Retiring

Well, friends and blog-readers, it's time for something both exciting and a little bit sad. In honor of the submission of my first short stories since high school and what will be the beginning of my grown-up, professional writing career, I am retiring this blog. I do plan to leave it up in perpetuity, however, as there's a lot of good stuff on here that I don't want to forget.

I've come a long way since 2008. Been a lot of places, done a lot of things, and more importantly, I have improved vastly as a writer. This blog was the beginning of me taking myself seriously as an artist--an outpouring of the same change in philosophy that led me to study narrative, revamp my attitude towards college coursework, and eventually discover how and what I really wanted to write. For that, it will always have a warm place in my heart. I hope that you have enjoyed it as much as I have, and I hope that you will join me over at The Real Jeff Seymour, where I promise more of the same things I delivered here, and more frequently.

Arrivederci, my friends, and thank you.

Something beautiful for Thursday

"Dadada dadada dada dadada dadada dada..." Murmuration - Nomad Soul

No words necessary. Enjoy.

The 'Click' Moment

"Don't...don't you want me?" - Don't You Want Me - The Human League

So today I was reading the PW Daily e-mail from September 30th, because as a result of exciting things happening in my professional life, which hopefully I will able to share soon, I am almost a month behind on reading publishing trade news, and I refuse to just delete it and start over again, and I came across the following quote: "It’s such a distinct moment (for me, at least) that I can almost always pinpoint the moment—down to the page number—I felt it happen. The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides: page 94. Michael Lewis's Boomerang, out on Monday: page 6 (yes, really). Touré’s Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness: page 32 (see our interview with Touré below). Péter Nádas’s Parallel Stories: still waiting."

The PW editor writing the article was discussing at what point he felt a book was really going to be a great one. What's most interesting for me is the point at which that happened in each book. Page 6. Page 32. Page 94. Page 6 an aspiring author might get from an agent or an editor, if their mechanics are sound. Page 32? Page 94? Not likely.

What to do with this information I'm not yet entirely sure. It seems to speak loudly in favor of not putting too much stock in the traditional publishing process, but traditional publishing has a lot more going for it than a lot of people think. As I exhaust my stock of friends and family readers for Soulwoven: Exodus, I'm discovering that there is, in fact, a point at which what I need is not so much people who can tell me "I don't like this," which I then translate into "This thing I was trying did not work for this person," but someone who can say "You're trying to do this, and it's not working. Here's why."

The only way I know to find such a person is the traditional submissions process, because it's the only time I'm aware of you can get a professional to read your entire manuscript without paying them for it ahead of time (sure, you pay them a lot afterwards, but by that time you should already have a pretty darn good idea of what exactly you're paying for, in the form of the "So, what direction do you see the book needing to move in?" conversation you ought to have before you sign anything).

Also, I've been writing short stories. I think they're turning out splendidly. They will be out on submission soon, which will likely mean the end of this blog and the inauguration of a new one. Sneak preview available at The Real Jeff Seymour. Check out that beard!

Storage Locker?

"I'm not after fame and fortune, I'm after you." - Rise Against, From Heads Unworthy

I use this blog for a lot of things---advice, venting, taking the time to develop my own thoughts and commit them to fake paper---but more than anything else I I think I use it as a storage locker. A lot of the wisdom (and regardless of how it may serve you, for me that's exactly what it is: the lessons I have learned through experience) tucked away in various posts down the sidebar are things I have forgotten by the time I go back to read them, and I am always very, very glad that they're there.

Every so often, I find something created by someone else that's so wonderful that I think it needs to go in the locker even though I had nothing to do with it. It's a bit like clipping articles from a magazine and tucking them in a drawer to find years later.

This, a blog post by Tobias Buckell about dreams, rockets, and loving what you write for its own sake, and not for the good you think it will do the world or the satisfaction you think it will bring you or the financial independence you hope it might grant, is one of those things.

I hope you read it. I know that I'll be back to, though I have no idea when.

THE PASSIVE VOICE!

