My Decade Of NaNoWriMo: ReDux!

Last year I wrote a big long thing about my NaNo experiences, and as it was rather well received I thought I’d bring it out, hose it down, biff a hat on it and do a lazy lazy repost.

So then! November. NaNovember. Did I ever tell you about the time I was the first person in the southern hemisphere to finish NaNoWriMo? Ah, those were the days. The scent of lemon, the halcyon days of spring, something to do with birds quite possibly, and of course I was very, very drunk. If you’re thinking about ‘doing’ NaNo I really recommend it, it’s a great chance to just get some words out without worrying about anything except your wordcount. Some people say this is a rubbish way to write, that you should be focusing on quality, to those niminy-piminy naysayers I say away! Away with your negative applesauce, go spread your brand of gloomsome folderol elsewhere!

But anyway, here be the goods:

2001: I’m twenty years old (or similar) and everyone is too polite to tell me I’m rubbish at writing. I stumble upon NaNoWriMo, lo! What’s this? Fifty thousand words in a month, are they mad? With youthful arrogance and untoward bravado I sign up anyway. November 1st arrives sooner than I had expected, and I’m struck senseless with a lack of inspiration—what to do? I have no story! Aha, but I do have a project, a silly wannabe-Pratchett thing that could use some words. I’ll just write that! Days pass. My word count hovers at two or three hundred. What to do? Just keep writing, harder and longer than I’ve ever written before! More days pass. My daily word count is now in the dozens. No motivation, no plan, no outline, I don’t know where this story is going, I’m just making this up as I go along, I don’t know what to do!

November 30th rolls around.

I barely dare look at my word count.

But I must.

Shock. Disbelief. Somehow I’ve written fifty thousand and sixty-seven words in November. Fifty thousand and eleven of them are unreadable rubbish, but this doesn’t matter. I have joined the elite circle of NaNoWriMo winners. Fifty thousand words in a month; to this day I have no idea how I managed it.

2002: I am a year older; I am a year wiser (theoretically). This time I have a plan—vague, ill-conceived, barely workable, but a plan nonetheless. I will structure my novel into vaguely-linked segments, and each segment will be about anything I want, in whatever tense I want, in whatever style I want. Fantasy, comedy, slapstick, high adventure, Lovecraftian horror, all of these would have a place in my grand second NaNovel. My plan has a secondary component; daily word count goals. This worked better than I expected, and was something I kept as part of my NaNoWriMo armoury.

November 1st: I start writing.

November 4th: This is easy. This is fun. I’m getting some great words out and meeting my daily goals without hassle, who needs an outline, who needs a plot, I’m sure things will tie themselves neatly together once I get near to the end.

November 12th: Over halfway there! Yes, I’ve resorted to retelling my favourite myths and legends as stories-within-stories, no, the plot doesn’t seem to be anywhere near any kind of resolution, yes, I’ve lost track of at least two characters, but I’m sure it’ll work out in the end.

November 17th: WHAT AM I DOING.

November 20th: HELP.

November 22nd: I have met every one of my daily word count goals, but I am not proud of the things I did to achieve this. The story has figuratively exploded, a giant in-universe retcon in a desperate attempt to gain structure and purpose. On the positive side of things I only have twenty thousand words to go.

November 24th: THESE ARE THE LONGEST TWENTY THOUSAND WORDS IN THE HISTORY OF ALL THINGS.

November 25th: Screw it, I’m giving up.

November 25th 1/2: Oh all right then fine I’m not giving up, I never give up, let’s just write anything and see what happens.

November 26th: Uneventful.

November 27th: In a classic fit of anticlimatic activity, somehow I edge over fifty thousand words. The completed manuscript is unsalvageable, but once again, somehow, I have won. I suspect the daily word count goal may have been a contributing factor. Unexpectedly, I’m looking forward to next year’s NaNo. Yes, next year, I’ll have a PROPER plan then!

2003: I actually DO have a proper plan this time. I know you were expecting some kind of deflation joke but this isn’t a book, this is my LIFE. I write notes, I cobble together a basic eight-page outline, I make my daily word count goal chart, I start writing.

Eight days later, I have fifty thousand words and a completed story.

