Hairy-Footed Women, and Other Protagonists We Need More Of

Today's post brought to you by this, which is awesome.

Also of note! The price for the Soulwoven e-book has dropped to $2.99.

Gender norms are a topic of note in my house, my family, my reading, and, sometimes, my writing. I will admit that discussions of them often make me uncomfortable (aka aware of my privilege) and fill me with doubt as to whether I'm secretly a reprehensible human being despite all my efforts not to be.

But sometimes, they're just awesome.

Like today, when my fiancee sent me a link to this post about someone changing The Hobbit so that Bilbo is a girl. I am, I will admit, an unabashed fan of swapping the genders of protagonists and seeing what happens. So this is really in my wheelhouse. But also there's the picture. And in the Facebook link I was sent (embedded at bottom), there's an even better picture of a woman cosplaying the hell out of Bilbo, hairy feet and all.

I'm sure I'm late to this party, because this blog post went up seven months ago and I'm always late to the Internet party, but it's still cool.

And it made me think how much the world could use more female protagonists with hairy feet, hairy legs, hairy armpits, etc. Because hairlessness is a feature of childhood, and that's, well...problematic. I'll let you fill in your own dots on that one.

So what other kinds of protagonists could we use more of? Let me know and maybe I (or someone I know) will get a great idea for a story built around them. :-)

Post by A Mighty Girl.

Thoughts on Fictional Characters and Free Will

My sister recently sent me a link to this blog post, which contains a link to this blog post, which consists mostly of four questions for writers on how they think about their characters. I've been noodling it, and I figured I'd take a stab at answering them today, in part because somehow it got to be 11:00 p.m. and I still haven't written a blog post today.

So here goes.

1. Do you ever perceive your characters as having any free will? Do you feel like you consciously control everything your characters do, or do you sometimes feel like they control their own actions?

A two-part question! That's cheating. I don't think of my characters as having free will. One reason I think fiction is worth having (because this cannot be done to nearly the same degree in nonfiction) is that it allows you to very clearly lay out the chains of causation that lead people to take the actions they do. There are greater and lesser degrees of that in every story, and how much you show the reader is a creative choice, but in my head, every time a character takes an action, I know why. And that makes it difficult to maintain the illusion that they have any free will. The world is constantly pushing them into things, and even when they choose to buck what other people want them to do, they're still doing that because of who they are, which is a result of their life experiences.

That's not to say that my characters don't surprise me. They often do, if only because when I'm plotting or writing a first draft I often make assumptions about how they'll behave that don't add up when push comes to shove, or I learn/create things about them as I write that alter the way they interact with the world and with other characters.

2. Do you perceive your characters as having more free will (or more of a “mind of their own”) if they are similar to you or dissimilar to you? Does the point of view you are writing in ever affect this?

No and no. But what the question seems to be digging for is "do you ever feel like your characters have more a mind of their own?" and the answer to that is yes. Every once in a while, a character seems to spring forth from the depths of my mind more or less fully formed. Their personality is so strong that I know what they're going to do in any given moment without understanding why or sometimes even knowing more than the most basic facts about their history. And when that happens, they surprise me more often.

3. Do reader/fan reactions ever change your understanding of who a character “really is” (or have you ever discovered something you did not realize was true about one of your characters based on feedback from early readers?)

Yes. Maybe it's a sign that I'm not as tight a writer as I'd like to be, but I imagine this happens to everyone. When I write, I leave space inside the narrative for the reader to inhabit. Every person who reads my books will read them slightly differently. Thinking the way I do about stories (which is that they take place only in the reader's mind, and that the words on the page are really just code designed to evoke a story in someone's mind), it surprises me more often that anyone ever agrees on who my characters are.

4. If you’ve ever had a movie made from your book, do you think the movie altered your mental image/concept/understanding of the character in any way?

Go ahead. Rub it in. I'll have you know that Peter Jackson has been alerted to my book, so it's only a matter of time before he turns it into a trilogy.

