Advice from Authors - Or Not?

Over the years, I've seen plenty of articles written by other authors. Two articles I saw were from Erica Verrillo's blog; one set of tips from Stephen King, a key one from Frank Herbert and one from Ray Bradbury. Advice is all very well, but if you let it begin corrupting your own style, it's stops being helpful.

My advice came in the form of emails from Frances Hardinge, an author who had just entered the scene when I was introduced via a family friend. Her criticism and appraisal of my work helped me get a good idea of where I wanted to go and what I needed to improve. Hardinge's advice was far more helpful than a lot of things my family and friends were saying at the time. But while her advice was helpful through and through, others have not been.

The quote from Herbert above is hugely significant for me, as my stories are driven by characters and a set progression inspired by many things from television series to Herbert's own work. I find his advice valuable and insightful. I'm still aware of the industry's pitfalls in this regard, but Herbert's advice helps me see past it towards making my hopeful career.

Verrillo's article on King's advice. It focuses a lot on story-telling style, and advocates a streamlined style which is short and snappy, but leaves little-to-no room for going mad with things like poetic expression and deep description. As I've seen plenty of authors make successfully careers out of that style, I don't find his advice entirely convincing. But I also see the merit of keeping it in mind. Being able to do both gives an author an edge; they can switch markets when needed, increasing their readership by at least double. There is a different piece of advice she extracted from the writing of his debut Carrie, which basically boiled down to revision and never throwing away old drafts in case they might be useful. That I agree with.

Bradbery's advice boils down to "write, write, write". To quote:

If you can write one short story a week, it doesn’t matter what the quality is to start – at least you’re practicing. At the end of the year you have 52 short stories. And I defy you to write 52 bad ones. It can’t be done. After 30 or 40 weeks, all of a sudden a story will come that is wonderful – just wonderful. That’s what happened to me...

He also emphasises the importance of absorbing the works of the masters. Personally, I feel a little conflicted. While I'm certain many of the story ideas I create wouldn't make good novels, and I could write a story per week, he's writing from a very different position. In fact, all of these authors seem to be speaking for a perspective that isn't mine; a self-employed writer trying to break into a competitive market, where the industry is in the midst of the e-book revolution, which in turn impacts the conflict between short fiction and longform works.

All of these little bits and pieces have helped inform my approach to pushing at the industry's iron-clad walls. And I hope these may help others in the same position as me. Just make sure you take these pieces of advice as they are offered, and remember their context. You'll take more away from it if you do.

Let's Play the Ten-Word Game

Anyone here know the ten-word game? If you don't, here's a basic explanation. Take a story - any story - and condense the plot into ten words or less. It's really quite fun, and throws some interesting revelations on how derivative or formulaic some stories can be. Including mine.

So for this post, I'm going to do some ten-word summaries of several stories, and the answers will be blacked out. Just highlight them after you've thought about it for a while, and see if you were right.

("E" stands for example, and "A" for answer)

1E; Person makes journey to destroy lethal object. Succeeds. World saved.
1A; The Lord of the Rings. And a few other stories.

E2; Two people from different groups meet. Form a bond. Conflict.
A2; This could be a wide range of stories as the theme is present in much of fiction. To my mind, this is Romeo and Juliet, How to Tame Your Dragon, Disney's Pocahontas and Avatar.

E3; Bad person gets redeemed. Fights crime. Battles adversary. Finds love.
A3; Once again, this has many parallels, particularly in the superhero genre. My personal pick would be The Shadow. The movie version, that is.

E4; Person cruelly wronged. Survives and returns to seek retribution. Succeeds.
A4; Any descent revenge story follows this pattern, with The Count of Monte Cristo being the most famous example in modern literature.

That's just a very few. There are endless possibilities for describing any story in ten words or less. What stories can you describe? You don't even need to show their titles. Just describe it to someone, and wait to see if they get it.

Go on. Try.

Choices, Choices

NOTE: Many apologies for my lack of activity between Saturday and Thursday. I was on a camping holiday in Herefordshire with three other generations of family. Not entirely nice due to my inexperience with camping, but enjoyable enough that I'll remember it.

The life of someone trying to get published as an author is hard. You finish one work, and immediately think about moving on to another one once you've recovered. But is there any point? You're not published yet. Yes, there is a point! There is absolutely a point! Stopping at one work won't cut it. Some authors can tenderly refine and improve their work over so many years and strike lucky with an agent or publisher. But that's not my way. You can still refine and polish one work while writing another. And that's not counting short stories, and posts like this.

