The Doom Loop Barometer

First, a big happy birthday to Mom!

I'm gradually getting better, and having the cough syrup really helped. But I didn't realize that Robitussin was a controlled substance. When it rang up, the cashier had to enter my date of birth (she said she didn't need to see my ID because, as she put it, I was obviously old -- I wasn't insulted because English wasn't her first language and I could tell she didn't mean it that way, and apparently the restriction was you had to be 18 to buy it, and I don't even want to look 18 these days). It seems like kids use this stuff to get high. Obviously, I'm doing something wrong because all I ever notice is that it stops me coughing, and when I've been coughing, I suppose that feels good enough to count as a "high." Otherwise, I've got nothing. You probably have to mix it with something or snort it or smoke it, or generally go to the kind of effort that makes me think that if they devoted that time and effort to actually doing something fun, they might feel even better and not harm themselves. I would say that proves I'm old, but I felt that way even as a teenager when I couldn't quite understand what was so "fun" about hanging out in someone's pasture, drinking beer until you threw up. Reading a good book sounded like much more fun to me.

Speaking of books, thanks for the recommendation of The Thief. It did take a while to get into it, then it really picked up, and then, wow, the last bit got kind of mindblowing. I love a good unreliable narrator. Now I need to read the rest of the series.

I realized that last week when I was talking about how publishing trends work, I forgot to mention my personal barometer for when a publishing trend has peaked: Harlequin will launch a specialty category line related to it. When the first wave of paranormal romance was hitting, they started up a soft horror/modern gothic line, and paranormal tanked. When those single-title contemporary romantic comedies were big, they started up a few different romantic comedy lines. Soon, that trend tanked. When they started a category line that was essentially chick lit in category romance, chick lit died about a year after those books hit the shelf. They've recently launched an urban fantasy/paranormal romance line, so we'll see if the pattern holds true or if there's an exception. Mind you, these are all category lines as opposed to imprints from the parent company, which are often ahead of the trends -- Red Dress Ink was a big driver of chick lit in the US and Luna had a lot to do with establishing female-centered urban fantasy. But they usually dream up the related category lines when something is already hot in the market instead of leading the market, and then by the time they get books bought and then published, the trend is already well established, and about a year after the line is launched the trend will be showing signs of fading. I have learned that when Harlequin announces a new category line that's related to what I'm writing, I need to start making a transition to something else. If I had discovered this rule earlier, I might have pushed to sell Enchanted, Inc. as fantasy instead of chick lit, considering I first discussed it with an editor at the event that was the pre-launch party for Harlequin's chick-lit-like category line, and the fantasy imprint being launched at the same event had just started considering contemporary fantasy. Ah, 20/20 hindsight. But at the time I didn't have quite enough data points to see the pattern. And I did send it to Luna (the editor I was talking to asking to see it was what spurred me to write it in the first place), which rejected it with a form letter.

Incidentally, they're also starting to do a young adult line, but I think it's more of a sub imprint rather than a category line. Still, I'm hearing that YA is not quite as hot as it was a year or so ago ... I'm not sure if the inspirational romances count for or against the pattern, in that they did start with category romances and inspirational books have taken off quite well since then, but the category romances were launched under a new imprint that now also does other kinds of inspirational books. Looking at it strictly as category, it breaks the pattern, but it was part of a new imprint, which verifies the pattern.

And now I am determined to get some writing done today. After getting errands and other projects taken care of yesterday, I had no energy left to write, but I did re-read where I left off to try to get my brain back in the game. I don't have anything pressing to deal with the rest of the day. I'm still wavering about ballet class tonight. It's the first class with our substitute teacher while our regular teacher is on maternity leave, and we don't have class next week, so I don't want to miss, but I'm not sure I'm physically up to it, and I'd probably make an even worse impression if I go but am a slacker. Not that it should matter what impression I make, but this teacher is supposedly the "tough" teacher and the reason that some of the people in our class are still taking the beginner class instead of his intermediate adult class, and I am an overachiever.

Avoiding Mary Sue

I think I'm really on the mend! No more sneezing, much less sniffling. I have cast aside the Pink, Fuzzy Bathrobe of Imminent Death. However, as Mom warned me, the cold is threatening to move into my chest, so this afternoon I've planned a Target excursion to get some cough syrup and some V-8 for Mom's super-powerful cold remedy (prepared horseradish in V-8 or tomato juice, best drunk warm, and you'll feel like a vampire getting your daily dose of blood), as well as to re-stock the other essential cold supplies so I'll be prepared for the next time (which means I'll be healthy as a horse all winter). I don't think I'll make it to choir tonight, though, since singing doesn't seem to be working for me at the moment and even talking isn't too much fun. I have a ton and a half of things to catch up on now, not even counting being WAY behind on word count. But I'll survive, and I'm even looking forward to writing, which is a sign that I'm better.

And now, for a Writing Wednesday post!

A lot of writing books give advice on how to create a character readers will relate to and pull for or love. I haven't seen any that give advice on how not to go too far with that. Not that it would be a bad thing for readers to love your characters too much. Rather, you don't want to go so far in trying to make readers love your characters that you end up having the opposite effect and create a Mary Sue.

A "Mary Sue," for those who haven't delved into the world of fan fiction, is a character inserted by the author into an existing world (like a new crewmember on the starship Enterprise), and the character is essentially an idealized version of the author or a representation of the author in that world. A Mary Sue is beautiful, often in some striking or unusual way (violet eyes are quite common among Mary Sues), she's good at everything, everyone loves her (and the people who don't are just jealous), she's romantically involved with the author's favorite character, and she saves the day by being more skilled than the existing characters. The male version is called a Marty Stu or Gary Stu. A Mary Sue can be fun to write -- after all, if you're going to play in a fictional universe, you might as well get the guy and save the day -- but it isn't much fun for anyone else to read. In fan fiction, one of the problems with the Mary Sue is that most people who are reading stories set in that universe are doing so because they like those characters, and they want to see those people doing stuff, not read about some Mary Sue who takes over the story.

But even in the realm of original fiction, a Mary Sue can show up. She's a little less obvious because all the characters in a novel are theoretically original, and the main character of the book is supposed to be the one to save the day or get the guy/girl (though I have seen series where the author seems to become enamored of a secondary character who ends up taking over the series while the original hero gets shoved to the sidelines). I would say that a Mary Sue in original fiction is a character the author loves or identifies with enough that she loses the ability to be honest or objective about this character. The author gets so caught up in living out her own fantasies through this character that plot and story fall by the wayside and readers roll their eyes.

Some signs of an author's "Mary Sue" include:
-- The character is universally liked, and if anyone doesn't like her, they're just jealous. Or else certain groups of people universally like or dislike her, like the men all fall in love with her while the women all hate her.
-- The character is good at just about everything she tries to do, better than anyone else around, even if they have expertise in that area. Taken to extremes, this becomes what I call Magical Specialness, and fantasy is rife with it. That's when a character is miraculously good at something without any training or preparation. The first time he picks up a sword, he can singlehandedly defeat an entire squad of trained and experienced soldiers. After five minutes of magical training, the greatest wizard in the world says, "There is nothing more I can teach you."
-- The character has no real flaws, just superficial imperfections like a chocolate addiction, clumsiness or a birthmark.
-- The character may have flaws that readers notice but that the other characters (and possibly the author) don't seem to notice -- she does some pretty awful things, but the other characters all think she's wonderful.
-- Things come easily to the character -- if she isn't able to get or do something she wants, it will somehow come about that it happens anyway for her.
-- She doesn't have to face the consequences of her actions -- if she messes up, it still works out for her.

Not all extremely competent, good characters who are paragons of virtue are Mary Sues. Sometimes they're incredibly likable and readers fall madly in love with them. So what's the difference between a character like this and a Mary Sue/Gary Stu?

1) Go back and add "for no good reason" to that list above), and you'll have what really makes a Mary Sue. If you actually think through why things are the way they are, then you're on your way to creating a real character. Take that tendency for a character to be universally liked, or for all the boys to like her while the girls hate her. Yes, the girls might hate her because they're jealous of all the boys liking her, but why do the boys like her? Some are shallow enough to like her for her looks, but chances are that somebody -- your romantic leading man, I would hope -- will like her for some other reason, and that may be something that at least one girl is going to be looking for in a friend. Build individual character relationships that exist for a reason. If you want to show that a character is loved by others, you need to show why the others love her. You've got problems when you tell readers how much everyone loves a character, while they dislike that character.

For another example, take the "being good at everything" point. Have a reason for your character to have these skills that come in handy for the plot. If you've developed the backstory, that will fall into place -- and it will mean that there will be some things she doesn't know how to do.

2) Give your characters real flaws. A flaw needs to be more than just some negative characteristic. For writing purposes, I consider a character flaw to be a trait that causes the character to make mistakes or poor choices. That includes things like greed, suspicion, jealousy, insecurity, cowardice or laziness. It can also include positive traits taken too far, such as independence or softheartedness. It needs to go beyond merely something that gets the character in trouble to being something that causes the character to make a decision that gets her in trouble. So, clumsiness isn't a real character flaw, even if it does get a character in trouble when she falls into things she shouldn't because it doesn't involve a choice. When the characters do make mistakes or poor choices because of their character flaws, make sure there are consequences that matter. You don't want a character to be able to screw up and get away scot-free.

3) Make characters work for it. Showing the effort the characters have to take to get things makes them more likable. Show the character working to make new friends instead of just being liked by everyone -- maybe even make the first attempt not so successful. Show the character who's the best ever with a sword doing daily exercises and practicing. Let characters have a few failures along the way.

