The Road to Publication -- and the bodies I left piled in my wake

Today's guest blogger is Jason Cordova. Jason's first book, Corruptor, has just been published. You can find an excerpt here. You can find out more about Jason by visiting his site. Now let's give him an MGC greeting -- No, Dave, put down the coconut. Jason might just toss it back at you, with love and respect of course! ;-P

It's funny, really, when I tell people I'm an honest-to-goodness published writer. Their reactions are almost identical. The look of initial disbelief, followed by the tentative congratulatory smile. Then they usually say something which seems uncomfortable for them, like “Oh” or “That’s nice”. Then first thing they inevitably follow with is "How did you manage it?"

I'll tell them that my way is not the usual way. Publishers generally don't buy your book six days after you submit it. You're lucky if it's in the six month range. I got really, really lucky.

There are a lot of variables which helped along the way though. Fearlessness was one of my biggest assets early on. The utter, incomprehensible lack of fear when it came to submitting novels, query letters, and talking to publishers really helped. It's not that I lack fear in general, but I don't fear any form of rejection. Tell me no? Fine, I'm going to come back later with a better proposal. Don't think it's for you? That's cool, there are literally hundreds of publishers out there who are looking for my genre. Or better still, I'll tweak the proposal letter to fit your requirements. Like most people, I don't take being told no well. However, I deal with it much better than the average person. I figured out that I'm either extremely persistent, or the literary equivalent of a stalker. Since I seem to be lacking in restraining orders, I'm going to go with persistent.

Sarah Hoyt told me once, a long time ago, that she wished she hadn't waited for so long to submit her work. It struck me as ridiculous, since her books are brilliant. But it made me realize that the fearless thing came in handy. I sold my first novel (no ghost writing) at 27. I like to think that the fearless handicap helped. I also am firmly convinced that most people no longer fear anything once they hit a certain age, which can explain the age gap between when a writer first starts their craft and the time they actually become published. Just a theory I have...

Another plus in my favor was that I made friends with other authors. I resisted (mostly) the urge to ask them to "read my book" and tell me what I've done wrong. Instead I've read their various works, studied their styling and pacing, and developed my own voice with their help. Sarah helped initially, unwittingly guiding my baby steps into the realm of urban fantasy. Dr. Monkey showed me how humor can be injected into the worst of situations and not seem out of place in the most serious of science fiction books. These authors, along with others, became a sort of "guiding light" for me. I still read their books, though I'm more comfortable with my voice than I was four years ago. But they helped, and I learned what I liked and what I didn't like.

But in the end, the number one thing that allowed me to become published was listening. I listened to advice I received from various authors, listened to them when they warned me from doing things that could end up making me look bad. Listened to editors tell me what I'm doing wrong in my work and how to fix it, despite my utter conviction that I knew everything already.

So tell me... how rocky or smooth has your own path been? What pitfalls have you run into, or better still, created for yourself?

Ryk Spoor's Road to Publication

*Ladies and gentlemen, aliens and dragons, please extend a warm Mad Genius Club welcome to Ryk Spoor.*


Authors get asked lots of questions.

Undoubtedly some of the most common (besides "when's the next book out" if you're writing a series) are "where do you get your ideas", "Why do you write", and "how did you get published" (sometimes phrased as "how did you become a writer").

I'll answer the last question first, because it's undoubtedly the most interesting of the answers.

Waaaaay back in the misty reaches of time (okay, in 2000), Baen Books was preparing to do a re-issuing of the works of James Schmitz, with Eric Flint doing the editing to bring all the stories together, sort them into priority for republishing, and connect them into coherent wholes.

At the time, I was only vaguely aware of Baen Books (mainly because I generally paid little attention to publishers per se).

I was (and still am) a fixture on the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written (having been present since around 1989).

Baen, of course, had recently begun their experiment of creating their own online community, Baen's Bar, and Eric Flint had his own conference on that community.

It is important to understand at this point that James Schmitz was (and is) one of my favorite of the old-time SF writers, someone who started out writing material that bordered on Doc Smith pastiche but quickly developed his own voice, and a voice that -- for his era -- was almost unique, especially in that most of his stories focused on competent, quick-thinking FEMALE characters who were fully as competent as any of the men around them, and showed few of the failings common to other authors' attempts at such characters.