Right now, I've got between three and four possible large projects to pursue. By large, I'm talking about novels. Short stories can be completed in around a week, though that's without taking editing and proofing into account.

My first possibility is a strange blend of sci-fi and fantasy, inspired by two things; that amazing trailer for Beyond Good and Evil 2, and pirate stories ranging from On Stranger Tides and Treasure Island to contemporary offerings such as Laputa and Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl. Basically the romping tale of one woman's selfless search for a wish-granting island, it's something light and friendly I can do after completing an extremely weighty sci-fi revenge story.

The second is slightly darker, and comparatively easier. A take on Lovecraft where the Eldritch monstrosities he described are simply how we appear in a simultaneous parallel "Other" realm crossing the prose of Lovecraft with the fleshy weirdness of Cronenberg. I'm setting it around North Wales, particularly Anglesey - my home, and consequently the perfect setting for me to describe a place with native detail and twist it using the filter of the Other.

The third is something that occurred to me on holiday, while I was playing the card game Once Upon A Time with my mother, sister and niece. I'd long had the idea of creating a grand adventure in a "classic" fantasy swords-and-sorcery realm which would help question many of the genre's accepted tropes. The role of the hero and "princess", what evil is, the sometimes-contrived events that happen along the way. Combined with the card game's premise of telling and influencing a story based on the cards in your hand to reach your "Happily Ever After" inspired this concept. A grand fantasy world where the hero's actions and events encountered were influenced by a group playing a game in the real world. The only one conscious of this at first is a single player expelled from the game that has entered the world controlled by the cards to tilt the game in favour of winning its freedom from control.

Those are the best contenders. And so, as the title of the post says.... Choices, choices.

Crazy Idea: "A Miss Werewolf to see you"

Remember my last crazy idea? Well I've been brewing another one for some time. Slightly more fantastical, and just as obscure. It came from watching several movies and absorbing other media related to werewolves. Have you ever noticed that while female vampires are plentiful, female werewolves are anything but. You'd think that werewolf kind was some kind of male-only realm like the Garrick Club. So I thought to myself; what about a female werewolf?

Before anyone says anything, I know female werewolves have been seen. Once. In the final scenes of The Howling. But that hardly counts. And they are present in fiction such as Housman's The Were-wolf, just not mainstream stuff and not often in the sympathetic light shone on female vampires such as Carmilla. In popular culture, the figure of the werewolf is still very masculine, as has been noted in this article on Artsy.net.

So there's the vision I had. Not only is this werewolf female, but it's not the atypical ravening beast so many have come to expect. Imagine this.

You walk through a forest in the dead of night. The moon is full above you, the air is cold and damp from a clinging mist, there are no lights within range aside from the single lamp swinging in your hand. Then you see a form reclining on the bow of a tree up ahead. A humanoid lupine figure with a long tail swinging absently below it. It turns its head, and its eyes reflect the lamp light's gleam. It shuffles and jumps down, standing a head taller than you, digitigrade legs propelling it forward with stately grace. You are frozen to the spot in fear. It speaks.
'A late night to be out. Where are you heading? I'll be your escort, if you wish.'
A woman's voice; deepened and with a subtle growl in the throat, but a woman's voice nonetheless. You nod automatically, too dazed to think clearly. And that night, your escort is a female werewolf. She talks in a candid way about her travels during the night of the full moon, wandering the forest. She talks of flowers, or badgers, of loneliness, of the difficulty telling people she "just wants time to herself each month". You reach the bridge across to the town where you are staying for the night. After a cordial farewell, the werewolf vanishes into the night.
Little do you think that the following full moon, your servant will come in and say,
"A Miss Werewolf to see you. Are you in?"
And even less do you think that the following night would be one of cordial and interesting conversation with a dark-haired lady. Or rather, a lady with dark hair all over her. 

This werewolf isn't a voracious monster, but is still a wild thing. She is able to comfortably wander through a land that terrifies and bamboozles normal people, as any woodland animal would. But she hasn't lost either her humanity or her key female elements by becoming a towering humanoid wolf creature. Bear in mind, this is a prototype for a "crazy idea", and needs both time and polish before it becomes anything substantial.

But aside from that, what do you think? What female werewolves do you know about? Please share and comment. Until next time!

Shared Post: "Writers Are from Venus, Agents Are from Mars" by Erica Verrillo

During my long and hard road to try and get published - and more importantly get sales for my work and begin making a living - one blog has been my constant ally and bulwark. "Publishing...And Other Forms of Insanity", a blog run by children's book author Erica Verrillo. I've shared her work on my own blog before, and it's that time again. This time, it's a post of hers from December 2012,

As the title suggest, it highlights the differences between authors and agents, which are very different from authors. While authors are creatives, agents are salespeople and want both a saleable product and a face to act as a promotional tool. To quote...