4) Be wary of superlatives (in other words, avoid Magical Specialness). Does the character absolutely have to be the very best, right now? Would it be enough for her to have the potential to be the best, with some work? Is "really good" enough? Of course, you want your hero to be good enough to beat the villain, if it comes to a direct showdown, and the villain has to be pretty good to be a worthy villain. But it's usually not necessary for the hero to be the best ever at first try. If it is necessary for the plot, then you really need to set it up and explain it, and probably have some consequences. There should be a price to be paid for being the best.

5) Be honest with yourself. There's no crime in writing yourself into your own books -- in fact, just about every author does it in some way with almost every character because you're the only person you know from the inside out. If a character really is based on you or the way you'd like to be in that world, acknowledge it to yourself, be aware of it, and then take a step back and make sure that you remember that this is a character, not your own role-playing exercise. JK Rowling has admitted that Hermione in the Harry Potter books is largely based on herself, but I wouldn't call her a Mary Sue -- she's the best student in the school because she does her homework, studies and even does extra reading, not because she's Special. She's severely lacking in social skills and tact (even as she lectures the boys on their lack of tact and social skills). She's a bit of a bossy know-it-all. She's a human being, with all the flaws and frailties we expect to help round out the good parts. (Oddly, the character comes across as much more of a Mary Sue in the films, which Rowling doesn't write.)

Finally, writing a Mary Sue isn't necessarily the kiss of death, especially if the Mary Sue you write is universal enough that a large number of readers can easily step into that character as their own Mary Sue. There are some hugely bestselling books starring characters that are obvious Mary Sues. But I think it's risky to count on that working. It's far better to create a real character readers will love.

Sick-Day Entertainment

I was perhaps a tad overoptimistic yesterday when I said that the worst of the sniffling and sneezing was past because it proceeded to get even worse. I did get some rest last night (though with a weird dream that is haunting me for some odd reason, when it's not the kind of dream I tend to dwell on. It was a seemingly innocuous dream, but I woke up with the odd sense that it was some kind of Portent, and I can't shake that), and I don't seem to be sniffling quite as badly today so far. I want to try to write today, but my head is still a little fuzzy, and it's hard to concentrate.

I did not end up going back to that movie. I think I'll try reading the book instead, because what I've seen about the book seems to be something I'd be all over. In fact, since it was around when I was a kid, I can't believe I didn't discover it then. I watched a couple of Pushing Daisies episodes, then BBCAmerica has put up some of the original Monty Python episodes on OnDemand. I've only seen the sketches pulled out as excerpts and haven't seen them in context, which is a shame, as the funniest parts are often the way they flow into each other. I also hadn't noticed how close Michael Palin keeps coming to losing it entirely and cracking up in the first Spanish Inquisition bit. But the part that had me howling with laughter (and then going into a coughing, sneezing fit) was Wuthering Heights done in semaphore.

Finding exactly the right entertainment for a sick day can be kind of tricky. I've discovered that anything that makes me cry is right out, as that only makes the sniffling and stuffy nose worse. In fact, I think a lot of the Sunday morning flare-up can be blamed on a very sweet story that was in the newspaper that had me weeping. So, that rules out just about every romantic comedy because those always seem to make me cry. I'm having trouble staying focused enough to read fiction, though I can somehow manage to read non-fiction. I think that's because fiction is generally about people struggling with various crises and conflicts, and that tends to undermine one of the few good things about being sick: wallowing guilt-free in self-pity. It's hard to huddle up in the Pink, Fuzzy Bathrobe of Imminent Death, bemoaning your fate in life, while reading about other people who have bigger problems. Or else it's hard to care about those problems when even the super-soft, lotion-infused tissues feel like sandpaper on your red, raw nose (you could even say it glows); when your head feels like someone sprayed it full of foam insulation; when you can't stop sneezing; when you reek of eau de VapoRub; and when your throat feels like ants are marching up and down it if you go for more than a few minutes without sipping hot liquid (which makes it hard to sleep for very long). Then I get like "Who cares if you have to stop the Ultimate Evil before it destroys the world, and the Hounds of Hell are chasing you to the ends of the earth? I hab a code!"* My don't-care-o-meter seems to be less critical for television or movies than for books, so I can lie on the sofa, huddled in the Pink, Fuzzy Bathrobe of Imminent Death and not care much about what's happening on the screen, while I can't stay focused on a book if I'm paralyzed by not caring very much (to steal a phrase from Spike).

*Translation for those who don't speak Stuffy Nose: "I have a cold!"

I want to try to write some today, but I'm not sure I can come up with anything that makes sense. I keep reminding myself that it's an arbitrary goal with an arbitrary deadline, but then my overachiever self says, "But I'm behind on word count!"

Achoo!

NaNo update: I didn't get any actual writing done on Friday because I had reached a point where I had no idea what would happen next, so I focused on brainstorming and plotting. It turned out that my problem was that I hadn't really developed character arcs, so that was why I was at a loss for the big, climactic scene. That's where the hero is supposed to complete his transformation, and if I hadn't figured out what transformation needed to take place, I couldn't very well come up with a scene where that happens. Once I got that worked out, I made up for the lapse with double the word count on Saturday. And then the sniffles that started on Friday blew up into an all-out cold Saturday night, and I spent Sunday huddled on the sofa in the Pink, Fuzzy Bathrobe of Imminent Death, eating chicken noodle soup and guzzling large quantities of hot liquids. However, my reading and viewing for the day sort of counted as research for the book, and it gave me some ideas. I don't know how productive I'll be today. If I had a "real job" I would probably have called in sick. The worst of the sniffling and sneezing seems to be past, but I'm just really tired and woozy (I haven't slept well during this) and have that generally cruddy sick feeling. If I feel better after doing some napping or resting, maybe I'll do a little work later in the day. Otherwise, the priority is getting well.

It may turn out to be a good thing that I didn't try to do NaNo "officially," as I suspect I will run out of story before I hit the word count. This is a middle-grade book, so 50K is in the ballpark of what the finished word count will be, and I already know I will end up adding a lot in revisions. It would be pointless to stretch it out just to meet an arbitrary goal, and I would prefer to let the book rest a while so I can be more objective when it comes to rewriting, so I don't want to go back and start adding stuff at the beginning just to meet the arbitrary goal. However, I will have accomplished my goal, which was to draft a novel in the month and establish some better working habits that I can carry forward.

Meanwhile, I met another goal for the year last week. I wanted to read a hundred books this year, and last week I read #100. Granted, some of them were children's books, but others were big, fat fantasies, classics and reference books for which I took a lot of notes as I read, so I think it evens out. Plus, I didn't count partially read books, like references where I only needed to read a part or books I started and didn't finish or just skimmed.

Now I think I'm going to finish a movie I started watching yesterday on HBO OnDemand, and we'll see if I can get through it. It was The Seeker:The Dark is Rising, which I believe some of you warned me about, but hey, it was free and I was bored. I had to quit at the scene where the villain shows up at the boy's house, pretending to be a doctor. I could deal with Christopher Eccleston as the villain when he was all black-cloaked and ominous, but then his doctor guise was so goofy in a remarkably familiar way, and then when he introduced himself as, "Hello! I'm the Doctor!" I pretty much lost it and couldn't see the scene as ominous, the way I'm sure it was supposed to be, with the boy knowing it was the bad guy in his home but not able to do anything about it. I was waiting for the moment when we'd find the blue phone box in the front yard. Hmm, I just read some of the IMDB reviews, and it seems like I should spare myself the misery, or else this may be the only time I can watch it because the misery of the movie may make me forget the misery of my cold -- or a cold-addled brain may be the only way to watch it. Too bad Nanny McPhee isn't currently on HBO rotation. I think I need to get that DVD because it's perfect sick-day viewing. Maybe I'll dig into the Pushing Daisies DVDs instead.

And now, my final word for the day is "Achoo!"

Overachieving Frugality

NaNo update: I hit my target goal but didn't make myself go beyond. I still don't know what the end will be. Now I'm past 30,000 words, which means I need to figure that out.

I think part of my frenzy in writing this comes down to the fact that I'm a classic overachiever. The goal is to write a book in a month? Ha! I'll write one in three weeks. I need to write 2,000 words a day? Then I'll write 4,000. Plus, I am impatient. My agent has mentioned that there seems to be some demand for this kind of book (not that she knows what I'm working on), and that got me excited to have something to give her. Meanwhile, she was really high on the concept for The New Project, and that has me thinking that maybe once I'm done with the NaNo project, I should just finish it so that by the time it sells (fingers crossed), I'll have a complete manuscript, which means it may get released faster. I'm eager to finish the one book so I can get to the other story.

And I think I've figured out why hitting my goal seems to take no time, while going beyond it takes all day. I've been forcing myself to write earlier in the day (though that didn't happen today because I had a slow start this morning), so I'm finished with my writing goal about an hour to an hour and a half before I usually try to start writing. I hit my goal, I do my "I rocked, I rolled" chant that I stole from the gargoyles in book 3, and then I feel free to goof off a while or do other stuff. But then when my usual writing time rolls around, I feel like I should be working, so I set out to work, and then my usual bad procrastination habits kick in, which means it might take me an hour or longer to get around to actually writing. As a result, it ends up feeling like it took me all day.