"Every day I'm shufflin'..." LMFAO- Party Rock Anthem

Recently, after a two-year hiatus from the company of other writers, I swallowed my post-collegiate distrust and began attending a critique group. In many ways it has been a wonderful experience. As advertised, it turns out it is almost always useful to have more eyes on your work once you think it's ready for them, I have gotten some good advice, and the opportunity to play editor for others has been a valuable one.

That said, there are many in this critique group (and other critique groups across the internet and the planet) who are, I feel, overly disparaging of a.) the passive voice, and b.) the verb "to be" in general. So much so that I fell asleep on Friday constructing what I felt to be a spirited defense of the passive voice and the verb it uses so heavily. What little of it I remember two days later, I shall share now.

First I shall sum up conventional wisdom as it has been (ahem) explained to me:

Passive voice ("it has been explained," or more simply "The dead horse was beaten," is almost always inferior to active voice ("My professors explained it," or "My professors beat the dead horse"). It is somewhat tolerable when the entity performing the action is unknown ("A rock was thrown from the crowd") or in journalism ("Three suspects were arraigned today...") when the actor (the person doing the arraigning) is unimportant to the story.

There is some truth to this. Passive voice can make for weak, boring writing. It can be especially painful in academic writing, which is where most writers are first made to realize they're using it. But there are circumstances in which it can be not just tolerable, but preferable to active voice. We'll start with, "A rock was thrown from the crowd," and move into a hypothetical critique group battle royale:

"Bad!" cry those who despise passive voice in all situations. "Consider the following: 'A rock hurtled from the crowd,' 'Someone threw a rock from the crowd,' 'A rock from the crowd struck the wall just left of the President's head." Look at the detail! The action! The zing! The absence of the word 'was!'"

Let's start with the first example. "Hurtle" is a Big Word. It's unusual. It's eye-catching. It bears tension. "But wait!" cry my haters of passive voice, "Aren't those all good things? I want my writing to be all of that!" To which I reply that if something hurtles or erupts or volcanoes forth in every sentence in your paragraph/chapter/novel I as reader will very quickly lose any sense of what sort of motion is important and what is not, and probably throw something across the room.

"Someone threw a rock from the crowd," is slightly tougher to defend. It is very similar in most respects (meaning, length, tone, emphasis) to, "A rock was thrown from the crowd." A poet will notice that the sentences scan very differently (meaning that the accents on the words occur in a different pattern). Someone else might note that this affects the rhythm of the sentence as well as the sentences around it. I maintain that that in and of itself is reason to keep the passive version, especially given that little of importance is changed by making it active in this particular way.

And finally, "A rock from the crowd struck the wall just left of the President's head." This is my prime example of what can go wrong when a writer seeks to eliminate passive voice. It's a good sentence. There's detail. It's interesting. We can go in just about any direction from there. But consider the different sentences placed in the context of the following paragraph:

Tony shivered. The President looked pale and shaken on his balcony. Tony's ankle was swelling up and he knew he wouldn't be able to run far if things got ugly. A rock was thrown from the crowd. He needed a way out.

Versus:

Tony shivered. The President looked pale and shaken on his balcony. Tony's ankle was swelling up and he knew he wouldn't be able to run far if things got ugly. A rock from the crowd struck the wall just left of the President's head. Tony needed a way out.

In the active example we wind up having to redefine the subject of the paragraph again in its last sentence ("he" would be ambiguous). This paragraph is about Tony. It's not about the rock, or the crowd, or the President. There are things going on around Tony that are making him nervous. That's what's important. The only reason this paragraph exists at all is to let the reader know that. When we make "A rock was thrown from the crowd," active in this way our paragraph loses its focus.

"But wait!" cry my haters, "You could..." and I don't care any more. I could spend a lot of time fiddling with this paragraph and changing it in all kinds of ways, but the only way to make the sentence, "A rock was thrown from the crowd," active is to make the rock an actor in the sentence. That's how you get rid of passive voice. It's the fix. And when you make the rock an actor you introduce three actors (yes, "looked" is a weak verb, but it still counts, and I picked a weak verb in that sentence for the same reasons I picked passive voice later) into a five-sentence paragraph that's meant to be about only one of them, and that's just too many.

