Holy schmoly, has this been a ride. I projected the CURSE OF A DARK GOD to be 140,000 words. When I blew by that, I projected it would be 170,000. Today I just typed the last word of the first draft. It’s 230,000 words. For reference SERVANT OF A DARK GOD is 170,000 words.

The bad news is that while I’m really happy with this draft, it IS a first draft and needs some editing. I’m also behind schedule. I hit 140k words just a few weeks after my original deadline (in March), so I pride myself on knowing how fast I can write, but at that point I had, unknowingly, about a normal novel’s worth of material left to write. Obviously, I haven’t quite figured out yet how to estimate the size of these bigger works. The problem is that instead of getting a month or even two to revise, I’ve got two days. Then I have to turn it in to my editors.

The good news is that my editors haven’t canned me, yet. And that they have great insight into story. And that I should have plenty of time to fix and polish this thing to make it shine. I just don’t like turning in first drafts. My goal with book three is to get back on schedule.

Having told you my scheduling woes, I am very excited about the characters and storylines and expect readers to enjoy this as much or more than the first in the series. However, I do wish I could get this process down so that I was 99% of the way there in one draft. There are some authors who can do that. Perhaps that will come with more experience. Until then, I get to enjoy revision.

Here are my stats:

• 550 hours to write, from pre-draft to the end, not including thinking thinking on walks and drives and discussion time with my wife who saved me thrice.
• The bulk of the writing was done in a 24 week period. I averaged 17 hours per week during that time. This is on top of my day job.

 For those who don’t know, an average young adult book as from 40,000 to 80,000 words. An average adult novel is from 70,000 – 120,000 words. I’m very pleased I was able to finish this monster. I might not be the fastest writer, but what this tells me is that I should be able to finish two big novels a year if I should ever be so lucky as to go full time.

James Maxey loved met and loved a woman named Laura. She told him she had breast cancer. He didn’t care. Later when the disease advanced, he offered to marry her. She turned him down, but not because she didn’t love him back. The disease progressed.

His posts about this experience are tender and poignant. When you read them you will rejoice. You will sorrow. And you will think about life.

He begins like this:

She was dying when I met her. We met through online personal ads, and she wrote me saying that she liked the philosophy I had sprinkled through my post. I don’t even recall what it said, really–something about finding humor and hope even in down times, I think. And she told me she’d been through some down times. She’d fought breast cancer, her husband had left her when she was diagnosed with the disease. This might send other people into a spiral of despair and self-pity that they could never pull out of. But, she hadn’t surrendered to her worries and woes. She bested them, and went on to live a terrific life. She had gotten a butterfly tattoo–it was her symbol of transformation. The time of her cancer and her divorce were when she had been drawn into her cocoon. But she’d emerged with wings.

Here are the five I would read. They’re short. So take some time. Savor them.

1. Laura Kathleen Herrmann
2.  Laura and the Flowers
3. Laura’s Snow
4. Cancer on the Comics Page
5. One Year

When you finish, you might then want receive a free book of his in exchange for a donation (of any size; yes, even for just one buck), to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer foundation. To make a donation vist his Books for Breast webpage.

Then live and love while the sun shines. And be glad.

The main role of villains and antagonists in stories is to generate suspense, anxiety, and fear in the reader. They make it possible for us to worry that the hero will not be able to avoid a significant threat or remove a lack. There are other effects–mystery, poignancy (about the human situation like in Les Mis). But those are secondary.

For the main things to happen the villain has to be a credible, significant, and immediate threat…all the way through the book until he or she is smushed or wins.

If he’s not credible, the reader realizes there is no real threat. If the threat is not significant, who cares? If it’s not immediate, again, who cares?

So how do we make a villain like that? We make him or her smart, powerful, a few steps ahead of the hero, and dedicated to doing something we root against (because it’s just plain wrong or because we love our hero and want the best for him and the villain is pitted against him). He has to be able to put the hero on his heels most of the way through the book, and our poor hero is scrambling to adjust.