But I told my overachiever self to chill yesterday and went out to help stimulate the economy. I've felt like I'm kind of to blame for some of the stuff that's been happening, as I haven't been spending money. It's not so much because of national economy fears as it is personal economy. I'm always frugal, and though I made decent money this year, I'm between contracts so I don't know how long the money I made this year will have to stretch. If it comes down to a choice of buying something now or being able to hold off trying to find a real job later, well, it's pretty obvious to me. But my main issue is that I don't really need anything. I'm overwhelmed with stuff. I have shelves loaded with books I haven't read yet and am reluctant to bring more home (the lovely thing about the library is that they store the books for me). I don't listen to music very often, so I barely listen to the CDs I own. I have DVDs still wrapped in plastic. I have a closet bulging with clothes, when I spend about 98 percent of my time wearing jeans, shorts or sweats. Even most of my social life involves jeans. I don't need more clothes. I don't wear jewelry all that often, and most of that is a few sentimental pieces. I couldn't even come up with a Christmas wish list to give my parents. So, most of what I've been buying is stuff that gets used up -- food, toothpaste, soap, office supplies.

In the interest of saving jobs and all that, when I hit Target yesterday, in addition to the toothpaste and soap, I bought the season one DVDs of Pushing Daisies (plus, good DVD sales may help save the show). Then I hit B&N and bought a couple of books. And then I bought groceries. Then I didn't make myself work when I got home.

I will confess that I think the overachieving thing has hit the frugality, too. With the news full of all those stories about stretching your dollar further, I feel like I have to be even better at saving money than everyone else is, and since my baseline is pretty frugal, saving even more pretty much will involve growing my own food and making my own clothes.

My Solutions for the Doom Loop

NaNo update: I passed the halfway point and hit 28,000 words yesterday. So, yeah, not so much with the balance and avoiding the all or nothing thing. It seems like if I do 2,000 words a day, that leaves me with enough free time that I actually feel guilty about it and find myself doing more work, but doing 4,000 words a day somehow seems to take up most of the day and leaves me with no free time. I'm not quite sure how that works. The story is taking shape, but I'm totally stumped for an ending. I know how it should end -- you know, good guys win, evil vanquished, yay! -- but I'm not entirely sure how that should come about. By this time, I'm so far away from the synopsis I write seventeen years ago that it's of no help whatsoever (and that was a really lame way of doing it, according to the judge, and I have to agree).

I've been talking about the Great Publishing Doom Loop, which is what happens when a trend becomes hot and soon all you can find is books that fit the trend, but then when that trend fizzles out, nothing is left of it as the publishers all chase the next trend. There are certainly business realities that feed the doom loop, but I have a few ideas on how publishers could avoid the worst of it. Mind you, I'm no MBA, but I have worked in marketing and communications and I listen a lot to readers and booksellers and spend a lot of time in bookstores.

So, here's my manifesto on what should be done when the revolution comes (not that I'll be leading the revolution, but I am open to being an advisor):

1) Avoid the all-or-nothing mentality (yeah, I'm one to talk).
Yes, if a trend comes along, then you naturally want to take advantage of the opportunity. It would be silly to ignore it entirely. But you don't have to go crazy, and you don't have to stop doing everything else. Variety is your friend. Sticking with some things that may not be burning up the bestseller lists at the moment but which do sell steadily will probably pay off in the long term. You don't want a whole segment of your customer base to get out of the habit of shopping for books because there's nothing to satisfy them. When a trend fades, it doesn't mean it has to stop entirely. Just pull back to a reasonable level.

2) Don't forget about quality when pursuing a trend.
While you're taking advantage of current market conditions, do so only if those books are books you'd be willing to publish if that subgenre wasn't the hottest thing on the market. Don't pressure authors into writing the currently hot thing because it will show if their hearts aren't in it. If you've got an author you want to keep on board but who doesn't fit the trend, that's where the variety thing comes in.

3) Be honest in your packaging and marketing.
Don't use pastels and funny fonts and breezy-sounding cover copy on a serious book, just because the funny books are what's popular. Don't put a sexy cover on a non-sexy book, just because sexy is hot now. Readers recoil when they feel burned. And it's that variety thing again. You've got plenty of people buying the currently hot stuff. If you've got something different, you want the people who aren't into that trend to be able to easily spot the different stuff. Right now, if I hit the fantasy section and see a book cover that doesn't feature a black-clad, tattooed chick with her back to me, I will probably pick it up, just to see what it's about, because it's different and doesn't look like the books that I know I'm not looking for.

4) Try to understand the trend.
For an industry that is so driven by public tastes, it doesn't seem like publishers do much market research. Harlequin does focus groups and surveys, but I don't know of too many others who've done things like that. Knowing why readers are all over a certain kind of book and what they like about those books could make a big difference in avoiding the doom loop. It could help publishers avoid flooding the market with books readers won't respond to, and even as the trend fizzles, it could help publishers know which books to stick with or which elements they can carry over to other trends so that they can still satisfy those readers. I got the feeling that the publishers never really understood the appeal of chick lit, for example. They just reacted by flinging out a lot of stuff that looked kind of like it until the market was flooded and the trend tanked. There's been a lot of talk about finding the next Harry Potter, but it doesn't seem like they've bothered to look into what the various market segments found most appealing in those books -- and I'll bet that kids were into slightly different things than teen boys, who were into slightly different aspects than teen girls, and then adult men and women were into yet other aspects. You might not be able to find something else that crosses demographic lines to such a massive extent, but finding out what those various groups were looking for could have helped publishers fill that gap within each of the groups. Instead, all they seem to be doing is looking for "boy with magic powers" stories to fill that gap.

5) Look beyond the bottom line numbers to find potential you can do something with.
I think a lot of the doom looping on both the publisher side and the bookseller side is because of the way sales are measured. I don't think anyone actually tracks overall sales by type of book. Stores may track title sales or department sales, but they're probably not tracking sales of, say, urban fantasies with vampire heroes. Likewise with publishers, who track title and author results, and they usually look at total sales, period. They don't seem to have a way of noticing that the same readership is being spread out among more books, and they don't seem to care as much about steady, ongoing sales as they do big bursts that make a splash. That goes back to the research -- if you've got a book that is selling steadily if not spectacularly, that is getting lots of positive reader response, and that seems to have "legs" beyond the initial release date, which is the way a lot of non-trend books seem to go, then it might be a good idea to look into why it hasn't managed to break out -- is the market really limited to the relatively small number of people who are really into that book, or is there some reason why other readers who might like that book aren't finding it? Find a bunch of readers, survey them on their reading habits and tastes (genres they like, which bookstore sections they shop in, favorite authors, favorite books), give them copies of the book, then survey them after they've read it on what they think about it, where they'd look for it in a store, maybe what their impression of the cover is and whether they'd have bought it if they'd seen it. I bet it would be eye-opening to correlate reading preferences to impressions of the book, and my guess is that most of the time the problem is that the book is being marketed badly so that people who might like it don't find it. And that will change the impact of trends because one reason trends get hot is because those books become so easy to find. If you can improve the performance of existing books/authors, trends become less important. For an industry that functions like Big Business in so many respects, it's amazing how non-businesslike they act when it comes to marketing and sales. They seldom do focus group tests on things like covers and cover copy. It's like they expect Big Business results, but the things that really affect results are still done on gut instinct. The closest they come to getting cover feedback is with the major chain buyers, who can trigger a cover change if they hate the cover but think the book has potential.

6) Take moderate risks instead of copycatting.
This is one of those lessons they never seem to learn. So many of the huge bestsellers literally came out of nowhere. They were rejected by just about every publisher around and sold for relatively low advances (see the first Harry Potter book). The initial book may not even have done that well, but sales gained momentum as the series progressed. What's really sad is that often the follow-up books that come in a trend go for far more money than the initial hit that sets off the doom loop. That first book may have sold for only a few thousand dollars, but then when the trend gets hot, similar books during the buying frenzy will command huge advances. Of course, that initial author does eventually earn the money in royalties and will get higher advances for later books, but those later authors will probably not earn out their advances and will end up making more money than the books are really worth. Which is most profitable for the publishers? And yet so many are afraid to step out there and buy something that isn't just like whatever's currently hot, preferring to throw a lot of money at something trendy. Since a publisher has a lot to do with which books become bestsellers (as I've mentioned before), it seems like buying something different for a modest advance and then putting the money into pushing it could pay off far better than buying something trendy for a huge advance and then having to also pay to push it in order to make the book earn enough to make up for the huge advance.

7) Be patient.
This problem probably has a lot to do with the fact that many of the publishers are owned by entertainment conglomerates who are used to overnight ratings and weekend box-office reports, so they treat books the same way. But someone can see a movie on Friday night and tell several friends right away so that those people can go on Saturday, and then they can tell more people, who go on Sunday, and you're already getting word-of-mouth results on opening weekend. Books don't work that way. First, unless it's a highly anticipated new release, it might not even be on the shelf on release day. Even if someone buys it on release day, she may not get around to reading it until the weekend. It may take a few days to read it, so it may be a week after release day before she can tell anyone else about it. Then that person may not read it right away, so by the time word of mouth can spread beyond one level, the book is probably out of co-op placement at the front of the store, and it's even harder for someone browsing the store to see it and realize that's the book her friends were talking about. Plus, they're really bad about not really pulling the marketing trigger until release date. I was lucky if they put up the information about the book at the online bookstores on the release date. Apparently, it was policy that they didn't put up information like the cover copy and reviews until release day, which made it hard for someone who stumbled across it while browsing to be able to decide to buy it or look for it. I can see the argument that you don't want to spend a lot of energy marketing something that people can't just buy right away, but at the same time, if you're expecting most of the book's sales to come in the first two weeks, and if you'll consider the book a failure if it doesn't have big sales in those first two weeks, regardless of how well it sells in the long term, and if you're counting on word of mouth to do most of your marketing for you, then you need to get the conversations about the book going before the release date.

