Busy day, so this is gonna be quick.

Agent Andrew Zack blogged the other day about Bookscan, a service to track and report book sales: The Lie that is Bookscan.

My own agent, Joshua Bilmes, has posted his own thoughts, disagreeing with Zack’s assessment: A Bookscanner Darkly

Personally, I tend to agree with Joshua, and not just because he sells my books.  As far as I know, most writers, publishers, and agents know perfectly well that Bookscan represents a percentage of total sales, and that percentage could be anywhere from 70-80% for one author but under 50% for another. Bookscan seems to capture a lower fraction of mine, since I do better with independents.

I don’t think Bookscan ever claimed to report ALL sales. It’s more data than anything else I’ve seen, save from the publisher itself, but it’s definitely not 100% of my sales.

A publisher using Bookscan as the sole criterion for rejecting an author (as described in Zack’s post) is troubling, but I see that as a problem with the publisher, not with Bookscan.

(I do still track and graph my Bookscan numbers every week to fulfil my neurotic validation needs, of course. They don’t tell me actual sales, but they do help me see trends.)

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

I talk about wanting to quit the day job some day and write full time.  Every once in a while I get a weekend with nothing planned, and I get to see what that might look like.  It ain’t pretty, folks.

Done so far:

1. Wake up to a little boy crawling into the bed with us.
2. Take care of dogs and cats.
3. Quick home repair job, thanks to dog’s chewing habit.  Grumble.
4. Front lawn mowed.  Back lawn procrastinated until tomorrow.
5. Lunch for kids.  Lunchtime already?  Dang.
6. Finally, some actual writing!  3000 more words on the final (for now) rewrite of Red Hood’s Revenge.
7. Dinner break, courtesy of my wonderful wife — thanks, babe!
8. Short story feedback for the writer who won my critique in the Brenda Novak diabetes auction.
9. Start working on an interview with a tight deadline.
10. Break to watch old Transformers episode while doing the 4-year-old’s nebulizer.

Still to come tonight:

1. Page proofs for The Mermaid’s Madness.
2. More work on the interview, hopefully.
3. Read through notes on Red Hood to figure out the next chapter so I can do it all again tomorrow

Can someone please explain how 8:45 pm snuck up on me like that?  Seriously, what just happened?  Where did Saturday sneak off to?

On the bright side, I’ve got 12,000 words on Red Hood after four days.  If I keep up this pace, I should have no problem making my deadline.  On the down side, this is not my natural pace.  if I keep it up for a month, I’m likely to go a little nuts.  But I want to get a head start before we head up north on vacation.  I’ll be taking the laptop, but I doubt I’ll be doing 3000 words a day while we’re there.

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

Why are all the SF/F writers doing series these days?  What ever happened to the good old standalone novel?

I can’t give you a thorough answer on that one, but part of it is simple economics.  Let’s start by comparing Goblin Quest and Stepsister Scheme, and please forgive me for geeking out with math and graphs.  Nothing here is all that complex or life-changing, but I tend to obsess a bit.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

It’s an interesting paradox. As a writer with four novels in print, one of the most common questions I get is “When are you going to quit your day job?” On the other hand, take a writer who has done just that and runs into financial trouble. One of the first questions they hear is “Why don’t you just get a real job?”

Writing “professionally” is a real job.  It’s more work than any day job I’ve had.  There’s the actual writing, the rewriting, the communication with editors, agents, and fans, the paperwork (contracts, taxes, etc.), and that’s before you decide to go to that convention or booksigning, or try to do some publicity for your work.

The real question is “Why don’t you get a safe job?”  One that would provide you with stable income, health insurance, and everything else you needed to avoid this mess.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

Okay, “wisdom” might be an overstatement.  But at Penguicon this year, it occurred to me that I’ve been doing writing workshops for a long time.  As a participant, I’ve done creative writing class discussions, the Writers of the Future workshop in ‘99, Critters, and then several years with a local group until they dissolved.  Eventually, I started cofacilitating workshops, helping to run them at ConFusion, ConClave, and now Penguicon, among others.

