This is the latest in a series of Meaty Monday posts – longer posts where I ramble on about writing related topics. You can find the first Meaty Monday post here.

Authors are almost legally required to hate ebooks. After all, those cold, soulless packages of bits and bytes can’t compare with the tactile and olfactory delights a real book provides. In a lot of ways that’s true and as my heavily overloaded shelves will attest, I’ve always had great difficultly resisting the lure of the bookshop. In fact, until a couple of years ago ebooks held no interest for me at all but then I bought my wife a Kobo reader for her birthday and then I borrowed it to read William Gibson’s Zero History.

I was hooked.

Sure, the first generation Kobo reader is slow and doesn’t have wireless or any other bells and whistles but it was so convenient and – for some unknown reason – fun.

I quickly bought myself a Kindle and I’ve never looked back. I do still buy physical books, usually Subterranean Press or Cemetery Dance limited editions, or books by my favourite authors (Caitlin R Kiernan, Haruki Murakami etc.) but generally I choose the digital version if I can. The biggest advantage of doing that of course is that I can buy as many books as I like without taking up any more space in our apartment.

And buy I have.

I now have well over two hundred ebooks, most of which I would never have bought if I’d needed to dedicate shelf space to them. The insubstantial nature of ebooks has released me from any guilt I might feel about cluttering up my home and unleashed a ravenous book buying fiend. I’m buying books 4-5x quicker than I read them – a habit that has followed me from the physical bookshops I might add.

Not only am I buying more books, I’m reading more too. The convenience and simplicity of having so many books at my fingertips has reignited my love of reading and the ease with which I can buy the next book in a series or try out a new author at exactly the point where I’m about to start a new book makes it easier to keep up my momentum.

Of course, some of this is because of the profusion of very cheap ebooks – I’m a sucker for 99c sales – but a couple of days ago, for the first time, I paid more for an ebook than the equivalent paperback – Dan Wells’ I am Not a Serial Killer.

There’s a general expectation that digital products cost less than their physical counterparts. In part, that expectation is driven by the downward pressure on ebook prices being created by the army of self-publishers taking advantage of the digital revolution to try to hook readers with a cheap taster of their work in the hope it will prompt them to buy the next few books at a more realistic price.

The other factor in this sense of fiscal entitlement digital readers feel is purely a matter of economics – it has to be cheaper to make these virtual products. After all, there’s no manufacturing, no shipping, no warehousing. That saves the publishers money and surely, all those savings should be passed on to the reader.

There’s a fundamental flaw with that thinking.

Yes, ebooks don’t have those physical costs associated with them so yes, they are marginally cheaper to create than their physical counterparts but that’s not what you’re paying for when you buy a book. You’re not paying for the paper they’re printed on, the ink or the trucks used to get them across the country and into your hands. You’re not even paying for the professional editing or the other work the publisher does on behalf of the author.

You’re paying for the story. You’re paying for the unique combination of creativity, talent and craftmanship the author used arrange those specific words into that specific order to create a world you’ll immerse yourself in for hours and, with luck, remember for the rest of your life. The fact that you’re experiencing that world via a virtual product rather than a physical one makes no difference. The pleasure you get from a book will be the same, however it’s delivered.

The combination of extreme price competition and readers expectations are rapidly driving down the price of eBooks. On the surface that sounds like a good thing but in reality, if this kind of aggressive price war continues it’s the reader that will lose out. “Writer” is already a precarious choice of occupation and it’s tough for anyone to earn a living writing free books. Of course, there’ll be a stream of new writers coming on the scene who will be prepared to follow the drug dealer business model and give away a few hits to build that fan base but they’ll struggle to build a professional career if they can’t earn a professional income and they’ll soon be forced to move on to more lucrative employment – working in a bookstore perhaps. The end result will be less professional writers and a dearth of new, high quality, fiction.

The rise of ebooks seems inevitable. I can foresee a world where most fiction is only available as an ebook and the kind of luscious limited editions created by Subterranean Press and Cemetery Dance. That does make me a little sad but I still hold out hope that the convenience and accessibility of so many stories will inspire future generations to devour those books just as it has me. I just hope the true worth of those stories isn’t lost along the way.