I feel fantastic.

This was the year in which I was the first person in the southern hemisphere to win. The book I wrote is … not terrible. Not entirely. The story of a girl who lets her imagination get the better of her, who is stalked by her fridge, who is visited in her dreams by a man she’s known since she was a little girl, strange and lonely. No, not entirely terrible. With work it could be publishable, but blech, work. On to the next; 2004 will be even better!

2004: This year is not even better. I come into NaNovember without an idea; blind, I start writing anyway. The first two attempts are dismal failures, I get five thousand words into the first before giving up, over ten thousand into the second before abandoning ship.

The third idea holds promise; a fantasy story with intrigue and machinations and spycraft and I didn’t outline it at all so everything fell to pieces after twenty thousand words. Nevertheless I struggle on, write some decent scenes and some cute dialogue and then realise that the story is never going to come anywhere NEAR completion in fifty thousand words. I snip it off with an utterly unsatisfying cop-out ending and call it a learning experience. Still, I wrote fifty thousand words in a month so that’s a technical win.

2005: Hectic. My November was spent in Japan, I think I arrived on October 30th or something ridiculous like that. Fortunately this was the dawn of the era of flash drives, so I wrote the whole thing on a one gig USB stick and borrowed computers. This was the year I came the closest to losing, I submitted my finished manuscript six hours before the deadline. Not a bad little story, actually, but it needed more than fifty thousand words to tell it—another cop-out ending, less unsatisfying than 2004′s, but nowhere near a publishable story.

At this point I am beginning to suspect that outlining may be a good idea.

2006: Despite my suspicion about outlining, I don’t outline this year. Instead I write Fairytale X/Once Upon A, Like, Time, which is a collection of fairytales retold by a semi-clueless teenager trying to understand just what the heck they were going on about, with a lot of MST3K-style snarking. Kind of fun, kind of quirky, kind of shallow. An easy fifty thousand words, but at what cost? I feel like I wasted this year. 2007 will be different.

2007: I don’t really remember what I was doing around this time, but 2007 saw the creation of brother-sister pair Apples and Oranges. They live in a world not unlike our own, except just a teensy bit more awesome. Kind of a fun book, but structurally rubbish. (Still not outlining at this point, and it really, really shows.)

2008: Last year’s book was pretty fun, I should write a sequel to it! That’s a grand idea! Except I was never clear on the story I was telling so the book kind of just fizzled out. Fifty thousand words of pointless (though kind of fun) fluff. On to the next.

2009: I’m starting to take writing more seriously. I’m also starting to appreciate the value of outlining; of having a plan before I begin. I have a lot of ideas for Apples and Oranges, so I outline and then write the third in their series, a quirky little thing about the creation of a Pokemon-like game by the Free Art Academy Apples attends. It’s fun but terribly, terribly self-indulgent, although the climax, wherein Apples and OJ use their spirit guides, David Bowie and Michael Caine, in a Pokemon-style battle, is one of the funniest things I’ve ever written. (To me, I mean, not to anyone else. Anyone else would read it and just think, “This author is mad, and not in a good way”.)

2010: I’m starting down the road to indie authordom. E-publishing has not come up on my radar yet, but I’ve put a few books out in print (to be universally ignored). At this point I had written Miya Black I through IV, was struggling with V, and had also written Birds Of Passage and The Boy & Little Witch. My intention had been to write the fourth book in the Apples and Oranges series, about the adventures of OJ’s band, and I had some great ideas for it … but in the last week of October an idea came out of nowhere and wouldn’t leave me alone, a superhero story, a diary thing—I just couldn’t stop thinking about it. Come November 1st I wrote notes like a maniac, hammered out a pretty detailed outline, and by the end of the day I had eleven thousand words written. Day two, another nine thousand. On day three I got serious, put my head down, and got up to 41,000—and ran into a problem. The story was finished! There wasn’t anything more to tell! But I worked on it that night, I read through and thought about things I could include or expand on, and eventually I realised that there was something significant I could add to it and that took me over fifty thousand words. Phew. So last year I finished NaNoWriMo in four days, and came out of it with

 

Jolly Motivation: Week Three and a bit

Goodness gracious where does the time go. My goodness. Saturday already! Nearly Sunday of all days. This past week-and-a-bit has been pretty good for getting allegedly important real life things done but absolute poo as far as writing is concerned. In any case my intended goals were:

PRIMARY GOALS
* Charlotte Powers #5 outlined.
* Charlotte Powers #4 sorted out in terms of continuity and such.
* Tactics Heart Episode 10 written.
* Tactics Heart Episode 11 outlined.

