Category: Writing

story is the music of books

“If iTunes store decouples “music” from “albums”, what will future publishers decouple from “books”? What’s the “music” equivalent?” – Kathy Sierra, on Twitter

“For tech books, safari already does do some decoupling; I grab just chapters and subsections all the time off of safari” – Matt Bowen, in response

“but that’s my question… the word “chapter” (or section) does imply fine-granularity (like “song”), but what’s the “music”?” – Kathy Sierra

The music is the story, for fiction, and the knowledge, for non-fiction.  (Generally.)  It is the part of the “book” that remains the same, regardless of format or edition: Whether you read the story in a hardback or a paperback, from an eReader or an iPhone, have it read to you by a professional storyteller or a friend, and for this analogy even when you watch an adaptation for stage or screen or as a video game (or other interactive entertainment), there is a core thing that remains the same.  Whether you get your information from a technical manual, a lecture, a powerpoint presentation, an instructional video, or direct mentorship, there is a core of knowledge that remains the same.  This is the music, this is the melody, of what books provide.

iTunes is not what decoupled “music” from “albums” – music existed prior to albums, as sheet music and as live performance, at the least.  Even after the advent of the album, the concert experience -unless the live playlist strictly matched the album’s- decoupled music from the confines of the album, often mixing, mashing, and altering the music with every event.  The single separated out a song or two at a time (sometimes several “singles” released over time for each album), but if singles weren’t doing the sort of decoupling you imply iTunes does, then neither does iTunes.  That sounds like more of the job of the device; the record player, the walkman, the iPod, the live performer, which decouples the music from the medium (record, tape, MP3, memory/sheet-music) to deliver it to you.

So now I’m wondering what you meant, rather than pursuing the interesting part of the line of thought, about story:  Did you mean how iTunes delivers music electronically, without a physical container (MP3 vs CD), or did you mean how iTunes allows you to buy individual tracks rather than the groups of tracks known as ‘albums’, or did you mean something else I haven’t understood?  Hrm.  There are plenty of electronic book sales channels out there that deliver the book without need for the physical container, and most of them have stripped away everything but the raw text (current eBook formatting is atrocious), delivering only the story and none of the window dressing (think the big album artwork on a record, and the glossy, embossed dust jacket on a big paperback – it’s not the book, it’s not the album, it’s marketing material).

But then again, there’s this interesting thought about ‘story is to book as music is to album’ that seems very interesting to me…  And the other idea -that Matt brought up- of ‘chapter is to book as song is to album’, and how for some types of writing (poetry, technical manuals) it makes sense for people to want/buy individual tracks/chapters apart from the book as a whole, but then there’s most long-form fiction, and linear and narrative non-fiction, where that doesn’t work.  Do you want just chapter 24 of the latest techno-thriller?  Just the first and the final chapter of a mystery?  Or are you here for the story? Some thoughts:

Voice acting & performance is to audio book as page layout & cover design is to paper book.

A concert is to an album as a reading is to a book.

The easy to use, high-capacity MP3 player with custom playlists and ‘shuffle’ changed the way we, as consumers, take in music.  I see electronic reading (including blogs & RSS aggregators, dedicated eReaders & smart phones, and Twitter & facebook status updates) driving toward shorter and shorter ‘chunks’ of words; often part of a longer narrative, but easily broken into bite-size pieces.  RSS aggregators are like shuffle (and playlists, if you categorize your feeds) for online writing.  Twitter mixes all the conversations of everyone you follow together in the same way – narrative & story have not disappeared, they’ve just been chunked and shuffled.  People are micro-blogging fiction, writing whole novels on Twitter and on facebook pages (and in Japan, novels via SMS, written and read without ever leaving phones), and have you heard of the growth of ‘flash fiction‘?  The alteration of the landscape of story, which is the music a book plays in your mind, has been going on all around you, and it is already decoupled from paper, from ‘book’.  Writers are changing the way they write stories, readers are changing the way they consume stories, (and not just stories, but knowledge as well, as evidenced by most of the feeds being non-fiction, and the success of services like Safari (which Matt mentioned) breaking non-fiction into individually-available chapters and sections) it’s been going on for years, and the paper book isn’t going to die because of it – we’re simply beginning to have a richer, broader landscape that comes to mind when we think of ‘book’.

Ignorance of professional writing

“Love it when I run face-first into my own ignorance. Will work on another blog post, soon, about something new I just learned I didn’t know.” – me, on Twitter

So, as I sometimes do, I followed someone’s intriguing link to the ISBW site a little while ago.  I haven’t yet been intrigued enough by what I saw there to want to actually listen to the thing.  (I basically stopped listening to podcasts 18 months ago, when I switched from working a boring day job that gave me 40+ hours/week that didn’t engage my mind or give me anything else to listen to … to being a full-time creative.  I can’t listen to podcasts while I work on my podcasts, or while I’m reading (books, blogs, news, et cetera), or while I’m writing, or while my wife is home (because I’d rather not be ignoring her during the few hours we have together, awake, most weekdays), and that doesn’t leave any regular (ie: available every week) time for listening.)

