Tuesday, December 28, 2021

2021: The Accounting

Well, it’s that time again. Last few days of the year, holidays have flown past, the new year is looming and we’re all looking back on the past twelve months and figuring out what we got done. Was it a productive year? Was it good creatively? Mentally?

I think it’s good to do this sort of thing, personally. It’s hard to tell if I’m improving at something if I don’t keep records and establish some sort of baseline, even if it’s just being able to compare this year to last year. So I like adding all this stuff up so I can remind myself that, yeah, I really do work at this a lot. It’ a nice reminder when the imposter syndrome kicks in late at night.

Plus, let’s face it. This year, like 2020, was rough on productivity. In a lot of ways, it was much better than last year. At the same time... wow, 2021 started rough and felt like it never really got its footing. We all tried to go back to normal and for so many reasons... we couldn’t. There’s just been this lurking unease all year, about so many things—covid, politics, the supply chain. It’s like we know the killer’s somewhere in the house with us, but we’re not sure if we should bolt for the door or just stay quietly hidden here in the living room. I mean, nothing bad’s happened to us but there was some shouting and then a scream from upstairs where Randi was but she’s probably okay?  And maybe we could try opening the window and getting out that way but is it worth the risk? That window really squeaks sometimes. Maybe we’d get out, yeah, but maybe it’d be one of those things where we’ve got one leg and an arm and our head out the window and then something YANKS us back inside.

It’s been like that. For me, anyway. Maybe it wasn’t as bad for you. But if it was, you weren’t alone. This is my full time job and for the past two years... it’s been tough to focus on being creative.

Anyway... what did I do this year?

Right off the bat, it just struck me that I didn’t have a single thing come out in 2021. No novels or short stories or anything. Been a couple years since that happened.

I finished The Broken Room in January, then ended up doing another pass on it based off some talks with my agent (which actually led to a whole new chapter and some big tweaks to a few others). Then there were all the story edits and copyedits with Blackstone. Maybe worth adding in that I chipped in some creative thoughts on the marketing and cover art, even if all of those thoughts were wisely ignored. I mean, I still did that work, so we should count it. And this is the point where I shamelessly say, hey, you can preorder The Broken Room right now from your favorite local bookstore, Indiebound, or any monolithic online superstore named after a South American river.

I also did a massive outline for a six book series I’ve wanted to do for a while now. Like, a whole beginning-to-end hexalogy. Some of you may have heard me talk about it  here or there. The entire combined thing was just shy of 44K words. I also used that to make a trimmed down, 10K word pitch document for my agent, who I’d also been talking about this with for a few years.

And, hey, then I sat down and wrote the first draft of book one of said series, which came in at a terse 73K words. Like a lot of my first drafts, it had some holes and some bits I skimmed over. I just wanted to finish it because...

(dramatic break)

While my agent really liked the six book series, he also admitted it’d be a tough sell at this point. Just because of the state of the industry, the point my own career is at, and so on. We had a couple conversation about it—the kind of conversations the artistic side doesn’t’ like, but the business side knows you need to have—and, well, after finishing that first draft of Book One, I sat down and worked out  pair of outlines for two different, stand-alone books that had been tickling my brain for a while. So that was another 17k words scribbled out.

And after we talked about those two outlines, David pretty enthusiastically said I should focus on one of them. And I’m currently about 35K words into that as we speak. Hoping to have a first draft done by Valentine’s Day, maybe?

And on top of all that...

I scribbled up 52 blog posts this year, counting this one. Granted, three or four of those were cartoons, so I didn’t have to put much effort in past, y’know, posting them. But hopefully still enough that one or two of you found something useful here. Seriously, I’m never sure if this is more useful for you or therapeutic for me...

Speaking of therapy, so many Saturday geekery threads. At least forty. A lot of B-movies dissected in real time. Most bad, but some good ones, too.

I also jotted a few thousand words (maybe eight or nine) down for a geekery side project I’ll probably be launching this year. Nothing spectacular, don’t get too excited. Well, some of you may end up very excited, some will be willing to try it, and a few of you will greet this with a resounding “huh.”

