Writing 101 • How I Did It, by Karl K. Gallagher

I started writing my first novel in 2013. 

After some work by a wonderful editor, I sent it off to a publisher I liked and set to work on the sequel. Nine months later I received the rejection note. I didn’t want to lose years waiting for other publishers to make up their minds, so I found an artist to do a cover for it, learned how to do proper formatting, and put it up on Amazon in December 2015.

It sold about two thousand copies over the next four months. It’s still selling a trickle of copies, and the omnibus of the whole trilogy sells in a somewhat larger trickle. I’d shown up at what I call ‘the end of the gold rush.’

When Kindle publishing started, a bunch of people bought e-readers and there weren’t many e-books out there for them to enjoy, so any good book would have desperate readers grabbing copies. I made a sale before I’d told anyone about posting it; even my mother (I was trying to fix a formatting problem).

With so much demand, more writers piled in, and trad publishers began to budge on letting their books have electronic editions. Writers reclaimed the rights to their backlists and released e-book versions. Publishers followed along.

At some point, I’m guessing 2016 or 2017, this new e-book supply exceeded the demand. Writers were now competing for readers’ attention. Bowker estimates over three million books were published in 2023, five/sixths of them indie, and that doesn’t include the e-book-only publications. (1)

How am I doing in this flood of new books? I’m treading water. I’m up to twelve novels in three different series and two story collections. My Amazon sales are declining. Part of that is I haven’t kept up with the advertising algorithm changes, so my ads aren’t bringing in as many sales. Someday I need to spend a bunch of time revising my ads, but I’d rather be writing.

There are other ways I’ve been bringing in money:

• I have a Substack where I post short stories and samples from my novels in progress. The paid subscribers are providing me more support than Amazon.
  
  
• Local craft fairs, comic shows, and science fiction conventions are chances to sell in person. I wouldn’t recommend this to someone with only a few books, but with fourteen titles I have a better chance to pitch a book that matches someone’s interests. Not every event is worth selling at—make sure you match the theme.
  
  
• Running a Kickstarter let me fund covers for my two story collections, and was a chance to sell higher-end books (hardcovers of my first trilogy) to long-time readers. One supporter went for the $300 pledge to pick a topic for me to write a story about.
  
  

Can I quit my day job? No. But I’m making a modest profit, or put another way, subsidizing my habit of going to science fiction conventions. My most recent book was #7 in a nine-book space opera series. My hope is that when the series is finished, readers burned by GRRM and other unfinished series will pick it up, so once #9 is out there will be a big sales spike.

Do I recommend doing this? Nah. It’s an experiment, one that’s taking years at my writing speed, and I don’t know if it will work. Indie publishing is like that.

So what do I recommend?

First, I advise against chasing trad pub contracts. The big publishing companies are in the mating dinosaurs phase of their lifecycle—merging and dying. You don’t want to commit your career to a publisher who may be bankrupt or auctioned off in a few years. As their cash flow constricts, the big houses are making their contracts nastier, demanding extra rights and sometimes not allowing termination clauses. Kris Rusch is a long-time writer who’s tracked these trends at her site (2).

For the multinational corporations that own the big publishing houses, the real value of a book may not be its sales, but valuing it as an intellectual property asset and then depreciating it to balance income in other parts of the corporation (3). If that’s what they want a book for, they’re not going to put much effort into marketing it.

The people who do get trad publishing contracts tend to fall into the buckets of:

• Those with large followings who can be counted on to buy the book. They’d probably be better off going with Kickstarter.
  
  
• People with good connections to agents, editors, or publishers. Nobody coming to a blog post for advice is in this category.
  
  
• Anyone who’s the proper demographic or ideological flavor-of-the-month in Manhattan. A fickle game, alas.
  
  
• Someone with a one-in-a-million superb book. Good luck.
  
  

If not trad, what do I recommend?

First, get good at writing. Write a lot of words. Fanfic (under a pen name!) is a great writing exercise. Blog. Write essays. Do stories for practice. Before I started a novel, I’d written probably over a hundred-thousand words of RPG adventures, white papers, operations orders, and wargame scenarios. It’s a skill. You improve it by practicing.

When you’re good enough (alas, only readers can tell you, and you have to publish stuff for them to give feedback on), write something to be published. Find an editor, maybe more than one. You need someone who can spot problems with the story structure and one who can spot typos, continuity errors, etc. If you find them in the same person, bless them. 

You need a good artist to do a book cover. Might be you, if you have the skill. The cover shouldn’t just be a pretty picture. It has to say “This is a book of sub-genre X.” If it looks like a mystery but it’s actually space opera, you will get unhappy readers.

Amazon is the big gorilla of publishing. You can go directly there. Doing that gives you a link you can start promoting on social media and with advertising. How to do that? Sorry, I’m not good at that part of the game.

There are other outfits you can put your book on (Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, etc.) but they won’t sell as much as Amazon. If you go Amazon exclusive, your book is available to Kindle Unlimited readers. Some months I get more from KU than from sales; usually it’s about a third of my Amazon revenue. If Amazon ever cancels my account, I will be screwed, so it’s a gamble.

A mailing list (Substack, MailChimp, many others) will let you keep in touch with your core readers, the people who can be counted onto buy all your books. Make yourself visible—social media, conventions, in-person sales. Recruiting readers one at a time is slow, but gets you people who will read everything you write. Substack has the advantage that instead of charging you for sending emails, they offer subscribers a chance to pay you (while Substack takes a cut, of course).

The Amazon algorithm rewards publishing fast. I’ve seen writers succeed by putting out a new book every month. Some authors have teamed up to write in shared universes so they can jointly feed the algorithm. I don’t write fast enough to do that, but if you can do it without burning out, Amazon will reward you.

Kickstarter is a good way to bypass Amazon and the other e-book platforms, to contact readers directly. An “event” lets you attract attention. You can have a range of pledge levels from cheap e-books to autographed hardcover sets, to bring in readers with different incomes. You can also offer huge pledge levels to hook “whales” among your fans.

If you’re going “wide” (not exclusive to Amazon), you can build a website of your own to sell books directly. That’s more labor, but you keep the highest percentage that way. I know an indie writer who’s become so successful that her husband quit his day job to handle shipping for her books.

For an introvert like me, selling in person is hard. I got better with some advice from fellow author Chris Schmitz (4). This is another thing practice helps with. Meeting readers in person is another way to add to your following.

It’s not easy being writer. It’s not a great way to make money unless you’re both good and lucky. But if you work hard, you can do your part in changing that three million new books a year to four million new books a year. 

