Why Wattpad?

I get a lot of questions from other authors about why I have work up on Wattpad. The most common is, "What do you get out of it?"

I've answered that in bits and pieces before. I get encouragement and feedback. I get to test stories before I decide what kind of a budget to set when I publish them. I get fans.

But Wattpad recently rolled out a new feature that will let me show you the primary thing I get in a way I haven't been able to before.

This is a map that shows where the Wattpad readers of Soulwoven are from. Darker countries have contributed a greater share of readers. White countries have contributed none.

And this is what I get.

Not the map. Bla bla business intelligence, yes, there's some information that's economically useful there, but it's not important.

The darkest country on this map is a place I can (and do) reach by self-publishing. But there are also a lot of countries on this map that I can't reach that way. Maybe most importantly, there aren't that many countries on this map with no shading.

Think about that for a second. Someone has read my writing in almost every country on Earth.

How many people in human history have ever been able to say that?

So the next time someone asks me, "Why Wattpad?" I will point them here with great happiness.

Legacy

Today's post inspired by this post, written by the inimitable J.A. Kazimer. Julie's going blind, which is sad for a nearly endless host of reasons. And she's thinking about her legacy, and in her post she asks other people to do the same.

So I'm going to, because this is a question I have struggled with over the last year.

To me, the question of legacy is one of what you want to be remembered for, which boils down more or less into what will make you consider your life a success. And that, in turn, translates into the question of what it's most important to do with your time. Because time is the one thing we can't get more of.

All this interacts with the writing lifestyle in complicated and terrible ways.

The writing monster will consume as many hours as you throw at it. You can always write more. Do one more revision. Sleep less. Quit your job. Abandon your family. Live for the art and the art alone.

Really, you can. There's nobody who can stop you from doing so but yourself. And there seem to be (and I place a lot of emphasis on seem to be here, because our culture loves narratives of hard work) a lot of successful writers who, at some point in their lives, did pretty much nothing other than write.

So for me, struggling and struggling and struggling to build a career out of hard work and dedication glued together with a little bit of talent, I had to confront a very difficult question last year:

What is most important to me, in life? Is it being the best writer I can possibly be, or is it something else?

And I decided (more accurately, I remembered) that writing successfully is not the end-all be-all of my existence, even though that poses certain challenges when making a career out of it. A long time ago, I decided that the measure of success in my life would be how many other lives I improved.

So that will be my legacy, I hope. When I cross paths with people, I want them to be glad they met me. And when I'm gone, that's what I want people to remember.

Writing is one way I hope to do that, but it can't be the only one.

And if I succeed at writing well, I suspect that will be why. When writing is all you have, it's easy to get desperate---for praise, for money, for validation. And you can't be desperate when you write. People can smell desperation, and they tend to stay away from it.

But if you build a balanced life and give writing only as much of it as it deserves, you can avoid that, I think.

So cheers. Legacy. And if you're into it, go read one of Julie's F***ed-Up Fairy Tales.

One for the Locker: Charlie Jane Anders on Worldbuilding

Like I said last week, I'm taking a class on worldbuilding, and we just got a great link to a worldbuilding checklist. I want to have it to hand, and I want to share it, so here it is, preserved in the locker for posterity.

Cheers!

Some Thoughts on Markets, Authors, and Submitting Short Stories

So while I'm working on my various summer short fiction projects, I've been doing a lot more thinking about traditional publishing and submitting stories to the few markets that pay very well.

Really, there aren't very many.

I've also been reading more of them. I work my way through a story every morning at breakfast now, and it's been a fantastic addition to my day. I've also learned that there are an awful lot of very good writers creating very good short fiction out there, and that many of them have never published a novel.

And because let's go ahead and form a trifecta so we can triangulate my thoughts, I've also been thinking more about writing fiction for a living and how simultaneously terrifying, liberating, and exhilarating it must be.

These three things have come together and forced me to ask myself a new question every time I write a story. They have also shed some light on why traditionally published authors can be so darn hostile sometimes.

The question is this: Is what I'm writing so good that it deserves to take bread off someone's table and put it on mine instead?

Because that's an undeniable reality. Clarkesworld, Tor.com, Asimov's, Lightspeed, Apex, et al. only publish a few stories each every month. Depending on the particulars of a story (length, especially), the markets for it might be even more limited. There really isn't that much money to go around (and for the record, it's better in SFF than it is in other genres), and if some of it goes to me, it's not going to someone else. Someone else who's probably writing something great, and who may be depending on the sales of their short fiction to stay afloat.

