Nostalgia and New Blood

It's interesting, sometimes, being a fan of SF/F/H, but not being especially connected to a particular fandom. Among other things, it allows me to have a different perspective on things that are being remade, rebooted, or transferred from one medium to another. It means that I can usually approach those works from a place of "What story are they telling this time?" and less of a place of "OMG! They are so gonna fuck this up."


I dunno. Maybe this is where eight years of classical piano studies comes in handy. See, in classical music each performer has the opportunity to massage the original work into something special. Maybe not unique - in the sense that they still play all the same notes - but still different. Because each performer brings something new to the table. Their education, their own love of certain types of music, their emotional awareness, their technical skill. All of these things effecting minute changes. [For a concrete example you can check out this video on YouTube which compares five different pianists versions of Bach's Invention #1. Although I suggest stopping after the first four and listening to Gould's version here - he hums along as he plays.]


The point being that the same source can produce vastly different end results depending on the individual bringing it to life. And this is not necessarily a bad thing because it gives us a chance to see (or hear or read or whatever) something from a new perspective.

Does that mean it's always going to be good? No.
Does that mean every person has to like every version? No.
Does that mean that there aren't certain standards of quality to be applied? No.

What it does mean is that clinging to a single version of a song or type of story can mean you miss out on something else good.

Why am I mentioning this? Because yesterday the trailer for the new Ghostbusters movie came out. And there is a lot of hate for it. Some of it centers around the fact that the new team is all-female. Some of it centers around the fact that the sense of humor is different. But most of it boils down to "But I liked the original and this is different. Boohoo." (Seriously, the number of folks talking about how the new movie is ruining their (already in the past) childhood is just... stunning. Like the new movie is going to erase the old one.)

Remember when I mentioned being a fan, but not so much a member of particular fandoms? Here's where that becomes relevant.

I first saw Ghostbusters in my early teens (well, after it had first come out, although we were still using VHS tapes) and I loved it. I even daydreamed about what it would be like to be a Ghostbuster. I'm still a fan of the original movie. But here's the thing.

Yesterday, as the trailer was being rapidly disliked on YouTube by a bunch of butt-hurt older fans, I went and looked up the trailer for the 1984 movie - just by way of comparison. And... it's not great. (Partly because, you know, the 80s.) It's not terrible either. It's the sort of thing that will immediately appeal to some folks and not to others. The humor will make some people laugh, and miss completely with others.

Does the trailer for the new Ghostbusters make me dance around the room with excitement? No.
Are all of the jokes laugh out loud funny (to me)? No.
Do I think it looks like a complex and nuanced plot? No.

But it is going to be new riff on a story and world I like. And if it turns out to be awful it won't change the story and world I like. (Again. New versions of old movies are not like the Terminator - they don't travel back and change the past.) And if it turns out to be good, then all the more to love.

I won't let my nostalgia get in the way of enjoying something different.

This Girl Needs to Get Paid: Or Why I Sell My (Self-published) Books Through Gumroad and Not Amazon

A few weeks ago I put my short story collection (The Weather's Always Fine in Paradise) up for pre-order on Gumroad. Another writer friend contacted me and said "I saw that you have a new book coming out, but when I looked for it on Amazon, I couldn't find it."


I told him I prefer to distribute my self-published* work through Gumroad because I get paid considerably more per sale that way. (If you aren't familiar with Amazon's rates they take 30% of the money and give you 70%. Unless you are selling something for $0.99, in which case they take 70% and give you 30%. Gumroad charges $0.25+5% of the price. Even on the $0.99 sales, I make a much higher percentage with Gumroad.)


"Yeah, but Amazon has such a big piece of the marketplace."


But I make more money with Gumroad.


See, here's the thing. I understand browsing for books. I understand that Amazon are not only a marketplace, but also an aggregator. (When was the last time you didn't use Amazon to look for that book you read a few years back but can't quite remember the title or author?) I understand that while bookstores still maintain 40%-ish of physical book sales, they only have 10% of ebook sales (while Amazon has 90%). I understand that they have Top Seller lists out the ass (a couple years back I was in the Fiction - Western - Science Fiction top 10 multiple times) and algorithms that (sometimes) recommend your book to folks looking at (supposedly) similar work.


But I make more money with Gumroad.


Based on observation during the period Eggplant Literary had my SF Western novella on Amazon, the vast majority of my sales come through personal referral. That is, when I told someone to check it out or I tweeted about it or posted a link to a review. When I didn't do those things... there was just the eerie silence of watching my book plummet through the sales rankings.

