You have to be willing to take risks in this business of ours. Calculated risks that are nonetheless precarious for the careful thought you put into jumping off whatever cliff of opportunity looms before you. Sometimes a marvelous parachute glide awaits you, easing you into your next step forward. Sometimes there turn out to be holes in your plan and you land in the trees–if you’re lucky. Sometimes you crash and burn completely. My experience with Dorchester Publishing these last few years, like many authors, has been more the latter. But as of last week I can officially say it hasn’t been a crash and burn fiasco, and the trees that were grabbing at my chute are receding farther and farther away each time I look back. Perspective?One might call it that, this ah-ha sensation filling me. Hind sight gives us the illusion of finally seeing things as they were always meant to be. Maybe it’s just dumb luck… You be the judge.
Too often it feels as if I have absolutely NO idea how I got to this moment of deep sighing and appreciation for a journey well traveled and a fight bravely faced and won (Amazon, the publisher who also recently signed a three book deal with me to publish a women’s fiction/contemporary romance series has bought out Dorchester’s list at auction and will not only pay me royalties due from the last three years, but will re-list and potentially buy new titles into my sci-fi/fantasy series).
To be honest, I have some idea. But my mind’s still spinning as I process the twists and turns and decisions and retreats–stopping myself, ultimately, from making several end-game decisions that would have ended this wild ride before I achieved what I’d set out to. What follows is the CliffsNotes version of that adventure, because publishing can be a sucky journey for all of us and I’m happy to share my personal suckage if it might possibly help others finding themselves in their own potentially no-win situations, trying to choose the least objectionable of the unsatisfying options before them.
But first, let’s identify what exactly I wanted to achieve from the start.Because the best business decisions are potentially bad business decisions, regardless of the odds in your favor, if you don’t understand your goal. My best advice to anyone when they ask me my opinion of what they should do about a book, agent, publisher or contract is to figure out what you want and determine the best way to achieve that. Beyond that, I got nothing. Because as you’ll see below, the rules are always changing and what works for me or someone else now may be a no-win choice for you tomorrow. You have to be flexible in this business. You have to dodge and duck and know when to jump or stand still. None of which you can do effectively if you aren’t sure where you’re headed.
My goal with my sci-fi/fantasy series: To establish my mainstream fiction work and to build a series for a broader audience than my contemporary romance roots, into which I could continue to sell future novels. Simple right?
Let’s take a closer look, shall we?
Round about the fall of 2008: Dorchester offers a 2-book deal for my Legacy Series. Dark Legacy to release nationwide in mass market paperback in the fall of 2009.
I deliver the book on time, but the advance money isn’t coming from the publisher as quickly as it should. Agent pushes hard behind the scenes, but we don’t pull the book from the schedule. It’s more important to my goal to be established as a mainstream author with bigger stories to sell than my category romance roots, than it is to join in the shrieks of dissatisfaction with the publisher beginning to rumble all over the Internet.
Fall, 2009: Dark Legacy in stores, positioned well, I’m signing in the B&N flagship store in New York’s Lincoln Center, and we’re off. Sales are good but nothing fabulous. We can do better, publisher says. My series is repositioned away from traditional romance and closer to the sci-fi/thriller market it’s better suited for.
Secret Legacy due to editor in early 2010 for a rushed summer 2010 release because they want to break it out. They’re behind this very different, edgy thing I’m doing with my mainstream work 110%. They’ve also by now paid me the advance I’m owed to date. Agent and I see this as a good chance to shine within a smaller traditional press, so I keep working.
Health issues and surgery prevent me from turning the second book in on time. Editor and publisher couldn’t have been more understanding. Deadline for delivering Secret Legacy is pushed to the spring of 2010, with a fall release. It’s the hardest writing period I’ve ever had, and I called my agent to quit more than once, but the book was finished and revised in a gruelingly short amount of time. If nothing else, this experience proved to me that I had to keep writing–if for no other reason than I couldn’t seem to make myself stop.
Fall 2010: Serious money spent on my part and committed by publisher to promote the book that should break out, even though remaining advance for the second book on the contract hasn’t yet been paid. However, lots of publisher plans–print and digital promotion. Extensive online blog tour being set up. Again, agent and I are staying focused on the publishing possibilities and my investing in my mainstream future, which means I continue to do my job and play nice while she rattles their cages fighting to get me the money owed.
