Filling the Well

I broke into publishing the old-fashioned way. Which is to say, exactly how all the “How to get published” books tell you how to get published. I wrote for a long time. I wrote badly for a long time. When I was 16 I started sending stories to magazines like Analog and Asimov’s (because this was back when I thought I was going to be a Big Idea hard SF writer. Dr. Schmidt and Mr. Dozois, at this time I would like to formally apologize for sending you my really bad “big game hunters from Alpha Centauri killed off the dinosaurs and environmentalists from Alpha Centauri are getting ready to reintroduce them into their natural habitat” stories). I kept writing. I kept sending out stories. I had a few successes in college with the literary magazine and contests. I kept writing. I wrote my first novel in 1995-6. I liked it. I still do. I sent it to publishers. It didn’t sell. I kept writing. I wrote two more novels that will never see the light of day. In 1998 I went to Odyssey, a 6 week long summer writing workshop. I had a chance to do nothing but write for a good stretch of time, and I learned a lot. I learned how to revise, which turned out to be the big hurdle I’d been trying to get over. I write crappy first drafts. I’d been sending out my first drafts all this time. I write much better second drafts. I sold a short story to Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword and Sorceress anthology in 1999.

I sold some more short stories. I didn’t sell a lot of short stories. I wrote two more novels, both fantasy. I sent them out. They didn’t sell. Then I wrote Kitty and The Midnight Hour. I got an agent, via someone I know. I left the agent. I got another agent, via a one-page query letter. This was now 2004, about 15 years after I made my first short story submissions. In August 2004, my agent sold Kitty to Warner Books. In 2006, I finally sold a story to Asimov’s.

From what I can gather, my numbers are about normal. Ten years to sell a short story, four tries to sell a novel. Maybe a little more than some, but I think that was a function of starting very young and being quite naïve and stupid about it all for a longer than average stretch of time. But that shows you how I did it. BTW, I advocate starting young and stupid because by the time you figure out how hard this gig really is, the actions — writing every day, sending stuff out — have become habit and you’re less likely to talk yourself out of it like you might if you’re old and wise.

I’m going to be catty for just a minute: I have gotten a few questions along the lines of “What’s the secret handshake so I can get my book published too?” There is no secret handshake. There are guidelines such as never give money to anyone up front (see Yog’s Law). But what it all comes down to is hard work and sticking with it. Write better.

Write better — this is one thing I don’t think people say enough. Being persistent isn’t enough. You have to be constantly working at your writing, challenging yourself, getting better. If you persist in writing the same drecky Mary Sue fantasy novel over and over again, or your short stories all show the same problems with plotting and point of view, you’re probably not going to break in no matter how long you try. One great way to improve is by reading other people’s work, and analyzing the hell out of it. What did you like? What didn’t you like? You hated that novel so much you couldn’t finish it — why? Were the characters wooden? The plot unbelievable? Why? You can apply that to your own writing. This is why my Masters is in English lit rather than creative writing. Analyzing works of literature makes me a better writer.

One of these days I’m going to post that big game hunters from Alpha Centauri story so you can see that it is possible to become a better writer than the one you start out as.

I have some good news and some bad news.

There’s been some confusion because the back of “Silver Bullet” says one thing and I’ve been saying something else. The deal is this: my editor and I came up with this hoopy plan to release #5 and #6 back to back, as a sort of two-parter. This required moving the schedule around a bit, to give me a couple of extra months to get #6 ready in time.

So the bad news is, Kitty #5 (which still doesn’t have a title, darn it) is currently scheduled for February 2009, not fall 2008.

The good news is, Kitty #6 is currently scheduled for March 2009. Shortest wait ever.

In the meantime, I have two Kitty related short stories due out in anthologies in 2008.

“Life is the Teacher” is about Emma, who at the end of “Washington” was turned into a vampire against her will. It will appear in “Hotter Than Hell,” edited by Kim Harrison and due out in June.

“Il Est Ne” is about Kitty, and another rogue werewolf she meets on her travels. It’ll be in an anthology of werewolf Christmas stories, “Wolfsbane and Mistletoe” edited by Charlaine Harris and due out in October.

Maybe…someday… I don’t really get to make that decision, ultimately, unless I win the lottery and can form my own production company. Hollywood is a weird duck.

Oh, and please support the WGA strike. Thanks.

Lots of books start with the premise of “what if vampires and werewolves existed in the real world?” The stories tend to get soap-opera-ish and angst ridden. I decided these folks needed their own call-in advice show because Dr. Laura just couldn’t handle their problems.