SECONDARY GOALS
* Tactics Heart Episode 11 written.
* Charlotte Powers #4 edited.

… and actually I did manage to write episodes ten and eleven of TH, so … well, I guess I did pretty well there. Some small progress was made with Charlotte Powers, too. Plus I got distracted in the middle and sorted through a whole bunch of stuff in early prep for NaNovember, so … well, I suppose I got more done than I thought. Even so, Will Try Harder.

Also, right now I really really want to just start putting Tactics Heart out there. It’s huge, it’s a massive thing, far bigger than I expected it to be—it is simply astounding how a straightforward two page episode outline can turn into 12k+ of actual words. I’m not even halfway through with Episode 11 and the silly thing’s already over 100k. Could even top 300k by the end, I’m still not sure how I’m going to e-book it—unfortunately there’s no real halfway point where I could neatly cut the series in two, I’d feel like I was just ripping people off if I did that, so … I don’t know, something to dwell on later. I keep thinking it should probably be a webcomic or something instead of a book, however episodic, but if it was a webcomic it’d take probably a decade to tell the story—pure text has its weaknesses, but as a storytelling medium it can be pleasantly efficient. Still, it’d be nice to have some illusts and so on for this, kind of a light novel vibe. I might start scouting DevArt for sickeningly talented artists.

Anyway, I probably shouldn’t start releasing it now. That would, perhaps, be a better thing to do for the new year. Fresh start, fresh serial, an episode a week for half a year. Which reminds me, I wanted to talk about NaNo.

Hello! Here I am talking about NaNo. This year I’m going to be a little bit ambitious. Fifty thousand words in a month isn’t exactly a stretch. So how about doubling it? 100k in a month? But even that feels a little on the manageable side. I want to push myself, so my goal for November of this year will be ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND WORDS.

That’s around five thousand a day, which is about my average when I’m in first draft mode. But consistently? Every day? For a whole month? Now that’s an actual challenge. Not all of these words will be on the same project, but I will proceed in a linear fashion—currently, my plan is to finally write that literary wibbly wobbly timey-wimey thing that’s been bouncing around in my head since before last year’s NaNo, then perhaps move on to Charlotte Powers 5 for tradition’s sake, then just pour everything left into Tactics Heart. Going into December I hope to have a whole bunch of rough as guts first draft words to polish up, as well as at least twenty episodes of Tactics Heart.

So, in order to do this I’m going to have to clear my slate. That means Charlotte Powers 4 has to be done, because it’s been hanging around too long already. I want to go into November fresh and clean, and so my goal for this month is:

SINGULAR GOAL FOR OCTOBER
* Sort Charlotte Powers #4 right out. Like published levels of sorted.

That means I’ve got three weeks to sort out the tangles, incorporate all the foreshadowing, and edit the living daylights out of the thing. To that end, here are my goals for this week:

GOALS
* Get Charlotte Powers #5 outlined.
* Sort out anything that needs sorting out re: #4/#5 connections.
* Get cracking on an edit of #4.

Everything else can just get pushed aside. This is what I need to be working on, and these are the goals I will have accomplished by next week.

So, with that said, see you then!

 

Jolly Motivation: Week Two

Lost track of the days and a little late, but hello! Goodness goodness doesn’t time fly. Getting straight to it, my goals for this week were:

PRIMARY GOALS
* Charlotte Powers #5 outlined.
* Charlotte Powers #4 sorted out in terms of continuity and such.
* Tactics Heart Episode 10 written.
* Tactics Heart Episode 11 outlined.

SECONDARY GOALS
* Tactics Heart Episode 11 written.
* Charlotte Powers #4 edited.

