Tag Archives: novels

In which NaNoWriMo makes me feel bad

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I was talking to a woman at work today.  She’s had some health problems, but she’s feeling better and has a bit more energy. As a result, she told me, she just participated in National Novel Writing Month.  How did that go? I asked her. Great! she replied. I wrote my 50,000 words.

Fifty-thousand words in a month.  From a woman who’s working full-time and has health problems.

Where did I go wrong? My novel Where All the Ladders Start (which I swear is coming out real soon now) took me two years to write and contains about 85,000 words. In case the math is not evident to you, that’s less than 50,000 words per year.

The key to success in modern publishing, I am told, is to publish a lot, but make it high-quality.  Here’s a post making this point, written by a guy who writes 7-10,000 words a day. I’m pretty sure I’ve never written as much as 2,000 words in a day. I’m pretty sure writing 7-10,000 words a day would kill me inside a month.

But as an experiment, I’m going to see if I can write my next novel — a sequel to The Portal — in under a year.  I won’t lessen the quality, but I’m going to try to get it out in 2015.

Er, wish me luck.

We’re on Google Play! And Scribd!

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When Google started selling books, their site was a bit of a mess, and my publisher stayed away. Now things look much better, and my publisher is onboard. You can see my books here, along with all the other stuff that comes along when you search for my name. The one weirdness is that their list prices are much higher than you see on other sites, but the prices are discounted so that they end up around those standard prices.

My publisher is also onboard with Scribd, the book subscription service that competes with Kindle Unlimited.  The idea, as we’ve discussed before, is to be a Netflix for books. For $8.99 a month, you can download as many books as you like from their catalog. They have fewer books than Kindle Unlimited, but they’re better quality.  From the author’s perspective, they pay better royalties than Kindle Unlimited and, most important, they don’t demand exclusivity.

Finally, their interace is really nice.  Here’s Scribd’s page for The Portal:

scribd

Is this the greatest novel in the English language?

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Middlemarch, I mean.  Wikipedia tells me that this is the opinion of Martin Amis and Julian Barnes.  It also quotes Virginia Woolf, who calls it “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”

I first read it back in high school or college, when I read pretty much everything.  I doubt that it was assigned reading — it’s about a billion pages long.  So I probably spent a chunk of my spare time devouring it one summer.  This time around, almost out  of the blue, I decided to have my hero Walter Sands read it in the course of Where All the Ladders Start (coming soon to an ebook store near you!), and I decided I’d better take another look at it myself, to make sure the things I said about it were true.

It surely is a novel for grown-ups.  I can’t imagine subjecting a middle schooler to it, the way we make them read Oliver Twist.  I can’t imagine what I would have made of the book in high school.  A few more thoughts:

  • Middlemarch has its moments of rustic humor, but Eliot is never as funny with her rude mechanicals as Dickens is with his working-class folks.  And she even doesn’t try to be as funny as Jane Austen when it comes to relations between men and women.  That is serious business.
  • There’s a bit of social commentary in the novel.  I didn’t recall this from my first reading, but it’s actually a historical novel — written in the 1870s but taking place in the 1830s.  So we see the railroad about to make an appearance in the area, for example, and the Reform Bill is in the air.  But that material seemed fairly bland to me.
  • Where Eliot is great — and maybe unequaled — is when she deals with love and marriage, and the complexities of serious relationships in a serious world.  Dorothea and Casaubon, Dorothea and Will Ladislaw, Rosamond and Lydgate — by the end of the book, we are so deeply inside these characters’ heads that we seem to know them as well as we know ourselves.  That’s a pretty impressive achievement.

That is to say, I re-read the whole damn thing, which used up a large chunk of my reading time for the year.  It was worth it.

Amazon vs. Hachette — The Final Blog

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Amazon and Hachette have finally settled.  Thank goodness.  The settlement appears to follow the outlines of Amazon’s recent agreement with Simon & Schuster — the publisher can set its own price for its ebooks, but they get better terms if the price is in the range Amazon likes.  This is exactly how it works with independent authors — we only get the lovely 70% royalty if we set our price between a dollar and $9.99.  Anything higher or lower, we only get 35%.

