One Man's Hope

So last week was something of a crazy one in this Brave New World of publishing. On the one hand, bestselling author Barry Eisler turned down a half-million dollar deal to self publish. On the other, million-dollar self publisher Amanda Hocking inked a two million dollar deal to get OUT of self publishing.

Folks all over the internet are trying to figure out what's going on. Things are changing, and in a big way, but none of us truly knows how.

I don't have answers. But I do have hope.

When I started writing, I knew what I was getting into. I knew I'd struggle to break in, to stand out in a crowded field. That I'd have to write my ass off to get an agent, to stand out in a field crowded with wannabes. That every year publishing houses face hundreds of agented submissions for fewer and fewer debut slots.

I knew that getting published was only the first step: The death of the midlist made the writing life a Darwinian struggle, brutal and fierce.

I knew I'd have to do my own promotion. That I'd have to turn in manuscripts polished to the point they barely required an editor's attention. That I'd have to take the cover and the title I was given or run the risk of being labeled 'difficult'.

And I knew that for all my own effort, my fate was still out of my hands. My publisher could spring for coop enough to make me a bestseller, or a negligent decision on sell-through could doom me to a life of declining sales. A title readers wanted could be allowed to go out of print.

I knew all this, and I went for it anyway. I danced around the room when I got my agent, and I took the hit calmly when my novel was ultimately rejected by marketing (that's right, marketing) for it's lack of American focus.

After all, the game was rigged, but it was the only game in town.

Ebooks are changing that game. And none of us quite knows how.

But I have my hopes.

I'm not hoping for the demise of Big 6 publishing. That's actually the last thing I want. Like JD Rhoades, I don't believe that a cabal of three (Amazon, Smashwords and B&N) is guaranteed to treat writers any better than the cabal of six.

Novelists have never been very good at collective bargaining. Screenwriters have a strong union that fights for pay rates, royalties, etc. Novelists, not so much. As long as the oligarchy hung together and enough of us were willing to take a bad deal, just so long as it was a deal, bad deals were going to be the rule.

I hope ebooks give us a real alternative. For a long time now, the Big 6 have acted like a bullying husband who treats his wife like dirt because what's she gonna do without him? She's got nowhere else to go.

Well, now we do have somewhere else to go. Ebooks are already a viable alternative, and the market's got a lot of room to grow yet. Some folks are making plenty of money. Some, like me, are growing an audience by word of mouth, something I wouldn't be able to do in today's mainstream climate. And yeah, most are still sinking beneath the waves. After all, success is never guaranteed.

My hope, my great hope for the future of our industry, is that the ebook revolution will reform the Big 6.

They can't expect to act they way they have and survive.

It won't happen overnight. Likely, there will be a lot more pain before they change their ways. As ebooks find their natural, lower price point (and they will, whether publishers like it or not), they'll need to offer a better deal. After all, why should an author like CS Harris (for whom ebooks are ALREADY a quarter of her sales) accept 14.5% of $2.99 or even $4.99 when she could self-publish and take 70%? Yeah, she'd lose a lot of print sales going POD-- enough that right now the move doesn't make sense.

But there is a tipping point there, and it's coming fast.

At the point mainstream authors can make more self-publishing, with accurate and up-to-date accounting and no 'reserves against return', publishers will have no choice but to change their game.

Of course, they probably won't. Not right away. I anticipate a bit of bullying, bluster and outright pleading to keep profitable authors in their stable, but when the losses get bad enough, I hope we see a change.

Equitable royalties on ebooks. Small-batch, POD-style printing to keep booksellers stocked without carrying extra inventory (like Toyota's just-in-time manufacturing). Term licenses for titles instead of the current 'forever and ever'. And services offered that actually add value.

Imagine a world where publishing houses changed their game to actually court writers, to offer us good reasons to go with them instead of going it alone...

I can hope.

Fleeting and Fickle

Delay not; swift the flight of fortune's greatest favours.

-Seneca

So a month ago, February 21st, I had this life. I was the reasonably proud owner of one the biggest tattoo studios in Christchurch. I was booked out for a month and struggling to find time to keep up with my other commitments.

I had stopped smoking. Spent four nights a week swinging fists and sticks at the gym. My waistline thanked me.

My book Poison Door had somehow climbed to #23 on Amazon.UK's bestseller chart for 'Female Sleuths'. I still have no idea how that happened. Just, overnight, the Brits started buying the hell out of my book.

The next day, everything changed.

