Sunday 29 September 2019

What the fuck?

So, this is about a comment on my book, Gunlaw, that's free to read on Wattpad:

https://www.wattpad.com/story/43453733-gunlaw

And it's about "bad language" / cursing.

I understand that some people do not like and want to avoid cursing. I get that. When I stop getting it are the cases when that desire is juxtaposed with the desire to read violent fantasy fiction - and let's face it, most fantasy fiction is violent. When there are swords being carried, hungry dragons, pitched battles etc … there's generally going to be violence.

So, here's the exchange. I'll admit that I took it as a passive aggressive attempt to control what I wrote, and reacted as I generally do to passive aggression - i.e. with actual aggression. That just feels more honest to me.

First note that the person complaining about the word "damned" had earlier on the page been lolling at the idea a minotaur had broken a prostitute.




And here's the exchange where they make their point about the "bad language".

(click on text to enlarge)
(click on text to enlarge)

So, yes, by all means take steps to avoid reading curse words if they offend you. But I reserve the right to think it's madness to be somehow morally outraged by the word "fuck" and yet be entertained by violence and murder.

And of course it's fine to be entertained by stories of violence and murder. We have been for millennia and will doubtless continue to be. Reading a story about them doesn't condone them. And if the person whose arm has just been chopped off with a sword says, "Well, fuck!" We aren't condoning the naughty word either.

It seems odd that I need to explain this...

And for those interested, here are the fuck-counts for my traditionally published works:


For the record, the fuck-count for Gunlaw is 29!




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Wednesday 11 September 2019

Distance

The further you are from something the smaller it gets until at last you can cover it with an outstretched hand and then a thumb and then finally not see it at all.

The further I get from the Broken Empire trilogy the smaller my description of it gets. Currently I'm at the thumb. Small doesn't mean inaccurate. There's a clarity in condensing.

Imagine how you would describe what The Broken Empire is about.

Here's how I do it:

It's about the anger he feels.

It's not about where it comes from, it's just about that raw, broken anger. What it does to him, how it feels, how he fights it, how he uses it, and where it goes in the end.

Tuesday 10 September 2019

Writers' Pay


A writer friend recently told me that they had been offered $1800 to write a 30,000 word novella for a successful franchise of books. That's a one-off payment, no royalties.

A traditionally published author (and this writer has been traditionally published) normally puts out one book a year if they are lucky enough to have ongoing contracts. Some famous authors are unable to manage this rate.

A fantasy book can vary in length but let's call 120,000 words typical.

Note that it is harder to write four 30,000 word novellas than one 120,000 word book. Just like it is much harder to write thirty 1,000 word short stories than one 30,000 word novella. Each of these things requires a new idea, a beginning, middle, and end. An arc. A plot. A reason to exist.

But even if 4 x 30K word novella = 1 x 120K novel, then this still means for a typical year's worth of writing my online friend was being offered $7,200.

It's not possible to survive on $7,200 a year in a first world country.

$1,800 for 30K words is 6 cents a word. The better paying fantasy magazines pay 10 cents a word. Nobody suggests that a living can be made from writing short stories for them - even if placing every short story you wrote was a given rather than a gamble at fairly long odds.

The men and women who work at the publisher who offered my chum what is effectively an annualised salary of $7,200 all have jobs that pay well above the minimum wage. They can cover their mortgage and food bills, run a car etc. In the US they will have health insurance.

So, why pay so little? The person commissioning the writers will point to this:

There are, they will note, hundreds of other writers who will say yes if you say no. Toward the end of the virtual queue at their desk are people who will actually write the novella for nothing just so they can say they've been published and point to a book with their name on it. Right at the end of it there are probably people who would PAY THEM for the chance.

It has to be noted at this point that if the publishers also had a hole they wanted dug in the carpark outside their office then at certain points in the economic cycle they could assemble a similar real queue of itinerant workers and walk down that offering lower and lower wages until they got a refusal, then go back to the one before.

Of course, we have labour laws to prevent that kind of exploitation. Specifically the minimum wage.


The flipside of this coin is that lots of people like writing, whereas rather few people like digging holes. So this over-supply of talented labour combined with the enthusiasm for the work creates a situation where people are earning $2 an hour writing novellas for companies that make millions and pay their regular staff a living wage.

