It’s been several months since I’ve regularly posted to the blog, and there’s a (semi) good reason for that. Regular readers will know that I began actively querying The Curse Merchant back in February. For a while I recounted the ups and downs of this Agent Safari for everyone to follow along, until I ran across some sage wisdom from one literary agent in particular. Turns out, agents aren’t terribly impressed with authors who detail the results of their querying, for a couple reasons. The first of which is that knowing another agent has passed on your manuscript calls into question “why did they pass?” Which encourages a pass in turn. The second reason is simple… it’s not a terribly professional thing to do.

Fair enough.

I reacted to this revelation with equal parts gratitude and panic, the net result of which was a basic information lock-down on this blog. For that, I apologize.

But now, I feel free to announce that I am no longer actively querying The Curse Merchant. I haven’t given up on it, mind you. Far from it. And next week, I hope to make an announcement regarding poor old Dorian Lake. But for this week, I’d like to discuss Silence.

In August, I ended the pre-writing phase of my next project and began putting words down to (virtual) paper. What’s the new project you might ask? What’s the genre? What’s the working title? You might well ask.

And I won’t tell you.

Hell, I won’t even tell my wife. Why? Because I’ve discovered a truth to my personality as a writer. I like to call it Hydrostatic Storytelling Pressure. It’s the “need” to tell a story that often propels me forward. I’ve discovered in the past that when I outline a story for someone else, even briefly, it relieves part of that pressure, which in turn robs me of my forward momentum.

This perhaps overstates the situation somewhat, but for this novel I want to try keeping it completely under wraps until the first draft is complete. Thus, I intend not to tell anyone the working title, what it’s about, or even what genre it is. Thusfar the only one who knows is my five-year-old, because he loves having that little secret no one else knows. Plus, I’m very certain he doesn’t remember anyway. Hopefully this experiment will prove that Silence is Golden.

So, what do you think as a reader? Does the mystery of the thing make you hungrier to read a pending release? Or do you prefer to be fed snippets of your favorite author’s next book ahead of its release?

My friends, I am truly on a roll. In the last month I have read four novels. This is a record for me, and I believe all of the credit goes to my Kindle. This little electronic device has revolutionized the way I read. I’m sure there’s some kind of physical/mechanical reason for this. I have no idea what it is, but I’m reading faster, I’m reading better, and most importantly… I’m reading.

Which puts me into a position I’m not used to. I am turning into a book purchaser. Which is neat, because I’m also trying my level best to be a published novelist. Blog posts and advice on marketing and packaging one’s manuscript have proliferated on Internet like a swarm of jackrabbits. I’ve read all kinds of schemes, including how to make your novel “viral” (I was certain Robin Cook would have been involved somehow, but what can you do?)

But when you really boil things down, all of the advice in the world is reduced to a question anyone can answer: “How do I decide what book to buy?”

Mehhh... that one has a mauve cover. Mauve makes me itch.

Assuming one does not consult star charts or sheep’s entrails, the process is internal. And the answer is different for everyone. I’ve purchased four e-books in the last month, and I’m about to do it again. This time, however, I’m dissecting my thought process as I make this routine decision.

Why? Because I want to internalize the process. I want to know why anyone would answer this question with a book I have written. Turns out, it’s easier said than done.

The last four books I’ve read have been the Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins, and World War Z by Max Brooks. I chose to pick up The Hunger Games because I wanted to read it before I saw the movie. Okay, fair enough. I then picked up the rest of the trilogy because the first book did a fine job of wanting me to finish out Katniss’s journey.

Then I was stuck… no more Hunger Games books to necessarily follow. I floundered for a day or so before I read an article on IMDB.com about casting the World War Z movie. That reminded me of how I almost bought World War Z last year, but decided to wait until I had a Kindle to buy it in electronic format. Bingo. Decision made (and I’m happy to say it was the correct decision. What a book!)

And so, here I am again, faced with the decision.

Last night I was hopscotching around the blogosphere when I ran into an article on Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth structure. This article referenced Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game and how it conformed to the Monomyth. That got me thinking about how I had mentioned to a friend of mine recently that I had never read Ender’s Game. She told me it was being made into a movie, and BAM! Now I’m worried about the movie coming out without having read the book.

