Category Archives: Uncategorized

— Mark Paxson

When I started my writing journey around 20 years ago, I came up with what I believe was a simple idea for my first novel. Since then, my ideas have become more and more complex. It’s one of the reasons I have struggled with writer’s block — the idea that I cannot see these more complicated stories to completion.

I have a half dozen half-completed novels that I struggle mightily with when I dip my toe back in every now and then.

And so it is today. I’m about to publish a novella and a short story collection. And with those nearing fruition, I started turning towards something else while I wait for that process to wind down.

A couple of days ago, I started reading a story I started in 2015. One that could be, should be, a novel. As I’m reading it, I love what I’ve done with the first 7 or 8 chapters, which span almost 20,000 words. I’m concerned though that maybe there are too many darlings in the story. Ultimately, however, my biggest concern is that I have bitten off more than I can chew with this effort. In two different ways.

First, can I write the path these characters are taking and get to the ending. I think I can do that. It’s the second issue that is problematic.

I start stories with a certain flow, a certain vibe, and then I become convincned that I can’t carry that flow or vibe through to the end. There are things I’m doing with this story that … well … it’s a dystopian story where I can kind of make up the rules as I go. It’s led to some fun stuff, a certain amount of freedom in the telling, but once started, I feel like that fun and freedom and rule-making needs to carry through each chapter. And it’s a hard thing to do.

I’m torn between cutting to the ending, which will leave it as a novella and with a whole lot of holes in the possible story, or gritting my teeth and grinding through a longer version of the tale. Something that has baffled me so far whenever I try to sit down with this story. Which way do I go? I want to tell the full tale, to not skip ahead to the ending. I want to fill those holes up with the kind of vibe I started the story with. But I don’t know if I can do it and, eventually, doing so might lead to this being an epic tale of many, many words. Requiring much more patience and effort than I may be willing to give.

Do you ever have this experience? You start a story. It’s going great and then something gets in the way and you begin to wonder if you can actually pull it off. If you can get your head around all of the details and the possibilities and the realities of the story itself?

If you do … what do you do about it? I’d love to hear your thoughts because I have to figure out how to finish this tale that I really, really like and do it right.

-Berthold Gambrel

H.R.R. Gorman and Peter Martuneac were discussing this the other day, and I thought it was an interesting question for writers. Would you rather a reader:

1. Give up on your book only a little way in (say around 5%) and never say anything about it…
2. Or, they read the whole book, but give it a scathing one-star review?

Personally, I’d prefer the latter, especially if the review can be thorough and document what the reader didn’t like. Reviews that consist of nothing more than “I hate this,” or similar are useless. But if somebody really tore into it, and explained in detail why they didn’t like this character or that plot element… well, that could actually be useful in future writing projects.

What do you think?

I am quite content to be an amateur author and self-publisher of speculative fiction stories. I enjoy everything I do as a writer and publisher, and avoid everything I don’t. And if I don’t make much money doing so, I don’t lose any either. So, I’m happy. But maybe a little bored.

Back when I published my first three novels, in 2015, there seemed to be the potential for something to happen. For lightning to strike. What did I know? In 2022 I do know. And what I know is that I’ll not be missing any buses to fame and fortune if I hold off self-publishing my new novel for a year while I try selling it to a traditional publisher.

A year and a half or so, ago Mark Paxson wrote about his efforts to get his novel The Dime traditionally published, You can read about his journey in these posts:

A New Journey

A New Journey, Part II

The Journey Continues

I’m embarking on that same journey through what is often called “Query Hell” more or less as a lark. Not having been hatched yesterday, I know that my odds of selling my novel are pretty close to zero. However, I think there is something to be said for simply having tried.

One motivating factor for me was that the British SFF publisher Gollancz had, in June, opened a one month long submission window for manuscripts by unagented authors. Since I wrapped up my novel in June, I researched how a manuscript should be formatted, and sent mine out to them, along with a cover letter and synopsis, as requested. I gather that they expected to receive 1,000 plus manuscripts during the month and hope to get back to everyone within 6 to 9 months. Which is fine, since it gives me a nice 6 to 9 month window to find an agent for my novel while I await word of its fate, with no temptation to fold early and self-publish the story.

For agents, I found a list of 141 agents accepting science fiction on the web site reedsy here: https://blog.reedsy.com/literary-agents/science-fiction/

I went down the list, copying only the info on agents who are accepting queries and open to the works of non-published writers. I then viewed the websites of their agencies to see their profiles to get a feel for what they were like and what type of stories they were looking to take on. I found 31 agents that I thought worth querying and rated each as to how promising they struck me. I also noted how they wanted the queries – letter only, letter & 5 pages of the manuscript, or letter and 10 pages, or if they used the query tracker web app instead. All this was the work of a few hours over two days.