I won't feel bad about that, but only if I'm writing something that's so damn good that when they read it, they'll agree with the editor for buying it.

This isn't to say that you shouldn't write and shouldn't seek markets for your writing once you've finished it. But it's a piece of the puzzle that I had forgotten about, and it's worth remaining conscious of.

Cheers, and Happy Monday,
Jeff

Some (More) Thoughts on Worldbuilding

Hello, dear readers!

I'm back from my trip to the Great Upstate, where much planning of weddings was done and I even managed to read most of a book. Hazah! Now it's back to work, and I feel quite refreshed.

I gave up on the idea that I was going to an authorial wunderkind years ago and resigned myself to what I think of as the Rod Smith approach (Denver Broncos fans will probably know what I mean here, but the tldr is that he thought of himself as much less talented than the other top guys people in his field, so he made sure to work twice as hard). Part of that, for me, is a constant drive to improve various aspects of my writing from book to book. I have a long list of things I want to get better at, and one of them is worldbuilding.

So I'm taking a class from Scott Lynch of Gentleman Bastards fame, and I'm learning more about worldbuilding and spending a lot of time thinking about it. Fairly early on, it became apparent to me that I build my best worlds in a way that's often been described to me as "lesser." To wit: my best worlds seem to be the ones I build as I go. When I build a world and then try to set a story in it, the story, and by extension the world it's set in, usually feels a little flat. I really have to struggle to get all the elements to line up. On the other hand, when I start with a story and then build a world around it, everything seems to fit together much more tightly and harmonize much better.

With the help of my classmates, I've come to call the second way "discovery-style" worldbuilding, because you discover things about the world as you write.

I was working on an exercise for the class last night, one for which I'd been tasked to write a short bit of description to accomplish some worldbuilding goals. I wrote it. It read like crap. Absolute crap. I even cheated by setting it in the Soulwoven world and choosing an interesting scene from the backstory to write (for the curious, it's the moment when Eshan and Crixine leave Duenel).

As I was describing a river in the distance (again, for the curious, the Soulth'nth---the one the characters travel up to reach the mountains in the end of the first book), I realized why.

When I do "discovery-style" worldbuilding, I get to create the setting to match the theme. A river only exists in a discovery-style narrative (that I write, anyway) because it serves a thematic purpose; it's a metaphor for a journey, or a point that must be crossed and can never be uncrossed (like the Rubicon, the Lethe, etc.), or one of any other number of things. When I set a story in a world that already exists, the river is there, and I must describe it if the characters are looking at it. That's very limiting to me as a storyteller.

I'm glad that I spent months building the Soulwoven world, writing history and language and geography and myth. Doing that taught me a lot about how to build worlds, and I have a better sense now of what I need to discover when I'm writing them discovery-style (though I'm still learning and probably always will be). Plus, that was how Tolkien built his world, and given how much the traditions I work in derive from his work, it felt good to follow in his footsteps for a while.

But I don't know that I'll build any big worlds like that again; they just don't quite fit my style.

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.

Backstory

This is a very scattered blog post. Because the "log" part of "blog" comes from a time when blogs were more or less public, online substitutes for journals, and sometimes I like to use mine that way still.

Backstory is a very interesting thing. In case you're unfamiliar with the term, it's the part of the book that explains the things that happened before it. Like in The Lord of the Rings when Gandalf tells Frodo about the Ring. It's a very old thing; the Greeks used to do it with choruses of singing people in plays.

When you learn how to write, particularly if you write fantasy or science fiction, one of the first things people are likely to tell you to do is to cut out extraneous backstory. Done poorly, it bogs down a narrative and confuses readers. This is especially true if it's not immediately relevant and triple-dog-dare true if the reader isn't sure who and what the story is about yet.

But a lot of authors use backstory pretty intensively nonetheless. I'm reading Among Others by Jo Walton for my local SF/F indie store's book club, and I just finished a whole long passage of backstory. I've noticed others in Neil Gaiman (American Gods) and Scott Lynch (Lies of Locke Lamora) recently as well. I've noticed it in a whole lot of other authors too, but I can't remember whom or in what books precisely.

And it has occurred to me that when backstory is done right, you can get away with an awful lot of it.

The trick is to focus on the story part of the word.

When backstory works best, it's structured as a little miniature story within the story, almost like flash fiction. It has a beginning and a middle and an end. There's an important event that starts it and an important event that finishes it. The people or things being discussed change in the middle in interesting ways. And ideally it tells you something about characters you already know about and has some kind of impact on the plot.