If you want to see what I’ve done, you can check out my books on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/stores/Karl-K-Gallagher/author/B0195ZEOO8

And my short stories on Substack:

https://gallagherstories.substack.com/t/shortstory

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Footnotes:

1. New books stat: https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/96468-self-publishing-s-output-and-infuence-continue-to-grow.html
   
   
2. Kris Rusch: https://kriswrites.com/new-contracts-and-dealbreakers/
   
   
3. Depreciation: https://deanwesleysmith.com/advanced-magic-bakery-chapter-five/
   
   
4. Live selling: https://authorchristopherdschmitz.myshopify.com/products/sell-more-books-at-live-events-how-to-sell-more-books-at-conventions-shows-signings-events-and-beyond?variant=45077611413760

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Karl K. Gallagher is a systems engineer, currently performing data analysis for a major aerospace company. In the past he calculated trajectories for a commercial launch rocket start-up, operated satellites as a US Air Force officer, and selected orbits for government and commercial satellites. Karl lives in Minnesota with his family.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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ATTENTION, AUTHORS!

Are you a successful self-published or non-trad published author? Have you had a self-published, small-press published, or other non-traditional-published book released within the last three years? Are you willing to share what you learned from the experience with other writers? If so, we’d like to hear from you, and to share your story with our readers.

Query first, please, to stupefyingstories@gmail.com, subject “Success Story.”

We’re most interested in hearing what worked for you, and what didn’t. Is there one thing you did that really worked well, and that you’d recommend that others do? Conversely, is there something you did that you really wish you hadn’t, and would caution others to avoid?

Yes, of course you can use this opportunity to shamelessly promote yourself and your own books. 

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Writing 101 • Understanding the Publishing Ecosystem: an RFP

Continued from: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
Supplemental reading: How to Get Rich Quick Writing Big Hit Bestsellers!

RFP: It’s engineer-speak for “Call for Submissions”

Rather than continuing to charge ahead with what’s turned into a series of posts, I’ve decided to pause, take a step back, and really think about where we’re going with this.

Understand, I came into publishing in the 1980s, when the objective was to make enough pro market short story sales to draw the attention of a traditional publisher, and then to land a book deal. I have had such book deals, for mass-market paperback, trade paperback, and hardcover books with major publishers, and have had my books win awards and make bestseller lists, at a time when a mid-list book sold 50- to 80,000 copies and a bestseller moved six figures or more.

In 2000 I got fed up with dealing with traditional publishers and went back into working in software development, where I was mostly happy for the next 20 years. In 2010 we launched Rampant Loon Press and Stupefying Stories, in part out of intellectual curiosity and a desire to explore this brave new world of electronic publishing (which always made more sense to me than did the wasteful economics of trad publishing), and in larger part to help promote the careers of up-and-coming writers.

In the 20-teens we did moderately well, publishing e-books that sometimes flopped but more often sold, and sometimes sold thousands of copies. To my surprise I learned that a title that moved a few thousand copies was a bestseller, in this 21st century small-press e-book world, and that every time I thought I had the market all figured out, the rules changed.

The rules really changed with the COVID pandemic.

Since the pandemic, while we have released books that have gotten great reviews and even been short-listed for major awards—and when I compare the hardcover of The Princess Scout to that original first issue of Stupefying Stories, I am astonished by how rapidly the quality of the books we can produce has evolved—

We have not had a bestseller since the pandemic. 

The closest thing we have to a bestseller in the current catalog is The Midnight Ground, by Eric Dontigney, and we released that one before the pandemic. It’s getting a lot of attention now, but it had a long, sputtering, slow-burning fuse before it finally took off. The lessons we learned from this one are idiosyncratic, and not readily applicable to anything else.  

Hence this RFP. I am not looking for fiction submissions at this time. What I am looking for are success stories. So my questions are:

• Have you self-published or small-press published a book within the past three years?
  
  
• Has the book sold well? (No need to disclose numbers.)
  
  
• Are you willing to share what you learned from your experience with other writers?
  
  
• Can you think of one thing you did that really paid off and that you’d recommend others do?
  
  
• Can you think of one thing you did that you really wish you hadn’t and want to warn others off of doing?
  
  

Again, remembering that the entire point of Stupefying Stories is to help promote the careers of up-and-coming writers, I am looking for success stories, not OMFG failure stories. (I have enough of those of my own already, thank you.) Ideally, I’d like like to run a series of guest columns, along the lines of—

 

If this idea gets your interest, drop me a line at stupefyingstories@gmail.com, and let’s talk.

Thanks,
Bruce Bethke
Executive Cat-Herder in Chief, Stupefying Stories 

P. S. Yes, of course you can use your guest column to shamelessly promote your own book. 

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In science fiction circles Bruce Bethke is best known either for his 1980 short story, “Cyberpunk,” his 1995 Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel, Headcrash, or lately, as the editor and publisher of Stupefying Stories. What very few people in the SF world have known about him until recently is that he actually began his career in the music industry, as a member of the design team that developed the MIDI interface and the Finale music notation engine (among other things), but spent most of his career in supercomputer software R&D, doing work that was absolutely fascinating to do but almost impossible to explain to anyone not already fluent in Old High Unix and well-grounded in massively parallel processor architectures, Fourier transformations, and computational fluid dynamics.

Now retired, he runs Rampant Loon Press, just for the sheer love of genre fiction and the short story form.

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Writing 101 • Understanding the Publishing Ecosystem, Part 3

Continued from: Part 1 | Part 2
Supplemental reading: How to Get Rich Quick Writing Big Hit Bestsellers!

This is where things get sticky.

I would have a lot more confidence in what I’m about to say if we’d had a big hit bestseller recently. We’ve had hit bestsellers. We’ve had books that made a plethora of Top 10 lists, been nominated for awards, and sold thousands of copies.

But not within the last three years. And here in StreamingWorld, more than three years ago is ancient history. That’s, like, forever ago.

I put the link to How to Get Rich Quick Writing Big Hit Bestsellers! in Part 2 with a certain sense of snark and irony. There are a lot of good ideas in that column, if you don’t mind that it’s dripping with cynicism. But I wrote that column 15 months ago, and parts of it are already obsolete. The idea of building your readership by serializing your novel on Kindle Vella, for example—

A few months later Amazon cancelled that program. You say it was a crucial part of your marketing plan? Tough. It’s gone. tb;ss. Too bad, so sad.

