Reflections on Two Weeks in Publishing, Part 3

And now we come to the last of these posts, in which I'll sort of sum up what I got out of the experience, how it affected me, and whether I think it's a good idea for a writer.

First, as I've said before, I learned boatloads. To use the phrasing of the inimitable Donald Rumsfeld, I not only learned some known unknowns, but quite a few unknown unknowns as well. Things like the pace of the industry (fast, but not too fast), the feel of a publishing office (friendly, with everyone genuinely interested in what they're doing--but also a bit overstressed), and what it's like to work with other people's books all day and then come home and try to work on your own.

Which brings me to my next point: how it affected my writing. I was a bit leery going into it, as I know that when I spend all day working with books at school, I don't want to see another, not even my own, until at least the next day. I was very afraid that the same or worse would happen while I was working in publishing.

That said, I'm happy to report that it was actually quite good for my writing. Being a part of the process of other people getting published was very inspirational, and every day I was excited to come home and get my own writing to the point where it would be undergoing the same process. Despite losing about ten hours of the day to work and the commute, I got more writing done during the past two weeks than I did when I was only spending 4-6 hours a day in class and studying. So my advice to others would be to not be afraid that it will impact your writing negatively, as for both me and the novelist/publisher I talked to (see my last post), it had a positive effect.

And finally, whether I think it's a good idea: yes! Absolutely, 100%, yes. I'm not sure whether I'd like to make a career of it, as there are a lot of negatives to offset the positives (you're pretty much limited to New York or London if you want to work at a big, commercial press, you don't really get paid enough to live in either city until you're well up the career ladder, and at the entry levels it's a business of a little bit of very enjoyable work and a whole lot of drudgery), but for a short time at least I think it's invaluable. You can gain experience not to be had elsewhere, not even from the most effective speaker or the most well-written book, and the people in the publishing industry are (for the most part ;-p) genuinely interesting, friendly, and a pleasure to get to know.

And one more thing---I met another intern while I was there who was in his late twenties. So it's never (well, maybe almost never ;-p) too late to intern for a short period of time, and if you can save up the money to not get paid for awhile, it may be worth thinking of it like a vocational training program--one at the end of which you'll be much more likely to get a job either as an author or a publisher.

Reflections on Two Weeks in Publishing Part 2

With the wisdom gained from my meeting with my boss out of the way, we'll now move on to wisdom gained from my meeting with an assistant editor who had just gotten an agent for his novel. I didn't learn quite as much new information as I'd hoped, but it was still great to talk to him and get his perspective on what seems, at first glance, like the obvious choice of trying to do both careers at once.

The answers to most of my questions were the ones I expected. His process was much the same as anyone else's. He researched which agents he might want to represent him and sent them query letters. The difference is that he had inside information--he knew what the agents were like personally, what they looked for, how they represented their authors, etc. That seemed to be, to him, the most useful part of working in publishing as it related to getting published. There are things that you pick up working in the industry that simply can't be conveyed without doing the work--it's like any job in that respect.

I was also glad to hear that nobody at the publishing house seemed to be bothered by the fact that he was working on publishing a novel. In fact, most people seemed to be pretty supportive of him. He said that he expected it would be the same pretty much anywhere, but that he could imagine that if someone was a pain in the ass about constantly reminding everyone that he (or she ;-p) was a writer, it would get pretty old pretty fast. Common sense, I suppose, but also worth remembering--being a good writer doesn't necessarily make you a good publisher, and vice versa.

I asked him whether he had mentioned the fact that he worked in publishing in his query letters. He said that he hadn't (he had actually been so worried that he had written to agents under a pseudonym), but that in retrospect it wouldn't have been a bad idea, so long as you avoided looking like you were trying to leverage your position somehow, and that mentioning that you had met people in a professional context before (something I personally would be leery about) wasn't a faux pas either.

Finally, I asked him whether or not working in publishing had affected his own writing---whether he had been distracted, or too tired to write after working with books all day, or had been affected unduly by what he was working on from 9-5 while he was writing.