It's an old conundrum about where something that many do as a hobby turns into something that you should be able to make a living from. It's complicated by the fact that at the very top of the game you can make a ton of money. Many might point to something like golf or tennis, played by millions for fun, played by many very talented people for peanuts, and played by a few hundred people for large sums of money.

With that comparison it seems reasonable. You're gambling your time against the chance of making it BIG.

But I'll return to this business of franchise writing. Here you really are more like a regular worker. The publisher owns the IP, you will get zero or minimal royalties, and so there's no breaking big. The novella my friend could have written might have sold a million - he would still just have his $1,800. At what point is it just exploitation with the illusionary carrot of "exposure" dangled before the writer? At what point should they get paid a decent weekly or monthly salary for the agreed period?


I've no answers really. I wrote for fun chasing $10 and $50 a story in magazines (and not getting that many hits). And now I write for a living and make a decent amount of money. It's that middle ground - which thankfully I was lucky enough to vault over - where writers devote a serious amount of time and effort for very meagre returns, that prompted this blog post. If nothing else it lets readers know what's going on under the hood.






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Sunday 8 September 2019

A map for The Girl And The Stars!

To ramp up the already sky-high expectations for The Girl And The Stars, First Book of the Ice, I thought I'd share the map with you.

It's mostly ice, admittedly, but if you look +really+ hard you can just make out areas of snow.




This series of satellite images of Greenland may help appreciate the finer points of the map.



 


And for the dedicated reader I propose to offer framed copies.




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Friday 6 September 2019

Readers might steal your book but writers won't steal your ideas.

A message to new writers:

Nobody is going to steal your idea!



It's not uncommon for new writers, having written a book, to be terrified that someone is going to steal their ideas, write a different book based on them, and make a mint.

It may not be an uncommon fear, but it is an unreasonable one.

As I (and many other people) have said before: writing is the hard part, the ideas are easy.

I've spoken to writers who are too scared to send their manuscript to agents in case the ideas are stolen. While this is to some degree an understandable novice fear, it's also unfounded. 99% of manuscripts that go before an agent get such scant consideration that stealing of ideas - even if it were a thing - would not be possible. The great bulk of manuscripts are rejected after a page or two on the basis that the writing is not strong enough. Many that survive that first hurdle will fall fairly soon after on the basis that the pacing is off, or the voice weak, or the characters unengaging etc.

On the rare occasions that an agent gets to the end of a manuscript what they then do is consider where they might be able to sell it and if they believe it to be saleable they will offer to represent the author. What they won't do is try to get another author to stop what they're doing and write a new book using the ideas from the one they've just read.

(warning: magic system spoilers for two books follow) 


The main (but still very small) danger is not that your ideas will be stolen but that if you delay sending out your manuscript because of this fear then eventually someone might just randomly come up with something similar.

Nearly twenty years ago I wrote an unpublished book, Blood of the Red (now available on Wattpad). The magic system is based on drinking the blood of dragons and thereby gaining powers that depend upon and are similar to the dragon's. So drinking the blood of a red dragon gives fire magics etc. Additionally, drinking the blood is fatal to almost everyone, but certain individuals can tolerate it.

In 2016 Anthony Ryan wrote the much better book The Waking Fire (first in a trilogy) in which the magic system shares exactly the same top-level description. Ryan didn't steal the idea from me - he had zero opportunity to do so, I didn't put the book on Wattpad until after his was published and I'd read it. It's just that if you wait long enough all possibilities will be explored.

But the bottom line is that if the most famous fantasy books in the world had not been published, and you came to me with the core ideas from The Lord of the Rings, A Game of Thrones, etc … neither I nor any other active fantasy writer would be snatching them out of your hands. We all have far too many ideas of our own that excite us. The difficult part of writing those books was not having the idea - it was putting words on pages in a manner that refuse to let readers go.

Once the book is published then of course the unfounded fear that other writers will steal the ideas can be replaced with the genuine knowledge that many readers will refuse to pay for your work and just take illegal copies off the internet.

So, bottom line, fearful writers: send your manuscript out to agents without fear. Nobody is going to steal your ideas, and they can't steal your skill.





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