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I’ve been getting Counting From Ten ready for a new edition — one to replace my dwindling stock of the original small-press edition, one that will be available both for the Kindle and via print-on-demand, so people will finally be able to order the damn thing via Amazon, instead of sending me money via PayPal and waiting for me to actually go to an actual Post Office.  Pretty much a win/win situation.

I’ve been going over the text of the book — and, annoyingly, re-typing several of the stories, since I mysteriously seem to lack electronic versions of them — and doing a little light line-editing.  Nothing serious.  Catching a couple of typos that made it into the original edition.  Tightening up the occasional word choice here and there, but mostly leaving it alone.

There are a couple of stories, though, where I’m seriously altering some of the details to bring the story up-to-date.

Mainly, it has to do with telephones. The book originally came out in 2004, and, well, things have changed since then.  Here’s a for-instance: in a story entitled “The Catalog,” the lead character makes calls from his land-line phone, and at one point, from a pay-phone. Right now, I honestly don’t even know where I would go to find a pay-phone if my life depended on it.

In short, there are random details that make the stories feel like they were written in another time.  Which, yeah, they were. But I had to ask myself — did I want to leave them that way?

Often, whenever someone goes back and changes something in their creative works before re-releasing them, it annoys me. I usually wish they had left well enough alone. (Case in point: Greedo shot first. End of discussion.)  I would rather that creators knew when to leave well enough alone, and let a story be the product of its time.

But on the other hand — every time I tripped across something that now felt anachronistic, it jarred me a bit. I stopped and noticed it. In other words, it took me out of the story a little.

In any kind of editing, from a massive overhaul to a simple line-edit, there’s really only one question that should be paramount in the editor’s mind: What’s the best thing to do to tell the story?

And I finally decided that, in most cases, it didn’t matter to the story whether it took place in 2004 or 2012 — and if the fact that a detail made the story feel like it wasn’t taking place in the present day was at all distracting from the story itself, then out it goes.  In the case of “The Catalog,” I gave the lead character a cell phone.

So that’s what’s going on with Counting From Ten — all the stories are getting pulled out, dusted off, squinted at in the sunlight, and sometimes getting a shiny new coat of paint before I put them back in the anthology.

What’s your take on updating stories vs. leaving them alone? What would you do?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to get permission to live the life you want.

You might have been thinking about this, too, if you’re a writer, or if you merely write but you’re waiting on someone else’s permission to actually call yourself a writer.  And you have been, haven’t you? Writers, real writers, are surely arcane mystical creatures who live lives very different from yours and mine, who subsist only on the rarefied air they breathe and on the sunlight that shines down in dusty shafts to illuminate their current manuscript as they effortlessly lay down word after elegant word onto the page.  That’s not you.  You have a day job, a messy kitchen, a thousand little distractions anchoring you down to the all too real world around you.  You may write, sure, and you may even suspect you might be good at it, but surely, you’re not a writer.

Even if that’s the first word that pops into your head when someone asks, “What do you do?”  Even if that’s what you secretly call yourself when you picture the life you want to be living. It’s not a word you can say out loud.

Say it out loud.  And, just maybe, live it out loud.

This is becoming a more concrete and less theoretical concern for me, lately. I lost my day job about a month ago.  I’d been working as a web developer, and I just last week had a fairly promising interview for another such position at a different company, and if they offer me the job, I know I should take it, I know I shouldn’t turn down a regular paycheck and health insurance, I know I’d be crazy to do that, especially in this economy and et cetera and et cetera and et cetera, but –

– My heart isn’t in it.  It’s not what I really want to be doing with my life. This is what I want to be doing, this, right here, laying down the words and getting my voice inside your head. Telling you stories that will leave you a little off-balance and leave you looking at the world a little differently.

I don’t honestly . . . have to have a day job. I don’t. If I could tighten my belt a little, I could probably go for a year without having to get another job.  That would be a nice long chunk of time to spend writing, editing, promoting. Getting my work out there.  But it would be a scary, uncertain, unusual thing to do.

I keep wanting to talk to friends, to family, get their advice, but — it all comes back to that same old problem I outlined above.  I don’t want advice.  I just want permission.

