What I'm Worth

I had an interesting thought lately. Been a while, I know.

I often read people proclaiming that I, as a writer, should not 'sell myself short'. They decree that I must only accept payment reflective of what I'm worth. That if I offer myself or accept work for free I'm discrediting myself and being taken advantage of.

I see the wisdom in this advice, and don't get me wrong I'm keen to make money off this stuff, but I can't help but ultimately disagree.

Thing is, it's a competitive market. And it's a seller's market. There are more writers than there are jobs. There's more books than there are book deals. Sure, indie publishers and content creator-driven enterprises are bridging that gap. But they'll never bridge it completely, because not everyone who can write has the time or energy to market their own book or run their own business. Even then, the returns are even less guaranteed with these forms. You might even be doing more work for no money.

I might want to do something for free to promote myself. Hell, this blog is me constantly putting out free content in the interest of developing my skills as a writer while slowly building an audience. That's normal. In fact, it's encouraged by many established authors to actively promote yourself by submitting writing to contests and making content publicly available for free. Pretty normal stuff.

Now yes, there's a difference between writing for my own self-interest and making no money and writing for an employer and making no money. The problem is, the line between 'employer' and 'publication to promote yourself through' is often very, very thin. Say I submit to a low-budget magazine that is someone's side project and barely makes enough money to cover its printing costs. Should I demand payment from them? Hell no. I go into that sort of arrangement expecting to not get paid.

Many will argue that by going into that arrangement I'm selling myself short and not valuing my skillset, and that may be true, but it's still my choice.

I think I'm worth a fair amount, but that doesn't mean every sentence needs to be making money. Sometimes, I just like to write for fun.

Boy Do I Love Milestones

Pretty simple midweek update. Lifebringer has hit 200 pages and 40,000 words. Still got a fair way to go though...

In other news, the main inner city bookseller, Whitcoulls, is closing their doors. After a series of rough years and a total failure to so much as try and get it right, they're shutting their largest store. The company isn't going under, but when all the other locations sell board games, greeting cards and 17 of the Top 50 bestsellers, it certainly feels like they're on their last legs.

Whitcoulls, I'll let you in on a little secret. If I want to buy a board game, I'll go to a fucking specialty board game store. Same with greeting cards. You know where I go to buy books? The bookseller. You know what you are? A bookseller. You know what you need to sell? SOME FUCKING BOOKS.

Take the Hunger Games off the 'Top 50' shelves already, it's been there for 3 years. Give some other books the chance to shine. Trim down the 'generic crime thriller' section, and can the whole 'bestseller' isle. You're losing out to the online market, and that's because they're selling all those things for $20 cheaper than you.

You know what your point of differentiation is? Immediacy. That's right, you bitch and whinge that we're the 'instant generation' and have forgot to cash in on exactly that tendency. When I pay the extra money to buy a book from you, I'm not paying for a book, I'm paying for the convenience of having it straight away. When I order from the Book Depository it'll take a month to arrive, if it arrives at all. When I order from Amazon, I pay $30 in handling fees. And that's before shipping costs. I want to buy some goddamn books, and I want to hold them in my hand, and read them on the bus home.

You know why I don't buy from you? Because you don't stock anything I want to read. All the Jeffrey Archer, and Patricia Cornwell, and Dan Brown, and Clive Cussler. That's the shit people are buying online. They know those names. They don't need to see them on a shelf to be reminded of their existence. People will go buy those books where they're cheapest, and that place isn't your bookstores.

I've spent 5 months looking for a copy of Ernest Cline's 'Ready Player One' and Andy Weir's 'The Martian'. You don't stock them. At all. Not one copy. I've finally relented and paid $60 to have them both shipped to me, and it'll take 2 weeks for them to get here.

Bookstores aren't about buying what you know, or buying the latest 'bestseller', they're about discovery. Discovery, and niche markets. When I walk into a bookstore, I want to find something I would have never heard of otherwise. When did you stop delivering that? And for fuck's sake, why?

Hire a team of buyers for each genre, even each sub-genre. Have them buy stuff a little more off the beaten track. Have them be your quality control for indie books. Have them find stuff that isn't Dan Brown, or 'the next Dan Brown!', or 'praised by Dan Brown!'. Have them find books the rest of us never would without them.

Oh and when you only have 10 shelves for Fantasy and Sci-Fi, A Song of Ice and Fire shouldn't be taking up 4 shelves.


Don't sell chunks of printed paper. Sell discovery.


End Rant.


You pricks.

The Worst Prompt Ever

Sorry John

So about a year ago I was on a writing course, and it was excellent. In the last few weeks of it we were given a writing exercise that went 'here's three things, write a piece that includes all of them'. Some of them were fun and challenging, but one of them had the following three prompts:

Donald Trump's gold encrusted 757
A lobster
A bad acid trip

What the fuck is that? You want me to write a story using those?

