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Writing: Serial Characters and the Book Deal

Writing: Serial Characters and the Book Deal

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World Fantasy Award Nominee
World Fantasy Award Nominee.

A growing number of Black Gate authors have moved on to book deals, and some were published novelists before they appeared in the magazine.

Two of us, James Enge and myself,  landed book deals featuring recurring characters that had appeared in Black Gate short stories.

They were the Dabir & Asim stories for me (“Whispers from the Stone” and “Sight of Vengeance“) and the Morlock tales for James (six appearances in BG so far, starting with “Turn Up This Crooked Way” and “Payment Deferred,” and most recently the novella “Destroyer” in Black Gate 14).

Back before James got nominated for the World Fantasy Award in the Best Novel category (for his first novel, no less! — that’s Blood of Ambrose, if you don’t have a copy yet) the two of us got talking one day about the connections between magazine sales and book deals.

We decided to turn the thing into a public back-and-forth discussion about writing serial fantasy characters, starting with a look at the idea that short story successes lead naturally to selling books.

I’ve captured and condensed that conversation here for your enjoyment.

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Writing Against Resistance

Writing Against Resistance

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warofart1I think one of the reasons that there are so many books out there offering writing advice is that there are so many ways up the mountain. Different writers use different ways to battle their way up the height, sometimes changing their own approaches day to day or project to project. I wouldn’t be surprised if most serious writers have at least one or two of these books on their shelf, or in a box somewhere, its resting spot likely depending upon how useful the writer really found the information.

My current favorite is titled The War of Art, and it has held that position for almost two years, partly because I’ve been too busy to read many writing books, but mostly because it gave me everything I needed to fight my most recent battles. You may recognize its writer, Steven Pressfield, as the author of Gates of Fire, Tides of War, The Legend of Bagger Vance and sundry other works.

But it doesn’t matter if you’ve never heard of Pressfield or read a line of his work if you’ve ever had trouble procrastinating with your writing or any other creative pursuit. Pressfield names your opponent in the battle between creation and NOT-creation “Resistance,” with a capital R, and in this short, concise book, tells you how to recognize it and move forward up that mountain.

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The Weather: Part Art, Part Science, and Part… Magic?

The Weather: Part Art, Part Science, and Part… Magic?

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poison-study2Predicting the weather is an art and a science… yes, really, it’s a science, believe me. I spent four years at Penn State University learning chemistry, calculus, physics, thermodynamics, and fluid dynamics to earn my Meteorology Degree – I should know.

Did that transform me into a great forecaster? Er…no. So I must have relied more on my artistic side, right? Er… no again. Good thing for the masses of people that might have relied on me to forecast their daily weather that I decided to go into environmental meteorology, and work with air quality and air pollution instead. Did you hear that sigh of relief? I did.

Eventually, I ended up changing careers and becoming a writer (long story, but it involves boredom, rage, despair, dissatisfaction, and sex… you really don’t want to know, trust me). But it seems my initial love of weather and storms wouldn’t just die quietly.

No, it found ways into my writing without my conscious consent. My first book, Poison Study, has a very rare weather phenomenon that my one friend (a meteorologist that can forecast – imagine that!) has been the only person to recognize.

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Writing Tools: Notebooks, the Kind with Paper

Writing Tools: Notebooks, the Kind with Paper

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Ye olde trusty notebook.
Ye olde trusty notebook.

From the time I was in grade school all the way up until after I graduated from college I wrote in notebooks. It seemed such a natural process that I wonder now how I got away from it, and why it was such a revelation when I took up writing in notebooks again.

In my school days I used to carefully comb through available notebooks  and select one with multiple subjects, college-ruled. Usually it would be a spiral-bound Mead, 8 1/2 by 11, but sometimes I’d experiment with slightly smaller sizes. When I was older and wandering through the Kansas City Renaissance Festival with my wife, I purchased a lovely Celtic leather notebook cover with an unlined sketchbook, and I filled a succession of replacement sketchbooks between those covers with my scribbles for years after.