Of further note: once you've demonstrated that when you use backstory it has an impact on the plot once, readers will trust that anytime you use it from that point on it will become important later, unless you betray them.

Y'know, in case you were curious.

Research. Also Being Rusty.

Tonight I'm researching things I'd rather not have to research because I wish they didn't exist. There's a scene in Soulwoven: Exile that was very difficult to write, and that it's extremely important to me not to get wrong. So. Research. Dark Things. Frightening Things. A whole mess of unpleasantness that taps my pysche in all kinds of unsettling ways.

And it's Monday, and that's one of the days I blog now, and I don't really have anything else to talk about.

Oh! Except being rusty. Good. Let's focus on that because it's less of a bear to write about without spoiling. Also, it's a happier subject.

This morning I finished making revision notes on Soulwoven: Exile and started revising. At the end, actually. Because one of the great tricks of a good novel is the way the end wraps around to the beginning, and the end wasn't working quite right. I need to nail it down before I go back to the beginning and make sure the circle closes.

It's been a month and half since I wrote anything new, and man, am I rusty.

Returning to writing after a layoff is always a little bit terrifying. I'm never sure whether it's going to come back, or whether I'm just going to keep on sucking as much as I do for the first however-many-hours-it-takes-to-get-out-the-kinks. Inevitably, it comes back, and then I get better. Thank God.

But right now, I feel like a shadow of the writer who finished Soulwoven. And having spent most of the last month and a half staring at the pages of Soulwoven, I'm not sure how I'm ever going to achieve that level of polish again.

I will. I'm quite certain of it, because that's how this whole thing works. You just keep spitting and polishing and spitting and polishing until it shines. And the thing that is Soulwoven: Exile lying underneath the grime of I-haven't-polished-this-yet is going to be beautiful. It's better than Soulwoven. It may even be much better than Soulwoven. The final paragraph (which only became the final paragraph this morning, after I snipped off some extraneous bits) gave me shivers. I will get the rest of it to look like that too eventually.

But in the meantime, I'm scared. And that's normal. And I say that because I don't think there's anyone in my life who isn't scared about their career sometime, no matter how good they are at it. And if you're reading this, there's a reasonable chance you think I do a decent job as a writer. Maybe if I'm honest about how terrified I am of sucking sometimes you'll think of it someday when it can help you.

And that would be wonderful.

News for the Week of 3.28.14: Back at Work!

Greetings, gentle readers!

It's been a while since I've given you an update on what I'm writing. That's because, well, I haven't been writing. Handling all the launch whatnot for Soulwoven, plus all the work I put off while I was making it ready for publication, has had me absolutely overwhelmed. It hasn't felt good, honestly.

But this week I got back on the horse! I've been cruising through the current draft of Soulwoven: Exile, which continues the story, and making revision notes. I should be finished with that in a few days and on to actually making the revisions, which is where the real magic happens.

It feels really, really good to be writing again. Exile is a darker and more mature beast than the first book was. It's been fascinating for me to read the reviews of Soulwoven as they come in. I've noticed in particular how many people are pointing out how the structure of the book---the heroic quest---is a bit, well, old-fashioned. Authors With Big Names aren't really writing those anymore.

Well, Exile's not a heroic quest. It's the aftermath. One of my reviewers compared Soulwoven to Lord of the Rings (we're talking broad strokes here, not enduring literary merit). If you take that comparison to the next book, Exile's what you might've gotten if Tolkien had spent a whole book exploring what happened to everyone on their way home, and if what happened was a little more frightening and difficult than chasing a defanged Saruman out of the Shire.

So that's what's on my mind. It feels like I'm sailing again after a month in port. The wind's in my hair and the sun is shining, and I've let the sheets out as far as they'll go. I hope to have bits of Exile to start sharing with you in the next few months.

Yours always,
Jeff

Some Thoughts on Gardening

Yesterday, Stephen Deas posted a thought-provoking article over on Fantasy-Faction (where I've been writing reviews of indie books this year) about one of George R. R. Martin's quotes on writing and the idea of authors as gardeners and architects.

One of his points, about the move toward multi-point-of-view narratives in fantasy in recent years, struck a chord with me.

As an aside, here’s a thought: is ensemble fantasy with no clear central character a relatively new thing (although Lord of the Rings arguably splits the lead between Frodo and Aragorn)? Does the rise of this type of story owe anything to table-top roleplaying games, the goal of most of which is to tell a story using an ensemble cast of roughly equal status? Has Dungeons and Dragons trained a good swathe of modern fantasy authors towards a certain kind of storytelling?

