Guest Post – Stuart Jaffe

Guest Post – Stuart Jaffe

My buddy Stuart has a new book to promo, so I figured I’d lend him my little corner of the interwebs to promo his stuff.

Hi all!  To start, a quick Thanks to John for letting me guest post today.  If you haven’t treated yourself to a slice of John’s writing, you should do so now!

Okay, to the post:

Since my post-apocalyptic fantasy novel, The Way of the Black Beast, has just been released, I thought I’d share how this one came about.  It’s by far my most interesting (and longest) experience in writing a novel.

In order for you to get the full scope of how I created this, here’s the book blurb to give you an idea of what the final product is like:

Malja wants answers.  She wants to know why the two most powerful magicians in all of Corlin ripped her from her mother’s arms, raised her only to fight, and then tossed her away to die at age ten.  She wants to know why they are trying to recreate the spells which caused the Devastation that wiped out most of the world’s population, leaving behind skeletal cities and abandoned technology.  And she wants to kill them.

With Tommy, an orphan bearing the tattoos of a sorcerer, she crosses this shattered land.  Despite the challenges they face — crazed magicians, guitar-playing assassins, mutated beasts — Malja pursues her vengeance with a single-mindedness that may destroy all she holds dear, forcing her to make a terrible choice between the family she lost and the one she has built.

Okay — to start we have to go back to 2004/2005 — I was attending the first Ravencon (my favorite con, BTW) and met Tee Morris.  Tee was raving about this new fangled thing called podcasting and he got me really excited about its potential.  I went home trying to think up of ways to use it.  I ended up creating The Eclectic Review which I co-host with my wife to this day.  But one of the early ideas was to do a monthly “radio play”-type thing.  I wrote out 8 episodes and planned out 12.  The story was called The Way of the Sword and Gun.  It was a science fiction tale that followed Dana, an ex-security agent struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic world and seeking vengeance on those who wronged her.  With her is Owl, a master of the Way of the Sword and Gun, and Tommy, an abused orphan who never speaks.  The idea was to blend Western and Samurai tales (which share a lot in common) with an apocalypse.

Though I tried a few times, the podcast never got created.  Over the years, I kept coming back to those scripts, though.  I tried writing a few short stories from the material there but the ideas in it were too big.

Fast forward to 2009.  ConCarolinas.  After a long day of panels, networking, and drinking with friends, I sat in my bed too wired to sleep.  The spark of an idea hit — what if I wrote about a post-apocalyptic world in which magic had caused the apocalypse?  From that grew the character of Malja and the country of Corlin.  And, of course, I now had a place to plunk down and tweak all that work I had done years before.

Malja replaced Dana and did so with an entirely new character.  Nothing of Dana remains except her desire to protect Tommy.  Tommy was the only core character that made it into the book but he went from an abused kid who never spoke to an abused kid who never spoke but also could create magic.  And Owl?  Poor Owl and his special fighting style didn’t make the cut.  Malja had too much else to deal with and Owl was too undefined in this new world of magic.

Side note: This odd mixture of magic with Western with Samurai led me to analyze Japanese story-telling and archetypes which I eventually overlaid onto a classic monomythic structure.  And if you followed that, you’ll have an extra level of fun while reading the book.

Now that The Way of the Black Beast is out, I’ve started to work on the sequel where I get to mine my old scripts some more.  The sequel’s title: The Way of the Sword and Gun.  Owl now gets his due with a story that comes crashing into Malja’s story at lightning speed.

Moral of the post: Never throw away the material that doesn’t work for you at first.  You never know when it’ll come in handy.

 

 

Delusions of Grandeur? October submission challenge!

Well yesterday was certainly fun hanging around at Magical Words and answering questions. It was nice to have folks say that I did things “the right way,” but of course everyone’s mileage will vary with how they go about stuff.

One thing was brought up in comments that I’ll talk about here briefly. Someone asked if I’d had any friends who had self-published and not sold anything, and what I did when they asked me why. Basically asking – how do I handle it when a friend asks me to read something that’s crap or not ready to be sent out for submission or publication.

Well – here are a couple of answers.

First – I don’t know, because since I’ve started publishing I’ve only read stuff by three of my friends with an eye towards critique, and they all knew exactly where their work was with regards to its completion. The first friend knew that her book was in first draft format and needed a lot of love. This was some months ago, and we swapped critiques on her book and Knight Moves before I released it. She gave me some really helpful tips for my book’s third draft, and I hope that I helped her work out some plot points and get her book moving in the right direction for her second draft.