Of those goals, I actually did pretty well. Charlotte Powers #5 is proving to be a buggering buggery bugger, but I’m crawling my way through a rough preliminary outline scene by scene and starting to make some headway—it’s one where for almost every decision I make I have to stop and check things and think and make notes and those notes lead to more notes and oh and ah and blah blah blah. It’s a slog, is what I’m saying, but I am getting there. In any case I can confidently state that I am in a much better place with it now than I was a week ago, and that’s kind of the whole point of this. I also started making necessary changes to #4, just a few small things, but significant.

As for Tactics Heart, episode ten is finally done. Phew. Episode eleven is coming along nicely too—outlined and halfway written. It’s funny how the addition of a single brief scene can change everything. I also did some work on the overall structure and arcs and so forth, a bit tedious and time-consuming but necessary.

So, for the coming week:

PRIMARY GOALS
* Charlotte Powers #5 outlined at least up to the first big moment.
* Tactics Heart Episode 11 written.

SECONDARY GOALS
* Tactics Heart Episode 12 outlined/written.

Onwards onwards!

 

Jolly Motivation: Week One

Well, here we are already! Week one of my ‘come on old chap buck up and fly right’ self-motivation schedule has come and gone, so how’d I do? Well, not terribly, but not terrifically either. I have yet to achieve either of my goals, but I wrote quite a bit and sorted out a couple of tricky things that had been hanging over my head. The arrival of hideously addictive space roguelike-like FTL slowed productivity quite a bit, especially after I got it into my head to take notes during a session and it turned into something I just had to write (Crew Of The Osprey: A Recollection). That wasn’t such a disciplined thing to do, although I had a lot of fun and it’s been a while since I got into that kind of writing space, where everything was clear and all I needed was time to hammer out the words—it feels like everything I’m working on right now is fiddly and intricate, with a lot of things to balance and think about and consider, and just splurting out ten thousand words of straightforward space adventure was a nice break from all that. All in all I can’t say I regret it, but in terms of focus I feel that I need to improve.

Taking down the rebel flagship with fire bombs is an accomplishment, but is it productive? (Spoiler: No.)

So! My stated goals for the week were:

1) Charlotte Powers #5 outlined to a basic degree; connection with #4 firmly dealt with.
2) Episode 10 of Tactics Heart outlined and written.

And on both counts I have failed. CP#5 still isn’t outlined and the connection to #4 needs further expansion. Tactics Heart 10 IS outlined, but only around three-quarters written. So, in terms of actual new words over the past week (not counting the FTL thing), I got around ten thousand out. Which isn’t bad, but still, Could Do Better. With that in mind:

PRIMARY GOALS
* Charlotte Powers #5 outlined SERIOUSLY.
* Charlotte Powers #4 sorted out in terms of continuity and such.
* Tactics Heart Episode 10 very definitely written.
* Tactics Heart Episode 11 outlined.

SECONDARY GOALS
* Tactics Heart Episode 11 written.
* Charlotte Powers #4 edited.
* Stop playing FTL so much gosh.

See you next week!

 

Jolly Motivation: Goals, Dang It

Lately I’ve been lazy; so very lazy. (“Lazy” in this case meaning “Still working like an electric beaver, except on ‘easy’ things like proofing and making notes and research and such; not actually producing anything new and that’s what needs to happen”.) I’m out of the habit of writing and into the habit of all of the other activities that surround writing, and that’s not such a good place to stay for extended periods. I have all these projects and so many notes but very few actual written words—I mean, I do feel that when I actually do write those words that they’ll be very splendid words indeed because of all this groundwork I’ve done, but I also feel that until you’ve actually produced those phantom words that nothing’s worth much of anything. First drafts are the only currency of worth, everything else is just … everything else.

Because posts are more interesting with pictures, here’s a picture of the gaang as fruit.