He seemed quite sure that it hadn't affected him adversely, and said that he honestly wasn't sure he would want to write full-time anyway---that being in an office environment really helped him as far as creativity went, and if he had to be in an office it might as well be one that worked with books all the time. He also said that, for him, working in non-fiction (he is a fiction writer) was extremely helpful as well, as rather than saturating him with what was currently being done for his own genre, it exposed him a lot of new ideas that he would never have taken the time to research had it not been for his work.

It was a very interesting meeting for me, to say the least. I was reassured to hear that trying to write and publish at the same time wasn't looked down upon by people in the industry, and also that using your professional contacts in that manner was accepted, so long as you weren't a jerk about it. Tomorrow I'll finish up this series of posts with my conclusions about working in publishing, how it affected my own writing, and whether I think it's a good idea.

Reflections on Two Weeks in Publishing, Part 1

As you all hopefully know, I spent the last two weeks working at a publishing house here in London. I learned a pretty incredible amount during that time, some of which I've shared on the blog already, and some of which I haven't yet.

So I decided to put together my reflections on the two weeks into a couple of blog posts, as well as some of the things I learned from my meetings with a couple of the lower level editors there. Hopefully it'll be at least a little enlightening.

First off, some interesting bits of knowledge I learned from my meeting with my boss. I asked her about the career ladder in the publishing industry, and one key thing jumped out at me. There seem to be, more or less, two different kinds of editors: those who acquire books, and those who do not. The day-to-day jobs pretty much split into those two categories, with a few different titles and pay grades, as well as some slight variation in duties, available in each.

That was interesting to me, as I'd always thought anyone with the job title "editor" acquired books. Au contraire, at least at the company I was working for, and my boss seemed to think it a common state of affairs.

Also, at the company I worked (a big house), there are different departments for proofreading (editing for typos, factual errors, etc.) and Editing with a capital "E". I'm not sure that it's like that everywhere, but it's another thing worth keeping in mind when looking at careers in publishing, or making sure you're not barking up the wrong kind of editor.

Next, the appraisal process! Her information here wasn't that great, because I worked for an imprint at said big publishing house that focuses on producing a few, big, important titles, rather than trying to capitalize on whatever the market will bear---but it's still an interesting snapshot so I'll share it anyway.

The sheer number of people who must sign off on an acquisition is rather astounding. There's the editor acquiring it, the director of his/her department, someone from sales, and someone from marketing. All of these people can basically veto a book at any point during the appraisal process. And that's for a book with a small advance. Over a certain threshold, the Managing Director of the whole publishing house has to sign off on it as well.

So I guess when people talk about how your book must be pitchable, that's why. You need to be able to get many more people than just your agent and your editor to buy into it before it ever sees the light of day.

She was a bit more hazy on how some of the people on that list make their decisions (she's not directly involved in the appraisal process herself, I don't think), but she did list these things as important: past sales, the author's platform, whether sales estimations will at least be similar to those of the other titles on the imprint's list (you can help yourself out with this one, I think, just by watching trade magazines and tracking how well books at an imprint you're targeting are selling, and estimating whether you can promise to match that), whether the book offers something new, and whether it will build the reputation of the brand (again, I think, unique to this particular imprint, which is very image conscious).

And of course, as she came back over to my desk after our meeting to tell me, the writing must be moving and impeccable. That is the sine qua non, as it were, of getting a book published. Good to hear that that's still how things work. ;-p

Fantasy Names

First, apologies again for not posting last night. They threw a big party for someone leaving the company, and since it was my last day there, well...there was a lot of free booze.

But with that out of the way, I have an urgent, burning, pertinent question about naming in fantasy. Oftentimes fantasy names contain references to fantastic things. Robert Jordan in particular does this all the time. See Rand al'Thor, Shai'tan, etc.

I'm of two minds about this. It doesn't usually bother me, but sometimes I find myself thinking "Really? In your world people name things after gods that don't even exist there?"