The second friend sent me a copy of her manuscript after I asked to see it, and it’s almost ready to go. It’s a good story, but there are a couple of spots in the beginning that I think need to be re-organized or tweaked somehow, but I think this one is a very publishable book and a darn fun story. And she knew when she sent it to me that it needed a little love, but was further along than Friend A’s book.

The third friend had a short story that had already been published, but she now had the rights back and wanted help with the mechanics of converting and uploading the story. It was polished and ready to go, and she didn’t need me to tell her that. :).

So I’ve been really lucky that I haven’t had any deluded buddies come up and tell me about their book that’s sure to be a bestseller once it gets out in the world. I have only looked over manuscripts from people who are serious about the craft of writing, have paid some dues in the writing biz, and have a good sense of where their book is in its development. I suppose I need to set a policy of reading unpublished work (or not), because that’s the kind of thing that can get somebody in trouble if they’re not careful. So I guess here it is – if you don’t know me well enough to call me on the phone, I probably won’t read your unpublished book and offer critique. It’s a litigious society out there and I have to protect myself.

What I find more often than anything is that my friends have delusions of mediocrity. I have some really good writers that I’m friends with, and some of you guys aren’t putting anything out there. Come on! Get the stories out, get some feedback, really get a sense of where you are along the continuum of writing talent and skill. I’ve developed a pretty good sense of where I am (happy to be a hack), and I don’t let it hold me back! So here’s my challenge for all of you writer-types out there – submit something in the month of October. I don’t care what it is, but you must submit. And I’ll go with you. I promise that in the month of October I’ll create a piece and submit it somewhere that I’ve never been published before. So I’ll find an anthology or magazine, and I’ll submit right alongside you. We can track our progress here together. I bet one of you gets a piece accepted before I do.

Welcome

If you’re coming over from Magical Words, then welcome! Take a few minutes, poke around in the archives, check out some of my lighting design photos, book links, that kind of stuff. Thanks for stopping by. If you’re not here from Magical Words, then go over there and read my guest post today.

Another series, are you nuts?

Well, yeah, I kinda am, I guess.

Enough equivocation in that sentence for ya? Suzy, who knows full well exactly how crazy I am, asked me roughly that question when I told her I’d come up with a new character for a new series of stories. I replied that Bubba the Monster Hunter is not necessarily going to be a novel-length character, but he’s somebody fun to play around with while I’m between longer works. The first story, Voodoo Children, is out now, and available wherever e-books are sold (it’s free on Smashwords, BTW, and hopefully will be free on Amazon before too long, but I have only limited control over that). But Bubba is just a fun side project, and as the Black Knight books have been taking a little bit of a darker turn, Bubba gives me the opportunity to let my sense of humor have free reign. And since I’m not AT ALL gearing the Bubba stories towards younger readers, they’re free to have more profanity and adult situations than some of my other work.

In a sense, Bubba stories are just fun stories about a giant redneck behaving poorly and killing monsters in the process. And being a somewhat larger-than-life redneck in reality, I enjoy behaving badly, so it’s a big chunk of my id running around loose yelling WOOO-HOOOOO and “Hey Y’all, watch this!” I’m always going to have about eighty-seven different projects in the fire at one time, that’s just the kinda guy I am. Look at this weekend – I want to finish edits on The Chosen in preparation for a relaunch of that book with a new cover, new edits and maybe (just maybe) some bonus material. Then I want to write and do the cover for a second Bubba story (Bubba goes to the Circus), and I’ve got a buddy doing a book signing that I want to go to, the Panthers are playing (hoping for the first win!), I have to drive to Atlanta for the day job, and now that at least one beta reader has told me that Return to Eden isn’t a total piece of crap, I need to start working on a cover and edits for that books. So I’ve got a lot going on, not the least of which needs to be taking a HUGE box of DVDs to the used DVD joint to try and unload them and cover my bar tab in Atlanta this coming week.

Oh wait, I’m on a diet. So much for a bar tab. Guess I’ll just sell off the DVDs to get them out of the house.

On a completely different note – as writers, or any type of creative person really, do we ever get over that terrified feeling of being the awkward kid asking the pretty girl to dance? When I finished Return to Eden I was convinced that it was crap, the worst book ever written, and that no one would ever want to buy it. In my saner moments I knew this was not likely to be true, since I felt the same way about every book I’ve ever written, and they all turned out to be okay in the end. But when I sent that poor little book out to my betas, I didn’t feel like a proud papa watching his kid go off to school for the first time. I felt more like the pizza-faced skinny kid with glasses who sent a rose to the cute girl in middle school then found out that she didn’t like him and he had to get the rose back and send it to someone else “as a friend” despite the entire seventh grade knowing about the whole thing and making him feel small like only middle school kids can do.