It’s highly likely I’ll end up buying Ender’s Game, now. But here’s the thing… Hollywood appears to be driving my purchasing decisions, and I’m not 100% comfortable with this. I say that, but why should that be the case? Why should I feel that Hollywood somehow besmirches my literature decisions? Is there some misplaced distrust I’ve cultivated against the movie machine? Or is it not the case that Hollywood is farming popular literature for a reason?

At the end of the day, however, this dissection of my purchasing process hasn’t benefited me all that much as a writer. If a reader like me is the standard, I’ll have to get a novel published, sell the movie rights, and wait for the casting buzz to hit the Internet before people will buy the book. That’s kind of bass-ackwards. The good news is that I’m not the average reader. I’m a relative new-comer to mass literature ingestion (dibs on Mass Literature Ingestion as a band name). There are old school readers out there eager to consume. I’m not in their heads just yet, so I’ll fall back on some solid advice I received from a composition teacher:

“The best thing you can do is to write a great book. Everything else is secondary.”

Amen, Dr. Crone. Amen.

Image credit: David Castillo Dominici

I wasn’t specifically tagged for this, but I’m going to take a lead from Liz Norris, whose novel UNRAVELING is coming out this month, and roll the Lucky 7 game on the good old blog.

Here’s the idea:

1. Go to the seventh or seventy-seventh page of our WIP.
2. Count down seven lines.
3. Copy the seven sentences that follow and post them.
4. Tag seven other authors.

I’m going to skip step #4, as I tend not to bother people when I can avoid it (more seldom than you might imagine). Here’s the seven sentences from page seven:

“I couldn’t imagine why I’d stayed away for so long. The Druid Hill Club was about as old as some of the Square States, founded just after the Civil War by Baltimore’s industry kings. Since that time, all manner of notable politicians and businessmen frequented the club for its atmosphere, seclusion, and the company of young women.

It was exactly my kind of joint.

“Hell with it,” I grumbled as I plunged out into the evening, my shoes crunching on the gravel alongside the pavement.

There was a time when I would drive directly up to the porte cochere, hand the valet my keys, and plunge into a world of discrete inebriation. By the time I reached the double oak doors, however, I didn’t even see a valet on duty. “

If you’re an author with a blog, and you see this… consider yourself tagged!

Greetings from the Land of Limbo!

First, a quick update. I am still actively querying The Curse Merchant, and there have been nibbles on the old fishing line. Beyond the blog contest in February which generated some requests for partials (and a full!), I have had two agents request full manuscripts from cold querying. Now proceeds the Long Wait. Nothing can really prepare you for the Long Wait. You just dive in and… well… wait.

What I have learned from the query process so far:

1. Social Media can be an invaluable tool, if used properly. Improper use would include querying via Twitter/Facebook, badgering agents, spamming Twitter feeds, etc. I have learned volumes not just about the agencies and their requirements, but also about the particular flavors of fiction that the individual agents are really wanting to see.

2. Blogs = free information. The querying process itself has its own set of unwritten rules. Scratch that, they are totally written and published on agent blogs. It’s out there, it’s free, and it’s absolutely worth reading.

3. You’re never too cool to feel the sting of rejection. I’ve steeled myself for rejection, prepared for it, meditated and even endured an 80’s era training montage set to Kenny Loggins. Still, when that form rejection rolls into the inbox, it stings. I figure it always will, because if it didn’t, I wouldn’t care about my manuscript.

4. It is absolutely vital to keep busy writing, but at the same time it doesn’t totally work.

"Hey, let me put you on hold a second... I need to hit refresh on Querytracker."

On that note, here’s what I’ve been doing to keep moving forward on my writing career.

My next long-format project is still in pre-writing phase. Namely, outlining. Any reader of my blog knows I can be unspeakably left-brained about my pre-writing. This next project has a lot more twists and turns than did Curse Merchant, and so a waterproof outline is the only thing keeping me from slipping into a Salvador Dali-esque landscape of dangling plots and melting clocks.

