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A Deal You Can Refuse, But Shouldn’t

A Deal You Can Refuse, But Shouldn’t

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Black Gate HQ in downtown Chicago
Black Gate‘s Manhattan offices

There were seven hundred and seven stairs leading to John O’Neill’s desk within the Black Gate publishing complex, twelve more than last time, and I was exhausted when I reached the top. There, I waited, watching with trepidation as he finished reading a sheaf of papers, each heavily marked with the red pencil in his white-knuckled fist. His youth of back-alley boxing had left his hands suited to little more than holding an editor’s pencil, and this he wielded furiously, gold rings glinting in the dim light. From behind his massive chair the bodyguard, Tolstoy, glowered silently. Finally, the publishing magnate looked up at me and scowled.

“Starr,” he muttered, running a finger down a printed agenda on his desk. “Something about a blog post.”

“Yes, sir,” I stammered, holding out the two flimsy pages in my hand. Sweat had made the paper soft and slightly rumpled, and he considered them with distaste before taking them. His eyes flicked down the length of the copy before he tossed them down on his desk.

“Rubbish,” he declared.

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Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Pro-Tips From Paul Dale Anderson, Installment #2

Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Pro-Tips From Paul Dale Anderson, Installment #2

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Paul Dale Anderson (photo by Tim Hatch)
Paul Dale Anderson (photo by Tim Hatch)

For our Pro Tip this week, we’ve got the second of what will be several installments from the prolific and generous Paul Dale Anderson, who answered all the questions on our list.

Chicagoans will have a chance to hear the Rockford native this Wednesday, when he’s the featured reader at the Gumbo Fiction Salon reading series. (Details on the event are at the end of the article.)

Paul has written across a variety of media and genres for more than twenty years and all across the spectrum of commercial fiction, including romance, westerns, science fiction, erotica, and especially horror. He’s written a huge amount of non-fiction for television, radio, newspapers, and academic journals, along with poetry and book reviews.

His latest novels are Darkness (2AM Publications, 2015), Abandoned (Eldritch Press, 2015), and Axes to Grind (Crossroad Press, 2015). He has new short stories coming out this fall at The Horror Zine magazine, Weirdbook 31, and Pulp Adventures 18.

To Outline or Not to Outline – What Works For You?

I outline only after the work is complete in manuscript. I let my characters tell their own story and each work writes itself. Then I write an outline, synopsis, elevator speech, and what I want to see as jacket copy. If I try to do that first, the story loses momentum. I put all of my creative energy into the story. Everything else is foo-foo.

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Politics: Slightly Less Important Than Breathing?

Politics: Slightly Less Important Than Breathing?

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The Gate to Women's Country-smallThere’s been a lot of election talk in the air lately (here in Canada we’ll have our federal election on the 19th of October) and that’s led me to thinking about politics in general, and politics in genre fiction in particular. Without having gathered any statistics, just on a gut feeling, it seems to me that politics plays a stronger or more obvious role in genre writing than it does in non-genre writing.

Unless we’re writing thrillers or mysteries, when we create our worlds, we can’t just take the background of the real world for granted, as non-genre writers can. Even if our focus is family drama or interspecies romance, we have to create the socio-political framework for our novels along with everything else – this is part of the “world building” that so many panels at so many conventions address.

I know this to my cost, as my editor at DAW, Sheila Gilbert, is always asking me for details that I just take for granted. I always thought that when I say “king” everyone else just fills in the socio-political blanks, and I can get on with my story without having to figure out where the food and the saddled horses came from.

That turns out not to be the case.

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Tips on Writing a Great Swordfight from a Professional Swordsman

Tips on Writing a Great Swordfight from a Professional Swordsman

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Sword fight in Robin Hood-smallIn my book Swordfighting for Writers, Game Designers, and Martial Artists, I devote about 45 pages to advice to writers. I thought the readers here at Black Gate might like me to expand a bit on some of the points I made there. Let me start with a quote:

There are several distinct skills that go into a good written fight. They are:

  • visualizing the fight accurately, to avoid describing impossible actions;
  • maintaining dramatic tension and pacing the fight to be exciting;
  • maintaining characterization: making sure that the characters’ actions in the fight give the reader the sense of their personalities that you want; and
  • serving the plot, so that the fight meets the needs of the story and is not just shoehorned in.

Dramatic tension, characterization, and plot are key skills for a novelist; ask M. Harold Page if you don’t believe me. Visualizing a swordfight accurately is a much less common writing skill.