That’s a lot of fiction feedback, and after a while, you start to notice patterns.  I figured it might be helpful to list some of the more common feedback I’ve given and received over the years.  Like all “rules,” some of these can be bent.  Others can be broken.  Our job is to learn them well enough to know when and how.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

Terribly Twisted Tales [Amazon | Mysterious Galaxy] came out last month.  This is an anthology of twisted fairy tales, so I’m sure you’re all shocked to learn I contributed a story.  But for some reason, I’ve been nervous about this one.  I wrote “The Red Path,” which gave me a chance to explore the origin story for Red Riding Hood from my princess books, but I wasn’t sure it really worked.  So I was happy to find a review listing it among the best stories in the anthology.  (Kelly Swails also gets a shoutout.)

I’m left with another question, however.  I wrote “The Red Path” a year or so back, before even starting Red Hood’s Revenge.  Now that I’m writing the book, I find myself adjusting details of Roudette’s (Red Riding Hood’s) backstory, particularly when it comes to the hunter’s role.

So here’s the question.  Having published this story and written in the author’s note that this character will appear in Red Hood’s Revenge, how bound am I to keep the details of that story?  Given sales numbers on most anthologies, far fewer people are going to read the short story than will see the novel.  Am I allowed to alter published backstory if it improves the book?  Or am I pulling a major Lucas here, violating my own canonical history?  (Red Riding Hood shot first!)

I could use the unreliable narrator approach.  Roudette was a child at the time of that whole wolf/hunter incident, after all.  She probably missed a lot that was going on.  But even then, I find myself adding wordage to the book to explain why her original account was wrong … wordage that doesn’t need to be there for anyone who hasn’t read the short story, and thus will be dead weight for most of the novel’s readers, and should probably be taken out.

I don’t know.  I think my obligation is first and foremost to make Red Hood’s Revenge the best book I can, and if that means compromising the short story, well that sucks beanstalks but I still need to do it.

What do you think?  How would you feel knowing the hunter in “The Red Path” isn’t the same as he is when we get Roudette’s “real” backstory in the book?  What would you do as a writer, and what do you prefer as a reader and fan?

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

From a random author interview:

“My books are my children.  I love them all, and could never pick a favorite.”

Same author, different interview:

“Oh yes, I trunked several of my children back when I was starting out.”

The author at a booksigning:

“Psst.  Hey, you.  Want to buy one of my kids?  Take two, the older one and the newborn!”

The bookstore staff three months later:

“Time to clear some shelf space for the new arrivals.  Get out there and start stripping children.”

The library, where anyone can–  On second thought, I should probably stop.  I think we all get the idea.

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

This is one of my least favorite questions, and the one I’m asked most often.  The best times are when parents tell me they’ve read the book, but still ask me whether it’s appropriate for children.  Yes, this has really happened.  On more than one occasion.

Should your kid read my book?  How the frak should I know?  Some parents let their kids read the pop-up Kama Sutra at age six.  Others think The Cat in the Hat will turn their children into drugged-out hippies.  (Some of Seuss’ more adult works, on the other hand … but that’s another topic.)

I understand parents are busy, and don’t have the time to prescreen everything their children read.  Heck, I wouldn’t have wanted my parents to limit me to books they had read first.  But as an author, it’s a lot easier for me to answer the parent who asks “Does your book have any graphic sexual imagery in it?” than it is “Should my kid read it?”

The first parent is asking about my book.  The second is asking me to make a parenting decision for his or her child.  I have no problem trying to help, but for all our sakes, please don’t be the second parent.

Clear enough?  Groovy.  Because now it’s time to list all the answers I’d like to give, but probably shouldn’t….

“Should my child read your book?”

• Can you prove that’s really your child?
• Yes, but only the odd-numbered pages.
• You mean the kid standing there playing Grand Theft Auto on his Nintendo DS?
• No!  She should read my books, plural.  How do you expect me to quit my day job if your lazy kid only reads one?
• Yes.  When he’s finished, he can let you know whether or not it’s appropriate for grown-ups.
• How do you feel about nose-picking injuries, pixie pee, and gay fire-spiders?
• I’m sorry, Jim left an hour ago.  I’m his decoy.  His protection.  His loyal bodyguard.
• Not without a prescription.
• Wil Wheaton said my book was cool!  If you don’t buy it, he’s gonna march down to this bookstore and start throwing critical hits on your ass.
• Make sure she reads it backwards so she gets all the subliminal Satanic messages.
• You must be this tall to read Stepsister Scheme.  But he can read the goblin books.
• Print is dead.
• Everyone knows kids prefer to read books about younger characters.  Here, try this one by Nabokov.
• Sweet Zeus, what are you saying?  Nobody can read these books!  We have to keep the words trapped in the pages.  Can’t you hear them screaming?  Always screaming and plotting their horrible, horrible revenge.  Don’t open that book!  Don’t let them see you!!!

