Guest Post: “‘You’re doing what?’ – Why I Decided to Self-Publish My Next Series” by Rachel Aaron

Whenever a New York published author decides to self-publish, there’s always the implicit assumption that Something Happened. Why else, after all, would an author who was presumably happily settled in a nice, big publishing house suddenly strike out on her own, like a child running away from home? Clearly, something terrible must have occurred. Was there a fight? A hot tempered editorial phone call where bridges were burned like kindling? Or perhaps it was the book itself? Maybe the story failed to meet the publisher’s expectations, and now the slighted author is unloading drek onto her fans for a quick buck?

Whatever imagined tragedy you prefer, they all start with the same opening: Something Happened. Something fundamental went horribly wrong in the publishing relationship. There’s simply no other plausible explanation why an author who’d already “made it,” who’d cleared the slush pile, gotten the agent and the book deal and gone on to write multiple series would give it all up and go it alone in self-publishing, the last refuge of the desperate and rejected.

I don’t blame anyone for assuming such things. I used to think them, too, and with good reason. Ever since I decided to get serious about my writing in 2004, I have been reading and researching and educating myself on the American publishing industry. If you’re going to be trying to make a living from something, it’s only common sense to figure out how it works. This education has been an ongoing process over all the years of my career, and for many of those, self-publishing was exactly what I described above: the place you went once everyone else had rejected you, a final long shot riddled with fraudsters eager to cash in on authors still desperately clinging to their great dream of being published.

Guest Post: “Writing Real Women” by Jon Wallace

I reckon that one of the hardest things in the world, when you’re starting out as a writer, is when a friend critiques something you’ve written. You’ve put (what you regard) as a lot into it, you’re convinced it’s unparalleled genius, and when you meet to discuss your work you sit there confidently expecting praise.

Your friend normally starts off by giving you what you want: “I loved this, that bit was cool, I really enjoyed the way you did such and such”. You sit there, nod in agreement that it’s all great and think: Excellent, my skill is acknowledged. Then come the words:

“The only thing is…”

Guest Post: “SEEDS IN THE DESERT” by Peter Liney (Detainee Blog Tour)

I’m not exactly sure when THE DETAINEE started to take shape in my mind. For a long time I had this notion that I wanted to write a book about the human spirit, about the fact that, no matter how dark the situation, given hope, we always find a way to survive. Like those seeds that lie dormant in the desert, year in, year out, waiting for rain, and when it comes, suddenly burst into the most beautiful of life. Or the victims of kidnapping, political prisoners, those held for no reason and often under the most appalling of circumstances, where do they find the will to survive? To wait for the arrival of that shower of life-giving rain?

So that was my theme, but where was my story? Well, if you’ll forgive me, it started with garbage (yes, I know I’m running a risk saying that, but hey, it’s the truth). Some years ago now, whilst visiting New York, I wandered into the City Library and was greeted by an exhibition about landfill on Staten Island. Ting! Yep, it was one of those writer moments – landfill, rubbish, everything society throws away, what if people were discarded with them? What if they were sent out to live on a stinking pile of waste in the middle of the ocean? Unable to escape, terrorised by fellow Islanders – that would be a pretty good challenge to the human spirit, wouldn’t it? What if society decided to discard all those they could no longer support? Those who can’t support themselves? So many countries in the world are concerned about their ageing populations, about how they can possibly sustain them, and really, the mathematics do seem overwhelmingly simple, not to mention, chilling. How will the few who are still working pay enough taxes to support those who are not? I mean, we can juggle the figures around, make people work a little longer, but is that going to do it? And that, of course, is if all things remain as they are.

What if we have yet another economic crisis? Or should I say, what if this one takes a turn for the worse? What if governments have to make even more savage cuts? No more free education, healthcare, the old left to take care of themselves – what would happen then?

And with story, of course, comes characters. Good, strong characters with clearly defined goals. The courageous Lena, the resourceful Jimmy, the enduring Delilah, and, of course, our hero, Clancy, a reformed villain with an inherent sense of right and wrong. A man to respect, and well-qualified to oversee a life-or-death challenge to the human spirit.