I did this myself. The last name of two of my characters is Jinn, which needs only a D to become Djinn. This happened because waaaay back in ancient history when I was first conceiving the novel, there were going to be summoned creatures in my world, and one of my characters was going to be a Djinn. As the book simmered in my mind, however, he became a human and the brother of the main character, who inherited his last name, which had just gone from Cole the Djinn to Cole Jinn.

So now I have my main character named Litnig Jinn. It's not a bad name, really, but I worry about what having a reference like that on the back cover of my book (or in my pitch) would do to people's expectations. Will they read it and think "Oh, just another fantasy novel?" (I fear this less of their encountering it in the story itself, because by that time they'll be hooked---or so I hope ;-p).

I'm considering, in what would be a brutally painful decision for me, changing his family name to Jin. But while it would eliminate the Djinn problem and make the novel sound more original, it would also, I think, change the impression he immediately gives. I won't explain my reasons for this, as I'm hoping to be wrong about it and I don't want to color anyone's impressions, but I'm looking for comments. Which is a better last name, Jin or Jinn?

Publishing and DRM

So I came across this article today at the Bookseller's website.

To sum it up, it's from the CEO of the Publisher's Association, a lobbying group for the UK publishing industry, and has to deal with e-books. In it, the CEO talks about how publishers need to figure out how to protect people from stealing their digital content before they put it on the market.

*sigh*

I understand this is the way that big business does business. In some places, it makes sense---like in a retail bookstore. If a book is stolen from them, they lose the money they paid for it, and they money they could have made by selling it. It's a double-whammy.

The digital world doesn't work that way, however. If an e-book gets stolen--"stolen" usually meaning illegally distributed without the consent of the copyright owner--there's no loss involved, only the opportunity loss of money they might have made had someone decided to purchase the e-book instead.

But there are other, hidden upsides---like what happens when that person, a book reader, decides they want a real book and goes and purchases one by the same author, or even the same one they read in pirated e-format.

Perhaps more importantly, DRM (digital rights management--the solution movies and music providers have gone to and publishing will probably head towards as well) is a major pain in the ass for end-users. You're locked into certain programs, have to maintain subscriptions, and getting your music or video from the internet to your computer to your mobile device can be extraordinarily frustrating and sometimes impossible.

To use a real-world analogy, it's as if department stores didn't take the ink-spray tags off of clothes when you bought them. Imagine walking around in your sexy new swimsuit with a big plastic thing hanging off the end, and you have an idea of how annoying DRM can be.

And one final thing: hackers will always, ALWAYS, ALWAYS break your copyright protection schemes. It's what they live for. Look at the backflips Sony has done to try to prevent user content from being available for the PSP (every few months a new security system update comes out with the latest batch of games and movies, only to be cracked a week or two later when the hackers put out their own updates), and you'll see that that's very clear.

Maybe publishing's DRM will be better. Maybe they'll figure out how to protect their copyrights without making it so difficult to use legitimate content that people are driven right into the arms of the pirates---but I doubt it. Nobody else has, and by starting off with the "We must protect our rights!" philosophy publishing just looks to be following the crowd. And in the meantime, they're talking about saddling a brand-new and fragile potential revenue stream with unnecessary baggage and losing money that could be made off of e-book purchases by sitting around trying to figure out how to protect themselves from "online thieves." Color me unimpressed.

Take a Deep Breath...

I looked through the Bookseller's Buyers Guide for 2008 (what seems like a fairly comprehensive list of titles being published by the major houses in the UK) during some downtime at work today. Naturally, I flipped to the section on Sci-fi and Fantasy.

At first I was encouraged. There were a lot of titles. Not as many as "General Fiction" or even "Sagas, Historical, and Romance," but enough to reassure me that the market was still buying. There were even more "Tolkienesque," and "epic" fantasies than "urban" or "dark" fantasies. I was feeling pretty good.

Then I started looking for titles by new writers.

There are three coming out in hardcover and three coming out in paperback---and that's a generous estimate. The paperbacks may just be new editions of previously published debut hardbacks and one of the hardcover books may not actually be from a new writer.