Please feel free to add your own.

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

Practice is supposed to help you improve, right?  The more you practice a process, the easier it becomes.  Yet I’ve talked before about how each book seems to be more challenging than the last.  From speaking to other published authors, I know I’m not the only one hitting this apparent paradox.

So just for fun, I thought I’d break down the books and figure out some of the major challenges and lessons I had to learn from each one.

Goblin Quest: 1st published book.  Just trying to write a publishable work!

Goblin Hero: 1st sequel.  Had to figure out how much to summarize from book one.  Also added a second PoV character, with her own plotline.

Goblin War: Left the goblin lair and went out into the world, which required a little more worldbuilding.  Had to learn how to conclude a series.  Had to learn how to incorporate backstory and intertwine it with the current storyline.

Stepsister Scheme: New series with a somewhat more serious tone.  New world, new characters, new everything!

Mermaid’s Madness: Four PoV characters, each with their own plotline.  Eep!  Massive sailing/ocean research.  Larger worldbuilding (multiple nations, cultures, etc.) than anything I’ve done before.

Red Hood’s Revenge: Stepping out of the pseudo-European fantasy feel into a different cultural context.  Working with sustained plotlines and character developments that carry through 4 books.

Having thought about this stuff way too much, it’s not that writing gets harder the more you do it.  Instead, I see two factors.  (Okay, two and a half.)

1.  I’m writing more ambitious books.  Goblin Quest was a blast, but it’s not the most complex plot, and there’s only one PoV character.  I suspect that if I were to go back and write a similar book, it would be a lot easier than the current work in progress.  (Being stubborn, I suspect I’ll just keep getting more ambitious until my brain explodes, though.)

2.  I’m more aware of the different aspects of writing.  Compare it to karate.  The first time you go, you learn some basic moves.  “Look ma, I’m punching and kicking!  Go me!”  But the more you practice, the more you become aware of things like stance, breathing, the proper way to make a fist, how far to extend your punch, the snapback after an attack…  With time, a lot of that becomes instinctive, of course.  But for every aspect that becomes automatic, you discover three more new things.

2.5  My family situation has grown steadily busier since I wrote Goblin Quest.  So basically, I’m writing more challenging books with less time.  Whee!

Please understand that I’m not complaining.  I love what I do.  I’m just trying to understand this phenomenon.  I’m still young in my career, so I don’t know how things will evolve over the next 10, 20, or 30 books.  (Yes, I’m an optimist!)

Have other people found the same increasingly steep curve?  Or maybe it’s my memory playing tricks on me.  This novel always feels like the hardest one to write because it’s the one I’m doing right now, and I forget how hard the last one was.  (I’ve heard there’s a similar phenomenon with pregnancy and childbirth, actually.)

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

I was originally going to call this entry “Neil Gaiman is my bitch,” but decided against it. Controversy is fun, but I don’t know if I could survive the hordes of Neil fans coming to rip me apart. There’s also, as cissa* pointed out, the misogynistic/sexist aspect of the whole “my bitch” slang.

Anyway, last week I linked to Gaiman’s post about readers and entitlement when it comes to things like completing a series on time. Being an author myself, my first response was “Hell yeah!” I haven’t missed a novel deadline yet, but it’s likely to happen sooner or later. So I tended to side with Gaiman on this one. Most of my reading list seemed to feel the same way … but then, a large part of my reading list is made up of writers.

Prompted in part by comments on my post, I decided to step back and take another look at this thing.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

Publishers and authors tend to keep actual numbers under wraps when it comes to print runs and books sold. As a result, new authors are often clueless as to what's normal. I know I was completely lost the first time I saw actual numbers for Goblin Quest. Was my book selling well? Was I going to get dumped if I didn't sell 100,000 books in the first year? How many books did my publisher actually print?