8) Rethink book advertising.
Most book advertising, quite frankly, sucks. It's like there's a generic book ad template out there that everyone uses -- the cover of the book, a few review quotes, maybe a picture of the author if the author is really famous. I bet you probably have a vivid mental image of the generic book ad right now. Publishers like to tell lower-tier authors that advertising doesn't sell books, as justification for not doing any advertising for their books. But then they go and spend a fortune on (really lame) ads for the big-name authors. The only reason those ads work is that those are authors with a huge enough fan base that all it takes to sell zillions of books is just announcing that the author has a new book out. They don't even have to bother with dropping the cover and quotes into the generic book ad template. They really just need to fill half a page of USA Today with "The New Book By Nora Roberts Is In Stores Now" in giant print. I'm not even sure how well those ads work. To a large extent, they're ego sops for the authors. If a publisher wants to retain a bestselling author, they have to demonstrate their commitment to the author, and one way of demonstrating that commitment is by taking out a full-page ad in the New York Times book review section. As a result, the majority of a publisher's advertising budget is spent on very expensive ads that may or may not do any good for books that are guaranteed to sell well, even without advertising.

The generic book ad template does nothing to sell books by new or less famous authors because it doesn't say enough about the book to allow people to know if they'd even be interested in such a thing. It would take truly creative advertising that goes beyond the cover-and-quotes model -- something like you see for other products, where the ad has an attention-getting headline and some clever copy that gives at least a feel for the story. I don't think publishers have the budget, even if they did cut back on the pricey ads for bestsellers, to do a real, effective national advertising campaign that could sell books by entirely unknown authors on a very wide scale. But I think you could do a really effective ad campaign online for a reasonable cost -- do the clever headline and the fact that it's about a book in the ad, and have the ad link to a site with all the info about the book, including an excerpt and purchase info. You can really target specific demographics that way and hit a good number of people who are likely to be interested for far less money than a single small ad in a national publication. I know someone whose publisher is doing that for her books, and she saw her web hits and sales really go up when they advertised, of all places, on I Can Has Cheezburger. I've halfway considered doing an ad for my series at GraphJam, since it's focused on office humor, so it's a good tie-in, and is one of the less expensive sites in that group, but I don't have the resources to make the kind of campaign out of it that it would take to really get results. Plus, I'm not sure how widely available in bookstores my whole series is now, and it would be rather pointless to advertise something people couldn't find other than online.

At any rate, it's nearly impossible for readers to discover the majority of new books being published right now, and that doesn't sound like a very good business model to me, to put out products you have no way of knowing if people will like, packaged in a way you don't know will actually appeal to the customers, and without doing much of anything to make potential customers aware that these products exist.

Why There's a Doom Loop

NaNo update: I should hit the halfway point today! Yesterday was the first time I finished my target word count early in the day without having anything else I needed to work on. Theoretically, that should have meant the rest of the day was free, but I found myself writing nearly 2,000 more words and feeling guilty when I wasn't writing. I still managed to do a ton of laundry and some tidying, but I need to work on that idea of giving myself free time after meeting my writing goals.

To follow up from yesterday's post, why does the publishing world operate in a doom loop when it should seem obvious to anyone with common sense that it doesn't work?

For one thing, I'm sure I vastly oversimplified the scenario. There are so many people and numbers and books involved that it may be impossible to really see the pattern, especially not from within the company, and changing anything would mean taking the kind of huge risks that businesses usually avoid.

For another, publishing certainly isn't alone. Almost every industry I've dealt with functioned in a kind of doom loop. You see similar things in movies, television and music. Something is successful, everyone jumps on the bandwagon and soon there aren't a lot of other options, so they lose the part of the audience that doesn't see anything they like, and then the remaining audience is spread too thin across what's left until everything tanks, and it starts all over again when someone takes a risk to do something new. Everyone sits around waiting for someone else to be the one to go out on a limb with the new thing, and then they're willing to pounce when it works, but then they kill it when they all go overboard with it because no one wants to be the one to cut back on doing something that's currently popular, even though they're flooding the market.

I didn't work with publishing in the Good Old Days, so I don't know if what I've heard is merely misty water-colored memories tinted heavily by nostalgia, but apparently it used to be a "gentleman's endeavor." Someone with money who liked books would set up a publishing house, and since there were no computers to track the minute details of profit and loss, the business decisions were mostly made on gut instinct and weighing the merits of individual books, and as long as the trust fund was still more or less intact, then all was well. But I suspect that if that model had really been all that successful, those publishers would still be around in more or less that form. Instead, though, they merged or were bought out, and now major corporate entities own most of the publishers. There are about five or six major conglomerates these days, encompassing all the little publishers from days of yore. Names like News Corp., Viacom and Disney are involved, and the groups that aren't owned by entertainment giants are owned by foreign holding companies that may or may not have anything to do with books. That means it's now about the money, and the fast money, at that, because the shareholders want to see their stock prices go up. It's very hard to take a "flywheel" approach in a publicly traded company because Wall Street likes to see activity. Steady momentum doesn't look like activity.

Another thing about the Good Old Days was that they didn't have elaborate inventory-tracking systems and point-of-sale data recording. Bookstores knew what they'd sold when they saw an empty spot on the shelf or noticed the book going out the door. Publishers knew what books were selling and what books weren't when they got returned books from the stores or orders for more books. That could have been months later, and when you don't get sales data until months later, it's really hard to jump on trends. Now they know day-by-day exactly how a book is selling, and all decisions are made on those hard numbers, often just looking at the bottom line instead of considering other data points. With services like Bookscan, publishers now also have access to numbers for every book, even their competitors', so that makes it that much easier to jump on a bandwagon when they see something taking off, and they have all those numbers to plug into P&L projections.

One big problem is that it's nearly impossible to track demand that's not being met. I used to do PR for a company that did supply chain management software (you see why I write books now instead?), and supposedly they could make sure that things that customers wanted would be where they wanted them, when they wanted them by analyzing sales data and feeding that into ordering systems. I stumped a room full of engineers by asking what happened if something someone wanted wasn't in the store, so there was no sales data. They knew what customers were buying and could supply more of the same, but they had no way of knowing about potential sales that they'd lost, either because that item was out of stock that day or because the item didn't exist. And I haven't thought of a reliable way of capturing that. When the helpful cashier asks if you found everything you were looking for, what she means is was there a product that exists that they carry that you didn't find on their shelves that day -- maybe because you didn't know where they shelved it or because they were out. She's not gathering information on what you'd really like to find but that no one makes.

At bookstores, you can ask for books they don't stock to be special ordered, and that often will trigger the computer inventory system to put them in the store's usual inventory. But if no one's publishing what you want to read, there's no real way of letting publishers know that. All they can do to measure public taste is see how well what they make available sells, and that tends to trigger the doom loop because it just feeds on itself.

So, say I'm browsing a bookstore and a helpful bookseller notices me wandering aimlessly around the shelves and frowning. After she catches me in a flying tackle when I try to avoid getting help even though I really need it (I have issues with that), she sits on my back and asks if there's something I'm looking for. She can only really help me if I know a title or author she can type into the computer and tell me if that book is in stock or if she has to order it for me. If she's a really knowledgeable bookseller, she can ask about the kind of book I'm looking for and maybe make a recommendation based on her own observations and reading. So, because she's sitting on my back and won't let me go until I let her help me, I tell her that I'd like to find a fun contemporary-set fantasy novel that's more about magic and wizards and stuff like that in the modern world, and not about vampires, werewolves and all that dark stuff. Something more like Harry Potter, with that sense of whimsy even as the plots got serious, but for grown-ups. And not a paranormal romance, either. I don't mind romance mixed in, but I want the story to focus on the fantasy, not the romance. "Hmm," she might say, "have you read Shanna Swendson?" I'd say that I am Shanna Swendson, and therefore I've read that whole series, thank you very much. I want something like that without me having to write it. If she can't think of anything to recommend, we're both out of luck. I don't find a book, and she doesn't make a sale. After she lets me up, it's not like she can get on the Batphone to corporate headquarters and let them know about the kind of book a customer was looking for that they didn't have. The bookstore chain can't send out an alert to publishers saying "Here are the kinds of books our customers requested this week. Maybe you should publish something like this."

I don't think it would do any good for readers to go directly to publishers and say what they'd love to see. I know I've chatted with editor friends, but that doesn't help, as they can only go with what authors send them, and then there's all that pesky P&L stuff, so that if something like that doesn't exist, they can't get numbers and will have trouble getting corporate buy-in even if someone writes it. They're not going to go out seeking a certain kind of manuscript on the basis of a few readers saying what they'd love to see. I have heard editors at conventions asking people what they'd like to see more of, but a few people who really want something doesn't mean that thousands of people are dying for that same thing. Obviously, there isn't a huge hunger for the kind of light contemporary fantasy I'm looking for or else my books would be selling a lot better, since there aren't a lot of other options out there for readers who want that kind of thing (or, perhaps, the people who really want that kind of thing aren't finding these books because they aren't shelved as fantasy, but that's an old, futile argument).

So, I think that's a lot of the problem. The decisions are made based on which items out of those currently available sell well -- and even there, they don't actually know why they're selling or not selling, so that doesn't help in making other decisions. And there's no way to know who's not buying books and why not, so the trends sort of feed on themselves.

