Friday, February 29, 2008

Introduction (Read Me First!)

Twenty-one years ago this November, when I wrote my first novel, I had only the most vague ideas as to how writers actually got published. I didn't actually realize that people wrote books until I met my first author, but even then, she was an adult a lot older than me (I was about 12 at the time.) To me, writers were mystical creatures like unicorns or Mark Twain, who was dead, but a larger-than-life figure nonetheless.

When my best friend Jenni informed me that she was writing a romance novel, I was floored. I'd never thought that just anyone could sit down and decide to write a book. I thought you had to be in some sort of special club or something, or at the very least, an adult. None of the books I read from the library or outright owned had a teenager on the flap. They were all adults. Some of them lived in far away places like New York or England. There were a few who lived close by, but we didn't get much exposure to actual authors at all.

From that moment on, in Mrs. Wenzel's seventh grade reading class, I decided that if my best friend could write a book, then so could I. Since I had no real idea what to write a book about, I decided to base my first novel on the one-sentence description of the next episode of Beauty & the Beast, my then-favorite TV show. I had seven days until that episode aired; surely, I thought, that was enough time to write a novel. After all, some of my favorite novels only had a few hundred pages, and some of the YA novels I'd read had just a little over a hundred. And I was only writing (by hand, back then) what I hoped was the next episode of Beauty & the Beast.



I did absolutely no homework that entire week. In every single spare moment, I wrote. Eleven days later, I had a complete one hundred and two paged 'novel', handwritten--sometimes in pencil--and I was hooked. My prose wasn't exactly bestseller material--

From page 58:

Tiphani was still exploring. She had been walking for over two hours and she was getting tired. Tiphani sat down against a wall and sighed. For once, she thought, I am hopelessly lost. Tiphani sighed, stood up, and started walking down the lighted corridor. Every once in a while, there was a door and every door was tried by Tiphani. The only thing she found in the room were beds and some articles of clothing. Tiphani walked farther down the corridor, opening doors. One door didn't open, though!

(At one point in my life, I wanted to spell my name Jennipher.)

From page 74:

Light was beginning to filter in from the grates overhead and if an early riser would have looked down one certain grate, he would have seen a strange sight. Six strange forms were sprawled out under the grate. If that person didn't know better, he would have said that they were people. But that's nonsense! People don't live down in the tunnels, do they?

from page 94:

"Who are you to Vincent?" Rainald asked, finally looking at Catherine. She smiled. "Vincent is very special to me," then she grew puzzled. "I don't know how to explain but we're connected in a very special way. I can't understand it, it's just the way it is!" She fondly looked down at Vincent. Rainald smiled and Nathaniel walked in.


My next book was two hundred and some pages long, and set in world quite like Beauty & the Beast, only with more beasts and less beauty. I found I was much better making up my own version of things; my own worlds. I found that fantasy writers could pretty much do anything they wanted, and so I started to form my books from the books I read, including Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, Stephen King, Anne McCaffrey, and many, many others. Knowing absolutely nothing about worldbuilding or openings or medieval settings or the vagaries of stew, I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote.

Sometime during all of this, I picked up my first "how to write" book. It was, if I remember, by Dean Koontz (The first edition of Writing Popular Fiction. Boy, do I wish I had one of those now. The library probably discarded it!) It talked about agents and publishers and slush piles and things I didn't really understand, because I was still working under the impression that books just appeared, whole, without much involvement by anyone else. I knew nothing, obviously.

But people kept asking me what I wanted to do with my life, and I'd always answer, "Be a writer." I didn't want to be a journalist; I wanted to be a writer. A novelist. I wanted to do just what I was already doing, which was: write. I didn't think (and still don't think) that I needed to go to college to do something I already knew how to do. By then, I was figuring out that you needed to submit stuff, and I entered a couple of contests (and placed, but didn't win in one) and after my Dad gave me a manual typewriter, I started typing manuscripts in proper format. I tried to make sense of the vagueness that was publishing--exactly how did editors work? And what, exactly, was a slush pile?--and pretty much failed.

In 1997, ten years after I wrote my first novel, I bought my first computer, and quite suddenly, the vast world of the internet appeared to confuse me even further. I joined an online writers group (the only local one was pretty defunct.) By then, I had a job at the local library, a good fit for me, and I had read more 'how to write' books, including Writer's Digest, and I had subscriptions to the magazines, etc., etc. I'd not interacted with many writers, though, and that's where my first exposure to the varied egos that explain some of the attitudes I've encountered came into play. There was a publishing conspiracy! 'They' didn't want the little guy to succeed! 'They' only wanted potential bestsellers! Etc., etc. Thankfully, I took all of this 'advice' with about a pound of salt.

However, a year or two later, epublishing started to appear, and some of the big publishers got involved, but quickly left town when there wasn't enough profit in it for them. I started to learn more about what happened to midlist authors and their books, and I started to wonder if I wanted my books to potentially be lost in purgatory if they didn't sell well enough and the publisher wouldn't release my contract so I could try somewhere else. And then I heard about (quite a few) writers who were forced to change the names they published under because a new name meant a new identity, and they hadn't sold well under their own names. And those series that I started to love, where only the first three books were published, and never any more. And let's just not get started on all the terrible covers out there, or the fact that the author--the person who wrote the book in the first place--really doesn't get much say.

