As a creative person, the first thing you realize after you've spent hours of your time crafting something from the aether of your mind, is that it has already been made by someone else. Worse yet, it has already been cleaned, polished, refined, packaged and sold, not to mention that it's orders of magnitude more awesome than what you've created. The initial reaction is shock. Secondary and tertiary reactions include feelings of anger, disappointment, self-loathing and failure. This is about as common to creative people as is, I assume, misplacing a decimal symbol every now and again for mathematicians.
There is, despite how hard you try, only one story that can ever be told. But it must be told, all the same. In no genre is this truer than in fantasy, where a burgeoning author not only has to deal with the likes of Titans like Tolkein and Lewis (you'll hear me mention them a lot, most likely), but also with newcomers like Rowling who storm the fantasy realm with infectious and massively lucrative offerings that blot out other works with the same efficacy as does, for lack of a better (or more appropriate) metaphor, the moon to the sun during a solar eclipse. How does one make their work stand out? How does one make a living at that which they know to be their life's purpose, when their measure of worth is reliant on things as fickle as other people's opinions?
Believe you me, if I knew the answers to these questions, I would not even be writing this entry. Or perhaps I would, but from a more explanatory and less exploratory perspective, for the sake of others who would take the same path as I and who are (undoubtedly) feeling the same frustration. Until the day when I solve this riddle, I'll be continually enslaved to my computer, hawking and plugging and languishing away to eek out one more book sale. I speak as though I have endured much hardship, though in reality my publishing career has barely gone on long enough to even call it one.
For my part, I pride myself on my originality, and I prefer to let it speak for itself. At first glance, the influences of my masters seem clearly visible, but I have to disagree that my, in fact most, fantasy is simply copying other fantasy. Rather, I think that those who enjoy reading fantasy, as well as those who endeavor to write it, must have a certain sensibility that leads them to draw the same conclusions about the way fictitious worlds work. To distill it even further: great minds think alike. Replace the term "great minds" with "the minds of fantasy writers working independently of one another to contribute to an overall genre and the readers who support them" and perhaps you'll understand what I'm talking about.
To use my own book as an example, I created characters long before I'd ever read "The Lord of the Rings," who, miraculously, fit the archetypes set forth in that pinnacle of fantasy almost perfectly. I had a young protagonist of a rare and curious race that is not widely known in the world. I had a mystical old magician who imparts what wisdom he can on said protagonist before brushing him out the door and onto a grand adventure. I had a hearty, loyal dwarf and a cave-dwelling, treasure hording dragon, an evil wizard in a mysterious hermitage, a flawed warrior seeking to do right by his king and his people, even a humble woodsman who ascends to greatness. In the very early stages of character development, my young protagonist even had a loyal friend and faithful companion... whose name was Sam.
I can't help but believe that not all of this was coincidental (I did, however, scrap my Sam once I started reading "The Fellowship of the Ring." See the first paragraph of this post to determine how I felt about that). I wasn't plagiarizing, I wasn't copying... I wasn't even aware of Tolkien's work! There are just some facets to genre fiction that simply exist in the minds of those who wish to write it, without having been put there by anyone else at all! It must be true. I can think of no other way to explain it.
You can imagine my heartfelt glumness when I read "Lord of the Rings" and realized there was no way I'd ever be able to compare to a man who spent his life crafting one specific world that has since become the standard by which all literature of the genre is judged. So what did I do? I stopped trying to compare. I decided that I couldn't necessarily improve upon what had come before. All I could do was be faithful to my vision, to the worlds and characters and stories that unfold in my mind, and all else be damned! Well, not damned, per se, since I love reading and watching works of fantasy, but I suppose you know what I'm driving at.
Hence I submit that what you read of mine, indeed of most authors is not simply an amalgamation of what has come before, but a continuation. There is a realm in which these people, these creatures and these powers are very real, at least to some of us, and they must be respected for what they are. Fantasy is a genre that lets us look at ourselves, our culture, as though looking at others, and it thrives not only on the uniqueness of the imaginations of its authors, but also upon the common language spoken between reader and writer. That language predates me, predates those who have gone before, indeed may even predate language itself, and that is the singular beauty of it.
Monday, March 28, 2011
Monday, March 7, 2011
I just clicked "Publish." So... now what?
What does it feel like when you've taken a crash-course in HTML so you can finally finish formatting the manuscript that's taken you half your life to write, gone through all the necessary steps on the various eReader dashboards and then finally clicked the "Publish" button at the very bottom? Well, if you're anything like me and have cut off the tip of your right index finger within the last 3 years, the first thing you feel is a sort of dull numbness. This is quickly overshadowed, however, by the kind of abject terror that nestles itself neatly into the folds of your stomach lining and stays there until you either eat something or perform the action opposite.
It's out there. It's available. It's for sale. People--some of whom I've never even met, and therefore haven't had the good fortune of priming with my usual self-deprecation--are spending their hard-earned money (not to mention their valuable time) on this thing that I've created, that I'm solely responsible for. That's pressure. A few reviews have come in, and so far none of them have been particularly scathing, which makes awaiting that eventual critic-with-a-bone-to-pick all the more agonizing. I feel as though I can do little more than sit and wait.
Right, so now what?
It's long since been known (at least by anyone with a remotely up-to-date copy of the Writer's Market) that even well-known, published authors get little to no help on the backside of their print run. They're almost always left to do their own marketing, and as any self-respecting writer can tell you... that's hard. Perhaps it's doubly so for a person who spends their days in solitude, nit-picking for hours over the right way to say "Bill sat down," and who view the world through a hazy lens that only half pays attention to it.