Anyway, scrolling back through the ISBW posts (half of which … I don’t get, because I never listened to Mur’s book, I guess) there was one that included the following:

The fabulous tool Story Tracker is now available for your iPhone/touch. I used this tool a lot when I was actively working on short stories for many markets, and it’s invaluable. It takes a lot of work on the front end (listing your stories, the details, sales, rejections, income made, trunked status, etc, not to mention all the details for the markets you submit to) but once you have all the information it’s so very useful. Highly recommended. (Thanks to Tobias Buckell for blogging about it and alerting me to its existence. You’re reading Toby’s blog, right? RIGHT?)

Immediately my awareness of my ignorance was expanded.  That paragraph is like a list of things I didn’t know.  First:  There’s software specifically for authors’ tracking of their short story submissions?  How many authors need such a software for it to constitute enough a market that people are making iPhone apps for them?  I followed the links to the software’s site and the blog in question and in the comments on the blog post discovered two more software products and two additional web services that perform the same function.  Seriously?  How many authors have so complex a situation re: short story submissions that there are (at least) 3 different softwares and 2 different web services to address that need?  A couple other things here I don’t know: What is “trunked status”?  Who is Tobias Buckell?

In the blog post, by way of explaining why the iPhone app wouldn’t work very well for him, Buckell said “I have an excel spreadsheet with 650+ submission entries on it, tracking 130+ short stories or so, I don’t see sitting in place and keying these in by hand into it.”  — What stood out to me first about this sentence was my inability to think of anything near enough places that even publish short stories to accommodate that quantity of submissions.  I had no idea.  On the Duotrope site they “list 2580 current markets, plus 1246 closed/dead/removed/DNQ markets” – where by ‘markets’ they mean … places that publish short stories (or poetry), I assume.  The list of current markets for fiction includes 2121 listings, right now.  I had no idea.

In addition to which … 130+ short stories?  I’ve written 2 or 3 dozen short stories in my life.  Of course, that might have to do with the fact that I didn’t know there were thousands of potential publishers for short fiction, which implies even more readers – someone must be buying what those publishers are putting out, right?  I had no idea.  I’m aware of maybe a handful of places (read: publications) I might go to if I wanted to read short stories, myself.  Not dozens, not hundreds, certainly not thousands.  As far as I knew, from my personal experience as a reader, short stories were vastly in the minority -both in terms of number of stories and in volume of writing overall- compared to other available fiction, perhaps a fraction of a percent.  Since I didn’t read much short fiction, and wasn’t aware of much short fiction, I’ve never spent much time thinking about writing short fiction.

(Of course, until I started reading through industry reports (ie: after I started my own publishing company, in 2007) I had no idea that fiction was only a small fraction of the overall book market.  Fiction gets all the visibility, most of the press, and most of the big advances…  I just hadn’t thought about it.  I’ve never been very interested in writing non-fiction, so I just didn’t look into it beyond by interests as a reader.)

I just … I guess it comes down to approaching writing not as a profession, but as a calling.  Instead of ever bothering to look into what other writers do to make a living, what markets exist to sell the written word into and what they’re looking for and will pay for, I just wrote what I wanted to write.  I wrote the stories that I had to tell, in the way they wanted to be told.  I wasn’t trying to write to make money, to build a career, or even just to follow in the footsteps of other writers.  So many other people who label themselves as writers are on such a different path from me.  They want such different things.  They write all the time, they write with specific markets in mind, they are aware of and follow genre conventions, they collaborate with each other, they build their “platforms”…  I noticed recently that there is a further distinction being made, automatically by people classifying themselves as such – that people who are writing blogs, writing journalism, writing short fiction for specific markets, writing non-fiction, working on most any commercial writing… they say they are a “writer” (or that they are an aspiring writer).  I am an author.  I’m not in this to write.  Writing isn’t the point.  It’s all about the stories, the ideas.