It was an interesting idea, but one I didn't quite buy. The roots of fantasy run deep, deep, deep, into the realms of mythology and religion. So I commented.

I do think that wandering stories with no one main character are as old as stories themselves though. It’s been a while since I read the Iliad, but my recollection of it is that it wandered all over the place and let many characters share the spotlight. It is, after all, the Iliad. It’s about Troy, not about Achilles or Agamemnon or Paris or Hector or Helen alone. Shakespeare (not a novelist, but what fantasy writer isn’t familiar with Midsummer Night’s Dream?) certainly didn’t confine his plots to one main character. And while Dickens (not a fantasist, but for my money as much a contributor to steampunk as Jules Verne) did at some times, at others he wrote pretty broadly. I’d have a tough time saying that Tale of Two Cities was about one character over the others.

That's all, really, except that it's now occurred to me that maybe Dickens was something of a fantasist. He wrote A Christmas Carol, after all. But it's an interesting topic, and I wanted to point you the gentle blog reader toward it. Hope it gives you something to wrap your heads around. I'm sure there must be examples of pre-D&D fantasy that don't center on one main character, and it's interesting to me that I didn't come up with anything off the top of my head, and neither did anyone in the comments.

Unexpected Influences

I'm presently about halfway through doing the hand-annotated copies for early Soulwoven backers. Doing them has forced me to look at the book in a different way than I have before. Among other things, it's meant scanning for influences and spotting broad trends, because I jump around from page to page and sort of skim, which isn't a normal part of my writing or revising process.

One of the trends I've spotted is an unexpected influence.

I've never been a huge consumer of stories in the horror genre. When I was a kid, they terrified me. Like, seeing movie trailers for scary movies would give me nightmares, never mind the movies themselves.

And yet horror has its fingerprints all over key moments in Soulwoven.

It starts with the descriptions. When things get dark, really dark, the characters begin to see the world in the way that characters in horror stories do, where everything is out to get them. And their descriptions reflect that fact. There's a character with sharpened, yellowed teeth. There are undead crawling out of the ground and terrorizing people. And there's the dragon itself, floating in their minds and taunting, taunting, taunting them.

Soulwoven is a fantasy novel. There's no doubt in my mind about that. But if you wanted to, you could plot it against the structure of a horror novel and find a surprisingly high correlation. There's one (short) chapter, in particular, that's more ghost story than anything else in terms of structure.

So apparently, even though I didn't enjoy horror stories much growing up, and I still don't read a ton of them, they left a strong imprint on me. Maybe it's because they resonated so strongly with me that I didn't enjoy them. Or maybe it's because they terrorized me so much that their elements burned themselves so deeply into my brain. I can't really be sure.

But they're there nonetheless, and I don't think they're going anywhere. I suspect all writers have these sneaky little influences. There are things we're aware of that shape us (for me, Tolkien, Martin, Kay, Gaiman, Mieville, Hickman and Weis, the teams who wrote the Final Fantasy games, and much more), and there are influences we're not aware of until after the fact. With all the hours I've spent staring at and analyzing and fine-tuning this book, it's amazing to me that I continue to find things inside it I didn't know were there.

Incidentally, I think "What Lies in Darkness," the horror novellette I wrote for All Hallow's Write last year, is one of the best pieces of short fiction I've ever put together. It's up for free here on the blog as well as on Wattpad, and if you've got the stomach for horror, you might want to check it out.

All Hallows Write Wrap-up

Well, All Hallows Write 2013 is done, and I've had a few hours of sleep and am ready to start processing the experience a bit.

First off, it was really everything I hoped it would be. It was fun to have the pressure of an insane deadline and an ambitious project and to try to pull it off. And it feels immensely satisfying to have conceived this thing and brought it to life. I do think I'll try it again next year, though with some tweaks to make it a bit more palatable to people with jobs and lives and families. I missed out on a pretty fun holiday, and I don't want to do that every year.

The story itself...well, to be honest, I can't really evaluate it right now. I suppose I'll leave that up to you. It's here and will go up on Wattpad tomorrow. It was extremely ambitious to try to write in 13 hours, and I'm pretty amazed that I finished it. I got in two revision passes, which means that I'm pretty happy with the bones of the story (the plot details, the characterizations, etc.), but I'm also fairly certain that the language isn't as polished as I'd like.