Writers, especially fiction writers, focus on crafting our work. After a long and difficult labor, we give birth to novels. The last thing we need while in the throes of contractions (no pun intended) is for the midwife to ask, “What kind of diapers would you like? Cloth or disposable?” As far as we are concerned, our job is finished when we push out the last line.

This is simply not how the publishing world works. Before contacting an agent, you must not only have a finished work (edited, proof-read, and ready for the printer), you must understand the industry. That means knowing what is going on in the publishing world, knowing what is going on in the book selling world, and knowing what is going on inside your agent's head. In order to do that you must go to your local library and pore through issues of Publisher's Weekly, Writer's Digest, and The Writer. You must read blogs kept by agents and editors in order to familiarize yourself with the lingo of the trade: proposal-to-publish forms, subsidiary rights, and promotion potential. You must become vertically integrated.

I had my own introductions to the publishing world, but soft and hard. Now I'm ready for what may come. Any aspiring author needs to face this at some point. But don't let that stop you. It's these kinds of challenges that make getting yourself established as a writer earning a living worth the effort.

A Song of Ice and....Ribos?

Basic setting. A world which has extreme summer and winter seasons, with the story set during one of its prolonged winters. The world is home to a Medieval civilisation that has yet to discover many of the higher sciences modern humanity takes for granted, and whose people are influenced by prophetic shamans and believe in icy monsters that take unsuspecting intruders. During one particular winter, one of the northern capitals is the setting for political machinations, a little slight of hand, and great tragedy as people begin to die according to the shaman's foretelling.

Now you may think I've just described a very basic version of the universe of A Song of Ice and Fire, a series of books by George R. R. Martin which began their creation in 1993. But you'd be wrong. What I just described is the basic scenario of The Ribos Operation, a serial from the 1978-79 series of Doctor Who written by Robert Holmes, starring Tom Baker as the titular alien time traveller and Mary Tamm as his new Time Lord companion Romana. When I first saw The Ribos Operation on DVD, I had heard nothing of A Song of Ice and Fire, and thought it was a nice and fairly novel setting for a somewhat bland narrative It wasn't until many years after I'd heard of both that the similarities struck me.

Of course one could look and see any amount of minor details that don't match up, the largest being the world itself and its context. The explanation of Ribos's status is given in some detail due to outsiders appearing from off world; its seasons are caused by the planet's highly elliptical orbit, and is classed by outsiders as a Grade 3 planet with a protected low-technology society that could not reach the more advanced Grade 2 - and consequently be open to alien contact - for "many thousands of years". The main narrative for The Ribos Operation revolves around the character of Graff Vynda-K, an exile alien tyrant whose goal is to reclaim his lost provinces. This makes him easy prey for a pair of human con artists to sell him a fictional mine of a powerful space age fuel. In the middle of all this, the Doctor and Romana are trying to find one sixth of an important cosmic artefact, and naturally can't help getting tangled up in the schemes of both the Graff and the con artists.

There are far too many plots to count in the current run of A Song of Ice and Fire, but the basic gist revolves around dynastic and international politics between multiple nations spread across several large and small landmasses. It's also incredibly violent in places, with main characters dropping like flies when compared to similar fantasy sagas.

In many ways, the two are as dissimilar as chalk and cheese, but the similar setting and tone suddenly clicked. It just goes to prove, nothing's new when it comes to fiction.

Flash! 2018 Progress Report.

Hi! I haven't had the time or the energy to write anything like my usual posts, so I thought I'd do something different. As I continue to push forward with my dream, and fight of submission-based or just plain anxiety (more on that here and here) attacks that come in monthly cycles, I'd like to give those who actually read this blog a little update on what I've managed to do this year.

One book self-published, with its sequel to follow later this year!

Getting on for or perhaps over 30 submissions sent out between February and June of this year, for multiple projects that I felt had the potential to be accepted.

Between 4 and 6 short stories written.

One sample of flash fiction written.

And alongside all this...

Helping my family cope with a sudden and very personal upheaval which I won't describe here for obvious reasons.

Continuing to do occasional battle with my self-esteem issues.

And that's it! Today I feel great, and if you too feel great, then please browse through my (approaching) two years' worth of posts. Who knows, you may find something you like. Have a great Sunday!