You will remember the Alaskan Bookie site recently gave my time travel thriller, TimeSplash, a five-star review. Well, afterwards, Dorothy, who runs the site, asked me [...]]]>

Interviews are clearly like buses: you wait ages for one and then two turn up at the same time. That’s what happened today.

An Interview with Alaskan Bookie

You will remember the Alaskan Bookie site recently gave my time travel thriller, TimeSplash, a five-star review. Well, afterwards, Dorothy, who runs the site, asked me over for an interview. You can see the result on the Alaskan Bookie website. This is a particularly good interview in a couple of ways. Firstly, the questions were really enjoyable. I’m not sure quite why, but each one sparked a little excitement – which you might notice in my enthusiastic responses Secondly, I am very impressed with Dorothy’s professionalism. You can see some of this just in the way the interview is laid out. It is one of the best-organised interview formats I have ever seen, with all the right information available but presented in a very palatable format. Again, I’m not quite sure why I think this. I will have to sit down and analyse my aesthetic response to what Dorothy has done here. Anyway, if you want to see me in excited and enthusiastic mode, talking right at you, visit the Alaskan Bookie today.

An Interview with Kayelle Press

As part of the continuing launch and publicity efforts for the Hope anthology, Kayelle Press is running a series of brief author interviews with each of the contributors. Today is my turn and you can find my interview on the Kayelle Press blog. For me, this series of interviews is very interesting. Hope brings together some of my favourite Australian writers – including at least three I’d call friends – so it is nice to get a quick peek at what they say about themselves and the story they have contributed. You might not have the same level of interest, but if you want to hear from over a dozen writers, all at different stages in their careers, talking about a particular piece of work, it is a fascinating snapshot. And while you are over at the Kayelle Press site, why not pick up a copy of Hope? It is full of good stories and interesting articles. It is there to raise suicide awareness, something our society needs. Besides, Christmas is not far away and a book is always a great gift.

“Whassamatter with you guys? 127 minutes to go and the offer for a FREE Kindle copy of [Book Title] closes! Tick tock…”

Reading between the characters (tweets are so short [...]]]>

 I came across a tweet today. It was from a complete stranger, about a book I’d never heard of. This is the full text:

“Whassamatter with you guys? 127 minutes to go and the offer for a FREE Kindle copy of [Book Title] closes! Tick tock…”

Reading between the characters (tweets are so short you don’t get the luxury of lines) here is an author trying to promote his book who thought it would be a good idea to give it away free for a period to get some interest going. It seems like a reasonable thing to do and yet, you can tell he isn’t having a lot of luck with it. The puzzlement is obvious; surely people will grab a copy of your book if it’s free? After all, it’s free! Free, as in, it doesn’t cost you a penny. There is also, I suspect, a hint of fear there too. If you can’t give your book away for free, what do you have to do to get people to read it?

The problem is that the premise is all wrong.  A book – any book – is never free, even if you don’t have to pay for it. It will still cost you hours of your time to read it. And your time is without doubt the most precious thing you own. It’s a finite resource, you have very little of it to spare, and there are a million other things you could be spending it on.

So let me make this post uncharacteristically short and jump straight to the take-home message. If you want people to read your book, you have to persuade them that it is worth their time to do so. Sell it to them. Get them to want it. Convince them that the hours they spend reading it will be much more fun and fulfilling than spending those same hours in any other way, and on any other book. Then you won’t need to give it away – or sell it for $0.99c. An experience that good is worth paying real money for.

Novels take a long time to write. Well, they take me a long time. Some people bang out several in a year. I’m happy if I can [...]]]>

I’m 24,000 words into my new novel and I can’t help thinking about the process I’m going through as I hammer this story out, word by word.

Novels take a long time to write. Well, they take me a long time. Some people bang out several in a year. I’m happy if I can write just one. The last novel I finished was a sci-fi comedy called Cargo Cult. From beginning to end, it took me more than ten years. Even when it just takes a year, it’s far too long to plot it in detail and then just write what you plotted. In a year of living with a group of characters in your head and a particular set of ideas you want to explore, you are going to find that things develop. Your initial plot can seem shallow and weak by the time that year is up, same with your initial characterisations, and your initial thoughts on your main themes. I’d go so far as to say that, if these things don’t develop, mature, improve, deepen, and evolve while you write the book, you’re just not thinking very hard about what you’re doing.

Day-to-day, of course, nothing much happens. The actual mechanics, the craft, of putting words on screens is absorbing and takes up most of my resources. The choosing of every word, the structuring of every clause and sentence, the building of every paragraph, section, and chapter, are all such massive tasks with so many possible alternatives, that it is a miracle a mere human brain can do the job at all. Probably it can’t. Sometimes I find myself ‘satisficing’ (as the brilliant Herbert Simon once put it) when I’d rather be optimising, but I’m limited by what my brain can do. I suspect the mark of genius in writing is the degree to which optimisation is possible for an individual writer.