Hope that's some interesting food for thought! And happy May.

Lucy Hounsom on the Importance of Fantasy

Another post today coming from Fantasy Faction, where Lucy Hounsom penned an excellent article about what makes fantasy important. Most salient quote to me:

The camaraderie we feel with well-crafted characters – of shared trials while questing – is one of the reasons I started reading fantasy. I was an unsociable, diffident teenager and a bit of a loner frightened to make friends. The physical and psychological transition from childhood to adulthood is the hardest we face as individuals, and many of us find ourselves reaching out to others in the same situation. I found myself reaching out to characters that lived in entirely different worlds. That was part of their gift. Unable then to adjust to an adult world full of novelties, I felt that I could only grow with – and learn from – those who fought their battles and faced their demons in the realm of myth.

This is one of the reasons I write (and read, and edit) fantasy as well, and it's the reason I decided at a very young age to dedicate a life in which I believed I could've done just about anything to telling stories. I was not an unsociable and diffident teenager, but I still found the transition from childhood to adulthood incredibly difficult. I still needed stories. I too found what I was after in fantasy, and I have always wanted to give something back---or pay something forward, put more accurately---to it.

And I will be looking forward anxiously to Lucy's first book in 2015, since it seems we're cut very much from the same kind of cloth.

Michael Martinez on Self, Hybrid, and Traditional Publishing

Mike Martinez, for those who don't know, writes an incredible hybrid blend of science fiction and historical fantasy, in which tall ships battle for control of the solar system rather than the New World (full disclosure: I edited his novella The Gravity of the Affair, so I'm not exactly unbiased). So it's only fitting that he's a hybrid author, and he took the time recently to weigh in on a brouhaha in the publishing world forming around a survey of author earnings done by a prominent self-published author and his partner. The survey in question grabbed a bunch of data from Amazon and crunched it to try to compare average earnings of various types of authors.

There's been a lot, and I mean a lot of vitriol floating around concerning this survey.

Mike took a more peaceful approach, one shared by a lot of authors, including myself, and I wanted to share it with you.

There are an awful lot of reasons to publish a book, and the various approaches to doing so will suit you better or worse depending on what your reasons are. One book may have different reasons than another. Your reasons may change as your career progresses, and it's a good thing that authors can and are moving fluidly from one publishing model to the other and back as it suits them. Personally, I love working with authors who were self-published as an editor; they tend to be better educated about the industry than those who never went through that crucible.

I'm also immensely enjoying being my own publisher. It's teaching me a lot.

And for what it's worth, I haven't read much that's self-published that's as good as Mike's books are.

For New Readers

Note: I wrote this post originally to reach out to several thousand new followers of mine on Wattpad. But once it was written, I realized it might be worth sharing with a wider audience as well. So here goes!

TL;DR Thanks for taking a chance on me. I mostly write fantasy for young people. You can find a lot of my work on Wattpad. I appreciate your support and love talking to readers.

Hello friends and readers!

This post is mostly aimed at my new followers. Those of you who’ve been around for a while can feel free to carry on with your Wattpadding uninterrupted. :-)

But to the rest of you: a special hello! Many of you are completely new to Wattpad, and I want to thank you guys for choosing me as one of the first authors you’ve followed. I know a lot of you haven’t had the chance to read any of my work yet. That’s cool with me. I want to earn your support and readership, and I figure I’ll start by extending a welcoming hand and giving you a brief introduction to what I’ve posted here.

NADYA SKYLUNG AND THE CLOUD PIRATES is a fantasy steampunkish adventure written with middle-grade readers (11-14 or so) in mind. Judging by early reactions to it, it is by far the best thing I’ve ever written. There are only three chapters of it up on Wattpad, because I’m waiting to introduce it to the world with a bang, but it’s a good place to start and get an idea of what I write. 