His most famous novel work is undoubtedly The Witches of Karres, but in some ways I consider the Telzey Amberdon novels to be more representative, and his stories featuring Nile Etland -- especially The Demon Breed -- are some of his best work.Someone -- I do not recall who -- posted an excerpt of discussion from Flint's conference on what was being done on the Schmitz re-issue to rec.arts.sf.written.

Unfortunately -- or fortunately -- this excerpt was taken completely out of context, said context being that it was a discussion on Eric's conference between him and those who knew him and understood his discussion habits and tactics.

Taken thus out of context, it made it sound like Eric Flint: 

1.Intended to completely modernize the text, removing "outdated" references Felt Schmitz didn't understand how to properly tell a story
2.Was going to re-edit and possibly even re-write pieces of the stories to make them "better".

I took strong exception to this; in my view, even if the interpretation of that excerpt was exaggerated, the entire concept of "editing" a dead man's work made no sense at all. If you were going to re-issue it, well, RE-ISSUE! Take an old copy of the book, transfer those words, typeset and print. You don't need an editor for that!

Well, this ignited a flamewar the likes of which was rarely seen even on that newsgroup -- which had certainly seen many.

Several separate message threads were created, with over 2,000 posts, with Eric and I shooting back and forth at each other while others took various sides and added their own volleys of fire.

However, even at the height of this flamewar, neither Eric nor I focused on insulting the other PERSON, just their choices or viewpoints, and when one of us DID make an actual error (which both of us did at least once during the debate), we admitted it to the other person and corrected ourselves.

This was a somewhat rare occurrence and caused both of us to recognize that the other guy might be obviously wrongheaded, but sincerely and honestly so.

The flamewar continued in spurts for so long that the first book in the reissue actually hit the shelves while it continued. It was at that point that Eric said to me, paraphrased, "why the hell are you still arguing about what you THINK I said about what I might do to the book, instead of just picking up the book and READING it?"

To which I replied "Because I'm not sure I want to spend money on something I'm not sure I even WANT!"

To which HE answered: ".... that's a good point."At which point, he quickly asked Jim Baen for permission and then proceeded to send me the original files -- with his edits, and commentary on what he'd done, and why, so I could see what did and didn't change, why it had to be changed (in Eric's view) and so on.

To which my response was: "Well, dammit, now you've gone all REASONABLE on me! Now I'm going to actually have to read it and give an INFORMED opinion!"And after reading the original and final versions and Eric's notes, I posted my opinion, which boiled down to: most of the edits were trivial things -- changing punctuation which was not needed, etc.

A few were substantiative, of which two I felt actively damaged the stories in question, and one was a stroke of genius which I was surprised had been missed out on by both John Campbell and Schmitz himself. "But overall these are 95%+ original Schmitz, excellent stories, and well worth owning. If you don't already own them, go out and buy these. It's well worth it."After that, Eric used me for a while as his "loyal opposition" -- sending me copies of other re-issues underway so that I could be there as a sort of third-party reviewer.

During one exchange of conversation, he happened to ask where I lived, to which I replied "East Greenbush, NY" and he said, "No kidding. My mother in law's in Schenectady."

So the next time he came up to this area, he dropped by to visit. And while we were talking, my wife brought up the fact that I wrote (something I would not have done in that context). In Eric's words: "So naturally I had to ask if he had anything finished, and this is where Spoor showed how clever he was, by telling me that all he had was some kind of vampire story. Now, normally I consider anything involving vampires about as interesting as watching paint dry, but Spoor knew my contrary nature would make it so that I'd feel obligated to REALLY give his story a fair try."

Eventually Eric got a chance to read the three connected stories I'd given him, and one day I got a phone call.

Since Eric had NEVER called me previously (except to verify directions to my house) I figured this meant he was trying the personal touch to let me down easy. Instead he said, "This is eminently publishable stuff. There's just one thing wrong with it: it's too short."

He gave the stories to Jim Baen, who agreed with him, and I then bashed out another 60,000 words in about 2 months to add to the first three, tweaked those a little bit, and about a year later I held in my hands my first copy of Digital Knight, which was dedicated in part to The Butcher of Baen, Eric Flint.

Also in Eric's words, and mine: I do not recommend anyone else attempt this route to publication.

There are so many ways this could go wrong.To address the other two questions:I get my ideas from many sources; I read literally thousands of books when I was younger, and there's nothing so convenient as taking a piece of A.E. Van Vogt, connecting it to something from Robert E. Howard, and setting it in a universe Heinlein might have worked on.