This all seems perfectly reasonable.  Clearly, Amazon wasn’t trying to put mainstream publishers out of business.  It wasn’t trying to destroy literature and “disappear” authors.  It was using its clout as a reseller to get ebook prices where it thought they ought to be, to maximize sales. Business as usual.

Hugh Howey sums it up:

Conflating our love of books with the virtuousness of those who package them is a very bad idea. Publishers belong to multi-national, multi-billion dollar corporations. They need to make profits. They do this by pushing prices up on readers and pushing wages down on writers. I don’t blame them for that (though I do try to pressure them to be more fair to both parties).

The people I blame are those who should do their homework, understand this business better, and get on the right side of these debates. The real damage has been done by those who refuse to fight for the little guys; the real damage has been done by the parties who seem to think that publishers can do no wrong and that Amazon can do no right.

This includes the New York Times and many other traditional media outlets. It includes The Authors Guild and Authors United. By waging a PR campaign without understanding the issues (often stating things that were patently untrue), these parties caused severe damage and helped to prolong this negotiation. They aligned themselves with a party that has broken the law to raise prices and refuses to pay authors a decent digital royalty. I don’t think this damage is done intentionally or with malice but by simple ignorance.

First sentences

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I finally got around to starting my new novel today.  I wrote the first sentence, which goes like this:

I was standing in the snack-food aisle of the 7-11 when I saw her.

Pretty good, huh?

Let’s compare it to first lines of the top 20th century English-language novels, according to these guys.

Here’s Ulysses, which came in first:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

That’s fine, although it doesn’t stand by itself.  In second place is The Great Gatsby.

In my younger and more vulnerable days my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

Again it doesn’t stand by itself; you need to read on to find out what the advice was.  Next is A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo . . .

Well, first sentences just don’t get any better that.

Let’s try number 4, Lolita, skipping the hilarious foreword:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.

OK, that one’s great, too.  The whole first paragraph is incomparable.

Fifth place is Brave New World:

A squat gray building of only thirty-four stories.

Good but abrupt.  Like Lolita, missing a verb, and you need to read the entire (short) paragraph to get the point.

Anyway, I’ve been put in my place.  And now I want to re-read some novels.  Which I’d better not do, or I’ll never write the remaining ten thousand sentences.

Bad advice for writers; also not funny

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At first I thought this article on Bad Advice for Writers was pretty funny:

Advice #4: Correct negative reviews

There are only two types of reviews: the positive kind, and the kind where the reviewer didn’t understand the book. A bad review of your book is actually a cry for help!

Whenever you see a negative review that makes you say to yourself, “I should reach out to this person, perhaps in a borderline illegal fashion,” by all means do so. Find out where they live if you want! Show up on their doorstep and offer to politely explain how they simply failed to understand your novel. Make it clear that this is something they need to resolve within themselves and not a reflection on your work, and also that there’s no need whatsoever to call the police, so please put down the phone and stop crying.

Interaction is what reviewers are really looking for from you, the writer. Words like “awful” and “incomprehensible” and “this may have been written by a very dumb parrot” are really their way of saying, “I have failed to fully grasp your clear brilliance and would like for you to explain it to me”. So get out there and interact!

Then I read this, and I stopped laughing:

In an update to the fabulously written Goodreads review of Brittain’s awful self-published opus, a reviewer going by the pen name of Paige Rolland describes how Brittain stalked her Facebook page, discovered where she worked and traveled all the way to Scotland where he violently hit her over the head with a full bottle of wine, causing her to be hospitalized.

The reviewer describes the attack:

I was in the cereal aisle, bending down to get something from the bottom self. When I stood up, something hit me on the head. Hard. At first, I thought that maybe I’d hit my head off the shelf, and as everything started to spin and go black, I wondered how the hell I could be so stupid as to hit my head so hard. My vision was black, and my hearing was muffled, but I was very much conscious – I did not pass out (and this is important ’cause of my pride). I turned and put my hands out to lower myself to the floor gently, which is something my mother has always taught me to do should I think I’m going to pass out. It prevents further injury. As I lowered myself, I heard the tinkle of a bottle on the floor and I thought that something had fallen on me (even thought there is definitely no wine in the cereal aisle).