It's here that many writers wind up damaging their own writing in an attempt to purge it of passive voice. Yes, passive voice is weak. Sometimes weakness is desirable. Not every sentence gets to be captain of the ship.

The other instance I wanted to talk about is when you're working deep inside a character's head (which, SPOILER, I contend you always are. Hemingway's nameless, formless narrators are as much characters in his novels as his actual characters are). People experience the world in words. Four different people watching the exact same footage of a rock being thrown from a crowd could turn out the four different sentences we go over above. It is imperative that a character who, seeing that footage, would say, "A rock was thrown from the crowd," be allowed to relate it to the reader that way through the narration, even if he or she isn't talking or thinking it directly. If we're in Tony's head, we ought to see the rock the way Tony does, and no matter how much the writers in some critique group might hate passive voice, I'd much rather experience the rock through Tony's words than theirs.

Vacation

"Vacation all I ever wanted..." The Go-Gos, Vacation

I had an interesting moment the other day. I'm in Austria, visiting a friend of mine who has been teaching English here for the past two years, and as we were sitting around in his apartment (which we often do, being as it is cold and rainy here and mein deutsch ist nicht so gut) I realized I couldn't remember the last time I had gone more than about two days in a row without writing.

This realization occurred at the same time I was really, really struggling to move forward on Book Three of Soulwoven, and discovering that Book Two was going to require a lot more revision than I had hoped.

I wondered if the two were related.

So I have taken some time off. Damn near two weeks of it, actually. And I feel good. Very good. Some of the knots that seemed so undisentanglable seem looser. The difficulties of structure and plotting in Book Two that were daunting me no longer seem so daunting. I'm excited to get back to it. The other day I was in the midst of reading a chapter of Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind and had the sudden urge to put it down and go back to work on Soulwoven instead.

This is a good thing. I return to the United States on May 4. Shortly thereafter, I shall declare my vacation over and go back to work.

But I'm glad I took one. Really, I am.

Subtitles

"Hang on to me and I'll hang onto you..." -Carbon Leaf, Deep Blue Sea

No, not the kind you're thinking of. They kind that come after a colon in a book title, preferably to help delineate the chunks a longer-than-one-book story has been broken into. Like Dragonlance: Dragons of Spring Dawning. Or Somethingvaguelyhauntingandprofound: A novel. Depending on your genre preferences.

Anyway, awhile ago (months, really. I should have posted this long before. Mea culpa.) I came up with working subtitles for the four parts of Soulwoven. I'll share them in a moment, but the interesting thing that came out of the subtitles is that they are helping me immensely in focusing the books. The more I tell of Soulwoven the more it tries to do what epic fantasy inevitably does---sprawl out and out and out, and the more picky I have to be about choosing which stories to tell and which to leave untold. The subtitles remind me of the themes I'm working with. They help me decide which episodes should begin and end the book-length chunks of the story I'm writing. This is not a development I predicted. I simply decided one day that if I wanted to maintain any sort of control over the titling of what would eventually be four or more books, I ought to make a real attempt to title them. The focus was just a happy side effect.

I share this in the hope that somewhere out there someone will read it and think "Aha! That's what I need!"

It may not be true. Or it may. But either way it's worth noodling.

And oh yes, the (working) subtitles are:
Soulwoven: Exodus
Soulwoven: Exile
Soulwoven: Redemption
Soulwoven: Brotherhood

I like 'em. Someday it will prove interesting to see if a marketing department does too. :-)

The One-Sentence Pitch

"Shiny happy people holding hands..." -R.E.M., Shiny Happy People

I have a great breakthrough to report: I have finally, finally, finally nailed the one-sentence pitch for my story down. And I have some news to share regarding how I did it.