The majority of thinking about the story, its characters and ideas, for me at least, goes on outside the periods of actual writing. I just don’t have the capacity to do both well at the same time. Sometimes the need to understand some element of the story is a prerequisite to proceeding. I become lost in a miasma of ignorance and stupidity as I grapple with some important idea without which the story cannot proceed. Sometimes this is a technical issue – how long the tether needs to be for a Lunar space elevator, for example, or how the Polish secret service processes interviewees – and these are the easy ones. They can usually be solved with a half-hour of research (and some maths revision). Much harder are questions of how a character should develop – what’s realistic, what’s likely, and what’s best going to serve the story? Or  what the future will be like. I spent several days doing nothing but charting likely developments in science, politics, economics, society, healthcare, various technologies, etc., and their tangled interactions, over the next fifty years, before I could write my novel TimeSplash. And then did it all again, pushing it out an extra thirty years for The Credulity Nexus.

The hardest problems of all are the ones to do with concepts. For my novel Time and Tyde, I spent scores of hours reading books and papers on the physics of time travel (none of which appeared in the book, but I needed to get it straight in my mind before I could be confident I wasn’t going to write something stupid). For Emissaries, the first book of my first “Omega Point” space opera, I agonised over the physics of space-warping in a similar way. Again, little of it got into the text, but I have to know that what is there is completely consistent with the science. Yet the hardest concepts of all are the ordinary human ones – love, jealousy, fear, dependence, and so on. For a recent short story which is to appear in an anthology called Hope, I decided I needed to understand exactly what hope is before I could start. Have you ever wondered? It took me a whole month to get my feeble brain around that one. A month in which I did nothing constructive at all and drove my wife crazy as I tried out new “insights” on her day after day. It’s a kind of writer’s block, I suppose, but one that always, always leads to a better story in the end.

Right now, I’m grappling with an old friend: the antipathy between empathy and psychopathy and how far a character whose nature is dominated by one can be led by circumstances towards the other. This conundrum and I went twelve rounds during the writing of my last-but-one novel, Mindrider, in which my protagonist was a rather unpleasant, alien brain parasite. I think I won on points, so I suppose it’s hardly surprising it is demanding a re-match in my new work in progress, The Sentience Machine.

Writing a novel is such a long way from catching words as they float by and pinning them to the page. It is a massive decision-making process on multiple levels, coupled with a huge effort to understand at least some aspects of the people we are and the universe we inhabit, together with the presentation of all this work in a form that will stimulate and entertain. It is by far the most difficult, most satisfying, and most enjoyable work I have ever done.

Look, guys, I know all the marketeers tell you to use the power of social [...]]]>

Of late I’ve been receiving friend requests on Goodreads from people who have (apparently) read 0 or 1 books and have a large and growing number of friends. Where they have 1 book listed, it is invariably their own.

Look, guys, I know all the marketeers tell you to use the power of social networking to plug your products, but, for heaven’s sake, if you’re going to do it, do it subtly, or don’t bother. And don’t pervert sites like Goodreads, which is there for readers to get together to talk about books, by using it as a platform for what amounts to spam.

I have loads of friends on social networks. I follow or friend them because they seem interesting and seem to share common interests, similar views, or a similar sense of humour. I’m not going to friend you just because you ask. And, yes, when a friend of mine, someone I’m interested in, says they’ve published a book, I do often go off and buy a copy – but that’s because it was someone I like, not just some stranger.

Twitter has a very useful “block and report for spam” button for people who are simply trying to sell me things. Sadly, Goodreads does not. So I’m developing a stock response to Goodreads spammers, which goes something like this:

Dear X,

You’ve sent me a friend request on Goodreads. It’s nice that you’re so keen, but I have to tell you, I deliberately “ignored” it. It’s nothing personal, I’m sure you’re a great guy and you’re nice to your kids and all that, but when I see a friend request from someone who has 1 book listed and 500+ friends, all I think is that you’re using Goodreads to market your book.

And that’s OK too, but if *all* you’re doing on Goodreads is marketing your book, I can’t see why I’d want to sign up for that.

The people I have friended on Goodreads have read, rated and reviewed many books, typically hundreds. They’re into this. They like sharing their views about books. Like me, they like reading. They’re not just trying to sell me something.

So, I’m sorry, but I’m more than just grist to your marketing mill. I know how hard it is to get people to notice one’s book, and I sympathise, God knows, but this is not the way.

Regards,

Graham.

My view on free advice in general is that tends to be worth exactly what you paid [...]]]>

Emma Newman, rising star of the YA science fiction world, has just posted a thoughtful piece on her blog about why she doesn’t like giving writing advice. As with many of Emma’s musings, it got me thinking.

My view on free advice in general is that tends to be worth exactly what you paid for it. Mind you, I speak as somebody who worked as a consultant for many years, so I’m used to charging people through the nose for even the most banal truisms.