I'm inspired by anime I watch, by images -- one entire novel I recently wrote was triggered simply because I happened to see an absolutely magnificent rainbow one day, while driving home -- and by music.

The largest single source for me, though, and the most powerful tool I have to help me with working out my ideas, is roleplaying. I run RPG campaigns and throw pieces of my concepts into the grinder of the player characters, let them gnaw on them, bash them around, and see how well they survive!

As to WHY I write... partly because I can't NOT write. I started writing when I was 6. I have stories that want to be told, and I tell them. But I also write because there's stories I want to read, and no one else writes them.

If there is any actual PURPOSE to what I write, then it is to bring forth the Sense of Wonder, that thrill that widened my eyes and inspired me to dream when I was 11 and first read about the Lensmen and their galaxy-spanning conflict with the implacable forces of Boskone and the even more terrible powers lying behind them, the chill down my spine from first reading "One Ring to Rule Them All, One Ring to Find Them...", the triumph and glory that only words and imagination can evoke and that often seems absent from other fiction I have read. This is the REASON for fiction, to me, to exalt, to lift up the reader and make them see something better, grander, more glorious than anything they have seen... and to, at least for a moment, BELIEVE in it.

Ryk was born in Omaha, Nebraska, Ryk moved with his family to Vermilion, South Dakota, then Atlanta, Georgia, and to Latham, NY before ending up in Schenectady, NY. As an effort-induced asthmatic, he was often confined to the house and spent the majority of his time reading and, as time went on, writing (getting those first million words out of the way early!); while science books -- especially those on volcanology -- were a large part of his reading, the Oz novels by L. Frank Baum were his favorites in early life.

In junior high, a teacher gave him a battered, slightly scorched old copy of E.E. "Doc" Smith's Second-Stage Lensmen, which pegged his sense-of-wonder meter permanently and set him on an inevitably geeky quest to become a science fiction writer. In high school he discovered computers and RPGs, and ran the very first play-by-email (PBEM) roleplaying campaign in 1977-1980; it was during this time he first began using the online alias of "Sea Wasp" which he uses to this day.

Since then he acquired degrees in mathematics and science, psychology, and information science, worked everywhere from fast-food joints to an internet-bubble filesharing company to Borders Books, and now works as the R&D Coordinator for International Electronic Machines. Along the way he became a Usenet fixture, a RPG consultant and writer, an anime fan, and eventually achieved his ambition to be an SF writer when Baen Books published his first novel, Digital Knight. Since then, he has also published the short novel Diamonds Are Forever as a part of the anthology Mountain Magic, Boundary (the latter two with Eric Flint), and his latest solo novel, Grand Central Arena, which is a modern space opera intended as a salute and tribute to "Doc" Smith and the other Golden Age writers; a sequel to Boundary, Threshold, is due out at the end of May.

Ryk E. Spoor now lives in Troy, NY, with his wife Kathleen and four children (Chris, Gabriel, Victoria, and Domenica), and one small poodle.

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To Print

　
This is partly publishing business and partly life, and it occurred to me that you guys might want to know what sometimes happens as a novel winds its way between writing and publication. And how it changes.

So, a little chronology and history on what happened to my novel Darkship Thieves, which comes out from Baen on Jan.5

1 - April 1996 - After one of the worst times in my attempts to break in, a time when great effort led only to a flurry of rejections, and after retreating into Austen fandom for six months, I realized I couldn’t take anymore just writing things that would never sell. So I rejoined my weekly writers’ group and sat down to write a story for it. Only the story ran to twenty thousand words, giving me exactly two markets: Analog and Asimov’s, neither of which I’d cracked at the time.

The novelette started with a guy – yes, you read that correctly, guy – in the hospital, trying to figure out how to rescue someone else, ina profoundly unpleasant future Earth. All noblesse oblige and stuff.

2 - rest of 1996 - wrote the novel, since I couldn’t sell it as a short. Over the time writing it, I realized it was the first time I was consciously wondering if I was giving the reader enough clues, etc. Up till then, though I’d been writing for nine years, I’d written mostly for me. Honestly, I consider this one of the big hah hah moments in my writing career.

3- Just before Christmas 96, send out a bunch of queries to agents. One answered. We’ll call her Ms. B Lister. She said she liked my idea, could she see the opening. Of course she could. I think I beat all records at getting those first chapters mailed.