Then I researched on how to write a query letter. There are plenty of guides online and on YouTube that tell you not only how to do it, but what not to do as well. Alexa Donna has a number of good YouTube videos that you can find here on the entire process: https://www.youtube.com/c/AlexaDonne/search?query=query%20letter

I wrote a hundred variations of it (just a guess) before settling on my current one.

I also wrote a 1,000 word synopsis of the novel for Gollancz and any agents wanting to see one.

In short, I think I did my homework. Or as much of it as necessary. I was never a lad for homework.

While there is no reason not to send queries out to everyone on the list all at once, I’m only sending out four a month. Sent out the first four yesterday. Better to savor the joy of the journey. And, with having to wait on Gollancz before I could self-publish the book anyway, I figure that I might as well spread out the query process, renewing my hope every month with a new batch of query letters. We’ll see how that goes…

Though I read Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness in high school, half a century ago, one image remains…

“The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green as to be almost black, fringed with white surf, ran straight, like a ruled line… we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn’t even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush… In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech—and nothing happened. Nothing could happen.”

I am quite sure Conrad was thinking about querying when he created this image.. Ah, the romance!

All that remains is for me to mutter, “The horror. The horror” six months from now.

I know that readers of this blog have gone through the same process, and no doubt some have succeeded in finding publishers. And there are probably others who are considering giving it a try. So how did you find the experience? Do you have any suggestions for others who would follow you down this path?

There is a slim chance I might speak at a local writing event in November. Slim because I’m terrified of public speaking. But a chance because I am committed to overcoming my fears.

I have an idea for what I would want to talk about, but I’m curious. If you had to fill an hour, including time for questions, and could talk about anything related to writing, what would you want to talk about?

— Mark Paxson

I’m reading a book recently published by F.L. Rose, one of my favorite indie writers. The book is called The Point of Us. I’m waiting to complete it before I reach any conclusions about the quality of the story, but I’m pretty certain it’s gonna be a good one. I’m gonna skip the description of what the story is and go right to my question for this post.

One of the main characters in the story is a writer, a pretty successful novelist. At some point, there is a discussion of writers and why they do what they do and the conclusion is … that it is all about vanity.

So … that’s my question. Do we do this for vanity? Do we slave over our stories and put them out into the world for vanity’s sake?

I’m of mixed minds on this. On the one hand, I write strictly for my own internal reasons. I don’t believe it has anything to do with vanity. I write because I want to see if I can do it. Turn an idea that forms in my head into a story with a beginning, middle and end, and is … readable. I don’t know. I write because I want to and I want to see that idea through to the final words.

But then … when I post it on my blog or publish something via the Amazon monolith, why am I doing that? The story hasn’t been blessed by the gatekeepers. No agent picked it up. No publisher. I am swimming free and clear of the gatekeepers and still putting my words out there into the wide, wide world … and why am I doing that?

Why do you do it?

In our last video chat we began a conversation about why we read. Maybe a better question for us indie authors is why do we publish?

Years ago, before technology turned the publishing world upside down, there were vanity publishers. Places a writer could go to pay thousands of dollars to have their book “published,” which typically meant getting boxes and boxes of copies of their books that the authors than had to try to figure out how to sell themselves.

Now, vanity publishers have been replaced with KDP and Ingram Spark and SmashWords and countless other platforms that allow us to publish our books with almost no cost up front. (And there are still companies like the old-fashioned vanity publishers — places that promise to publish your book for a small fee of several thousands of dollars and then leave you hanging with no support, no marketing, no nothing.)

The question remains though, regardless of how easy it has become to publish, why do we do it?

For me, I want to reach readers and hope to grow my audience and get more people reading my stories. But why? What does that mean to me if they do? Why should it matter? Particularly in the modern world of indie publishing, where there are so many books getting published it’s virtually impossible to be seen and to be read by anybody other than those who already know you.

I think there’s some truth to F.L. Rose’s thoughts as expressed in The Point of Us. There is some vanity involved. The first definition of “vanity” is “excessive pride in or admiration of one’s own appearance or achievements.”

When I read that definition, I begin to reconsider the idea that I publish for vanity. I’m far from “excessive pride in or admiration” of my writing. But I typically do like the end result. My biggest reason for publishing and sharing my stories is to … just put them out there and see if readers like what I’ve come up with. But still, there is a feeling of confirmation when I get a positive review, there is still a good feeling in the cockles of my heart when somebody has something good to say about something I’ve written. If I were to publish and none of those good things were ever said or shared with me … if I just published into a void without reaction or response … I most likely would stop publishing. And if I stopped publishing, I’d stop writing. Because at the end of the day, I write to share and to get a reaction.

Is that vanity?

