Unfortunately, our signing will be the store’s last. The parent company will be closing it down (along with 100 other stores) in January.
It’s a complicated decision, not helped by the fact that the mall in which the store is located is doing poorly. But it’s also an example of everything wrong with corporate bookselling. Increasingly, the big chains are trying to sell books as if they were commodities. The manager of this store has been repeatedly frustrated over the years by her inability to sell books she feels fit her community’s tastes and needs. Instead, the company insists her store sell the same titles as every other Waldenbooks, and in the same amounts.
Think about that. Do you think the folks in western New York want to read the same books as the folks in western Tennessee? Sure, they’ll read a lot of the same books, but they won’t all be the same. There are regional differences (in fact, the folks in western New York probably don’t even read the same books as the folks in New York City or Long Island). And there are other differences, too. Do you think the folks in a town with a large military base read the same books as a town with a couple of small liberal arts colleges? I doubt it. And yet Waldenbooks (and Barnes & Noble) demands that their stores do just that. And then they judge the stores on their ability to match up against this artificially created national taste, too. Can a store manager order more books than the national buyer already has for her store even if she knows she can sell them? No. The national buyer tells her to have the customer special order the book instead.
Stupid national buyer. Why would anyone come in to Waldenbooks and special order a book Waldenbooks doesn’t carry when they can order the same book from Amazon from home? Have Waldenbooks fail to carry a book you’re looking for a couple of times, and you’re going to start not bothering to come in at all.
Which means that Amazon has the chain bookstores right where they want them.
So what is the future of bookstores, and bookselling, going to be? The Kindle and the Nook? Hardcovers as a luxury market for bibliophiles the same way vinyl is for audiophiles? Bestsellers in grocery stores and airports and everything else online? POD?
Writers discuss this all the time. What do you think?
]]>The rude, the uncouth, the unwary who let slip the fundamentally important pivotal core detail while talking about some recent book or movie to someone else who has not yet read or seen it. The reviewers who, in absence of an opinion on a piece, trot out a plot synopsis complete with spoilers embedded within.
The thing is, I understand the aversion to basic spoilers *completely* - so long as we are talking about *current work*. Something that’s still in the cinemas, some book that’s barely hit the shelves, that sort of thing - the kind of situation where your partner in conversation might want to keep from knowing certain details until they’ve had a chance to experience those themselves. That’s understandable, and perfectly fine.
But just where does one draw the line, when talking about older works?
In a newsgroup I frequent recent discussions have centered on the Oz books, and on the Odyssey (yes, THAT Odyssey. Homer’s). Someone asked a question along the lines of “Wasn’t there an Oz book where….?” and someone else answered “Yes.” That was suddenly considered a spoiler - a malicious interference with people, destroying the pleasure with which new readers will approach the Oz books.
But correct me if I am wrong - first, the Oz books are pretty much aimed at kids (weren’t they? Even the spoiler-whingers talked about eight year old readers somewhere) and those readers are not on this forum at all - which means that no spoilers have been made for THEM - and frankly, if you’re forty and you still haven’t read all the Oz books and don’t want spoilers *just in case you do* I don’t feel that’s my problem. These books have been around for a long time, they have been talked about for a long time, I don’t think you can even GET some of them any more they’ve been out of print for so long, and I don’t see how the fact that some grown-up human being won’t take responsibility for his or her own choices to read or not to read the Oz books should affect what I have to say about them.
But Odyssey ?!? Yes, that Odyssey, Homer’s, the one which has been around for a COUPLE OF HUNDRED YEARS - how can anybody, with a straight face, even talk about a spoiler for that? I read it as a child; I’ve probably forgotten more about it than some people will ever know, and you know, that’s fine, not everyone has to have read this as a prerequisite for growing up. It was just my own good fortune to have been raised steeped in the culture and literature and mythology of the old world and the history at the dawn of time, and while I would love for everyone to have shared that upbringing I realise that they have not (especially in the modern United States of America where 150 years counts as old and historic and anything before that all too frequently dismissed away as irrelevant). But really, if you are living in a Western civilization and haven’t grown up in Papua New Guinea or some isolated South Sea island, you will have - SHOULD have - heard of the civilisation of ancient Greece. Perhaps even of its Gods and heroes. Perhaps even of its poets. Screaming “spoiler!” if someone references a poetic saga hudreds of years old simply reveals an abysmal cultural ignorance, and not an eager desire to “get around to” reading the Odyssey one day, some day, when other more important things (”hey guys the game is on”) are not interfering with that goal.
Just how old, just how hoary, just how venerable does a book or a movie have to be before it can be spoken about in public without someone shutting you up about spoilers? I’ve heard the cry of spoiler go up with such things as “It’s a Wonderful Life” - but for the love of Clarence the Angel, just about everyone involved with that movie has died of old age. I should think that the statute of limitations has run out for it by now. Oh, here’s another - there’s a Big White Rabbit. And his name is Harvey.