When we’re children, we think that once we’re adults, man, that’s gonna be amazing — no one will be able to tell us what to do! But sometimes, not having someone to tell you what to do is paralyzing. Terrifying.   I just want someone to tell me, “yes, it’s okay. You’re allowed. This is a chance you’re allowed to take.”

I don’t know for sure what I’m going to do, yet. I’ll let you know when I reach something like a decision. But for now, if you’re looking for a little bit of permission of your own, if you want to be able to really call yourself a writer, and you still feel like that’s not a label you have the authority to give to yourself, you’ve been waiting for a publisher or an editor or an agent or someone to come along and tell you that, yes, you are one of the special chosen ones — I want to do this much for you, at least:

I want you to print this out, cut out this certificate and hang it on your wall:

There. Looks pretty good. And it’s just as legit as any other form of external validation you may have been looking for anway. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’m going to put one of those on my refrigerator.

– They Fight Crime!

For most people, I figure that site is good for a few minutes of laughs, and then that’s it, time to move on with your day.  But if you’re a writer, it might just spark some ideas.  Take the result I listed above — okay, the actual combination of those characters might seem a little ridiculous, but looking at each of them individually, I can’t help but start to come up with ideas for scenes featuring them, maybe even whole stories if I let myself.

Go, visit the site, hit “reload” a few times.  See who jumps out at you.

If there’s anything I like better than a compliment, it’s a random, unexpected compliment.  That’s just what I got yesterday when I fired up my Twitter client and saw this:

Started “Slices” by @montoure – Indy writers take note: Great covers matter. Shows professionalism, sells books! bit.ly/ySbFYy

— Steve Tannuzzo (@BostonProWriter) March 8, 2012

That definitely made my day.  I’m very pleased with how the cover for Slices turned out, but honestly, I’m a little self-conscious about it. I designed it myself, and the prevailing wisdom for self-published authors is Thou Shalt Not Design Thy Own Covers.  (But, like I said yesterday, there are no experts on how all this works, so I shouldn’t let that worry me.)  So it was nice to hear someone else say that my cover shows “professionalism.”

At some point, I should tell you about how I made that cover — but not today.  Today, I’m going to tell you about the process fellow Seattle writer Luna Lindsey went through to get her new cover designed, since she posted this not long after I received the above tweet, and I still had cover design on the brain:

By browsing [DeviantArt], I decided I wanted a photo manipulation style, and then I let my visualization processes stew for a while until I imagined my character in the pose I wanted, with props and background.  I made a terrible sketch in pencil just so I could remember the details, bookmarked the artists and images I liked [...]

I chose three artists based on these criteria:  1) I liked their art, 2) they seemed professional — i.e. they presented their gallery in a professional manner, they listed the fact that they took commissions, they had their own website, and they had a portfolio of previously commissioned work.

[...] What impressed me most about Ana was her professional attitude in her email replies.  She stated that she always produces a “sketch” or outline of the art before spending too many hours on it, so that if there were foundational corrections, it saves time and money.  That showed me that she’d given this lots of thought.  If you are commissioning cover art, I would strongly recommend you request this of the artist.  Given that this is a digital image, my “sketch” was full color and consisted of the basic model standing in front of the basic background.  Details such as her hair, props, touch-ups, color-finishing, etc. had not yet been done.  The feedback I gave at this level greatly improved the direction of the image, so I was able to get exactly what I had envisioned.

– Luna Lindsey: Emerald City Dreamer Cover Art.

Very cool, and definitely the route I intend to take when I need a cover for Still Life, the novel I’m revising. Her cover looks great, and you should go take a look at it.

For the past couple of years, as the publishing industry has been rocked by changes, and as writers have been figuring out how to get their writing into their readers’ hands in ways that don’t really involve the “publishing industry” at all, I’ve been watching a lot of people reacting to this rapid state of change in the best way they know how.

Namely, by freaking the fuck out.

Me, though? I’ve been feeling increasingly calm and relaxed and collected.  Why is that, I wondered?  Keeping my head while all about me are losing theirs is generally not considered one of my core competencies, so what gives?

I think I’ve finally figured it out.