For years, the one-sentence pitch has been one of the things I struggled with most when describing Soulwoven. What is it really about? Like, really, really about? At its broadest, its most basic, in one sentence? For a long time I fiddled around trying to sum up the first book and wound up with very broad, very bland descriptions: "A group of characters has to save the world from necromancers trying to release a dragon."

And I looked at the sentence and thought, well, yes, that happens. But it's not really what the book is about, is it?

So after a writer's conference and my time working in publishing and my experience writing reader's reports I decided to try focusing on one character, and I wound up with this: "A 2o year-old swordsman fights to save the world even as he discovers that the power he has to do so comes from that which is destroying it in the first place."

Better! Serviceable, even. But that's a thick, meaty sentence. It's a little convoluted, hard to understand. You have to read it twice. If I were telling it to you out loud you might say, "Wait, what?"

Then I decided to treat all four books of the story as what they are: one story. I zoomed way out, and asked myself not what the first book of the story was about but what the whole story was about, and I came up with this: "The choices of three brothers shape the destiny of a world torn between loving and hating itself."

Mmm. Yummy. Vague but interesting. The kind of thing that sticks out as you read through the zillions of one-sentence synopses on Publisher's Marketplace every day.

And it came from zooming out. Way out. As far out as I could get. Because I was out that far, there's so much more packed into every part of the sentence: "What choices? Who are the brothers? What destiny? What world? Loving and hating itself? Explain!"

And questions lead to page-turn, and page-turn is what the craft of writing is all about.

Reading Out Loud

"Ah-hoo! Werewolves of London," Warren Zevon- Werewolves of London

J.R.R. Tolkien read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy out loud to C.S. Lewis before it was published. I don't have a C.S. Lewis to read to, but one of the biggest revelations of my last year has been the utterly inimitable experience of reading my novel out loud to people, and what that means for my writing.

Put shortly: you really have to stand behind what you write when you read it to someone's face. The little voice in your head (which I've heard called the Inner Editor elsewhere on the blogosphere, and which, for the record, I am a fan of) that tells you when something is wrong gets a lot louder when your precious self-esteem is at stake. It's easy to tell yourself "Oh, that's okay, I'll come back and fix it later," when you're reading to yourself, even out loud. It's a lot harder to say that to a friend or a significant other. There have been a couple of chapters which I have had to stop reading and just say, "Okay, I thought this was ready for you, but it's not. Sorry. Can we try again tomorrow?" And that's a good thing.

You also get an amazing chance to gauge which parts of your story are interesting and which are boring. If you're reading to a room of people, you feel the atmosphere change. When it's good, they're on the edge of their seats, their eyes are wide, they're leaning forward, they get upset if you pause to fix a typo, and it feels great. When it's bad, they're looking around the room, checking their watches, yawning, fidgeting, and it doesn't really hurt so much as tell you, "Okay, this spot right here. This paragraph, this sentence, this word, is where I lost them," which is incredible. If you're only reading to an audience of one it's even easier (especially if that one is someone who'll snuggle up close to you while you read).

So once you're ready to edit your story, find people to read out loud to, no matter who they are. It's an invaluable tool that I think writers often skip nowadays in favor of the workshop approach, and that's a sad thing.

C'est Funissement

"Can we pretend that airplanes in the night sky are like shooting stars?" B.O.B. - Airplanes

Saw this linked today on Neil Gaiman's blog and laughed out loud so many times watching it I had to kick it back out again.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Neil Gaiman
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election March to Keep Fear Alive

Roffles!

And he's back!

"We dance across til we drop, the bells keep time and never stop..." Carbon Leaf - Lake of Silver Bells

And here's to a brave new year...just before it ends. But taking some time off from the blog has been good for me. Simply put, I spent more time living and writing and less time talking about them, and that was good. But I have things to say again, so I thought I'd say them. In the meantime, an abridged review of things that have happened since last I wrote:

I bought a car for $700 and put 10,000km on it driving around New Zealand for four months. I worked for a fantastic (indie) bookshop, where I read everything from Sun Tzu to Robert Rankin to Geography textbooks. I finished Book One of Soulwoven, then decided I ought to wait until I finish all the books (three to four, I'm expecting at this point) before publishing any of them. I climbed some mountains, hiked some trails, took lots of pictures, got into great shape, got mushy again, returned to the U.S.A. (where I discovered it's a lot more difficult to live than in New Zealand), spent a summer in the woods writing and doing little else, returned to the town I went to college in to be with the one I love, discovered how to live on minimum wage, and watched helplessly from the sidelines as the publishing company I interned for hurtled off a cliff.