In addition, I began a short story that had crawled into my noodle and refused to wiggle its way back out without being written. However, I ran into a snag. Point of View.

I am brutal about POV. It was drilled into my head at an early stage in my writing career that POV must be ruthlessly restricted. Head-hopping is a cardinal sin in Sloan-ville. What’s worse, I find that the books I have enjoyed recently have been Deep Third Person, burying the reader into the head of the protagonist. The Hunger Games are an example of this. Nothing happens outside of the sensory perception or internal monologue of the main character.

That said, I must admit to being  overly dogmatic in this regard. There are other perfectly valid POV’s out there. This is the bias I was given long ago, and I haven’t had much luck shaking it. The good news is that it has steered me clear of certain liberties that plague poor writing.

The bad news is this short story has wandered into omniscient POV. I’m not comfortable in omniscient POV. It’s just too… wide. I get agoraphobic when writing in omniscient. Right at the midpoint, I started the double-guessing game. Is this good? Does it suck? Should I drink more whiskey until it improves?

Then it occurred to me. I’m writing a screenplay. Yep. It’s all there. Emphasis on blocking and physical descriptions. Setting. Camera angles. All I had to do was start over.

Start. Over.

Joy.

Well, start over I have, and I’m past where I left off with the prose version. The good news is that I may or may not have a contact on the West Coast who is eager to take a look at it when it’s ready. How’s THAT for motivation?

Image credit: David Castillo Dominic

I have an odd habit. I tend to spend my hour-long commutes each day arguing with myself. More accurately, I create an antagonist to argue with out loud in my car. I suppose one might view this as bordering on sociopathy, but I find it quite therapeutic. My self-targeting arguments typically range from something as mundane as why a panini-pressed Reuben is an abomination that needs to be outlawed, to more pithy matters such as the existence of God.

If there is a God, then why does He let bad things happen to good sandwiches?

It was such a self-induced diatribe regarding God and Existence that led me to a “holy crap I just missed my exit” moment. I asked myself a question I couldn’t answer… and not because I didn’t have an answer prepared. It was because I asked several questions at once. Here it is:

“Do you believe in aliens?”

Simple enough, isn’t it? Five tiny words. A stumpy little sentence, easily uttered, casually flung into someone’s face like a wet sock. How hard is it to answer such a shrimpy little question? Pretty hard, turns out. Because it’s a loaded question, absolutely pregnant with connotation and cultural assumption. When anyone asks “do you believe in aliens”, know what they’re not asking? “Do you believe that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe?”

Considering the sheer size of the universe, the number of possible planets in existence, and the variables required for life not only to begin but to ascend into cognizance, the question of whether intelligent life exists is basically a mathematical certainty. However, the same scale that creates this certainty also precludes any reasonable likelihood that intelligent civilizations would exist at the same time, much less that they would ever contact one another.

But that’s not the question that was asked. “Do you believe in aliens” speaks less to mathematical certainties, and more to societal norms. The question asks “do you believe that intelligent life is currently in contact with our planet, has been for a long time, and that its involvement with our government may or may not be the stuff of conspiracy?” It’s asking about crop circles, lights in the sky, cow mutilations and questionable body cavity explorations.

It’s asking if you’re a raging nutter, basically. At least, that’s the purpose of such a question. The same stealth payload of twisted connotation comes in other questions, such as “do you believe in God?” or “are you a writer?”

See what I did there?

Often times, when one is asked “are you a writer?”, the real question is “are you hopelessly and foolishly pursuing a pipe dream, filling your days with self-indulgent navel-gazing and histrionic coffee-shop type mongering?” There is an assumption that writers are mislead. They are unemployed artsy types demanding that society justify their existence. They aren’t producers. They aren’t part of the system.

Naturally, this is a lot of rubbish. Anyone who has written an email or scratched a grocery list together has written something, and therefore can be classified as a “writer”. What we really mean by “writer”, or “author”, is something more self-defining. But should it be?