You can have all sorts of villains–liked by many or few, kooky or calculating, eccentric or plain, noble or sadistic–just as long as they remain significant, immediate, and credible threats. The minute they lose threat status, the game’s over because at that point fear, anxiety, and suspense in the reader vanish.

Everybody knows that we got into this recession because banks began lending money to people who had terrible credit ratings, right? People who didn’t have to prove they even had a job. I mean, how long are you going to stay in business when you keep handing out dough to people you never hear from again?

But is that all there is to it? And was it really just the fault of congress because they told Freddie Mac and Fannie May (the organizations that purchased loans) that they had to start purchasing these highly risky things? Or was it all those greedy Wall Streeters?

In this must-read article, “How it All Came Crashing Down,” BYU econ professors explain how we got into this mess—and what we can learn from it.

But that’s not the end of the story. Ira Glass and the folks at This American Life uncover deeper causes of the problem in their must-listen show “The Watchmen” (no, not the movie). I mean, come on, we were told these high-risk loans were as dangerous as milkshakes. Shouldn’t SOMEBODY have seen it?

President Obama keeps saying that the root of the problem was that there wasn’t enough government oversight. Sounds good, doesn’t it?  We’ll get disinterested Uncle Sam to protect us from all these investment bullies. But if we dig a bit deeper, it appears that Uncle Sam was one of the major players at the root of the mess.

Ouch.

Read. Listen. They are two fabulous pieces.

Take a guy who does humorous journalism, but not in the sneering sort of way, and send him out to find out more about extremists (KKK, Islamicists, etc.) and conspiracy theories (he didn’t really believe in the Bildeburgers…until he was followed), and what do you get?

Well, you get British journalist Jon Ronson.

I just listened to a wonderful interview with him on Radio West.

Don’t miss it.

Scott Card recently wrote “Marriage needs lots of humor.” It’s an awful title for one of the best articles of his that I’ve ever read.

I’m not going to spoil it for you. But I will say that I’ve found that it’s the small things that seem to make the biggest difference in relationships. And this is one of those small things that packs a HUGE punch. But not until this article did I realize it.

And for you writers who are wanting insights on what makes characters interesting and sympathetic–there’s a little treasure trove here for you as well.

Enjoy!

How would you like to listen to a master story teller for almost an hour? You can. Radio West recently interviewed Pete Docter who directed Pixar’s recent motion picture Up.

Docter has been with Pixar since the beginning and he shares a number of insights into story telling. He talks about the importance of emotional hooks, getting ideas and developing them via the creative Q&A process, and editing a story from schlock to greatness, and much more. What a wonderful interview.

Click here to listen.

What’s the best predictors of which nations are most likely to go to war or exhibit instability?

Up until now these three factors were assumed to be the most predictive: poverty levels, lack of democracy, and the nation’s adherence to Islamic values. However, Valerie Hudson and the folks of WomanStats have found a fourth factor that is a better predictor:

These results indicate that if a scholar or policymaker had to select one variable—level of democracy, level of wealth, prevalence of Islamic culture, or the physical security of women—to assist them in predicting which states would be the least peaceful or of the most concern to the international community or have the worst relations with their neighbors, they would do best by choosing the measure of the physical security of women.

I found it interesting that their research indicates of all the predictors prevalance of Islamic culture is the weakest. So much for the idea that Islam is the bogey man.

Before presenting their findings, they make a theoretical case by synthesizing insights from evolutionary biology and psychology, political sociology, and psychology. When summarizing the ideas from evolution, they state:

Evolutionary theory suffers from two common misconceptions. The first is that evolutionary predispositions are intractable. No evolutionary theorist believes this. Richard Dawkins explains, “It is perfectly possible to hold that genes exert a statistical influence on human behavior while at the same time believing that this influence can be modified, overridden, or reversed by other influences.” The second misconception is that evolutionary theory posits static and essential characteristics for males and females. This has been debunked as well. In debunking this myth, Theodore Kemper notes, “Across the spectrum of the social sciences, the results show that females are not essentially pacific, retiring, unaggressive, lacking in motives and psychological need for power and dominance. While successful ideological socialization may persuade many women that this is true of themselves, it is not biologically true.”

