It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement if you have an offer for your book. You want to believe SO HARD that you are on the Road To Success that it’s easy to shut your eyes and ears to big, fat warning signs along the way. Before you sign any agreement, please, keep these points in mind.

THERE ARE NO EXCUSES OR EXCEPTIONS FOR THE FOLLOWING.

If your print publisher isn’t a traditional publisher, you need to think long and hard about whether you want to choose them. They’d better have a really innovative way of publishing to make it worth your while–and most of those kinds of “oddball” publishing methods are in areas like comics, not novel-length fiction.

1) Traditional print publishers pay advances.

2) Traditional print publishers have print runs.

3) Traditional print publishers have marketing and distribution networks–being in a catalog and on Amazon.com isn’t enough.

4) Traditional print publishers pay royalties at a market-competitive rate.

5) Traditional print publishers pay out royalties at least twice a year.

6) Traditional print publishers never ask you to sign over the copyright to your work.

7) Traditional print publishers have a means by which your book can go out of print and revert to you.

8 ) Traditional print publishers edit and proof your work.

9) Traditional print publishers provide the cover art.

10) Traditional print publishers don’t rely on you to sell the book.

11) Traditional print publishers don’t require you to buy any of your books.

Note that epublishers have a different model! It can be very successful, too.

Every writer should have a designated work space.

For those who primarily use desktops this will, of course, require a desk and all the usual computer paraphernalia. But many writers now use laptops, Alphasmarts, or other handheld devices.
Whatever your preferred writing device, you don’t need a dedicated office. You can use a corner of your bedroom or the living room for a desktop set up or you can choose wherever is most comfortable for a portable device. I recommend, though, that your workspace be orderly (this will probably mean regular cleanings!), that there be lots of space for you to spread out, and that the room be as free as possible from distractions and noise. If you have six kids, the kitchen table is only a good idea if they’re all off at school. If the TV is constantly on in your house, the family room is a very poor place for your computer desk.

Portability provides a lot of flexibility, but it also opens the doors to some dangers. I do not recommend working in bed, for one. This has a high chance of leading to either sleep problems or work problems. On the one hand, you now associate your bed with more than the two activities it should be reserved for, and so you may now find sleeping harder. On the other hand, you will be more likely to fall asleep while working! While Karen Hawkins, for example, has talked about working from bed in her pajamas, as a Reformed Bed Worker myself, I have to recommend against it. All the sleep experts will cheer.

You can have several places to work. I do! In the early mornings, I prefer the living room because it gets the most sunlight. In the late mornings and afternoons, the kitchen table gets the best light. I move where the light is. I use my desktop when I’m editing a lot at once. I recommend paying attention to natural light when choosing your writing location. It is a luxury that few office workers have. You should make the most of it!

You don’t even have to work indoors. Alison Kent likes to work outside on her Alphasmart whenever she can.

Wherever you are, working at a table with your feet flat on the floor and your knees at a 90-degree angle is best. If you prefer to work with a portable device in your lap, get a lap desk or even a laptop table to bring your work up to the night height. Writing with a laptop directly on your lap is a bad idea. It can lead to chronic pain needing physical therapy intervention. You can also get a condition called erythema ab ignis, a reddening of the skin caused by repeated exposure to heat that raises your chances of skin cancer. And if you’re male, it can damage your sperm and even make you temporarily sterile!

Many authors don’t work in their houses at all. This has the advantage of taking you away from all the distractions at home. Some have set up writing sheds in their back yards, taking over or even specially designing a small outbuilding to use as a writing den. Roald Dahl had one of these. Others work at coffee shops or restaurants or even public parks. A few take jobs like as a night desk clerk–this gives them a schedule that they must meet and some extra income with very few job duties to take them away from writing. (In college, I did most of my writing while working as a computer lab assistant!)

Wherever you choose to work, you should make sure that you can write regularly and productively without being unnecessarily distracted.