All of a sudden I wasn't feeling so good. Six titles in a year, at best. Six slots, more or less, to compete for with however many thousand other writers. So I took a deep breath...

And reminded myself that if I can't even produce one of the six best fantasy manuscripts in a year I'm nowhere near good enough to publish my novel anyway, and to do so would be a quick end to a long-awaited career.

Yes, the odds are bad, but if you think about the number of people trying to get published (in the thousands, probably) the difference between six new writers being published and something like ten or twenty (which would have been a huge proportion) is still miniscule statistically. Like <1%. So really the odds aren't any worse than I thought they were, they just look like it ;-p.

In other news, I met with my boss today to talk about publishing, and on Friday I'm going to talk to an assistant editor who recently got an agent for his first novel about how that process worked for him. After some consideration I think I'll lump the wisdom I get from both of them together for one uber-wise blog post. Stay tuned. :-)

Editorial Meetings

I got to sit in on an Editorial meeting today. At long last I got to see the nuts and bolts of how books get acquired!

...sort of.

It was very interesting and revealing to see the Editors hashing out amongst themselves whether or not books looked good, whether they thought they'd sell, what the competition was, when the manuscript would get delivered, how it would affect the brand, etc.

But there was a lot that wasn't discussed that I still don't understand. Like how the appraisal process for a book works (fairly key, if you ask me), or who approves the purchase price for a manuscript and how that process works, or how marketing money gets allocated amongst titles purchased.

Some of these things I hope to learn later this week, as my boss has graciously agreed to take some time to sit down with me and answer some of my questions about the business. A lot of the rest I hope to pick up this summer, when I'll have a much longer time period to ask questions and observe.

But honestly, I'm finding myself very much wishing that someone had written a book on this--or explained it in a blog post or a chapter in a how-to-get-published book or something. It's the kind of thing that would really really help in knowing what it takes to get yourself published.

I promise to share my knowledge once it's all gleaned and polished. ;-p

Different countries, different philosophies

Another in the "Things I learned in Europe" series of blog posts. This one courtesy of my friend Chelsea's Uncle Ricardo in Rome.

He was kind enough to act as our tour guide to the city for a day, which was amazing in a number of ways. Rome was just as full of fodder for my writing as I expected, but I got a little tidbit from Ricardo that I hadn't expected.

He paused in the middle of explaining one set of ruins to explain that the ancient Romans had built everything to last for thousands of years, fully expecting their Empire to continue for that long. This was an interesting enough facet of a civilization in and of itself to merit "chalked away for further use" status, but what he said next was even more interesting.

He told me that the modern Romans, having grown up surrounded by the evidence of the fall of ancient Rome despite all its careful planning, had evolved a very cynical approach to claims of Empire, or permanence. This in turn, I think, has a great deal to do with the open, free-wheeling reputation of the city and its people.

So when he told me a this a lightbulb went off in my head--not only did that particular aspect of a civilization fit perfectly for my dwarves (yes, I shamelessly pull from history and my experience, but every writer does...deal with it ;-p), but the realization that a people's past is inextricably linked to its present mentality was a very important one for me. It is yet another thing that must be taken into account to build a full and three dimensional world, which takes much, much more work than I ever imagined when I started creating mine seven years ago. More on that later this week.

Useless Characters

Ok, it's the weekend and I don't hold myself to trying to post on Sundays, but I have something to get off my chest.

I've been watching Naruto lately--more as an educational than an entertainment experience. So many people enjoy it so much that I figured I should see why for myself. I'm currently thirty episodes in, and one of the main characters has done nothing.

Literally, she has done absolutely nothing. Every once in awhile she provides some comic relief, but this is a show about ninjas--freakin' ninjas, and she hasn't done anything other than consistently beg the other two main characters to save the day. She's supposed to be a ninja, and not only that but one who is literally at the top of her class, but she has yet to lift a finger more than a season into the show.