The first crucial thing to remember is that Amazon doesn’t care. 

If they cared, they wouldn’t sell all the A.I.-generated slop that’s already out there, with more being added every day.

The second crucial thing to remember is that it’s far easier to sell people more of what they already like than to get them to take a chance on something truly new.

On this foundation is the mighty Amazon commerce empire built. But in fairness, we can’t blame this on Amazon. Publishers have always used the, “If you liked [that], you’ll love [this]!” sales pitch. As the blind poet Homer wandered ancient Greece, I have to imagine he was preceded by an advance man shouting, “If you liked The Iliad, you’ll love The Odyssey!”

§

Take another look, if you will, at my inverted funnels sketch. It’s easy to see it as a stack of challenges, frustrations, and obstacles, through which you must fight uphill every step of the way to reach The Land of Happy Readers. Every writer who undertakes this quest sooner or later starts to think, “There must be an easier way! Some short cut no one else has discovered…”

What isn’t on the sketch is this: that at every step along the way there are hordes of Gríma Wormtongues, all eager to tell you that yes, there is an easier way, the shortcut does exist, and they will be happy to show you exactly what and where it is—

All you need to do is buy their self-help book. Or enroll in their webinar. Or hire them to write your book blurbs. The secret to success lies is Amazon advertising. No, it’s in Facebook advertising. No, it’s BookTok! It’s in posting videos on social media! It’s in learning to master the arcane secrets of Amazon Kindle keywords and having a great quote from Kirkus Reviews!

Did you know you have to buy book reviews from Kirkus? And if you want to quote their review in your advertising, that costs you even more?

The secret is, there is no secret shortcut to success. There is no foolproof way to game the system. No amount of money spent on advertising and courting the favor of social media influencers can push a bad book uphill. The big publishers have proven that repeatedly, every time they’ve bought a novel by a “celebrity”—unless you want to do what Putnam did with William Shatner’s TekWar series, and hire Ron Goulart to actually write the books.

I’ll assume you don’t have the resources to do either: to hire a well-known actor to be the public face of your books, or to hire someone else to actually write them. But know this: you can spend a lot of your own money trying to chase shortcuts and push your book uphill, if you listen to all the Grímas you will meet along the way.

§

The Best Option: Traditional Publishing

The best option for most authors remains what it has been for decades: to try to get a book deal with a major publishing house. They’re the ones with the resources to pay authors significant on-signing advances; to buy professional cover art and editorial and book design services; and to buy ad placements on Amazon. Getting a deal with a major publishing house is also the ticket to getting physical books into those few brick-and-mortar bookstores as still exist. If you can get a book deal with a major publisher, it’s still the way to go.

However, seeking a book deal with a major publishing house is not for the impatient, and the aperture of entry is tighter than a frog’s sphincter. Also, once you’ve landed a book deal there are still a multitude of ways in which it can go to Hell in a handbasket, and I’ve explored most of them.

MY ADVICE: Never ask a publisher what they want to see. The answer invariably is either something just like whatever was their most recent big bestseller, or else something just like whatever was a competitor's most recent and even bigger bestseller. You can save time and answer that question yourself, with about five minutes’ research.

Never ask an editor what they want to see. They’ll just tell you what their publisher told them to look for.

Never ask an agent what they want to see. They’ll just parrot whatever they heard from the last editor or publisher they spoke with most recently.

The Worst Option: Totally DIY Self-Publishing

Have you ever been wandering around Netflix or Amazon Prime late at night and decided to take a chance on a movie you’d never heard of before, because the poster art and description looked promising? Then, once you started to watch, the credits were something like—

Starring
MICHAEL SCHWARTZ

Directed by
MICHAEL SCHWARTZ

Produced by
MICHAEL SCHWARTZ

Screenplay by
MICHAEL SCHWARTZ

Based on a story by
MICHAEL SCHWARTZ

Catering by
MICHAEL SCHWARTZ

Mr. Schwartz’s wardrobe by
MICHAEL SCHWARTZ

Have you ever seen such a movie that was actually good? (Okay, Bambi Meets Godzilla. That’s one.) Or even watched such a movie for more than a few minutes before giving up on it?

This is what you’re up against when you decide to bypass everything and go the totally DIY route, straight from yourself to The World: the perception that anything published this way is very likely to be total crap. That perception may be wrong. Your book might be the one brilliant exception; the Bambi Meets Godzilla, as it were. But so many have trod this path before you and so thoroughly befouled it that you’re never going to make more than a few pity sales, no matter how much of your own money you hand over to all the Grímas you meet along the way who are eager to assure you that you are doing the right thing, and you’re sure to succeed, if only you take your spending to the next level and give them more.

MY ADVICE: This is the worst option. Don’t do it. All you will accomplish is to waste your time, money, and energy, and fray the nerves of your friends and relatives. Don’t do it!

And don’t think saying “Vince Flynn” is a meaningful rebuttal. (Self-pub evangelists love to do that.) As happens I have a signed, first edition, first-printing copy of Term Limits right here, and know quite a bit about how Flynn parlayed that self-published book into a lucrative deal with Pocket Books and NY Times Bestsellerdom. Suffice to say, it was a one-of-a-kind never-to-be-repeated exception, not a model you can emulate.

The Chaotic Good Option: Assisted Self-Publishing

 

And on this note I’m out of time to write today, so I guess this is going to roll over into a fourth column after all.  See you tomorrow!

~brb

 

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In science fiction circles Bruce Bethke is best known either for his 1980 short story, “Cyberpunk,” his 1995 Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel, Headcrash, or lately, as the editor and publisher of Stupefying Stories. What very few people in the SF world have known about him until recently is that he actually began his career in the music industry, as a member of the design team that developed the MIDI interface and the Finale music notation engine (among other things), but spent most of his career in supercomputer software R&D, doing work that was absolutely fascinating to do but almost impossible to explain to anyone not already fluent in Old High Unix and well-grounded in massively parallel processor architectures, Fourier transformations, and computational fluid dynamics.

Now retired, he runs Rampant Loon Press, just for the sheer love of genre fiction and the short story form.

 

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Writing 101 • Understanding the Publishing Ecosystem, Part 2

Continued from Part 1

Funny thing about time. It always moves forward. 

Never slows, never pauses—if anything, it seems to accelerate as you get older—and absolutely never flows backward.

I sometimes wonder if our perception of the passage of time is at the root of our urge to read and write science fiction and fantasy. We long to imagine what it might be like to live in the future, or to have lived in the past, or frankly, to live anywhere else except in the boring and grubby confines of our personal here and now. We want to imagine living a life beyond our biologically allotted fourscore and ten.