Whatever, I'm not afraid of a challenge, so here's the story I wrote. Let this be a lesson in bathos.
Oh and yeah, language warning and all that. Like seriously, if you've found me offensive so far then do not read on.

                Some lobsters are blue. Most are pink, but some are blue. Of course Donald Fucking Trump would buy a blue one. I'm sitting at a dinner table across from him and he's wanking on about Kobe lobster, as if that's a real thing. It sounds like the rich person version of the gluten-free fad. Slap 'Kobe' on something and the Donald Trump's of the world, yes all 7 of them, are all over that shit. I would bet $20 that the truth is that the lobster's name is 'Kobe', but $20 to Donald Trump is like a jumbo jet to a cockroach; totally fucking irrelevant.

                The menu is about as wanky as the man himself, shit like 'venison Carpaccio' and 'corn-fed chicken'. I don't care about the chicken's childhood, just how it tastes. I actually don't care about Donald's childhood either, but here he is going on about it. Fuck off, this isn't your autobiography Donny just some kid who won a competition. You know that shit on cereal boxes and cans of V where they say shit like 'buy one and you're entered in the draw to win'? Well fuck me I didn't know they could enter you automatically and track you down using your credit card number. Creepy shit...

                Backtrack with me for a second. I buy this coke months ago because I'm thirsty as an east-end whore. This can has their latest summer promotion emblazoned over the side, and Donald Trump has just done some ghastly TV ad with him in a Hawaiian shirt drinking coke with teenagers like he's finally found time for his midlife crisis. I don't put two and two together ok? And why the fuck does coke do a competition to win dinner with Donald Trump? I've seen the apprentice, dude's like the corporate version of Gordon Ramsay.

                I get a phonecall, and I'm a winner winner fucking corn-fed chicken dinner. Donald picks me up from an agreeable location, which means I had to bus to the richest part of town so that poor people don't tarnish his car with the gaze of their unwealthy eyes. He rolls up in, I shit you not, the author shits the reader not, one would not consider themselves shitted, a stretch Maserati with his initials made from rows of diamonds on the side. What the ever-loving fuck? What does his automobile actually fucking gain from that? Do diamonds increase the fuel efficiency of his car so that he can pay less for gas and have more to spend on diamonds? Fuck this cunt and his god damn car. Especially fuck the pictures inside. He looks like a rapper with his framed picture of a plane made of fucking gold and him beside it with his toupee that's probably made of the hair of fucking Kobe African orphans.

                I don't know what to order, mainly because I can't pronounce half this shit and the other half has 'Kobe' written next to it and I couldn't possibly subscribe myself to such wanky dining. He explains to me that the plane is a Boeing 757, and he has a huge, throbbing stake in the company with his 9-inch shares and he can arrive 7 times in a night at any given airport with this plane. The rage boils inside me and I start doing this thing where I stop breathing and imagine my fist buried in various objects around me.

                The waitress wonders over because Donald clicked his fingers and I get so angry tentacles begin to sprout forth from my upper lip. He orders that blue cunt-fucking lobster and looks at me, ready to judge my mispronunciation of my choice of main and I look at the waitress and I say 'I'll have the twice-cooked Donald Trump' and she looks at Donald Trump and he says he'll have the crème brulee for dessert and I lose it. I've lost it before, but in the past 'it' has referred to 'most of it'. Today I lose literally all of it, absolutely everything 'it' could ever be. I look at Donald and say in a voice so neutral it could calm Hitler 'I don't fucking care'. Leathery wings break through the skin on my back and spread out behind me, my head grows outward, morphing into that of a cephalopod, Donald implodes leaving behind a small raincloud and the smell of mackerel. I raise my head and let out my mighty Cthuloid screech, fist-bumping the waitress as I stand and moonwalk out of the restaurant. And that, kids, is how I met your mother.

Raising the Dead

It's been a long, long time since I've posted here, and I daresay I've had good reason to stay quiet. I've been a busy man, and busy men don't blog. Why write a post now then? Well, I felt like shouting into the void again. Whereas before my posts here were a self-deprecating croon, this time it's a fanfare of achievement. I may be tooting my own horn here, but there's traffic and no-one else around to toot for me.

'So what's been happening, Pixie?' I hear you cry with anticipation. I'm teasing you, drawing it out. All you want is the sweet release of information. Well, let me slake your thirst ever so slightly. I finished the first draft of Maiden Voyage a few months back. 'Aww, is that all?' you whine. Now now, I can't have you fully quenched just 2 paragraphs in. The first draft of Maiden Voyage was completed late last year, clocking in at 65,000 words and just over 300 pages. The first editing pass included some sparing structural shifts and 2 shiny new chapters, bringing it to just over 70,000 words.