SOULWOVEN is the reason most of you are here. Wattpad spotted it when I started posting it last year and asked to feature it. It’s an epic fantasy about brotherhood, friendship, young love, saving the world, losing your identity, and what we have left when everything is taken from us. It’s ambitious, and it’s a little dense, and it’s aimed at lovers of fantasy and literature ages 15 and up. 

Finally, THREE DANCES is a short story collection I published earlier this year. It’s five literary fiction stories done in a magical realist style that deal with tricks of language and myth, gender and sexuality, and growing up. It’s aimed pretty squarely at adults, but it’s a good read if you like its niche. 

I hope you find a book you love on my list. And if you do, I hope you take the time to let me know by voting and commenting (ed: or by buying Three Dances or backing the Soulwoven Kickstarter!). Those things are what make the world go round for us authors. And if you just want to say hi, drop me a line for that too. I’d love to talk to you. :-) 

Cheers, Jeff

One for the Locker: Austin Grossman on Video Games and Writing

If any of you have ever taken the time to peruse my old blog, you'll see that I've learned a lot of things about storytelling from playing video games. I now no longer have so much time to do that (sad! Although I have a smashing idea that will give me an excuse to play for 24 hours straight next Fall, so stay tuned), but I still think often about the writing in video games and what an amazing playground it looks like to me from the outside.

Anyway, this article is about what it looks like from the inside, and its author reminded me a bit of myself. Except that I applied for jobs writing video games and got one in publishing instead.

Funny ol' world, innit?

http://www.polygon.com/2013/4/18/4231940/opinion-video-games-taught-me-how-to-write

Some thoughts on self-publishing

So. As part of my daily routine, I read two publishing-related trade publications: Publisher's Lunch, which I pay for, and the Publisher's Weekly Daily e-newsletter, which is free (woohoo!). The reading takes up a lot of time (usually an hour or two), but it helps keep me up-to-date on the industry I care most about in the world and is always well worth it.

Today, as I was reading the industry press for January 30 (I'm three weeks behind on my reading. It's very easy to get that way.), I discovered a couple of very, very interesting links to articles on self-publishing, right next to each other.

The first describes it as a bubble, a la the housing industry in 2006-2008, the dotcoms in the '90s, etc. And the scary thing is, the description fits very well, especially in light of the second, which includes the following gem of a statement:

Don’t have time to write it. Then tell it to a ghostwriter you outsource to for almost no money. You don’t need 60,000 words. Do it in 20,000 words. Throw some pictures in. Just do it. Then when you meet someone and they ask for your business card, how cool will it be when you can say, “here, take my book instead.”

Interesting to note the sources of each article. The "it's a bubble, react cautiously" article comes from The Guardian, a prestigious UK newspaper, while the "OMGGETRIIIIIIICH" article comes from Techcrunch.

Reading the Techcrunch article, it's very, very easy to see the author of the first article as entirely correct. I do sometimes wonder if the window for massive success as a self-published e-author existed only when the technology was brand new, and it's quite apparent that even if the window is still open, the number of people trying to climb through it is absurdly higher than the number who can actually fit.

At the same time, self-publishing has strengths where traditional publishing has weaknesses (namely cost and time to market). It's an incredible place to experiment. And one thing the author of the Guardian article fails to note is that it's entirely possible to go through all the rigamarole of the traditional publishing process and still only sell a few hundred books.

In the end, I do believe it's still a viable option both for getting your writing out to the public and for making money doing it. I think the cream will rise to the top and be swept off the top by traditional publishers. And most importantly of all, what I have always taken as the one necessary to having success as a writer still holds true: You just have to be great. For what it's worth, the one self-published Kindle bestseller I've read was actually pretty good, though it needed an editor.

In the end, it got one. It was picked up by a traditional publisher a few months back.

Things to keep in mind.

Oh! And a third interesting article from today's (well, last month's) reading. A press in Canada let a journalist sit in on one of their editorial meetings. The result is a very candid description of what they look like, and well worth reading for anyone interested in the industry.