These misconceptions are very interesting indeed and should be remembered when examining genetic based arguments for all sorts of behavior. When they discuss social learning theory from psychology, they reiterate this point:

First, social learning psychologists argue that biology does increase the likelihood that a child will engage in aggressive or violent behavior, but does not guarantee it. For example, twin and adoption studies find that genes make a small contribution to various forms of antisocial behavior compared to environmental factors. For example, while finding that having a biological parent who was antisocial increased the risk for antisocial behavior to be seen in an adopted child, these same studies also demonstrated that having a disrupted home environment contributed more significantly to the risk for a child to engage in antisocial behavior.

They then discuss specific environmental factors that lead to violent behavior against women. It’s a fascinating article. I highly recommend it. You can find the original, “The Heart of the Matter: The Security of Women and the Security of States,” in Harvard university’s International Security, volume 33, issue 3.

Okay, okay, so how do the countries rank? Here’s a summary from the Deseret News:

A WomanStats map reveals highest levels of women’s physical insecurity in the Middle East, India, much of Africa, Brazil and Mexico. On a Violence Against Women scale, the United States sits smack dab in the middle, at a level 3 on a 5-point scale, with moderate levels of domestic violence and rape.

I am a big believer in free-market solutions. However, I’m not a big believer in Wild West capitalism. Government plays a vital role in helping us prevent capitalistic abuse. But what’s the right role of government in health care?

I found that both John Stossel’s 20/20 “Sick in America” and a recent report from Safeway give brilliant insight into the situation and possible solutions. Enjoy!

Sick in America Part 2
Sick in America Part 3
Sick in America Part 4
Sick in America Part 5
Sick in America Part 6

How Safeway Is Cutting Health-Care Costs from the Wall Street Journal

My buddy Rob just brought this Jon Schmidt YouTube to my attention. It’s terrific!

Bow to the dark god, ye minions. Here’s some of what’s coming in book 2:

• The dogmen of Toth and their maulers
• The Ungar and the one they call Ruin
• The tanglewoods of the woodikin
• Firesteeds
• Gloryweaves
• Nashrud the hunter
• And last, but not least, the Orange-eyed priest of Mungo

The end is in sight on the first draft of book 2 in the Dark God series, and because this one has been a roller coaster, I had to post some of the coolness before I have to go back into frantic mode. My word count estimates for this book have been so consistently off it hasn’t been funny. Literally. It’s made me panic and stress. It should clock in around 220k. And then it’s going to be cut, cut, cut.

In the meantime…dogmen of Toth (give it the James Earl Jones).

Oh, baby.

The Writing Excuses guys have posted another good podcast: this one on world-building a history.

I wanted to add a few comments. You’ll notice that a lot of the blurbs for my novel mention my world-building, so I guess it’s a strength in my writing. However, I don’t write huge world building documents in the pre-draft stage. I do write some history, of course. But I don’t think it would take up more than a few pages. A lot of world-building happens in draft.

It seems to me there are two levels of “history” and a lot of it can be done on-the-fly.

1. There are small hints of CHANGE in places and people.

Dave Wolverton taught me this one. You come upon an orchard in the woods that’s gone wild and is overgrown. It takes two lines to describe it and it gives a strong feel of past. The reader wonders who was there, what happened. Maybe you tell them. Maybe you don’t. You mention that the village Knight used to be fat but is wasting or vice versa. I find I can do these types of things usually on-the-fly as I’m writing. And I don’t need to know much about them. I just ask myself if anything has changed with the location or characters in the current scene.