After all, the value of a great book comes from its story, not the dead tree you hold in your hands.

This is the third in a series of Meaty Monday posts – longer posts where I ramble on about writing related topics. You can find the first Meaty Monday post here. This time I’m talking about Robert A. Heinlein’s five writing rules.

I first heard Robert A. Heinlein’s writing rules quoted by Neil Gaiman when he was in Vancouver promoting Anansi Boys and they’ve stuck with me ever since.

They were originally published in Heinlein’s 1947 essay On the Writing of Speculative Fiction (republished in Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy, among other places).

The bulk of the essay is about the types of science fiction stories (human interest or gadget-centric) and the three plots that human interest stories can have – “boy meets girl”, “the Little Tailor” (the little guy who becomes a big shot or vice versa) and “the man who learned better”. It’s Heinlein’s five rules or “business habits” as he calls them that have gained the most attention though.

1. You must write

This one is obvious really, let’s face it, but all around the world there are people that would like to be writers but aren’t actually doing any writing.

2. You must finish what you start

More good, solid advice. This is one I follow 80% of the time. I have my abandoned folder for stories I’ve given up on for the time being, and the first sixty-odd thousand words of a novel I began a very long time ago but generally I try to finish what I start. And by finish I mean write the story, then revise it until I’m as happy with it as I think I can be.

3. You must refrain from rewriting except to editorial order

This is the one that gets Heinlein into trouble – very few people think you should write a single draft of a story and then start sending it out. There’s several ways to interpret this particular rule.

a) Assume he actually meant something different – like don’t endlessly rewrite.

b) Assume that he did mean what he said but that it no longer applies because the market has changed. When Heinlein was writing it was entirely possible to earn a living by writing short stories, as long as you were prolific enough. That basically meant churning them out and hoping you got enough sales to cover the rent.

c) Assume that “finish what you start” includes revision and polish, making a rewrite in this context exactly that – a rewriting of your story.

Or you can do what I do which is not worry about it too much and move on.

4. You must put it on the market

You’ve found the time to write, you’ve finished your story – NOW SEND IT OUT!

No one every published a story of any kind by writing it and putting it in a drawer. No one.

Pick an appropriate market, read their guidelines, follow them to the letter and send them your story. In Heinlein’s day (and some of mine) that meant producing a hard copy of your story in the appropriate format, sticking it in an envelope and putting it in a postbox (with a stamped self-addressed envelope of course) and waiting.

Nowadays, it’s much easier; most publications accept electronic submissions of some sort and sites like Clarkesworld have fancy schmancy submission systems that do half the work for you. You still need to wait though. And follow their guidelines, don’t forget that. Forgetting that would be bad.

5. You must keep it on the market until sold

There’s a huge amount of luck involved in getting a story published. The world is full of stories and novels that were rejected hundreds of times before the right slush reader in the right mood passed it on to the right editor who was also in the right mood and had the right gap in their publishing schedule to publish it to great critical and commercial success. Don’t give up on your story after the first rejection – send it out again as soon as you can and keep sending it out until it finds a home.

I have a handful of my favourite sites and magazines that get any story I think is appropriate for them but once I’ve exhausted those, I prowl Duotrope’s weekly email updates, looking for suitable candidates for my homeless stories.

The key word there is suitable. Think about where you’re sending your stories – read a couple of issues if you can – and only submit if you think your story fits the market. That way you’re helping the editor by making sure they aren’t wasting their time on your story and you’re helping yourself by making sure you don’t sit at home waiting for an acceptance that’s never going to arrive. It can take a long time to get a reply – my first acceptance took 308 days and I’ve had numerous 100+ day rejections  - so don’t waste your time by sending your splatterpunk story to Highlights.