Just being on Amazon was not enough.
Let me repeat that.
As a debut author with a small publisher, just being on Amazon was not enough. Sales did not magically trickle through due to algorithms or Top 10 lists. (This, by the way, is not a surprise. Targeted promotion and marketing is fucking key for authors of any level with any size publisher selling books through any venue or marketplace.)

So, when my sales are still overwhelmingly coming from me telling folks "Hey, you should buy my book," where do you think I want to point them? A marketplace that takes 30% of my profit or a marketplace that takes a little over 5% of my profit?

"But Amazon!"

Yeah. But I make more money with Gumroad. And I need to get paid.

*A publisher is welcome to sell my books however they see fit. From the trunk of their car, on Amazon, even dropped from a helicopter like a near-flightless bird over Cincinnati.

ConNooga 2016 - Schedule

Next weekend (February 19-21) I will be down at ConNooga. In addition to selling copies of The Weather's Always Fine in Paradise in the Dealer's Room, I will also be participating in five panels throughout the weekend.


Friday
3:00 PM Lost in Spice - Dune panel
5:00 PM Creating 3 Dimensional Characters

Saturday
6:00 PM Intro to Fantasy
7:00 PM Writing Openings that Hook Your Reader
9:00 PM Writing: Building Tension in Scenes and Stories

Feel free to stop by and say hi!

FORTHCOMING! - The Weather's Always Fine in Paradise

Coming on February 16th!

"Eleven stories about love, survival, and the depths of the human heart. 

Eleven worlds – some remarkably similar to our own, some dramatically different.

From the clammy dungeons and mysterious rooftops in The Spider Thief and the Sorcerer to the muddy, voodoo protected shores of Lake Ponchartrain in Legacy to the highrise slums of Venus in The Weather's Always Fine in Paradise, this collection of short stories will take you out of the everyday world and into the realm of 'what if'?

What if magic and knowledge were things that could be leased and reclaimed?

What if voodoo could open a woman's heart to the possibility of love?

What if the things that mattered most were not things at all?

Explore the possibilities in this short story collection from A.G. Carpenter."

That's right, folks. I have a short story collection coming out this coming Tuesday. It features some of my favorite, previously published stories, plus one brand new short story, and one brand new novelette. 

You can preorder a copy in paperback or .epub. (The ebook will also be available from the usual vendors like Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Scribd, etc.)

Angst on Toast (AKA 2015 in Review)

At the beginning of 2015 I set myself a single writing goal: Write a Better Book.


The year started off pretty well. I was working on the Southern Gothic/Horror project and cranked out a solid novella in a couple of months. It was weird and a little different from what I'd written before. And it felt... better. I read the prologue and the opening chapter at one of the local conventions and got a very enthusiastic response. It felt strong. It had touched on better narrative skills than some of my other projects.


But I wasn't sure about trying to sell a novella. A Horror novella, no less. I thought perhaps I could take the total story arc (which was conceived as three novellas) and turn them into a novel. So I started working on the second one in April.


Thus began the Great Flailing of 2015. I wrote the first chapter, then set it aside because something wasn't working. I picked up the opening of an unfinished high fantasy/steampunk/mythology redux and hammered out another novella. But it didn't feel right either.


I wrote an outline that heightened the conflict and stakes, but also meant expanding the novella into a novel. That stalled so I set it aside.


I had written the first dozen pages or so of an Original Graphic Novel (OGN) script in May. I picked it back up and wrote the rest in about two weeks. It was good. It was strong. I was excited because I was back on track.


I tackled the Southern Gothic project again. And stalled. Maybe it needed to percolate a little more.

I started working on another older project - the Epic Not Fantasy. Wrote an outline. It seemed a little long for a novella, but that was okay - this one I could handle being a little longer. Revised the opening, making adjustments for new plotlines. Picked up a new thread in the story and added 20k I hadn't even planned on. Still okay because it made it a better book.


I was busy, but still making progress. I loved my characters. I loved their flaws. I loved the things they were trying to do. And then I got to the middle of September and something in my brain screamed "OMG! This year is almost over and you haven't sold ANYTHING!"


It's an uncomfortable thing talking about the slow road to "overnight success". Because we really want to think that if we take the right steps and achieve certain milestones that it's just a matter of time before you can run around the interwebs yelling "SUCCESS! I've done The Thing!" But then the months tick past and you get a nice rejections that talk about how intricate your world-building is or your delicate way with words or the emotion in the romantic subplot but it's still "just not right for us at this time."