I’ve scoured the Web for advice on writing, and talked to my social network til I’m blue in the fingertips, but I haven’t found anything much that was useful in all those millions of words. It seems to me there are areas of this business where advice is worth having and there are areas where it is not (that’ll be $500, please.) Advice about the business side of publishing is something that most beginning writers need. Until I got some myself, I was just wasting my time and energy, with no hope ever of being published.

Advice about how to write is another matter altogether. My own view is that part of what you bring to the table as a writer is a sensitivity to what good writing sounds like. Some of this sensitivity you develop by reading lots of the very best books. The rest is just there in you. Some have it and some don’t. It’s like having an ‘ear’ for music. You can train yourself to some extent but in the end you are limited by your innate sensitivity to the nuances of the composition. And the worst of it is, if you don’t have it, you may never realise it.

It isn’t as simple as learning the ‘craft’ – understanding plot, sentence structure, punctuation, and so on. Those things are essential but that’s like saying understanding music theory is essential to writing a brilliant symphony. I know lots about music but I will never write a great symphony because I just don’t have the talent for it.

I’ve always been awed by something Stephen King wrote. It is in an essay called, “Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully: in Ten Minutes“. He tells the tale of being a cub reporter on a small town weekly. He had turned in his first piece and the editor made a few deletions and adjustments. which he shows us in the essay. Standing there reading through what the editor had done, he says, “[The editor] looked up and must have seen something on my face. I think he must have thought it was horror, but it was not: it was revelation.” The young King, seeing those editorial changes, immediately grasped what it takes most of us half a lifetime to understand about the sound of a good piece of writing. And, he tells us, he never made those mistakes again.

I think this is why writing advice doesn’t help much; good writing depends on your own aesthetic sensibilities more than on anything else. Because of this, about the only thing I’ve found that does help is an honest critique, and the only people I’ve found who give you those are editors. A rejection is an honest critique (and helpful, in a limited way) but acceptance is where it really starts getting interesting, because then you have someone with a good ‘ear’ for writing, working to help you improve what you’ve written. Even then, like King, you need to be able to ‘hear’ what your editor is asking for.

Until you get to the point of working with a good critic, however, you are almost on your own. But not quite. You have two invaluable sources of criticism to tap into that can really make a difference. One is the critique group – of which there are many and of varying quality, online and off. If you’re not being accepted by publishers and working with editors, join a crit group. Do it now. The other is your own brutal honesty, which you really do need to cultivate. You have to listen to your own sense of what sounds good and what doesn’t. You have to refuse to accept anything you write that is merely acceptable because good enough is not good enough. If you let it go by, the editor won’t, and you’ll be rejected or (sometimes worse) you’ll have to suffer the horrible embarrassment of having a passage corrected that you already knew in your heart of hearts wasn’t the best you could do.

G’day mates. It’s a bright and sunny winter’s morning as I write, Independence Day in the US, and just another gorgeous 5th July here in Australia. Since I’ve been neglecting my readers lately, I thought I’d throw in a simple update on my writing life just to keep things [...]]]>

Look out! It's BP!

G’day mates. It’s a bright and sunny winter’s morning as I write, Independence Day in the US, and just another gorgeous 5th July here in Australia. Since I’ve been neglecting my readers lately, I thought I’d throw in a simple update on my writing life just to keep things moving along.

My head has been buried in my netbook for the past few weeks as I tackle my latest novel, Loner’s Deep. It’s part 1 of a three-part spce opera (and a sequel to another three-part space opera of mine). I’m just about at the half-way mark on my first draft and it is rolling along quite nicely, thank you. The structure of the story is one I haven’t really used before – several groups of characters whose story arcs are leading them inexorably to one point in space and time, where they will all meet and resolve everything. It’s fun but very much complicated by the scale of the piece. It is set in a far-future time when we have colonised stars out to about 50 light years around the Earth, but we don’t have faster-than-light travel. Yet the story visits many different planets and the characters travel huge distances. This makes the timings and the interactions rather complicated. One of the main characters, for example, has a journey of 55 light years, during which she ages about seven years. Another character, whom she will meet, travels just 8 LY and ages about one year. Yet both their stories unfold side-by-side in the book. I’m not sure I can make it clear to the reader that events in their stories are not simultaneous until the very end. Time will tell.

Meanwhile, I’ve been doing some plumbing around the house – the perfect antidote to time dilation calculations – and trying to find an agent for ‘The Credulity Nexus’ – also rather mind-numbing.

Over on Smashwords, they’re having their Summer/Winter sale. I put a children’s story there a few months ago (the picture of the dog on the left is the cover) so if you want to pick up a copy for free, July is the time to do it. Smashwords is a company I have a lot of admiration for. They seem to be doing everything right and I wish them huge success in the future.

So, a happy Nice Winter’s Day to everyone, and, for those still celebrating Independence Day, maybe you should have kicked the Brits out of the Gulf of Mexico while you were at it.

Although no-one has ever asked me, I thought I’d answer the question anyway. I’ve just started writing a new book – a new trilogy in fact – and I’ve been watching myself as the process of coming up with the story unfolds. And this is how it happened.