I don't actually know what my print runs have been. I have some guesses, but nothing from the publisher. But then I got to thinking...

We know the median first novel advance for a SF/F author is probably around $5000 or so. That's the boilerplate first offer I got from Baen (which then fell through, but that's another story). Average is a little higher than the median, but I'm going to stick with $5000 for ease of math.

We also know not all novels earn out their advance, especially first novels. $5000 is a best-guess on the part of the publisher as to how much they should invest in your new book.

Sticking purely with mass market paperbacks for the moment, let's say you get royalties at 8% (fairly standard but not universal for an original mass market, I believe) and a cover price of $7.99 (also standard U.S. cover price for mass markets). So you're earning $.64 per book. Juggle the numbers, and a $5000 advance means you're going to need to sell roughly 8,000 books (7,812.5) in order to earn out. In my case, I'd guess the publisher probably did a print run between 10,000 and 15,000 books, but that's a total guess, and hopefully more experienced publishing folks can speak to that piece. (ETA: ramblin_phyl points out that there's also a break-even point in the cost-efficiency of first print runs, which might mean the numbers on that run were a little higher.)

Hardcovers and e-books add more variables, as the royalties are different, but I'm trying to keep things as simple as possible for this example.

The numbers are important, but so are the expectations. Goblin Quest got a $4000 advance from DAW (lower than average, in part because it was a reprint). In 2.5 years, it's sold somewhere around 15,000 copies or so. I don't have exact numbers, so that's a best estimate based on royalty statements and other sources. 15,000 is well above and beyond the number needed to earn out the advance, which means the book is doing pretty well, and my next advances were higher. Go me!

Compare that to a book that gets a $40,000 advance. Here the expectations are very different, and 15,000 sales would be abysmal.

There's a lot I don't know, and every book is different. All else being equal, a debut YA urban fantasy will probably get a higher print run and better expectations than a debut comedic fantasy, because the former tends to sell better. Total number sold also depends on how long the book stays in print (DAW is good about keeping books in print, and Goblin Quest has probably sold an extra 1500-2500 copies in the past six months alone, two years after it first came out).

So, helpful data or just me overobsessing and playing with numbers again? Any questions or things I didn't cover? I'm hopeful that others will also fill in some of the gaping holes left by my own lack of knowledge.

Edited to fix my bad math skills.

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Has anyone else caught the show Warriors on the History Channel?

The premise is pretty simple. Green Beret and veteran Terry Schappert "travels the globe to discover exactly what it takes to be a warrior." Each week they study a particular warrior culture: Vikings, Samurai, Zulu, examining everything from the weapons to the tactics to the role of the warrior in this particular culture. There's usually a story structure, following a particular military leader and/or battle.

From an academic standpoint, it doesn't feel like the most rigorous of scholarly research. And sometimes it seems like Shappert is a little too proud of his own prowess, making sure we all know that he's just like these warriors, and they're all part of the elite warrior culture together. I wouldn't quite call it machismo, but something along that vein.

I find myself watching while thinking about Talia's character, trying to get into her mindset and to understand more of her character as well as the ones who trained her. After all, fairy blessings or no, she still had to study and learn how to kick ass.

If you come at fantasy from the generic pseudo-medieval standpoint, you get fairly generic pseudo-medieval warriors. One of the nice things about the show is that you see the difference in various cultures. You see how the weapons and tactics evolve, how the mindset of the Viking warrior compares to the English knight. Even if it doesn't always feel as deep as a more scholarly text, it works well as a jumping-off point to figure out more of Talia's character and backstory. I've pretty much figured out the Arathean warrior class, coming up with some fascinating rituals and backstory that otherwise wouldn't have been there.

For me, it also helps to see this stuff on the screen as opposed to (or in addition to) reading it on the page. Watching how the Viking spear can be used, or seeing exactly how a pole arm pierces the weak spots in a knight's armor, or even just watching how steel is folded to make a katana. It sticks better in my admittedly leaky brain.