Also, my perspective on publishing itself is a bit skewed, since I know I can put together a collection of short stories and publish it as soon as I’m happy with it.  I can publish even an individual short story as an “eBook” to the kindle and via Smashwords (which is apparently about to start selling through to B&N and its subsidiaries) as soon as any individual story is done, and not wait until I have enough for a book.  I could even put together chapbooks and sell them by hand & through my site, if I had the urge to sell physical copies of short works – individually or as collections not large enough to warrant becoming a paperback.  I hadn’t thought much about submitting short stories to other publishers, since publishing them myself is so straightforward.  I don’t even really know how much money people are able to make from writing and selling short stories to those thousands of “markets” … and I think I’m only wondering it in the context of “how many copies do I have to personally fail to sell for selling to someone else to make sense,” since I’m not really motivated by money – just curious how the different models compare.  Maybe I’ll look into it, now that I know that the short-fiction-publishing world is so much larger and more complex than I’d suspected.  Perhaps I’ll even start writing (and/or reading) more short fiction.  But I have trouble holding back finished writing because it’s the industry standard way to do things, so … I doubt I’ll ever have use for the sort of softwares discussed above.

Creativity, Commercialism, ?

It isn’t that I want to be intentionally anti-Commercial, that I want to produce art so-much-for-art’s-sake that it has no chance of being sold. Rather, I want to avoid creating art for the sake of money; I don’t want to be creating simply to sell it, because I need the money (which I do; don’t get me wrong about that), but to be creating what I am inspired to, to follow my heart, mind, & dreams – and then hope that others share my heart enough to want it hanging on their walls.  (And then maybe enough that they’ll pay money to put it there.)

It’s difficult.  Partially because I do need the money, so the commercial aspect, the idea that I’m making art I’m going to try to sell in order to buy groceries, is constantly in mind.  When I get in the neighborhood of thoughts like ‘what can I paint that will sell?’ and ‘what sort of art do people want?’ I tend to get stuck.  Like writer’s block, but for artists.  Well, like writer’s block for writers whose block stems from not wanting to “sell out,” anyway.

I have no interest in freelancing, or in getting a job as an illustrator, designer, journalist, pro-blogger, or any other such thing.  I don’t want to write the same book over and over again (ie: formulaic fiction, or process-wise, most non-fiction).  I don’t want to paint/create the same image over and over again.  I know, yes, verily I know, that these are core ways writers and artists are able to “establish” themselves and their “style” and to build a career.  To build a base of buyers who want to read another one like the last one you wrote, who are comfortable with your art because although each swirly tree is different, they can at least count on you to still be painting swirly trees the next time they need something for their walls.  And buyers would be nice.  Repeat buyers would be even better (and I have a few), but I nearly never want to be painting the same thing I’ve painted before.

((Technically, my not-very-publicly stated policy on the subject of re-creating an original work is that the base price multiplier for each successive recreation doubles.  I have a formula (an occasionally altered one, but fairly consistent for the last few years) which accounts for a work’s size and quality to determine price.  It is intentionally tweaked to give quirky prices.  I like them.  But imagine for recreations that formula is multiplied by 2n (where n is the number of times I’ve been asked to reproduce the image).  If created in quick succession, at the same size and quality, prices would quickly rise, say from $60 for the original to $120 for the second, $240 for the 3rd, $480 for the 4th, $960 for the 5th, $1920 for the 6th, $3840 for the 7th, and very quickly someone asking for the 8th copy is paying 128 times the cost of just buying something different instead.  Luckily, people don’t often ask me to paint something I’ve done before – and when they do, I simply tell them how much it would cost & see if they want it that much.))

But it is hard even to paint something new, if all I can think about is wanting to avoid painting something that won’t sell, because the bills just keep coming, even when I have a couple of dry sales months.  I’ve even been stalling a little, lately, in working on my next novel, which is intentionally an experiment in writing a formulaic (or at least recognizable) zombie novel – because although I’ve come up with a story I want to tell (and in my research of what makes a formulaic zombie novel fit, I’ve discovered that my novel won’t be as formulaic as I’d hoped… which is part of the problem), both writing a novel in reaction to people’s negative reaction to my last one (which is what motivated this experiment in the first place) and knowing before I start that my experiment will be a failure (ie: my novel will fail to be a cookie-cutter zombie novel, or to follow the ‘rules’ of commercial fiction) give me pause in pursuing it.  Even though it’s a story I want to tell, a book I want to write.

I am having trouble both because I don’t want to write commercial fiction and because I fear my attempt to do so will be ridiculously far from that blasted mark.  How can I be properly creative with this dark and complicated cloud of commerce always hovering over everything I do?

Collaboration

I may have fallen out of practice at being social, but I never really learned how to be socially productive. How to work in groups. How to collaborate. I solo MMOs, I don’t even bother to buy games that are multi-player only. In school and at work I never worked well as part of a team – except when I was the distant|hated manager of said group activities. (I know how to make a group of people work; I don’t know how to work well within a group.) I don’t deal well with politics, drama, dishonesty (& other commonly accepted unethical practices), power struggles, and other bizarre & unhelpful things that seem to abound in most group activites I’ve found myself involved in. So I naturally continue to avoid them – or at least to avoid seeking them out, generally.