I'm sorry, but some things just get my goat, and useless characters are one of them, particularly useless main characters--and especially useless female "damsel-in-distress" main characters. They're dead weight in a story, not to mention morally reprehensible, and if I ever meet someone who's ruined what could otherwise have been a decent story with one of these I will punch them in the face. You've been warned.

Career Building Can Be Fun

Apologies for not posting yesterday, but I stayed late at work to help my boss and one of the Editors with a capital 'E' (the big wigs) finish a project.

To be honest, I really didn't mind doing it. I'm used to working 10 hour days from my internship last summer, only had to stay half an hour extra, didn't have anything planned for the evening, and was rather enjoying the process of trying to get editorial notes typed up in time to make a courier deadline. It was finally a chance to put to good use the skills that won me a "Fastest Typer" award way back in middle school ;-p. Also a chance to work on my cryptography, as the Editor's handwriting was poor to begin with and got worse the closer we got to the deadline.

But afterwards, as I was getting ready to go home, my boss told me that she and a few co-workers were going out for a drink (it's been a long week at the office) and asked if I wanted to come along.

I don't think I need to tell anyone that that's a no-brainer. A chance to really connect and make friends with an editor (not to mention she's a nice woman I'd like to be friends with anyway)? No thanks, I think I'll go home and make some cheap tortellini instead...

So I went out for a drink, and one drink turned into two, and two drinks turned into 'It's my friend's birthday and they're having the party at this other bar, but you're more than welcome if you want to come'. Which turned into yet more drinks, all on no dinner. So by the time I got home I wasn't really in a state to blog, but I had an absolute blast and really got to know my boss, her boyfriend, and some of his friends. A pretty good day overall, even though I left home at 8:30AM and didn't get back til after midnight.

So what started as an exercise in career building (staying late to help my boss) ended with a great night out on the town and some new friends made. Aws.

Writing When Tired

So last night I did a little experiment. I decided that it had been about long enough since I'd written anything, and despite the fact that I was exhausted and didn't really feel like writing, I opened up the next chapter to be edited in my novel and started working on it.

Unfortunately, it happened to be one that needed a fair amount of work. I had to re-do a couple of scenes, and when I got to them my enthusiasm began to flag. But I pushed through and rewrote them anyway, despite being conscious that I wasn't at my best. I figured at worst I would get some ideas down and could come back to revisit them the next day.

So this afternoon I reopened that chapter again when I was fresher and had a look at what I'd done. To my surprise, it wasn't bad. Sure it needed work, but not appreciably more work than my revisions usually do (When making major changes I generally go in once and make the big change--like writing in scene a segment of the book previously told through narration--then come back and make sure that the language, pacing, and structure of it are up to snuff a bit later).

So I learned (or more accurately, re-learned--I knew this before, I had just convinced myself otherwise) that I don't write worse when I'm tired, it's just a more difficult process. I don't know if this holds true for everyone, but I think it's worth finding out about yourself--seeing as being tired is pretty ubiquitous and being able to write when tired can be helpful when you're under a deadline.

Don't Let The Intern Get Your Query

No, seriously. Don't. If you do, it will get rejected 99.99% of the time. Wanna know why?

Because interns are inexperienced and woefully unprepared to evaluate whether or not a project is worthy of being taken on. For real---that's why they're interns and not full-fledged, paid staff members.

Today my boss came up to me with another submission and said, "Here you go, probably just another rejection letter." Meaning, "I glanced at it and wasn't impressed. Take a look, if you think it's special bring it back and I'll look at it again. If not, just write a rejection letter for it."

Said submission was for a non-fiction business title. I opened up the letter, read it, and thought it looked interesting. Then I looked at the table of contents that came with it, and that looked interesting too. I saw some reasons it might be worth looking at.

I also knew there were about 10,000 reasons it might not be, none of which I was knew. What else was the company publishing? Was there a book on that subject already on the list? Had the subject already been dealt with sufficiently by someone else? What was the track record of books on the subject? Were this guy's credentials (they looked decent to me) actually worth anything at all?