Assuming that training in actual swordsmanship for a few years is out of the question, here are three ways to get it right, if you want to go into technical detail (which blade goes where).

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Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: No TV for You

Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: No TV for You

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TV News cartoonSo you’ve got a new book out, and despite all attempts at humility, you secretly believe it is the coolest thing invented since smart phones. The whole world would love to read it – if you could only get those jaded, cynical, world-weary, keepers-of-the-gate to give you a little television air time. Forget it.

I briefly worked as a newspaper reporter, and I married a television news producer. I made a side trip through the land of promotion, working as a publicist for a couple of authors, for a few years.

So, believe me when I tell you, forget what the perky little “You can do it!” how-to promotion articles tell you – unless you are Stephen King, Anne Rice or a celebrity already – you are NOT going to get television coverage for your magnum opus of fiction.

Let me explain why you aren’t going to get television coverage, and so, should not waste your valuable and probably-limited personal publicity funds on it.

Look at the word Tele-vision. The Vision part is key – there must be something to see. No matter how pretty your cover art; there’s no movement, no action to it. And there’s no way to change that fact. Therefore, your book is of no interest to the television reporter – or to the television station’s viewers. Even if those viewers read ten books a month, when they turn on the television, they expect to see something visually entertaining.

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The Great Serialization Experiment: Don’t Kill Your Reader – Eat a Cookie Instead

The Great Serialization Experiment: Don’t Kill Your Reader – Eat a Cookie Instead

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Write on your own tombstone. Is there anything the Internet won't do? What a world we live in, people. What a world.
Write on your own tombstone. Is there anything the Internet won’t do? What a world we live in, people. What a world.

Remember, Kids: A Dead Reader Is A Non-Purchasing Reader

Here we are, last post of this series. Thanks for sticking around! Check out the first two parts if you haven’t yet: The Lay of the Land and Attack on Multiple Fronts.

The Mad Science

Ah, the eternal question: To plot ahead, or to write by the seat of your pants? I like to strike a healthy balance between planning and OMG WHY DID I THINK THAT CAPTURING MY NEIGHBOR’S PETUNIA GARDEN WOULD BE SIMPLE AND WHY DIDN’T I STUDY THEIR SQUIRREL DEFENSE GRID MORE THOROUGHLY FIRST??? I seriously still wonder about that one, as do my scars. I enjoy a combo of planning and flying by the seat of my squirrel-shredded pants is what I’m saying, in case that was a bit much on the cap locks.

This is what I did for Nigh, but I already had two published trilogies by the time I wrote it, so I had some idea of how I draft best (hint: very caffeinated). I didn’t have book 5 written when book 1 came out, but I had my plan. A thin little plan full of hunger and pain, but a plan nonetheless. I focused on arcs (skeleton) and promises (muscles and organs), and then tacked on the skin as I wrote.

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Cixin Liu the Superstar: How Taking a Risk on a Chinese Author Paid Off Big For Tor

Cixin Liu the Superstar: How Taking a Risk on a Chinese Author Paid Off Big For Tor

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The Three-Body Problem-smallOne of the great things about science fiction conventions is getting to rub shoulders with your heroes.

Some years ago I received an advance proof of an upcoming fantasy from Bantam Spectra, just before heading to Archon in St. Louis. I threw it in my luggage, and brought it to the author’s reading. There were only seven people in the audience, so afterwards I got to have a nice chat with the author, and he graciously signed my book for me. The writer was George R.R. Martin, and the book was A Game of Thrones.

In fact, writers who will draw huge crowds in public can often be vastly more approachable at small conventions. Perhaps this is because seeing Neil Gaiman at your local library is a big deal, but hanging out with him at the bar at World Fantasy is just a lot more casual.

Of course, there are rare exceptions. There are a few writers treated like superstars, even among fellow professionals. I saw it happen when Stephen King came to my home town of Ottawa for the World Fantasy Convention in 1984, and autograph lines spontaneously formed whenever he sat down. I got in line an hour early just so I could be in the front row during his reading from The Talisman (and ended up giving up my seat anyway, just so Tabitha King wouldn’t have to stand in the back.)

And I saw it happen again in June of this year, when the hottest new writer in science fiction, Cixin Liu, author of the Three-Body trilogy (The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End), arrived in Chicago for the Nebula Awards weekend.

Mr. Liu was in making his first trip to the United States as a published author to be on hand for the presentation of the awards. His first novel in English, The Three-Body Problem, published by Tor in November of last year, was up for Best Novel.