And you've done all the right things. You've written the best book you could. You struggled through the query trenches and landed an amazeballs agent (whom you love for loving your books and wanting them to be better just like you want them to be better). You've written other novels and short stories so that you have new projects to go out on submission if the first one doesn't strike the right nerve with the editors.

All the right things and still the months go by and that feeling you've always had, that maybe you aren't as good as you thought, that maybe you're really one of the tone deaf contestants on American Idol singing your heart out and being told there's just no hope that this thing you love will ever be a career.

I wallowed for a bit. Not deliberately. That's just how it is when the depression kicks in. I would try to write and I couldn't muster the energy to do more than open my documents and stare at the words I'd written weeks before. And the end of the year got even closer and the panic got bigger.

I talked to Agent Amazeballs and we agreed that maybe the Southern Gothic novella needed to remain a novella series instead of trying to remold it into a novel. And I should take the lead on subbing it. So it went out.

This was a decision that cut both ways. Putting it out there made me feel active again instead of stalled. But it also brought the total number of projects out on submission up to four. Not including a few short stories I still had in circulation.

I took another week or two to try and get my practical goals straightened out. I found that even though I wasn't ready to write the next Southern Gothic novella, I did (finally) know what I wanted to do with it. I also figured out how to rework the high fantasy/steampunk/mythology redux novella so that it would be longer, stronger, but not a full on novel.

I started writing on the Epic Not Fantasy again after almost six weeks of not touching it. I was scared it wouldn't work, but it all came back. Like I'd just set down the pen (metaphorical pen) for a few minutes and then come back to it. And this time I told myself that even though I wanted to finish it by the end of the year, I would just work on it until it was done. Even if that wasn't by the end of December.

November was NaNoWriMo. I didn't win. I wrote about 20k words. I brainstormed my simple plot for the Epic Not Fantasy into something spectacular. And epic. It's a really wonderful book.

It's not done yet. And thus we return to the point of this review of my year as a writer.

Sometimes things don't go like you plan. One thing I kept struggling with was the feeling that I hadn't accomplished anything this year. It wasn't true, but I was letting the things that weren't working like I'd planned obscure the things I had done.

I'd lost sight of the fact that sometimes success is not giving up. Sometimes progress means not taking a step back, even if you can't take a step forward that day. Or the next.

The end of the year is only days away and I have worked on my singular goal of writing a better book. I haven't met all my individual project goals, but I haven't given up.

And that's success.
  

The Failed Query

I've talked about the query I wrote that resulted in an offer of representation from Bob Mecoy. But what I haven't talked about in detail is the query I tried to write before that which was not as successful.


There were a number of reasons the first query was terrible. First of all, I spent a lot of time looking at other queries. That isn't a bad thing, but not every book requires the same kind of query and there are certain phrases that tend to be particular to various genres, phrases that are hard to avoid (but should be), and a general instinct to try and mimic something that was successful for someone else. Secondly, I tried to use a group of folks to help me refine my query. Again, this isn't specifically a bad thing, but it's important to A) have folks familiar with the genre you write and B) think more or less like you do if you want useful feedback.


So. I researched and the basic advice was "Read successful queries. Write a query for your own project. Get feedback. Revise until everyone likes it." I read QueryShark and dug through the Query Letter Hell at the Absolute Write Water Cooler, then I wrote a query. And then revised it based on well-intentioned, but not overall helpful feedback. That process was frustrating because I wound up rehashing the same stuff over and over again. (There were versions in between the ones posted below that no one saw but me.) Eventually I tried condensing my entire plot into a single sentence and that resulted in my "start with a logline" approach and I haven't looked back. However, it occurred to me it might be helpful to look at that first query and see what wasn't working.


Here's the first take.

Since childhood, Keira Fennel's closest friend has been her father. Despite the long months he spends away – investigating the misuse of magic – Padraig is the most important person in Keira's life.
When Padraig's spring-form heart – a device that warns of danger to the person who built it – breaks, Keira knows there is only thing for her to do: go to London and find him before it is too late to save him.
It doesn't matter that getting to London means running away from the magic school at Ballaghadarreen Abbey, stowing aboard an airship bound for Great Britain, making an ally out of a Scottish shape-shifter and confronting a brutal serial killer who uses magic and silver as his weapons. Da is in danger and Keira will do whatever she must to find him.
As Keira's friendship with Lowen McCrae, the were-wolf Scotsman, grows into something more intimate, they both fall deeper into danger. With her Fey magic bound by an iron collar, Keira tries to do the right thing and her father is killed for it. Desperate not to lose both of the men she loves, she makes a terrible choice to try and save Lowen's life.
Realizing that her betrayal is worse than death, Keira will draw on the darker blood-magic of the All-Father of the Undying and risk the cold immortality as a vampire to save Lowen.