Plus, I don't think the publishers and booksellers take responsibility for their roles in the trends. They act like it's all the readers at fault -- the readers were the ones driving the trend by buying the books and the readers were the ones who rejected the trend when they stopped buying the books. There may be some readers who are heavily influenced by trends and who will only read what's popular, but the majority are most likely reading what they like out of what's available. When a trend takes off, it's not because all the readers only want to read that kind of book. When a trend dies, it's not because readers who used to like that thing have totally changed their tastes and no longer do (though they may get burned out when there's nothing else to read). The trend happens because that's what publishers are putting out there and pushing. That's where they focus their marketing. Because of that marketing, that's what bookstores are buying, and that's what you'll see prominently displayed. And, guess what, people are more likely to buy books they can see. If something is trendy and you like that sort of thing, you can stand at the table in the bookstore aisle and gather an armload of books. You don't need word of mouth to find those books. If what you like isn't trendy, you may have to dig harder to find fewer books to your taste. You'll have to read book blogs or online bookstore recommendations, or dig through the shelves at the back of the store. Which kind of book is going to sell better?

Tomorrow, I'll have my recommendations to whoever wants to spearhead the revolution and change things (actually running the revolution would be too much work).

The Publishing Doom Loop

NaNo progress: I topped 20,000 words last night and have more than made up for the Saturday off. However, I sense an "all" binge in the making. We'll see if I give into it or if I hold fast to the idea of giving myself time to have a life and find balance.

Thanks for all the book recommendations. I think I know what I'll buy next time I'm near a bookstore so I can do my part to Save Publishing and I also have a library list. Not that I was running out of things to read. My issue was finding things I wanted to buy. But a list of books to read is always good.

Yesterday, I blamed the publishing doom loop for the reason I can't find much that I want to read right now. That concept came from the business book Good to Great, and I did a whole post on how that book might apply to writers. But I think the doom loop concept applies more to the publishing industry, as a whole.

As a refresher, the ideal is to go with the "flywheel" approach, where you can slowly and steadily build momentum over time until that momentum keeps it turning with minimal effort. That requires consistency and sticking with things rather than constantly changing course. The opposite is the doom loop, where you get into a vicious cycle of chasing after trends and changing direction so that you never end up getting anywhere.

So, here's how I see the publishing doom loop working, based on whatever insight I've gleaned from dealing with this industry.

Stage One:
A book comes seemingly out of nowhere to become a huge bestseller. It's new and fresh, and there hasn't really been much of anything like it before. Quite often, it's a book that was rejected by almost every other publisher, not because it wasn't a good book but because they didn't know what to do with it. It didn't fit into a convenient niche. Because it was new and unique, there was nothing else to compare it to. When an editor makes a pitch for a publisher to buy a book, the editor doesn't just make a case for what a great book it is and how much people will like it. She also has to pull together projected profit and loss numbers about how the book will be expected to sell, and those numbers come from looking at the performance of similar books. With no similar books, there aren't good numbers for the P&L projections, and that means the bean counters and the sales staff will give it the big thumbs down. The publisher that bought the book took a big risk, but that risk paid off.

Stage Two:
All those publishers that originally rejected the bestselling book now want to jump on the bandwagon and publish something similar. Because of the stellar performance of that book, their P&L projections on similar projects all look really promising, so the bean counters and sales staff give a big thumbs up. Never mind that the other things kind of like the original book they rejected earlier may not actually be as good. Every publisher in town wants a book like that, so anything that comes close will likely sell for a pretty high advance and get a good promotional push. Meanwhile, the readers who loved the original book have been looking for something more like it, so they pounce on these new books, and they become bestsellers.

Hollywood notices the trend and starts optioning books for film adaptation. Editors start talking at writing conferences or in interviews about how they'd love to see more books like this.

Stage Three:
All those bestsellers make the publishers giddy. They want even more books like that, to the point that they're buying things they might not have considered previously. But hey, the P&L projections look amazing, so who cares? There's a clearly demonstrated demand for this kind of book, and readers want more, more, more! When they can't fill slots with this kind of book, they find ways to package other, slightly similar books in ways that make them look like they kind of might possibly be books like this. They may encourage some of their current authors who aren't writing this kind of book to try writing one like it. Meanwhile, there are fewer and fewer slots left open for any other kind of book -- so that some of those authors already working with the publisher may not be able to sell books unless they try writing this kind of book. Authors who want to break in look at this as their big chance and try writing this kind of book, even if that's not what they read and enjoy. Readers who aren't into the new trend can't find anything to read and may even get out of the habit of book shopping so that sales of other kinds of books drop, and those numbers validate the publishers' decision to focus on this trend.

Things start to take on a look of sameness at the bookstore. The books in that hot subgenre/category reach critical mass, and even the devoted readers who love books like that can't possibly buy them all. They start picking and choosing, and they're seeing a quality drop as the authors who were merely jumping on the bandwagon or who were more or less forced onto the bandwagon don't produce books these readers find very satisfying. Instead of all the readers buying all of the few books like that available, as before, all those readers are spread out over a wider number of books, so the sales numbers for each individual book are lower, even if overall total sales in that subgenre/category remain high.

Stage Four:
Because the way publishers and bookstores track sales is on a book-by-book level, all they see is that sales are dropping. When sales drop on certain titles, that means the comparable numbers for future potential books like that look worse, and the publishers start wondering if the trend is about to end. The bookstore chains order fewer of each title like that or fewer of those authors' next books because they base their orders on previous sales. Meanwhile, readers are mostly still enthusiastic about that kind of book, though they're starting to be even more careful about their purchases because they've been burned on the lower-quality books the publisher flooded the market with or with the books that weren't actually like that but that were given covers and marketing treatment to look like that. After being burned, they learn to go with known quantities and stick to the first-wave authors they've read before and loved. They're leery of new authors.

Stage Five:
Books by authors who weren't in that first wave of the trend start tanking, so publishers are leery of buying any more, and the bookstores don't order as much of the books that are already in the pipeline, which guarantees that the books will tank before readers even get a chance to consider them. The publishers evaluate the situation and decide that the problem was that all those books were too similar. They start looking for books that are similar to the trend, but different somehow, with some kind of twist. They reject anything that's too much like the original books that started the trend, except maybe by that core of first-wave authors who continue to sell well. Some of those authors have grown bored with writing that type of book and try to move on to something else. The more marginal authors who came along at a bad time and ended up being victim to the downward trend have to reinvent themselves.

Meanwhile, the readers are still enthusiastic about that kind of book and buy a lot of their favorites, but there are still too many books for them to buy them all, and they become pickier. The people who work at bookstores and who see the kind of books they ring up at the cash register, instead of looking at the performance of each individual ISBN, think those books are still hot because they sell a lot of books like that.

Stage Six:
The "same, but different" books start hitting the shelves. The readers who've been driving the trend, who liked that kind of book, don't really like the "same, but different" books, so they tank. There was a reason they liked the original books, and these new ones are missing the mark. All that's left of the kind of books these readers wanted are the ones written by those bestselling authors who still have the leeway to write the "classic" books of that type without trying to be different. Those continue to sell well, but the rest of that market totally dies. The publishers conclude that no one wants books like that anymore, and the trend is dead. The bestselling authors from that trend are now considered author brands and not part of the trend. Their books continue to sell well, but publishers won't even look at anything else that looks remotely like the books in that trend, and they've pretty much dropped all their midlist authors who were part of that trend, unless they've been able to switch gears and write something different. Readers get frustrated because they can't find new books by some of the authors they liked. They still like those books, and they bought a lot of them, so they don't understand why they went away like that. The surviving bestsellers can't write fast enough to provide enough books like that, and the readers have gone from feast to famine. When the surviving authors do have books out, they're smash hits. Bookstore clerks continue to think that these books are hot because whatever they get like that now, they sell a lot of, and their customers keep asking for more like that.

Meanwhile, a new manuscript is making the rounds, but most of the publishers don't know what to do with it because there isn't anything like it already on the market for them to plug comparable numbers into a P&L sheet.

Stage Seven:
One publisher takes a chance and buys that book, which becomes a major bestseller. And it all begins again.

Book Searching

NaNo update: I more than made up for the Thursday lapse on Friday, finishing up the Thursday goal, hitting the Friday goal, and then going past that. Then Saturday was a lost day. I was out all day and then too tired to get anything done. I got my target word count plus a little extra done on Sunday, so that extra plus the Friday extra means I don't have to go too far over today's target word count to make up for doing nothing on Saturday. The story is flowing, and I'm really liking these characters. I've already accomplished my errand for the day, and it's a nice rainy day, which means good writing weather and nothing that should get in the way of my writing.

A blog by an anonymous editor had a post last week about some of the current economic challenges in the publishing industry and why a lot of returns right now is bad for bookstores, publishers and authors, and how we could all make a difference and help the cause of books by just buying one book this weekend. As a bookoholic, I'm totally on board with any scheme that requires me to buy a book as a civic duty, in spite of the stack of books I currently have checked out of the library and the towering to-be-read pile that will someday topple and kill me.