This is inconceivably awful.

And then there’s this weird story.

Why Amazon is not a monopoly

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Franklin Foer of The New Republic has joined the ranks of folks with Amazon Derangement Syndrome; take a look at this article.  The best response I’ve seen is this blog post at the Washington Post (now owned, of course, by Jeff Bezos). To Foer’s assertion that big publishers just can’t compete in the face of Amazon’s demands, the author points out the obvious:

They just can’t compete?  Why the hell not?  They can’t sell their e-books from their own websites?  Why is that?  Or at barnesandnoble.com?  Powells.com?  Ebooks.com?  The ebook market is, as the antitrust lawyers say, as “contestable” a market as one can imagine, with virtually no barriers to entry.  Sell your stuff there, at whatever price you want to sell it at.  If you want Amazon to sell your stuff, you have to take their terms.  It’s not “exacting tribute”!  It’s “business as usual.”  If you don’t like it, go elsewhere.

Of course, convincing people that Jeff Bezos is the devil and Amazon is an evil empire is one way of competing; I don’t find it a very compelling approach, though.

As I mentioned in another post, the one time I wanted to buy a Hachette book on Amazon lately, it took me three clicks to find it at Barnes & Noble with a 20% discount.  No monopoly here.

Here’s the first chapter of my new novel

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As I mentioned, the book is called Where All the Ladders Start.  Those of you who have read its predecessors, Dover Beach and The Distance Beacons, will notice that I use a standard private-eye opening in all of them.  Except, of course, life is different in this fictional universe.

The remaining 35 or so chapters are coming soon to your local ebook store . . .

***********

I got off my bike and stared at the guy in the brown robe.  The guy in the brown robe stared at me.  He was sitting at the front of a cart piled high with apples, pumpkins, squash, and other fall produce; half a dozen dead turkeys hung from hooks at the back of the cart.    He was big and broad and scary, with small black eyes, long stringy hair, and a scraggly beard that was interrupted by a deep scar on his left cheek.

“Hiya,” I said, trying to break the ice.

He stared at me for a second, and then his eyes moved to the horse, who ignored him.

“Looking for me?” I asked.  “Walter Sands?  Got a bit of a late start today.  Sorry if I kept you waiting.”

The guy didn’t respond.  I hadn’t really expected him to be looking for me.  But Lower Washington Street was an odd place to park a cart filled with food.

“The Food Market is a few blocks over,” I tried.  “They’ll love your stuff.”

Nothing.

“Well, have a nice day.”

He didn’t look like he was interested in nice days.  Fine.  The world was filled with strange people, and he was just one more of them.  I walked around the cart and entered the building that housed my spacious, well-appointed office.

Okay, those adjectives aren’t entirely accurate, but the place fits my needs, which mainly consist of a stove to keep me warm and shelves to hold the books I read to pass the time while I wait for clients to show up.  Also, a desk and a couple of chairs in case a client actually does show up.  Not that this had been happening much lately.  Or, well, ever.

I carried my bike inside and walked upstairs.

From the hallway, I noticed that the door to my office was open.  I always close the door to my office when I leave at night.  Of course, the door doesn’t lock, but that doesn’t really matter.  Nothing worth stealing in my office.

I took out my gun.  I wasn’t especially worried, but it pays to be careful.  “Please don’t do anything stupid,” I announced, and then I went inside.

And there, sitting by my desk, was the most beautiful woman in the world.  She was wearing a powder-blue robe, and she was staring at me.

“Mr. Sands,” she said calmly, ignoring the gun.  “Do you remember me?”

It was impossible to forget her.  “Of course,” I said.  “Sister Marva.  How are you?  And please, call me Walter.”  We had met during one of the many disastrous episodes in my previous case.  She was a disciple in the Church of the New Beginning up in Concord.  Long black hair, creamy white skin, deep blue eyes.  I found it hard to break my gaze away from those eyes.

