Hired Guns

Here's some interesting reading: The Best Reviews Money Can Buy.  Read this before you proceed any further with this post.

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Welcome back.  How do you feel after reading that article?  Are you for or against hired guns reviewing an an ebook, your own or someone else's.  Whether you agree with the practice of paid reviews is neither here nor there.  I have my opinion and you have yours.  The point is that we have started (or perhaps joined) a very interesting debate.

For my part, here is my pledge as an independent writer: I promise to never pay for nor solicit, from friends or family, reviews of any kind.  Any reviews that appear on any ebook retail site will be from genuine, flesh and blood readers.

When an independent author pays for or solicits reviews, favourable or otherwise, he or she does the work a  great disservice and discredits whatever innate talent he or she possesses.  Such authors put themselves in the same category as performance-enhanced athletes.  I understand the fear independent authors feel when they put their work "out there".  They are taking a huge risk that the piece of writing they worked so hard on will be poorly received and people will criticize it harshly and result in poor sales.  I'm afraid of that, too, but you have to accept the risk.

Final verdict: Paying for positive reviews to drum up sales?  Cheap.  

Harrison Ford on "It"

The whole idea of it--"it" being acting--was to try and establish an emotional relationship with the audience, to give them someone on stage that they could feel along with, feel the story through.  I wanted fear to be an element.  I wanted vulnerability.  I thought it was more interesting.  I also thought it would allow for more fun, that there would be humour in it.
-- Harrison Ford, from an appearance on "Inside the Actor's Studio"

The Nobility of Starting at the Bottom

When I was young, my ambitions were very modest. I thought, “If only I could play at the battle of the bands at the Y, that would be the culmination of existence!” And then the roller rink, and you work your way up branch by branch. Whereas if you’re [thinking], “I want to be a rock star”—those kind of people just want to know how they can start at the top, and they’re doomed not even to get to the bottom.
-- Neil Peart

I take a lot of inspiration from successful writers, artists, and musicians--really, anyone in the creative arts.   This quote from Neil Peart from a recent MacLean's magazine article perfectly encapsulates my internal struggle as a writer to grow my career slowly and deliberately versus the irrational desire to "have it all now".  It's "irrational" because nothing worthwhile is instantaneous.  There is no "become a published author in 8 easy steps" formula.

A fully grown oak, majestic and strong, does not just suddenly appear.  It starts from an acorn dropped from it's parent.  It finds purchase in a patch of soil somewhere and when the conditions are right, it begins to germinate.  Roots develop along with a supple stem and tender shoots.  If it isn't trampled or eaten, it strengthens and grows.  The stem becomes a trunk, the shoots become leaves.  Years pass and the  sapling becomes a tree, growing in height and girth and crown.  The same is true of a writing career.

I grew up in an age that suffered keenly from "instant gratification".  I used to pity those fools who suffered so sharply, never once thinking that the affliction was in me in some way or another.

Take, for instance, a recent discovery about online publishing.  I learned this morning that any sales I make on Smashwords or Amazon will take time to get paid out.  More than that, it will take time to get my work distributed to online retailers--days or even weeks!  I have found myself chafing at that disappointing news.  I had expected immediate results.  (Secretly, I had expected my work to be instantly popular and it would garner me tens of thousands of dollars.)

I have to laugh sadly at such misguided notions.  I mean, really, let's start at square one and get a story finished before I start worrying about what to wear at my first book signing.  Before you can win the race, you have to jump a few hurdles.  Before that you have to get out of the blocks without falling on your face.

I must make mental allowances for the Universe's natural unfolding process because success doesn't come overnight--only through putting in the hours at the keyboard, running the paces.  More than anything it is a process of commitment and re-commitment turning on itself over and over.

Redrafting "Conservation"

Spent the weekend rewriting sections of Conservation and I'm pretty happy with the results.  I sound ambivalent because there are still things that need to be improved, but I'm filling gaps and fixing problems so that's a step in the right direction.

Some surprising things happened, too, so that can only be good for the reader in the end.  I'm looking forward to a full week of this since I'll be looking after Keith's house while he and the family are in Penetanguishene.  I need the peace and quiet to be productive.  The ideas need stillness within and that won't happen unless there's stillness without.

For now, though, I must focus on my day job.  For writers who are  not supported by grants or patronages or that mythical siren, "the publisher's advance", focussing on a day job can be very difficult when they are finally getting some traction on a story.  Ideas intrude on the mind all day long like new puppies that want to play.  Every hour spent in front of a computer not writing is an hour lost.

...but one must satisfy obligations; one must eat; one must pay the rent and fill the tank with gas.  And so I scratch those ideas behind the ear and send them off into the backyard of my mind with a promise:  "Soon, little buddies.  I'll be out to play soon and we'll run each other ragged."

The (Fake) Reviews Are In! First Look at "Conservation"

"Terrible.  He should not quit his day job." -- George St. John, National Post Books

"My brain is crying.  Someone stop this man." -- Carol Barnes, New York Book Review

"I had to stop reading when I gouged my eyes out." -- Phil Larkin, Chicago Tribune literary critic

Nothing brings you back to a sense of your own inadequacy than reading the first draft of a story you wrote. I had this experience very recently with a Harvey Cook short story called Conservation.  I am beginning to experiment with FeedBooks.com and Conservation will be one of the first pieces to go up.  I pasted all the contents into their interface, generated the ebook, added the cover and gave a copy to one of my buddies to read.

Then I started reading it myself.  

The story is about Dr. Harvey Cook, a former government xeno-biologist, who attempts to steal back his own research on an invading extra-terrestrial plant life from a private corporation to prevent it from being used as a basis for bio-weapons.  As first drafts (or as I like to call them "shit drafts") go, it was pretty terrible.  There's a huge gap in the action about a third of the way in, the style is bad, the characters don't seem to know what they're doing.  A reflection on me, of course.  I hope Adam reads it with a sense of charity.

To give you a sense of the problems I saw, here's an example from the third movement of the story.  Harvey Cook and his young research assistant arrive by stealth at their old lab, break in and make it all the way to their work stations only to realize that all their computers have been removed.  They sneak back out and get away without being detected.  All of this after Cook had been warned by Anna Royse, the story's antagonist, at the very beginning that XenoCon had learned about their plans.

So you see what I'm facing.  It doesn't make sense for Cook to attempt the infiltration after Royse tells him that they know what he's up to.  It's like a cop telling a bank robber, "We know what you're up to." and the robber breaking into the bank anyway, having second thoughts and then leaving--all without the cops who would be lying in wait for him--not arresting him.  Dumb.

What can I say about this travesty?  In my defense, I wrote the tale in haste at a weekend writing retreat that my other buddy slash writing partner and I held about a month ago and my writing style lends itself to slower, careful plodding.  At any rate, I'm sure Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom! wasn't a gem in its rough form either.

I am taking a break from my other project, The Dead Shark, so I can focus on improving Conservation.  I started rewriting the entire third movement yesterday and so far I like what I've come up with.

All is not doom and gloom, though.  I've started learning how to use Gimp to create ebook covers.  Here's the cover I made for Conservation. I think, for a novice, I did a pretty good job.

...now if only I could whip the story into shape. :)