Book 6 total: 12 pages
non-LJ project: 5 pages

I’m going to have some slow days ahead, but not for a bit.

There’s a reason I don’t post too often about the process of writing, and it is simply this:   I strongly, strongly believe in doing what WORKS.  I am not tied to any particular process or pattern or genre or whatever–if it works for you and for the work you’re creating and for you goals, DO IT.  I don’t care how wonderful or bestselling or prolific (or all three) another writer is–she isn’t you, and so what works for her is unlikely to be perfectly transferable to your case.

This doesn’t mean that all writers’ discriptions of their days or their work or their approach is bad for you to learn about.  This means that there is an ENORMOUS danger of writers taking what they’ve heard from someone who is well-respected and deciding that THAT particular way is the way every book or every romance book should be written.  Because, invariably, it isn’t.

There are some things that are inviolable because they are part of the DEFINITION of a genre.  A genre romance isn’t a romance unless it focuses on the romantic relationship between two people with a happy end.  That doesn’t mean that you can’t have a romantic book that doesn’t meet these requirements–it just means that it won’t be a romance, like a 5-page story is not a novel.  That doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with writing a 5-page story–it’s just stupid to call it a novel and pretend that you’re doing something SPECIAL and GROUNDBREAKING.

If you notice, I tend to take a descriptive approach to talking about writing, not a prescriptive approach.  That means that I describe alternatives and explore the effects that they have, positive and negative.  I do not ever tell you that a story must have a 3- or 5-act structure.  I do not ever say that a romance must do this or that.  The closest I come is declaring that selling your readers and the book short by writing crap and defending it (”it’s JUST a romance!”) and treating your audience like morons is an attitude that angers and sickens me and that I find artistically corrupt.  But I’m not going to tell you how many subplots you ought to have, how much or how little sex a book should have, or what kind of person your characters should or shouldn’t be.

If it works–for you and for your artistic attempt in this book and the artistic totality of who you want that particular author to be–DO IT.  If it doesnn’t, don’t, no matter who told you otherwise.

This ties into a big mantra of mine when it comes to writing:  TOOLS, NOT RULES.  (A friend of mine who gives a lot of workshops has adopted it, too, now!  *g*)

What I mean is that everything you hear about writing, from me or anyone else, is not a rule.  It’s a tool.  And, yes, that includes grammar, punctuation, and everything else.  Standard grammar and punctuation is a tool to seamlessly and “invisibly” convey language to the reader.  But sometimes characters or narrators don’t use the simplest or most standard or most elegant language.  They might use dialect or slang or colloquialisms or regionalisms.  Sometimes it works.  Sometimes, it’s a nightmare.  If it works, do it.  If it doesn’t…don’t!  Sometimes, for some reason or another, you might not want to use standard punctuation–say, no quote for dialogue.  If you’re goal is to write a self-aware, pretentious, pseudo-avantgarde book, go for it.  Now, my statement above pretty much sums up my attitude toward the likelihood of you achieving anything of greater worth by taking this step, but I also think that James Joyce was full of shit, so pardon me if I don’t jump on board your artistic vision.  But if it really will make your work more what it should be, do it.  Even if it’s a horrible decision, you just might impress enough people who think that self-aware convolutedness=good writing that you’ll seem to succeed even if you don’t!
The ability to tell what yours–for you, your book, and your goals–is just about the hardest part of writing well, one of those unteachable things like an ear for writing.  But knowing that you ought to have such an ability is the first step to developing it!

On June 1, I had written all of 160 ms pages of VOICES.

I had polished less than 110.

I’m finishing editing the last chapter this morning. That’s roughly 240 pages in 33 days.

I SPENT LESS TIME on those last 240 pages than on the first 160. Mainly because I wrote a large part of the first three chapter three freakin’ separate times before getting the tone right. *sighs*

A) I really, really write better when I write fast.

B) My editor would crucify me if she knew. My agent would cheer.