I have a full-time job that pays the bills, and requires that I spend inexcusable amounts of time on I-70 arguing with myself about aliens. I also carve out time in my schedule to outline, draft, edit and revise. My soul’s avocation is to entertain, to tell a story, and to move a reader to some new emotion. I recognize that there is no One True Way to achieve my dream, nor should there be. But I refuse to accept the assumptions placed upon me by those who don’t understand my compulsion to write fiction.

So when someone asks me “are you a writer?”, my response is “yes, and so are you.” The manner of subverting an assumption is as self-defining as the assumption itself, and I’m happy to get someone thinking about the questions they ask.

Just don’t ask me to press your Reuben. That’s just unthinkable.

Image credit: John Kasawa

I have a confession to make. I’m a terrible reader.

I’ve always struggled with reading. I suspect I may have some manner of undiagnosed learning disability, however innocuous, that makes reading an almost physically exhausting practice. My reading speed is glacial, and I often find myself repeating the same sentence three times in row (or more) before it sinks in. I will pause on words and force myself to read it forward, then backward, then forward again. Sometimes I’ll re-read an entire conversation with different voices in my head. I don’t know why this is, but it places a tremendous burden on me as a writer.

As I prepare to approach literary agents with my manuscript, I feel it’s appropriate to dig into current examples of published fiction in my chosen genre. This means lots of reading, a tricky proposition when it takes me an average of four months to complete a single novel.

This glacier will travel six inches before I reach the Inciting Event.

Allow me to add another psychological wrinkle into the mix. Haven’t we all been told we can’t have dessert until we finish dinner? Haven’t we been brow-beaten from an early age that one must finish a project before beginning the next? I certainly have, and when I find myself immersed in a slow-paced or otherwise unenthusiastic read, I tend to set the book aside and I won’t move on to a new book out of some misplaced sense of guilt.

Well, I had an epiphany this week, courtesy of Twitter. In a flurry of tweets discussing “dull books”, several editors and agents asserted that they give a book fifty pages before abandoning it.

What a revelation!

I have been so saddled with the duty to finish what I start, that I have never entertained the notion that not only am I allowed to give up on a book I don’t enjoy… I deserve it! More accurately, the book deserves it. No guilt. In fact, I should be the one offended, shouldn’t I?

Perhaps this is overstating the sentiment, but there’s a point in placing value in my time as a reader. After all, I push myself to write novels with crisp pacing, an opening the immediately hooks the reader, and a satisfying conclusion. Why, then, do I not hold the authors I read to the same standard? After all, it isn’t my job to maintain interest in their book. That’s their job.

So I pledge to myself the following: give a book until the 20% mark on my Kindle. If by that point I am not turning the pages with enthusiasm, I will allow myself to liberty to stop reading without guilt.

This Twenty Percent Rule may be somewhat arbitrary, especially as my threshold for focused reading appears to be thinner than the average person’s. However, I can name three books right off the top of my head which have captured my interest and held it firmly in place. Three books I have read in the last couple years that I have completed in three days. For me, that’s the speed of sound!

For the record, they are:  THE RUINS by Scott Smith, THE ROAD by Cormac McCarthy, and THE TAKING by Dean Koontz.

Maybe the solution to my problem is to only read novels with THE and a NOUN as its title?

In Curse Merchant news, I have secured the services of Allyson Peltier and Ambitious Enterprises toward reviewing my query letter. I held a thoroughly enjoyable phone conversation with Ally last week, in which we discussed my goals and how her company could best assist me. For the first time, I received a professional’s opinion on my level of editing skill. The news was positive! My immediate plan is to craft the best possible query, and begin casting the net. If after a round or two of queries I find little more than form rejections, I’ll revisit the manuscript to see what isn’t working.

I am very close to sending The Curse Merchant out into the real world. The ultimate question remains: is it as good as it can be? For the first time in my life as a writer, the answer is “Yes!”

Image Credit: vichie81

First off, I’d like to encourage everyone to go check out Dan Streib’s author page on Amazon. He writes thrillers with a James-Bond-meets-Anderson-Cooper main character, and seriously, who among you doesn’t want to see Anderson Cooper pilot a car-boat through Venice?