With all of that out of the way, I think what I should do—and what I will do—what I will attempt to do—is begin using this bjournal as more of an update on where I am and what I’m doing. I’ll set goals and then chastise myself for failing to complete them, or else congratulate myself on a job jolly well done. And so:

STATE OF BJK
I just released

 

Creation of a Cover

I love mucking around in Photoshop. It’s so relaxing and fun, not like that troublesome ol’ writing lark.

why did I make this

Sometimes this mucking around leads to a cover, sometimes for a book I haven’t even written yet. I often find it to be a good sort of semi-distraction, something to focus on while my subconscious figures out little things and tries to find the shape of the story. Recently I’ve even been sketching out rough ideas before doing any actual fiddling. With the most recent story to occupy my head space, Blood Sisters, I had this grand idea for a dramatically epic cover featuring the protagonist standing over her wounded sister, facing down dozens of murderous bandits in a night forest lit by torches. I even sketched out a rough outline before remembering that I can’t draw. I’ll save you from having to see the offending sketch; instead here’s a portrait of James Townsend (Esquire), Lord Mayor of Olde London Towne:

“Hello.”

So then, given that my grand, overly-ambitious ideas for a cover were nothing more than idle dreams, I went the other way; simplicity! Striking central image! Colours! Bright colours! Red is a bright colour! Aren’t there some red flowers? I could make it a BLOOD flower!

Unt I did

Pretty decent first draft cover for a thriller, I feel. Except this book’s a fantasy story. Ho-hum. Still, I really liked the central image and the basic thing of the thing, so once more I fiddled and I faddled and I mucked and I … micked, eventually deciding that a more comic booky style might be more ‘fantasy’.

Or should I say, Doctor VON Scott?

Here I felt that I was on the right track, but that font … that FONT. (Trajan, incidentally, a good go-to font for mucking around with.) I decided that the best way to say ‘fantasy’ was to make a fantasy-ish logo-title-thing. Looking a bit like a comic book would not, I felt, be a bad thing. And so:

Just what exactly are you implying?

Now it was starting to feel more like a book I wanted to write. Still, it needed something else, it needed something more, it needed … fiddly bits.

So fiddly

At this point I started playing around with different ‘moods’ for the cover:

Literally hours of fun

Then I got distracted making a ‘series logo’, as this book would (eventually) (possibly) (hopefully) (if all goes as planned) be part of a larger collection of vaguely related but ultimately stand-alone stories united under the title of “The Song That Ends The World”. So, I made this:

Bang, zoom! Straight … to the moon

Which, to be perfectly honest, still needs a lot of fiddling to get right and I might change the font and blah blah blibbity blah-blah-blah. It’d do as a placeholder for now in any case, and so:

Phew

Still a lot of mucking around to do and who knows, I might abandon the whole concept or even go with a completely different title, but that’s the story of this first draft of the cover for Blood Sisters, possibly the first book in the Song That Ends The World series. (Potentially.)

In other writing-related news, since I’m here, Charlotte Powers 4: Rising Power is nearing first draft completion. Miya Black V is also in a state of near-readiness; just a couple of proofs before it’s ready for release. I’d say Rising Power is on track for a late-August release, while Miya Black V could be out before the end of this month, depending on how things go.

 

Reflections On The Release Of Hidden Power

Well, I admit that I pushed myself a little bit harder than I probably should have, but I’ve managed to get Charlotte Powers 3: Hidden Power released before flitting away to Japan (and with, oh, at least two days to spare). I did consider skipping a proof in order to release it even earlier, but decided against it—I only picked up one actual error on that last round but it was a doozy (‘baseball leg’ instead of ‘baseball bat’, I would have been horribly embarrassed to let that one through), so I’m glad I gritted my teeth and just did it. Cover graphic and link? Yes, I think so:

After actually publishing something I usually feel a combination of satisfaction and emptiness, and this time is no exception. I really do put everything I have into my books, no corners cut however tempting it might be to do so—that final proof is a good example, how much did it improve the book, really? By one percent? Less? It’s the law of diminishing returns, the first edit might give a twenty percent improvement to the book, the next ten percent, then five, then three, then two, then one, but even that one percent improvement, catching another error, tightening up those final few sentences that are just a little loose, killing that ‘she said’ which isn’t really necessary, adding that single line of description that really sets the tone of a scene, all of these things really are just so important to me. Little details. Little details are important. After the last proof I did on the book my feeling was that doing another could possibly catch another error or two, would maybe turn up a few sentences that could be better, but in terms of story and polish, I was (and am) happy. I think part of being not just a writer but an author—and in a certain sense a publisher—is learning when to say ‘this is as good as I can reasonably expect to make it; it’s time to cut the cord’. That’s probably the single most important skill I’ve developed through this whole indie author adventure; learning to finish things, really finish them, not just outlining and writing a first draft that I come back to every so often mostly because I want to read that scene I’m particularly fond of, but focused crafting of not just a story but a book.