The list goes on. So let's do one of those Beautiful Mind-guy decision grid things that econ majors like so much, and you can try to guess what I did. Choice one is to bring it back to my boss, Choice two is to reject it. It's either good or bad, so there are four possible outcomes.

Outcome one: I bring it back and it's good. My boss asks for a full, and I never hear about it again or am even remembered by the time it's published, because I'm just an intern and I leave in two weeks.

Outcome two: I bring it back and it's bad. My boss rolls her eyes, thinks less of me, and I spend more time making copies and less time doing interesting things (like blurb-writing, which I got to do today, woot!).

Outcome three: I reject it and it's good. Nothing happens. Maybe some other publisher takes it and it blows up, but nobody at my company will ever remember it got submitted except maybe me, and I sure won't be telling.

Outcome four: I reject and it's bad. I do the right thing and I win.

These four possible outcomes hold true for pretty much every query that lands on an intern's desk. The only likely reward for us in finding something good is the knowledge that we did so, and the thought that we're helping some stranger achieve their dream.

Don't get me wrong, that's still a little motivation, but it doesn't outshine the fear of losing face and not leaving the copy room for three days.

If I'd had a brilliant, shining description of a fantasy novel, something I know a lot more about, I would've taken the risk. But here's another secret about interns (and, as I understand it, many entry-level editorial assistants): we don't necessarily wind up at houses or imprints that play to our strengths. We end up wherever we can get a job. So for every fantasy expert dealing with a business proposal there's a horror expert dealing with a romance query and a literary fiction expert dealing with a math textbook proposal.

So don't let the intern get your query. Seriously. And in practice that means getting an agent. It might be sad that the publishing industry has come to that, but it has, and personal experience has only driven that home for me.

Planes and Home on the Road

So, another post gleaned from my European Adventure experience--this one involving feeling at home in the strangest places.

Like crammed into the middle seat of a Ryanair jet. Yep, that's right. I felt at home on a plane. Forget that I hadn't been home for four months, and that I was actually thousands of miles away from it, I felt right at home. Probably because I'm so used to flying home from school that getting on a plane just makes me think of home.

It was a strange moment for me, but also one that I find very pertinent to writing--especially writing in fantasy, where characters often (hell, I'll say always and dare someone to prove me wrong just to get a comment or two on the blog ;-p) travel away from home for extended periods of time.

Some of these characters travel long enough that they should certainly begin to feel more at home on the road than at home itself. An interesting observation and one I found particularly applicable to my own writing.

In other news, I think I had two or three good blog ideas while at work today, but the drone of the copy machine must have drilled them out of my head before I left because I can't remember any of them. Tomorrow I bring my trusty Moleskine along to jot them down in.

RRP? ASP? WTF?

Day one working in the publishing industry complete, and man does it feel good to finally say that. I even got to write some rejection letters! Somehow it feels a little different when your name follows the "Sincerely" instead of the "Dear" on those ;-p.

At any rate, I learned a lot of things, one of which was that the publishing trade magazines would have been an invaluable tool for gaining knowledge about the industry before I got there. You hear these mentioned every once in awhile under the "advice for aspiring authors" sections of websites, but not too often and not nearly in bold enough terms. To be perfectly honest, I can't even remember an American one off the top of my head.

But reading through The Bookseller, a British trade magazine, while waiting for my IT account to be set up today taught me much more about the publishing industry than I expected to learn in an hour or so. Not only did I get a sense for what sales figures are right now, and in general, and what constitutes success (#50 on the bestsellers list had sold, I believe, around 7,000 copies last week), but I was exposed to terms I had never heard before, like RRP (I think the suggested retail price of a book) and ASP (stands for Average Sale Price, and usually around half of the RRP...one goal for tomorrow is to track my boss down and ask why there's such a discrepancy).

My first day at work very much humanized the publishing industry for me as well. I was fortunate enough to start on the day that the company I'm interning for published its quarterly newsletter, in which you could clearly see the different departments laying out what they were proud of accomplishing over the last quarter. It was strange and somewhat touching to realize that the people behind the rigamarole of the submissions process and all the rejection letters, who hold such power over so many people's dreams, are at some level insecure enough that they hold up their accomplishments (some of them quite humble compared to others) for others to see and hopefully appreciate.