For some reason, around this time, the 'us vs. them' mentality really started to hit home. At one point in time, it was the 'professionals vs. the self-published'; now the 'professionals' were against anyone else that somehow threatened them. I was warned against publishing my books electronically, and I was told--by professionals in the field--that I'd have to change the name I publish under if I ever expected to 'amount to anything' as a writer. I was told that my publishing contracts meant nothing, and the fact that one of my books is actually a mass market paperback and not print-on-demand did not matter, because my publisher wasn't SFWA (Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America) approved.

(Considering some of the stuff that the SFWA has been up to lately, I say good riddance.)

I started getting really quiet around this time, and I also stopped reading a lot of new fantasy. I very occassionally checked out the bookshelves at the local bookstores, but I never seemed to find anything interesting, and the few times I did were anomalies. And if those books tended to sell, six months later, a bunch of similar ones would be published, and the publishers, ever-desperate for bestsellers, stopped editing the really successful writers (LKH, anyone?) and fantasy started to become more hard-edged erotica and less the straight urban fantasy that I liked to read.

I got kind of tired of vampires around that time, too, at least reading about them, which should say a lot, if anyone knows my reading tastes.

To have a goal to write full-time seemed to be more like having a job with a mean boss (unless, of course, you performed to their expectations 100% of the time, or sucked up big time) and I didn't need another job. I published a few books, had to pull one, switched publishers with another, and saw the epublishing venue begin to grow. I liked the fact that I had more control over my contracts and my covers; my books sold in decent numbers (by my standards, at least), and I got actual fan mail. I didn't make a lot of money, but I realized pretty quickly that I don't really write for the money.

If I wrote for the money, I'd be a journalist or something. I write for the story. I always have, and I'm afraid I always will. I don't think there's much I can do about it. To me, the story is more important than anything else. That's one of the reasons why you'll never see anything that I write in a magazine that takes all rights. Or published by a publisher that controls my ideas, my world, or my characters.

It took me a while to realize it, but writing is my vocation. The stories in my head are more important than any paycheck, any thirty pieces of silver, any bounty. I have the responsibility to the characters I create to tell their stories as well as I am able. Whatever happens next is not up to me. I just write the stories.

You have to read them to fulfill the other half of the bargain.

I could not make a single penny from any book I write from now until doomsday, and I'd still write. If I ended up not being able to find a publisher that would publish me, I'd publish my books myself, and damn the naysayers that would dare to tell me that I was anything but a 'real writer.'

The money I make writing goes where the money I make always goes--towards buying seeds for my garden, food for my cats and my dog, and paint for my old house's walls. And, of course, any money I make goes towards allowing me to have the time to write the books I write, and spend some time in the worlds that--alas--only exist inside my head. And that's okay. I don't need a lot of money to live the way I want to live.

And if the average advance for a 'professionally' published novel is somewhere around $5,000 and the average author publishes one book a year, then how can you survive on your own making less than minimum wage? In any other profession, you're at the very least paid an hourly wage, and usually enough to live on. Why is writing different?

Twenty-one years ago this November, I wrote the opening line of my first novel. It wasn't the first story I've ever written; I wrote a handful of short stories before then, but it was my first novel, and at heart, I am a novelist. And I have written over forty novels (probably close to fifty now.) Most of those will never see publication, although I do have someone (my youngest sister) typing a few of the moldy oldies up so I can have electronic versions of them.

Last year, I finished a novel that I had been writing on and off (and I finished it at least three times) for quite a few years. It started out as a dream, expanded to a short story, expanded again to a novel, was taken over by the Wild Hunt, and morphed into what it is now.

In celebration of my twenty-first year as a writer, instead of submitting it, I am going to give it away instead.

Heart's Desire is the first book in the Beth-Hill series. It is definitely now a novel of the Wild Hunt. It didn't used to be, but they kind of took over the plot. It spans a century, from the binding of the Hunt to the end of that binding, and what happened in the intervening years. There's death. Destruction. Tears. Laughter.

I think you get the point.

It takes place before the Karen Montgomery series (so far) and before the entire Jacob Lane series (so far.) The three series will catch up eventually.

It will be illustrated with photographs of the exact locations of the Hunt's haunts--my parents' backyard and surrounding woods. If you've read the Karen Montgomery series or the later books in the Jacob Lane series, you're in for a treat, I hope.

Note: Heart's Desire will be updated every Sunday. I plan to be finished by my birthday, which is October 14th--there's 116,000 words to go through, so that's a good possibility. While this book is being posted for free, I'll have links on the sidebar of the blog to where you can buy my other books if you so wish. The Hunt appears in the book 3 and 4 of the Jacob Lane series (so far), and as supporting characters in the entire Karen Montgomery series (so far.)

Heart's Desire has a Livejournal Feed, and an RSS feed as well.

And here's to another twenty-one years. :)

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