Anyway, I hope people like this one. The ending is even more difficult than Power Play’s (which was pretty bad, in that sense), but it’s all going somewhere. I’m not just throwing these things together, I have a definite end in mind and know just what has to happen to reach that end. So after Hidden Power there are going to be two more books, Rising Power and then Power Overwhelming, and that’ll be the end of Charlotte’s story. For better or worse. After that, I don’t know. I have other projects and other series but I don’t want to let go of Charlotte’s world just yet; there are stories still to tell.

Anyway, for now I’m happy with where I am. I was especially happy at the response to my pre-release announcements—that there was any response at all was amazing. It wasn’t so long ago that I was just writing entirely for myself, making these little stories for no grander reason than my own amusement, and now here I am, slowly but surely getting my books into the hands of people who actually want to read them—who look forward to the next in the series enough to say ‘yay!’ or ‘hurry up!’ when I announce it’s coming. These sorts of things might seem minor but they really do mean a lot to me, and I’m grateful to all my readers. The simple truth is that this wouldn’t be nearly as fun without you.

 

Coming Out As An LGBT Lover

No, not like that. I haven’t made much of a fuss about this before because (as I’m going to talk about) I feel that doing so somewhat undermines the point—and yet over time I have become increasingly aware of how important it is to openly talk about these things and explicitly ‘come out’ as a supporter of (for want of a better term) alternative lifestyles (the ultimate goal, of course, being to make the ‘alternative’ part irrelevant). Like a certain T-Rex, I got opinions, and also like T-Rex I sometimes get confused and distracted while voicing them, so I’m relying on my old friend BOLDED TITLES to help me through this.

SO WHAT’S THIS ABOUT LGBT

LGBT stands for Lesbian Gay Bi Transexual, and it’s sometimes criticised for being a little exclusive (in the sense of excluding people). QUILTBAG does something to remedy this, standing for Queer (or Questioning), Undecided, Intersex, Lesbian, Trans, Bisexual, Asexual, Gay, and there’s the kind of fun but ever-so-slightly dismissive LGBTetc which attempts to include everyone. GLBT also exists as a variant and you can add on all sorts of acronymical letters and numbers to indicate various identities but really the point of it is to more accurately describe the increasingly inaccurately named ‘gay community’.

BUT OF COURSE YOU ALREADY KNEW THAT

Quibbling about definitions, although fun, isn’t the point of this thing. What I really want to talk about is the issue of LGBT characters in fiction. Let’s be frank, non-straight non-white characters are woefully lacking in all areas of western fiction—Hollywood movies are perhaps the worst offenders but just take a look at the fiction bestsellers and count up all the non-straight non-white protags. Not a lot there. Any present could be considered what I think of as ‘splendid freaks’ (a term I picked up from an interview with Alan Moore, where he used it to describe the (unexpected, baffling, wonderful) popular success of Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman”), very much the exception; far from the rule.

SO THERE’S NOT ENOUGH LGBT FICTION OUT THERE

There is FAR from enough LGBT fiction out there, ESPECIALLY genre fiction—and often what IS out there is overtly labelled and shuffled into what’s commonly referred to as the ‘gay ghetto’, a specific section put aside for anything that might offend more ‘normal’ sensibilities. There are arguments for and against this—if people WANT that sort of thing then they should be able to easily find it, and if people don’t want it they enjoy a measure of ‘protection’ if it’s segregated—

AH THAT’S A BAD WORD THOUGH

It IS a bad word. Well, not natively. But the implications are, I feel, not good. Segregation leads to marginalisation, it reinforces the notion that this is something different, that it is not part of What Is Normal but instead part of What Is Different and thus Not To Be Casually Accepted. To my mind this isn’t particularly positive.