I tend to suffer from analysis paralysis — I’ll over-think a problem so much that it prevents me from actually doing anything about it, especially if I think there are aspects to that problem that I don’t know about or haven’t considered.

One of the things that freaks me out, and keeps me in this paralyzed state, is the fear that I’m not an “expert.”  The thought that there are other people out there who know more than I do about the topic at hand makes me want to stop trying.  How can I possibly do better than the experts?

Well — right now, when it comes to publishing — there aren’t any experts any more.

With e-books and self-publishing and print-on-demand and other new and disruptive factors keeping the publishing world in it’s current state of aggressive churn, anyone who claims they know for sure how publishing will work five years from now, five months from now, or, hell, five days from now is either:

1. An astonishingly crazy-brilliant, practically omniscient prognosticator, or
2. Lying.

There’s no one out there for me to feel intimidated by.  I don’t have to worry that anyone else has a head start.  I don’t have to wonder if I’m listening to the right people, following the right advice, doing everything that’s expected of me.

I don’t have to sit back and wait for things to “settle down,” to figure out what the new “normal” is.  I don’t think we’re going to see a new “normal” any time soon — maybe not even in our lifetime.

There are people out there who have found success and happiness writing and publishing, either by going it old-school or by embracing change or by doing a little of both, and most of these people have been generous enough to tell us what’s worked — for them.  I may or may not be able to reproduce their results.  Who knows?  Nobody, that’s who.

I feel free to take whatever sounds to me like good advice, and forge my own path.  I’m just as much an expert as the next guy.

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

– Buckminster Fuller

Time to stop analyzing. Time to stop waiting for someone to come down out of the mountains with a set of stone tablets that clearly lays out that this is how we sell books now.  It’s not going to happen.

What we have now is not comfortable, it’s not certain, and it’s not safe.  But it is, finally, a level playing field.  And that’s why I suddenly find myself calm about all this.

All right, so — as outlined in Tuesday’s post, I set a goal for myself of reaching out to at least ten book bloggers on Wednesday.

Just following up to let you know, I made it!  I was up past my bedtime, but it got done.

The trick to this sort of thing, in my experience, is over-preparation.  I actually included seventeen book bloggers in the Excel file I put together yesterday, even though my eventual goal was just to contact “at least ten.”

That way, when it came time to actually work my way through the list, as soon as I hit the point where I started to feel tired of doing it, I was able to tell myself, “Well, remember, you don’t have to do all of these — you’ve done seven already, so just three more and you can stop, okay?”

So I was able to hit the goal I set and enjoy the slacker pleasure of getting to “quit early.”

I mention all this because I figure any writers reading this are probably slackers, too.  We all are, or else we’d want real jobs. This turns out to be a pretty good way to trick yourself into being productive — give it a try.

Now to wait and see if any of these queries results in a request for a copy of the book.  Fingers crossed.  I’m going to need to keep repeating this process and looking for other reviewers, but this is a decent start.

(Remember, if you’re interested in writing a review of Slices for your blog, or for Amazon or Goodreads or the like, just let me know, and I’ll set you up with a free copy!)

Okay, I’m halfway done with the goal outlined in yesterday’s post — I said I would contact at least ten book bloggers today about Slices.

I’ve gathered together my list.  I’ve actually ended up with seventeen of them, and that’s just from doing a Google search and some fairly casual browsing — I’m sure I can find a lot more in future.

(Oddly enough, no one on Twitter recommended any book bloggers when I asked.  Really, Internet? I thought you people had an opinion about everything!)

In a burst of organizational enthusiasm, I put together all the relevent information in this Excel spreadsheet, which you’re welcome to look at if you’re curious, or if you’re looking for a starting place for your own submissions.  (Don’t just rely on my spreadsheet, though — visit the sites and actual read their guidelines, ‘kay? ‘Kay.)

You’ll note that there’s a column for “query date,” which is currently blank, ’cause I haven’t sent any of them out yet — I’ll do that tonight when I get home.  (Yesterday’s lunch hour was spent finding these blogs, and today’s lunch hour was spent putting together this spreadsheet.)  This seems like a very good idea to me, to make sure I don’t end up querying any of the same bloggers twice for the same book in future.