Two weeks before Secret Legacy’s launch: it’s announced on the Internet (not to individual authors) that overnight Dorchester’s pulling their print publishing arm (meaning all my mass market print books are being yanked, never to be distributed retail) and beginning immediately to shift to a digital first/print on demand business. My break out release: not going to happen. My sizable investment in promoting to mass market retailers and readers: wasted. My remaining faith in publisher: destroyed.
When you’re a tech writer, you learn you have to have head’s-down writing days. Whether you’re in a busy office or working at home and everyone’s pinging you on your laptop through your DSL or whatever and the phone won’t stop ringing, you have to learn how to tell everyone that you can’t chat today, or do lunch, or even make a hour-long meeting that should only take fifteen minutes. You have a certain number of pages to get done to stay on your project plan, and that’s just the way it’s going to be. You’re not moving from your desk or even going to try and pretend to be social until they’re done.
Fiction writers need head’s-down days, too. I was talking with someone yesterday about meeting daily page count goals. If I could do it writing 600 pg. security administration guides (brain damge would be a more interesting pursuit), I can damn well do it writing something fun like how to make dreams leathal or how to kill a bad guy with a Yoo-hoo-spewing vending machine (don’t ask). Your daily fiction writing goal is your professional project. If you have to, make a formal plan to track it. Then follow the plan. Even if you think you can’t be creative today. Of course you can be creative. You’re a creative writer. It’s you job. DO IT.
Sorry for yelling. I’m on target to write more this year than I have in the last two years combined, and I think it’s getting to me
AND I know it’s not that simple. We all have lives, and some of us (me included) work at home and that comes with a whole other world of distractions. But be committed to your page count. To your story. It has to be a priority. Otherwise, you’re not giving your creative job your all. And it will show in the characters and plot you develop. (more…)
Whatever your long-term goal, meeting short-term milestones is the key to success. As is enduring between them. The troughs between the high points is where it’s easiest to quit. Our souls are most vulnerable there. Our love for competing with ourselves is most at risk. It’s these between places where we’re more likely to hit a wall we feel we can’t possible scale…
I’ve achieved several of work/book milestones the first half of 2012: getting back under contract; finishing novels; building up the editing side of my business; rediscovering what feeds me as an artists and committing myself to that journey above all else.
Personally, there have been even more highs: 21st wedding anniversary; my teenager’s success in his 3rd semester of high school, his kick-ass internship, his (waaaaaaa!) obtaining his driver’s license and next step toward freedom; my getting a handle on the health issues that have ground most everything else into the dust for 3 years and owning, along with my artistic inspiration, what will be required likely for the rest of my life to keep me thriving.
Startling progress for six months of living, particularly after the slow down that became my 2010 and 2011… Then I hit a wall in July that narrowed my focus to quite honestly getting through the next minute, next hour, next day, next deadline. So help me God, I was going to get through! And I did. Where, exactly, did July and the first part of August go?
No wonder all I want to do right now is sit in a corner and quietly, passively, watch the world go by.
Like with the distance runners and swimmers we cheered on in the Olympics, just before and just after a peak in performance we’re exhausted as our bodies and minds are wanting to let down. We’re inspired, yes, but often least able to believe that pushing through MUST be done before all else. Our focus is skewed toward a short-term goal, and we begin to wander, to wonder, to miss the point0–that the journey is key, not the result. (more…)
I’m a geeky, analysis-loving writer. I live to plan and revise. Drafting–NOT so much my happy place. While I’m drafting, I must continually slap my hand and let go of the overly organized stuff my brain prefers. So nix on clinging to the forms and charts that I’ve filled out and used to rough out my characters and plot. It’s the only way I ever get a draft done–I have to trust my instincts and my planning and let myself go–to PLAY. Writing is improvisation. It’s playing. I’ve being asked a lot about my process as I do the blog tour for my latest release–here’s some of the high points about my drafting process.
Drafting is hell for me…until that ugly first draft is done. Then it becomes heaven, because now I have some place to start to REALLY craft a story I’ll love. Believe me, this is a dynamic that won’t change for my process. I just sent the first draft of my Christmas on Mimosa Lane to my Montlake editor after working on it FOREVER and much longer than I was supposed to have to write it (BLESS my editor and agent for being so patient while I tackled such a complex story), and only now do I really see the potential and beauty of what I’ll ge to work with through the editorial revision process.