Now we have a tale to tell...

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Peter Liney’s The Detainee will be published by Jo Fletcher Books in the UK on July 4th 2013. The Detainee blog-tour continues at the following sites…

July 9th – J For Jetpack

July 10th – Speculative Assessments

July 11th – GavReads

July 12th – Ranting Dragon

There’s more! I’ll be sharing an excerpt from The Detainee this Friday, and with luck I’ll have the book reviewed next week or the one after. Be sure to come back and check these posts out!

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CORRECTION: The original version of this post stated that The Detainee was to be published on August 1st. I was wrong. Correct date now mentioned above.

Guest Post: “On Writing Fiction vs. Writing Games” by Richard Dansky

A 14 year veteran of the video game industry, Richard Dansky is the Central Clancy Writer for Ubisoft/Red Storm. Named by Gamasutra as one of the top 20 game writers in 2009, he has written for games ranging from OUTLAND to the upcoming SPLINTER CELL: BLACKLIST (which I’m rather looking forward to). Richard is also the author of six novels, including the critically praised Firefly Rain. He lives and works in North Carolina with his wife and their statistically improbable collections of books, scotch and cats. His latest novel is Vaporware.

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ON WRITING FICTION VS. WRITING GAMES

The big difference between writing games and writing fiction is whose story you’re actually telling. When you’re writing fiction, you’re writing a singular, defined narrative. The characters do what you want them to do. They say what you want them to say, when you want them to say it, and the plot moves, one page at a time, toward the conclusion. The reader receives the narrative; the story’s told in linear fashion, and while the reader can adjust the way they receive it by reading out of order – or by skipping the bits with Tom Bombadil and getting straight to the barrow-wights – the text is set on the page. It’s the writer’s story, not the reader’s.

In games, it’s not your story, it’s the player’s. Every piece of writing you do, every word you put on the page isn’t there to advance your story to a singular conclusion. It’s there for the player to pick up and put on and experience, and then to make their own. It sounds counter-intuitive, but it’s true. Without the player actually playing, those story elements sit there inert. They’re pure potential, waiting to be actualized by the player engaging with them. Until then, they just sit in memory, waiting to be triggered by the player’s actions.

What this produces is a very different kind of story. For all the classical genre tropes that so heavily infest game writing, classical storytelling techniques need to be adjusted to allow the player room to play. It’s what I called “the player-shaped hole” at my Game Developers Conference talk a few years ago, the possibility space around what the player might do at any given moment. And even in the most straightforward game, the list of things the player can do at any given moment is surprisingly large. Shoot? Maybe, but even with that there are innumerable choices to be made (weapon, rate of fire, choice of target, etc.). Move? Duck? Jump? Check inventory? Use a healthpack? Fiddle with the controller? All of these things the player can do, things that might be incorporated into their personal story of playing have to be accounted for so that when the player looks back on their experience, it feels like all the choices they made were the right ones at the time. Before it happens, it has to be open; in hindsight, it has to be seamless.

That’s not to say that the gap between writing fiction and writing games is insurmountable, though I confess, as someone who’s done both, it’s often easier to go from the ultimately interactive scenario of game writing to the ultimately dictated scenario of fiction than the other way around. And a look at the writers working both sides of the fence these days – Austin Grossman, Erin Hoffman, Lucien Soulban, Jay Posey, and many more – might even suggest that there’s some potential benefit to laboring in the vineyards of games and learning the hard way to tell stories not your own.

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If you want to learn more about Richard Dansky and his work, be sure to check out his website and follow him on Twitter.