Ten minutes to one, I was waiting for the mobile espresso van to bring me my midday shot of Brain Enhancer before I went to bank the month's rent.

A minute later I was standing behind the counter, surfing one a floor that wouldn't hold still. The sounds were deafening: the building rattling, glass crashing, one of my artists screaming.

When it stopped I got the upset girl outside, went back in to start cleaning. Enough equipment was broken or damaged that I knew we'd have to close for the day.

More people started yelling. Something about 'flooding' and 'trapped'. A dark wet line appeared through the carpet. I went out front, pulled the sidewalk-sign in and locked the door. Brown water was rushing out from between sidewalk and building. On the other side of the wall, it was filling my front room. The building was still rumbling. Aftershocks made cracking sounds in the roof.

Out back, more water gushed from under the building. In the time it took to lock the front door and leave through the back, the nose of my car had been buried in wet brown mud.

I snatched a cigarette off the first smoker I saw.

I got three weeks off work. Unpaid.

Poison Door sank like a stone from the UK charts.

Now, it's a month later.

Zyban's cutting the smoking habit- in just over a week I've gone from a pack and a half to five. My gym's reopened, now almost an hour from my house. I'll travel that distance, just to lose the results of four weeks of fried food. (Most nights I'd just stare at the fridge, stare at the stove, and go buy fish and chips.)

My new shop is open. The new place is smaller, more intimate, and the rent isn't such an incredible stone around my neck. I can't help but be aware that in a city where half the storefronts fell down and competition for those still standing is fierce, I was wise to hustle and a little bit lucky too.

And in the UK, Poison Door has sold two copies. That's right, two. I don't know why, any more than I know why it sold so many in February. Sales in the US are steady and growing, but that weird spike in England... just baffling.

In times of trouble and times of joy, I read the Stoic philosophers. They help me 'meet with fortune and disaster, and treat those two imposters just the same.' And seeing as I opened with a quote from one of my favorites, I'm going to go out with him too. Especially poignant in light of the tragedy in Japan:

In the presence of death, we must continue to sing the song of life.

We must be able to accept death and go from its presence better able to bear our burdens and to lighten the load of others.

Out of our sorrows should come understanding.

Through our sorrows, we join with all of those before who have had to suffer and all of those who will yet have to do so.

Let us not be gripped by the fear of death. If another day be added to our lives, let us joyfully receive it, but let us not anxiously depend on our tomorrows.

Though we grieve the deaths of our loved ones, we accept them and hold on to our memories as precious gifts.

Let us make the best of our loved ones while they are with us, and let us not bury our love with death.

Seneca

Bit Like Hiking

So recently I (or one of me-- see my Facebook pages for the schizophrenic details) was moved to post on the wall of the Mighty Miss DeBow:

"This isn't a sprint, you. It's a long, grueling cross-country race, through forests and mountains and stretches of desert where the sand burns and the harsh winds shred your flesh. Run if you like, crawl if you must. No one cares that you entered until you reach one of the finish lines, but if you stop moving, well, the bones of others before you are piled high on every side..."

This may have been a little bleak, a little harsh. I've been pretty bleak and harsh of late. These things happen.

Thing is, there's some truth in there.

So often, we creative types feel like we're in some kind of race. Like we should be going faster, harder. Like if we haven't made (insert milestone here) yet, we're somehow failing.

Fact is, this crazy life is not a race. It's not even the long-distance race I referred to earlier. It's more like a hike.

I'm a big fan of hiking. Here in NZ we call it tramping. (And yes, I'm also a big fan of complaining about hiking, but that's human nature, innit?) Thing about hiking is, you know you stand at the bottom of a bloody great hill and say to yourself, yeah I'm walking to the top of that thing.

So you start. One foot, another. A few steps and a few more. You walk until you start to get tired, or the sun starts to beat down on your head, or you decide you really, really need that drink of water. You look back. Hell, you've barely moved. That damn hill is still just as high, and your car is still terribly, terribly close.

So you turn your feet uphill and start walking again. One step after another. One stupid foot at a stupid fucking time.

You come to hate yourself. You wonder what you were thinking when you set out. Your life becomes a tiny, hyperfocused prism of movement. Step by plodding step. Every time you stop to look around, the peak still seems just as high, the car in the parking lot only marginally smaller. You don't even know WHY you keep going, only that you do.

After a time, you no longer look back. You don't look ahead either. You look at your feet, willing left and right and left again to carry you forward, step by step by stupid fucking step.