And I read a lot, too. Nowhere near as much as I would’ve liked (never as much as I would’ve liked). I think I’m looking at ending the year with twenty-six novels under my belt, plus one or two non-fiction books and a ton of articles (an actual metric ton). Weirdly enough, very few comics this past year. Covid isolated me from my regular shop in LA (The House of Secrets) for most of last year, and this year I was hesitant about going to find a new place because, y’know, the killer’s somewhere here in the house.

So that’s more or less where I am.

How about you? Did you get some cool stuff done this year? Don’t worry about how much—did you get anything done? Did you carve out a little time and manage to  do something in your chosen field of creativity?

Again, don’t beat yourself up over what you didn’t do. There’s a lot of stuff we all didn’t do. This is about celebrating what we did. Taking note of it. Figuring out what we need to do so we can improve next time.

And speaking of next time...

When next we meet it’ll be 2022. I’ve got a couple topics I plan to blather on about. Was going to talk about plot and character a bit, perhaps touch on how long things can take to write (or how long it can take to get a career going), maybe talk a bit about making things up. And maybe some of that will sound interesting to you. Or maybe you’ve got something that’s been gnawing at you and you’d like to hear me blather on about. If that’s the case, drop a comment down below or over on Twitter or Instagram.

So until next time, please have a safe and happy New Year, please get your shots if you haven’t already, and please please please...

Go write.

Monday, December 20, 2021

Going With It

Holy crap how is this year almost over? Why is time moving so fast? What did all of you do? Who touched the red button?!?!

So, not to keep mining the past, but I wanted to talk about one more thing that came up at the SDCC Writers Coffeehouse. During the Q & A someone asked what I generally think of as an “impossible” question—although just looking at that written out I really should find a better term. See, it’s not so much that these questions are impossible to answer, it’s that there’s really only one person who can give a definitive answer. And it’s usually the person asking the question.

Y’see, there are questions that are very specific to my story, and the “correct” answer for me probably isn’t going to be the same correct answer for you. Things like, how many characters should I have in an ensemble? What’s the correct point of view to use? How much sex is too much? How much detail do I really need? See what I mean? There’s no real way to answer that unless I know the whole story, how it’s written, the context things are happening in...

Somebody at the Coffeehouse asked (paraphrasing from memory here) “how many made up words can you have in your first couple pages before an editor stops reading?” And my immediate answer was, well, I couldn’t really answer that. Again, the right answer for me won’t be the right answer for you, and said answer’s going to change from book to book.

But about a week later it struck me there is a way that we, as writers, can at least get a sense of if something’s disruptive or not. And that’s by being aware of the flow of our work. So let’s talk about that a little bit.

I think we’re all aware of flow on one level or another. I first heard the term from a writing coach named Drusilla Campbell, but I knew what she was talking about as she explained it. Paraphrasing a bit more, she described it as why some books you can’t put down and other books make you think about how  the laundry needs folding.

I’d say flow is equal parts pacing, tone, and empathy. It’s about me understanding what’s going to jar my reader, either by nature of structure or material or vocabulary. What’s going to make them pause to remember these are just words on a page and not actual events. It’s about me stepping out of the way and not trying to be seen as the author. Letting people read my story rather than analyzing it. Really simply put, flow is what keeps people in my story instead of, well, knocking them out of it.

And that brings us to using words we’ve made up. Could be a simple portmanteau or clever bit of wordplay. Maybe terms from a technology we made up. Or a secret dark order. Maybe even a whole language. But I have to be careful, because  there’s a good chance I could kawonk someone right out of the story if I’m using a lot of words I’ve made up.

You all see what I did there, right? Or maybe you didn’t. Kawonk is a nonsense pile of letters I threw together, but in context you kind of understood what I was saying with it almost immediately. Some of you may not even have really registered it as a made up word and just read it as a funny onomatopoeic sound effect or something.

