Writing Excuses

At the Out of Excuses Retreat we took some questions from our listeners, and then answered them before a live audience. Here are the questions:

* How do you find beta readers?

* Legal and IP issues? Should you copyright your work before submitting?

* Advice for a discovery writer?

* As a fan, what is the best way to pay my favorite authors?

* Can chapters be too short?

* How much time do you spend reading?

Bill Schafer, co-publisher at Subterranean Press joins us for a discussion of publishing. He talks to us about how this small press fits into the overall market, and why they're thriving in spite of the current market disruptions.

Bill explains to us what the publisher's role is. We've spoken with plenty of agents and editors, but Bill's our first publisher, and the distinction is an important one. We also talk about why it's important for you, as a writer, to understand this. He also weighs in on the future of publishing, and puts a couple of stakes in the ground.

Steelheart Tweeting Thingy: Per the episode intro from Howard, we're giving away three more Steelheart audiobooks, courtesy of our sponsor Audible.com. Tweet us your epic power, and how it will enable you to win this contest! Here's the format:

"{MY EPIC POWER, AND HOW IT WILL HELP ME CLAIM} the STEELHEART audiobook from @WritingExcuses."

Obviously you'll want to replace the stuff between the {braces} with something clever. You have ninety-four characters with which to hone your message. Also, you should follow @WritingExcuses on Twitter so we can Direct Message you if you happen to be one of our three lucky winners.

Start tweeting now. We'll cut things off Wednesday morning (our time - Mountain) and then we'll announce the winners by the end of the day Thursday.

Cherie Priest stopped by for an evening during the Out Of Excuses Workshop and Retreat this summer, so of course we took the opportunity to drag her into the basement and grill her relentlessly about dystopian fiction, in front of witnesses.

(Okay, maybe that's not exactly how it happened...)

After the requisite introductions, we give you a working definition of dystopian fiction, and why it's popular. Cherie and Dan tell us about their dystopias, and then we dig into talking about how to build them well.

Steelheart Tweeting Thingy: Per the episode intro from Howard, this Monday, September 30th we'll be giving away Steelheart audiobooks, courtesy of our sponsor Audible.com, to some randomly-selected people who tweet their epic weakness and the name of the book. Here's the format:

"My epic weakness is {WEAKNESS} and the chance to win the STEELHEART audiobook from @WritingExcuses"

Obviously you'll want to replace {WEAKNESS} with something clever. You have fifty-two characters to play with. Also, you should follow @WritingExcuses on Twitter so we can Direct Message you if you happen to be one of the lucky winners. We'll announce the winners on Tuesday.

This was recorded at the "Out of Excuses Retreat," and the questions came from our attendees. Here are the questions! (You'll have to listen for the answers.)

* How have your opinions on self-publishing changed in the last few years?

* What did you find difficult early in your career? How did you address this?

* What do you now find difficult? How do you address it?

* Do you put Easter Eggs in your work that only your friends recognize?

* How much do questions/comments from readers influence you?

And the question we did NOT answer, but it's a great one for speculating...

* Where would Brandon, Dan, Mary, and Howard be, career-wise, if their paths had not crossed?

What do you do when something goes wrong, really wrong, with your career? What happens if it's your fault? What about if it's someone else's fault?

Mary leads by talking about the Glamour in Glass misprint -- the first line was omitted in the hardback -- and the difference between her private and public reactions to the issue.  She likens this to similar sorts of situations that might happen on stage in live theater, and how those teams are expected to behave.

Dan tells us about the issue in I Am Not a Serial Killer, which gave some readers fits because it was edited in such a way that readers didn't know there were supernatural elements in the story until chapter 10.

From these and other experiences, we extrapolate some behaviors you can use, and some things to steer clear of.

After a quick, two-and-a-half-minute announcement about Writing Excuses winning the 2013 Hugo Award for Best Related Work, we get on with the topic at hand...

How do you go about transitioning characters in relative prominence during the course of a series? This might include fading a main character into the background, or drawing a side character into focus as the protagonist.

Howard talks about doing this in Schlock Mercenary, and how readers have reacted. Dan discusses doing this in the John Cleaver books, and what was required to make that work. Brandon tells us about Spook in the Mistborn trilogy, and why it was critical to the story for him to come to prominence. Mary explains that this shift is something that happens anytime there's a POV shift.

At the time this podcast airs, Jeph Jacques' Permanence project on Kickstarter has just nine days left. Jeph joined us at GenCon Indy to talk discovery writing with Brandon, Mary, and Howard, and yes, we totally agreed to plug his rock-and-roll side-gig in exchange.

Jeph Jacques is best known for Questionable Content, and by way of disclosure, Brandon has been a QC fan for years. He's a discovery writer, and he has written himself into more than one corner. We ask him how far ahead he works, how he develops an idea, and especially how he fixes things if his discovery writing has taken him someplace he needs to get back out of.

His first step is to admit that he is, in fact, stuck in a corner. One of his tricks is a tool any of you can use in any project, Oblique Strategies, in which a random phrase (drawn from a deck of cards, or generated for you on the web) challenges you to rethink the spot that your story is in.

Obviously there's more to it than that, but this? This is not where you'll find the transcript. Transcripts end up here.

When people who have succeeded at a given endeavor speak about their success, we are inclined to listen because hey, we'd like to succeed there as well. It's critical to recognize the bias here. Survivorship bias is the skewing of the data that occurs when you examine and seek to emulate successes without considering failures in that same space.

Here at Writing Excuses we suffer from it. So in this podcast we'll talk about the places in which our experiences may just not apply to you because we got lucky. Sure, there are things we've done right, and clearly in some cases we've been able to exploit good fortune to our advantage, but in this episode we'll focus on the non-reproducible aspects of our own success with an eye toward helping you to focus your own efforts on the things that actually matter.

The Liner Notes We Keep Promising You: Here is Tobias Buckell's post on Survivorship Bias (note: contains strong language)

Word of the Week: "Rothfussian," which means "writing something so awesome on your first go that success cannot be denied to you."

How do you help your readers relate to the non-human characters in your fiction?

The first question to answer is why you're putting non-human characters in the piece to begin with. What are your goals for that race, culture, or whatever? Once you know that, you can begin addressing the challenge of helping the reader relate.

We talk about our strategies, and we cover examples from Iain Banks' Look to Windward, Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, and of course from our own work, including Kiss Me Twice, I Am Not a Serial Killer, and The Body Politic.

Immediately Discarded Negative Example, Because the Rathole is Just Too Deep: The 1977 Star Wars Christmas Special

Microcasting! It's what we call a Q&A, because it's like several little podcasts in one! Here are the questions (you'll have to listen to the show for the answers):

* How do you manage your workload?

* Are writing contests worth it? Which ones are good?

* How do you make it clear that the weird aspects of your world are done on purpose rather than just being bad science?

* How do you know when to take a break from your writing?

* What are your word count suggestions for various markets?

Some Worthy Links: Writer Beware, Writers of the Future