I also made my second big mistake in planning the next step in my career today (the first being a grammatical error in my resume that persisted through the first 8 or so applications for summer internships I sent out. Oddly enough, the company I'm going to wind up working for this summer was the first one that got the error-free resume. Go figure ;-p). I have been informed that I missed the deadline for applying for my school's internship funding by a week. Meaning that I'll begin starving for the pursuit of my career slightly earlier than anticipated. Oh well...at least I like ramen noodles.

A Writer's Burden

Ok, a bit of a grandiose title, but I'll start off my series of "things I learned in Europe" blogs by talking about the need to experience new things that is, to me, so much a part of being a writer.

It's pretty much common knowledge that having first-hand experience of a thing makes you better at recreating it. There's a reason that artists work from models, even when painting something imaginary. The same goes for writing, except that writing encompasses far more than just the visual. Experiencing something is the only thing that can truly make you understand every facet of it, and understanding that makes you much better able to reproduce it on the page.

In one sense, this is a blessing. It gives a sense of legitimacy to some things that might otherwise be considered entirely self-indulgent---like traveling for three weeks through Europe. It also provides a silver lining to even the worst situations. The deepest pain can be accepted because it makes you able to reproduce that pain in a way that others who have felt it will identify with and others who haven't will be able to gain a sense of it from. For me, it will allow me to do a lot of things I would love to do anyway, like go on a tallship cruise or learn how to swordfight, and call it work.

In another sense, however, this is a curse. For me personally it requires stretching my boundaries a lot further than I particularly enjoy doing. Traveling through Europe for three weeks was amazing in some senses and profoundly uncomfortable and difficult in others. And the kicker is that the discomfort and difficulty were as important for my writing as the amazingness.

Knowing what it's like to be a stranger in a strange land, to feel alone even when surrounded by others, to miss people so intensely that the world itself seems to turn to gray, and to be cold, wet, and lost are as important as knowing what it's like to look out from a castle wall over a sunlit river valley, hike through an emerald green forest in a snowstorm, or walk through the ruins of a two-thousand year old civilization, but the latter are a lot more enjoyable than the former.

There are other things that will be more difficult for me but that I must experience nonetheless. I should really find a time to push my body to the brink of complete exhaustion, seeing as I make my characters do it so often, and as much trauma as I've had trying to ride horses in the past, I need to learn how to do it if I ever want my characters to.

Even the aforementioned tallship cruise and swordfighting will not be completely enjoyable. Both of those things entail certain hardships in and of themselves, which is part of the reason they must be experienced, and anytime I'm in a situation I need to write about later there's a great mental drain just from trying to remember every sensation so acutely that I can reproduce it on the page in any way I like, whenever I need it.

I don't know that every author does these things, or even if they're completely necessary. But for me my writing has become the great work of my life, and everything else is subsumed to it. In order to be great, as I aspire to be, that is necessary. But it is not easy, it is not always enjoyable, and it is not always what I want to do. The amount of work that will be necessary to realize my dreams astounds me, and the realization that I will have to continue to do that work for the next ten or twenty years at least (if all goes according to plan) can at times be a very daunting one.

I know many writers have felt like this before, have dedicated themselves like this and have felt burdened at times by that dedication, but I wonder how many writers of fantasy have done it, and how it worked out for them. If anyone knows anything on that topic, I'd be curious to hear about it.

I'm Back!

Okay, so I slightly reneged on my promise to blog from Europe. My bad, but it's tough to do when you're limited to 10 minutes of internet time at once, there's a ton of cool stuff to see, and you have to use your precious internet time to arrange phone interviews from casino lobbies in Garmisch-Partenkirchen Germany for summer internships.

That said, I did take the time to write down notes of things to blog about, so I have a ton of good material stored up, and I start my London internship tomorrow as well. Should be in for a good couple of weeks on the blog, now that it's resurrected. :-)