Where am I now then? Well after finishing the draft I spent a long time avoiding the piece entirely. Perhaps I needed to step away from my fictional world and look at it again as a reader. Whatever it was, I was eventually able to return to Maiden Voyage and fix a series of errors with layout and grammar. 'But Pixie', you whinge, 'that's not where you are now, that's were you were a few months ago.' Shut the fuck up, reader, I'm getting there. If I gave you the whole story in the first sentence I wouldn't be a very good author would I?

Around the beginning of the year I signed up to a frankly excellent writing course. I had already taken the introductory course, which spanned 8 weeks in the latter half of 2013, and had learned little. Why take the follow-up course then? Well, when you're around writers and talk for 3 hours on a Thursday night about writing, you tend to go home and write. Did I pay $5,000 to stay motivated to write? Of course not, I paid to learn from the best. Writing was a side-effect.

As a part of this course I was paired up with a mentor. I was lucky enough to be placed under the temporary tutelage of Fiona Kidman, possibly the country's most prolific author. It is with some shame that I admit I had to google her when I first read the name, totally oblivious of her laudable works. With the help of Fiona, I was steered in the right direction for the remainder of my editing work.

So that's where I am now, a third of the way through completing Maiden Voyage. The piece currently stands at just under 73,000 words and fills 334 pages. I have a sequel planned, and others within the same world idly being cooked up in my mind as the days go by. When I finish this editing pass, I'll likely sweep once more for grammar's sake and start shipping copies off to publishers. Have I written a bestseller? Probably not. But fuck you, I wrote a book, what the fuck did you do with your year?

The Zone

Today, at around 4 30 p.m, I found myself in the Zone. I quite like being in the Zone, it's a space that harbours hyper-productivity and I like being able to get a lot done given that I spend a lot of time getting nothing done on most days. I was looking like I would be finishing a whole chapter within the hour and would undoubtedly be finishing another whole chapter by the end of the week.

At 5 20 p.m someone came into my room and made a fuss about who would be cooking dinner, deciding that since I had mentioned I was at home during the day I could cook (despite not being able to plan a meal and get ingredients etc etc etc) even though the task had been prescribed to someone else. To put it plainly, my mother came in to my work space and acted rudely. The interruption in and of itself was frustrating. The death sentence to my precious Zone was that the exchange left me feeling angry. I haven't written a word of that story since, despite being on a roll of sorts.

This post is meant to be about the Zone, not the interpersonal dramas in my home, so I won't go into further detail about my afternoon. The Zone is like a bubble. You can call out to someone inside it and they will be able to hear you, but try and interact with the person inside and the bubble will burst instantly. It's such a delicate thing. Staying in the Zone can be challenging purely because it is so fragile. One can learn, and do so very quickly, how to stay in this Zone provided they are not interrupted. Thankfully the Zone promotes tunnel vision, so it is surprisingly difficult to get voluntarily distracted by things like the internet and food and that spot on the wall that is suddenly very interesting, all of which are common distractions to a person working while outside of the Zone.

The externals can simply not be controlled so easily. I can turn my phone onto silent mode but it will still light up and beg for my attention if someone sends me a message or calls me. I can ask that my dinner be left aside so I can reheat it at my leisure but at some point I will still have to eat it. I can be in the most isolated room in the building and someone might still choose to enter it.

Minimising these external threats to the integrity of the Zone is crucial to prolonging its lifespan, I have found. I have also found that there are in fact simple was to minimise these threats. Leave phones out of sight. Have an emergency sandwhich in your workspace when you start writing. Hang a 'Do Not Disturb' sign on your door. Untangle yourself from headphone cables lest you find yourself in an infuriating spaghetti-esque bundle.

"But Pixie," you cry, "I did all these things and someone still ignored my 'Do Not Disturb' sign so they could tell me off for not cleaning my room!"

Here's a quick guide for what to do when you are, for some reason or another, pulled out of the Zone. Fist of all, let it out. If you're angry, let it out and get the anger out of the way. Then lie down for a bit, maybe watch something on youtube. Numb your brain a little bit and let yourself get distracted. All the explosive emotion released when that bubble burst will get buried beneath the distraction and you'll return to the neutral state you were in when you entered the Zone. If you can't just sit down and pick up where you left off, go do something else creative. Pick up your local guitar, doodle something, make fart noises to the tune of 'Call Me Maybe', go write a blog post...