OF COURSE THAT’S MORE OF A TRADPUB THING

It is, but in a lot of ways it’s even harder for indies—I’ve seen some tentative talk of using labels to identify books as ‘gay-friendly’ but there again, even just the word, ‘labels’—it’s such a tricky area. I don’t have a clear answer, except to suggest that with time and effort and everyone pulling together, it might end up not being a problem at all.

WHAAAAAAT

Here’s the thing, and I’m going to veer off a little here so, y’know, bear with me. As I said before, there’s not enough LGBT fiction out there, especially genre fiction. I want to see more diverse characters doing more diverse things. YA adventure is especially lacking in this area, I want more non-straight non-white characters.

SO WHAT ARE YOU GONNA DO ABOUT IT PUNK

For a start, writing about LGBT characters for whom being LGBT is not all they are—and whose stories are not always about the conflicts that being LGBT might bring. Don’t get me wrong, I love an ‘issues’ book, and coming-out stories can be great. The hardships of being different in a world that celebrates conformity is a theme that is close to my heart, and any book that explores this in whatever capacity is likely to be one that I enjoy—and more than enjoy, take something away from. But as great as coming-out and issues and the-hardships-of-being-LGBT stories are, they’re just not what I usually want to write—which is more along the lines of conflicted but determined characters doing everything they can to protect those they care about in the face of overwhelming adversity, often with pirates and zombies and other such menaces, and in such situations sexuality does tend to take a back seat.

THAT DAMN BACK SEAT SEXUALITY

I think including characters who are LGBT or otherwise outside the norm but not having their sexuality (or lack thereof) define their character is absolutely vital. I also think it’s important not to make a big fuss about this—this may feel self-defeating, but there’s a certain cultural tipping point beyond which ‘tolerated’ becomes ‘accepted’, and once you’re past that you can move on to the far more important goal of ‘celebrated’. Because that is what is necessary; diversity needs to be celebrated.

SO THEN WHAT

The way I approach things is like this: my straight characters don’t make a big song and dance about their sexuality, so why should my non-straight characters? Sexuality is part of who a character (or person) is, but ONLY a part. If an author is listing ‘gay’ as a defining character trait, I would submit that they’re doing it wrong. Too often (especially in movies and on TV shows) we see characters for whom being gay IS their character, camping it up and doing nobody any favours. Not that there’s anything wrong with campiness, but if the sole purpose of a gay character is to be a big joke then, no, that’s not okay.

LET’S HAVE A POSITIVE EXAMPLE

One that immediately leaps to mind is Scott Pilgrim’s Wallace Wells. He’s gay, and this is shown not through fabulous fashion sense or camp mannerisms or a love of musical theatre, but mostly through sleeping with dudes. He’s very much his own character, one of the best (and most popular) in the series, and while being gay is part of this it’s absolutely not all that he is.

WHAT ABOUT THE HATERS

Yep, they’re out there. People who’ll slag a book (or whatever) off simply for daring to include something that’s outside their personal comfort zone. I don’t personally care if someone doesn’t read a book (mine or someone else’s) because of LGBT characters. That’s their choice. Well okay fine I DO care a little bit, but I’m not going to point and say “Oi! You! Read that!”. See above about the tipping point into acceptance. You can’t force people to change, it just doesn’t work like that.

I SAY THAT IN THIS LIFE

It might seem callous to say this, but the bigoted narrow-minded never-gonna-change types are (given time) all going to get old and become less relevant and eventually, inevitably, die. And those who come after them will (hopefully, with enough positivity, with enough cultural support) be a little more accepting, a little more open, a little more understanding, a little more compassionate. A little more accepting. A little more willing to celebrate that which is different. Things are changing, and it’s my feeling that they’re changing for the better. Perhaps slowly, but that’s okay. Gradual change is often the kind that lasts.

LET US NOT FORGET

So to sum up, I think that it’s important to include LGBT characters even in non-issues books, and especially in genres that are currently dominated by non-straight non-white characters (ie all genres). I think that it’s important not to let a character’s sexuality define them, no matter what it might be. More than that, more than being ‘important’ I just think it’s fun and interesting—and in fact I don’t have much say over the sexuality of my characters, it’s just something that I realise somewhere along creating them, “Oh, she likes girls, he thinks men are delicious, she’s not really a particularly sexual person”, these come up like hair colour or a love of apples or that their favourite colour is puce. Part of who they are; not all they are.