I’m pretty sure our perception of time is what’s responsible for the catastrophic / apocalyptic /survivalist themes the science fiction. Unable to imagine what the future might really hold, some writers say, “Aw, screw it,” and decide to destroy the world instead, so they can start over again with telling stories set in the Stone Age.

Slightly attenuated, this impulse might explain how steampunk was able to erase the 20^th Century and try to start science fiction all over again, beginning in the 19^th Century, with Jules Verne.

§

This column has proven more difficult to write than I’d expected. I left off last week with a promised confrontation with the Great Boss Monster, Guardian of The Critical Chokepoint.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I feel as if I’m biting the hand that’s fed us. Longtime readers know Stupefying Stories simply would not exist were it not for that first Kindle I bought for my late wife, when she first began chemotherapy and found her customary book bag too heavy to carry. That Kindle was a godsend for her, and on the RLP side of the house Amazon literally opened the world for us, making it possible for us to reach readers we had no hope of ever reaching before.

(And I will add, right from the start, dealing with Kindle Direct Publishing was always orders of magnitude better than dealing directly with Barnes & Noble Nook or Apple iBook publishing.)

Then again, the business relationship is essentially parasitic. Amazon’s business model seems predicated on convincing enormous numbers of people to pour their time, energy, blood, sweat, toil and tears into developing new markets and creating new products that make Amazon’s platform more valuable. Then, once a new market has been proven to exist, they change the rules and make it impossible for third parties to make a profit—at least, not without giving Amazon a bigger cut.

It’s difficult to think objectively about Amazon without becoming cynical. I base this not just on my long experience with Rampant Loon Press, but on our even longer experience with K&B Booksellers. If you are lucky enough to get in early on some new opportunity, they will do a good job of feigning being your partner, at first. Eventually, though, they will either undercut you and devour your business, or else simply kill off the program entirely, if they don’t find it profitable enough. If it’s a program you built your business around: tough.

The essential thing to remember is that Amazon doesn’t care what they sell. They only care that they sell, and skim a percentage off the top. They’re a conduit to customers, that’s all. Amazon would sell used baby diapers and outdated gray-market medical supplies if they could—and in fact they have, but that’s another story.

The problem for the rest of us is that Amazon has had years in which to develop their conduit, and they have gotten very, very good at it. As far as fiction publishers are concerned, Amazon is the world, and the world is Amazon’s. There are some fringe distribution channels left, but only because Amazon has not yet found it worthwhile to devour them. Whenever publishers and publishing-adjacent people get together, one topic keeps coming up: When is the pendulum going to swing back? When will we start to go back to the way things were before Amazon?

Answers: never, and we’re not. Time keeps moving forward, remember? That friendly neighborhood indie bookstore you remember so fondly? It’s not coming back. Spinner racks in convenience stories loaded with mass-market paperbacks? Not coming back. Magazine racks and newsstands? Nope.

You are in Streaming World now, and if it isn’t electronic and online, it’s not going to sell in more than boutique numbers. Movie industry people will complain about this long and loud, if you let them. Now, when a new movie is released, it’s not just competing against all the other new releases coming out at about the same time. It’s competing against almost every other movie ever made, now streaming on Amazon Prime.

Ditto for books. We writers have always sensed this, that we’re competing with our predecessors, which perhaps explains why each generation of writers seems to truly hate the generation that came before it. Mark Twain hated James Fennimore Cooper, after all. But now, you’re not just competing against all the other books currently on the shelves in your local bookstore. You’re competing against practically every book ever published.

So how do you break through that enormous inert mass?

§

Remember my inverted funnel sketch from Part 1? To recap, at the top is The World, the wonderful place where readers live. The World is huge, and thanks to the Internet in general and Amazon in particular, it’s much larger and more densely populated than ever before.

At the bottom is Author Space, which actually is a subset of The World, but it’s hard to express that in a two-dimensional pencil sketch. Thanks to the Internet, Author Space is also much more densely populated than ever before, and I can tell you from firsthand experience that there are a lot of writers in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and South America who can tell an engaging story much better than can someone who is fresh out of an American college with a newly minted BA or MFA in Creative Writing. My current theory as to why this is so is that the latter tend to be stuck firmly in Author Space, with minds so loaded full of received wisdom about writing qua writing that they have forgotten that their purpose is to entertain readers by telling them a story.

Emphasize those words. Entertain. Readers.

Basic theory tells us that communication consists of three elements:

• A transmitter (you)
• Sending information (your idea)
• To a receiver (the readers)

All else is noise, filtering, attenuation, encoding protocols, or other characteristics of the transmitter’s chosen medium. Without receivers, all else is meaningless. Or to paraphrase Mark Twain: ‘Writing alone purely for your own pleasure is like having sex alone purely for your own pleasure, and a practice you should stop before reaching adulthood.’

So the first step in breaking through to The World is to consider your orientation. Are you looking at this challenge from the perspective of Author Space concerns, or from the point of view of Readers?

If you’ve been focusing on Author Space concerns and finding yourself going nowhere, perhaps you need to adjust your frame of reference.

§

An aside before we continue: another thing hard to convey in a 2D pencil sketch are the 4^th dimensions of both Author Space and The World. Out in The World, most people seem to live inside a bubble about ten years long. Five years ago is ancient history. (“You mean, like, before the Pandemic?”) Five years in the future too far away to imagine. I sometimes think ten years might even be optimistic, and six years more accurate.

In Author Space, on the other hand, writers tend to live inside much larger temporal envelopes. They read; they remember. Writers tend to take a longer view of history, and a more far-sighted view of the future. But they also forget: most other people don’t.

Both populations are constantly turning over. Writers, I’ve observed, have a half-life of about ten years, between the time they decide to get serious about their craft and the time they get fed up and quit. The reading population turns over much more quickly: about six years, I’d say, between the time they decide to get serious about reading and the time their tastes have ossified; they’ve found their favorite authors and styles and aren’t open to trying anything new unless it’s very much like something they already know and like. The readers of today are not the same readers of even five years ago. Whenever publishing-adjacent people ask: When is the pendulum going to swing back? When will we start to go back to the way things were before Amazon?  

It can’t. There is no “there” to go back to. Those readers are gone. They’ve aged out of the marketplace and been replaced. And for the new readers who have come in to replace the old ones, the way things are now is the way things have always been.