Phew. That's not even everything. But I'm writing well these days, somewhere around halfway through Book Two of Soulwoven, meaning somewhere around halfway through the whole story, and that's exciting, especially since I only finished Book One about six months ago. And that's a good thing. So here's to more writing, and hopefully some more blogging to go with it. :-)

Phew...

"I got hurt feelings, I got hurt feelings..."-Flight of the Conchords, Hurt Feelings

Sometimes life gets so busy it's hard to write, let alone write about writing. Recent thoughts:

1.) Knee pain is no fun, and devilishly hard to find a way to turn into lemonade by working into my writing.

2.) Small things, like chocolate wafers that dissolve in your mouth after you suck cocoa through them, are amazing.

3.) One should never assume that one's camera batteries are fully charged before leaving on a hike.

4.) It can be difficult to write an episode that corresponds too closely to events in your own life too close to the events in question. Sometimes chapters need to simply be flagged "come back later."

It's Sunday in New Zealand and Saturday at home. This still amazes me. Work continues apace on Soulwoven, and all is well.

MARTIIIIIIIN!!

"Somewhere between Jesus and Huey P. Newton," The Flobots, The Rhythm Section

I had two great goals in coming down to New Zealand. Well, scratch that, I had many great goals when coming down to New Zealand, but two of them were to read more and write more. Unfortunately, the first very quickly got in the way of the second. I made the mistake of continuing George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire straight off when I got down here, only to realize that it quickly became very difficult to write in my own voice when I was exposing myself to his for two or three hours every day.

I suppose this was a rather predictable predicament, but it didn't make it any easier on me. I had to shelf my writing for a few days while I finished up the book, which was extraordinarily frustrating to me. That said, now that I have finished it, I was able to come back to my writing feeling very refreshed, and reminded of a few things that Martin's writing has taught me in the past about structure and world-building. So cheers to that.

You, out there in internet-land--do you also have trouble sticking to your own voice when reading an author with a very strong voice of their own? Do you even bother reading at all while you're engaged in a longer project? Tell me. I want to learn.

New Zealand?

"Love on the rocks with a twist of desperation,"- Eve 6, There's a Face

I suppose I should come clean. I'm in New Zealand, embarking upon a 6 month adventure of migrant labour and summer-during-winter before returning to Colorado in the spring to hopefully begin my career in publishing in earnest. It's the sort of adventure a lot of people dream about but never actually live. A co-worker of mine who is also a writer got all excited when I told him about the trip and started talking about Kerouac's On the Road. I've never read On the Road. It's on 'the list' to be sure, but I haven't gotten around to it.

To be honest, this adventure isn't about my writing, it's about me. And therefore it's also somewhat about my writing, as everything that effects me inevitably effects my writing. Case-in-point: with all this unemployed free time I'm enjoying at the moment, I've had plenty of time to write. I just haven't been able to (more on this in a later post...MARTIIIINNN!!!).

And that's all right, I think. I've come a very strange period in my writing process where I don't feel the need to press through too quickly. I'm moving slowly through the revision of Soulwoven, but moving with deliberation and doing it right. I recently spent two weeks writing two chapters only to realize that, in the end, they need to be cut. They're great character development, but the plot does not move in them. At all...not a single sentence, not a single word related to the broader, overarching drive behind the story. They're just characters talking in a coffee shop, although instead of a coffee shop it's the prow of a beaten and battered clipper sailing through the icy north seas of their world. And in the end, characters just talking isn't what Soulwoven is about. So I'll keep the chapters I've written on-hand, maybe to include in a 'director's cut' of the novel someday, or offer for free on my website for those who are interested, but in the end they have to go.