So I started browsing the online bookstores to see what might catch my fancy of something that's currently in print and that I might possibly find in one of my local stores. And it seems like the current publishing doom loops are leaving me out in the cold. Apparently, the things I like and want to read aren't what's currently in vogue. The books that caught my eye were all either out of print or not being published in the United States, while no method of searching managed to bring up something that really fit what I wanted to find (browsing by category, looking at the "people who bought this also bought" lists for books I'd liked). That could be why my book buying has been down significantly in the past year (other than the fact that they opened a nice, new library two blocks from my house). I'm reading older stuff from the library that isn't available in bookstores and not finding newer stuff to my taste. Maybe I'm a total oddball and the only one with this problem, but it is possible that the publishing problem isn't purely related to the economics of returns and how people are choosing to spend their money. There could be more people like me who would like to spend money if we could find something to spend it on.

Here's what I'd love to find:

A good gothic, something in the vein of Mary Stewart. You know, spooky village or old house, lots of secrets that put Our Heroine in danger, a man who seems good but who turns out to be evil, and a man who seems dark and dangerous but who turns out to be good. I wouldn't mind it being a little updated from the heyday of the gothic, whether in a contemporary setting or in a historical one, with the heroine being allowed to have a brain instead of just being the damsel in distress, and no cover illustrations of a girl in a white nightgown fleeing a castle while glancing over her shoulder. Some of the romance publishers have done what they call modern gothics, but they've mostly consisted of books about freaky men who live alone in remote mansions bringing about the sexual awakenings of women who somehow get stranded at said mansions. What I'm looking for is that blend of mystery, suspense, atmosphere and a touch of romance.

A lighter contemporary-set fantasy, something in the vein of the Harry Potter books, but for grownups (or, you know, like my books). Yeah, the Harry Potter books got pretty dark and serious in places and had some serious consequences but I still wouldn't consider them truly dark because they always maintained that sense of whimsy and they didn't wallow in the darkness. Harry himself always remained firmly on the side of light. Too much of contemporary-set/urban fantasy wallows in the darkness, without that sense of fun and whimsy (unless you count a wise-cracking heroine). I haven't found anything that really scratches that itch for me. The fantasy/chick lit hybrids have been a little too focused on the romance and relationships (and sex) without the world-building (too much real world), the urban fantasy is too dark, and the fantasy romance tends to focus on vampires and sex and has gone very erotic. Basically, I don't want anything that could use my Halloween costume as the cover illustration. I know this is a really narrow niche, but I can't be the only one writing it or the only one who wants it.

A fun epic or traditional-style fantasy. Not necessarily funny -- I have Terry Pratchett for that -- but more in the vein of adventure romp instead of facing the Ultimate Evil that will suck the entire world down into the pits of hell if the hero doesn't succeed. Yeah, you want the stakes to be high, but that doesn't always have to mean the end of the world. The stakes can be personal and still be high. I think that's why I enjoyed that Doris Egan series so much. The main characters were in peril and their situation was life or death, but they weren't facing Unspeakable, Ultimate Evil. They were caught (in my favorite book in the series) between Overzealous Bureaucrat and Ruthless Outlaw, so their fates were at stake, but the fate of the whole world wasn't at stake. So give me quests, give me dragons to slay, give me corrupt wizards who want to take over the kingdom (rather than the whole world), give me princes or princesses who need rescuing. I want a fun adventure story with magic involved. And preferably without lots of darkness, demons, hell-spawn, etc.

A classic chick-lit novel. The publishing doom loop really struck here. A few funny novels about single women navigating the minefield of bad bosses and worse boyfriends with the help of their friends were hits, so suddenly publishers were scooping up more and more of the same. And then when they had too much of the same old thing, they wanted something "different," but that different wasn't as much fun (to me), and they entirely walked away from any at all of the original recipe. I guess they've never thought of just branching out. Instead, it's all or nothing. So the books filling that slot now tend to be about issues and family woes, etc. Or else motherhood and parenting. Way too many of them have cover blurbs that start along the lines of "She thought she had the perfect life with her perfect husband, but then he walked out/she discovered he was cheating, and suddenly her life was different." I did find a few old books I hadn't read yet (some imports) on a used bookstore crawl, and I'm hoarding them. None of the authors I really love have anything coming out soon in the US, or if they do, they've moved on to the manic mommy/departing husband type books. They're still publishing some of the big names, but the second tier of British authors doesn't seem to be hitting these shores.

A mystery that falls somewhere in between "cozy" and "gritty." The so-called cozies -- the ones without a lot of gore or violence (a la a lot of Agatha Christie) -- have gotten pretty twee, with all sorts of wacky gimmicks, so that the amateur sleuth has to have some entirely unrelated career that lends itself to clever pun titles and things to include in the books, like recipes or knitting patterns. I'm sorry, but I find it hard to believe a cake decorator whose clients keep getting murdered would stay in business for long. On the other end, we have the mystery equivalent of urban fantasy, with hardcore grit and gore, really rough language and graphic sex. If it's a series, I'd like the personal lives of the main characters to actually progress instead of them remaining in a ridiculous holding pattern. Really, I guess I'd like more people writing like Dick Francis. Not necessarily involving horses, but with that mix of action, danger, mystery and a hint of romance (but not in the same way as the gothics). I have a stack of Dorothy Sayers books to get through, and that's right along the lines of what I want, but it doesn't really help in the "buy books to help save the publishing industry" effort.

Is anyone else having similar difficulties finding what you want to read? Of course, any recommendations of any recent/current books along these lines would be appreciated.

If you do find things you want to buy, buying books now could make a difference for bookstores, authors and publishers (and you might not find a lot if you wait much later because they're purging inventory for Christmas stuff). If you want to be strategic about your purchases, support the authors you like because if their books are selling, they may be less likely to be selected to be stripped and/or returned. Support the genre you like so it can maintain its shelf space and get new books in without returns. My guess is that the really vulnerable books right now are those that are on the front tables that aren't bestsellers because once the co-op time runs out, if the books still haven't sold, they'll be the easiest to sweep away to make room for the Christmas displays.

Ruining Childhood Memories

Oh, the new pillow worked like a charm. Normally, it takes me a while to get used to a new pillow, and I wasn't sure I got the right kind, considering there are now dozens of very specific kinds of pillows, depending on how you sleep (and there must be a lot of side sleepers because all the specific side-sleeper pillows were sold out except in king size), but it worked well enough that I slept ridiculously late (I must have been short on sleep) and woke up with full range of movement in my neck, which hasn't happened for a while.

I found out yesterday one of the reasons why I don't manage to write three books a year. Not every day works out to be the kind of writing day when I can easily dash off a couple of thousand words. I did have the hour of writing time, but when the rest of the day is spent dashing about and taking care of Real Life, it's a lot harder to summon the mental energy to write. I might have been able to hit my target word count if I'd done that plotting/planning, but I reached a brick wall a thousand words in and knew I needed to do some thinking before moving on. But I did do a thousand words, and because I've been ahead of my target every other day, I'm still ahead of my planned pace. That just means that today I need to do some brainstorming, and the only bit of Real Life I have to deal with is the post office.

Last week I mentioned finding the final two books in Joan Aiken's Wolves series. I kind of skimmed through them then (along with the one I own that comes before them) just to see what happened, but now I've actually read them, and I think I'm even more disappointed. I believe I said in response to a comment that my problem wasn't that the books got dark, since they started pretty dark, with the first book being about children in a workhouse. I take that back. The next-to-last book involves some pretty graphic discussion about sadistic torture, plus some gory on-stage deaths, some of which are utterly senseless, and one of which was rather disturbing, in that it was treated so callously. The person who died wasn't really a good person, but was the kind of person who never really had a chance to be good. She gets killed while saving the life of one of the good guys (somewhat inadvertently -- she's not planning to sacrifice herself, but she does step between him and the bad guy and gets hit instead) and yet the good guys are all "well, no big loss" and even tell the one whose life she saved not to worry about it because she was basically useless. Mostly, I think she was a Mary Sue victim, in that she wanted the same thing the book's Mary Sue wanted, and therefore she deserved to die. And all this is in a children's book. I'm not one of those people who thinks the precious darlings need to be shielded from everything icky, but I'm 40 years old and was freaked out by this stuff, so I'm guessing it's a bit much for the under-twelve crowd. Or, it should be. I hate the idea of kids that age being okay with this sort of thing.

There may be spoilers in the following rant. I'll try to keep discussion of the latest books vague, but it's hard to discuss the later books without getting into the major revelations that came from Black Hearts in Battersea, so if you've read the earlier posts and were intrigued by that book, move along, there's nothing to see here. And I do still love that book. I'm just planning to negate the existence of the later books.

I'm going to have to assume that the last two books were written when she was rather old and not entirely all there (I think the last was published posthumously) and that the publisher was just glad to get a couple more books out of her before she was gone because I have a hard time imagining an editor not going, "Uh, what?" We've definitely gone from alt-history Dickens-lite to all-out quirky fantasy, now even with made-up kingdoms, flying monsters, magical creatures, and a witch who rides a golf club instead of a broom (which I wouldn't be opposed to if the series hadn't started much more realistically). The plots for the last books more or less consist of the good guys wandering around with no purpose, and then the bad guys tripping over their own feet, so that the good guys win. The main plot for the final book is a quest that is resolved after some wandering around with one of the characters getting a letter telling them where to find what they've been looking for.

Continuity goes right out the window. Granted, timelines were never her strong suit. In the good books she even managed to have conflicting timelines within the same book, which makes me wonder where the copy editor was. Martha the Super Copy Editor would have totally put in a comment to the effect of "You say here that he was eight when this event occurred, yet on page X you say it happened five years ago, and on page X you established that he is now fifteen, which would mean it happened when he was ten. Which is correct?" But by the end, she moves around events that happened during previous books, probably because if you pay attention to the number of years that would have had to pass, all of the main characters would be well into their twenties by this point (and yet, in the final book, she has Simon clearly remembering an event that earlier in the book was said to take place 25 years ago).