Not a flawless show by any means, and I can't speak to the level of accuracy. (I'd be curious to hear what the more historically educated folks think of it.) But it works for what I need. It provides some inspiration and ideas to build the story and the character.

Closing on a totally different and far cuter note, a while ago my friend Seanan (seanan_mcguire) passed a few of my books along to her mother. Apparently Mom liked them, given that she named her new puppy after a certain fire-spider :-) I borrowed a picture from Seanan so I could present Smudge's latest namesake:

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Let me get this out of the way right up front. I don't actually know how to write a bestseller. If I did, I would have already written one.

I've been reading some books by Simon Green which my agent was kind enough to send my way. The Man with the Golden Torc and the first three books of the Nightside series. Green is a New York Times bestseller with dozens of books to his name, so clearly he's doing something right.

Yet as I was reading, I wasn't blown away by his books. They weren't bad, but they didn't strike me as great, either. The protagonists felt a bit flat, as did the overall plot of the stories. As I read more of his work, I started to pick up on patterns.

The books tend to be very episodic, almost an early-20th century serial feel, with each chapter being a (fairly) self-contained conflict and resolution ending with a teaser for next week's show the next chapter. Formulaic? Possibly ... but it worked. Even though I knew what the author was doing, I was still curious to turn the page and see how our hero got out of this next mess. The overall plot and resolution at the end of the book wasn't terribly earth-shaking or exciting, but the smaller fights along the way keep you up late turning the pages.

I also noticed there was a surplus of Shiny Ideas. Sometimes it felt as though entire scenes and chapters were devoted to "Look at this nifty character I've created" or "Check out this awesome magical effect!" But again, this tended to work. I like Shiny Ideas. Green's good at pressing the "Ooh, what if...?" button.

What I didn't see as much of was character arcs. You got some with Golden Torc, but in the Nightside books, our hero doesn't change much at all. John Taylor of Nightside ... well, I'm curious about his mysterious mother, but he didn't strike me as a terribly interesting character. His power is interesting, but the man himself? Meh. Likewise, we get backstory on secondary characters, but usually it's a capsule summary of a character's cool background, without much real development over the course of the book. (There are exceptions, of course.)

You can't draw much useful data from a single author's work. But it did get me thinking about what sells, what readers like, and what makes a successful commercial novel. (Which may or may not be the same as a good novel.)

What do you think? If you've read Green, I'd be curious to hear what you liked or didn't like about his work. In the end, I'm going to write the stories I want to write and just hope they sell, but I do think there are lessons you can learn from just about anything you read.

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1. My pop quiz for writers regarding public (online) behavior, over at SF Novelists.

2. Mind Meld presents some of the Funniest Writers in the History of SF/F, including my contribution at the end. (Leading to a new question for the pop quiz -- when asked who the funniest authors are, do you proclaim yourself to be one of them? Really?)

3. I need to give away another copy or two of The Stepsister Scheme [Amazon | Mysterious Galaxy]. Last time we did a joke contest. Any suggestions or preferences for this giveaway?


One of the panels at Millennicon this weekend was "How Not to Break Into Publishing," talking about all of the bad advice out there for aspiring writers. Needless to say, there's enough bad advice to keep the panel going all weekend. ("Don't have credits to add to your cover letter? Lie!" "Want to really grab an agent's attention? Slide your manuscript under the stall when he's doing his business!" "Don't like the submission guidelines? Ignore 'em!"*)

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you a prime example of how not to break into publishing. Russet Noon is "the tribute sequel to the Twilight saga". Fanfiction is one thing, but this sucker is supposedly going on sale later this year. Anyone care to take any bets as to how long before Stephanie Meyer's lawyers reduce the whole lot of them to a smoking crater?

::Grabs the popcorn::

My first contribution to the panel was that anyone who tries to tell you "This is the One True Path to publishing success" is probably full of crap. That might be the path they followed, but talk to a dozen authors and you'll get a dozen different stories about how they all broke in. The stories will probably have some things in common (the writer didn't interrupt an editor's poopy time, didn't try to sell his/her fanfiction book, etc.), but few of us follow the exact same path.