You curse a lot.

Bugs bite you. You sweat. The sun becomes a hammer against your skin. Sweat prickles and dries and itches. Your water bottle grows lighter, but you are no less thirsty. You forget about the summit. You quit thinking about walking. Every little piece of you is concentrated on lifting one knee, and then the other, just lifting it high enough to fall that little bit further forward.

You wonder why any sane human would do such a thing. And you suspect the answer is that no sane human would.

This isn't a race. It isn't a competition of any kind. If you were to say fuck it and turn around, no one would know or care. You're doing this for you, for reasons you neither care to name or describe.

And please, never mind those senior citizens who passed you on the way up and are now wishing you a good morning on their way back down. Don't even think about them. Just keep lifting those goddamn knees...

Every novel I've written has been like this. Hell, my whole writing career is like this. And my art career. And more than a few of my longer, cooler paintings and tattoos. The compressed narratives of Hollywood condition us to expect that success comes at the end of a montage full of 80's music. Real life is about bugs, and sweat, and long hard effort.

And yeah, it's effort no one cares about. The world doesn't care if you quit. It doesn't know you're the next Stephen King or Nuryev or Mozart or MC Hammer until you actually ARE. In the meantime, you're just another hiker on the trail. And don't for a moment doubt that they too are just hikers on their own trails. Just trying to lift one foot in front of another....

It's long. It's hard. There's no end in sight and there are probably better things you could be doing. But this is what you do. So do it.

And yeah, there are rewards along the way!

Shaken, Not Stirred

It was still dark when I woke. 4.30 Saturday morning, and someone was shaking my bed.

Except: My bed's enormous and I live alone. Shreds of sleep were still falling away when I knew the truth. I was in an earthquake.

More than one ex-girlfriend has compared me to stone, to wood, to a machine. I've been called cold-blooded, soulless and untouched by human emotion, usually when the women in question were trying to draw me into a shouting match.

Fact is, I'm just not that emotional in a crisis. Clear and decisive, yes, but not in the least emotional.

My bed thumped and jumped across the floor. Furniture rattled. The house shook but did not screech, creak or groan. I thought about the plate glass window behind my head and decided the curtains were protection enough. The power died. In the front of the house, something crashed.

I stayed calm enough not to wake Butler, sleeping beside me.

After the tremor stopped, I got up to check on Midge and Buddy. There were books all over the floor, but nothing major was broken and the cats were well.

I went back to sleep.

Unfortunately I didn't get the rest I needed. There were aftershocks to endure, texts and calls on my cell to send and receive, a bright spring sunrise and yet more aftershocks.

That morning I had coffee with some elderly neighbours. With no power, they boiled water and made toast on a barbeque grill. By then I knew my friends were safe, and vice versa. My neighbours and I had a lovely chat, and it was off to work.

The tattoo shop looked a wreck. Once the lighting fixtures were back in place and a tipped-over sculpture set back upright, it wasn't that bad. Frankie showed up, and together we cleaned up the spilled ink and broken potted plants, set the jewelry cabinet to rights and got the place back together. The room shook and jumped, stopped, shook again. We set the shop up so any further shocks wouldn't break anything and locked up again. That night I went to a friend's birthday party.

We've had over a hundred earthquakes in the last few days. Some of them rattled no more than a large truck passing in the street outside. Others had me scrambling to keep palette, painting and brushes from juddering to the floor. Buildings are falling around town, and some of my favourite restaurants and businesses are gone. We have power back, but will need to boil our water for some time to come.

Meanwhile I've kept the tattoo shop open and running, got the shop's bookkeeping sorted out, done my workouts at the gym (a building too old and tough to crumble) and navigated the rubble downturn to make it to the NZSA's monthly writer's lunch.

I also kept writing. Through all this, I keep drawing, painting, tattooing and piling up pages on my novel.

Way I look at it, life is just as fragile in good times and bad. Love is just as precious. Every life has disasters and crises.

None of that is any excuse. Every single one of us tap dances under a dangling sword. One day the blade will fall, and the only thing that matters worth a damn is the manner of your dance.

Or, as James Lee Burke is so fond of putting it, sometimes you just have to smile and walk through the smoke. :-)

Failing Well

One great secret to success in life: Failure.

More specifically, the ability to fail well. To shrug off your failure and come back just as hard as the first time. It's what makes champion sportsmen, successful inventors and industrialists and every career artist/writer/actor/dancer/musician/creative type you'll ever meet.