I just re-watched an old favourite movie on an afternoon re-run on TV - well, I was sick and bored and miserable and I couldn’t concentrate on much else so I watched a lot of TV, okay….? - and you know what? I know this movie practically by heart. I know it on a level that’s so full of spoilers that it would freak the spoiler-averse out to an epic degree. But knowing the dialogue as it is uttered - knowing the expressions that will come into people’s eyes - knowing certain favourite scenes are coming up and waiting for them with eager anticipation - it is possible, you know, to watch/read a story for the Nth time and STILL get a kick out of it…. when it is that good. This movie I am speaking about? The first time I saw it, cold, spoiler free, I cried. I cried every time I have seen it since. And the spoilers have taken nothing away from that. NOTHING.
So. For myself, I pledge to remain courteous about the issue, and conscious of other people’s desires to experience a movie or a book for the first time for themselves…. so long as it is a NEW movie or a book. Anything older than a quarter of a century has been around plenty long enough to have been “spoiled” by someone other than me a long time ago. And if somebody just hasn’t “got around’ to seeing or reading a particular (elderly) work of art… well… that can’t be my problem. I cannot curtail my speech or my opinions because I do not know whether someone on the other side of a written page, or a screen, has read or seen some book or movie which I reference. We are all guardians of our own culutral universe - and the only way to avoid spoiler talk altogether is simply to withdraw from the real world and lock the doors behind you. If you do NOT want a book or movie spoiled, do not read reviews, do not frequent places where people might have conversations. Here’s the thing - the rest of the world can’t, and won’t, wait until you catch up. It’s moved on, to other things - and in its wake the things that were older are now embedded in the matrix of common knowledge.
For myself, the answer to the question which is the title of this post is, I don’t really care. For me, the lure often isn’t the destination. It’s the journey. I don’t care if I know in advance that the Butler Did It. What I want to know is How The Butler Did It. And for that… I’ll watch the story. A good story will survive any “spoiler”, any day.
What do you think?
]]>The fact is, I don’t know. I have finally realized (and I’ve written a trilogy and series before this so you think I would have figured it out), that I won’t know what’s necessary until I finish the book and come back with a little bit of mental distance. In the end, I may not be able to tell. I may need beta readers or my editor or agent to tell me. But I have to trust my instincts and experience now and I have to keep writing. I can’t revise an empty page and my deadline is looming closer than I would like. So I’m at the point where I have to stop dithering and just write and let the chips fall where they may, and hope they fall into proper place.
Actually, the good thing is that once I reach the point of no time left, my head usually kicks into high gear and the internal critic is drowned out by the panic stricken voice of the creative side of me shrieking the end is nigh! The end is nigh! Clearly I’m already punchy. Sorry about that. But I’m at last making good forward progress. I keep a sign by my computer that says: Abandon All Standards and Write Fast. To me, that translates into get the draft done. The real writing is in the revision, but i can’t revise if I have nothing written. so the sign tells me to get to work and stop worrying.
And now for the Shameless self Promotion. Today, November 3rd, I’m live blogging over at Bitten By Books, and there is a contest where you can win Amazon gift cards, along with an interview with me. Come on over and ask some questions.It starts at noon central time and runs until midnight central time. I hope to see you there.
And about Bitter Night. Here’s a description the first chapter. I hope you enjoy.
]]>I’ve grouped Bad Things into several general behaviors:
What other bad behaviors would you add to the list? (I’m not looking for specific stories about specific people - that would violate my gossiping note, above!)
]]>This is where it REALLY helps to have talented family members. My husband is a professional website developer as well as a writer himself, so he designed and built my new website; my brother Dave is a filmmaker, and he made my first book trailer. Both of them took projects that could have been hideously stressful for me and made them astonishingly fun.
Because Patrick and Dave were the ones working with me, I wasn’t stressing out over the Oh-My-God Pressure of trying to market my book. Instead, I was helping to shape something creative with someone I loved. And that made all the difference.
Since this is my first book, I am laughably ignorant about the whole process of book promotion, and I wasn’t exaggerating - the concept really does terrify me. It hits all my old buttons, the ones shaped way back when I was a kid.
Back then, I used to be paralyzingly shy. And I’m not being metaphorical there - it genuinely felt physically paralyzing. On the first day of high school every year, surrounded by strangers in my new classes, I used to stare down at my book on my desk while giving myself silent pep talks.
Just say hi to someone. Just try it. They might be nice. Just say hi…
Guess how many times that worked? Only once - and it was a total disaster. I tried to say hi…but my throat had choked up so tightly with nerves, all that came out was a breathy: “H-h-h-h-h….”
