Storytellers Unplugged

How Better Happens

2012-02-09T10:32:27Z

This is for the ones who despair. This is for the ones gripped by the feeling that it will never get better. That they will never get better.

I promise you this much: It can. And you might. That’s the best guarantee you’re going to get. Can and might. There’s only one certain guarantee, and that’s how to make sure that it doesn’t and you never do:

Quit. Whatever you’re doing, just stop right now. I mean it. Put down the pen, close the Word file, toss the notebook in the trash, click that folder full of story files and half-formed dreams and punch the Delete key like you mean it.

There, now. Just relax. Breathe. Doesn’t that feel better?

If it does, if it genuinely does, then go ahead and empty the trash, real or virtual, stop reading right now, and go about the rest of your day, the rest of your life. You’ve just been spared years of toil, doubt, and heartache.

But if it doesn’t feel better, if in fact it feels kind of awful, then you’d better fish those temporary discards out of the trash before something bad happens. Clutch them to your breast and promise to never treat them — or, more importantly, what they represent — with that kind of disrespect again.

Respect is important, because there’s work to do.

The Agony And The Ecstasy. Mostly Agony.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been digging among my roots. I’ve just finished prepping my first two novels for new editions. Both predate my migration to word processing, so I’m working with files generated by OCR scans of the original books. You have to proofread these things. Carefully. Sometimes OCR software has a whacky sense of humor about what it thinks it sees.

I’ve had no need to look at either of these novels for more than twenty years. Now that I have, I can honestly say I would’ve been happy to let them sit another twenty, if only to spare myself the daily torture.

I thought these novels were awesome at the time. And they still have their moments.

But now they’re like that TV show you used to love as a kid. You know the one I mean. The one you were absolutely nuts for, that you couldn’t get enough of. The one you’d run miles to get home in time to watch.

The most merciful thing you can do is never watch it again, ever. It never holds up. Better to leave it alone and let the sepia-toned memories remain intact.

Here’s how I described my reaction to this process the other day, in a new Afterword to one of the novels:

“Here and there are bits that make me glad I wrote them, that wouldn’t look or feel out of place in later work, but mostly I just groan a lot and want to bang my head against the desk, unable to believe that this was the published draft.”

Which sounds polite for general company, but really, it’s more like this prayer:

“Please, oh Odin, god of battle and poetry, please make it stop! And if you can’t make it stop, make it better. And if you can’t make it better, please send your ravens to pluck out my eyes.”

Yeah, that bad. To me they are.

There are a lot of things about these formative works that should console me: That agents thought they were worth representing. That publishers thought they were worth publishing. That reviewers said good things about them. That there are readers who remember them fondly, maybe even loved them the way I did, and that even now there are publishers who want to bring them back into print.

While I’m enormously grateful for all that, I can’t say there’s much consolation in it.

But then there’s this. This summation of the gulf between then and now, of all that’s come in the interim, and all that’s still to come. This may be the finest thing you could ever say about yourself when comparing where you began with where you are today:

I would never write that now. It would never even occur to me. Or if it did, I wouldn’t write it in remotely the same way.

It’s so clear: Things got better. I got better. Mostly as a consequence of not stopping. Not stopping, and an unrelieved sense of dissatisfaction.

Through The Looking Glass

Pure serendipity. The other day, not even knowing what I’ve been up to lately, my longtime friend Clark Perry cued me into the quote below. Clark is one of the few spawning salmon who made it all the way upstream, past a million belly-up floaters who gave out, to get hired writing for TV.

We were there at the very beginning, for each other’s origin stories. We saw each other through years of the exact process that Ira Glass, host and producer of Public Radio International’s This American Life, describes in this clip from 2009:

“…all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there’s this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit.

“Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you’re just starting out or you’re still in this phase, you gotta know that it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work … It’s only by going through a volume of work that you’ll close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions …

“It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You just gotta fight your way through.”

Except there’s one thing Glass doesn’t address here: Okay, so how do you fight your way through?

The Good Fight

People analogize the creative process and the crucible of improvement in different ways. Me, I like finding the parallels with, appropriately enough, fight training. It resonates.

If you’ve never done any fight training, just know this much: The bag work, the mitt work, kicking pads and drilling your footwork and head movement … it’s all just theory. True practice comes when you take what you think you know and match it against something that hits back. And when you start sparring, it’s a humbling, humiliating experience.

How did this guy just hit me six times and I couldn’t do anything about it? What openings did he see that I wasn’t even aware of? That I couldn’t see on him?

Simple. Once he (or she) was where you are now. He was the one getting hit six times. She was once the one without the experience to spot the openings.

It’s nothing personal, this pounding you’re taking. Or if it is, it’s personal in a good way. You and your sparring partner are actually there to teach each other. True, it’s a hard way to learn. It’s also the only way.

Your partner got through it by doing what you have to now: find something to love about the process. Something you love more than you dislike the discomfort. Something that never gets old, that keeps the experience alive and fresh for you. Something that keeps luring you back from the pits of discouragement.

You get through it by learning to live for the little victories. Maybe next week you only get hit four times in a row. Or she swings and you’re no longer there. Or you nail him with a sweet counter.

And so it is with writing, with every other creative endeavor.

Everything you think you know from books, from blogs, from classes … it’s all just theory. Everything you work up behind closed doors and leave there in the dark, that’s theory too, just another kind … still something you haven’t yet put to the test.

True practice comes from putting it out in the world, daring to risk the vulnerability that goes with this. Feedback readers, critique groups, submissions. Especially submissions. That’s when the ordeal begins. That’s when you have to find the thing you love enough to keep you going despite the rejections, the cheap shots, the indifference, and the clear-eyed recognition of the gap between your work and your ambitions.

That’s when you have to learn to live for the little victories. Do you know how many successful writers have had their day made, their week made, when a rejection came with a personalized note of encouragement from the editor? All of them.

That’s how better happens. By increments and milestones and thinking in timeframes that most people don’t have the patience or guts for.

So put in the time. Take the hits. Keep going.

It does get better. And so will you.

***** Sure, that was a lot to absorb. Take a breather anyway, pack a light lunch, and come on over to my own blog, Warrior Poet, and glean some ideas for 2012 from “Rock Your Writing This Year With The 30-Things Challenge.”

[Photo by Eric Langley]

Patchwork Dreaming

2012-02-04T17:45:12Z

Or…”interrupted by a person on business from Porlock” — sustaining the vision of the story you want to tell as life’s storms rage around you.

Trust me, it’ll make sense.

Quite some time ago in a LOCUS interview, Jay Lake talked about the challenges of containing the story he’s working on in his mind, or living in the “dream world” of his fictional creation.