Thing is, that's harder than it sounds. Failure is hard on the ego, and failing at something you really, deeply care about can be devastating.

Or not. Thomas Edison failed something like 3000 times before he got a light bulb to work. Walt Disney was turned down by over 100 banks before he was able to finance his first amusement park. Actors get turned down at one heck of a lot of auditions for every part they get, and there isn't a writer alive, no matter how bestselling, without a fair-sized stack of rejection letters behind them.

Failure is how we succeed, *if* we don't let it get the best of us. And how do we do that? How do we take those rejections, those hard knocks, and come right back swinging?

The key is how we explain our failures to ourselves.

The ones who stay down when they fall, or need MUCH more time to get back up, are those who see their failures as Pervasive, Powerful and Permanent. For example, Joe Writer gets a rejection letter. He thinks, "I suck at everything (Pervasive), this letter proves it (Powerful). I'll *never* be any good as a writer (Permanent)." It takes him a week to work up the nerve to send the next submission, if he doesn't just stick his manuscript in a drawer and give up. After all, he's no good, right?

Those who bounce back do it first in their heads. The better they see their failures as Isolated, Weak and Temporary, the better they do on their next performance. Jane Scribbler gets her rejection letter too, but she is able to think, "It's only one letter (Isolated), and just one market (Weak). Somebody's bound to say 'yes'."

I know, this perspective is easier to say than to do, especially when your latest setback has you feeling like you've been kicked in the guts. But, if you want to succeed, learning to fail well is vital.

###

One side point: Denial, Distortion and Projection are also effective ways to deal with failure. Effective, but not exactly healthy. Refusing to allow that failure into your mental landscape (Denial), reshaping reality to meet our mental needs (Distortion) and pushing the causes of our failures outside ourselves (Projection-- often persecutory in nature), these are elemental ways our ego protects itself from damaging information.

Thing is, what protects our ego often blights our character. Blocking failure robs us of the opportunity to correct the causes of our failure and eventually succeed. Nothing good can come of this...

Losing It

Charles posted on writers who destroyed themselves when they felt their best work was behind them. The examples he used were vivid: Hemingway, Howard and London, two suicides and one who drank himself to death.

Truth is, Charles barely skimmed the surface, but he did make his point. Writers struggle with the idea that they've 'lost it'.

Reading his post, it occured to me that I might have a useful perspective on this. You see, I've lost it a few times in life. Sometimes lost and found it again. Others, just, well... lost.

Comics: I haven't drawn a comic in some years now. My last original work was two parts of a trilogy that still sits unfinished. I never meant to stop, it just sort of worked out that way. The stories that have come since then have been novels, or sometimes paintings, but no comics.

Painting: While I'm on the subject, I was a keen painter in my twenties (back when paint was a newfangled invention) but I somehow managed to go the best part of a decade without picking up a brush. Those rare occasions I did try to paint, the work simply wasn't up to scratch. I made up my mind that those particular guns had been hung up.

Then one day a couple-odd Christmases ago, paintings were requested as gifts. I dutifully strapped on my brushes and made a big old mess out of some canvases. The work lacked my old magic (whatever that was), but it was too late: I was once again in love.

I got back to painting. The magic wasn't there, but the love was back. Then Frank Frazetta's Painting With Fire gave me permission to paint like my new self, if that makes any sense. New magic came. Last year I did my best to date. This year, well... it remains to be seen.

Tattooing: I've also certainly had fallow periods in my tattooing. Times when the work I turned out was... uninspired. When I'd look at the next tattoo and think I just couldn't be bothered.

Couple of those times I took a sabbatical, lived off my savings, took in illustration work, whatever. The most recent one, I couldn't afford to quit. So I just kept on keeping on. One day, I found inspiration again, this time in the work of Guy Aitchison, Kat Von D and Nikko Hurtado. I remembered why I picked up the needles in the first place. My focus shifted. The magic returned.

Personally, I think plateaus are natural. Exercising and learning, the curve tends to be periods of sharp, upward development and long, flat stretches where what really counts is the will to continue. No reason to think that things should be any different for creative skills.

Who says we have to be fresh, always doing our best?

And who says we can't?

Any writer who worries that they've 'lost it' should look to Johnny Cash for inspiration. Johnny came out of the gate with a bang: the first few years of his career, he wrote Walk the Line, Cry Cry Cry, Folsom Prison Blues and most of his classics. It was an unbelievable streak of creative brilliance.