So why am I being so public about all this?  Three reasons.  First, if you’re  a writer, I thought you might be interested in seeing my process to see if any of it would work for you.

Secondly, if you’re a reader, you might like to see how the sausage is made.

Finally, this keeps me motivated.  If I say, “Hey, I’m gonna do a thing!” I don’t want to have come back here tomorrow and post, “Oh, actually I didn’t do a thing.  I spent all night looking a pictures of kittens on Tumblr instead. Sorry.”

So come back here tomorrow, and I’ll let you know how sending out the queries went.  Or I’ll at least have some pictures of kittens.

One of the biggest complaints I ever hear writers make — and here I’m even being generous and including people who call themselves writers but never seem to, you know, write anything — is that there’s never enough time.

Time is the one commodity that no one’s making more of.  It does  slip through our ink-stained little fingers, if we let it — especially if you’ve got a day job, a spouse, kids, a home to keep clean, errands to run, and a three-hours-a-night television habit.  (Well, maybe not that last one.  If you’re guilty of that one, go stand in front of your mirror for me, slap yourself in the face, and scream, “what the fuck are you doing?”  Thanks.)

Well, listen, I can’t give you an extra day in your week, but tomorrow, you’ve got something to think about — an extra day in your year.  It’s Leap Day, February 29th. You actually, for once in every four years, have some extra time.

I just wanted to say, let that inspire you.  Think of all the times you’ve said, “if only I had more time, I’d — ”  What?  Drop those short story submissions you keep putting off in the mail?  Drag out that trunk novel and start revising it?  Toss aside your current manuscript, the one you’re so bored with by now, and finally get started on that big new project you’re really excited about?  Here it is!  More time!  Do it!

In fact, let’s stretch this metaphor out a little more — since tomorrow is called “Leap Day,” make a real leap.  Don’t just do something you’ve been putting off — do something you’ve been a little scared to do.

Putting my money where my mouth is — I’ve been a little scared to contact book-bloggers about Slices.  “Oh, they’re probably not interested in short stories, and it’s hard to find reviewers who will take self-published books, or who are interested in horror, or — ”  Blah, blah, blah, excuse, excuse, excuse.  Anything I’m making that many excuses about I figure I must be scared of, and that means the only way to face it is head-on.

So, I’m going to go out and put together a list of — oh, let’s say ten book-bloggers, and drop them a line.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

That’s the Leap I’m going to make tomorrow.  What’s yours?

Last weekend I went down to Los Angeles for the 23rd annual Gallifrey One convention, which, for the uninitiated, is a Doctor Who convention. So, in other words, it’s the longest-running convention in the world for the longest-running science-fiction television series of all time.

Doctor Who is probably quite literally my very favorite thing in the entire world. If you enjoy my stories, you have Doctor Who to thank for it — in a very real sense, the mysterious adventures in outer space and the many monsters I watched the Doctor fight when I was a child permanently warped my fragile, delicate little developing mind, and left me with a deep love for the strange and terrifying.

This is only the second time I’ve been to Gallifrey One, but I’m sure this will be an annual pilgrimage from now on. I’m not sure I could even tell you how amazing it was.  This is an incredibly enthusiastic, friendly, creative, engaged fandom.  And you know how actors and the like in their public appearances always go on about how much they love their fans, and they do this all for them, and thank you so much and blah blah blah and it always comes across so fake?

Not here.  Everyone up on that stage (and there were a ton of guests) seemed to be absolutely genuine when they said that kind of thing.  They love the show, they love being involved in it, they love the fanbase.

Anyway, since this is my writing blog, and not my geeking-out-about-Doctor-Who blog — I don’t have one of those, but maybe I should — I’m mainly posting this to tell you I finally got a chance to meet Simon Guerrier, who was the editor of How The Doctor Changed My Life, the Doctor Who anthology that features my story, “Relativity.”

Working with Simon had been a real pleasure.  Since that was technically my first professional sale, it was the first time I’d ever really worked with an editor, and the process was surprisingly fun and painless.  His suggestions and line-edits genuinely helped to improve the flow of the story and make the characters seem more authentically British.  He was more than willing to let me push back on the few changes that I thought would change the intent of my story too much.  The version that ended up in print still feels very much like my vision of the story, and that he just helped make that vision clearer.