I’ve always related to the problem, and kept the issue alive in my notes if not in my ever shrinking mind. I know I’ve mentioned the idea before, but perhaps never explored the concept. Also, over the years as life has closed in and its many challenges consumed innocence, insouciance, and energy, writing has become harder, not easier.

The topic haunts me.

One of the many romantic notions about writers is that they rattle off poems, stories and novels in a “white heat” of inspiration, working day and night, chain smoking, sitting in their dirty underwear in small rooms, their haggard faces lit only by the light of a computer screen (a single dusty bulb in the “old” days, and by candle flame in ancient times) surrounded by empty liquor bottles and piles of pristine finished manuscript, until the book is done and the royalty checks are already in the mail.

Everything real seems to stop in these writers’ lives. Children are magically fed, creditors compassionately defer their pursuit of unpaid bills. The sanctity of the torch of inspiration is respected, and the fire is allowed to burn until the fuel is spent and words are forged.

Now, it’s true there’s a least one famous thriller writer who books a hotel room for a few weeks and locks himself away to write a novel. And there are writers with significant others who “enable” their writing by taking care of the little details of life so they can concentrate on living in the imaginary world of their story until the tale is told.

The reality is that for most writers, that ain’t happening. More often, we’re like Coleridge with what we innocently and passionately believe is Kubla Khan in our heads, putting down lines from a (hopefully not opium inspired) dream vision until we’re interrupted by, as the story famously goes, a person on business from Porlock.

And if you’re a writer and never heard of anything from the above paragraph, stop reading and don’t write, but search out the poem and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Romanticism.

So the problem (one of many) for writers is keeping what you’re working on alive in your mind. For me, what Jay Lake is talking about is more than a memory problem of recalling plot direction and character tics. And it’s not “inspiration,” that magical booster shot people who want to be writers wait for so they can produce something when, and only when, they feel like it.

I believe containing the story in your mind is about getting a state of awareness about what you’ve done, where you’re heading, and what you’re supposed to be doing with your story when you’re at your keyboard. Something like an altered state, without the opium. An understanding that certain things have happened and that, because of those things, the blank page/screen is waiting for you to set down what you already know, deep down inside beyond your conscious mind, will happen next.

Maybe it’s a meditative state, for some. Or the “zone” athletes talk about, in which years of practicing certain skill sets, along with instinct, experience, and athletic talents, combine to elevate performance out of the mud of fear, nerves and thought. A higher state is achieved in which the baseball appears bigger, moving slower, toward your gigantic bat which swings so effortlessly.

A dream state. Being “in the moment.” Focused on the thing you are doing.

This precious state of knowing and being happens all the time in life, I think, though we may not be aware of it. I think it happens in the process of raising kids, working, driving, praying. Addicts miraculously rise from their stupor to orchestrate their next score.

For writers, I think it means avoiding the struggle of finding the “next thing” to write, rekindling the fire of “inspiration,” feeling again the urgency of having to say the thing you wanted to say in those first moments you scribbled down the story idea. It means recapturing the magnificent arc of story you saw at some point early in the process, re-entering the dream of your vision of Kubla Khan, with all its shimmering details, its clever references, plot points, characters, imagery and layers of meaning, and dragging it out into the waking world whole and complete.

We want it to happen whenever we write.

But it doesn’t happen all the time. We can’t live 24/7 in the dream state of our stories. Other lives, including our own “real world” lives, also need tending and care. Duty calls. Responsibilities knock on our doors.

Obviously, opium worked, at least once for Coleridge. The “romantic” image of writers that includes empty liquor bottles documents the supposed need for alcohol and other drugs to “lubricate” the imagination.

Certainly there are plenty of literary legends fueled by this kind of inspiration. There’s also a lot of bs, folks claiming one thing but doing quite another because, well, the bon vivant is a cool “platform” from which to sell stuff. Aside from the physically, emotionally and cognitively self-destructive aspects of these habits, there’s also regret.

If you wrote that well when you were high, think how much better it would have been if you were in your right mind.

And then there’s the sad reality that 99.9% of that stuff is buried, unseen, along with the creators. Mostly, at a very young age.

So what triggers these states? What else can we use to find the dream in which we can create?

I believe the discipline tricks writers use – writing in the same place, at the same time, every day – not only helps with production, but it also gets the writer back into the “space” or “head” of writing. It’s certainly helped me at times.

Keeping a Fortress of Solitude, a Batcave, a private space decorated so that it resembles the inside of your mind, is a tried and true. But I’ve found that isolating, at times. Cut off from life. Too unreal, perhaps too comfortable. And sometimes, when illness, death, disaster, financial woes or other big life tragedies and issues knock on the door, the Fortress walls come down, or they seem just silly and irrelevant, both in terms of life and to a story you may be trying to tell.

Music, especially when writers talk about specific genres for different types of writing, also serves as an emotional and imagination gate to get back into the story. I’ve seen candles and scents would do the trick.

There are stories about writers doing it naked, as if getting back into some kind of primal state to get the work done.

But not everybody works that way, and even if these techniques work for the structure and discipline of getting back to the work of writing, there may still be problems finding the dream of the story, particularly when time has gone by or a writer is jumping from one piece to another.

I guess what I’m looking for is something tied not to the act of writing, but to the story you’re trying to tell. An anchor, or a touchstone. A key that unlocks the cabinet through which you enter the adventure.

Well, yes, music works for a lot of people in this regard. Theme songs, like a Quincy Jones arrangement for a detective show, except the show is your story and the theme song is whatever rocks your boat. Alas, most of the time this is not for me. I find music too distracting, engaging me in ways that make me want to do other things besides writing, unless I’m writing a very musical story. And even then, at some point, I have to shut it down so I can concentrate on what the characters are saying and feeling.

I guess one factor in finding the right “key” is understanding which of the five senses dominates your awareness – are you visual, auditory, etc?

I do find getting in touch with the story’s setting a good way to start things up each time I write. Working on a longish piece set in a surreal desert, on and off over the past months (more on this another time), I found pictures, documentaries, even a screen saver all pretty good starting points. I write a lot in urban settings, and I live in a city, but I’ve also done nature settings, and I like parks and country, too. I know in those times when I write in a non-urban setting, I’m always thinking of and remembering the time I’ve spent upstate, out West, by the sea, etc.

Setting to me establishes the mood of a story. Again, I can see how music would be a great tool. But I’ve used, as above, documentaries, Sunrise Earth (HD films of sunrises in different parts of the world), and touchstone movies – Blade Runner, Casablanca, David Lynch stuff, surreal cartoons – running silently in the background to guide me into my zone.

Another way is to start every writing session by editing the previous session’s writing. This is a good habit, anyway, as what seemed like gold last night can turn out to be lead in the morning. But, depending on your need, re-reading the work and starting to tinker with it can get you back into the frame of mind you were in when you were last writing. Sparks fly, connections are re-opened. You’re reminded of things you wanted to say, or why you said such and such. You recall threats, you react to dangers. Hopefully, at some point, you’ll feel the need to stop editing and move into the action.