Maybe more importantly, it showed me how little I really know about the horror genre. I'm wearing my influences baldly on my sleeves in the story. I'm not really breaking any new ground. I wanted it to be fun in the way that a haunted house can be fun, and I wanted it to make you think in the way that my favorite horror stories always do. I have no idea whether my use of the conventions I played with was trite or cliche, because I don't read enough horror to make that judgment.

It was good for several things, though. One, it scratched my itch to do something difficult that I'd never tried before, and that's not an itch I get to scratch all that much anymore now that I've put my adventuring days behind me in order to write seriously. Two, it stretched my mind. I got a chance to try out a new kind of story, a new kind of narrative, a new kind of suspense and atmosphere and tension, and that will probably seep into my other work in places where it's appropriate. Three, it showed me what I'm capable of when I have the time to work on a project properly.

Writing is a funny career, because in order to succeed at it without starving to death or getting very lucky, you must become so good at it that you can make a living working part-time before you jump into full-time. A lot of people never really do write full-time, because if you can make a living doing it part-time...why not relax and take your time and enjoy life? You (probably) suffered for years to get there.

I can't wait until I can do this full-time. Not a day goes by that I don't wonder whether the next project will be the one that lets me get there.

Anyway, if you enjoyed the story, let me know, and if you didn't, let me know that too. I really have no idea whether it's any good, and I'd appreciate the feedback.

Oh, and you can buy Three Dances here if you want more stories (sometimes every bit as weird, but not nearly so horrific) from me.

All Hallows Write Tonight!

Quick blog post for today, with the promise of a larger coming tomorrow.

Tonight I'm going to stay up all night and write a scary story. Because it's Halloween, and because that's the kind of thing that sounds like fun to me.

So tomorrow, there will be a brand new, hot-off-the-laptop scary story up on this blog for you to read. Hopefully it will be good. I have a plan for it, but according to the rules I made up for All Hallows Write, I can't put that plan on paper until sunset tonight, and that means I can't quite see how all the pieces are going to fit together yet.

And of course, these things always change in the writing anyway.

Why do this? Why have the rules? Why not break them?

For the same reason poets write haiku and sonnets and villanelles and sestinas. Sometimes having rules makes you more creative.

Anyway, it's going to be fun. If you're a Twitterer, you can follow the action starting at sunset (6:45 EST where I am) at the hashtag #AllHallowsWrite. If you're a Facebooker, you can watch my Facebook page, where my updates will stream automatically.

Hope you'll join in for a few hours and come back tomorrow to see what I've done. The plan is...ambitious.

But I have two energy drinks and am anticipating a surplus of Halloween candy to fuel me.

What could possibly go wrong?

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

Three Dances Launch Party, Speechifying Part One: How Books Start Their Lives

Hello gentle readers!

The Three Dances launch party farfnoogled its way into history this weekend, to my very great enjoyment, to my stomach's very very great enjoyment, and to my waistline's subtle detriment.

I wish I could offer you a sliver of all the food and conversation, but that is somewhat beyond me.

Instead, I'm going to offer you a snippet of my speechifying. I'll be putting up three clips from it this week, one of which is a reading from the first story in the collection, "The Jazz Festival."

But today's clip touches on something different: how books start their lives, and how in some ways self-publishing and traditional publishing are very much the same.

I'll expound at greater length on some things that didn't fit into the speech tomorrow, but for today, here you go:


As a reminder, you can buy Three Dances in print or e-book on Amazon or B&N.

Countdown to Three Dances: Images

Various versions of Three Dances are under final review at Amazon and B&N. The print version, actually, is live here: you can buy one (or ten, or a hundred) if you want, and I will get paid for it.

For some reason, this is terrifying to me.

So in order to stay clear of being afraid, I'm going to put up a blog post I wrote months ago with the plan of posting it in the runup to the Three Dances launch, mostly because I thought it was interesting and also because I thought it might drive some attention. Warning: It's long and gets a bit technical in places.

Anyway, here goes:

--

Today I want to talk about the art for the collection, and the interesting challenges it has presented for me-as-publisher.

I decided to include art in the collection because I wanted something to help it stand out from the crowd. There's so much being self-published right now, and it's so easy to just chuck something up on Amazon as an e-book, that I wanted to provide my readers with immediate proof that I had not just chucked the book up on the Internet. That, in fact, it had been planned and plotted and slaved and sweated over, and was going to be worth their few dollars of money and few hours of time to experience.

Including custom art seemed to be a good way to do that.