Those are Heinlein’s rules and, as much as possible, that’s how I live my writing life. I’ll leave you with some closing comments on the rules from Heinlein’s essay…

“…if you follow them, it matters not how you write, you will find some editor somewhere, sometime, so unwary or so desperate for copy as to buy the worst old dog you, or I, or anybody else, can throw at him.”
Robert A. Heinlein – On the Writing of Speculative Fiction

Robert A. Heinlein at the 1976 World Science Fiction Convention

This is the second in a series of Meaty Monday posts – longer posts where I ramble on about writing related topics. You can find the first Meaty Monday post here.

Today, I’m talking about ideas.

You’re probably familiar with this quote.

“In writing, you must kill your darlings.” - William Faulkner

Or this one.

“Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it – whole-heartedly – and delete it before sending your manuscripts to press. Murder your darlings.” - Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch

Or how about this?

 “Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.” - Samuel Johnson

They’re all variations on a theme – if you think a scene or a sentence or even a whole subplot is the most wonderful piece of writing in the world, you should cut it.

Some people take this literally and remove their favourite bits from their work just because they like them so much – apparently director Danny Boyle always cuts the single best shot from his movies. I take it more as encouragement to examine those “particularly fine” pieces of writing and consider whether they might be too clever or just plain unnecessary.

I try to remember this advice when I’m revising (and when I’m writing a first draft although that’s harder). I don’t just focus on the bits of the story that are obviously bad; I try to look at all of it. Just because I like a scene or a paragraph doesn’t mean it needs to be there – it might slow down the story or distract the reader or just not add anything of value. If that’s the case, no matter how well it’s written, it can go.

Of course, it’s still something I get wrong – I’ll be killing a few darlings in my upcoming rewrite of The Ghost Smuggler – but I do try.

But, there’s another concept I’ve found very useful over the years and that’s making sure I nurture my rabbits.

Hunny Bunny image by Zettmedia

The idea comes from this quote:

“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” - John Steinbeck

As soon as I read that a light came on in my head. That’s exactly what it’s like for me. I may start off with just a vague inkling of an idea but if I keep rolling it around in my head then before I know it I’ve got another idea and another and another. Conversely, if I stop thinking about my ideas, they wither and die and I end up in a creative wasteland, miserable and alone.

In the software industry we call this phenomenon feature creep. As you develop a piece of software it becomes easier and easier to think of more and more cool additions. You quickly start to believe that those cool ideas are critical to the project’s success. Before you know it the design doubles in size and you need to start adding programmers to the team to get everything done. Inevitably you don’t and your software ends up shipping late or it’s rushed out full of bugs.

But in writing, nurturing those rabbits is essential. You can’t write fiction without ideas and the more you have the better. Even the uninspiring little runts are worth keeping around; who knows what they’ll grow into.

I find the early hours of the morning particularly fertile ground for ideas. That’s when Ethel the Muse joins forces with Captain Insomnia and the pair of them keep ideas bouncing around my head until the sun comes up. Some of those ideas are titles or phrases. Sometimes it’s an ending or a striking scene or fantastic imagery. Often, they’re opening lines that I love without having any clue where the story is going to go. Whatever form those rabbits take, I know that if I let them play around in my head for a while, if I poke and prod at them, they’ll turn into a fully fleshed out story filled with potential. Then all I need to do is get that potential out of my head and onto the page and that’s the easy bit, right?

Of course, I’m very careful not to dive straight into writing one of these early morning offspring – I let them percolate for a while to make sure there’s enough there to support an entire story. Often, ideas that seem like a stroke of genius at three am are truly awful in the cold harsh light of day.

And ideas frequently pop up while I’m writing – half the time I’m relying on that happening to get to the end of the story (or through the middle). Those ideas aren’t always good and they might not fit into my current story but that doesn’t mean I should forget about them; I just add them to the rest of my ideas and see what happens.

Whenever your rabbits appear, make sure you write them down somewhere. Some writers use a notebook to store them, I have a document on my PC. I try to get  all the rabbits, even the unruly ones, in there. Every now and again, especially if I’m feeling low on inspiration, I take a look through the ideas file and inevitably find something to kick start my imagination. Be careful to make the notes clear enough that you’ll remember what you meant years later – it’s very easy to be unintentionally cryptic at this point.

So, nurture your rabbits, take care of them and play with them and before long you’ll have hundreds of the damn things trying to get out of your head and onto the page.