I’m a writer, I’m an artist, and these pursuits are -generally- solitary ones. In November I do like to go to NaNoWriMo write-ins & sit around with other writers, each of us writing our own things… Every month I like to go down to the Phoenix First Fridays Art Walk downtown and show my art alongside other artists. Every year or two I like to redesign each of my websites a bit (or totally, as I recently did with modernevil.com), but I just sit in front of a computer (or two, or three) for a couple of days for that – usually not talking to anyone about it until, days later, I finally lift my head up from a completed site and show off my work. If there’s a way to do these things in a group, socially, collaboratively, I … I don’t know it.

Right now I’m sitting at #createliveaz, surrounded by creative people. There are people painting, illustrating, drawing, crocheting, writing, playing music, working on laptops, but mostly they’re chatting. I’ve met most of the people here at one social event in the valley or another and, barring that, on twitter. Yet I can’t help but feel left out. This is partially my fault, I know this, I’m not the social butterfly I once was. I’m not pro-actively seeking out social engagement. And when the ‘cool kids’ came over & asked to take a seat, they didn’t mean to sit down with me and my wife and our creative activities, they meant to take the chair across the room to sit with the other ‘cool kids’. ((Update: A couple of hours in, a really nice guy from among the ‘cool’ crowd brought one of the chairs back and actually sat down to talk. A little later another joined the 3 of us for a few minutes.))

Why are we here? Why did we drive 100 miles (round trip) to Gilbert and back to hang out in a coffee shop with people who wouldn’t go to the trouble to walk across the room to talk to us?

I’ve had quite a few comments from various other creative people over the last many months that have suggested to me that I was conspicuously absent from their perception of the “Phoenix Arts Scene” – and that have given me the impression that becoming more involved would be beneficial to my ongoing work as an independent artist. I’ve been reading (a lot) for the last couple/few years about “social media” and how the internet is changing the way creative people connect -with their audiences as well as with other creatives- and how this is creating new ways for independent creators to find success… most of this reading has mentioned collaboration or has stated outright that it is being involved in a community of creatives that generates success, rather than mere disintermediation, instant, global communication, and the other great things the internet allows. So, as reluctant as I am to deal with all the garbage connected with people in groups, and despite my being unable to see (right now) how it is I might be able to collaborate with other creative people in any meaningful way, I’ve been looking into it. Thinking about it. Trying to figure it out. And attending events like Creative Connect and #createliveaz and Ignite Phoenix, to see if I can make any sort of connection with local creatives, and/or learn anything about how they work together.

Current status of these efforts: No f_cking clue.

I haven’t given up on trying to figure it out, but … right now I don’t even know how to know, so I’m chalking ‘Collaboration’ up as yet another thing I don’t grasp. (See also: ‘Scene’ – I hear the word and imagine a childish “cool kids only” club for hipsters where they strive to be “counterculture” for no better reason than “rebellion is cool” — yet when people actually use the word, it sounds like they think there’s something of genuine value to be “part of the scene.” I don’t get it.)  As always, I encourage anyone who thinks they can give me any helpful/useful/meaningful information that might help me understand (or better yet, to collaborate – perhaps I could learn through experience?)…  Please try.

Title for my new zombie novel

For my next book I’m trying to do that new experimental-for-me way of writing a book where I try to write something marketable, that sticks in a single genre, and is easy to explain. In addition to the book itself, this tactic simply must extend also to the related materials. ie: the title, the cover, the copy. I haven’t written the first word of the book yet (though I’ve been outlining the plot -hah! I’ve got a plot!- and working on some notes), but I’ve been spending the last week or two trying to come up with a title and to imagine the cover. Cover… I don’t know yet. But I think I’ve got my title.

Cheating, Death

I know, I know, because of the way search engines handle punctuation it’ll come up next to the dozen or so books whose titles also include the words “Cheating Death” – only a few of which appear to be fiction. Looks like two kindle-only books have the punctuation-free version of this title, a murder mystery and a vampire romance. I’ll gladly add a zombie book to that mix.

Definitely going to need a clear, distinctive cover that communicates ‘zombies’ though.  If I could somehow depict the main character, his wife and his mistress on the cover, with zombies, the entire title would make sense at a glance.  Probably not likely, that.

Oh, and by the way:  I’m planning on putting this book up on Smashwords.com as soon as I’ve written the first chapter.  I’ll keep updating it as new chapters get finished, so you pay once and can watch the book take shape as I write it.  As soon as the book’s done, I’ll also make it available in print, on kindle, and then probably on Podiobooks.com as well.  (Depending on time management, I may simultaneously release chapters on Podiobooks and Smashwords, as I write them. I’m still podcasting Untrue Tales… so that may be difficult.)

But keep an eye out for my upcoming zombie novel that is a zombie novel, Cheating, Death.