Another issue that came up is that the longer a writer has been publishing, the less useful his or her story is likely to be. I got into trouble because I believed I had to write short fiction before trying a novel. 30-40 years ago, that might have been true. But at the time I was trying to break in? Not so much. I ended up spending years working on short fiction before trusting myself to try novels. The short stuff is fun and I enjoy writing 'em, but I prefer novels, and I wish I had started them earlier. Makes me wonder how long it will be before I'm completely out of touch with the new crowd of eager young authors....

It was noted that posting your book on the web and waiting for editors to swoop in and discover you generally isn't a great idea, unless you're John Scalzi. But for every John Scalzi, there are thousands of UnScalzis. Guess which one you're likely to be?

We also talked some about publicity once you've broken in, and the idea that writers must blog and have a web site. I actually agree with the web site advice. You want to have some minimal presence that will allow people to track you down if they want to do things like buy your books, invite you to contribute a story to an anthology, find out who your agent is so they can pay you lots of money to make a movie of your work, and so on. But telling authors they must blog to succeed?

Blogging can help sell books, sure. Heck, I know a number of readers here have picked up my stuff as a result of the blog. But I do it because I enjoy it, and because it lets me network with other writers and readers, not because it sells a few more books. (Don't get me wrong, I'll take all the extra sales I can get ;-) It takes a long time to build up an audience, and a lot of writing to maintain the thing. If you want to write one, great! But don't do it expecting a noticeable effect in your sales.

So what's the worst advice you've ever received?

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*Apparently this tactic only works if you're ccfinlay

Quick note -- I tweaked the font on those three icons from yesterday. Updated versions are now posted, if anyone wants to snag the new copies.

So I'm sitting here signing the contracts for Secret of the Snow Queen (or whatever it will eventually be called), and I figured some of you might be curious what a book contract actually covers. I'll stick it behind a cut tag out of consideration for the rest of you who could care less :-)

( Click for Contract Synopsis )

I'm not an agent, nor am I a lawyer. This is how I understand my contract to the best of my knowledge, but there's a reason I have an agent going through these things. No clue whether this will be interesting to anyone, but here it is. Let me know if anyone has questions. To other authors, I'd be curious to hear your take, and whether I've missed anything important.

This is something I've been thinking about off and on for a while now, and it mostly comes down to accountability.

As we're growing up, we learned that sometimes we could dodge the consequences of our actions. A well-told excuse or lie might keep us from getting into trouble. (No, really! I swerved to avoid a cat and hit a patch of ice, and that's how I ended up in the ditch. Nothing to do with doing donuts on the backroads...) It continues well into college, as any teacher of freshman composition can tell you. (If certain of my students had been half as creative and clever on their assignments as they were with their excuses, they would have done much better in the class.) Even as grown-ups, many of us still talk our way out of tickets, offer excuses for missing deadlines at work, and so on.

With my diabetes, I found myself wanting to make excuses when I went in to see my endocrinologist. "Oh, I know my blood sugars were high that weekend, but that was because I was under stress, and I had a convention, and then...." Sometimes those excuses were true and valid. Sometimes I just hadn't been as careful about monitoring my blood sugar as I should have been. But I realized it doesn't make a damn bit of difference.

Lousy blood sugar control will damage my body in the long term. My body doesn't care whether I had a really good excuse, or even a perfectly valid reason for that poor control. This week I've been fighting a cold, which always makes my blood sugars run high. That's not my fault, and I do my best to compensate, but the numbers are still high. I can either focus on why it's not fair and it's totally not my fault, or I can accept it and deal with it as much as I can. Easier said than done sometimes, but I do my best.

Writing is the same way. There are days I haven't been able to write. Sometimes for perfectly valid reasons, like various surgeries on my wife, son, and daughter over the past few years, or just the fact that I want to spend some time with my family. Other times, it's a less "noble" choice on my part. (I didn't have to watch Criminal Minds last night. I could have gotten at least a few more paragraphs written...)

The thing is, in the end, it doesn't matter. Unlike most day jobs, where you can dodge some responsibility, sweet-talk your boss, and so on, with writing you either write or you don't. You and you alone are accountable for your writing career. You can get advice and support, just like you can with diabetes management, but you're the one who has to do the work.