Yes, I know, there are some writers who cannot go on before finishing the perfect page. I studied under one of those. And for that person, the story was complete in his mind. It seemed like the dream of the story was readily accessible, though I was too young and stupid at the time ask. Most of us are not like that.

The point here is to get back into the overall story, the dream, and not to get caught up in close editing. Unless, of course, you find that to be your key. In any case, reviewing old work can wake up the other part of the brain where the dream is living. Listen to it when it calls.

By the way, I recently talked here on Storytellersunplugged about using “dead time” in your life as part of the writing process. Doing a little editing – re-reading what you’ve written, doing minor edits on the fly on your portable computer, smart phone, or manuscript pages — is not only a smart use of little snippets of time while waiting for something to happen, but it also helps to keep that dream alive in your head. Maybe it’ll make you more motivated to hurry home, or dip into the dream for as much time as you may have, and carry the story a little further along with new material.

The biggest key for me getting back into the dreamtime, I’ve found, are characters. I guess it’s something like an actor waiting in the wings, ready to throw up, having no memory of the lines, dreading the cue to step on stage. And when that moment comes and the floorboards creak underfoot, the actor doesn’t so much enter the play but the character in the play, and the lines flow and the fear flies off and the game is afoot.

It’s not the easy or magical, or nauseating, when I write. But I have found that once I’m “in” the character – I have a firm grip on needs, fears, strengths and weaknesses, as well as a sense of personality like sense of humor, patterns of connecting with others, how they relate to friends or family – I can see and understand the story through that character’s eyes. I’ve done long pieces through the eyes of several characters and never had a problem switching around and getting into the story from their point of view. Their individual worlds, and the world of the overall story, was usually within my reach.

Finding and feeling comfortable with the characters is another story, of course. Looking back, I can see the “failed” stories, particularly the ones that never sold or the ones I never bothered to finish, had problems centering on my lack of connection with the characters. The dream never came alive.

Sometimes (let’s not say often) dreams die when published. They never come alive for other people. So it goes. But at the very least, the dream should be alive for the writer.

Strong characters carry their own atmosphere, bring the mood to the story, invite certain kinds of characters to play with them. Good characters can make the work of telling a story so much easier.

Think of the Harry Potter series. Really, all that fantasy stuff is wonderful, but not particularly original. The magical schoolboy is practically an English genre all to itself. But it’s Potter and his Scooby gang that makes that dream come alive for readers. When I imagine myself writing something like that (and cashing all those checks!), I envy the way the characters come alive for readers, and how it must have been to work with them and letting the story flow from their traits, their histories, habits, needs and fears.

In my surreal desert fantasy (no, really, I’ll talk more about that next time, I really must), which was a pain to write and is still a pain in the editing/revision process, which this column is interrupting so I must hurry and finish so I can get back to that dream, I was only able to get back to it after through the many interruptions I had because the main character had a weight of her own. Sometimes she’d say or do things that completely surprised me. But I had a strong sense of her right from the beginning, and that anchor allowed me to slip back enough times (but not al the time, because no solution is perfect and writing is hard no matter how many tricks and shortcuts you use) to keep the dream of that story going.

Another thing that kept that piece, and most things I write, going and alive in my head is having an ending in mind.

For the desert piece, the reason I even started it was to write about the Caravan of Death. This was an idea and a collection of characters from one of my novels. I always loved the idea and wanted to return to it. I started the story knowing the little girl I invented would meet the Caravan of Death and somehow all hell would break loose. For that little girl to hold her own against something called the Caravan of Death, there’d have to be some special qualities to her, and finding those qualities became part of the process of telling the story, part of the dream.

But a general idea of the ending, in most cases, is part of the beginning of the story. As I’ve said before, the seeds of the end are always at the beginning. They may be invisible, implied, cast like shadows around the edges, part of the background, in the imagery and symbols, but usually it’s there, somewhere, lurking, waiting. You may not be aware of it. The secrets may only be revealed with time, the story’s development. You may re-read that beginning a hundred times before you see it. Or, you may have to go back and plant the damn seed as the ending becomes clear by telling the story. One way or another, the end usually gets there in the beginning.

And I say this not just because I have an Ouroborus tattoo on my arm.

It may not be the ending that actually happens, and in fact, it’s probably better if the ending changes as the story evolves. But having that ending, or just a general idea for how the character conflicts will resolve (where the characters are going in their individual arcs), serves not only as an anchor for the plot, but for all the different levels of the story being told. Having a direction, an ending, helps to give the dream And by general idea, I mean, do I want

Part of the reasoning behind beginnings/endings and characters as keys to keeping the story alive in your mind is another piece of advice that a lot of writers talk about: having a strong foundation.

By foundation, I don’t necessarily mean a strong beginning, though that helps. But, I’ve found to my chagrin, beginnings change. You think you’re starting in middle, like the sage writing advice tells you, but suddenly you discover you need to start the story earlier or, more often later.

And having a big finish in mind is no guarantee that it will happen, unless you’re the kind of writer who lives by the outline. No problem with that. If the outline works, and can contain the dream and make the story come alive in your mind, I envy you. Most writers I know throw out the outline at some point.

But a start and end does help to define the dream. It’s like recognizing a picture, knowing the outline on a map is not some vague blob, but Africa and all the history and pain and wonder that the name conjures.

And going back and making that beginning stronger, going back and revising and inserting and deleting material, even leaving notes here and there for yourself with what needs to be done right in the manuscript (and believe me, I’ve been startled by my own forgotten notes more than once, and slapped my head over a forgotten part of the dream that needed to poke its head out at the place I’d left a marker), is another reason to edit during “dead time” and start writing sessions by re-reading the story.

If you’ve been away from your story for a while, start at the beginning. See if the beginning awakens the dream, reminds you of the things you’ve already written about what’s going to happen, if the characters come alive and fill you with the need to go back into them, and if you sense what’s coming, good or bad, at the end, or perhaps more importantly, feel the drive to find out what happens, in the end.

If you do, then the story is still alive inside you, and the dream waits for you to join in the adventure.

IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT THE NEW TIME THEFT VIRUS – Please Read!

2012-02-02T17:51:21Z

Do you ever get tired of inventing new passwords and filling out your name, bra size, and address for new sites just so you can post a five word comment on a website or blog? Me too! In fact, it will not surprise me in the least if someday, when my time has come, Heaven informs me that they’ve kept a running tally of all my many forays into social media and a full three years of my waking hours on earth were spent retyping confusing CAPTCHA. I know it’s unreasonable to expect that there could or should be some easier way around all this but maybe I ought to be giving blood or getting a degree instead?