Strange, to spend so long writing something only to cut it, but there was a feeling of "Ahhh, THAT'S what I need to do," that came over me when I made the decision to axe those chapters. And more and more I've come to associate that feeling with the best of my writing. Wonder if it's the same for the rest of you.

Reading Bad Books

"I'm something's broke, I wanna put a little fixin' on it..." - Pearl Jam, The Fixer

So we all know that reading good books is a great way to learn how to write, yeah? I've talked before about how reading George Martin's Game of Thrones gave me the last piece I needed to tell my story the way I wanted to (and when Soulwoven comes out, I bet it'll be fairly easy to see just what that was). Beyond that, it's common knowledge that the monkey-see monkey-do (or rather, monkey-approximate-in-a-way-that-works-for-you) approach to writing works extremely well.

But the monkey-see-monkey-stay-the-hell-away-from approach works very well too.

I've had the opportunity over the past week or so to read a book that, well, isn't as well-written as some others I've read. Part of the learning experience for me has been in figuring out why it was published and popular anyway (about 100 pages in I hit upon it--a marvelous back-to-back plot twist/complication gambit that tossed out the cliches and replaced them with deeper, darker, more likable character traits). The other part has been in recognizing places where the writing really just fails. Unnecessary sentences, explanations of what characters are thinking that aren't needed, etc. etc. And lo and behold, when I go back to my own writing I find the same thing sticking out like sore thumbs all over the place.

Believe it or not, this is a good thing. These are easy edits to make. And since I'm already bumping up perilously close to the 110-125,000 word limit (it's a soft limit, but a limit nonetheless) for debut fantasy, every sentence I can cut out feels like a gift these days.

So go read some bad books. I mean really, find the worst book you can find and read it with an editorial eye. Chances are, when you go back to your own writing you'll find things that need to go. And that's a good thing.

Now here's something everyone can enjoy!

"Eyehole deep in muddy waters..."-Tool, The Pot

Sent to me by one of my workshop-mates last night. Sheer brilliance, really. It's called "The adolescent villain flow-chart."


Sort of what it's all about, eh?

Workshops

"What can I say, what can I do? Send your apologies to me." - Dropping Daylight, Apologies

So for a long time I've been on the fence about the efficacy of workshops. Specifically, it's difficult in a university setting to get a group of like-minded people together. You wind up thrown together with whoever is interested in "Creative Writing"--not necessarily in writing a novel, a fantasy, literary fiction, mystery, sci-fi, short stories, whatever your particular interest may be. And thus it can be difficult to get good, consistent feedback from people who are focused on the same things you are.

But when you do get good feedback it can be incredible, and one just has to look at the most successful writers to see that they often come in groups. Writing in a vacuum, in short, is the long way to getting good. A little help from some like-minded folks can go a long way.

So one of my resolutions upon graduating college was to put together a group of like-minded writers and see where it took me. This impromptu group had its first meeting last night, and it was really everything I hoped it would be---even though there were only two of us and I lost all my notes through some technical difficulties. Even when I wasn't getting great advice, I was given an opportunity to discuss out loud why I was writing the way I was, what I was trying to do in a given chapter, paragraph, sentence, etc...and saying that out loud to someone who not only understands what you're talking about but can offer advice is a really invaluable experience.

So yeah, I think workshops can be a great tool--so long as you own them and not the other way around, if that makes any sense. And it's worth the time and effort to put your own together. Just a few thoughts.

Injuries and Fantasy

"You know there's nowhere else I wanted to be, than be there when you needed me. I'm sorry too, but don't give up on me. And just remember that while you were asleep I got a little bit closer to you..." -The Wallflowers, Closer to You

So we all know that characters get injured in fantasy. It's almost a requirement, right? You can't face danger without coming away scarred from it somehow. Sometimes injuries heal practically without effect (Luke's hand in Star Wars), sometimes the effect is delayed (Frodo in Lord of the Rings), and sometimes injuries are permanent and crippling (Bran in Game of Thrones).