Decent metaphor, or am I stretching? :-)

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Well, the pitch for a fourth princess book went to my agent this weekend. He liked it, aside from one minor change, and hopefully that will go to my editor soon. Cross your fingers for me! I don't know whether book four would be the last in the series or not, but I definitely want to do at least these four stories.

The "Fighting Princesses" post over on sartorias's LJ has grown to almost 200 comments, and it's been a very thoughtful discussion. Among other things, it's helped me decide to include a conversation I hadn't been sure about, and it made me rethink a character in book three.

( Spoilers for Stepsister Scheme Behind This Cut )

I have no answers. But I think they're good questions, and I'm thankful for the insightful discussion over on sartorias's LJ.

(Be warned -- there may be Stepsister spoilers in the comments on this entry.)

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marycatelli posted a few thoughts and links on the warrior woman in fantasy, including a blog entry Against Tiny Kung Fu Women and a response by Judith Berman in Black Gate.

Given what I'm writing these days, I found these articles interesting. Berman makes a good point that your believable woman warrior will probably look more like Laila Ali than Buffy (though Buffy had magic backing her up). She's apparently spent a fair amount of time debating "whether women really could go up against men in combat and win before the invention of that great equalizer, the gun. [Her] position is yes, provisionally."

The Tiny Kung Fu Woman post also focuses on the muscle mass necessary to win a fight, and states that "every competent fighter in the world has muscular limbs."

ETA: I misattributed a quote. It's Braak (Tiny Kung Fu Women) who said, "I am, in fact, 100% in favor of more women warriors. I’m just opposed to the implausibility of tiny, skinny women being put into the role of a woman warrior without consideration for the practical demands of such a role." My apologies to Berman and Braak both. I've edited the opening paragraphs to fix this mistake.

First, the disclaimer: I'm no expert. I earned a black belt in Tae Kwon Do as a teenager, but I'm 20 years out of practice. I've taken a few other martial arts classes over the years, but not as seriously. And my first-hand experience as a warrior is pretty much limited to rolling d20s.

Muscle can be important. So is size. All things being equal, a big strong guy is probably going to have the advantage over the little, not-so-strong guy. (I say this with a lifetime of experience being the little guy.) On the other hand, the Aikido instructor I had back in undergrad liked to demonstrate techniques on the football players. The instructor was fairly small, probably in his 60s or so, with a bit of a belly. He'd pin guys twice his size and hold them flat with one hand on the wrist and pressure from the pinky of his other hand applied to the back of the elbow. As much as muscle and size can help, I'd still put experience and training over bulk any day.

When I write Talia's character, she has magic giving her speed and coordination, but she also knows where to hit and how to fight. There are places on the body where all the muscle in the world won't protect you. Throat, eyes, ears, groin, and joints, to name a few. The female fighter might have a weaker strike, but a hit in the right spot doesn't need that much force. Anyone who's roughhoused with a little kid and had them land a lucky blow knows how much damage a tiny opponent can do.

The style of fighting is important too. Wrestling will give more importance to strength and mass. Hand those same two combatants rapiers, and suddenly speed and control are more important, and size means greater reach but also a larger target area.

In the end, when you're writing a warrior woman character, not everyone is going to buy it. From the comments at Black Gate, "I can confidently state that even expert female fighters have absolutely no chance against half-trained male fighters." Fair enough. There are plenty of Conan novels for him to go read. But for the rest of the readers, I think one of the most important things to take from the discussion isn't that "Good fighters must be this strong and this big," but that the writer needs to figure out how the character fights, and think it through. In book two, Talia gets into a struggle with a male prince, trying to shove him off of the deck. When he resists, she doesn't try to overpower him. Nor would readers believe it if she did. Instead, she sidesteps, allowing him to overbalance while pushing him in the direction he was already going.

Like everything else, you have to think it through. The sword-wielding, armor-wearing mercenary will build up muscle, male or female. The assassin who relies on stealth, speed, and a knife in the back might not do well in a face-to-face brawl ... but of course she also knows better than to let herself be drawn into one. Part of winning the fight is controlling how it will be fought.

And very few practicing fighters are going to look like an anorexic Hollywood supermodel, regardless of their fighting style.