A few touches of CHANGE throughout the novel give a strong sense of history.

2. There are events, groups, and individuals who impact or impacted your characters and their community in large ways.

There was a war with a neighboring country not five years ago. Your characters have to travel through that land, or maybe half the male population went to war and never came back. Or perhaps your character lost his sister in a drowning he could have prevented. Or he lost her to slavers. Or perhaps there is a secret police (like the Roman couriers) who arrived two years ago.

Again, many of these things can be thought up on the fly as you look for conflict and the stories of a place and community. However, I’ve found that it helps to ask a few key questions in the pre-draft stage to lay some (NEVER ALL) the groundwork.

– What kind of conflicts do these nations and groups have?
– What events have had a large impact on my character and his community? They can be terrible or wonderful events.
– Who in the community are my characters friends and enemies? What’s the history?
– What are the local and regional stories of events (or people) that were eccentric, odd, mysterious, dangerous, or revolutionary?

I never get all my answers up front. But I will get some. And then as I write I just keep in mind that it’s neat to indicate change every once in a while and to briefly bring up stories from the past that relate to the current matter at hand in the present story.

Finally, I really like the idea the Writing Excuses guys brought up of sharing multiple explanations for an event (multiple histories) when it fits and to include more than one cause, although I’m pretty sure the 80/20 rule applies to causation.

At CONduit I spoke with an author friend who thought that marketing was indeed a bad thing, especially marketing for YA, because said author felt it didn’t build an audience based on the merits of the book. It built one based on hype and buzz.  Instead of buying a book because it delivered a wonderful experience, readers would be buying only because it was what everyone else was doing. Furthermore, publishers only have so much money, and by choosing to put the dollars behind some books, they choose to let other books, which might deliver a better experience, languish.

I understand wanting to build a readership that’s based on love, not hype. But what I think my friend is overlooking is that you can’t love something if you don’t try it. And you won’t try it if you don’t know it’s there. Marketing and PR help make sure people know the book is there.

Yes, some readers might try it the first time because it’s what everyone is doing. But if the book is really that good, i.e. it actually delivers a wonderful experience for the target audience, then those readers will come back for another serving. They might look initially because everyone else is, but they’ll stay for love.

One of my editors just forwarded a link to “Not Quite a PR Campaign” by Sherry Thomas. Lots of interesting details there about what she does for PR, but probably one of the most important ideas she shares is the fact that marketing & PR don’t build an audience. A great story experience does that. However, marketing & PR can get the book in the audience’s hands.

What we all want to happen is word-of-mouth. PR doesn’t really create word-of-mouth, love does. But readers won’t read a book until they know it exists. So then the point of a PR campaign, if a PR campaign has any point at all, is to create awareness and hope that awareness will translate into love, once a critical mass of readers have read and enjoyed your book.

Readers may miss many high quality (i.e. they deliver a great experience to the intended audience) books because the lion’s share of the publisher’s marketing budget is being spent on a small group of books, and the author who gets the leftovers just doesn’t have the cash or know-how to do it themselves. But that doesn’t mean marketing is bad. It means that getting a big marketing push is like any other lucky break or opportunity.

I just started reading Guide to Writing Fiction by Phillys A. Whitney (a huge seller in the 1970’s and 1980’s). It’s a wonderful, slim, down-to-earth volume. She opens the book with a chapter called “Opportunity is Like a Train.” She maintains that her success did not come from starting with loads of talent. In fact, she says her ability was “modest.” She certainly wasn’t as gifted as many other authors she’d worked with in the writing groups of her youth. Nor did it come from immediate initial success. It came from being ready when opportunity knocked. 

Of course, I have been lucky. I’ve had extraordinary breaks come my way–along with some pretty bad blows and disappointments. There’s been bad luck too, but that doesn’t always show. Good fortune and unexpected opportunities are always coming along. Perhaps opportunity is like a train on an endless track. Now and then it makes a stop at your station, often without fanfare, and without warning.