4 - Ms. B Lister liked it – to my shock, by then – and wanted the rest. I sent her the rest. I didn’t hear again till April, when she told me my story was hampered by two enormous coincidences being used to propel the plot, and also she didn’t like that my guy woke up with amnesia. Right. So I went back and rewrote it over a week. This caused the incident of the Shrodinger fish (Younger boy was supposed to feed the class fish. I went into deep re-write seclusion. NOTHING else happened. The fish were okay, but until we got there, they could have been dead or alive. And I didn’t even know fish could look happy to see you!)

5 - It is October 97 before Ms. B Lister got back to me. She was slow. OTOH though she had a couple other suggestions, she liked the novel, she wanted to sign me on, and she was sure it would sell. Around this time, first twinge of doubt, since she told me sometimes things didn’t sell for inexplicable reasons. Take, for instance, something she represented, a fantasy about the young Lenin. Yes, you read that correctly. She couldn’t figure out why it hadn’t sold.

6 - at a less frantic pace do rewrite, send it back in and we’re now in 98 and I’m selling a few short stories. My friend Rebecca Lickiss (look her up if you’ve never read her) is planning to attend the Oregon Writers’ Workshop that spring. I won’t say she bullied me into going – she might have. I honestly don’t know who thought about it first, but we both applied, were accepted and ended up going. The instructor for the novel weekend (as opposed to general course) was Ginjer Buchanan and we were supposed to bring a proposal for a completed novel. Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that after finishing the rewrite and between waiting for agent’s reply, I wrote Hall of Judgement, the first novel of the Red Baron. So I outlined that, and tried to make it a selling outline and all that.

7 - Went to workshop. By means I’m not allowed to divulge, they ensured everyone wrote a new novel outline the day before Ginjer arrived. It had to be an idea we’d never even thought of. I’m stuck in a little house by the sea, far from the internet on which I’d already come to depend as a fast research tool (even if I verify things on books/primary sources if available, afterwards.) How in heck could I do this? Mostly I wrote historical sf or space opera, both of which required research. Okay, okay, tel you what. I just wrote this short story about Shakespeare being a robot, and I did a massive amount of research – besides having been a Shakespeare buff for years. I’d do a novel involving Shakespeare. It’s not like it would sell – I mean, in twenty four hours or less? Right.

8 - I’d make it fantasy – no time to really think through time-travel or anything else. So... elves. And having recently watched Shakespeare in Love (Yes, they did threaten to throw me out of the theater for mumbling. How did you know?) I decided to solve the fair boy/dark lady thing by making an elf a gender changer. (Look, it was late at night, okay?) Plot kind of came from that.

9 - Meeting with Ginjer who liked the Red Baron novel but was afraid people would think he had been a Nazi (She might have been right. Yeah, I know, but she MIGHT have been. Trust me.) However, she’d also seen Shakespeare in Love and she LOVED the other one. The fatal question was asked "How soon can you have this to me?"

10 - Next six months consumed getting novel to Ginjer who bought it in three days. During this Ms. B Lister did everything but physically whine and snivel, because – I guess – this is not the path she saw for my career. By November I’d had enough. I went to my first convention – World Fantasy – and came to an agreement with another agent. We’ll call him Mr. Hot Shot.

11 - Mr. Hot Shot, perhaps reasonably, told me to forget that space opera and write more in the hot, hot, hot Shakespeare series. We sold two more books in 99.

12 - I finally gave the space opera to Mr. Hot Shot to read. Worldcon 2000, he told me he’d read it and it was pretty good but he had some revision notes. I was used to this, no prob. However when we met, he had no revision notes and had decided it was NOT good enough to submit. This solidified other suspicions I had that he actually did NOT read my stuff but got his receptionist – six months out of college – to read it, and he only read her notes. Um... Okay then. It would have been okay if he’d told me up front, but he didn’t. I gave him one more shot.

13 - November 2000 I send Mr. Hot Shot an outline for what was to become Heart Of Light. Unfortunately, since I’d signed with him, he’d developed a "One Right Way To Write A Successful Book" theory. This had already caused problems with the second Shakespeare book, but now he told me I’d written the wrong book and wanted me to put in all this formula stuff. (That book too underwent a massive revision before publication, but formula it was not.) I called a friend and started negotiations with her agent.

14 - First Shakespeare Book comes out a month after 9/11. I think it tanked so bad it cratered. Hard cover, unknown author. Nothing on the spine, not even "fiction" which works fine with push but without push... ah well. There were people hurting a lot worse at that time, but to me it felt like my career had also just died. I had two books in pipeline, still, and I thought I could make it, though.