I sat down behind my desk, and that’s when I noticed that she was pregnant.  Well, that was interesting.  Beautiful pregnant woman shows up in the private eye’s office, needing his help.  That’s the way it’s supposed to happen.

“So, um, what can I do for you, Sister?  The last time we met—”

“You almost killed Brother Flynn,” she reminded me.

“Yes.  I’m very sorry about that.”  Flynn Dobler was the leader of Sister Marva’s Church.  A very smart, charismatic fellow.  I snuck into the Church in the middle of the night and pointed a gun at him while he lay in bed.  I remembered Marva coming in and leaping on top of him, desperate to protect her master from the intruder.  All because of a really stupid theory I’d come up with about a kidnapping I was investigating.  This had not been my finest moment as a private eye.

“It’s all right,” she said with a sympathetic smile.  “Everyone makes mistakes.  But now we need your help.”

“We?  The Church?”

She nodded.

“Why?”

“Brother Flynn has disappeared,” she said, and the smile faded, and her beautiful blue eyes filled with tears.

“Disappeared?” I repeated.  “How?  When?”

“A week ago.  He was there one night in his room, and then—in the morning—he was gone.”  The tears started falling down her cheeks.

This was the way it always happened in the novels I’d read.  And now it was happening to me.  But this didn’t feel like a novel—this was a real human being, shedding real tears.  I wanted to comfort her, but I also needed to do my job.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.  “Was there a note?  Were there witnesses?”

She shook her head.  She wiped her cheeks with the sleeve of her robe.  I wished I had a handkerchief to offer her.  In my novels, the private eye always had a handkerchief.

“You’ve checked around the farm, I suppose?  There are plenty of wild animals, especially once you get outside the city.  Wolves.  Wildcats.  Feral dogs.  Probably some crazies, too.”

“Yes, of course.  We’ve looked everywhere.”

“Well, um, any theories?  Do you suspect foul play?”

Sister Marva lowered her eyes.  “Brother Joseph does,” she murmured.

“Who’s he?”

“Well, he’s the disciple—who, who runs things.  Brother Flynn’s second-in-command, I suppose.”

“Who does he suspect?”

“You should ask Brother Joseph, I think.  He asked me to come here and talk to you.  Because I go to the Food Market every day, with Brother Reggie.  He’d like you to come up to Concord and investigate.”

Brother Reggie was presumably the giant in the cart.  “You said Brother Joseph suspected foul play,” I said.  “What do you suspect, Sister Marva?”

She blushed.  “I think that perhaps God took him from us.”

I struggled to figure out what she meant.  “You mean, like, he died of natural causes?”

She shook her head.  “I mean—God brought him up to heaven.  While he was still alive.  Because He loved Brother Flynn so much.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because Sister Lucy saw it happen.”

“Sister Lucy saw Brother Flynn get taken up to heaven,” I said, making sure I had this straight.

“Yes.  You should talk to her too, I think.”

“I think you’re right.”  Maybe a more experienced private eye would have decided right there that this case wasn’t going to be worth the trouble.  But I’m not very experienced.  And, frankly, I had nothing better to do.  I decided to change the subject.  “By the way, congratulations on your pregnancy, Sister Marva.”

She smiled and inclined her head.  “It’s a blessing.”  Her smile made you happy to be alive.

“Do you mind my asking: is Brother Flynn the father?”

Her face clouded and she looked down at her belly.  “I don’t think—I don’t think that has anything to do with Brother Flynn’s disappearance, Walter.” she replied.  And then she fell silent.

OK, one more mystery.  I considered.  My friend and occasional employer Bobby Gallagher had a van, but it was out of commission while his driver/mechanic Mickey tried to scrounge or repair or manufacture a gasket or a flange or a defibrillator or some-such item; I don’t know much about vans.  “I’ll take the case,” I said.    “But if you want me to go up there today, I’m afraid I don’t have—”

“You can ride with us in our cart,” Marva suggested.  “We return to the Church after we finish selling our food.  We should be at the Market now, actually.  I’m sure Brother Reggie is tired of waiting.”

I considered some more.  “That means I’d have to stay the night at the Church,” I pointed out.  “I need to be back in Boston tomorrow.”

