17K more words as of last night, bringing it up to 82K total. Best week yet word count-wise, but at least one significant chapter felt underdeveloped, and may need serious expansion and revision once the draft is done.
I’m actually sitting at 83K right now with about two and a half chapters to go and plans for an interstitial story. I’m guessing the first draft will end up somewhere between 95-98K words. A little under my final estimate, but that’s good: I find I tend to expand my word count in revisions, focusing on characterization, setting, and world details that puff up my final count. My first draft should leave me with 5-10K words to play with as I expand the second draft before the manuscript starts getting beyond agentorial comfort zones.
After that, I’m thinking my third draft should be about cutting every excess word I can. Having done this with several short stories, I’ve found I can trim anywhere from 5-10% without compromising the story in any meaningful way.
This process, ideally, will leave me with a manuscript that’s got everything it needs and leaves out everything it doesn’t. Revisions are a bitch, but I’m looking forward to seeing how I do with this new approach.
Review’s here.
Egads. Watched this one with my girlfriend–a rare treat; normally the job requires me to go see Alvin and the Chipmunks or Fool’s Gold or Twilight by my apparently pathetic and lonesome self–which helped me work out my response to this challenging movie. I was somewhat frustrated in my expectations by the ending, but she was downright angry. Even so, she thought it was great. I did too, for lots of reasons, especially Scorsese’s vivid and haunting dream sequences, but I may not have given Shutter Island the benefit of the doubt without our long post-movie conversation where we worked through our strong emotional reactions to it.
I noted in my review it’s going to piss a lot of people off. I don’t think that’s an unfair response, either. But me, I was pretty blown away.
SPOILER ALERT
Also: only seen it once, but the exposition-heavy opening scene makes infinitely more sense from an artistic perspective once you understand Leo’s character is trying to convince himself of the truth of what he’s saying as much as he is Ruffalo. Forgot/unable to explore it in the review, but this is a pretty well-written script, too.
Also, I’ve heard some people call it predictable (though they liked it anyway), but I don’t think it telegraphed its ending at all, really–it made sense in retrospect, and you knew something funny was going on, but not what. Then again, I am a credulous movie-goer.
Thanks to con-going wiping out my last Friday and Saturday, I’m sitting at 65K words as of today, or 8.5K new ones over the last week. Or should I say the last “weak” because that shit is so measly it probably never had its MMR shot.
Did finish another Aether Age submission. That took an additional 1.5K, so if you look at my combined fiction output, I’m back up in quintuple digits. Booyah.
P.S. May change title to The Starlight Rebellion. Something more badass, anyway. One piece of con advice I’m trying to make practice is that a work sells itself from the title on down. Say you’ve got two books in front of you, The Key and The Hyperactive Adventures of Dog-Man on the Planet of the Invisible Bras. That “key” is probably some deep metaphor, but whatever door it opens, you can bet there aren’t any tits behind it.
C.J. Cherryh’s Down Below Station and Merchanter’s Luck. I’d read exactly none of Cherryh’s work going into RadCon, but after two and a half years cataloging used copies of her books at my last job, I was well aware that a) she’s a huge figure in the field and b) she’s written a shit-ton of stuff. I’m not sure just how many books–30? 40?–but enough that I had no idea where to start.
So, after seeing her be all funny and brilliant and knowledgeable on two different panels, I followed her into the hall and asked her where I should dive in. Observing the first rule of fandom, I shut the fuck up while she told me about those two books. Very cool woman. Looking forward to picking those two up. If they’re at all as good as she is in person, I won’t regret it.
Kevin Shamel’s Rotten Little Animals. An underground animal film crew dodges human discovery while filming a zombie cat flick. Bizarro fiction–was vaguely aware of the genre before repeatedly colliding with it at RadCon; now here I am covered in all this freaky literary goo. Thoughtfully, Kevin drew a zombie cat on the title page for me.
Jeff Burk’s Shatner Quake. A disruption in reality forces William Shatner to battle an army of his fictional personas, from Kirk to T.J. Hooker to Rescue 9-1-1 Shatner. Good. Times.
Carlton Mellick III’s The Menstruating Mall. Ten stereotypes–a yuppie, a housewife, a jock, etc.–get stuck in a mall. That drips menstrual blood down its walls. And is inhabited by a serial killer. I’d say you can’t make this stuff up except he totally just did.
Ellen Datlow’s obviously pretty brilliant, too, so I should snag one of her anthologies one of these days. But those were the ones where I didn’t have a choice. As soon as I’m done with my own damn novel, I’m looking forward to reading again.