As striking as that notebook was, though, I eventually fell out of using the thing. It became impractical to drag it wherever I went: my student days were over so I no longer had a backpack over one shoulder, and I didn’t have the kind of job where I always toted a briefcase. In those rare instances where I DID have a briefcase, it was already so loaded down that something weighing as much as a hardback book was a nuisance. I never used a notebook for writing unless I was at home, at which point I might as well have been writing on the computer. I thought that I had “outgrown” the use of a notebook.

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Black Gate‘s Vaughn Heppner reaches #1 at Amazon with Star Soldier

Black Gate‘s Vaughn Heppner reaches #1 at Amazon with Star Soldier

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star-soldierStar Soldier by Vaughn Heppner, Book #1 of the Doom Star Series, has reached the Top of Amazon’s bestseller list for Series Science Fiction in its Kindle edition.

Number 2 on the list is the second volume in the series, Bio-Weapon — outselling Dune, Foundation, and Orson Scott Card’s Ender series, among many others. In the general Science Fiction Bestsellers list for Kindle editions, Star Soldier reached #2, second only to the brand new Zero History by William Gibson.

Star Soldier is a full novel, 82,000 words in length, and is available for download for just 99 cents.  Here’s the description:

It’s survival of the fittest in a brutal war of extinction! Created in the gene labs as super soldiers, the Highborn decide to replace the obsolete Homo sapiens. They pirate the Doom Stars and capture the Sun Works Ring around Mercury. Now they rain asteroids, orbital fighters and nine-foot drop troops onto Earth in a relentless tide of conquest. Marten Kluge is on the receiving end. Hounded by Thought Police, he lives like an ant in a kilometer-deep city. The invasion frees him from a re-education camp but lands him in the military, fighting for the wrong side. Star Solider is the story of techno hell in a merciless war, with too many surprises for any grunt’s sanity.

Vaughn has sold three really terrific linked Sword and Sorcery tales to Black Gate, the first of which, “The Oracle of Gog,” will appear in our next issue.  I asked him to tell us a little bit about the novels:

In many ways Star Soldier is based from my years of reading about the Eastern Front during WWII. Social Unity is like the Soviets. The genetic super-soldiers think like Nazis. Marten Kluge, the hero, just wants to be free. But there is precious little freedom in the Inner Planets of the Solar System in 2350… I’m writing hard these days. I’m working on the third book of the Doom Star Series, Battle Pod.

Congratulations Vaughn!

Climbing Aboard the Dragon: Maps and the Fantasy Writer

Climbing Aboard the Dragon: Maps and the Fantasy Writer

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The world is a miracle, unfolding in the pitch dark.
— Barry Lopez, “The Mappist”

Just because you can travel to a place doesn’t mean you can know it.
—Alan DeNiro, “Salting the Map”

Like most things with us fantasy readers and writers, it started with Tolkien.

Map of the Wilderlands, from THE HOBBIT

I saw the map at the beginning of my now-battered Ballantine version of The Hobbit all those years ago. The book had two maps in it, for crying out loud — my eleven-year-old self had never seen such a thing. I wondered if there’d be some sort of quiz at the end of the book — was Mount Gundabad at the northern or southern tip of the Misty Mountains? (No fair peeking!)

I can’t tell you how many times I drew and re-drew that map. I think I even tried to recreate it on an old Apple II computer, using BASIC (ouch, just aged myself, big-time). I studied it, wondered about those Woodmen living on the western border of Mirkwood, and of course traced the path taken by Bilbo and the dwarves on the way to their final meeting with Smaug the dragon.

And then I got a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring and saw how that little slice of the world from The Hobbit fit into the much bigger world of Middle-Earth, and I was hooked. Forget sketching the map of the land — I wanted to live there! (Orcs and wargs and all.)

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Toy Story 3: Genre fiction writers take heed

Toy Story 3: Genre fiction writers take heed

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toy-story-3-lotso-huggin-bearWarning: This essay contains some spoilers.

If fairy-story as a kind is worth reading at all it is worthy to be written for and read by adults.

–J.R.R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf

I don’t get to the theatre too often these days, and with two young daughters in tow more often than not it’s to see a children’s film. But I’m not lamenting this fact, especially when the movies are of the quality of Toy Story 3.