Next, I’d like to fill everyone in on my current project situation. The Curse Merchant is sitting pretty in its third draft, courtesy of the valuable input I received from my beta readers. I’d send you each a canned ham, but most of you are vegetarians. I’m (almost) ready to begin pitching Curse Merchant to agents.

Hold up there. Almost ready. I’ve decided I want to run the manuscript under the nose of a professional editor first. Why? Well, it’s actually quite obvious. Literary agents only want to see the best possible manuscript you can provide. It was never a question of whether my manuscript would benefit from freelance editing. The only question was how much I am willing to invest into this manuscript. I have a high amount of faith in The Curse Merchant. Money is still a question, but I have reached the point where I’m ready to hear numbers. To that end, I have a conference call next week with an editor with experience at Simon & Schuster to discuss my manuscript. This is for copy-editing, mind you. I’ll see what she has to say, and make my decision at that point.

Time for a little fund raising... I wonder how much a pint of AB+ runs on the open market?

But this does leave me in a sort of holding pattern, writing-wise. Rather than sit on my creative assets, I’ve decided to begin pre-writing the next big project. What is the next big project, you may ask? Well, until recently, it was going to be the Curse Merchant sequel. I even posted about it a couple times.

Then I read some invaluable advice from literary agent Mandy Hubbard, by way of her Twitter feed. She spent several tweets last week discussing the folly of writing a series before you’ve sold the first book. Frankly, it opened my eyes to a bit of publishing reality.

I am, at my core, a world builder. I enjoy creating supersettings. My most fabulous, over-arching milieu is so dear to me, that I refuse to write the first novel set in that universe out of sheer terror I’d screw it up. Also: I’m somewhat neurotic. This means that I tend to write for future books. Which is great from the point of view of an editor. They love genre series. However, until you’ve sold your first book, you don’t know how the first book will end up. In the process after that magical moment when you are offered representation by a literary agent, and that mythical moment when the book is accepted by a Big 6 publisher, and that point of nirvana at which you realize your novel in print…

…there’s a lot of editing to do. Hell, the title is likely to change, much less treatment of character, or the survival of specific subplots and even major plot points. Writing a sequel is a fool’s bet, because you don’t know what the publisher likes about your book yet. You don’t know how the book will read yet. All of the work I would spend on writing The Curse Merchant’s Principle could amount to spitting in the wind.

So, what should I do? Outline the book (done), then move on. Thus, I come to my next project. I’m not going to divulge too much at this point, as I’m still outlining, but I will say that it is a horror/western. For anyone who has read my work, this should send your extremities to tingling.

So, until next week when I hope to report good news on the copy-edit front, I wish you happy trails pilgrim, and always go for the headshot!

Eek. Spoiler.

Image credit: phanlop88

What is horror?

Easy enough question to ask, but how does one answer it? The horror genre is long and storied, to be sure.  I suspect horror predates the written word, creating the stuff of late night caveman campfire entertainment. It immediately found its home in literature, then escaped the print and infected film and television as soon as those technologies were invented. Love it, hate it, fear it… we humans are entranced by horror. The trick is defining it.

If I sit down to write a horror story, what do I write? What makes a story a “horror story?” Must it require monsters? Ghosts? Blood and gore? Old castles and monasteries? Serial killers and cheerleaders? Aliens and sternum-ripping set pieces?

There is no good answer, in my opinion, because horror is chimeric, switching its form and function person to person. For horror to be appealing, it must touch some part of our subconscious… the underevolved length of our noodle charged with keeping the body alive. Perhaps it isn’t enough to say that horror must scare us.  Effective horror stimulates our fight-or-flight response on some level, be it subtle or outright, and gives us a brush with our own mortality.

Memento mori, y'all!

Certain traditional elements of horror brutalize our reptile brains in particular ways. Vampires and zombies trigger our fear of rejoining the food chain, and our disgust at infection. Ghost stories challenge our understanding of the hereafter and the absolution of death. Killers hold our gossamer illusion of safety up to a terrifying light such that we see through the pretense only briefly.