Guest Post: “The Monster Within” by Richard Thomas

Richard Thomas is the author of STARING INTO THE ABYSS (Kraken Press – awesome cover, above), and while I do some catching up on my ever-growing TBR Mountain, I thought it would be a great idea to invite him over to CR to write a little something. He kindly took the time to put together a post (despite my hectic, less-than-speedy correspondence). Check it out…

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“The Monster Within” by Richard Thomas

When we look at classic horror stories, and the need to update them, the way that so many authors today are trying to build on the beasts we all grew up with – werewolves, vampires, demons – I often take a step back, away from these creatures and ask myself what we’re really writing about. Is it a matter of graphic violence, the gore, do we just want to see a creature transform under the full moon, limbs stretching, bones popping, nails pushing through fingertips? Or the evidence of their feeding – necks ripped out, blood drained from pale flesh, muscle and sinew scattered across the forest floor, painting an abstract vision of the grotesque?

What fascinates me more is not a new version of the beast, the boogeyman, the creatures that hide in the shadows, swim in our waters, and hide beneath the earth. What I find the most terrifying, is the monster within us all.

Let me tell you a little story. It’s a true story, at least up to the endings I’m going to give you. When I lived in Wicker Park, a hip neighborhood on the near north side of Chicago, I used to grill out on a little barbeque pit I bought at Home Depot. Maybe $200 total for the gas range, easier to light in a hurry. I make these chicken wings every year for the Super Bowl, a mixture of hot wings, with the standard spices and hot sauces, but with an Asian flair—a bit of teriyaki, soy, ginger and Sriracha. I baste a ten-pound bag of wings overnight, stirring it, sucking the liquid up with a baster, and then squirting it back over the wings. It’s a labor of love.

Well, one year I was standing out in the cold cooking up the wings, after a night of marinating them, off to a party – not the Super Bowl, I know that much, because it was hot out – I kept running back upstairs to grab a cold can of Budweiser. Across the street from us was a block of Section 8 Housing – government property for those that were struggling to get by. I lived with my girlfriend at the time, Lisa, who is now my wife, and the mother of my children. These guys across the street, they were mostly black, a few Hispanics, nobody white. They would stand on the porch, smoke cigarettes, and at night the cars would stop, buy their drugs, and move on. They had kids of course – they were people you know, not monsters. I would nod to them when I walked past – I didn’t bother them, and they didn’t bother me. But I knew they had guns, I knew about the drugs of course – there would be fights, screaming, glass breaking, and the police would show up now and then.

I was about halfway done with the wings, when I ran back up to get a beer. I was only gone about twenty seconds, but in that time the boys across the street had run over, grabbed the giant metal bowl of cooked wings, and disappeared. I stood at the barbeque, a slow rage building. I looked across the street, and they were all gone, not a single person in sight. I’d even given a few of the wings to some kids that had wandered over, not fifteen minutes early, as they’d walked by, saying, “Man, those wings smell GOOD.” I had paused – should I share with them, I had a lot of wings. “Here you go, have one,” I said, holding out the bowl. They each took one and walked away – happy, I thought. I guess not. One was not enough. They took them all.

As I started to walk across the street to go get my wings, I stopped. I asked myself, “What the hell are you doing?” The guns, the violence I’d seen, black eyes and bloody lips, kids crying, police cars. I turned around and went back to the grill, and cooked the other half of my wings. The bastards even kept the metal bowl.

Why did I stop? Because I knew violence, and I knew that it would escalate, that in the end, I might be the one to suffer, my girl. I’d been in fistfights where the only end to the beating is when one person didn’t get back up. I’d seen faces stomped into the curb. I knew that the monster that lived in me would be happy to get into it, to start something – baseball bat in hand, bricks through windows, slashed tires in the dead of night. I looked at my car parked right in front of the house. How long would it last? Not long, I imagined. The ending I imagined, the one I’m making up here, that didn't happen (but could have) involved terror – looking out the window, waiting for my girl to get home, standing outside smoking a cigarette, and then a gun is pushed in my temple, and what then? I’d be lucky with a beating.