And I’ve revised the entire thing myself something like 15 or 20 times already. The ending chapters–I must have rewritten them at least 10 times in the last few weeks. Character arcs–each one has been obsessed over. Subplots–do they reflect the main? Secondary characters–do they have their own story to tell, as well as playing into the central plot’s overall themes? Setting–how well have I show the reader what I need to, so hopefully she’ll feel what my characters are feeling within their world? And on and on… All because of the momentum I allow to build as I draft freely, and the notes I keep so I can come back and rip everything apart once I have a big picture of the entire story.
I draft (from a proposal synopsis and around three chapters) forward without stopping. No going back. No letting myself fix things or revise. Not until I reach the end. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be an end. (more…)
What do you do when your muse deserts you? What keeps you going when today’s tight market seems to be saying you should give it up? I’m on vacataion this week. And, yes, working a bit while I’m here. But first and foremost, I’m taking some much-needed downtime to recharge and prepare for the next big push in my job–which is waiting for me a soon as I step off the plane in Atlanta. I better be ready to go when I get back, but how exactly do I make that happen, and how do I keep from getting even more burned out?
Well, for me butteflies work…
But maybe not so much for everyone else ;o)
The midlist is dying, we’re told. The task of getting the right manuscript on the right desk at the right time and selling a book has never seemed more Herculean. The average writer watches seven to ten years go by before she publishes her first manuscript. With odds like that, is it any real shock that from time to time the excitement that once inspired you to keep going just up and vanishes? We’ve all been there.
And let’s face it, nothing feels worse than to find yourself stuck in the quagmire you affectionately call your *%#$! work-in-progress, meanwhile everyone around you is effortlessly producing at Mach 3. You used to be producing, too. But now, plucking a fresh description or an unforgettable character out of what was once your boundless creativity is about as effortless as pulling a splinter from your hysterical six-year-old’s fingernail. There’s lots of screaming and tears involved, lots of wasted time trying to pin the little bugger down, only to have him scoot away just as you’re starting to make real progress. Finally at the end of your rope, you give up wrestling and wonder if you’ll ever be able to get the darn thing out.
So how do you recapture your muse?(more…)
I read an article recently that suggests that while the tendency toward having a depressive personality can be hereditary, how that part of your psyche manifests itself depends a lot on whether you were raised in a conflict/anxiety-driven home environment or a calming/nurturing one. Heh. Guess what the growing up years were like for this curly-haired bruentte whose happy-ending stories begin with broken characters who are worlds apart from each other and their hearts desire, forcing them to fight the entire book for that loving, sigh-worthy place waiting in their Emerald City?
Yeah, so it’s no mystery that dark and angsty writers tend not to come from the most warm and fuzzy of family bosoms. Then again, neither have a lot of the romantic comedy writers you love. The difference between them and me, I think, is that I find catharsis in facing the shadows within. While the lighter writers I admire heal by focusing on the good without, to get them through the tougher stuff. As many a wise person has said over the years–there are many roads to Oz.
Still, as I look at my body of work or even my current projects (a heroine with amnesia that must remember her troubled past to save her life–June 15th Dead Sexy release; a heroine just out of an abusive marriage who must face the emotional trauma she’s running from in order to save an abused little boy–July Heartwarming release; and a heroine who grew up homeless who must face the mother who abandoned her and give up her dreams of making the past better in order to have the future she’s always longed for–October Montlake release), the patterns are there and a little staggering.
I’m a woman dealing with what a lot of us do as adults–the fact that as children we weren’t loved and nurtured that we should have been by those who “took care of us.” The result–we live life too often still feeling abandoned, and frequently expect our friends and loved ones to chose to protect themselves whenever we most desperately need them to help us.
I write about strong heroines and protective heroes–but my mind doesn’t seem to be satisfied with simply brushing over the darkness that calls these characters to fight their epic battles. I evidently need to explore those places and spaces in my character’s (and my own) mind that are holding them (and me) back. My writing, I’ve come to realize–my creating–is about learning how to fight for the nurturing and care that I need, right along with my protagonist.
I’ve been described as a hopeful, inspiring writer, one who lifts readers up through realistic journeys that make you feel as if you, too, will find a happy ending at the conclusion of your battles.(more…)
“If you fall pick yourself up off the floor (get up). And when your bones can’t take no more (c’mon), just remember what you’re here for… Give ‘em hell, turn their heads. Gonna life life ’til we’re dead. Give me scares, give me pain. Then they’ll say of me… There goes the fighter… Here comes the fighter… This one’s a fighter.” ~~Gym Class Heroes, ft. Ryan Teddar, The Fighter
Watch this video. Listen to the song. Find all the lyrics and read them. Then do it all again.