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Chivalry: Might is Right… Not Quite What You Think

Chivalry: Might is Right… Not Quite What You Think

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Chivalry and Violence
I love writing knights because they had such a fascinatingly simple way of looking at the world.

I love writing knights because they had such a unapologetically simple way of looking at the world (first blog entry in this series here).

The knightly world view was internally consistent, but must have been infuriating to anybody with a logical turn of mind. In Swords Versus Tanks, I had fun imagining just such a conversation:

Ranulph swept his arm around the cell to indicate the corpses. “God has just shown you His will.”

“Knights!” The red-haired girl gestured at the carnage. “You think that was a trial by combat.” Her eyes narrowed. “You wear a somewhat soiled arming jacket, so it was defeat in battle which brought you to this dungeon. Was that also God’s will, Sir Ranulph?”

“I suppose that God wanted me here to save you,” said Ranulph, with a vague, familiar, feeling that he was going to regret arguing with her.

Swords Versus Tanks 1: Steel Tide (forthcoming)

In fact — if Kaeuper’s Chivalry and Violence is to be believed — real knights tended to take things further with an utterly glorious piece of reasoning:

Knight: “God granted me victory, therefore  I am more pious than the dead guy.”

Priest: “But you still need to do penance!”

Knight: “Penance, Sir Priest? Pah! Wearing armor in the field is mortification enough.”

Partly this was lazy thinking at work.

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When Is Fantasy Not Fantasy? Or, One Person’s Religion = Another Person’s Mythology

When Is Fantasy Not Fantasy? Or, One Person’s Religion = Another Person’s Mythology

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Peters BonesI’ve always been intrigued by the appearance of the supernatural in historical fiction. When a modern writer sets a novel in the historical past, and uses elements of the supernatural, or magic, or some such item, it’s fantasy, right? Or, is it magic realism? Or is it magic realism only if the story is set in modern day South America, preferably written by a modern day South American?

Just what is magic realism, anyway? Is it more than magical thinking on the part of characters? Or a way for non-genre critics to talk about supernatural elements in books they don’t like to think contain supernatural elements?

Are Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael novels examples of magic realism? Or plain old fantasy, for that matter? Cadfael prays to the Welsh Saint Winifred, and she responds. Miracles happen. The authorities, in this case the Abbot of Shrewsbury, might check for fraud (was the lame boy truly lame to start with?) but no one doubts the possibility of the miraculous, and no one searches for another explanation. On the other hand, no one suggests that this is a series of crossover books. Why not?

It’s one thing for modern writers to write of historical times and include the belief systems of the people of those times. Maybe that isn’t, strictly speaking, fantasy. But what about contemporary writers, by which I mean the people writing in those times? What about that kind of “historical” fiction?

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Adventures In Benign Cults: Parable Of the Talents

Adventures In Benign Cults: Parable Of the Talents

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Parable Of the Talents-smallIf a book vaults from mere printed text to a work of serious literature by virtue of posing a question, and then exploring it through the course of the story, then Octavia Butler’s The Parable Of the Talents fits the bill very neatly indeed.

Its primary question seems to be discovering meaning in what is for Butler a necessarily godless world, but it takes on secondary questions galore. Among these: what is the difference, if any, between a religion and a cult? How fine is the line between healthy determination and destructive obsession? And just how often do we reject others simply on the grounds that they challenge those (shaky) convictions on which we’ve built our lives? In other words, we blame and hold accountable people who represent our own failings.

Butler has a field day with all of these and more in charting the life of Lauren Oya Olamina, founder of Earthseed, a cult that locates God in change — the concept of change — and sets its sights on the stars when life on earth (or at least in the Disunited States of the 2030s) is nothing but chaos.

Formally, Butler’s Parable Of the Talents (the sequel to Parable Of the Sower) is epistolary work. The story is related through select journal entries, mostly Olamina’s, with other voices interspersed. These include her husband, her lost daughter, and her estranged younger brother.

First published in 1998, Parable Of the Talents won the Nebula Award in 1999. Like a good many other Nebula winners (such as The Speed Of Dark, which I wrote about here recently), this is not hard science. If you’re looking for the nuts and bolts engineering or chemistry found in Kim Stanley Robinson or Andy Weir, look elsewhere. Butler’s near-future tale focuses on social disintegration, and its rebirth via the benign (?) cult of Earthseed.

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