A few weeks later, a woman was raped in the gangway between our apartment building and the one next door. This is not fiction – this is true. A man beat her, tore off her clothes, and shoved his hard cock in her most private and delicate area and fucked her until she bled, leaving her crying on the concrete. Above, merely feet away, my girlfriend and I slept soundly, the air conditioner blasting, never hearing a thing. The only evidence on the concrete sidewalk was a dark stain that would never quite fade away, some broken glass, and the idea that violence knows no rules, no laws – random chaos that can descend at any moment, and come home to roost.

This is what scares me – not werewolves, vampires or demons. (Okay, maybe demons a little bit, but that also comes back to religion and some sort of factual evidence.) These are the stories that fascinate me, the Dexters and Hannibals, or even the unnamed evil that lurks in the heart of all men, all women – the desire to hurt another human being, the need for vengeance, to be right at any cost. So quite often, in my stories, it’s not that yeti, the chupacabra, or a zombie. No, it’s the guy next door, drunk, running over a child in the street. It’s a moment of selfishness that results in the death of a wife, and the magic and voodoo that any man would trade to get her back, the love of his life. It’s the feeling of loss, of disintegrating, losing yourself in the madness of a moment in time, that tipping point, something you can never get back. It’s the monster within us all, flawed as we are – that’s what scares me.

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For more, Richard Thomas can be found on Twitter and his website. Here’s the cover (again) and synopsis for Staring Into The Abyss:

As Friedrich Nietzsche said, “Battle not with monsters lest ye become a monster; and if you gaze into the abyss the abyss gazes into you.” In this collection of short stories Richard Thomas shows us in dark, layered prose the human condition in all of its beauty and dysfunction. A man sits in a high tower making tiny, mechanical birds, longing for the day when he might see the sky again. A couple spends an evening in an underground sex club where jealousy and possession are the means of barter. A woman is victimized as a child, and turns that rage and vengeance into a lifelong mission, only to self-destruct, and become exactly what she battled against. A couple hears the echo of the many reasons they’ve stayed together, and the one reason the finally have to part. And a boy deals with a beast that visits him on a nightly basis, not so much a shadow, as a fixture in his home. These 20 stories will take you into the darkness, and sometimes bring you back. But now and then there is no getting out, the lights have faded, the pitch black wrapping around you like a festering blanket of lies. What will you do now? It’s eat or be eaten – so bring a strong stomach and a hearty appetite.

Guest Post: “Influences & Inspirations” by Fredrik Brounéus

Civilian Reader has not featured enough authors from Down Under. Aside from some of the better-known SFF authors from all the way over there (e.g. Helen Lowe), not many people realise that there’s a huge SFF community down there. So, after a very amusing email from their head publicist, I discovered Steam Press (there was a very good joke about sheep and Hobbits). Anyway, I reached out for some guest posts and interviews with some of their authors. I hope to feature more Australian and New Zealand authors on the blog in the coming weeks and months, so watch this space!

To kick things off, I bring you a guest post from Fredrik Brounéus, a Swedish writer who has lived in Dunedin since 2009. His previous books include a children’s thriller and a young adult pop novel, both of which were published in Swedish. His first English-language novel is The Prince of Soul and The Lighthouse.

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“Influences & Inspirations”

Having read some of the excellent Influences & Inspiration guest posts on the Civilian Reader blog, I was inspired to share a piece about one of my own muses: my worries.

I’m the worrying kind. Don’t know if it’s in my genes (my dad – a great worrier; my mom – a legendary Amazon worrier) or just a hobby turned into a habit. As a kid I kept coming up with new stuff to fear – such as the TFM (Toilet Flush Monster), who’d grab me if I didn’t reach the carpet outside the bathroom in time; or the ghoul disguised as a magpies’ nest outside our house, which had me darting past the living room window to get to the kitchen alive.

Guest Post: “Protagonist Ages in Epic Fantasy” by Brian McClellan

Brian McClellan is the author of the upcoming PROMISE OF BLOOD, the first in the Powder Mage Trilogy (Orbit, April 2013). Here he discusses age conventions in Epic Fantasy…

“Protagonist Ages in Epic Fantasy”

The young farm boy is so common in fiction that it's become a cliché. I grew up reading about farm boys, or some other young, naive laborer, in the works of David Eddings, Tad Williams, Robert Jordan, or William Goldman. My favorite movie as a kid – Star Wars – centered around a farm boy who, like those in the books I liked, yearned for adventure and then was booted out of his home in a twist of fate and became savior of the nation! Or country. Or world. Or galaxy.