…What is important is not the lucky break, the stopping of the train–that’s only part of it. Life is full of trains that stop. What counts is what we are doing with our lives when there is no opportunity and not a train in sight.

James Dashner is someone who is getting a big promo budget from Random House this year for Maze Runner. A very big one. But if you read his story about how he got published (links to all nine parts of the story are in his sidebar) and what got him to this point, you’ll see this promo train was a long time coming. 

Meanwhile, if the big promo budget ever stops at my station, I’m going to hop on. Until then, I will keep writing the best stories I can and make my current marketing budget (part publisher, part mine) go as far as possible. I’ll do the one for the love, the other because I can’t share the love if nobody even knows it’s out there.

CONduit is a conference for speculative fiction writers. This year’s conference was great. I was able to see and talk to a bunch of writer friends (Dave Wolverton, Dan Wells, Brandon Sanderson, Howard & Sandra Tayler, Eric James Stone, Ami Chopine, Darren Egget, Skipper Ritchotte, Mette Harrison), make some new ones (Lee Modesitt, James Dashner, Julie Wright, Aprilynne Pike, Larry Correia), plus chat with a multitude of others who are trying to break in. I also got to record with the Dragon Crawlers Radio guys. Nothing better than spending a weekend with a swarm of friendly and talented folks.

I’m amazed at the success some of these people are having:

• Aprilynne Pike had an initial print run of 200,000 hardback copies and was #1 on the NY Times Best Seller list.
• James Dashner is going to be one of the main events from Random House this fall. I’m expecting an equally large print of his Maze Runner.
• Brandon Sanderson just signed a contract that was announced on Publisher’s Lunch for somewhere around 2.5 million for four books. Folks, this is amazingly large for our genre.

Of course, we already know Dave Wolverton and Lee Modesitt are some of the biggest sellers for Tor. Dan Wells is going to be big as well. And the Taylers have already got tens of thousands who read them regularly. They threw a great release party at this con.

Larry Correia has had some interesting success as well and came at it from a side alley. He self-published Monster Hunters International. He sold a few thousand copies (no mean feat, especially for a self-published book), with many of the readers coming from the armed forces in Afganistan and Iraq. The book was so good the owner of a large independent store in Minnesota, Uncle Hugo’s, called the editor of Baen Books up and told her that she was an idiot if she didn’t buy Larry’s book because he could sell the heck out of it. So she took a look, agreed, and Larry’s now under contract with a real publisher. It’s coming out in July.

In one conversation I learned the following about the Science Fiction & Fantasy genre.

• 4,000 hardback copies for a title in a year is the rough break even point for Tor. You sell more than that, you’re okay. You sell less and Tor might have to drop you.
• 10,000 hardback copies would be considered a very good seller.
• 15,000 – 30,000 hardback copies and you are hitting the top of the midlist
• Robert Jordan sold around 600,000 of each of his titles in hardback.
• Depending on the time of year, 4,000 – 5,000 hardbacks sold in a week will put you in the top ten, even the top three, on the NY Times bestseller list.

As for me, I printed up some posters and book marks using Swanland’s art. The cover got a great reaction there. And that’s huge for me because, looking at that Gallup Poll blog I wrote, the cover is going to drive a lot of sales for a new author. I had a wonderful time giving my workshop. And I think I finally figured out which part of my novel I can use for readers. Oh, and if you get a chance to hear Eric James Stone read any of his short stories, take it. I’ve listened to him twice now and both have been well worth the 20 minutes.

Tor Books’ production department has moved my book’s release date out one month. I’m getting so antsy to have it hit the stores, but October’s actually a better month, it being closer to the holiday season.

You still might be able to get it earlier if you pre-order. The books actually start shipping in the second half of September. But it takes a few weeks to get them out to all the stores.