Geez, you’d think people who routinely write about orbital mechanics and relativistic time-dilation would grasp that.

§

 

Thus we return to The Pass of Ultimate Glory or Failure, to find ourselves standing once more before The Critical Chokepoint, considering how best to deal with its guardian, The Great Boss Monster, Amazonas.

And at this point we must pause, because this planned 750-word post has already ballooned up to 1,500 words and I’m nowhere the end, and yet out of time to write today. I’ll try to wrap it up tomorrow, then.

In the meantime, your homework assignment is to read this:

How to Get Rich Quick Writing Big Hit Bestsellers!

 

...to be concluded...

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In science fiction circles Bruce Bethke is best known either for his 1980 short story, “Cyberpunk,” his 1995 Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel, Headcrash, or lately, as the editor and publisher of Stupefying Stories. What very few people in the SF world have known about him until recently is that he actually began his career in the music industry, as a member of the design team that developed the MIDI interface and the Finale music notation engine (among other things), but spent most of his career in supercomputer software R&D, doing work that was absolutely fascinating to do but almost impossible to explain to anyone not already fluent in Old High Unix and well-grounded in massively parallel processor architectures, Fourier transformations, and computational fluid dynamics.

Now retired, he runs Rampant Loon Press, just for the sheer love of genre fiction and the short story form.

Read More

Writing 101 • Understanding the Publishing Ecosystem

I know I said I was going to let Writing 101 rest a while, but a few recent conversations have made this post seem necessary. Lately I’ve run into quite a few young writers who seem to be lacking very rudimentary knowledge of how the publishing business works.

I wish we could meet in person. If we could do that, in a room with a big white board and a nice assortment of colored markers, I could lay it all out for you in a single image, and then we could have a conversation about it. Since we don’t have that luxury, you’ll have to settle for this crude and hastily sketched-out scribble, with some comments.

Think of publishing as an inverted funnel: a stack of ascending and ever narrower chokepoints. I use an inverted funnel because this way a.) it looks less like Dante’s map of Hell, and b.) at the top, you find—

THE WORLD

The world is a wonderful place. It’s big, and beautiful, and full of readers, who are the people you want to reach. If you’re not writing with the objective of reaching readers, you are setting yourself up for frustration from the start.

The World is actually much bigger than it used to be. When I began to write for publication, “The World” basically meant the North American English-language market, with some potential crossover into the U.K. market. Now, it truly does mean the world, as in the entire population of the planet Earth. This presents both challenges and opportunities.

The foremost challenge for you as a writer is to fight your way up through this stack of ever-tighter funnels, to get your work out into The World and into the hands of the readers who live there. All else is subsidiary to this goal.

THE CRITICAL CHOKEPOINT

This is in hot pink because I couldn’t find a way to make it flash in some even worse eyesore of a color. We’ll get back to this in a minute, but think of this as the final challenge: the Boss Monster you will face on the last step your hero’s journey.

This boss monster has a name, and it’s name is Amazon, and it will pretend to be your friend, but really, it wants to drink your blood.

PUBLISHERS

This should be more of a wide, smeared, and cloudy bar, as there are a lot of different publishers of different sizes and with different agendas, but making it a smaller bar emphasizes the constricting nature of the funnel. There are a few large publishers, who can afford to pay authors large advances and put major marketing muscle behind new book releases, but there are fewer of these every day, as companies merge and consolidate. There are a plethora of smaller publishers, many of whom serve some religious or quasi-religious agenda, or else that are more directly coupled with their ownership, and thus are typically short on resources and funding.

With the exception of religious and/or grant-funded/non-profit publishers, all publishers work for the owners of their organizations and have the same job. It is to acquire content and put it out into the world, with the intention of moving a large enough number of copies of that content to make a profit by doing so. This means publishers have a built-in aversion to taking risks, and a bias towards making conservative choices when acquiring content. They want content they can get as cheaply as possible, and that will require as little production and marketing expenditure as possible, while immediately appealing to the largest clearly identified audience known.

The green dashed lines represent paths to the world that publishers used to have available to them—e.g., through independent distributors, direct sales, or independent bookstores—but that are increasingly more difficult to use now, if not completely defunct. Most publishers now depend on passing through the Critical Chokepoint to reach the World.

EDITORS

Editors work for publishers. There are many different kinds of editors, but the ones we are interested in are the ones who have the power to acquire content for their publisher. Their success depends on their being able to present their publisher with content that can be published profitably, on-time and on or under budget, with as little time and money as possible being invested into making it publishable. Therefore editors have a built-in bias towards considering submissions that “look professional” and buying work that aligns with their publisher’s current marketing goals. 

AGENTS

Writers have a lot of misconceptions about literary agents. You don’t need to have an agent to break into publishing. True, some agents do function as pre-filters for editors, as certain editors and publishers will work only with literary agents. Basically, though, if you are not already famous, either for your previous books or for your accomplishments in some other field, this doesn’t apply to you. You are unlikely to attract the attention of one of these kinds of agents.

At heart, reputable literary agents are essentially commissioned salespeople. They make their money by taking a percentage off the top when they sell an author’s work to a publisher. As such, they have a built-in bias towards representing works they believe they can move very quickly, for as much cash up-front as possible—which means novels, not short stories. Some reputable agents will handle shorter work, but usually just as a courtesy, and only for someone for whom they are also selling novels.

I use the qualifier “reputable” because there are a lot of people out there who claim to be agents but really are parasites, feeding off the hopes and dreams of aspiring writers, and it is really easy to attract the attention of these kinds of agents. Remember: the money always flows to the writer. Any so-called agent who wants money from you in order to represent you is a creature to be avoided.

AUTHORS (YOU)

At last, we come to the place where most writers begin: with thinking about themselves and their writing. By inverting the funnel, I hope this helps you to think of publishing as a game, through which you, the writer, must keep striving to level-up until you at last achieve victory.

I made the Authors cloud messy and chaotic because for most writers, it is. A lot of aspiring authors write like mad, but go nowhere. Some get stuck in loops and keep repeating the same self-defeating mistakes. Looking at the drawing now, I should have drawn at least a few lines that went straight to ground, because I’ve seen so many authors do that. 

Some authors believe they need an Agent to take them to the next level, but in the early stages of your writing career, you don’t. At this stage, the best an agent can do for you is to help you negotiate better contract terms, if you have written a novel and succeeded in getting a publisher interested in it. For most writers, though, time spent chasing after signing with an agent is time wasted.