Originally, I was going to have a friend of mine who does amazing things with spraypaint and stencils and letters make the art, but his schedule got too crazy, and he had to back out. I then approached my grandmother, who has been making art for the better part of a century, about helping out.

Luckily for me, she was excited about the project, too.

Working with her has been a fantastic, once-in-a-lifetime experience worthy of its own blog post, but one of the upshots of it has been that I'm left doing the digitization of her artwork completely on my own. Computers are not her thing.

I'm using a free program called GIMP, which was introduced to me by the folks at Wattpad, to do it. Process breakdown below:

First, I receive the finished art from my grandmother. It's not exactly in ready-to-display shape, but we're on deadline here, and she's working for free, and I'm happy just to have it at all.

Next, I wait for good, natural light in my apartment, take a digital photo of the artwork, and shovel it onto my computer. It looks something like this:

Next, I crop and rotate the photo in GIMP.

At this point, it's still far from ready for production. The whites aren't white, and there are a lot of extraneous lines left to be cleaned up. My first thought was to attempt to go through and clean everything by hand, but that very quickly proved to be an untenable amount of work.

Luckily, GIMP has a tool called "Color Select" that selects everything in an image that's the same or a similar color. The tool has been a godsend for me. So next I create a new image with the same dimensions as the original, select everything that's black in the source image, and copy it over onto the new image. It gives me something like this:

Pretty big improvement, right? But we're not done yet. It looks a little washed out, like it's been copied poorly on a machine. So next I go after the gray tones.

It takes several steps, but eventually, I get this:

Still not perfect, but it's getting closer, and we're now at the point where manual touch-up becomes feasible. So I go in with my GIMP paintbrush/pencil tool (they work kind of the same) and eraser, and I blacken in lines that I think are meant to be blacked and get rid of lines that I think were not meant to appear in the final product. It takes some fiddling and a little artistic interpretation on my part, but eventually, I end up with an image that looks more like this:

Finally, I print off a test page, which includes the image and the text roughly as I think they'll appear in the finished version. I then put it under a good light and circle areas of the image that I think need further retouching, like so:

Then, after I go back through and do some more image correction, I come out with what's approaching a final version:

Now I still have to get it laid out for real and wait for proofs, and there's a chance that the image will need some tweaking at that stage, but for now, it's done! And in much less time than one might think, as well. This one probably only took me three or four hours of work, and I was figuring everything out as I went. Future images should take even less time than that.

--

The image I used as an example here is one of the black-and-white ones that appears in the print and basic digital (for black-and-white ereaders like the basic Kindle and Nook) editions of the book. Creating the Digital Deluxe Edition's colorized images was a bit more fun. I'll pop back on the blog to talk about that sometime next week.

I also have a Three Dances-related blog post in the back of my head that churns my stomach and brings tears to my eyes to think of. I will write it when I think I have the mental space to do it justice, and I will share it with you before the book's official launch on the 13th.

I promise.

Some Thoughts on Publishing and Rejection

Today as I was doing first page critiques on Wattpad, I ran across a message from a follower of mine asking how I deal with the constant threat and reality of rejection as a writer. My response to her got a bit longer than the standard e-mail, and I think it's got some points that other people will find interesting as well, so I'm going to share it here.

My response below. Thanks to @fairyfree on Wattpad for the question. :-)

As for your question: Yes, rejection is common and brutal. And I'd be lying if I said it didn't hurt. Despite having put twelve years into this, holding a college degree in creative writing, and working as an editor, I've had people talk to me like I first picked up a pen yesterday. Some of them have the best of intentions, and some of them don't. Either way, it still hurts. 

For me, that's harder to deal with than rejection. Rejection can happen for so, so many more reasons than bad writing. It can be because a publisher already has too many books like the one you're submitting, or because the editor dislikes something about your writing that another editor might love, or simply because they were tired and grumpy and not in a mood to cut you any slack when they were reading your submission.

Publishing is an incredibly subjective business. Every piece of writing has an audience, and just because something isn't likely to be commercially successful (Soulwoven, for instance), doesn't mean it's not good. But publishers are businesses, and they can't afford to acquire things they don't think will be commercially successful, so not everything gets acquired. 

So don't despair over rejection. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're a bad writer or that you're doing anything wrong (though I certainly had bad novels of mine rightfully rejected early in my career). In the end, if you're writing books that you're proud of, you're winning, period. Readers are a remarkably varied and forgiving group of people, and if you love your work, someone else out there will too, even if it's not a publisher.