This version is a not-inaccurate overview of the main plot and conflicts. But it had some problems. (That third paragraph is... cumbersome to say the least.) It lacked some of the intrinsic stakes in the story, the things that go deeper than just the main plot and conflict. And it didn't give proper weight to the conclusion of the story. So, I revised and produced a slightly different version. 

Since childhood, Keira Fennel's closest friend has been her father, despite the long months he spends away investigating the misuse of magic.

When Padraig's spring-form heart – a device that warns of danger to the person who built it – breaks, Keira knows there is only thing for her to do: go to London and save him.

It doesn't matter that getting to London means running away from the Spinners School of Magic at Ballaghadarreen Abbey, stowing aboard an airship bound for Great Britain, making an ally out of a Scottish shape-shifter and confronting a brutal serial killer called The Ripper who uses magic and silver as his weapons. Da is in danger and Keira is too stubborn to go home without him.

As Keira's friendship with Lowen McCrae, the were-wolf Scotsman, grows into something more intimate, they confront Devereaux, a man deadlier than The Ripper. He has a plan for Keira – to build forbidden devices crafted from the blood of shape-shifters. To prompt her cooperation, Devereaux murders Padraig and threatens to do the same with Lowen. Desperate to save at least one of the men she loves, Keira capitulates.

When Devereaux proceeds to use Lowen as part of his experiments anyway, Keira draws on the blood-magic of the Undying – risking the cold immortality of a vampire – to save him.

I actually liked version two despite the fact that it was a little long, but the folks who were offering critique did not. Some of this was due to not being familiar with the SF/F genres. In fact, many of the comments focused on the fact that I didn't discuss the relationship between Lowen and Keira enough. Or that there were too many terms that they didn't understand. 

It's possible that if I had sent this query out it would have been successful, but in the end, I felt I could do better. I hammered out a logline. (I actually tried to get feedback on that and was nearly as frustrated that time too. Mostly because a lot of the feedback consisted of "Loglines don't have a place in querying.") Then I worked that out into a solid query letter that I felt really nailed the heart of the novel. 

And then, in the end, I also sent out some queries that only had the logline and my publication credits in it and had an immediate response asking for the full. And two weeks later a phone call offering representation. 

What does all this mean? When it comes to a query you need to do your research on how to write a query. And then you need to follow your gut. 

There is a general structure and format for queries, but in the end you know what your novel is about. You know all the bits that make it special, the character quirks and strengths that make them compelling. You have to make the final decision about what to put in the query, but you are also in the best position to do that. 

I liked my initial attempt at the query, but I didn't love it. I didn't get the sense of satisfaction I got when I wrote the one I used successfully. Maybe it was just a question of sitting with the project a little longer. Maybe the practice writing the failed query helped. But I also learned that the best way for me to write a pitch is to start with a logline to help me see the overall structure of my story. And that was not something I would have learned if I had continued to try and write my query based on the method I had been presented.

In fact, I have come to wonder if the concept of thrashing through draft after draft of a query is perhaps not as helpful as it seems. I've talked to other authors who have mentioned writing dozens of drafts of their query over a year and a half (and still not being finished). But that's the process they've been told is necessary. (And I'm not saying just write one query and be done with it, but in general if you're writing the same thing over and over and over with only minor progress over a period of months or years, you may need to rethink your process.)

So. What do you think? Was I right to scrap this query and go my own way?

The 7/7/7/7 Challenge

Maggie Maxwell tagged me for another Share Your Work blog challenge.


In short, you go to the seventh page of a WiP, count down to the seventh line and then share the following seven lines with your readers. And then you tag seven more people. (I'm still working on the last bit. If you would like to be tagged, let me know.)


From my post-apocalyptic, Steampunk novel-in-progress, Survivor: [Izzy is an airship captain. She and her first mate, Kiirahk - a female gorilla, are checking out the remains of a traveling party that was attacked by scavengers.]

Kiirahk was already rolling the man onto his back, picking over him the way a mother examines a child. She grunted, surprised. /No wounds./

"He's covered in blood."

 

The gorilla pulled open the stained shirt, prodding the skin underneath with thick fingers. /Scars. No wounds./

Izzy shivered despite the smelting summer day. "Let me see."

(Want to play too? Drop me a comment and I will be happy to tag you.)