For most aspiring writers (speaking in sweeping generalities again), the best path forward is to work on developing good relationships with Editors. Don’t get too attached to any particular one, as editors serve at the pleasure of their publishers, who serve at the pleasure of their owners, who can change their marketing direction at the merest whim of the Great Boss Monster. But in general, learning to work well with editors is the most useful skill you can develop early in your writing career. Editors are typically the gatekeepers controlling access to publishers.

I have seen writers bypass editors and go straight to Publishers. It doesn’t happen often, and it succeeds even less often, but to my astonishment, I have seen it work, once in a rare while. I have even seen writers bypass publishers entirely and go directly to The World, but that succeeds even less often.

The greatest danger at this level of the game is this. An author will look at their ever-growing collection of form rejections; look at all the traps and obstacles still lying in wait before them, and especially at all the conservative biases built into the game—

[N.B. I don’t mean “conservative” in the political or social sense. In this context it means, “What’s the safe choice? What’s going to be most profitable for the least effort? What is everyone else doing?” Depending on the zeitgeist, “conservative” might very well mean publishing yet another fangporn vampire romance with an LGBTQ+ protagonist.]

—and declare, “SCREW THIS! I’LL BECOME MY OWN PUBLISHER!”

Whereupon they hurl themselves with all their might into The Critical Chokepoint…

And the Great Boss Monster feasts on their blood.

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BUT WAIT! THERE IS YET CAUSE FOR HOPE!

COMING NEXT:
“The Great Boss Monster, and What Lies Beyond”

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In science fiction circles Bruce Bethke is best known either for his 1980 short story, “Cyberpunk,” his 1995 Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel, Headcrash, or lately, as the editor and publisher of Stupefying Stories. What very few people in the SF world have known about him until recently is that he actually began his career in the music industry, as a member of the design team that developed the MIDI interface and the Finale music notation engine (among other things), but spent most of his career in supercomputer software R&D, doing work that was absolutely fascinating to do but almost impossible to explain to anyone not already fluent in Old High Unix and well-grounded in massively parallel processor architectures, Fourier transformations, and computational fluid dynamics.

Now retired, he runs Rampant Loon Press, just for the sheer love of genre fiction and the short story form.

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Writing 101 • Part 2: Mary Sue, Totally Badass Survivalist

One of the few benefits of being my age is that it helps you to develop a sense of historical perspective.

Most people, it increasingly seems to me, live inside a temporal bubble that is at best about ten years long. To such people five years ago is ancient history, and thus irrelevant, while five years in the future is so far away as to be impossible to imagine.

Ironic, then, that so many science fiction writers spend so much of their time and energy trying to envision the distant future, while completely stuck in the bubble of their own contemporary reality. 

You will find that the business of writing and publishing science fiction abounds in such ironies. 

Science fiction perhaps has an undeserved reputation for being a visionary literature. This is in large part a function of the genre’s commercial history. Before World War II, science fiction lived mostly in the pages of cheap and ephemeral pulp magazines. The mass-market paperback book simply did not exist in the American market before May, 1939. 

During the war, paper rationing limited the production of books, while at the same time the military services found it necessary to teach people by the millions to read. After the war, then, when rationing was at last lifted, there followed an enormous demand for new books, but A.I. not having been invented yet, the demand for new books far outpaced the supply of new content.

The solution was obvious. Companies like Street & Smith already owned the copyrights to the enormous amounts of pulp science fiction they’d published in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. All they had to do was bundle the stuff up in new packages, slap on new covers with exciting new ad copy, and put it on the book racks.

Given that, science fiction’s reputation as a visionary literature was easy to come by. To become known as a visionary, all you need to do is make a ton of prognostications, and then, ten or twenty years later, cherry-pick through them to find the ones that held up and say, “See?! I was right!!!”

If you make enough predictions, some are bound to come true, eventually.

§

With this historical perspective comes another pair of conjoined realizations: that this thing we call “science fiction” existed long before Hugo Gernsback named it or John W. Campbell Jr. began to relentlessly promote it as being something new, different, and visionary, and that the trends in the literature and the business of publishing it are cyclical, and approximately generational. Boom and bust; optimism and pessimism; utopian and dystopian; rockets and ray-guns action or introspective and thoughtful inaction: whatever you think science fiction is now, stick around five years, and it will change. In ten years it will be the diametric opposite of whatever you think it is today. In twenty years, what’s fashionable now will be back again, but in slightly different form.

It rarely comes back in exactly the same form, unless it’s self-consciously being presented as retro style. Writers can’t help but reflect the times in which they live. This is what makes so much Golden Age science fiction so uncomfortable to read now. It’s not that our knowledge of science has advanced. (Although I do chortle at the memory of an early Isaac Asimov story I once read in which the hero, faced with the challenge of having to get his spaceship through the asteroid belt, decides to save time and fuel by flying up and over the asteroid belt, and then cutting the engines and coasting back down to the plane of the ecliptic.) 

It’s the characters who make us uncomfortable, with the way they speak and act in ways that unconsciously reflect the mores, attitudes, and assumptions of people who lived more than fifty years ago.

But again, this is cyclical, approximately generational, and what is unacceptably outré in one decade can become just fine in the next. Difficult as it may be to believe, there was a time when all correctly thinking people in the SF business criticized the original Star Trek, as being “too militaristic.” This is why the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation was so bad. They were trying to make the Enterprise D “a ship of peace.”

It wasn’t until the second season, when Roddenberry stepped back from hands-on control of the scripts, Riker grew a beard and a pair of cojones, and the new show runners introduced the Borg, that Star Trek became the juggernaut franchise we know today.

§

SF tropes and trends are cyclical. Themes and ideas come and go, and then come back again. Utopian SF will be a hot category for a while, but then it gives way to dark and dystopian visions, as, let’s face it, utopian novels are always boring and preachy, and have been at least since William Dean Howells wrote A Traveler from Altruria.

One trend that always comes back around again is The End Of The World (As We Know It). We SF fans and writers do love our deity-free eschatons. I’m not sure why. Sometimes I think it’s simply a failure of imagination. We find that we can’t imagine living in a world more than five or ten years in the future, so we decide to blow the damned thing up and start over in the stone age. It was either that or adopt the Star Trek “California über alles” approach, and envision a future in which Western liberal civilization and values have ascended directly to the stars, mostly intact and unchanged and with only a few insignificant bumps in the road along the way. 