15 - Of course series entered death spiral. Meanwhile I had new agent. I’d rewritten the space opera yet again, realizing that for a man to have that level of aggression he came across as psychotic. Well, a woman did too, but it wasn’t THAT bad. You weren’t afraid of her. So, Athena was born. New Agent liked her, but she seemed at best lackadaisical at sending it out. (Actually at sending anything of mine out.) Mind you, we got along FINE other than that.

16 - World Fantasy 2003 it looked like my writing career was completely dead. A month later, I got a chance to write a project for Baen with Eric Flint (which needs to be rewritten and will now be called The Shakespeare Gambit.) Now, you know, going from "dead" to "someone wants me" was exhilarating. I told Jim yes over phone. (At any rate he was a man whom it was very hard to say "no" to.) I told Ms. New Agent. She didn’t seem happy, but went along with it. Contract arrived. She didn’t like this and that and the other, which was amazing since Baen contracts are ONE or two pages, and written in English. She finally told me it was her or Baen. Well... I’d had her for two years. And she had yet to sell anything for me. Yeah, it was a REALLY hard choice.

17 - Having muddled through and managed to fire Ms. New Agent – hard that, truly ;) – I started working on project with Eric and trying to sell a house. Somewhere in the middle of this, and I’m sorry, I don’t even remember the year, there was the famous phone call of "Sarah, do you have anything to sell me?" I had the space opera on Jim’s desk, so I thought he must be asking for something else. Well, he wanted the book in a month and I’d just started a book because of a dream I’d had. Also at that point, I was brow beaten into thinking I was a fantasy author. So I sold him Draw One In The Dark and he bought it in twenty minutes (beating out my three day record.) From here on, chronology gets fuzzy, since I’ve been busy as heck and often lost track of time.

18 - Somewhere along the line I hired La Agent. La Agent took me on for two reasons – the Magical British Empire and the Musketeer Mysteries. At the time I had an offer from "Mr. Way Up THERE" agent, but he wanted me to do a book a year or maybe every two years, and get a job teaching in college the rest of the time. Look, might be great for someone but not me. So, I took La Agent. She quickly sold the Magical British Empire and the Musketeer Mysteries. I didn’t even try the space opera, now convinced there was something fundamentally wrong with it. Oh, yeah, Sarah’s Diner – my conference in Baen’s Bar – was born soon thereafter.

19 - I was now writing and on the hook for three or four books a year. So the logical thing happened: I wanted a challenge. (G). While recovering from crud, I was reading my old stuff. I agreed with Jim my latest incarnation of the space opera was no-go. You see, I’d workshopped it so much, and tried to explain EVERYTHING that the first three chapters were molasses. But I remembered that the book USED to be decent. So I went to first version, and there was a light there. Purely for fun, since I knew NO ONE would buy space opera from me, I sat down and wrote a first chapter, with Athena but putting the old "life" back in and Heinleining the details, in the way I knew now, with almost ten novels below my belt. The response of the dinerites shocked me. They practically threw their greasy cloaks in the air. They did threaten my life if I didn’t give them more.

20 - I posted another few chapters in diner. At this time, it was not unusual to get emails saying "I read 80 pages of Darkship Thieves. WHERE is the rest? Mail me the rest, please!" Right. You know who you are.

21 - Toni informed me that though she was looking for fantasy, she was buying DST. So I stopped posting it, and started making with the finishing.

22 - And that, children and babies, is the glorious story of Darkship Thieves. Which opens thusly:
I never wanted to go to space. Never wanted see the eerie glow of the Powerpods. Never wanted to visit Circum Terra. Never had any interest in discovering the truth about the darkships. You always get what you don’t ask for.

Which was why I woke up in the dark of shipnight, within the greater night of space in my father’s space cruiser.

Before full consciousness, I knew there was an intruder in my cabin....

Okay, now... what about the above surprised you? I confess this book has had a harder road to publication than most, but others are often convoluted. Did you know things could take that many turns? Does it make you see any of your own stuff – or even stuff you’ve read – in a different light? Talk to me! I’ve been ill, it’s almost New Years and I need distraction!

Oh, yeah – and may the new year bring you everything you need and some of what you wish for!
　
Edited 12/31/09 -- Welcome Instapundit readers. Look around for a look at the mad, mad world of publishing and writers. Many thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link.