My one and only consolation was the other kids didn’t even realize I’d tried to speak, so I was able to hide my humiliation as I cleared my throat and pretended with all my might to be 100% absorbed in the book I held in front of me.
Even thinking about that moment still makes me shrivel up inside.
In the years since then, I’ve learned to put on the appearance of confidence. When I’m surrounded by strangers nowadays, I smile and I do say “hi” - and 99% of the time, my voice doesn’t fail me. Afterwards, though, when I’m alone, I have to take deep, deep breaths as I decompress…because the truth is, I’m just as shy as ever - I’ve just learned techniques to deal with it.
Book promotion is taking me to a whole new level of intimidation, though. I don’t just have to say hi to a few people and hope that maybe one or two of them will click with me as a friend; I have to introduce my beloved book to a whole world of strangers, and hope they want to spend money to buy it. The whole idea makes me want to hide under the bed.
Every time I start to retreat, though, what saves me is exactly what saves me in all aspects of life: my wonderful, generous friends and family. One of my sisters-in-law, a former pro photographer, took my author photos and made me giggle helplessly as she did it, instead of freezing up with my most camera-shy grimace. My brother Dave designed me “Everything’s better with highwaymen!” promotional buttons that make me laugh and relax every time I see them. (One’s pinned onto my backpack right now.) And every time I see that one of my friends has posted my book trailer on their blog, I feel a wave of warmth and gratitude.
There are a lot of scary things about book promotion. But I’m finding so much to be grateful for, as well.
]]>The books I assigned were, with one exception, favorites of mine that I thought he should read as a way of examining the craft of successful authors. The one exception was a book of his choosing by a well-known and critically acclaimed author. We’re two books into the term, and I have to admit that as I go back and re-read these favorites of mine, I’m surprised by what I’m finding.
These are flawed novels. At times they have serious point of view issues. Occasionally their characters behave in ways they clearly shouldn’t. The books are, in places, overwritten. At other points they wander and get lost in little narrative cul-de-sacs. In short, they are far from perfect, and though I chose them originally thinking that they would be examples of how to conceive and write a novel, I now realize that I may need to take a somewhat different tack in the discussions I’ll be having with my student. But only somewhat.
Because despite their imperfections, both books remain examples of how to tell a story. In fact, maybe I should drop the “despite their imperfections” part.
I recently spent a little time tooling around on Amazon looking at some reviews of my books. (Yes, this is a related point; bear with me.) I know: Looking at Amazon reviews of one’s own books is never a good idea. And predictably, I couldn’t help but focus on the negative reviews, though they were outnumbered by those that were complimentary.
I found myself growing annoyed, not with the criticisms themselves, but rather with the expectations implied in them. There is no such thing as a perfect book. Yes, there are great books. There are books that on first reading seem so transcendently excellent that they strike us as utterly flawless. But part of what makes art and song and literature so compelling is that these are inherently human endeavors. They express our desires, our passions, our fears and jealousies and insecurities. They also reflect our fallibility.
To be honest, I don’t want to be told that I’ve written a perfect book. Because as soon as I finish that book, I intend to write another, and I don’t ever want to believe that the next book I begin won’t be better than the last one. There’s nothing wrong with the quest for perfection; I embrace that. But I know better than to expect myself actually to achieve it.
And that is part of the lesson of these books I’m re-reading, the lesson I will impart to my student. We who write often refer to our WIPs — our works-in-progress. I would argue that our careers themselves are WIPs. I want to write and publish books. I want to sell them to publishers and have lots of people buy them off the shelves of bookstores, or out of the online catalogs for the latest e-readers. But I also want to grow as an artist. Unlike the accountants in a publishing house, I want to judge my work not on the basis of my most recent book, but instead on the arc of my collected work.
The books that my student and I have read are wonderful. They are thrilling and moving and, though written differently from each other, they are both wonderful examples of how to construct a narrative. Their flaws don’t diminish them. On the contrary, the fact that they continue to shine despite their shortcomings, and after so many readings, speaks to their excellence. On reflection, I realize that this is what I want my student to take away from this course. Like all young writers, he tends to beat himself up when made aware of the problems in his own work. I want him to see that a book or story doesn’t have to be perfect to be good, or even great. I want him to think about the elements of each book that make it powerful and memorable in spite of its flaws.
Because, as a writer, that’s how I would like readers to think about my novels.
]]>Needless to say, the movie is very earnest. There are no villains. Which brings me back to my original point - protags have to have someone to protag against, or it can be hard to find a reason to root for them.
]]>I thought that in writing the sequel that it would be easy to sink down into the story again and go. It usually is. I know exactly what I want to do, but unfortunately, the story isn’t quite cooperating. In fact, I’ve had to scrap all I’ve written and start again. This is no easy decision. I have been fighting it for some while, but I realized that I wasn’t writing anymore. Something inside me recognized that the work was fractured–there was something not quite working and I couldn’t move forward because of it.