Thirty-odd years later, he was still playing those same songs. He'd had a few bright spots creativity-wise (as opposed to commercially), but by the late 80's he was well and truly in the has-been category.

He was sure his best days were behind him. He even thought he'd quit recording, spend his time doing live concerts performing the music from his glory days.

Enter Rick Rubin, and a different vision. Johnny stripped down to the absolute essentials: his guitar and his voice. American Recordings may or may not be the best work he ever did, but it sure as hell showed the world his best days were far from over.

Maybe for Johnny (as for me), it was permission to be himself. To be that old guy with all the hard miles on him, not trying to fit who he used to be or who the other singers around him were. I know for me, those times I 'found it' again were also times I realized I had to be me, not a knock-off, even of my own earlier self.

Maybe if Hemingway hadn't spent so much time trying to reiterate Fiesta and For Whom the Bell Tolls, he would have had more, and better, work than The Old Man and the Sea. And maybe he wouldn't have been so damned depressed that he got the electroshock that made him suicidal.

And yeah, the Steampunk Word-O-Meter stands at 12,800 words. I think it's the weekend (my busy time at work) that's the culprit, not the scenes themselves...

Slings and Arrows

About a million years ago, I was an eager student of rough and violent men. One of my teachers felt the only proper way to learn nerve strikes was to experience them. Another worked us til we puked, then worked us even harder. Still another taught knife-fighting with live blades.

Those lessons were... memorable. I suffered at their hands. I never enjoyed it, but I did learn. And when I fought, and won, I was grateful.

This week has given me a fresh perspective: I've had the Tiny Dynamo reading my latest and reviewed the portfolios of a couple of aspiring artists.

The read hasn't been easy. Little D immediately pointed out a couple of major flaws. Major. Flaws. I didn't see them, because I'd spent so long, so close to the work. It was like being told that I had my fly open and spinach between my teeth. Of course, that's the beautiful thing about that First Read: the time you want to hear about the spinach and the zipper is BEFORE you leave the house!

The portfolio reviews weren't much fun, either. Two young artists, hardworking and talented. Type who've grown up being 'the best artist in school'. Two young faces, full of eager light and accustomed to praise.

Reminded me a lot of myself at their age.

One couldn't draw feet or hands. The other had this weird thing with shoulders, the arm seeming to sort of grow directly out of the neck. Both did everything in their power to avoid backgrounds.

The reviews went something like this:

How bad do you want this? These creative careers, they're not for everybody. It's a lot of hard work and heartbreak, with no certain reward.

You've got talent, plenty to have fun with this as a hobby. But if you're serious, if you want a career, you need work. You need to quit basking in your strengths and look hard at your weaknesses.

I don't know if my advice will do any good. One kid (the hands and feet kid) tried to argue with me: I got an earful of wounded pride. The other was sad but determined. I remember that feeling. Heck, I was in the middle of it with my current novel!

Bad reviews suck. One common trait among creative types is a certain... Luciferian pride. Our swollen egos crave praise. But what's good for the ego is not always best for the soul.

Steve's Full Throttle Guide to Slings and Arrows

1. Do. Not. Argue. Even if you win, you lose. Honesty is a rare quantity without attacking it. Besides, it's not a good look.

2. Consider the Source. Sometimes it's a matter of taste. Some readers hate the clipped sentences of James M Cain and Shirley Jackson. Others can't stand the endless run-on sentences of Faulkner or Cormac McArthy. I can't stand those slasher movies where all the victims do is run away. (FIGHT, for fuck's sake!!) You can't fault your critics for their taste, but you don't have to take their tastes to heart, either.

3. Consider Motive. There are people in this world who run around ankle-high trying to gnaw everyone else down to their level. Petty cruelty is their stock and trade. On the other hand, some of your harshest critics may also be your biggest fans, those who honestly want your very best.

The problem can be telling the two apart when your ego is wounded.

4. Admit the Truth. Even the meanest-spirited snake may still be telling the truth. Heck, a certain personality considers cruel truths to be their sharpest weapons. Whether or not it hurts (and it always hurts), being honest about your weak points will help you overcome them.

and finally...

5. NEVER GIVE UP. No retreat, no surrender. Not if you want anything more than a hobby. Keep upping your game and keep slugging. It's the only way to get where you want to go.

Nobody enjoys a harsh critique, but you can learn. And when your skills grow strong and sharp, you'll be grateful.