What do you think? What makes you believe a woman fighter can kill you as easily as look at you, and when do you lose your suspension of disbelief? For those of you who've read Stepsister, I'd also be curious to know whether you found Talia a believable fighter.

Sometimes writing seems to be as much about relearning as learning. I find myself making the same mistakes I did five years ago, or finding new iterations of old mistakes.

Today's lesson for review: it's okay to write crap.

For me, trying to get everything right the first time through is deadly to my productivity. Way back when I was writing Goblin Hero, I figured out that I needed to let go and turn off the internal editor. I used to joke about wanting a neon sign over my computer, giving me permission to write crap. Sure, the first draft would be ugly, but I could rewrite and fix things in revision. That works for me.

How many times should one person need to learn the same lesson? But no, here I am years later, thinking, "I've got four books in print. I'm a big fancy-pants Author now. I should be able to get everything right in the first draft!"

Sigh. So the past few weeks, I've been reminding myself -- again -- that it's all right if this draft has flaws. That it's expected, and I'll be in much better shape if I just finish the flawed draft than if I obsess and end up with a few sentences of tightly polished prose which will probably get chopped in revisions anyway.

But maybe this time the lesson will stick. After all, this time I have Mythbusters backing me up. Not only is it okay to write crap, but Adam and Jamie demonstrated a while back that it's also possible to polish crap until it shines.

Do with that metaphor what you will. Me, I'm going to try not to think about it too hard...

1. Steampunk LEGO. Because, well, it's steampunk LEGO!

2. Thanks for the contest suggestions! Joke contest tomorrow for a free copy of The Stepsister Scheme [Amazon | Mysterious Galaxy].



As much of my reading list already knows, Charlie Finlay (ccfinlay) has posted a free PDF download of his forthcoming novel The Patriot Witch [Amazon | Mysterious Galaxy]. Just head over to his web site for the download. No DRM, no registration, just pure fictiony goodness.

I've heard a lot of mixed opinions over the idea of giving books away for free as a way to increase word-of-mouth and sales. Neil Gaiman made American Gods available for free ... and then got criticized by other authors for doing so. But that's still better than the author who posted his newly published book as a free download and got ignored completely. And if Charlie Finlay giving a book away on his web site is a good thing, does that mean a pirated copy on a torrent site should also be a good thing for publicity and word-of-mouth?

Let's start with that last point. A reader e-mailed me a few weeks back to let me know a copy of Stepsister Scheme had shown up on a pirate site. I had very mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, go me! I'm finally big enough to be worth pirating! On the other hand, I admit it bugged me to see that someone had posted MY BOOK!!! without permission.

I have mixed feelings, but they aren't particularly strong feelings one way or the other. Do I think piracy will hurt sales of the print or electronic editions of my book? Probably not, but I can't say for certain. However, there's another issue which is more important to me. I signed a contract with DAW giving them the rights to distribute this book. If I turn a blind eye, I'm violating my contract and breaking my word. I'm not okay with that. So I contacted DAW and let them handle things. (The pirated copy was removed.)

I wonder if I should have asked DAW to leave the pirated copy up, though. Who was it that first said obscurity is a far greater threat to an artist than piracy? But I'm Lawful Good enough that it would still bug me to condone copyright violation. If we're going to give away a free book, I'd rather go Finlay's route and go through the publisher, with an approved copy (the pirated version of Stepsister was a bit messed up), and making sure everyone's on the same page with what we're doing.

I don't want to turn this into a screaming match about "Oh noes, teh Pirates!" vs "The book wantz to be free!!1!" But I think the ongoing discussion is a good one. Should we give books away? Does it actually work? The goal is word-of-mouth and publicity, but how to you publicize that your book is available for free? In the week Stepsister was available, it was downloaded 11 times, which is kind of depressing. But that makes me wonder if an official, author- and publisher-approved download site might also lead to greater visibility and word-of-mouth. And what's the best strategy? If I give away a download of Goblin Quest, would that boost sales of all three books, or would I piss off readers who then expect the other two goblin books to also be given away? Will everything change as reading shifts more toward the electronic?

I have no answers on this, and I'm skeptical of anyone who says it's simple or straightforward. What are your thoughts as both writers and readers?

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