Alas, keeping your finger on the pulse of the writing world and staying in touch with other authors is an important part of the profession. It’s an important part of any profession, for that matter. Gone are the days when a girl could hole up in her office in a faded t-shirt and flannel pants with a steaming mug and unbrushed hair and be all alone with her words. Do I mourn the simplicity of the olden days? Of course. Back then, the only one to come a-knocking was my trusty old pal Email and maybe, sometimes, the mail carrier. Blog was just some pesky upstart nobody that I could completely ignore and it wasn’t the end of the world if I forgot to uncheck the box that adds me to somebody’s mailing list because I still wasn’t even sure I wanted to give Amazon my credit card number so really, I didn’t have many accounts. I was a one password girl in those day and I thought I’d never have cause to stray.

But things change.

If I’m honest, it’s always been a balancing act so that part isn’t new. The distractions generated by my computer were fewer when I started but my kids were younger and more dependent in those days too, and research has always had the ability to rip me out of my chair and toss me back in time for hours that zip away like minutes, and not all of those minute-long hours have resulted in pertinent information for my writing. Most have not. The big difference now is that there’s been a big gassy explosion in my office and it’s raining Facebook and Twitter and Goodreads all over the place. How is one to navigate through the acid rain and keep their writing time from burning up until it’s been snuffed out entirely?

I love Goodreads, by the way. The other stuff too.

Participating and staying abreast of things is important and yet, while I so badly resent the time it takes to create new accounts, I guess it comes with the territory. My challenge in 2012 is to find a way to work at my computer and not allow myself to be stopped every time I’m invited to Like something new on FB. It’s proving very difficult. I’ve made up a schedule and I try to take care of social media stuff during certain hours of my work day but it’s like a crying baby and sometimes it’s all wet and in need of attention and every bit as hard to regulate as a one year old’s bladder. Truth is, I could use some tips for this that really work but I get Writer magazine and hey, we’ve already established that I’m keeping abreast of the writing world, so there’s been plenty of advice to be had and I feel like I’ve had them all. In the end, self-control is needed and, darn it, no one but me can give that to me. I know what needs to happen.

Even so, here are a few other things that would greatly help me out:

cheappuggireland.eu, please quit commenting on my Storyteller’s Unplugged posts and pretending like you’re responding when we all know you’re plugging boots or life insurance or marketing help or whatever the heck cheapuggirelands are. Here’s the thing, cheapug (may I call you cheapug? I feel I know you so well), I’m not going to post your comments so you’re wasting my time as well as your own. How about we both give ourselves back an extra minute in our day and use it for something productive? No? You won’t stop? Well, at least I tried.

What about you Goodreads? Why don’t you give a poor reader a break already and quit being so damned interesting! I love your reviews and the sight of all those books all over the place makes me quiver every time I stop in. Would you mind keeping the book chatter to a minimum? It’s hard for me to get anything done around here. Any help you could give me with this would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

As for you Shiny Black Cat Girl Vintage, please oh please, I beg of you – start accepting Paypal! I love that ice blue wiggle dress you’ve got for sale right now but I’m weary of giving out my private information and I can’t devote another second to non-work related business this month. Why can’t we all just be (Paypal) friends?

Unfortunately, until Spam dies a hard fast deserving death and everyone settles on one universal form of payment, I guess I’ll be forced to focus on the things I have a little more control over. Like time management. Oh dear, I’m not qualified to offer any words of wisdom on this subject as yet, only sympathy to those who, like me, suffer to uphold it’s shimmering covenants. But it would seem to be the only way out.

Good news is, it’s only February and the year is still young. There’s still time for me to make a difference in my life. I’m going to give self-control a good old-fashioned try and see what happens, by golly. I’ll get back to you next month J

Carole Lanham is the author of the Whisper Jar

http://www.amazon.com/The-Whisper-Jar-ebook/dp/B0062ID33K

Visit her at carolelanham.com & horrorhomemaker.com

A New World, New Tools – KDP Select – Game On

2012-01-31T01:44:41Z

Since we don’t have a poster for the 31st, I figured I’d take advantage and get in a day early. I wanted – this time out – to pass on what I do, and what I do not know about the Amazon.com KDP Select program. My new collection – ETCHED DEEP & OTHER DARK IMPRESSIONS – is live now on Amazon, and it’s enrolled in the program.

I KNOW: The book is exclusive to Amazon.com for at least 90 days.

I KNOW: Amazon.com members who are PRIME members can read the book for free.

I KNOW: That if you own a Kindle, you can “borrow” this book … and I will still get paid a yet-to-be-determined share of the big “pot” Amazon has set aside, a different amount every month to be split between all those whose books are borrowed.

I KNOW: I get five days – one at a time, five at a time, or any variation on that theme – where I can make my book free to download. My book, by the way, will be free from the 31st to the 2nd of February. Meaning, if you are reading this, it’s free now. Go get it – please? Be part of the experiment.

I KNOW: That a lot of others have tried this program. Some have had amazing results, catapulting their work to the top of the charts and managing to hang there after the promotion ended and the full price kicked back in. I also know others with much lower numbers on the downloads, and with much less spectacular continued sales – though there WERE continued sales in every case.

Here is what I don’t know…

I don’t know if I’ll actually lose very many sales by waiting 90 days to be available in all of the other eBook formats, but experience tells me…probably not.

I don’t know how many, if any, people will borrow my book.

I don’t know all the best ways to get the title seen by people looking for free books to download, but I know a few. I am blogging about it. I will be posting it to Facebook and Twitter. I will ask every author and reader I can make contact with to – particularly if they like my writing – a: download the book – it’s free – and pass the link on to everyone that THEY know who might want a free book. I don’t know if they will. Experience tells me that 5000 Facebook friends equates to about five sales and a lot of back-patting, but then again – it IS free.

I don’t know if I’ll give away enough copies to see the necessary bump to make my book stay visible.

I don’t know if the mentions of all of my other book in the marketing synopsis on Amazon will intrigue people, or if they even read it when downloading a free book, or whether the chapter of “My Soul to Keep,” and the link to all my work on Amazon will draw any traffic. I will be monitoring things pretty carefully to see if I can figure it out.

I have been saying for a very long time that the thing most lacking in Amazon’s KDP program is the lack of communication and promotion available through Amazon itself. There is no other site on the Internet that I’ve found where you can’t find a person who can answer your questions, or a program where you can at least PAY for promotion directly on the site. It’s too big, and it’s too ponderous. There is no way they could manage the flood of people who would want in. Now there is this.

I don’t know if the KDP Select program will be the answer .. or even AN answer. I do know, it’s what we’ve got, and I’m going to take a shot at it. I will come back, and I will tell you how much more I know – and don’t know – when all is said and done.

Now…get on over to Amazon.com, download a free book and SHARE THIS LINK.