But something can only work in context when I understand the context. So the more words I swap out with made up ones, the less chance there is of my readers understanding what I’m trying to say. Like if I told you we needed to kawonk this dreeenil ptoob before we niknik ptar the cheegles. I mean, if we hit a sentence like that we’re going to instinctively stop and start parsing the structure to figure out what this whoa I just broke the flow, didn’t I?

And even if there is plenty of context, it can get annoying to read something where I’ve decided to substitute existing words with made up ones for no real reason. Say, for example, people in my fantasy world all duel with scheevs. Some are cheap and crudely made, some are works of art, but most people have one. You see, a scheev is a narrow, double-edged blade about 24 to 30 inches long (originally iron or bronze, but mostly steel now), with a strong grip, some sort of protective guard or crosspiece between the blade and the grip, and often a small counterweight at the base that also locks the blade in place. And if you’re thinking, wait, did I just spend a whole paragraph describing a sword you are correct.

Except here they’re called scheevs. For... reasons.

And again, imagine how frustrating that paragraph would be if instead of bronze and steel it talked about droker and ogyed, flokks instead of inches, and an oppomass instead of a counterweight. Hopefully I didn’t make up my own numerical system, Think about pausing to dig through all of that and try to glean a meaning out of it and realizing we’re just talking about goddamn swords.

I don’t know about you, but that’d bring things to dead halt for me as I groan and rub my eyes.

‘Cause here’s the thing we always to remember. Weird as it may sound, the words I use don’t really matter. I mean, of course they’re important and they’ll bring nuance to the story. But that’s my point—the story is what matters. The characters matter. The plot matters. The actual words are just a delivery device. They’re the corn chip getting all that delicious salsa and guacamole into or mouths. And if I’m focusing a lot of my time and energy on coming up with a new way to say corn chip, that’s a good sign something’s probably going wrong in my writing.

I’m not saying don’t make up words. I mean, I put squale out there into the world. But there should be a reason for them being in my story, and the reason should be better than “I wanted to make things sound different.” Ultimately, they should be adding to my story, not distracting from it. Definitely not knocking me out of it to diagram sentences, glean meaning, or just grind my teeth in frustration.

Next time...

Okay, this was super late, so next time will be in three days. And I’ll probably be talking about the holidays.

Until then, go write.

Let’s be honest, we’re not going to get a lot more in before 2022, so try to make it count.

Thursday, December 9, 2021

Two Rights Don't Make...

Jeeez, it’s been so long. You’ve both been very patient.

I got a question a few weeks back about using the world of my books in a game setting. Not, like, a question from Blizzard or Bethesda or something. Just someone running a tabletop campaign who (very graciously) asked my permission to use a bunch of these elements I’ve created in the game they were playing.

And this put me in such an odd spot I didn’t respond to it for a while. The more I thought about the answer, the bigger and more sprawling (and apologetic) it became. And then there was a semi-related question that came up while I was blathering away at the Writer’s Coffeehouse for SDCC, which reminded me I’d never answered it here.

So... let’s talk about rights a little bit. This is one of those terms that doesn’t get discussed a lot. Well, not in the correct way, I think. I’ve seen a couple people get screwed over because they didn’t realize what they were giving up and/or who they were giving it up to.

Also, to be clear, I’m just going to talk about what rights are. If any of you want to talk about how much rights cost or how long they should be held, that’s a different conversation, and not quite relevant to all this. For now, just defining rights and a little bit on how they move around

The easiest way to think of rights is that they’re legal permissions. I’ve created something (for our purposes, a long story of characters and events) and I can give, sell, or rent out (so to speak) all the assorted rights to this story. You’ve probably heard of some like First North American Publishing Rights. This means the person who has those rights is (surprise) the person who gets to legally publish the story for the first time in North America. My agent likes to talk about foreign-language rights a lot—German rights, Spanish rights, Thai rights. That means who gets to tell my story in those languages. And we all love to talk about movie rights, television rights, and action figure rights.