So we reboot the world. It doesn’t matter how. “How” is always a reflection of the most popular “We’re doomed!” scenario du jour. When H. G. Wells wrote The War of the Worlds, it was at a time when novels depicting England being invaded, usually by Germans, but sometimes by the Russians, Prussians, or French, were popular and sold well. Wells, though, made his invaders Martians, and gave them all kinds of horrific new weapons that even the Germans didn’t have yet. That was what made The War of the Worlds an enduring masterpiece: the grotesque horror of people being slaughtered by tripods with heat rays or captured by monstrous aliens who wanted to drink their blood. That made it live far past its time. I mean, for comparison’s sake, just try to find a copy of George Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking now.

We reboot the world. We don’t actually destroy it. (Unless we also give the elect a way to escape and carry on the struggle, as in Greg Bear’s The Forge of God.) We just want to shock contemporary civilization to a flat line and start over. It doesn’t matter how; how is always a function of what’s currently in fashion. In the 1940s and 1950s there were a lot of atomic wars and bioweapon plagues in science fiction; later, as flying saucer hysteria took hold, we were invaded by yet more aliens. Towards the end of the 1960s global ecological catastrophes became very popular end-of-the-world scenarios, and in the 1970s there was a period when what Larry Niven termed “Big Rock Hits Earth” books were in vogue, resulting in novels like Lucifer’s Hammer and Shiva Descending. “Bioweapon plague that causes people to turn into homicidal zombies” seems to be an unstoppable two-fer: no matter how tired you personally may be of seeing such stories, the SF-consuming world, collectively, isn’t. At least, not yet.

In all such end-of-the-world tropes, there is an embedded epicycle. At first, the scenario is seemingly a new and fresh idea, and it results in some thoughtful and interesting books: e.g., Alas, Babylon, by Pat Frank (atomic war); Earth Abides, by George R. Stewart (plague); I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson (zombies); The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham (GMO plants run amok)…

[Seriously, if you’ve never read The Day of the Triffids, you owe it to yourself to do so. The novel is much better than any of the films that have been based on it.]

…The Postman, by David Brin (combined EMP and bioweapon attack)…

And then along comes a Mary Sue,* who looks at the shattered ruins of this post-apocalyptic landscape, and thinks, “Wow. Wouldn’t it be cool to live in this world?!”

[ * Or maybe a Kevin Costner ]

§

There was a poster that was very popular in the early 1970s. There were many variations on it, as the text, being adapted from Psalm 23, wasn’t copyrightable, but it usually said something like this:

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of
the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for I
am the meanest motherfucker in the valley.”

That, in a single sentence, is the essence of the Mary Sue, Survivalist story. The author has projected his (typically his, but not always*) idealized self into a survival scenario, and then gamed out exactly what he would pack along and all the ways in which he would be prepared to handily defeat all the obstacles that he, being the author, will put in his own way. The result is typically a story that is half testosterone-soaked macho chest-thumping, half REI outdoor gear catalog copy, with a big scoop of gun-porn thrown in on top.

[* On the other hand, if the protagonist is female, the author will likely substitute a familiar such as a small dragon, telepathic mountain lion, or some other cryptid in lieu of all the guns.]

Half this, half that, but all idealized self-image, absurdly over-competent and over-prepared to deal with the line of straw-man menaces the author has lined up for them to knock over. (Said menaces, by the way, will all politely wait their turns to attack the Mary Sue character one at a time, until the final boss fight with the biggest menace of all.)

Survival situation stories can be exciting. Survival stories can be dramatic. Survival stories can be revealing tests of character, with the ultimate stake—life itself—on the line. 

But in the Mary Sue Survivalist story, the character enjoys the survival situation, thrives, succeeds, and dominates in it, and doesn’t want to get out of it!

Another ironic aside: I’ve noticed that the authors who like to write these kinds of stories tend to be people who in real life can’t get through a hotel breakfast buffet line without putting their lives at risk. As in, “One entire plate just for bacon? Dude, that can’t be healthy!”   

§

One final sidebar: when I got to this line in the critique—

I think he’d be loaded down and I think there might be stuff attached to the baby carriage, too.

I thought of Lone Wolf and Cub. If you’ve never read the manga, or watched any of the movies or TV programs based on it, Lone Wolf and Cub is the story of a disgraced samurai who is making his way across Tokugawa shogunate-era Japan, pushing a baby cart carrying his infant son. It’s a dangerous journey, as they’re both under death sentences and being pursued by a plethora of bad guys, but Ogami has a secret weapon: the baby cart. It’s been tricked-out and turned into a rolling arsenal that puts the Batmobile to shame!

Good stuff. Bloody, violent, and ridiculously over the top, but if you’re a fan of samurai movies or manga, it’s definitely worth checking out. 

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Writing 101 • Sidebar: Hello, Mary Sue, Goodbye, Credibility

There’s a character you should all know and dread: “Lieutenant Mary Sue Je’nerik, the youngest cadet ever to make commissioned rank in Star Fleet.”

At least, such is the lore. I first encountered Mary Sue in a piece of Star Trek fanfic that was being passed around amongst my writer friends that was so badly written, I had to believe it was intentional parody. Since then, though, I have encountered Mary Sue many, many, many more times.

Oh, her name routinely changes, as does her description and her backstory. But Mary Sue is always a character who is meant to be taken quite seriously, by the poor benighted soul who has been selected by a sadistic caprice of the Muses to write her latest adventure. Mary Sue is typically young, attractive, smart, healthy and athletic, and impossibly over-competent at anything she tries. She is always the most intelligent and best-informed person in the room, and never wrong about anything—or at least, not about anything important. If she does have a physical flaw, it’s always something so obvious as to serve more as a constant reminder of her innate virtue than as a meaningful impediment to her success, and it’s also something that can be overcome or brushed aside in the final scene. She never faces any truly serious challenges; her greatest character flaw is frustration, that the people around her fail to recognize her innate superiority and defer to her obviously brilliant leadership. At the climax of the plot, when all seems lost, she is the one who invariably saves the day (ship|world|whatever), by coming up with a remarkable insight or noticing a tiny detail that all the far more experienced people around her who have been dealing with this sort of thing all their lives have inexplicably overlooked.

Okay, let’s be honest. Odds are you knew a real-life Mary Sue in high school. And you hated her with a passion hotter than the flames of Hell.