And, yeah, Dido remains a Mary Sue, even gaining super special psychic powers. As an author, I can understand wanting to write about the character who most interests you, so she had every right to entirely switch the focus of the series, even if it did disappoint me (however, also as an author, I can't imagine completely changing the life of a character at the end of a book and then having all the consequences of that change take place off-stage without dealing with them at all. Seriously, take a guy who's been living in a cave in the woods and raising geese, who's barely getting used to the idea of sleeping indoors, and have him discover that he's a viscount and heir to a dukedom and send him to live in a palace, and you don't even write that story?). I can also see wanting to pair up your two major series characters, no matter how improbable that pairing is (though if you really want us to feel like they belong together and that it's a real tragedy that they can't be together, it might help to have them actually be around each other for more than five pages per book).

But in the next-to-last book (Midwinter Nightengale) she committed the unforgivable sin, from my perspective: she Marty Stued (or Gary Stued, depending on which term you prefer) Simon. He's one of my lifelong favorite literary characters, one of my biggest literary crushes, one of my Book Boyfriends. I'd just been thinking after re-reading the second book that this was a textbook example of how to write a character who's pretty much a paragon of virtue without him being a Marty Stu, which isn't easy. He's a nice guy who is kind, clever and brave, just about everyone likes him, he can do almost anything, he's good with animals, he has a particular special skill, and he turns out to be the long-lost heir to a dukedom. But he still comes across as a real person. He has very human reactions to things -- he snaps when he gets frustrated, he has a temper that occasionally shows up, he can be smug and cheeky when he's outwitted someone. He's also not the only person who is allowed to have virtues. Sophie is just as nice and kind as he is, maybe even more so (and for good reason, as it turns out), and he does run into a lot of other nice people, and people like him because he's nice to them. He has a lot of skills because he's been fending for himself most of his life, doing a lot of odd jobs, and that tends to lead to a broad skill set. He is a gifted artist, but he's not really Magically Special at it. He still has to go to art school, and the teacher is pretty rough on him in making him work to live up to his potential. He's good with animals because he's probably spent more time with animals than with people, so he understands how to deal with them, and again it's not a Magical Specialness because the animals still act according to their natures around him. He gets attacked by wolves just like everyone else instead of the wolves turning into gentle lap dogs around him. But in the later book, suddenly he's become the flipping Pied Piper, where animals just flock to him and follow him around, killer bears become his friends, his pet owl intercepts carrier pigeons and brings them unharmed to him, and sheep just magically do stuff to make things easier for him. All the while, he never has to make hard decisions, people who threaten him just conveniently fall off cliffs, and he's suddenly next in line for the throne. The last book didn't bother me quite as much because he was so different it no longer felt like it was even supposed to be the same character, but in the next-to-last, he still had moments of being the guy I remembered, so it bugged more.

Now I have to erase those last couple of books from my brain so I can hold onto the memories of what I loved. I used to mock the more rabid Star Wars geeks who claimed that George Lucas raped their childhood in making the special editions and prequels, but now I can kind of understand.

Note to self: Start putting more money away for retirement so I don't have to try to keep writing past the point when I'm not really mentally up to it.

NaNo Lessons Thus Far

The book proposal is done (for now) and back with my agent, which means I'm down to just one project at a time and I may be able to focus a little more on the NaNo book, like maybe doing something wild and crazy and figuring out what's supposed to be happening. I have a sense of the general plot, but now I'm at the point where I need to figure out some specific things and pulling something out of thin air won't work as well. I am still on target, actually a little ahead of schedule.

And, in spite of the working on two projects thing and not knowing for sure where I'm going, it's been surprisingly easy. It generally takes a little more than an hour to write those 2,000 words. That means, theoretically, that in one hour a day I could write a full-length novel in less than two months. Add another couple of months for revisions and polishing. So, theoretically, with one hour of work a day (possibly more during revisions), I could write three books a year.

Which makes me wonder why I've been getting about one a year done and still never seem to have any time.

I've also learned that not only can I write before 3 in the afternoon, but I can even write before noon. In fact, it seems easier to just buckle down and do it and get it over with. Yesterday I hit the writing time late in the day because I was wrapping up the proposal and then I had something else due that day, and the don't wannas were a lot stronger when four o'clock rolled around and I finally had time to write. I'm looking forward to seeing how liberating it feels now that I'm down to one project and I can potentially be done with my goals for the day by noon.

Today's going to be another late start, though, since I spent most of the morning judging an elementary school writing contest. I was really impressed with some of the entries, given the ages of the kids involved. I admit I had to read through them all first to get in the right mindset because it's very difficult to go from doing a final, intensely critical edit on a professional book project and then immediately read something written by a six-year-old. I had to tone back the critical part of the brain. A few entries had me laughing out loud (and not necessarily due to the intent of the writer). I noticed a definite male/female divide. The girls tended to write stories or essays about the importance of volunteering or discovering the true meaning of friendship. The boys all wrote either about their moment of glory in an athletic event or about things like the moon blowing up. There was a fair amount of science fiction from the boys. I was quite the girly girl, wearing frilly dresses and the like, but I probably would have written one of the "boy" entries, especially in my major post-Star Wars phase.

The judging was in the elementary school library, and although it was a lovely library, I was surprised by how few books there were -- and this is a wealthy school. There was a lot of blank space on the shelves, so maybe a lot of the books are checked out at any given time, which would make it hard to tell what they really have. I found some of my old favorites, but a lot of the things I looked for, they didn't have on the shelf.

Before I can get to writing, I have to do the grocery shopping and I need to make a big splurge and buy some new pillows. I've had a sore neck for more than a week now and finally figured out it was because my pillows aren't very comfortable anymore. They've been smashed too flat to keep my head at a good angle, and since I'm a side sleeper, that's pretty crucial. I'm sure I'll write much better when my neck isn't sore. I will have to report the results tomorrow.

Archetypes: Putting it All Together

I'm still plugging away on schedule on the NaNo project, and I didn't have to do as much backtracking as I thought, though I did come up with one other thing I want to go back and add. And I finally made it through this round of revisions on the proposal, the major surgery part. It probably needs a good polish, and then I can get to focusing 100 percent on the NaNo book. The creativity breeds creativity rule is fully in effect, as the plot squirrels in my brain are churning out lots of good daydreamy stuff, most of which has nothing to do with anything I'm currently writing (a lot of mental fanfic), but I think the daydreamy stuff has given me a couple of ideas I can use in current projects. Oddly, I seem to be creating a lot of really angsty romances, which is totally unlike me. It'll be interesting to see if this finds its way into my "real" work and what effect that will have.

My time-wasting and procrastination exercises for the day seemed to all relate to A Room With a View. I had a sudden compulsion to learn the lyrics to the "O mio babbino caro" aria used for the opening credits because I was getting tired of just singing the first couple of lines and then having to go la-la-la. Then when I went out to check the mail, I noticed that the neighbors I saw gave me funny looks. I got inside and looked in the mirror and saw why. When I was procrastinating, I'd played with my hair, and I'd forgotten that I'd pinned it up in a rather Edwardian do, a la the movie. So I was walking around outside in sweatpants and a t-shirt with my hair in an elaborate Edwardian updo. I have no idea why this all might have been on my brain.

I've finally finished discussing all the archetypes from the hero's journey, and the big question is, now what? How do you actually go about using these? Here are some of my thoughts on the topic (and I really am pulling these out of thin air, as this isn't much addressed in the books I have on the subject).

One use for the story archetypes is in the initial casting of your story, depending on how your ideas come to you. If you're a plot or situation writer who thinks of the story or situation first, these are a good starting point for populating the story or situation with people. Trying to fill each of these roles is a good mental exercise for figuring out what characters your story needs. You may not end up with exactly that cast, but it's a way to get your brain going on finding people for your story. Going with these archetypes as the basis for your cast will ensure that you have a good balance of "change" energy vs. "status quo" energy, plus some major and minor conflict that will be meaningful for your hero. Developing a cast this way gives a sense of cohesion to the characters.

One question I've been asked is if every story needs every archetype. I don't think so, but I think you'll find what I've been calling the "energy" of each archetype in most stories in some way. Just about every story is going to have some signal that change needs to take place, some minor barrier, someone to get the hero up-to-speed on what's going on or give advice, someone who confuses the hero, someone who points out the foibles and someone who's opposed to the hero. These all may or may not be actual characters. They can be forces of nature, events or things going on within the hero. The same character may play two or more of these roles at various points in the story, or multiple characters may play one of these roles. There may also be common archetypes that aren't on this list. The really good writers will find fresh ways of presenting these archetypes so that you may not even recognize them for what they are unless you really dig into how they work psychologically.

The archetypes can also be a good way to delve into your hero and really develop that character. I mentioned that the hero can be a challenge to write, and it's very easy to end up with a bland hero because he has to be universal enough that most readers can identify with him. The archetypes are largely all reflections of various facets of the hero's character, blown up into an entirely different character. The Mentor is his positive potential, while the Shadow is his negative potential. The Threshold Guardian is what's holding him back, while the Herald is what he knows he needs to change. The Shapeshifter is the part of himself he's repressing and the Trickster is the part of himself that's aware of his own faults. Working through the archetypes this way and thinking in terms of how they reflect the hero will help you understand your hero better, even if you don't develop those archetype reflections into actual characters.