I’d heard he was going to be at the convention, and was looking forward to meeting him.  No matter what the picture on his Amazon profile may have you believe, he is not, in fact, a raygun-toting space badger. In person, Simon turns out to be a tall, pleasant Londoner, who is disconcertingly younger than I am, dammit.  He promptly mocked my costume, gave me a glass of some rather lovely wine, and then introduced me to L.M. Myles, who also had a story in HTDCML — the story immediately proceeding mine, in point of fact.  (Hi, neighbor!)  He introduced me as “one of his discoveries,” which charmed the hell out of me.

We didn’t get to talk much, but I’m glad I was able to thank him in person for having selected my story — to tell him that being able to officially write something for Doctor Who was a life-long dream, and to thank him for helping make it come true.  No matter what else ever happens in my writing career, I will always treasure that little bit of immortality — getting to carve my initials on a story that started before I was born and will continue long after I’m gone.

…. I don’t necessarily mean me, mind you, unless I actually happen to be your favorite author, in which case bless your little ink-black heart.  But I can guarantee you that no matter who your favorite author is, whether they’re a traditionally-published best-seller or a struggling indie, they’ll greatly appreciate it if you do any of the following things, today or any other day:

• Write a review of their book on Amazon. Can’t ignore the 500-pound gorilla in the room — Amazon almost certainly drives the majority of your favorite author’s sales, and the more reviews and ratings a book receives, the more likely Amazon is to promote and recommend that book.  This is probably the number one thing you can do to help get the books you love in front of people’s eyes and into their hands.  If the thought of writing a “book review” is putting you glumly in mind of your school days, don’t stress over it — you don’t have to write an essay or anything, just a few sentences about why you liked the book.
• “Tag” their book on Amazon.  If you add the appropriate labels for a book (for example, “thriller,” “ghosts,” “serial killers”, etc.), then that also helps improve the book’s visibility, and makes it that much more likely someone will see the book when they do a search for that kind of fiction.
• “Like” their book on Amazon.  Book listings on Amazon now have a little “thumbs-up” button on them, which should be a familiar concept to any of the 250 million or so of you who are on Facebook.  If you’ve got literally five seconds to spare to help an author out today, while this probably doesn’t do nearly as much good as reviewing or tagging — it sure can’t hurt, either.
• Add their books to a “Listmania” list on Amazon.  I’ll be honest — I personally don’t pay a whole lot of attention to Listmania lists, but there are definitely people who do, and this is another way you can help an author’s visibility.  Maybe put together a collection of “Best Horror Books for $2.99 or Less,” for example.
• Boost their  Social Media signal.  Are you following your favorite writers on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, Digg, Tweedle, Bloost, or Splinder?  Of course you are, even though I may have made those last three up.  Anyway, if so, when they have something they’re promoting there — a new book, a reading in your hometown, a Kickstarter campaign to fund a new project — help spread the word.  Retweet their tweets, share their posts, let people know.  If you follow their blog and you think a post is particularly interesting, pass the link around.
• Review their books on “social reading” sites.  If you love to read, and you’re not already a member of Goodreads, Shelfari, or LibraryThing, you should check them out.  They’re a great way to find new books to read via recommendations from people with similar tastes.
• Let them know you like their stuff.  Odds are, your favorite writer has a website, blog, Facebook page, or some other on-line means of contacting them.  So why not, you know, contact them?  Drop them a short note to tell them how much you like their writing.  Unlike the other suggestions on this list, this won’t increase their sales, but feedback is always nice, too.  Send them e-mail, leave a comment on their blog, send them an “@” message on Twitter, show up on their doorstep with a bouquet of flowers and a handgun.

Uhhh — let me look at my notes again, here.  Yeah, no, scratch the “doorstep” one.  But the rest of it’s good.

(If you’d like to show my book, Slices, a little love, here’s a link to it’s Amazon page.  Give it a thumbs-up, a couple tags, or even a review, and I will love you forever, I honestly will.  Happy Valentine’s Day, you lovely people, you.)

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