§

Despite the name, Mary Sue is not always female. I’ve seen plenty of male-presenting Y-chromosome-having masculine Mary Sues in the slush pile over the years, and come to think of it, quite a few Transgender Sues lately. In all cases, though, the core defining characteristics remain the same. Mary Sue is always the most intelligent and best-informed person in the room; healthy and athletic (unless an obvious physical flaw is part of the virtue veneer, like Cinderella’s tattered dress); and in the end, always right, no matter how much the authority figures in the story have disbelieved them up to this point.

Sorry, folks. I guess this means that in a lot of regenerations, Doctor Who is pretty much a total Mary Sue.

I once made the mistake of sending an encouraging personal rejection to an author who’d submitted a paranormal thriller that was pretty good, except that the protagonist, despite being a middle-aged man, was a Mary Sue. The author punished me for my error in judgment by sending me even more stories featuring the same protagonist, walking through a series of formulaic paint-by-numbers paranormal encounters while surrounded by a constantly changing cast of disposable secondary characters who may as well have been wearing red shirts. After awhile, I actually found myself rooting for the monsters in the author’s stories, as the recurring protagonist was such an insufferable conceited ass.

One begins to wonder: what compels an author to write such a character? Or worse, to write such a character over and over again, all the while believing this character to be good and interesting to anyone else?

The most charitable answer I can come up with is that the writer is projecting their idealized self-image into the story, or perhaps, an idealized image of themselves and their handful of closest friends. This, admittedly, is something most of us start out doing, when we first begin to write fiction in our childhood or early teenage years, but it’s a practice you should leave behind when you graduate from high school.

§

Mary Sue is on my mind this morning because of my recent work on this book.

As I was developing the cover and testing it out on my focus group, the Stupefying Stories Secret Inner Circle, one of the members had this to say:

“One of my big pet peeves is when people in survival situations in science fiction books have impossibly small backpacks that could not possibly carry enough supplies to last more than a short day hike. I think he’d be loaded down and I think there might be stuff attached to the baby carriage, too. I mean, his backpack isn’t even full.”

This comment turned into a lengthy conversation that went on… and on… and on some more…

Eventually, though, we got down to the crux of the matter, which was that his real objection was to the way that David Bruce Banner was portrayed in the 1970s TV series, The Incredible Hulk. 

 

“What really annoyed me about The Incredible Hulk was how David Banner had a little daypack that was about a third full and he knew he was gonna be traveling for months or years. Not to mention he knew he’d need frequent changes of clothes. I bet he couldn’t even fit a pair of jeans in that backpack of his.”

BRB: “Which would have been a real problem, considering how often he ripped his pants to shreds.”

“I mean, look at him! Not even a damned jacket!”

BRB: “Well, it is California.”

Ignoring for the moment the inherent silliness of expecting rationality in a TV series—one may as well ask how it was that no matter where they went in the galaxy, the Enterprise always arrived there in the daytime. You never saw a moment like this:

KIRK: “Uhura! Contact the Leptonian High Council!”

UHURA: “I’m trying to, sir, but all I get is a recorded message telling me they’re closed for the weekend and to please call back again on Grabtharsday during normal business hours.”

—I can assure you that no one ever plans to get into a survival situation. Survival situations come about because someone failed to plan, or did something stupid, or something that could never possibly fail, failed. As with “Hold my beer and watch this,” survival situations are usually preceded by statements like:

“The weather’s nice. We won’t need our raincoats.”

“Those little clouds? We’ll be across the bay before the storm hits.”

“There’s a gas station in Furnace Creek. We don’t need to stop to fill up now.”

“Ignore that. The engine always makes that noise.”

“The Russians are pushovers. We won’t need our winter uniforms.”

Or else by no words at all, but merely by being secure in the knowledge that that crucial bronze casting in the heart of the ship’s steering gear has never, ever, failed, not once, not on any boat, ever.

People don’t plan to get into survival situations. Survival situations come about because something has happened that is outside the range of reasonable human planning. If you could plan for going into a survival situation, you could make a better plan and plan to be somewhere else, and not in that situation in the first place.

So, as regards The Day We Said Goodbye to the Birds: Joe didn’t plan to be in this situation. The BART system broke down. He had to bail out and continue on-foot with just his daughter, her stroller, and what he had in the passenger car with him for what he’d expected to be a short trip. He’d never planned to end up on foot in Oakland, in the middle of a riot. 

Of such elements is good dramatic tension made…

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Uh-oh. I’m out of time and still have not yet finished what I set out to do this morning, which was to connect the Mary Sue character trope to prepper and survivalist science fiction. I guess this column will continue into a Part 2, tomorrow. 

~brb

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Writing 101 • Sidebar: Visualization Techniques

Sometimes, when I’m having trouble writing a scene, I’ll take a step back from trying to express it in words and just try to see the moment in my mind’s eye. Where is this taking place? Who’s in the picture? What are they doing? What important things are in the picture? What’s about to happen to those people or those things?

Sometimes an image comes readily to mind. Sometimes an image comes to mind so readily I need to think about it a little further, until I realize which old movie or TV show my subconscious lifted the image from, and then I discard it. There’s good money to be made in recycling old TV tropes, but not interesting writing to be done.

Sometimes it really helps me to find an old photo or an image that seems to crystallize something about the scene I’m trying to write or the people who are in it. I used to find old issues of National Geographic really helpful for this, as the photography was always eye-opening and mind-expanding. (I’m still trying to come up with a story idea that’s worthy of the incredible images published in “Zaire River: Lifeline for a Nation,” in the November 1991 issue.)

More recently, as magazines with good photography have gone extinct, I’ve found it helpful to type a few key words into Google search, and then to browse through the images the search returns. I can also find it helpful to go out to a stock art library and do the same, trying to find one or two images that really capture some key element of the story I’m trying to tell and the people who are in it.

Sometimes, this is really helpful.

Other times, it can lead to spending hours taking deep dives down unproductive rabbit holes.

And once in a while, I find an image that completely derails my train of thought, sends me off in an entirely different direction, and starts rewriting my characters’ dialog before I’ve even written it.

For example, recently I was trying to begin writing a completely new space opera tale; a serious story; one that played shamelessly to all the grand heroic action tropes and traditions of pulp sci-fi and yet (this is the nearly impossible part) owed absolutely nothing to Star Trek, Star Wars, or Starship Troopers. In my mind this story opened on the day before the commissioning ceremony for the space fleet’s latest and most powerful flagship, as a group of high-ranking officers gathered to conduct the final inspection. To help me visualize the scene I searched through the Adobe stock art library to find a few images that would really help me to crystallize the scene in my mind.

And that’s when everything went to Hell…

Well, damn. It looks like I’m back to writing satire again.

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