Writers are artists, in every sense of the word. Some of us are perpetually aloof, almost all of us are dreamers, and most of us are wholly incompetent at the business side of writing. Compounded by the ease and accessibility of eBook self-publishing, this presents a unique challenge for authors, but also a unique opportunity for those with the wherewithal to take advantage of all that electronic self-pub has to offer.
I, for instance, scoffed, scolded and shunned the idea of something so narcissistically asinine as Twitter, an even more useless version of Facebook that allowed you to do nothing more than tell people what you're doing at any given point in time. "Who the hell would care?" I thought. Turns out, the answer to that question is... a lot of people. I still don't buy the idea that a website built entirely around people telling me where they are and what they're doing should be a multimillion dollar business, but I have to give credence to what so many other eBook authors have said about the immediate access to hundreds of thousands of potential fans.
Apart from the obvious benefits of social networking, I have learned much in the past two weeks about creating "virtual breadcrumb trails" that lead from all of the websites and communities that I help populate to my eBook's Amazon and Barnes and Noble pages. You probably know them as "hyperlinks," but until recently I only knew them as "blue underlined thingies." Each time you create one, and each time it's clicked, you are broadening the path of information leading from the entire worldwide web to your book's little front doorstep. Google "The Wizard of Roaming Hall," for instance, and you'll find that my book occupies something like the first 6 or 7 results. By comparison, before I began hyper-hyperlinking everything I could imagine, I hadn't the time or patience to scroll through all of the pages of results to see if I even made the list.
My quest now is, ironically, to promote my book via all of these channels without seeming narcissistically asinine myself. My quest is to provide my readers with content of merit and weight, but to also do so at a rate that's consistent with the rather short attention span of the modern cyber-consumer. Not easy. If there is a nugget of wisdom to be taken away from today's rather rambling entry, I suppose it's that we must be cautious not to drive the artistry of our culture to the brink of extinction by demanding that it move with the speed of youtube videos or funny pictures of cats, and that artists must be cautious of using such a massive, filth-clogged channel of distribution as the internet, for they run the risk of damaging the integrity of their craft.
Such is the plight of the eBook writer, a microcosm of the publishing world that has only within the last 3 or so years really become prominent: we are old souls working with an ancient craft, trying to make a living on the cutting edge of modern technology. With a grin and a tingle in my stomach I say that the next several years are going to be pretty interesting.
It's out there. It's available. It's for sale. People--some of whom I've never even met, and therefore haven't had the good fortune of priming with my usual self-deprecation--are spending their hard-earned money (not to mention their valuable time) on this thing that I've created, that I'm solely responsible for. That's pressure. A few reviews have come in, and so far none of them have been particularly scathing, which makes awaiting that eventual critic-with-a-bone-to-pick all the more agonizing. I feel as though I can do little more than sit and wait.
Right, so now what?
It's long since been known (at least by anyone with a remotely up-to-date copy of the Writer's Market) that even well-known, published authors get little to no help on the backside of their print run. They're almost always left to do their own marketing, and as any self-respecting writer can tell you... that's hard. Perhaps it's doubly so for a person who spends their days in solitude, nit-picking for hours over the right way to say "Bill sat down," and who view the world through a hazy lens that only half pays attention to it.
Writers are artists, in every sense of the word. Some of us are perpetually aloof, almost all of us are dreamers, and most of us are wholly incompetent at the business side of writing. Compounded by the ease and accessibility of eBook self-publishing, this presents a unique challenge for authors, but also a unique opportunity for those with the wherewithal to take advantage of all that electronic self-pub has to offer.
I, for instance, scoffed, scolded and shunned the idea of something so narcissistically asinine as Twitter, an even more useless version of Facebook that allowed you to do nothing more than tell people what you're doing at any given point in time. "Who the hell would care?" I thought. Turns out, the answer to that question is... a lot of people. I still don't buy the idea that a website built entirely around people telling me where they are and what they're doing should be a multimillion dollar business, but I have to give credence to what so many other eBook authors have said about the immediate access to hundreds of thousands of potential fans.
Apart from the obvious benefits of social networking, I have learned much in the past two weeks about creating "virtual breadcrumb trails" that lead from all of the websites and communities that I help populate to my eBook's Amazon and Barnes and Noble pages. You probably know them as "hyperlinks," but until recently I only knew them as "blue underlined thingies." Each time you create one, and each time it's clicked, you are broadening the path of information leading from the entire worldwide web to your book's little front doorstep. Google "The Wizard of Roaming Hall," for instance, and you'll find that my book occupies something like the first 6 or 7 results. By comparison, before I began hyper-hyperlinking everything I could imagine, I hadn't the time or patience to scroll through all of the pages of results to see if I even made the list.
My quest now is, ironically, to promote my book via all of these channels without seeming narcissistically asinine myself. My quest is to provide my readers with content of merit and weight, but to also do so at a rate that's consistent with the rather short attention span of the modern cyber-consumer. Not easy. If there is a nugget of wisdom to be taken away from today's rather rambling entry, I suppose it's that we must be cautious not to drive the artistry of our culture to the brink of extinction by demanding that it move with the speed of youtube videos or funny pictures of cats, and that artists must be cautious of using such a massive, filth-clogged channel of distribution as the internet, for they run the risk of damaging the integrity of their craft.
Such is the plight of the eBook writer, a microcosm of the publishing world that has only within the last 3 or so years really become prominent: we are old souls working with an ancient craft, trying to make a living on the cutting edge of modern technology. With a grin and a tingle in my stomach I say that the next several years are going to be pretty interesting.
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