You get the point.

So why the young farm boy?

Guest Post: “The Worldbuilding of the Four Realms” by Adrian Faulkner

Hot on the heels of last week’s interview, Adrian Faulkner has written a guest post on how he went about creating the setting for his debut urban fantasy novel, The Four Realms.

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In The Four Realms, we spend some time in the world of Venefasia and the city of New Salisbury that lays within it. Connected to our world through various gateways, black market goods and elements of our commerce have found their way in. New Salisbury has a Starbucks and the streets are filled with diesel-chugging lorries and Tuk Tuks. It’s a fun and complex world to write but it started with a very simple image.

I was watching the news or something like the Discovery channel when they were reporting on an Amazon tribe. Apparently this was one of the most remote tribes in the world, with next to no human contact. The report was making a very big deal out of this. And yet, there in the background a small child was running around in a Nike T-Shirt.

Guest Post: “The Not So Secret Origins of the Multiverse” by Ira Nayman

A little while back, I was contacted by Canadian author Ira Nayman about a possible review. As you may know, I am usually wary of self-published works, but Ira amused me, so I asked if he would like to write a little piece to introduce his series.

As I write this, I have published three collections of Alternate Reality News Service (ARNS) stories (Alternate Reality Ain’t What It Used To Be, What Were Once Miracles Are Now Children’s Toys, and Luna for the Lunies!). In addition, I have produced the pilot for a radio series based on stories out of the first two books: “The Weight of Information, Episode One” can be heard, in two parts, on YouTube. Most weeks, at least one new ARNS article appears on my Web site, Les Pages aux Folles; as I tell people at science fiction conventions, if they check my Web site regularly, they can watch the fourth and the fifth ARNS books take shape (they should be finished and collected in print some time next year). I am also have another novel, Welcome to the Multiverse – Sorry for the Inconvenience, which builds on some of the ideas introduced in the Alternate Reality News Service books; fingers crossed, that will also be available next year.

Readers new to my fictional multiverse – which, let’s be honest, will be pretty much all of you – come to a fully formed fictional reality. But, of course, when I originally conceived of the Alternate Reality News Service around six years ago, I had no idea that this was where it would lead.

Influences & Inspirations: ROD REES

Rod Rees is the author of The Demi-Monde series – currently standing at two novels, Winter and Spring (published by Quercus in the UK and William Morrow in the US). With the release of the second novel in the series, I thought it a good time to invite him to talk about his influences and inspirations…

It’s an interesting question: what are the influences and inspirations that inform The Demi-Monde series of books, and it’s one I’ve never really thought about before.

But before I answer the question, maybe I should give a quick synopsis of what the Demi-monde is. It’s a virtual world, designed by the US army to train grunts in the art of urban guerrilla warfare, inhabited by thirty million digital duplicates of real people (none of them aware they are Dupes), who live in five city-states locked in eternal civil war (“the last thing we want is peace breaking out in the Demi-Monde”). It’s planned to be a dystopia so every city-state is overcrowded; linguistically, religiously and ethnically distinct; and led by a coterie of the über-psychopaths from history who, during their lives, visited such misery on humanity. Everything has been done to turn the DM into a living hell.

So what were the inspirations I drew on when designing the world?

Guest Post: The Soul Born Saga

About a year ago (I think), I noticed an author tweet about Kevin Breaux’s Soul Born novel. I’d never heard of it, and was intrigued. I did a little digging, and started following Kevin on Twitter. And he seems like a nice chap. I bought the first novel for the series, and it’s been on my TBR e-pile for a while now (really have to do something about that…). I decided I wanted to know a little bit more about the series, and asked Kevin if he’d like to write a guest post about it. He agreed, and wrote a beast! So, here’s his summary and explanation of what the Soul Born Saga is all about.

