented language, so that even if the author fails to do the math and accidentally keeps the same minor character twenty-five years old for almost a decade, the mistake will be fixed before the book hits print.   Characters who enter a scene wearing a t-shirt and jeans will not leave it wearing khaki cargo pants and a flannel button-down, unless they’ve been witnessed changing clothes in the interim.  The setting sun will not shine in through what can only be an eastward-facing window (if the author has supplied enough detail for a reader to infer the layout of the manor house, a good copyeditor will keep that layout in mind.)

In short, a good copyeditor will make you look smarter than you really are, and will ensure that your book is as good as it deserves to be.  If you get a particularly good or face-saving copyedit, it’s a kindness to tell your editor to pass along your thanks to the copyeditor — rather like sending your compliments to the chef — and to mention that if they’re free the next time you have a book come up on the schedule, you’d love to work with them again.

Bad copyedits . . . let’s just say that it’s almost impossible to be a professional writer and not fall victim to at least one staggeringly awful copyedit.    Authors gather in bars and tell copyeditor horror stories.  (To be fair, the group at the other end of the bar is a gang of copyeditors, telling author horror stories.  If no man is a hero to his valet, no author is a hero to his copyeditor.)  At times like these, it helps to keep in mind that the book is, in the end, your book, and to remember the magic word.

Stet.

A Plaintive Query

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Doesn’t anybody know how to use the past perfect any more?

(I’m reading slush these days, along with everything else.  All aspiring writers should do some slush reading if they get the chance.  It’s an enlightening experience, and far more entertaining than, say, grading freshman essays, which I’ve also done in my time.  Even the worst slush in the world was written by somebody who actively wanted to be putting words on paper, or pixels on screen; even the very best freshman essays, on the other hand, have a certain forced, gun-to-the-temple quality about them.  Also, when you’re reading slush, once you get to the point where you’re convinced that a piece is hopeless, you can stop.  With freshman essays, there’s no such release.)

Mr. Melville Submits a Proposal

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Any writer who’s ever tried to put together a proposal package for an editor or an agent knows the unpleasant truth:  Writing a proposal sucks.  You have to make up a summary version of something that you’re telling at novel length because you haven’t got any way to say it that’s shorter; and you have to put the prose equivalent of false eyelashes and fishnet stockings onto something that is — you devoutly hope — subtle and understated, or at least is naturally flashy and dazzling and not some tasteless imitation of the real thing.

Take heart.  And consider the example of Herman Melville, who in 1850 wrote to his English publisher:

“In the latter part of the coming autumn I shall have ready a new work; and I write you now to propose its publication in England. The book is a romance of adventure, founded upon certain wild legends in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries, and illustrated by the author’s own personal experience, of two years & more, as a harpooneer. Should you be inclined to undertake the book, I think that it will be worth to you 200 pounds.. Could you be positively put in possession of the copyright, it might be worth to you a larger sum — considering its great novelty; for I do not know that the subject treated of has ever been worked up by a romancer; or, indeed, by any writer, in any adequate manner.”

This is an effective proposal — the publisher in question bought the book.  Consider what it does:   It lets the publisher know when the projected work is going to be finished; it describes the nature of the book in terms of how it would appeal to the reading public (it’s a “romance of adventure” in an exotic setting — “the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries”); it lets the publisher know of the author’s special qualification through personal experience “of two years & more”; it demonstrates that the author can think of the project in commercial terms and is willing to negotiate.

Wisely, the proposal doesn’t say, as Melville later did when he wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne:

This is the book’s motto (the secret one), Ego non baptizo te in nomine – but make out the rest yourself.†

Melville didn’t enjoy the commercial side of writing (“Dollars damn me,” he wrote — to Nathaniel Hawthorne, again; the long-suffering Hawthorne deserves a gold star) but he could make himself do it when he had to.  And if he could, so can we.

†Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli — “I do not baptize you in the name of the father, but in the name of the devil.” It’s one of Captain Ahab’s memorable lines from Moby-Dick.

Feast and Famine

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I’ve said more than once that there are two basic states in the freelancing life:  the state of too much work and the state of not enough money.  Usually it’s either one or the other, though sometimes, painfully, it can be both at once.

In theory, there should also exist a balancing state of not enough work and too much money, but I don’t think freelancers get to go there.

(Which is a roundabout way of saying that I have a backlog of editorial work that I need to get done, so for the next little while my entries here may be somewhat brief.)