Yeah, that happened. What can I say? I wasn’t always the pantheon of cool that I am today.

But anyway, sending a new book out still feels like being that middle-school kid again. All awkward and nervous, just waiting for someone to slap you down, despite the experiential evidence to the contrary. What about you writer types? Do you still get butterflies when you send out a book to the first readers?

Carriers, Destroyers and Speedboats – why a small press might be your best choice

My friend Stuart has a great analogy for the publishing industry (and he has a new book out, so go here to check it out!). He says that self-publishers are like speedboats, nimble little boats that can turn on a dime and give you change, quick things that can react to market forces immediately. Then to continue the analogy, small press publishers are like destroyers, well-armed, but still fairly quick to turn and adjust to things. They don’t move nearly as quick as a speedboat, but they’re a hell of a lot better equipped than most. Then there are the aircraft carriers – this is the metaphor for traditional New York publishers. They’re huge, with a whole city inside of them, and they lumber along slowly, and it takes them forever to slow down and turn. But once they get turned and locked onto a course, you DO NOT want to be in their way, because they’ll run over a speedboat without ever noticing.

I was reminded of just how good an analogy this is last night at the meeting of the Charlotte Writers’ Club. Kevin Morgan Watson of Press 53 came to speak to the group, and he gave his opinions on the state of publishing, what it takes to get published in today’s world, and all sorts of other things. I found myself nodding at almost everything that came out of Kevin’s mouth, something that happened very little at Dragon*Con panels, and I was struck by the accuracy of Stuart’s analogy once more. Kevin is a small press, and I tend to use Minor League baseball as my metaphor for small presses.

I would classify Press 53 as a AA team. They have a good listing of authors, including some truly amazing writers, but they’re still a pretty small operation. They don’t have some of the distribution deals with Barnes & Noble that some publishers have, and they don’t yet have their entire catalog available in e-book format, but they’re moving that way and understand that e-books are the future, and have embraced that fact.

I classify Bell Bridge as a AAA press, because they do have the B&N print distribution, have some truly rocking deals with Amazon and iTunes, and have landed a bunch of their books on the Amazon top 100 list, which is a serious sales number. Also, they pay advances, albeit small ones, which is almost unheard of in the small press world.

Someone I call a A team would be someone like Hydra Publications, out of southern Indiana. They’re a start-up, with just a few titles so far, but Frank over there is a great guy with an eye towards the future, and I think they’ve got potential to grow into something over the next few years. So they’re someone to keep an eye on in your submission process.

Okay, now that I’m done expanding my metaphor (and don’t forget other awesome small presses like Kerlak or Apex when you’re choosing which one is the best fit for you, because those guys are great, too, especially for building up new authors), let’s get back to my point – small press publishers are paying better attention, and reacting better, to the market changes that are going on today.

I would sign with a New York publisher only if there was pay off my house money guaranteed.

I happily signed with a small press for less money in an advance than will pay off my truck (way, way less, but it was an expensive truck). And every time I talk to a publisher from a major press, or listen to them on a panel, I become more and more convinced that they have no idea how to change their business model to fit with the new world. And every time I hear someone like Allan from Kerlak, or Deb from Bell Bridge, or Kevin from Press 53 talk, I become more and more convinced that they are paying attention and working on a plan to figure out how to survive in the new world of publishing.

And that’s what has me so impressed with these small press folks – they’re working on a plan. They understand that the world is changing, and they have to change with it. They aren’t still trying to hammer square pegs into round holes, they’re taking keyhole saws to the pegboard and changing the shape of the holes. Duh! But when I talk to a publisher at a major house and ask “How would a self-published author get your attention?” and I get the answer “With a self-published work, they can’t. We won’t ever publish a reprint.” I think that I’m talking to someone who isn’t paying attention to the world around them.

I didn’t sign with Bell Bridge for money (although I do have hopes for increased revenue for both of us) – I may very well be giving up cash on the table by making this move. I signed with them for marketing support, assistance in building my brand, editorial help in crafting my books, and career development for myself as a writer. I could pay fifty grand in a Creative Writing MFA, and MAYBE get some of that education, or I can give up some of the revenue for a few of my books and get exactly that education. And since I’ve already dropped out of grad school once, I think it’s a better bet for me to go this route.

So there’s a few rambling (as usual) things to think about when looking for a publisher. Do you want to be the speedboat, or do you want to sign on with a destroyer or an aircraft carrier? Only you can make that decision, and only you will be the ultimate judge of whether it was the right call or not.