-DNW

Where the wild things (no longer) are

2012-01-31T01:06:54Z

As far back as the 1950s, my husband remembers seeing a quote from somebody saying that within 20 years all land on this planet will be *owned by somebody*. There is no reason to suppose the person who said was far wrong. I am sure it came to pass.

All OWNED by somebody.

No more wild places.

I would like to take a moment and think about what this means to us, the human race, as a species, as storytelling beings.

We began telling stories about the things that surrounded us and for which we had no explanation – and which thus had to occur through the agency of something beyond and outside of us, something divine, something wild. We created gods who lived in inaccessible places – sometimes odd and made up ones, fanciful and wonderful (but of necessity based on things that we knew – for instance, Valhalla) or real ones which were hard or impossible to get to by ordinary human agency and therefore gained an air of mystery and mysticism, like the top of Mount Olympus – and gave into their hands the power of the thunderbolt.

As human culture and civilization grew and our knowledge and insight increased, our stories grew and changed. The things that we knew in the present moment quickly slipped into yesterday, and yesterday slipped into history, and history slipped into legend, and legend turned into myth – and it was all born of that wilderness that existed outside of ourselves, the things that were NOT of Man but were greater or weirder or stranger or more worthy of awe or veneration.

The stories we told our children – all the fairytales ever told, all the fables, everything – were rooted in the wilderness. In the Wild Woods, where ancient and gnarled trees which were maybe a thousand years old grew in the gloom of spreading boughs, never before seen by human eyes. In the empty open places of the deserts. Atop great craggy mountains wreathed in cloud.

But that was BEFORE. Before that “every inch of this planet is owned by somebody” days. That was in the days where the gods and the creatures who inhabited our myths and our legends and our fairytales had room to live and thrive. Centaurs and dryads and rusalki and Koschei the deathless and the firebird and Quetzalcoatl and talking golden carp and the little mermaid and ifrit and djinni and flying horses and dragons and elves and witches and wizards and evil gnomes named Rumpelstiltskin who knew how to spin straw into gold. All of these, and more. They lived in those wild places where humans dared not go, and they loomed huge in the imaginations of generations of children.

No longer.

The wild places are going, or gone. There are no more tracts of forests into which no human has ever penetrated. There are no deserts where no human has ever been. There are no mountains which no human has ever climbed. We have gone to all of our wild places, and explored them, and mapped them, and conquered them, and… and tamed them. We own them now. If you don’t realize what that means think of the difference between a wild stallion and a working gelding pulling a cart on a farm. Think of the difference between the Minotaur and the domestic ox. Think, for that matter, of the startling differences between wild turkeys and the empty-headed domestic variety whose only redeeming feature is that they have lots of white meat to serve at the Christmas or Thanksgiving table. Think of Aslan (“he was not a TAME lion”) and that toothless mangy old beast in the back of the cage at the zoo.

We have gone to all the places where the wild things were. And they can hide in those places no longer.

Revealed, they are… diminished. There is less reason to fear something you can classify, and sort, and put into textbooks, together with means by which it can be combatted or defeated. We own our planet, but we no longer have a place where our minds and imaginations have a chance to escape, to play, to invent, to learn.

Perhaps the explosion of fiction of the ilk that is now known as “urban fantasy” owes something to this phenomenon. The creatures who used to be the wild ones have been driven out of their refuges and hiding places – and they have evolved to suit their new niches, the dirty back alleys of cities, the glass and steel metropolises. Our werewolves are no longer the shaggy feral creatures who came howling out of the scary night to frighten our ancestors – they now prowl the underground of our cities. Our vampires no longer live in distant castles behind high walls with creaking wrought iron gates – they are among us, and some of them (God help us) even sparkle. Even the Fae have found their way into the city lights. Everything is changing.

What does it mean to the Wild Things when the ownership of all the places which they once thought belonged to them is now claimed by us? If a human being signs the purchase papers for a stand of enchanted trees, does that human being now also own the dryads whose trees those are? Do they have to pay rent now? Does the human being who purchases a mountain and the mineral rights to everything within it also own the dragon’s hoard in the caves deep inside?

How are these bargains to be enforced on the creatures of our imagination, the creatures of the Wild? Are they really to be considered something that we can own? Has slavery returned to haunt humanity? Will the creatures we are buying and selling – in the end – rise up and fight for their rights? (Heh. Occupy The Wilderness…?) Do we have any right to fight back? What, after all, would WE do if the tables were truly turned and they came to us and told us that THEY owned the land, and therefore US?…

There are still stories here. But they are very different stories to the ones we have traditionally told. And they are getting harder and harder to hunt and find. It’s a little like those staged hunts now, where the so-called “hunters” are taken to a place from which they can safely and with 100% certainty shoot into an enclosure and bag their trophy of a lion or tiger or bear. Our wild stories have been increasingly corralled. There are still those which are loose, to be sure, but they’re more sophisticated than we knew them of yore, and harder to catch and kill and skin and display.

We’ve put the stamp of ownership on all of our wildernesses, and somehow we have thus closed the fences around ourselves. We are milling around inside those fences, thinking ourselves free, thinking ourselves mighty, while all the time the wonder and the glory of the wilderness is leaching away from us, leaving our memories, leaving us helpless and disarmed should something come up for which we no longer have the dark places of our world or our spirits to search for antidotes in.

Perhaps there is only one way left to go – up. Into the sky. Into the last wilderness of stars and space.

It is a tragedy that this last great journey of mankind will probably be undertaken with a single driving urge – to find out how we can stake our claim on these, too, and “own” them just like we now “own” every inch of planet Earth.

And maybe the last and best hope of humanity lies in the possibility that we will finally fail, and accept that we can only end with what we began – the wild places which we do not understand, and whose creatures we can invoke to frighten us into becoming bigger and better than we thought we could be.

FORENSICS 149: ATTEMPTING CLARIFICATION IN VEIN

2012-01-20T00:14:33Z

This essay might be of special interest to writers of detective and mystery stories who would like to enrich their stories by presenting their readers with a gift of extra detail. It might also be of general interest to many other readers.

Most readers probably remember Daniel Pearl, who was the South Asia Bureau Chief of the Wall Street Journal. He was abducted on January 23, 2002 in Karachi, Pakistan. While a captive, Daniel’s picture showing a gun pointed at his head was sent with demands that the United States free all Pakistani terror prisoners, end the US presence in Pakistan and allow a detained shipment of F-16 jet fighters to be delivered to Pakistan. Daniel was ultimately killed on February 1 and beheaded. His body was cut into ten pieces and buried in a shallow grave in the outskirts of Karachi. His remains were found on May 16 and were ultimately returned to the United States for burial.