Hey, I love Robert E. Howard, Bernard Cornwell, and the Viking novels of Poul Anderson as much as the next battle-mad fantasy fan, but I’m man enough to admit liking (most) Pixar films as well. And Toy Story 3 might be the best one I’ve seen. Critical consensus is not necessarily a hallmark of a good film (see Blade Runner, panned on its initial release by most critics, recognized as genius years later), but I think it’s telling that Toy Story 3 currently has a 99% “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes. In this case, the critics are spot-on.

Toy Story 3 is a near-perfect children’s film. Like all children’s films, it possesses straightforward story lines, engaging visuals, and brisk action in order to keep young attention spans focused. (If these qualities sound like less than appealing, well, genre films can’t be all things to all people). So why sing its praises on Black Gate? Toy Story 3 serves as an instructive example of how to tell a great story within the confines of a given genre. Just like you can’t get too bogged down in dialogue or non-linear narrative techniques in a movie for kids, that story you submit to Heroic Fantasy Quarterly better contain some elements of sword play and sweeping action if you want to stand a chance of getting it published. If you disregard your audience you’re destined to fail.

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Climbing Aboard the Dragon: Ten Things I Know Now…

Climbing Aboard the Dragon: Ten Things I Know Now…

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Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
— William Faulkner

CHINA TOWN, NAGASAKI, JAPAN by June OkaBecause this series about riding about the dragon called Publishing is geared at writers just starting out writing fantasy stories and novels, I thought I’d pull together another list (I love lists!) that include all the helpful stuff I wish I’d known back in 1995, when I was just starting out.

Ten Things I Know Now That I Wish I’d Known When I First Started

YOUR FAVORITE STORY OR NOVEL THAT YOU’VE EVER WRITTEN SHOULD BE THE ONE YOU’RE WORKING ON RIGHT NOW.  Enthusiasm for your current project is priceless, in my opinion, and you should never rest on your laurels.  Always try to improve yourself as a writer, just like an athlete or musician always works to get better for the next big game or performance.

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ON WRITING FANTASY: Character Is King

ON WRITING FANTASY: Character Is King

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wayofthewizard2
My wizard story "The Thirteen Texts of Arthyria" appears in THE WAY OF THE WIZARD, coming from Prime Books in November.

“A character is not a simulation of a living being.
It is an imaginary being. An experimental self.”
— Milan Kundera

“Each character is a piece of the writer and
the writer’s experience of other human beings, and also a piece of the reader and
the reader’s parallel experience.”
— William Sloane

 “The job boils down to two things: paying attention to how the real people around you behave and then telling the truth
about what you see.”
— Stephen King

What a character!

This fourth installment of an ongoing series covers the role of “Character” in Fantasy Fiction. (Previous installments covered Originality, Style, and Plot.)

The heart and soul of any story are its characters. Every story, no matter what style or genre, is basically about PEOPLE. Even if these people are aliens, monsters, robots, or talking fish, they still have human personalities. Why? Because the people who write them are human. Therefore, all stories are stories about people, i.e. characters. If you don’t have believable, memorable characters, you’re not going to have a very good story.

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Thank Goodness! Why Gatekeepers Will Always Be With Us

Thank Goodness! Why Gatekeepers Will Always Be With Us

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bglgSixteen of your US dollars. That’s what the latest (monster) issue of Black Gate has cost you in these days of fear and crumbling factories. It’s strange, isn’t it? You’ll spend all that money on a collection of fiction and game reviews when the internet is bursting with so much free content. If you go looking right now, you can find a million Sword & Sorcery stories out there that you wouldn’t even need to pirate: the authors, overcome in a delirium of generosity, are only too thrilled to supply them for free.

And it doesn’t stop with short-stories! There are more novels waiting for you online than any dozen people could read in a lifetime, along with plays, movie scripts, poetry…

Oh God. The poetry.

So, what’s stopping you? I’ll tell you what’s stopping me: I don’t want to be a slush reader. It is mind-rotting, eye-burning work that actually becomes worse the more of it you do. Like some sort of cumulative poison. And for every great story we read in the pages of Black Gate, there have been several hundred at least that would have had any sane person thinking more and more about drinking that bottle of bleach under the sink. Oh yes.

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