Happy Saturday, folks. Everyone is out of town today, so I'm working through the weekend. Wish me luck. :-)

Letter to a Younger Me

Lately, I've been trying to respond to as many Wattpad readers of mine as possible about Soulwoven, and to interact with them however I can. I do it in part because it's "best practice," whatever that means, and in larger part because I genuinely enjoying connecting with readers. It's the first time in my career I've had a chance to do so, and I'm really having a good time with it.

Yesterday, I ran across a reader of mine who's a college student. He was asking for advice on writing from the Wattpad community. There are several things I would really like to be able to go back in time and say to my college self on the subject, so I told him so and let him know what they were.

It occurred to me later that the advice might be useful to more college writers than just him, so I am now posting it here:

Write every day. Make it a priority. You may have a lot of excuses not to, like classes and college life and trying to remain sane in a high stress environment. You may even tell yourself it will be better to wait until after college to start writing seriously, because you'll be better then. You would be wrong to do so. Write now. Write often. Write whenever you can, on top of everything else you're doing. It will never get any easier to do it, and you will kick yourself down the road if you don't.

Signed,
An Older Jeff

Craft Breakdown! Soulwoven Ch. 5

Hmm...this post was supposed to go up over my vacation, during the middle of week in which I had neither Internet nor running water, and was in fact enjoying myself very much swimming and sailing and playing games with my family and writing in the dead of the night, when all was quiet and peaceful. But I failed at Blogger and it didn't happen.

Also, I built a deck that week. A deck!

Anyway, on to the craft breakdown for Soulwoven Chapter 5. Spoilers to follow! Read the chapter here first.

In Chapter 5, we shift back into Ryse's head. Only a little time has passed since we left her preparing to run away from the Temple. In the interim, she has torn like a bat out of hell through the city and ended up at the Jins' house. She enters Litnig and Cole's room through a window and finds Litnig awake and willing to help her. He then leads her up Sentinel Hill to a childhood hiding place of theirs where he thinks she'll be able to sleep safely.

This is another of my favorite chapters. It was a late addition--in most of the early drafts, I left the time between Ryse's departure from the Temple and her later reemergence at Litnig's side unexplained. But the deeper I got into Ryse's character, the more I wanted to explore what happened in those lost hours. And many of my early readers were clamoring to learn more about Litnig and Ryse, and to see the sweet side of their relationship before events that happen later on in the novel.

So I'm doing three major things in Chapter 5: I'm showing Litnig and Ryse's relationship to the reader, I'm deepening Ryse's character, and I'm furthering the mystery around Sherduan and setting up the next chapter. The first happens pretty naturally through the situation. Ryse comes to Litnig for help. That in itself says something about their relationship. So does Litnig's response, and Ryse's response to his response. She needs help. He offers it. She takes it. He offers more, and she turns it down. We see that he wants to be as close to her as possible, but that she has reservations and wants to keep her distance. Though she's comfortable relying on him, there's also a point beyond which she will not accept further aid. Importantly, that point is one at which he would put himself in significant danger for her.

But there's also a matter of atmosphere. I mentioned in my Chapter 4 craft post that I like to weave aspects of other genres into my writing when I can. I'm particularly proud of one short paragraph in Chapter 5 in that respect:  

She looked up into the gray eyes of Litnig Jin. He was shirtless, his hair mussed at crazy angles. His grip was strong as iron.

Romance, eat your heart out.

There are a couple of other places in the chapter where a few sentences accomplish a great deal (I hope). When Ryse explains why she left the Temple, Litnig responds, "So you left because of us," which vastly oversimplifies and misunderstands the situation. At that point, we start to see some of the problems with Litnig's relationship to Ryse. He overestimates his importance in her life, and he fails to understand a lot of the things she says and does.

The setup of the next chapter, on the other hand, takes two sentences. I struggled a bit in my latest draft to link Chapter 5 and Chapter 6, and I eventually had to look back at old drafts of Soulwoven, from before this chapter existed, to remember how to segue from Ryse's point of view into the point of view in the next chapter. I'll talk in the next craft blog about why that was so difficult, but I ended up recalling that I needed to set up a question in the reader's head that would provide an immediate answer for why the book goes where it does next (This is hard to explain without giving things away. My apologies, but Chapter 6 will be up soon, and then hopefully things will be a little clearer).

At any rate, in order for the next chapter's opening to seem connected to the story as a whole, I needed to make the reader wonder who was going to act on the destruction of the heart dragons. So at the very end of Chapter 5, I raise that question in Ryse's mind, which hopefully raises it in the reader's as well.