THERE IS HOPE

I think that things are getting better, but that every little bit helps. We all need to push together to get society over that ‘tolerance’ hump and into the valley of ‘acceptance’. From there, it’s a long but clear road to the ideal of ‘celebration’.

THERE IS HOPE!

I love works with LGBT characters. Love them all to pieces. Love experiencing different viewpoints than my own, love finding those new perspectives, love learning about struggles and hardships and conflicts that might never otherwise have struck me. The world is a huge and wonderful and spectacularly varied place, and the best thing about it is that there’s room for all of us, no matter who we are. Fiction that embraces this is always, always welcome.

 

Amazon Exclusivity: Well, Maybe

It would seem to be an easy question to answer; would I, in exchange for several juicy benefits, give Amazon exclusive rights to distribute my book? Given that I don’t use Smashwords due to quality control issues and given also that every major distributor except Amazon hates us dirty foreigners/indies/dirty foreign indies all to heck, why wouldn’t I go with Amazon exclusivity?

Well, for one, because exclusivity often leads to complications. In a certain sense it’s a bet; Amazon is currently the biggest name in e-book distribution, but will that continue? What if something changes? What if the KDP terms are altered (pray I do not alter them further), what if royalties are cut in half? I don’t personally see Amazon coming out behind in any e-retail fight, but who knows what the future holds—and what they might decide to do should they achieve that elusive monopoly. I have a certain amount of trust in Amazon (or, to be more specific, in Amazon’s business sense; they know not to mess with a good, profitable thing), but things could always change.

Right now I certainly can’t say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to exclusivity because this is all still very much speculation based on rumour, although it’s a pretty solid one as far as rumours go. I don’t know the details of the contract involved or what Amazon might offer, and so a lot of questions are raised. Would this exclusivity be for a set length of time, or could one ‘opt out’ with a certain amount of notice? What, exactly, are they offering—the ability to make your books free whenever you want (attractive), the option to make a product page for your books before they’re released and take pre-orders (very attractive)? What if (as is rumoured) some manner of special promotional options were included (extremely attractive)? Does exclusivity extend only to other retailers, or would it prohibit selling through my website—or even giving away books for free? What if I offered ePub versions of my books through my website as a free download with a donate button nearby (as I have tentative plans to do), would that conflict with ‘exclusivity’? What if a situation came up like I had earlier this year, with Power Play not being available to buy (for two freaking months), would I be allowed to offer it as a free download, as I did then?

Lots of questions, but of course no answers. As mentioned, this is all based on speculation which is in turn based on rumour. Pointless? Well, I believe it’s good to start thinking about these things early. It’d be a big decision to make, perhaps one of the biggest as an indie author; do I want to trust Amazon to be my sole distributor?

As things stand I think my answer could be ‘yes’, but it really does depend on the terms of the exclusivity contract and the bonuses offered. With that said I feel that the benefits for myself could easily (and heavily) outweigh any negative points. There’s another aspect to this too, one I mentioned right at the start; as things stand, Amazon really is the only major distributor that does us indies any favours at all—from the ease of use and openness of KDP to the mysterious Amazon algorithms working in our favour (without ‘also boughts’ I doubt I’d have even the few sales I enjoy), there is the sense that they have a certain amount of respect for us (or at least for the money we bring in). I do feel an odd sort of loyalty to The Mighty Zon for that; for the opportunities Amazon has given me.

Although with that said if this does all come to be and I am faced with this choice, my decision will be based on reason rather than emotion. I’ll read the contract, consider the benefits, consult with my learned peers, think things over, and only THEN will I click “YES YES TAKE MY INDIE SOUL GIVE ME THE SHINY TOYS YES”.

As a final thought, pairing this rumour with ANOTHER rumour, that Amazon may allow formats other than Mobi (most importantly ePub) to be sold through the Kindle store, well … that would make things look even more attractive. In any case it looks like 2012 is going to be a very interesting year. Very interesting indeed.

 

Never begin a sentence with ‘or’, ‘and’ or ‘but’

“But what if it makes for a better sentence?”

“And why not, exactly?”

“Or what?“