“We come to the Food Market every day.  You can come back with us in the morning.”

That was that, then.  I had a case.  “All right,” I said.  “I get two new dollars a day.  Ten dollars in advance.”

Sister Marva gave me another smile.  She looked relieved and grateful.  “That would be wonderful.  But would you prefer to be paid in food instead?”

That wasn’t a bad idea.  Inflation was getting to be a problem.  Who knew what the money would buy when I got around to spending it?  “Food would be fine,” I replied.

We went back down to the street, where Brother Reggie did not in fact seem to be tired of waiting.  It wasn’t clear that he had even moved since the last time I set eyes on him.  But his face lit up when he saw Sister Marva, like a dog greeting his master.  Marva and I agreed to meet at the Food Market later.  I filled a bag with produce from the cart and grabbed one of the turkeys.  Looked like ten dollars’ worth to me, and Marva didn’t haggle.  Then Brother Reggie helped her up onto the cart, and they headed off.

I watched them go.  The Church of the New Beginning.  Leave the past behind, it preached.  Start fresh—no technology, no government, none of the baggage that still weighed so many of us down.  Look at where all that stuff had led us.  Reasonable enough, I supposed.  The past had certainly ended up badly.

But now, strangely, the Church had a missing-person case on its hands, and it had decided to call on that useless relic of the past, a private eye.  Well, I had already seen some strange things in my brief career; no reason for this case to be any different.

I brought my bike out of the building and arranged the sack of food over the handlebars; I held onto the turkey.  Then I pedaled home to the townhouse in Louisburg Square where I lived with Gwen, the most wonderful woman in this godforsaken world, and Stretch, the most wonderful dwarf in the world.  Both of them were at work—Gwen at the Boston Globe and Stretch in the governor’s office.  I put the turkey in the icebox and the produce on the kitchen table, and I wrote them a brief note:

 

Off on a case!  Won’t be back today, but I will be back tomorrow.
Enjoy the food.

–Walter

 

There, that would intrigue them.  I left the note beside the produce, and I headed off to the Food Market, munching one of Marva’s apples.

Do world-class writers have world-class editors?

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This question occurred to me as I read Haruki Murakami’s new novel, Colorless Tsukuri Tazaki And His Years of Pilgrimage (why can’t I come up with catchy titles like that?). Murakami is clearly a world-class writer.  This novel was a #1 bestseller, it was reviewed on the cover of the Times Book Review, it got a top-of-the-line design from Knopf.  Murakami has won prestigious awards, people talk about him as Nobel Prize-worthy.  But…

The novel seem to me to contain some elementary fiction-writing mistakes, the kind that any editor or writing teacher would point out.  For example: the novel begins with Tsukuri in college, wanting to die because he has been dumped, without a word of explanation, by his five best friends from high school.  The novel becomes the story of why he was dumped and how he comes to terms with it.  Fair enough.  The problem is, the author never brings us far enough into that high-school world for us to really experience it.  We just get summarized memories.

The result is that, when we finally find out why Tsukuri was dumped, the revelation lacks emotional resonance.  It’s all about one of the girls in his group, but we have never really seen that girl, we have never experienced her.  So, for me anyway, the revelation didn’t matter much.

An editor would say: Show don’t tell, Haruki-san.  Consider some flashbacks.  Bring us more deeply into the world of the high-school kids.  Give the reader more of a stake in what the protagonist is going through.  (And while you’re at it, why don’t you explain what happened to that college friend who simply disappeared?  Don’t you think readers will care about that?)

But I have no idea if Murakami has such an editor.  Murakami has such a distinctive voice that perhaps an editor would be reluctant to point out what are obvious flaws by conventional writing standards.  What if Murakami had some deep reason for doing things the way he did them?  Are writers like Murakami beyond editing?  Maybe the publisher is so happy when he turns in a new manuscript that it goes straight into production.

This kind of editorial advice and support is supposed to be one of the strengths of traditional publishing.  As I’ve explained elsewhere on this blog, I never received much of it.  I wonder if people like Murakami are different.