[Warning: There are some spoilers in here, but it left me just as intrigued by the novel, so don’t think it does anything to ruin things.]

Guest Post: “Influences & Inspirations” by A. Lee Martinez

With the publication of A Lee Martinez’s next novel imminent (March 6th), I thought it would be a great time to dragoon him into writing about some of his influences and inspirations. Which he did. Which was very nice of him. Read on!

In A Princess of Mars, John Carter of Mars finds himself transported to the savage world of Barsoom (Mars, to you and me). He’s immediately taken prisoner by the race of giant four-armed green Martians. Soon after, he punches a Martian and kills him with one blow. It’s an accident, but it immediately earns him the respect of his captors. That’s how things work on Mars. It’s classic pulp bad-ass-itude, the kind of absurd levels of awesome that were once commonplace in the pages of Weird Tales and other serial magazines. John Carter is a power fantasy, a man who discovers another planet and through heroic resolve gets the princess, saves the planet, builds alliances, and destroys his enemies. Subtlety is not the goal of these stories. War is brutal (and often cartoonishly glorious). Love is as sappy and heartfelt as any romance novel, where people declare undying love merely upon setting eyes upon each other. And outlandish adventure is a way of life.

Guest Post: On “Nimpentoad” by Henry L. Herz

A few days ago, Henry Herz got in touch with me about Nimpentoad, an illustrated book he’d written with his two sons. I was intrigued by the sample of artwork he sent, as well as the story of him writing the book with his kids. So, I asked if he would like to write a guest post about the process.

– Stefan

Nimpentoad is the fantasy story of a courageous and resourceful little Nibling who leads his tribe through the perilous Grunwald forest, overcoming obstacles and encountering strange creatures along the way. This post is about the creative journey of Nimpentoad by a man and his two young sons.

Guest Post: “The Lure of the Stacks”

by Mieneke van der Salm

As some of you may know, I'm an academic librarian. This actually doesn't mean I spend my day surrounded by books, even though the building I work at is assuredly filled with books, since the focus of my work is mainly on Information Services and Information Literacy instruction. However, it does mean that whenever I read an interesting historical fiction or non-fiction book, it's very easy for me to find further information on the subject of said books. And this is a terrible, terrible trap I can tell you.

Guest Post: “On Gritty vs. Heroic Fantasy” by Michael Sullivan

In this week’s guest post, we’re taking a break from our Influences & Inspirations series with Michael Sullivan, author of the superb The Riyria Revelations. Michael offers his thoughts on today’s fantasy scene, his approach to writing his novels, and the value of optimistic stories and heroes.

Influences & Inspirations: HOWARD ANDREW JONES

In this latest instalment of the on going Influences & Inspirations guest post series, Howard Andrew Jones brings us the almost chronological story of his fictional education. If you don’t know of Howard’s work, the authors mentioned within might give you an idea of what to expect from his own fiction, and also some suggestions of how you can expand your own fantasy and historical fictional education.

Guest Post: “Influences & Inspirations” by Anthony Hays

In the latest in our continuing series of guest posts on Influences & Inspirations, Anthony Hays tells us a little bit about what influenced his decision to write a series based on Arthur. The first novel, The Killing Way, is out now through Corvus.

Guest Post: “What is Brave New World?” by Matt Forbeck

This week, I bring you a guest article by Matt Forbeck.

Matt is the author of countless games and many novels and stories. His Magic: The Gathering comic launches from IDW in December, and his 16th novel, Carpathia [a CR Most Anticipated of 2012], hits stores in March. He also has a mad plan called 12 for ’12, in which he plans to write a dozen novels in 2012. His first Kickstarter drive for his Brave New World Roleplaying Game novels hit its first funding level, so he starts writing the first book in January.

So, without further ado, What is Brave New World…?

Coming imminently to CR…

Watch this space… (August 27th 2011)