A senior operative for Al Queda, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, grew up in Kuwait, but obtained a degree in mechanical engineering from an American university. Subsequently, he received military training in Pakistan and claimed to have briefly fought the Soviets. According to United States law enforcement, he had a small role in the first World Trade Center bombing in New York City on February 26, 1993. The bombing was intended to topple the North Tower into the South Tower, flattening them both and killing thousands of persons. That did not happen, but the blast did kill six persons and injure more than a thousand.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was believed to be the principal architect of the coordinated September 11, 2001 (9/11) attacks using four commandeered passenger jets. Two of the jets were crashed into the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City A third jet was crashed into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. The fourth jet, which was on its way to Washington, D.C., crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania after its passengers tried to wrest control from the terrorists. These attacks reportedly caused 2,996 deaths and injured more than 6,000 persons.

Among his terrorist plots, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed reportedly described a plan to take control of ten aircraft. Nine were to crash into targets including those of the 9/11 attack, CIA and FBI headquarters, nuclear power plants and the tallest buildings in the states of Washington and California. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed himself was to land the tenth plane, kill all the adult male passengers and deliver a speech to the media denouncing the United States.

On March 1, 2003, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was arrested by the Pakistanis in Rawalpindi. He was reportedly held in Pakistan for three days and then moved elsewhere by US officials. During a closed military hearing, he confessed to being responsible for the 9/11 attacks and many others. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s confessions included the statement that “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan.” Since he confessed to so many terrorist acts, and since he had been the recipient of 183 water boardings, his confessions were considered by many as being inflated if not completely false.

A three-minute, thirty-six-second videotape showing Daniel’s decapitation was released on February 21. 2002. It was titled The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl. The video shows the arms and hands of a masked person severing Daniel’s head. Stills showing his hands were made from the videotape and compared by the FBI and CIA to those of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed after he had been captured on March 1, 2003. A bulging vein coursing across the back of a hand shown in the videotape was found to match a vein in Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s hand.

Although vein matching is not presently considered to be absolute evidence, it is corroborative with other forensic evidence. Both the FBI and CIA reportedly sometimes use vein matching, formally referred to as vascular technology, to identify suspects. Vascular structures of individuals are believed to be unique. Vein patterns are obtained by recording (typically near infrared) light that penetrates skin and reacts with hemoglobin in blood to reveal a vein pattern. By identifying the vascular structure of a hand or finger of a suspect and recording it digitally, a template can be created that can be compared to a template of a known person.

In addition to being a step forward in forensics, vascular technology, has other useful applications. Critical hospital applications include error reduction and unconscious or uncommunicative patient identification. The chief of hospital operations at one medical center claims that vein patterns are 100 times more unique than fingerprints. Vein matching is also being used in the financial field and for such tasks as entry allowance and attendance recording. For hygienic purposes, a version of a vein matching device has been developed that requires no physical contact. An important advantage of vein matching is that it appears it would be extremely difficult to construct a fake representation of a vein pattern. Fingerprints do not have this advantage.

In response to increasing incidences of credit card fraud and of the illegal withdrawing of funds from their customer accounts, Japanese banks have begun to use biometric technology. A form of this is finger vein identification. A customer inserts a finger into a device that reveals the vein structure within the finger. The structure is compared with that of a customer of record to confirm the identity of the finger’s owner.

I can’t help wondering how long it will take for someone to develop a finger vein identification device that will trap the finger of an unauthorized person and summon security.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Finger vein patterns of each finger of each person are different.

It took until May 2002 to completely clear the site of the World Trade Center disaster.

To protect United States journalists around the world, President Obama enacted the Daniel Pearl Freedom of the Press Act on May 19, 2010.
This essay might be of special interest to writers of detective and mystery stories who would like to enrich their stories by presenting their readers with a gift of extra detail. It might also be of general interest to many other readers.

I can’t help wondering how long it will take for someone to develop a finger vein identification device that will trap the finger of an unauthorized person and summon security.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Finger vein patterns of each finger of each person are different.

It took until May 2002 to completely clear the site of the World Trade Center disaster.

To protect United States journalists around the world, President Obama enacted the Daniel Pearl Freedom of the Press Act on May 19, 2010.

The Day Job

2012-01-16T11:53:47Z

I’m on a deadline and couldn’t think of anything to write about this month, so I dredged up an oldie but a goody from 2005 that is still as pertinent to me today as it was back then. I updated a few of the details but the sentiment is the same.

When people who’ve known me for a while find out that I’ve published some books and am pursuing a career as a writer, one question usually comes up before long: When are you quitting your day job?

This question brings assumptions with it, whether or not the person asking it realizes as much. First, there’s an assumption that if I’ve published books that are in bookstores and in libraries, continue to have good Amazon rankings, were reviewed in Publishers Weekly, are available as limited editions, were translated into other languages, etc. that I must be rolling in dough, so I’ll soon be upscaling my life. I think the idea that there’s huge wealth in publishing comes from an unwarranted extrapolation from the music industry or Hollywood, where a single modest success can set a person up for life.

The second assumption is that my day job is merely a support system for my writing. If that were true, if I was just putting in eight hours a day at a job I barely tolerated so I could write, I would be miserable. As it happens, I currently have two jobs. One I do during the daytime. I’ve been with the same company for 22 years. I love my “day job.” I’m good at what I do there, and it is fulfilling and rewarding. It’s not just something that pays the bills, buys printer paper and covers my family with health insurance. My second job, which I’ve been doing since 2000, is equally fulfilling and more flexible. It has to be, because I fit it in where I can, between day job, family life, chores, and many other things.

My normal response, when I really don’t want to get into a lengthy discussion of the finances of a writer (i.e. always) is this: “I know a lot of writers. I know a lot of writers with day jobs.” If I’m feeling particularly expansive, I say, “The number of writers able to support themselves comfortably solely by writing is fairly small.”

Here’s the reality. Suppose, just suppose, I wrote a killer novel, a publisher loved it and saw a decent market for it, and offered me a big advance. A huge advance. Hey, we’re making things up – let’s say the advance is a cool quarter million. $250,000 smakeroos. That, by the way, is astronomically higher than the average advance for a first novel. What would that mean for me?

Well, after my agent gets his 15% and Uncle Sam gets his share, I’d be lucky to come away with $150,000. And, of course, not all in one lump sum. Best case scenario, half now and half on publication. “Now,” of course, means that six to eight weeks after the publisher approves payment, a check will be sent to my agent. Sounds like a decent amount of money, but in the general timeframe of publishing I’d be unlikely to see both installments in one calendar year, so that really amounts to two years’ worth of income. I’d have to be hopelessly optimistic or foolish to give up a job where I have a fifteen-year history for something like that. Suppose I’m a one-hit wonder (or, worse, a one-flubber when the book doesn’t sell).