This is another chapter where I don't see too many weaknesses. It's got tension, it's got romance, it's got character development, it's got a beautiful setting for me to describe, and I think I execute it fairly well. I do worry a little about over- or under-doing the backstory on the legend of Sherduan (I'm feeding it to the reader in bits in pieces over several chapters), but my hope is that there are enough other things going on in the chapter that it feels seamless, and that readers who want the whole story on the dragon get enough to keep them satisfied while those who don't don't get fed up.

So that's Chapter 5! Chapters 6 and 7 are already up, with Chapter 8 to follow tomorrow. More craft blogs soon to come. Also, Soulwoven is notching about 100 reads and 5-8 votes per day this week, and I'm trying to remain calm about the whole thing while my imagination runs wild with possibilities.

Happy reading, dear friends!

Craft Breakdown! Soulwoven Ch. 4

I put up two chapters of Soulwoven this week, to make up for the fact that I'm going to be deep in the woods and out of Internet range next weekend. Unfortunately, Chapter 4 went up a little late, because I spent the weekend being chased off of mountains by thunderstorms and having adventures in automobile repair (if anyone knows what on earth a neutral switch does, other than cause your reverse lights to be on semi-permanently if you confuse it with your reverse light switch while replacing the latter, please let me know).

And with that out of the way, on to the craft breakdown for Soulwoven Chapter 4 (Spoilers to follow. Go read it here first!).

Chapter 4 is one of several of what I think of as "breather" chapters in Soulwoven. We've just had two chapters of pretty intense action, and I want to give the reader time to take a breath, put the book down (I mentioned I was going to break rules, right?) and go grab a cup of tea, walk the dog, do some math homework, talk to a family member--whatever--and process. I do this because a lot of my favorite books have these moments, and because I want my readers to be thinking. Dan Brown writes great page-turners, but I don't remember having a single productive thought while reading The Da Vinci Code. Neil Gaiman, on the other hand, writes books that I frequently put down, but I gain much more overall from reading them. Somewhere in the middle falls George R. R. Martin, who can keep seven or eight page-turning plots going in every book, but gives me time to take breaks between them as I switch from character to character.

So. Action is slower in Chapter 4. Litnig has his dream. It's weird, and then it's scary, and that's about it. The chapter is very short, even by my standards. In terms of plot, I'm working mainly on deepening the mysteries surrounding Litnig. We already know that he had a dream and it was weird. We then ran off on a big adventure through two other characters' heads. I want to remind the reader that Litnig had a dream, and it was important, so I bring them back to it in this chapter. Hopefully, the reader understands that Litnig's dream is not an ordinary dream, and will not be surprised when it keeps popping back up throughout the book. I'm not entirely sure if the repetition and positioning of the dream alone achieves this, but I hope that it does.

Because this chapter doesn't have a lot of action, it's also a bit of a litmus test for my writing. I mentioned Martin above. One of the reasons I think he's successful is because he has enough faith in his own abilities to do things like break the tension or kill off major characters and trust that he can keep the reader interested in other ways or develop new characters they'll love just as much. I aspire to that level of writing, and I figure the best way to learn how to get there is to attempt it. In this chapter, I'm counting on two things to keep the reader interested. One is the shock of horror Litnig gets once the dark statue starts moving, but that happens three-quarters of the way through. In the meantime, my writing has to carry the burden alone. For a few pages, my descriptions, my voice, my capability to generate a creepy and threatening atmosphere, are all I'm counting on to carry the reader forward. If I can pull that off, I'll know I'm in a good place as a writer, and the reader, hopefully, will respect the hell out of me. If I can't, the chapter will fail.

I don't think I've talked much yet about taking risks in these posts. But as a writer, as a reader, and as an editor, I love writers who take risks. They may (and in fact do, in my experience reading submissions) fail more often than not. But when they succeed, that's where the magic happens. So I do the same in my writing, and I do my best to make it work, and then I cross my fingers and hope for the best.

I want to make a brief mention as well that this chapter is more of a horror story than a fantasy story in my mind. I've structured it that way---I start with a character in a situation that he knows is wrong, then allow him to pull himself deeper and deeper into it against his instincts because he can't rationalize why it's wrong, and finally show him why it's wrong when it's too late for him to get out of it without being scarred. Another thing I respect in other writers is weaving multiple genres together, and I'm trying, briefly, to do that here as well.

So that's it for Chapter 4! As I said, it's a risk-taking, rule-breaking, genre-bending effort, and I'm more than a little nervous as to how well it works. I'd love to get some opinions on it.