Another 16K words this last week puts me up at 56.5K total. Good times, considering the middle of a novel is the most troublesome and bastardly segment. I don’t expect anything near that word count this time next week–RadCon ate up all my writing time today, and will cripple it tomorrow, even though I’m skipping out on the middle of the day to squeeze in a few hours on it before heading back for another series of author panels–but I ought to be up around the two-thirds mark, after which the logical course of the remaining story will be relatively easy. By which I mean it will regress from being as painful as five bitches on a bitch boat to two or possibly three.
Ellen Datlow, by the way, is a cool character. She shrugs off networking con people with an honesty that’s blunt but not impolite. When asked, as an audience member in a panel on taboos, whether she had any, she replied “As an editor? .. Bad writing.”
Between that panel and a later live interview by Eileen Gunn, I’ve got a clearer picture of how a lot of the big anthologies work–hers, anyway, but presumably she’s not alone–by request, mostly, once they already know your name. How do they see your name? By working with you before, obviously enough, but also by having your name out there. She reads Interzone, I know that much.
Still trying to figure out how much appearing in smaller zines affects anything. I meant to ask her take on that, but I’m crippled by some character trait (polite deference or over-meekness, depending on your values) which means I normally don’t ask my obviously brilliant questions. Those omnipresent rambling con-goers who don’t even know why they opened their mouths in the first place have to be heard, after all.
Again, I don’t have time to do get into this too far, but the review for Dear John‘s here.
My last job was at an independent bookstore. For a year and a half, I processed all our incoming used books. The last year I was there, I handled both the new and the used. Nicholas Sparks novels passed through my hands about fifteen million fucking times, and every one of them looked fucking stupid.
Dear John was slightly less stupid than I expected, mostly because it subverted my expectations for their romance. I can pretty well guess if I tried to read one of Sparks’ books I would need to be hospitalized for severe paper-related hand trauma after trying to tear it into its component atoms. But my overall take on him has been revised upwards from “execrable” to “dopey.”
Review’s here.
I don’t really have time to get into this, as vodka extended my sleep schedule past to the point where I should have been writing novel already, but after Taken, this was something of a disappointment. Fun, and competent enough, but it felt much more like a typical Hollywood action movie. If Pierre Morel does nothing but movies like From Paris with Love from here on out, I bet I’ll enjoy them all, but I hope his second American feature was more about proving he wasn’t a one-hit wonder than a sign of the direction he plans to take from here on out.
Up front: I’m in favor of the agency model. I think it’s much wiser to vary pricing to take advantage of the demand curve on new releases. To charge more when people are willing to pay more and decrease price to increase volume after that “Must buy new Author X now” market has been tapped.
Also, you probably already know all this. But, you know. And no one’s going to read this anyway.
What I keep reading as a big frustration among ebook buyers, however, is they’ve been promised the agency system in the past and still see ebook prices that never dropped from their initial high prices, sometimes years after the fact. Where an ebook edition sells for $20(!) alongside a $6.99 mass market.
Right now, based on past practices like that, they don’t trust you. You want to make this work, get your prices on places like fictionwise in line with the varied rates you’re promising.
Then–and I think this is what the agency model will do, if you keep on top of it, but this is really super extra-special critical–create a pricing structure that creates a new market rather than one that cannibalizes your existing one or, on the other end of the spectrum, does nothing to encourage readers to buy products in the ebook format. You want a middle ground on ebook prices that offers enough of a discount for people to feel like they’re getting a bargain in regards to the physical version without making the people who buy the dead tree version feel like fools. I’m talking something like this:
Hardback $25-30, ebook $12-15. Trade paperback $12-16, ebook $8-10. Mass market $7-10, ebook $5-6*.
Again, I think you already know this. But I’ve been reading too much about this issue in the last ten days not to blurt something out about it somewhere. The most important thing is the ebook price needs to drop each time a cheaper physical format releases. Otherwise, ebook readers are going to feel cheated, ignored, and lied to. That’s going to hinder the creation of this new market. And that would be a dinger, because the publishing industry is not like the music industry. A big chunk of readers will buy either format–sometimes both formats. Follow through on your promises with the agency model, and the opportunity’s here to expand the publishing market in ways that are exciting instead of terrifying.
*These are ballparks; I’m not running Random House’s accounting ledgers, and the main reason (seems to me) for the agency model is to be able to experiment with prices until you find the ones that maximize your revenue. But you get the picture: a price difference that’s meaningful without being overwhelming.
- Fantasy (5)
- Science Fiction (16)
- Breakers (11)
- Rebel Stars (3)
- The Cycle of Arawn (4)
- The Cycle of Galand (1)