C) This is my second book that I don’t hate at this stage. Mainly because I wrote the other book fast, too, though not this fast.

D) I write like crap when I’m shuttling across the country and the Bear won’t leave the room I’m in.

E) I ought to be writing a lot more books in a year because I only spent eight hours straight working on this for two days out of those 33.

F) I don’t work well until I’ve been up four hours. Six is better. If I write in those first hours, I’m wasting my time. I should play with the kid, clean the house, etc.

From one of my writing buds and a founder of the romance community AccessRomance:

In November 2004, my business partners and I started up the community site AccessRomance. I think we had 17 authors at the time of our launch; we definitely didn’t have more than that. What prompted us to do this were complaints from design clients about the service of other community sites. They talked about it taking days or even weeks, if ever, before they got responses from the people they paid to promote them and manage their online presence. They talked about paying for services they never received. They said they would leave if there was a better alternative.

At the moment, we have 38 names on our sidebar, with two more to come in July. Our growth has been phenomenal. And we’ve done very little to advertise the site to authors (up until now; we are sending promotional stuff to this year’s RWA conference in Atlanta), so most of the growth has happened through word of mouth. Which means our clients are happy, which is just fantastic.

One of our e-book authors told us that shortly after she joined, her editor said she’d had a huge jump in sales and was wondering why. A look at the stats of some authors we hosted before they officially joined AR shows a jump of more than 1,000 unique visitors to their sites the first month they joined. Another author, when recommending to a friend which community to join, said that if she had to choose between the communities she’s a member of, she’d stick with AccessRomance.

And the latest news to make us very proud is one of our authors who it seems is being forced to choose between AR and another community, and she’s staying with us because she looked at her statistics and saw that she had 60 times as much traffic from coming AR than the other community.

How cool is that? It means we’ve accomplished what we set out to do, and if that’s not something to be proud of, I don’t know what is.

Plus, of course, it allowed me to quit my stupid day job as a library drone.

I have a really sophisticated method of writing books. I kick some ideas around for a while, I read some research, I write a bit, I kick some more, I revise, and then I solidify the themes and write the rest of the book. Oh, yeah, and I might write up to three pages of notes. Needless to say, I’m an exception!

Garth Nix is a fabulous writer of dark YA fantasy, and he has a great page on his method. (I actually like mine better. It has a whole lot less of anything that resembles actual work…)

Most writers have to have a certain amount of time for an idea to ferment. It isn’t that WRITING a book takes most of us a year–or in my case, half a year. It’s that the book isn’t ready until then. I tend to write my books in…gasp…three months. But for me, the kicking-around-ideas is absolutely critical to the process. No kicking, no book. (Which is a great excuse to do nothing except the first three chapters during the first half of my writing window…)

This means that I actually have six months of the year where I’m not actually *writing* anything. And I’ve discovered that I can work on books in ANOTHER genre at the same time I’m kicking around the idea for one, so that means I can write four books a year in two genres fairly easly but can’t write four books a year in the same genre. Which is good, since no one would publish them, anyway. *g* (You can take this as an official warning that at some point, I’ll be writing books in addition to the LJ romances. You can’t take this as any sort of warning about what the other pseudonym will be. I haven’t really got a clue.)

Anyhow, if you’ve read a lot of fantasy, you can’t miss Nix’s interactive short story or his Really Epic Fantasy Series.

For kids seriously interested in writing fiction, I STRONGLY recommend
A) having a story to tell *g*, and B) if you have a story, finding
someone to apprentice with. It was a relevation for me to see all my
frustrations poured onto the page. I would have this great story going, and
then I’d stumble into portions where I had too many unneccessary
details, too much stage direction, too many CATALOGS of things, and I would
know the story was dying, and I had no idea why or how, so I’d give it
up partway through, then start again, then give up, then start somewhere
else, then grind to a halt again, then….. If I had just had someone
who could have TOLD me what was wrong, I would have spent so many fewer
years beating my head against the wall!