[Philip Harris]

Welcome to the first Meaty Monday.

Meaty Mondays will be a series of writing focused posts that appear – as the name suggests – on a Monday. I can’t promise they’ll be any more interesting or more useful than my normal posts or even if they’ll appear every Monday, but they will be longer. This week, I’m going to talk about my puzzling attitude towards self-publishing, or indie publishing as it’s called nowadays.

I have a very strange relationship with self-publishing.

I’ve self-published any number of video games and other pieces of software. In fact, I spent over seven years doing just that and that was before the iPhone kick-started the current golden age of independent game development. Even now, I still harbour secret desires to go indie again and crank out some of my own games for iPhone and iPad.

If I was still in a band, I’d be out there building websites, uploading recordings to iTunes and Bandcamp and hawking t-shirts, coffee mugs and limited edition hand warmers to anyone who strayed too close.

If I could draw, I’d have my own online comic strip. And the t-shirts, coffee mugs, limited edition hand warmers and the hawking.

But books? Books are different.

I have nothing against self-published books. I’ve read books by indie authors and enjoyed them. I don’t take pricing or publisher into account when I’m choosing a book to buy. As Roger Eschbacher discusses in this blog, it’s entirely possible to self-publish a book that’s as professional as anything else out there, particularly if you’re able to go the Kickstarter route. That said, I do wish more indie authors would put as much effort into creating a professional product as Roger and Scott Bury. Incidentally, if you’re a budding author and don’t read Scott’s blog you should give it a try.

It’s certainly not because of the money – I’m neither fooled by the ‘indie author hits the big time’ headlines or naive enough to see creative writing as anything other than an exceptionally improbable way to earn a living.

But still, there’s something stopping me from taking my lovingly crafted novel and becoming an indie author.

Books need an editor and I don’t just mean someone to make sure the author hasn’t made any stupid grammatical errors. You can pay people to edit your novel and it’s relatively affordable. There’s more to it than that, at least for me. I need an independent filter for my work.

I need someone to assess the quality of the story not just the technical aspects of the writing; someone to validate what I’ve written as something other than self-indulgent twaddle. You need to have a certain amount of arrogance to want to force a story you’ve written onto the world and ask people to pay for it. I’m arrogant enough to believe I’ve written something worth reading, but not quite arrogant enough to want to try to sell it without an impartial observer assessing its quality and finding it unique, or at least enjoyable, enough to publish.

Even now, as the Internet, digital distribution and the feasibility of low volume printing usher in a publishing revolution, this outdated idea that someone other than me needs to care enough about my book to want to get it out there persists. It’s irrational and probably stupid. Some of my favourite authors have published their own work and there are plenty of talented authors plying their wares on the indie circuit. Still, I can’t get past the feeling that I’d be unwise to go that route.

But as the great man says, never say never. The psychological barrier that is preventing me from going indie has worn down to a very thin membrane and every now and again I catch a glimpse of the wraith-like shadows of temptation lurking beyond. Every now and again they press eagerly against that tenuous barrier. So far it’s stayed intact but one day it’s going to break.

And then you’ll be sorry.

[Philip Harris]

Not a good day today – hence the late post. I decided to go running this morning but picked a route that was longer and tougher than I should have so the rest of the day has been a bit of a disaster. The only good point so far has been re-reading three stories from Cate Gardner‘s Strange Men in Pinstripe Suits. I was planning on posting a review, but that will have to wait until later in the week.

Luckily, yesterday was a productive day. I finished editing Backwards Boy and submitted it to a website. It came in at 1117 words and I’m pretty happy with it. Unfortunately, the speculative fiction element is very subtle so I think it will be a hard sell. I have another story with the same problem – Hidden and it’s difficult to find anywhere to submit it to.

I also wrote the first of a series of longer blogs I’m calling Meaty Mondays. It’s about my attitude towards self-publishing and will go live tomorrow morning.

And because that wasn’t enough writing, I also wrote the first 643 words of a new story. Its working title is Origami Man and Paperboy but that may well change.