“There’s no reason you should ever have your head down… It’s gonna take a couple right hooks, a few left jabs. For you to recognize you really ain’t got it so bad…”
It’s been a long week, and I’m being torn in about ten directions at once. But I’m living a life I’d only dreamed of ten years ago. And this is my time to shine, fight, work through the bruises and the challenges, come out swinging despite the obstacles, and give ‘em hell!
You wanna sell in romance and women’s fiction, give your heroine a strong hook. But don’t make her too damsel in distress, don’t make her too bitchy, don’t make her so smart she’s bossy, don’t make her too dumb, and don’t, don’t, don’t do anything to run away the average reader who buys the majority of books like the one you want to sell. Or should you? Because if she’s a down-the-middle kind of gal, where’s the hook? I’m just askin’.
In my Naked Hero blog post yesterday (over there I’m the Goddess of Mischief), a bunch of us chatted about favorite hero attributes. Now it’s the girls turn. And while I’m all for pleasing the reader, it can get a little crazy-making, talking with a publishers and editors about what they’re looking for in a heroine, what makes them want to pull their hair out about an over-used cliche, or want to smack a whiny leading lady, or turn a book down flat, because the female protagonist, in their opinion, just won’t sell to readers, she’s just not what most everyone is looking for in an easy read like a romance.
Okay, but what about the widow of a defunked televangelist. A man who was exposed as a lying, cheating sinner, run out of town, on the lamb from the law, then turned up dead, leaving his wife and son destitute and at the mercy of the small town he swindeled?
Or a former snotty, priviledged, cruel small-town beauty queen who’s fallen on bad times and wants to make amends/start over, only no one’s buying it? (more…)
We’re creative creatures, writers. We’re artists. We want to imagine our worlds into being what we need them to be, how we need them to feel, and we need others to share in that vision, to see us. Unfortunately, for those of us who want to make a living from our art, we typically need to do all of that on deadline. And there’s the rub. A brief workadayreads interview with me went up yesterday, talking more about the business/insides of writing than my recent guest posts, so take a look. Then shoot back over here, and lets get down to the nitty gritty of how to focus when you have to. Because you have to. No matter how much you love your story or characters or your readers, this writing/creating gig becomes a job at some point, and if you can’t focus your energy on your creating long enough to actually create something on deadline, you’ll be writing for yourself and friends for a long, long time–but the new hearts and souls that you could have reached with your work won’t ever get to share in your creative journey.
Think of focus as a tool. A zoom lens. It’s the determination that you will get whatever you need to get done today, DONE TODAY. In however much time you have, you will make the impossible happen. Because you have to. Even if what needs to be done is an intensely personal, creative thing. Even if it’s like pouring your heart or rage or fear or insecurities onto a page, that’s your job today. And you’re focusing until your job is done.
Your goal must remain your focus until you reach, well, your goal. Sounds easy, right? RIGHT.
Today, my goal is to get to the midpoint turning point of my book, (more…)
“How do you keep a writing schedule like that, ” one of my weekend students asked, “when you’re editing and teaching and everything else? How do you know you’re going to be able to write, when you sit down at your desk every day?”
My answer–I don’t know if I can do it, until I do it.
Then again, I don’t let myself up from that desk, until I’ve found a way to plug into the muse, the creative inspiration, that will take me a step or two closer to realizing my dream for this new book, the way I have for all the other ones that have driven me equally crazy. Crazy, you understand, having become my natural state, so it’s not so strange a thing to be asking myself to dig deeper into the crazy well, whether I feel like it at that moment or not.
I love talking with small groups of authors, many of whom aren’t yet writing on publishing deadlines. Their energy is kinetic, frenetic, and contagious. They’d do almost anything to make their stories better and sellable and one step closer to being published. No matter how busy their lives are, no matter how much trouble they’re having with everything else, these hungry writers are dying to get back to their books and their critique groups and their creativity and make something happen on the page.
I need to see that as often as possible, which is what makes weekend events like the one I just taught with my literary agent–and the first pitches I’ve officially taken for Entangled Publishing ;o)–exactly what I need when I’m too mired in my own impossible deadlines and creative low spots. Because fresh, energetic, wanna-be-published-at-all-costs authors like the ones at Carolina Romance Writers have just as much of a message for me as I do for them. (more…)
I’m on target to write more this year than I have in the last two years combined, and I think it’s getting to me