I wrote this when I was eleven, so you are officially Not Allowed To
Laugh, but this is an example of the kinds of narrative problems I got
bogged down in. This is the prologue, so it was meant to be in a kind of
omniscient POV (as I now know that it’s called!) I’m preserving my
original spelling and creative punctuation, too.

Emberwynd Darkling cupped the smokey globe in her hands and peered
intently into it, her small body tense.

“Now, Aunt Wisti?” she asked, the tinniest of glints in her other wise
innocent face.

_Yes. Now._ The words were not spoken, they passed straight into her
brain, bypassing her ears. A small smile appeared on Ember’s lips.

“Finally. It has started? The other Companion has been chosen?”

_Yes. The wheel has begun to turn._

“The Wheel of Change.”

_Yes._

“It has been a long time for you, hasn’t it?”

_Yes, but it was harder for you, for I am used to waiting. But now you
must go._

“Until we speak again.”

_Until we speak again._

Ember’s smile widened as she replaced the globe’s chain around her
neck. She giggled with mischeif as she turned to a great raven, perched
atop her stand.

“Come, Twilight. It is time to leave.”

[Okay, the description is flat and the poor girl’s name… Well, what
can I say except I that I was eleven? Next, though, it turns into
complete crap, and rereading it, I remember the crippling helplessness and
frustration I felt as I wrote it, knowing it was hideous and I had no
idea why. Now, I know: info dump and TOTALLY out of any POV without
ANY control. “Telling, not showing” and all that. But then the story
just spiraled out of control, and I quit in despair midword.]

Two years ago, Navanna’s underlings had destroyed her parent’s keep and
lands, murdered them, and kindnapped Emberwynd to be her apprentice.
Navanna felt that Emberwynd’s mother, a powerful enchantress, was a
threat to her growing empire. But Ember was jsut a child, and would be a
useful tool, if not her sucessor. But Navanna had misjudged the little
ten-year-old that had stood fearlessly before her that day. Both the
child and her aunt, Princess Wistava, centuries old. Emberwynd had
wanted to escape the instant she had founr the ancient se

And there it ends, tossed away in disgust. If I had had ANYONE capable
of providing a gentle guidence, I could have recovered quickly and gone
on with the story–and quite likely would have finished my first
manuscript at twelve, since I had started producing full-fledged original (if
somewhat cliched) stories by that age. But I didn’t, and it took years
for me to develop the sense to understand the requirements of the
story. :-/

Now, if I’d had no story to tell or merely liked the idea of writing
(as, honestly, most people do, whether twelve or fifty), then it having a
sort of apprenticeship wouldn’t have helped one whit. It also
wouldn’t have been worth the bother if I hadn’t been so passionate about
it then–and if I hadn’t had some raw material that could be refined
into something better. As it is, though, reading through my stuff and
remembering my younger self brought back memories of so much frustration
that now I see could have been so easily avoided!

I got an email a few months ago from a reader who really enjoyed my books but was disappointed at the page count. My first one was 302 pages of actual book material, my secon was 297, and I just found out that the third will be a mere 296 pages.

Well, here’s the truth: My first book, weighing in at about 95k words, is fairly average for romance. My second, at nearly 104k words, is quite long. My third one, at 108k words, nearly caused my editor to go into paroxyms. It is VERY long for romance, much less a romance from a nobody like me. NAL simply has smaller margins, less space between the lines, and smaller type than many publishers. And it seems that, perversely, the longer my manuscript, the shorter they make the pages. So please don’t think I’m cheating you!

I wonder what length it would take them to publish my ms as a microdot…

Larissa Ione has SOLD to Red Sage! May this be the start of a long and successful career of writing books that make her mother blush!

Okay, I’m coming in REALLY late here, but I hadn’t checked her blog until yesterday (see travel and all that) to make sure she’d announced it before I posted!