I wrote the first short story initially because I figured an idea that silly couldn’t possibly last for more than a short story. It turns out the radio show was the perfect format in which to discuss just about every aspect of the supernatural, paranormal, and all its attendant literatures and stereotypes I could possibly put my mind to. So, five short stories, a couple of spin-off short stories, and four novels later, I’m still writing about Kitty and her world.

A side note about Dr. Laura: I was working in a bookstore at the time (mid-90s) and her book, Ten Stupid Things Women Do to Mess Up Their Lives, was hitting best seller lists. I despise that book. No, I haven’t read it. But 1.) the title is so condescending it makes my blood boil, and 2.) a great number of the people who bought the book were middle aged and elderly men who said they were buying it to give to their daughters and granddaughters.

Oh. My. God. It was all I could do not to yank the book out of their hands and bitch slap them with it. Is it any wonder girls have low self esteem when the father figures in their lives are basically telling them, “I’m expecting you to mess up your life.”

By the way, it’s not usually a good idea to give a self help book, any self help book, as a gift to anyone. Even if you mean well. Especially if you mean well.

I honestly didn’t think I had anything new to say about vampires. Werewolves on the other hand have been sadly neglected. I felt like I had a lot more to work with.

One of the cool things about writing werewolves, I’ve discovered, is the ability to pick and choose what traits I want them to have. I think that’s the key to writing werewolves — at least werewolves in my universe. I look at them as being a scale rather than either/or. On one side of the scale is wolf, on the other is human. Some werewolves fall a little closer to wolf, some are a little closer to human.

But the really, really cool thing is both wolves and humans are highly individualistic. So the wolf end and human end of the scale is going to be different for every werewolf. Instead of the standard Jekyll and Hyde werewolf template that has saturated film and literature for the last hundred years, where the whole point of the werewolf has been about losing control of the inner beast, can’t control the monster within, yadda yadda stereotype, I have a whole world of individual werewolves to play with.

I’ve done quite a bit of reading on wolves, and wolves have many personalities. As a result, depending on what combination of personalities you get, every pack is different. This is very cool as well. It means I can keep werewolves in Kitty’s world interesting, rather than using the cookie cutter monster template.

No. I have a whole list of proscribed songs, mostly because they’re too obvious. Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf” is on the list. The Shangri-La’s “Leader of the Pack” is right on the edge. Pretty much anything with “wolf” in the title will probably not ever end up on a playlist. But I did use The Beatles’ “Hey Bulldog” on playlist #4. Is that close enough?

I’ve been promising a chatty FAQ on my website, and I figured this might be a good way to do it. I’ll add as inspiration strikes.

Is that me on the covers? No. I think there’s this thing that happens where all blonds look the same from the back. It’s like you say someone’s a blond and you don’t have to say anything else about them. Also, I wonder sometimes if I was part of a secret government cloning program (ala Mildred Ames’s Anna to the Infinite Power), because I’m always being told, “I have a cousin who looks just like you!” So who knows. The artist, Craig White, uses a model for the covers. Maybe she’s one of those cousins.

A related question that I’ve been asked a few times: how similar am I to Kitty? And that’s a good question because all my characters basically start out being me. I ask myself, “What would I do in this situation?” But that gets tempered by “If I were this kind of person what would I do in this situation?” Which in turn gets tempered by “What would someone go through to become that kind of person?” So in the end I have a lot of different characters who are quite different from each other and me.

Back to Kitty and blonds. I made her blond (like me) because that is one of the last great acceptable stereotypes. Lawyers are slimy, blonds are dumb and popular. And I actually get quite pissed off at the blond stereotype. How many novels (esp. in the paranormal/urban fantasy genre) have you read where the heroine has some flavor of dark hair, is insecure about her appearance, and often compares herself to someone of her acquaintance who is blond, glamorous and kinda dumb?

Or maybe I only notice that sort of thing because I’m blond. And not glamorous. And not dumb. So mainly I made Kitty blond because I think Buffy Summers may be the only blond heroine in the world of paranormal fiction and I wanted to change that. I also made Kitty an English major — like me — so I could throw in the literary allusions I love so much. But I’ve never worked as a DJ, unlike Kitty.

As far as how similar we are in other ways: people who only know me a little say we’re a lot alike. People who know me very well say we’re not. Oh, and I have a pretty good internal editor. Kitty doesn’t.

But I did know I was in trouble one evening when I couldn’t decide what to wear to go out with friends and I found myself thinking, “What would Kitty wear?” What’s scarier is that I knew what Kitty would wear and could pick it out of my closet. Heh.