Even if I hit the big times and got a million bucks in advance, that really only represents (after commissions and taxes) a decade of good income. I’m 50 – I have about fifteen years ahead of me before I could even start to think about retiring from my day job. What happens when I’m 55 or 58 and blocked and there’s not much money coming in from the royalties any more, and…

Maybe I’m a bit of a pessimist or alarmist. I prefer to think of myself as a realist. I love to write. I like the income I make for my writing. In the best case scenario, I hit my stride, find my voice, find an audience and start producing commercially viable novels every year or two, and I reach the point where I could conceivably retire from the day job. Would I? Well, I’m realist enough to acknowledge that if I attained that level of success, I might have to give up the day job in order to meet a regular publishing deadline. My 2-hour session between 5 and 7 a.m. before I get ready for the day job just might not cut it. It’s the kind of dilemma I wouldn’t mind facing some day.

In the interim, however, no, I have no plans to give up my day job. There are real people where I work. People I can interact with. A social group, a friendly bunch. And I enjoy what I do. It doesn’t get in the way of my writing – I’ve found a way to make these two avocations co-exist. I would miss it if I had to give it up.

It’s not my general aspiration to write myself out of a day job. It’s my aspiration to write, to continue to get published, improve my craft and have a blast with everything life tosses my way.

Thomas Sullivan: SEGAMI RORRIM

2012-01-16T02:57:43Z

If something has to be kept secret, it must be true. Secrets are self-proving. Lies are loud and wear red hats, e.g. Santa Claus. Okay, I’m being a tad glib here. I do not mean that only secrets are true or that all red hats – i.e. loud proclamations — are lies (your red hat is still true blue, Santa). But secrets tend to be true, else they wouldn’t need hiding. I think that most people believe this at some level. In fact some OVER-believe it, glomming onto every “exposed” secret as innately true because life after all is run by conspiracies and manipulative forces. Consider the power that this reflex gives to persuasion. Want someone to believe something outlandish? Present it as a secret.

And in this way my premise statement moves from being a truism about content to a truism about style. Because if you pretend something is secret only to make it seem valid when you expose it, you’ve given it the style of truth but not necessarily the substance. And that can be a literary device to disarm the reader. An effective literary device. In fact, take it a step further. Let the secret be some discovery you make contrary to what the writer is saying. No truth is more acceptable than underlying truth you think you perceive by yourself, after all. Better yet if you have to pry it out, testifying to your astuteness. In this model the falseness is the literal statement, parading itself as truth. The truth is the secret you discern hiding behind the falseness, and it is its opposite. Thus we have Mark Twain giving us his truth about all humans being of equal worth by having Huck Finn believe he is going to hell for helping the runaway slave Jim escape. The world has it backwards, Twain is showing us. Social morality is the real falseness and Huck Finn in the simple purity and honesty of his soul has it right though he believes he will go to hell for his choice. Edgar Allen Poe gives us an even more direct stylistic example in the beginning of “The Tell-Tale Heart.” “True!” his first person narrator tells us too loudly in the very first word, “nervous, very dreadfully nervous I was and am, but why will you say I am mad?” Already you know the character is mad. (“Methinks he doth protest too much.”) He is in your face, asserting his “truth” so loudly that you immediately know it’s a lie.

Life is full of opposites, isn’t it? It is tempting – particularly in an improbable life like mine – to put more faith in the counterintuitive then into the face value of things. But that would be another grave error. Nevertheless, it is counterintuitiveness that seems to yield the most insight into truth when it comes to understanding people and presenting characters. We are devious, after all, you and I; yet relatively transparent as well to the observer who has developed objectivity. So, in human behavior, it is often enlightening to look for opposites, contrasts, and apparent contradictions lurking beneath the surface.

These show up most clearly under stress, but with some people the occurrence is pathological. I find these pathological types to be the most predictable because they always try to be unpredictable, and I often use them for catalyst characters. They are people who have discovered a game, a posture, an attitude, or a tone that works for them. They are usually one-trick types who continually use the single gimmick of reverse psychology. Over time they tend to lose credibility, and so they wear their audiences down to the gullible, the susceptible, or the impaired. You might see them holding forth where education is scarce, or playing the victim, or sounding witty under neon lights just before “last call.” Drunk or sober, “in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” Their conflicts are seldom internal but instead come from trying to manipulate the external world. That’s why they make good catalyst characters.

More fascinating to me are people who are internally conflicted, because they are not neatly consistent or as predictable. Especially if their emotions are strong. This happens more with women than men. And, no, I’m not saying that women are less rational than men. But I am saying that they tend to be influenced by a more complex range of emotions than men usually are. In evolutionary terms, anger and aggressiveness work strongest for archetypal men, while a fuller range of emotions has more survival value for archetypal women. The former (male) tends to solve immediate tactical problems and be direct; the latter (female) may address long-term strategic goals and be indirect. Which is probably why women get hung with the tag of being unpredictable. In any event, if this makes sense to you, you can easily see why marketing biases favor physical action books for men (external conflicts) and emotional tension books for women (internal conflicts). Of course, just as in reality these stereotypes of men and women exist as a mix within individuals of either sex, fully developed writing reflects a mix of simple action and character complexity no matter what the genre or gender. The nod, though, goes toward internal conflicts with its focus on substantial characterization, if only because most readers are women. I like that. It takes me right back to the deliciously counterintuitive wildcard that emotions introduce.

Think of how many things can go wrong with internal conflicts as opposed to external. In external you have things and events; in internal you have things and events plus all the interpretations and psychological/emotional consequences of external happenings. Internal is where external crosses into human experience, the nerve center, the point of impact – if a tree falls, does it make a sound? (Does it matter to you, if you don’t hear it – if you don’t internalize it?) If you want to experience and communicate life fully, free your characters to be human. Let them become contradictory, confused, emotional, unstable and changeable – then let them find their way back (or not). And while you’re at it, free yourself from being that writer/person who has a one-trick pathology and writes/sees with one eye open in the country of the blind. With two eyes open in life, you have twice the chance of seeing the magic.

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com

http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=1219261326

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

A Vision of the Future

2012-01-12T04:50:55Z

Today, I want to offer forth a prediction for 2012. It may already exist, and if so I am simply going to display my ignorance of the most recent marketplace changes, but I don’t know of anything available like it.

In other words, if this doesn’t exist, the idea is being offered for someone to develop.

I’m calling it the E-Reader Deluxe Edition. It would be used for authors who have interlinked works. This might be something as straightforward as the Matt Scudder stories by Lawrence Block or as complex as the Dark Tower series by Stephen King. It would simply feature all of the associated stories bundled together into one discounted purchase, with each story parsed and coded so that when a reference is made to another work, the reader could open a link on that reference and bring up the associated story. The result would be akin to a frame story, diverging to the new path if the reader so desired and returning to the original point afterward.