As a writer, I suspect that choosing to address a particular psychology isn’t enough. I feel that horror should be personal to the author, if it has any chance of reaching the reader’s caveman campfire. The real question presented to the writer should be “what puts the hook in me?”

A few days ago as I went to clock out of work, I stepped into the darkened warehouse to find my timecard. As I turned to the timeclock, I caught a glimpse of someone ducking out of sight behind some workbenches. I froze. I knew the warehouse was supposed to be empty, which brought me to the conclusion that I was alone with a stranger (and therefore in danger), or that I was alone only in the corporeal sense. I steeled myself and moved to the back of the warehouse to investigate.

I found no one.

For a brief moment, my otherwise rational brain opened up to an extreme reality. I could picture the figure, if only blurry and dark. It seemed human. And it had vanished. The world tilted for a second. My nervous system flickered with lightning, sending hairs on my arms standing at attention.

The moment ended, however, as I spotted a full-length mirror one of the workers had leaned against his workbench. Naturally, the figure was my own reflection. But that one brief moment captured the thrill of horror in a pure essence. I was exposed to something unnatural, dark, and well outside of my understanding. For a second… I believed.

Perhaps the key to writing effective horror lies not in the suspension of disbelief, but in the construction of belief?

Image credit: luigi diamanti

The Curse Merchant is now in the hands of four beta readers, and will shortly find its way into the inbox of my lovely and talented wife, who has a secret life as a grammar ninja. Her intensity of detail will serve me well, I’m sure, and with any luck at all I’ll walk away without serious physical or emotional trauma.

Realizing that the manuscript is arriving at a polished state, I face a fundamental decision. What in God’s Green Hell am I supposed to do with it? There are a few options that present themselves immediately, and these options are weighing on my mind.

Do I self-publish? If so, do I offer the book only in eBook format, or do I provide a hard copy option?

Should I submit the manuscript for consideration by literary agents? If so, I will have a lot of work to do in creating a tight and powerful synopsis and query. I’ll need to do research on the most appropriate agents to solicit.

It’s this soul-searching that really brings me back to the formative question of my writing career… What kind of author do I want to be? Am I satisfied with writing a quality novel and distributing it myself into the hands of those who are looking for it? Or do I want to throw my hat into the ring of traditional publishing, and see if I can unlock a greater market?

At this point, I honestly don’t know the answer to that question. But I do know the following:

1. I want to write incredible stories that readers can’t put down. I want to engage the reader on an emotional level. I want to transport the reader into new, exciting worlds.

2. I want to get these stories into as many hands as possible.

3. I want a following.

I don’t see how either path is exclusive to these goals. Alas.

In the meantime, I have put thought into cover art, should I choose the self-publishing route. After a course search for graphic artists to hire, I came up with no satisfying visions for the cover art. That is, until I just tried to do it myself. Here is the product of my cobbling:

I pored over several blogs, articles, and websites dedicated to digital book cover art, and came away with some key points which I’ve attempted to incorporate in the image:

1. Keep it simple; avoid clutter.

2. Don’t try to represent a character; allow the reader to fulfill the image of the characters in her mind.

3. Choose classic typesetting fonts for the title and author name, and be sure they are clearly visible when reduced to an icon size.

4. Pick a theme that can be re-used for sequels.

Since I intend for Dorian Lake to reappear in sequels, I’ve chosen a design to which I can make minor tweaks for future books. For example, I can replace the sigil in the background (for those playing along at home, it’s the Fifth Pentacle of Mars), the foreground image, and the color of the banners. I can keep the type the same as well as the background color. Thus should you purchase all four books of the Charm City Chronicles (or whatever I end up calling the omnibus), it’ll look like a matched set.

That’s the thinking, anyway.

As you can see, I’ve put a considerable amount of thought into self-publishing, and I don’t necessarily consider it to be a fall-back plan. I see it as a very real, very valid option for my goals as an author. Good news is that I have a few months before I must arrive at a decision. In the meantime, the beta readers are poring over the manuscript as we speak, and I can hear my wife warming up the ink in her red pen already!