I thought about it for awhile and decided on a restart. This time I’m still not sure I’m completely on the right track, but I do know it’s more right than the last one and now I can at least go forward. I’m one of those writers who write linearly–I write from beginning to end and can’t write later scenes until the earlier ones are written. That also means that I can’t manage to go forward unless I’m on a solid foundation. If I don’t have the beginning right, then I have to go back and rework it until it’s right enough to allow me to go forward.
But of course the problem then is that it’s really hard to just trash a bunch of novel and start from scratch. All that work down the drain and nothing to show for it! Sigh. And certainly I am not trashing quite all of it. Some of it I will recycle I’m sure, but most of it has to go away. And really, that’s as it should be. I don’t want the earlier mindset to taint the new writing. It was wrong after all.
This is something that most writers suffer through at one point or another and really, you can’t be afraid to throw away the stuff that isn’t working. Or really, save it and put it away and then start anew. After all, some time it might come in handy or you might find a new way of using it. It hurts, but if it has to be done, do it quickly and start fresh.
]]>This kind of question is impossible to answer.
Parental opinions vary wildly as to what thirteen-year-old girls (or boys, or children of any other age you care to name) should and should not be reading. One doesn’t want their kid encountering anything rated worse than G. Another doesn’t mind fairly graphic violence, but won’t tolerate sexual content of any kind. A third figures, hey, they’ll find out about sex eventually — but God help you if your novel features two men so much as kissing.
What are you worried about? Sex? Swearing? Blood and gore? Bloodless suspense that will give your kid nightmares for a month? Drug use? Where exactly do you put the bar on all of these topics? And how the heck am I supposed to know?
And that’s just the question of what the parent is looking for. How about the one who will be reading the book? All thirteen-year-olds are not created identical. One girl may be ready for a story that would utterly traumatize her friend. One boy has the judgment to understand that the bad behavior of the characters isn’t something he should emulate; another doesn’t. It’s a function of their maturity, not their age, and those two things don’t map as perfectly as we’d like. Age is an easy thing to communicate, though, while maturity isn’t, and we therefore cling to those numbers as if they tell us something useful. “This book is suitable for readers 10 and up.” Maybe. On average. Assuming your priorities match those of whoever assigned the ratings. But their idea of how much blood a ten-year-old is ready for might not be the same as yours, and it’s possible that neither one matches what your ten-year-old is ready for.
But there’s no easy way around it, either. Kids have to decide what to read, and parents have to decide whether they think that’s a good idea or not. And authors (sometimes) have to answer questions about whether their books are “suitable.” The best I can do from my end is to answer with a description: it has X amount of violence and Y amount of sex and Z amount of swearing, and anything else I think a parent or reader might be worried about, and then let them make up their own minds.
I’d be curious to hear from parents who face this question, or teenaged readers who maybe have different opinions. What things bother you, and what things don’t? I’ll be sans Internet access when this post goes live, but have at it without me — just keep it civil — and I hope to come home to a lively discussion.
]]>I won’t name the book, or the author. Though I am called Sam-Who-Likes-Nothing with good reason, my policy is never to rip anything unless it’s already important and popular enough that there is absolutely no chance my harrumphing will be paid attention to. Books are always a good thing, whether or not they’re to my taste.
And this series of books are very good in many ways. They’re well-written, with interesting settings and characters, and a fascinating magic system. The story is first rate, too, with the characters going through absolute hell along the way. But the books haven’t sold particularly well, despite critical raves.
I think I know why.
There’s been a movement in some fantasy circles recently calling for fantasy villains to be more interesting and well-rounded. That’s well and good – it’s much better to have a villain with understandable motives than one who’s simply diabolus ex machina. But the idea can be taken too far. If, instead of a protagonist and antagonist, a story is about a pair of antagonists, and neither is given any sort of moral, ethical, or accidental advantage to rouse a reader’s sympathy, then the reader often loses interest.
That’s what happens in these books. Despite being wonderful in so many ways, the story left me uncompelled because the writer spent so much time making the protagonists equally interesting. And equally sympathetic, too. But when both sides are absolutely noble and unselfish in their motives, and want the same thing, you wonder why they didn’t just sit down at the beginning of the book and talk through their differences.
With the antagonists so similar, there’s not nearly enough conflict in the story, at least not for my taste. Everyone is wrong, and everyone is right. And everyone is happy (and still alive, too) at the end despite the book having been set up as a tragedy.
Even tragedies have villains, regardless of the protagonist’s flaws.
It’s our job as writers to make the reader care about our books. Otherwise, why buy them?
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