It would encourage readers to read more of an author’s work… for example, when references to Black Wind or the Freak Show frame story appear in Repairman Jack stories by F. Paul Wilson, directing readers to work they might not have realized was associative. It would also allow for collections which, while prohibitively expensive or comprehensive in print format, would be acheivable in electronic format. Lastly, it would bring forth some stories which have become effectively lost, stories published in magazines but never gathered into collected format.

Best of all, with the current scanning software available, it wouldn’t even be particularly hard, and would seem to be only a bit more time consuming than normal editorial and/or typesetting work.

Would fans pay for some material they already owned, if it meant getting access to rare works and suddenly being able to recognize each associative reference in a story? I’d be willing to bet yes, if only because I know that personally I’d buy an e-reader just to have such an edition of, say, the Oxrun Station works of Charles L. Grant or the complete Cedar Hill stories of Gary Braunbeck. I’ve met people who would sacrifice a digit to have an easily tracked set of Eternal Champion stories by Michael Moorcock… and the couple-hundred dollars or so an indexed version of those many stories and novels might cost is far easier to pay.

It’s just a thought. I think it’ll happen, though. And if it does, let me know where to purchase the downloads.

The Same River Twice: On Rewriting Your Past

2012-01-09T14:36:39Z

[What do you get when you cross a Storytellers Unplugged deadline with an exhausted writer who’s just finished a near-30,000-word novella that ran several thousand words more than expected? Today we get a redux: the very first column I did here, in June 2006, and which I recently tapped as supplemental material for a multipart series at my own blog.]

Several months ago, when the decade-old Hellnotes was still doing business as a weekly newsletter, before transmogrifying into a blog this May — transblogrifying, I suppose should be the new word — fellow contributor E.V.B. fired off a salvo in his monthly column that was aimed squarely between my eyes.

Well, no, it wasn’t. It would only feel that way if you were paranoid. E.V.B.’s “Writing 101” installments were full of excellent information and pointers for fledging writers, and often of value to experienced writers, too … and I just happen to run counter to one of them right down to the twisty double-helix of my being.

This particular installment dealt with writers going back to revise previously published work. E.V.B.’s position was unreservedly anti.* In a nutshell: If your work was good enough to have been published once already, leave well enough alone, get over yourself, and move along. There was a strong implication that any feeling a writer might harbor that he or she had grown in the interim and could do greater justice to the work the second time around is, well, kinda pretentious.

With apologies to none, I’ve always been one of those who refuse to leave things alone if time and greater objectivity conspire to make me see room for improvement.

Hang around long enough, and editors and publishers start to ask you for reprints. “Free money,” I’ve heard this called, because you’ve already done the work. All you have to do now is say, “Yes, thanks!”

If only it were that easy. As I’ve said elsewhere, “Whenever it’s time for a story to be collected, or reprinted in anything that comes much later than a year’s best roundup, I take another trip through it and almost invariably it sweats off a few more ounces. It serves the story well, I think, and keeps me from feeling as though it’s merely been dug out of mothballs.”

My tendency to tinker is much more prevalent when it comes to early work, and I would be surprised if that wasn’t the pattern with other chronic tweakers. Just as no one emerges from the womb fully formed, writers rarely start out with their voices fully manifested. After what must be a few million published words by now, I’m still working to refine mine.

One’s voice on the page is a product of evolution, honed through long use and critical self-appraisal. It often requires us to admit that while our works may have been good enough for somebody to publish, nevertheless, our ideas can be better and our ambitions bigger than our means of executing them.

Writers are not all of a single mind when it comes to post-pub revisions, nor should they be. If you feel that a story or a book should remain unchanged, forever reflecting the stage of development you were in at the time … well, to quote Yul Brynner, “So let it be written. So let it be done.” This is your Way, and it is faultless.

It just ain’t mine.

Around the time of E.V.B.’s column, I was spending a string of very late nights going through my 1996 novel Prototype and, I suppose, daring to imply that I really just might have grown as a writer.

Prototype was the last of four novels that came out of what I fondly remember as the Dell/Abyss years, and is slated for a hardcover edition this autumn. I’d salvaged the original computer files from a vintage floppy, which wasn’t entirely cooperative, and I needed to go through them to make sure nothing had gone horribly awry inside.

Offhand, I don’t recall if I started polishing the text on page 1 … but close enough. Reading this old work felt as though I were looking at a time capsule peppered with small but frequent sins that I’ve since tried harder not to commit. At least not as often. And a time or two, even I couldn’t figure out what the hell I’d been trying to say.

When the hardcover edition comes out, some readers will be reading it for the first time, and to them it will be entirely new. There’s no reason they shouldn’t have the best work I can deliver. I wrote the original text to the best of my ability at the time, but my best is better now.

Other readers will be returning to something they liked well enough to read again. They’ll find a novel that’s no different in content — their memories of it won’t be betrayed by characters doing things different this time around — but I hope they’re rewarded, even if subliminally, by a familiar novel that’s a bit more polished.

Here’s what it comes down to: The Dell/Abyss edition represented me in 1996. And the upcoming edition represents me now. One byline, but in a sense, two different writers.

There’s an old saying that you can’t step into the same river twice. As the water flows endlessly past, the familiar debris is swept away, fresh debris washes down from upstream, and all the while, the river has carved at its banks and resculpted the unseen silt and mud of its bed. It lives under constant renewal.

And so I have a hard time letting a work, especially an early one, wind back into print without wanting it to reflect something of what time and later work have done to whatever skills I may have. It’s no better a way than opting to not change what’s been set into type already, just a different one, coming from perhaps a different perspective on what one’s creative work represents: a static snapshot from the time and place it was written, or something drawn from a river.

It’s why Walt Whitman continued to update Leaves of Grass for nearly 40 years, why Stephen King redid the first book in his Dark Tower series, why chefs revise recipes until they’re perfect, why musicians remaster old recordings when new technology can make them sound truer to life, why George Lucas reworked the original Star Wars —

OK, bad example. But you get the idea.

Of course, we could’ve just scrapped every bit of the foregoing and defaulted to another old saying you may have heard, attributed variously to Jean Cocteau, Paul Valery, and Oscar Wilde, and whose subject alternates between art, poems, and books. But let’s take the broadest one possible:

“Art is never finished, it is merely abandoned.”

Or this one from Robert Cormier, which has its own appeal:

“The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.”

* While I wish I could print excerpts rather than summarize, the request to do so went unanswered.

***** That multipart series at my own blog that I mentioned? An epic reader-request fulfillment, it’s a comprehensive look at taking a work from its first draft through to the last, with all the revision stages in between I could think of. It wrapped up last week after four parts and a followup postscript, “A Fine Line Between Polish And Overkill.” Come for the warning signs, stay for the object lesson in shoddy makeup application.

[Photo by Gonzo fan2007]