If you're struggling with a story, it may help to go back and try to map your existing characters onto these archetypes. If there's one you're missing, that could explain part of the problem in your story or help you fix it. You might be able to map some of the archetype's role onto an existing character and use that to nudge your story in the right direction, or you may find you need to develop a new character to get things moving. For instance, I mentioned that one of the problems I saw with the Star Wars prequels was the lack of anyone in the Trickster role to balance out some of the pompousness of the rest of the story. You may also find that focusing on archetype elements can help you strengthen a character. Look for how you can find more of the Shadow in your villain, for example, and that will strengthen the conflict with the hero.

If you're interested in this topic, you can read The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, though it can be difficult to pull this stuff out of that book in a way that's useful for writing. The Writer's Journey by Christopher Vogler takes the Campbell theories and research and applies them to modern storytelling, mostly for film. I've started reading some Jungian psychology that isn't aimed specifically at writers, but I haven't yet found a good resource there. The Vogler book does list some other possible resources in its bibliography.

Thursday morning I have to go help judge a PTA arts contest at a nearby elementary school, which I'm really looking forward to, but it may mean I post later than usual, so don't worry (Mom).

NaNoWriMo: The Project

I'm still keeping up the pace for NaNo, hitting just a bit above my target yesterday, which means I'm ahead of schedule. I may have to do a little tinkering with what I did yesterday before I can move forward. Yeah, I know, you're not supposed to revise as you go with this, but it's better to adjust a few hundred words than to move the plot in an entirely wrong direction and have to rewrite the entire book later.

I mentioned that my NaNoWriMo project is one that's lived in my head for more than twenty years. I think it still fits within the rules because it isn't a work in progress. The actual writing is all new.

It started as a dream I had the summer after I graduated from high school. It was such a vivid dream that I can still remember it, and I thought it would make a great story. I wrote down what I remembered and played with it some to create more of a solid story concept and characters. I don't know if I wrote any actual text at that point. My senior year in college, I took a parageography course (the geography of imaginary worlds), and our big project for the course was to create a world of our own and find a way to describe it. I used this world for my project, and doing the thinking the project required really fleshed out the setting and situation. I still don't know if I actually wrote anything at this point.

Then a year after I graduated from college, I took what at the time was a huge splurge and registered for a writing conference. As part of the conference fee, you could enter two categories of the conference manuscript contest. Each entry required the first chapter and a synopsis. At the time, I was trying to be a romance novelist, so my main focus was on getting together a romance novel entry. I still had time before the deadline, and I wanted to get my money's worth out of that conference, so I decided to put together a fantasy entry, also. I threw together a first chapter and synopsis based on this idea. And then I won the fantasy/science fiction/horror category of the contest with this entry (I didn't even place in romance).

Then I never wrote any more of the book. I met a romance editor at the conference who invited me to submit something, so I frantically went to finish that romance book (it did become my first published novel, but it wasn't that editor who bought it), and then it was time for this conference and contest for the next year, so I put together a different fantasy entry and won again (I did finish that book, but it hasn't sold), and then I sold my first book to a romance publisher and wrote a couple more for them, and I guess I never got back to this book.

My computer won't even read the disc my files for this book are on, and the only hard copy I have is the critiqued contest entry (ouch -- the rest of the entries must have been awful if the judge said this about mine and I still won -- and it's amazing how much the criticisms can still sting, seventeen years later and with me agreeing with a lot of them in retrospect). I re-read it last week, and the writing isn't quite as bad as I feared it would be, but the structure is all wrong. It's the usual case of a first chapter that could probably be cut out of the finished book. And the plot in the synopsis seriously needs work. So, really, I'm starting with just some characters, a situation, a developed world (that's going to change some) and the barest skeleton of a plot. I'm not using any of the existing pages, so I think that counts as starting from scratch for the purposes of this exercise. I'm changing a bit of the world (moving the time period around, which will add some detail), changing some of the characters and even changing the category this book would fit into (I originally planned it as an adult fantasy, but I think I'll try writing it as a middle-grade novel, aimed at grades 4-7).

I am wrestling with some decisions about the book. The original version started with a scene of the bad guys meeting to discuss their evil plans (yeah, I know, yikes), so the reader knew the trouble the good guys were in before the good guys knew, and that meeting also outlined some of the backstory of the world (I may have even used the dreaded "as you know ..." construction to explain the backstory. But I was 22 and very inexperienced in writing). Now I'm trying to decide if I need to do any scenes from the bad guys' point of view so the readers will know what's going on, or if I should just keep everything a mystery until the good guys figure it out. So far, I've been writing it just from the good guys' POV and keeping it a mystery, but I seem to have developed a habit of creating a lot of half-overheard conversations.

I think as soon as I finish the book proposal for The New Project I really will have to do some plotting/planning on this one before I get too deep into the book. And now it's writing time!

Fantasy Cheese

I am making decent progress on the NaNoWriMo project, sticking to my planned pace of 2,000 words a day. My competitive streak did rear its ugly head when I saw people posting higher totals, and then I reminded myself that I'm not trying to go faster right now because my priority is revising the other proposal. And, besides, weekends are actually busier for me because things happen that require me to leave the house. Plus, the point of all this was to moderate my writing pace, and going all-or-nothing would sort of defeat the purpose.

I suspect the part I've written will require massive amounts of rewriting because at the moment I'm meandering and rambling, since I'm still wrestling with how best to convey this story (which points of view to use, what information to share and when to share it, etc.). Maybe once the proposal is done and once I have enough written to have a better feel for it, I can take the time for more serious planning and plotting.

I did discover that television makes a pretty good motivator for getting the work done. One of my favorite guilty pleasure movies was on SciFi Saturday afternoon, and I told myself that I could only watch it if I got the writing done before it came on. And I did, so yay. The movie is called Dragonsword on SciFi, but on IMDB and Amazon they have it listed as George and the Dragon. It's a moderately cheesy telling of the legend of St. George and the dragon (with many, many liberties taken), but it manages not to be quite as cheesy as the typical SciFi Channel movie. Most of the dialogue doesn't make me cringe and the cast is relatively high quality, aside from Patrick Swayze, who has inexplicably wandered in from another movie. Everyone else is British or at least attempts reasonably well to sound British, or is supposed to be foreign and therefore not supposed to sound British, and then there's Swayze with his Texas accent and not even trying to hide it (though, as we learned from Kevin Costner "playing" Robin Hood, the attempt to hide it can be much, much more painful) even though he's supposed to be from the same place as all the other characters. Still, there's just something fun and sweet about that movie that makes me happy, and since the DVD is pretty cheap on Amazon, I'm seriously tempted to buy it.

I attempted to watch the first episode of Legend of the Seeker, but I had to turn it off about half an hour into it because it was just too painful. Most of it was another language issue, since the lead characters sounded like typical American twenty-somethings, and that threw me totally out of the story. I know that in a story supposedly taking place in one of those fantasy worlds we can assume that the whole thing is being conveniently translated or dubbed into modern English so we can understand it, so there's no reason that can't be American English, but it still just seems wrong. If you're doing a sword-and-sorcery story set in a quasi-medieval European-type place, it seems like the characters should kind of sound at least a little quasi-European. The United States (or Canada) doesn't really have that kind of mythology (except as written by modern fantasy writers). We're too new to even pretend to have that kind of history that's been lost in the mists of time. So it just bugs me to have people running around with swords and magic and armor and castles and all the usual European-based fantasy tropes, and they sound like American college students. I lose that sense of "other" when they talk like people I hear every day. I'm curious as to whether British viewers feel the same way about fantasy, if they expect the characters to sound British or European or if they get thrown out of the story because the characters sound too much like people they hear every day. Are Brits more open to fantasy with American accents, or is that even worse to them than it is to me?

My other issue (and I haven't read the books -- and from what I've heard about them, I don't think I want to -- so I don't know if this is from the books or an invention of the TV writers) is the fantasy trope of the Destined Chosen One (with optional Magical Specialness) who's been hidden away by the Mentor Wizard, who doesn't manage to get around to telling him about his super-special destiny until, oops, that destiny almost gets him killed, and then in the middle of the crisis we have to have the "No, really? I don't believe you!" scene. Mind you, I'm a big fan of the unlikely hero and am all over the stories where the assistant underwater basketweaver turns out to be the long lost heir to the Empire's throne or the great mage who will save the kingdom. My complaint is more with the variation on this story where the wizard knows who he is and is even nearby, watching over him, but somehow never manages to share this potentially crucial information until after the time when it might have been useful (like, you know, before the kid confronts the people who want to kill the long-lost whatever). There certainly are reasons not to share the information, and that can make for an interesting plot if done well, but when it's done purely so that the big revelation can happen during the course of the book/movie and in the middle of the crisis that kicks off the story, I'm prone to much eye rolling. It's also kind of annoying tohave to stop all the action early in the book and go through the "Here's your entire backstory, and this is why these things are happening" scene, which usually involves much arguing about how it can't possibly be true and he doesn't know what to do, but he has this destiny, blah, blah, blah. And then everything else that happens in the book is all because of his Grand Destiny and Magical Specialness.

I actually much prefer the stories where nobody knows who this guy is, and where even the great wizard doesn't know where to find him. Then the revelation of who he really is comes near the end of the book, after we've seen him demonstrate his true worth without the confidence booster of knowing his Grand Destiny or being aware of his Magical Specialness.

At any rate, while I can be a big fan of fantasy cheese, I don't think this series is going to be my brand of cheese.

And now it's time to go rack up some words.