Bashful Prose Sweeping The Nation

I remember reading somewhere that there are two types of writers. Some of us are Sweepers and some of us are Bashers. I've never found something that seems to so accurately summarise the two approaches to writing. I may have tried a bit too hard to incorporate a pun into this post's title.

Sweepers, like myself, are writers who get it all down first. They write, and they write a lot. They will do big chunks before going back and editing. These 'chunks' might just be a single chapter or might be the whole book. After it's all down on paper they go back to the start and begin editing. This makes absolute sense to me as I tend to get 'in the zone' when I write and need to keep going until I comfortably reach a point where I can stop, at which point I walk away and spend some time thinking about how to continue. Rinse and repeat, hang out to dry for a few hours, bring in, fold, first draft done. It also makes sense to me from an editing standpoint. I can't edit the beginning until I know what the end will be like, otherwise I'll end up editing myself into a direction I don't want to take the story.

Bashers are perfectionists. For them, writing and editing are synonymous. They fight for every sentence and by the time they reach the end of the novel it's a completed work. Where a Sweeper might edit a whole act at once after finishing it, a Basher will instead opt to edit each scene as it is completed. This gives them a clarity of direction and helps soothe the pain of constantly questioning oneself about whether the last thing they wrote was 'right'.

I don't want this whole post being about the pros and cons of Bashers and Sweepers, or a bashing of Bashers, or an extensive list of notable Bashers and notable Sweepers. I want it to be about how us Sweepers seem to get catered to a little less than the Bashers.

I do think the writers that edit as they go are more common, and I do think most Sweepers do some small editing as they go (changing sentences here and there, correcting spelling errors, etc). I also think that the advice often given surrounding editing is geared heavily toward Bashers.

I would, given the above, like to offer some of my own advice. Edit. Definitely edit. If you don't do full-on edits where you re-write entire scenes and alter character arcs and so on until you've totally completed the first draft then that's ok. If you finish writing a bunch of pages, then go back and edit them before moving on then that's ok too. What's important is that you do, one way or another, edit your work before you call it 'finished'.

Bashers, go a little easier on yourselves from time to time. It could be worth your while to write that next little bit before editing lest you write yourself into a corner.

Sweepers, don't get discouraged. You may not have edited yet but that's fine, you'll find it easier when you've completed the novel's first draft as the whole story will be clearer in your head.

Commenters, seeing as I have some now, which of these are you? Are you a methodical Basher or an unbridled Sweeper?

Tomorrow I'll be uploading a short piece of fiction I wrote a few years back. In true Sweeper spirit, it will be completely unedited.

The Private Punchline

I love inside jokes. Inside jokes are the only thing that allow you the opportunity to grunt at a friend while rolling your shoulders backwards and make them laugh. It's a unique form of humour that can make or break the believability of a friendship in a story.

Maybe I've just read too much terrible fiction lately but I've come across so many stories that have had characters do or say incredibly weird things around a friend, have the friend laugh, explained that 'She laughed because it was an inside joke' and expected the reader to find it funny. It might be amusing to picture someone doing the macarena behind the back of an unsuspecting teacher in a hallway but it's not funny to be told it's funny. This breaks the believability of that friendship, because suddenly the reader is being told that the friends are friends and they have this inside joke because they are friends and it is funny because it is a joke. Maybe this boils down to show-not-tell, but I definitely think there's something more to it than that.

Some inside jokes in stories are good, and not just because the joke is funny to the reader. In fact, the entire point of an inside joke is that it's only funny to the people that are in on it. A good inside joke should be explained in a way that ends with 'I guess you had to be there'. It should seem weird to an outside observer. It doesn't even have to be funny to the characters anymore. The hilarity of it might have worn off and now it's a force of habit for those friends.

That seems boring though, doesn't it? What's the point of a form of humour being placed in a story if neither the reader nor the characters are laughing? It's simple really, the reader believes the friendship very quickly. I distinctly remember reading John Green's  'An Abundance of Katherines' wondering why the main character and his best friend kept saying 'fug' instead of the notably more offensive 'fuck'. It wasn't even explained to me directly that it was an inside joke of theirs (which, for good measure, had lost its humourous quality and was now a habit for them, which added to the implied closeness of the friendship). It was eventually explained to another character and only then did I come to understand the origin of the joke. Up until that point I had seriously been questioning whether Mr Green had simply been lamely censoring himself.

I think this all links to a wider opinion I have on writing humour into a story. In it's most basic form, the theory goes something like this:
Only write the humour in if you understand why the humour works.
Everyone has laughed at jokes before. Some of us have had the pleasure of making others laugh at jokes before. Few truly understand why they made the other person laugh. Even if they do understand it all, they must always keep in mind that when writing you lack the ability to truly apply things like comedic timing, intonation and rants about the Oxford Comma.