Is that why we write and why we publish?

Last month I posted about Google’s offer to convert the ebooks published in their Play Store into audiobooks for free. Unlike most audio books that use human narrators, these books would be generated using Google’s AI technology to convert the text into the spoken word. Google suggested that it would best for non-fiction books, but I decided to convert my fiction books anyway, since I don’t think my style of writing demands a lot of dramatic reading. And it was likely the only way I could enter the popular audiobook market. It has now been a month; so how has this experiment fared?

I offer my ebook catalog of 11 titles for free, and since Google was offering to create my audiobooks for free, I was happy to offer my audiobooks for free as well. In May 2022, the first month of their availability, with 11 titles available, I sold 434 audiobooks, in addition to 293 ebooks.

Ebooks first. My peak sales of ebooks to date on Google was 836 copies in October 2021 and they have been declining since then – 643, 633, 459, 409, 303, 390, so that May’s 293 sales total is more or less in line with that gradual decline. The audiobooks didn’t seem to have affected ebook sales one way or another.

As for audiobooks, well, with 434 books sold in one month with no advertising – I only posted their availability on my seldom visited blog two weeks ago – I have to believe that I’ve tapped into a whole new market. Only one audiobook has a rating, and though it is a 5 star rating, the jury is still out on how the AI generated narration fares with audiobook listeners. However, from my own listening, I am optimistic that they are good enough now, and will only get better as time goes on, since Google said that they will update the files automatically as their technology improves.

My standard is “Good Enough,” which is to say that all things considered, something is indeed good enough, even if it may be a couple percentage points short of perfection. If you hold yourself to a higher standard, then perhaps Google’s AI generated audiobooks may not be up to your standard. That said, I have listened to samples of audiobooks with a voice actor who uses different voices for different characters, and found it annoying. It seems that my golden standard for audiobooks is my dad reading bedtime stories to us as kids. I do know that the AI does a better job of reading books than I did with my own kids. So I think my audiobooks are good enough.

To take advantage of this technology, you have to offer your ebooks on the Google Play Store, though of course, you can charge money for them, and for the audiobooks as well, if that is your policy. Selling books for free is a magnitude or two easier than selling them for money, so your results will vary.

— Mark Paxson

I finished writing something and have pondered what to move on to next. This month started with me committed to writing a sequel to the novel I published almost a year ago. That particular story is told in first person from the perspective of several different characters.

The story I just completed is told in first person from one character’s perspective. About half way through, I decided to change it to third person and get some other character’s in the mix, to broaden the story a bit. But then I decided to keep in in first person because I wanted the story to be that character’s story and only hers. As a result, it makes for a much more minimalist of a story. We’ll see what people think.

Now I’m moving on to what’s next. I’ve decided to shelve the sequel above for another project. This morning I spent some time at a local books and music festival. I talked with a woman who has spent her life gathering historical tidbits of her ancestors and has spent the last five years putting those bits into stories. Kathy Lynne Marshall has written a handful of books in those five years. She includes information and resources about how to gather historical information about people from the past. So … I’m reading The Mystery of Margaret Booker now. About her great-great-great-great-great grandmother. Born a slave who walked to freedom 30 years later.

And an interesting thing happened when I got to the first page of the story. She tells it in first person. She is allowing Margaret to tell her own story in her voice.

That conversation and seeing the first person approach caused me to shift gears away from the sequel. I’m moving on to something that has been an objective for the last 4-5 years. A story about my grandmother, which I may have mentioned here a post or two ago. When I tried to launch the story back then, it was in third person. Which just seemed natural to me. How can I tell a story in first person from Grandma’s perspective? I can. Or at least I’m going to try.

More and more, it seems my stories are told in first person. My first novel wasn’t. Many of my short stories aren’t either. Most are told in third person, I believe. But lately, it seems like first person is the way to go. There is something about first person that I like. It’s easier to adopt a particular type of voice in first person. It’s easier to get inside a character’s head and see what they’re thinking and how they’re feeling.

But I wonder if that’s a good thing. Choosing a point of view or perspective because it makes the writing easier doesn’t necessarily make for a better story. Go back to that piece I just finishedd. I have no doubt that if I switched to third person and told the story from the perspective from multiple characters, the story would be more complex, with more layers. It’s what happened with my first novel — originally written in first person, but completely re-written in third person to allow for more details and more characters to have a place in the story. It definitely was a better story because of that change.

Occasionally, people ask how I decide POV for a story. I believe we’ve discussed it on video chats. My answer will always be … it depends. I still believe that, but I wonder what other writers think. How do you decide on the POV, or POVs, in which you’re going to tell a story? How do you decide between first person and third person? Is it a decision you can even describe? Because for me … it not only depends, it just kind of happens.