But, without fail, these injuries are catastrophic. A hand is cut off, a hobbit is stabbed by a ringwraith, a young boy is thrown from a tower. Chronic, nagging injuries don't get the same sort of page time.

My questions is, why not? Sure, there's something to be said for the fact that main characters are meant to be special, often in some way a fantastic representation of the reader, and most readers don't like to dwell on the fact that their knees hurt when they go mountain climbing, or they get tennis elbow if they swing a tennis racket, let alone a sword, or they get shin splints from running too much.

But given the verisimilitude that many works of fantasy shoot for, it seems that chronic injuries should pop up a little more often, if not with the same focus that catastrophic injuries often have. The only work I can think of that does it is Dragonlance, and then only with Flint's heart and arthritis---the younger characters are all fit as a fiddle, despite the fact that chronic injuries can start in the teens. (Go visit your local high school training room if you don't believe me).

Just some food for thought.

Drastic Changes

"I feel fine with the sun in my eyes, the wind in my hair, we're falling out of this sky..."-The Wallflowers, When You're On Top

At what point in your manuscript process do you stop making drastic changes? Hopefully, I think, that point is never. Despite having worked on Soulwoven in various iterations for more than eight years, I'm still making huge changes to it in its latest draft. Specifically, I'm evaluating eliminating a point-of-view character. Or rather, not eliminating him, but eliminating his point-of-view.

You see, I discovered through the process of workshopping the first portion of the book that he was boring. And I mean discovered--not was told. I was told, to be certain, but not believing everything you're told is an essential component of workshopping. As I went back and re-read, however, I discovered that this time my friends were right. He was boring.

I kept writing anyway, even though I wasn't quite sure how to fix him. I just filed it away under "to be completed later" and kept on moving through the story. There was enough work to be done in other areas that leaving him a little boring for the moment was alright.

Eventually, I fixed him. His character changed significantly--became more withdrawn, more serious, less troubled. He's much more interesting now---a little mysterious to the others, a little above them, and most importantly practical even to the point of heartlessness.

In short, he's a lot better. Unfortunately, the changes I've made to him will mean completely re-writing and possibly scrapping two chapters from his point-of-view early in the novel that I thought were particularly well done. Specifically, going too deep into his motivations, his demons, and his backstory too early will absolutely destroy the mystery that serves him so well, and I'm not sure I can do these two chapters through his eyes without doing that.

And the reason I'm writing this is because one of the things that has been hardest for me in the past is being willing to let go of great scenes and chapters I've written when they don't serve the story any more, and trusting in my ability to write new ones to take their place, and it's very, very, essentially, important to do.

Besides, as long as you hold on to your old drafts there's nothing to lose. You do hang on to your old drafts, right? ;-p

Publishers Lunch

"Now dance, f***er dance, man he never had a chance..."-The Offspring, You're Gonna Go Far, Kid

Alright. Publishers Lunch is something I've seen plugged and plugged and advertised over and over again on agent blogs. For years, I never took the time to check it out, because I surmised it wouldn't have much to do with me as a writer.

And for the most part, I think that's true. I finally signed up for it a few weeks ago, and discovered that it doesn't have much if anything about writing, and blogs like Nathan Bransford's and Kristin Nelson's (linked on the sidebar) do an excellent job of summarizing and analyzing its more important articles.

BUT...(there's always a but, isn't there?) for anyone looking to get into the publishing industry, I think it's priceless (and coming in at the low, low, price of free, that's pretty good value). Not only does it provide a list of interesting things happening all across the world in the publishing industry (which gives you something to talk about with potential employers), but its job board is second to none. I mean seriously. The major job sites have nothing in terms of publishing jobs, but every week one or two new, legit, non-scam entry-level positions come straight to my inbox. That's pretty incredible.

AND...we all know by now my stance on writers working in the publishing industry for a stint, even if it's just in an entry-level or internship position. To sum up: invaluable.

So don't be like me and wait four or five years to check it out. Go sign up now. Trust me, it's worth it.