You might’ve chuckled at that last bit, but it’s worth mentioning. The number of rights is pretty much infinite, because there’s a near-infinite number of things that can be done with my story. It can be turned into a hardcover book or a Portuguese eBook. It can be a French stage play or a Russian movie or an episodic Korean podcast with a dozen voice actors. It can be adapted into a comic book or a video game or a line of collectible stickers. It’s sort of like, well, Rule 34. If I can imagine a right, that right exists. Because I own ALL the rights to my work, no matter how bizarre or absurd they are. I still hold all the collectible blind bag phone charm rights to the Ex-Heroes series and you’d better believe nobody’s getting those cheap.

Also, remember when I mentioned renting some of my rights up above? That’s what an option is. If someone can’t afford to buy the rights (or maybe doesn’t want to commit that much at the moment), they may option them. It means they get to act like they own the rights, but there are certain limitations and a very strict time limit.

This is one of the reasons contracts tend to be long. We want to be very specific about what rights the writer’s giving up and what the other party’s getting (and for how long). F’r example, let’s say I’m making a deal with a company for the audiobook rights to a book. If I just say they get all audio rights, there’s a strong argument that I’ve also just included podcasts and live audio streams and maybe even recordings of performances. Yeah, if someone finally decided to make that stage musical of The Eerie Adventures of the Lycanthrope Robinson Crusoe, a good lawyer could argue that those folks couldn’t release an album because this other company has all the audio rights.

So rights get divided up and different groups get permission to do different things with my story. For example (again), right now there’s at least eight entities (probably closer to a dozen, but eight off the top of my head) who all legally have different rights to my book 14. Some have them for a few more months, some have them for years, one has them for more than a decade. And it takes my agent a bit of work to make sure there are no overlaps, or that things are very specific when there are.

Make sense so far?

This brings us back around to that original tabletop game question. Which was, if you remember, about getting permissions. Sound familiar? So this moves us into tricksy legal grounds. Because this is a discussion about gaming rights and also (looking at the original question) streaming rights. And there’s a good chance (in this specific case, a really solid chance) these rights are already tied up. Someone else has them, which means I legally cannot say “yeah, sure, go for it,” because I’m not the person who can give those permissions anymore.

And I know some of you might say “No, no, Pete, this is just a casual game between friends. We don’t need to be this serious about it.” Which I absolutely get. Seriously, I do. Believe me, I used to work stuff from books into my games all the time. But this is one of the weird downsides of our modern world. It’s fairly easy to reach me (or any other creative person you admire), but it puts us in the weird position of having to respond in writing. And we all know what it means when something’s in writing.

Which is why some writers often don’t answer or give a very definitive no when someone asks about things like this. It puts us in a potentially bad position. There’s a lot of deals and contracts out there, lots of rights changing hands, and me (or someone else) putting something in writing that contradicts any of that long contract could be a real headache for me. Or for you. Or maybe for that new deal my agent’s been trying to put together that was going to cover my mortgage this spring. Somebody stumbles across that Twitch channel or YouTube video and suddenly, hey, why are these people saying they’ve got permission to do this? I thought these rights were available?

Which is why a lot of folks—including me—tend to be a bit cold when people message us about this stuff. Because there’s business stuff going on that we might not be able to talk about, but we legally need to respect.

And two quick notes—first, don’t take this to mean you can do whatever you want with someone else’s material as long as you don’t ask. Not what I’m saying here and you know it, so don’t try to use that as justification—to someone else or to yourself.

Second—the simple truth is almost every writer I know loves to hear they inspired people this way. That people want to play in their worlds, literally or figuratively. They’d want you to have that fun. Just because you can’t say anything in writing doesn’t mean you can’t tell them in person (as we creep closer to having public events again).

And that’s some quick facts and thoughts about rights.

Oh, shameless plus in case you missed it. Yesterday we had a cover reveal for my new book, The Broken Room. Out everywhere in just a little over two months, and I'd really appreciate it if you stopped by your friendly local bookstore and pre-ordered a copy. They'd appreciate it too.

Next time... well, there was another question I got at the Coffeehouse that I’d like to answer a little better than I did there.

Until then, go write.

Seriously, the holidays are coming up and you know you’re probably not getting any writing done then. So write now.