My friend Nick linked to a post at the Self-Publishing Review today titled The Real Source of Self-Publishing Stigma. I read it and just have to reply.

I need to go through this point by point. Let’s start at the top. The first thing considered is “Mainstream Publishers/Agents”

They don’t really care whether you self-publish or not. I mean think about this for a moment. If you’re self-publishing, you’re one less manuscript in their slush pile. If you fail, they don’t have to deal with you. If you succeed, then you are a proven quantity to them… a sure thing, which is something publishers like.

Well, yes and no. The thing is that when you list self-published books and then try to get an agent or a publisher they do see it and count it against you. Why? Because it shows that you couldn’t find anyone else on Earth to take a chance on your work. Keep that in mind.

Agents DO discourage self-publishing very often on their blogs and such, but the stigma doesn’t really flow from them. More about that in a minute… [I am skipping down to the "more in a minute part as the rest of this quote] I find it insane that while many in traditional publishing will pontificate about how indie authors aren’t “vetted,” GUESS WHAT? Agents aren’t vetted. Anyone can call themselves an agent and a bad agent is worse than no agent at all. Most top agents aren’t taking on new clients because they don’t have to. They’ve got enough good authors making them plenty of money.

I agree! Agents aren’t vetted, except if you count seeing who their clients are and doing leg-work and vetting them yourself. Which the agent will do with you, as well. No there is no One True Source for it, but there are general rules and guidelines and many lists on-line of bad lit. agents. So… yeah if you do no work there is no master list. So do the damn work yourself.
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Seeing as how it is Read an E-Book Week or some nonsense I decided, yesterday, to try an experiment. I went ahead and made an offer to the world. “Here, world,” I said, “you can get a copy of Strange Angel for free, in PDF, until Midnight EST. All you have to do is email me.”

Now, I admit freely, this was an experiment. I could have just linked the book for download from the post, but I wanted people to have to go that one extra step. I know I download stuff and never get to it. But if I have to do something for a file, I tend to read it way faster. But would people go for it? Would people bother to email an author they probably don’t know and ask for some book they haven’t heard of?

Remember, of course, I have three books out. None of them widely out, my publishers tend to be small, so far. But I ain’t new, is my point. And I was curious. I mean I know you can convert PDF to something a Kindle can read, but it is a bit of work. Doing it the way I did it leaves all sorts of issues and work for the reader. Well, yes, it was the only way I could do it just then and whatnot, but still. Interesting.

So how did it go?

Somewhere around 120 copies were requested. Which is about 115 more than I expected. A lot of that is thank to my wonderful friends who spread the word around, even to a Kindle board. Still. Let’s call it 120 (It was something like 117 but in my counting I know I lost a few for the count so I’m rounding) people that now have a copy of Strange Angel.

• Will any of them read it? Some, but probably not all.
• Will any of them review it on Amazon or a blog or talk about it? A tiny tiny slice might.
• Will any of them want to read something else by me? Well, who the fuck knows. But if they do, hey great.

I admit to being curious about all of those above questions. The answers I have right now are all standard amounts. That’s how this works. Will giving it away for free change those numbers? I want to find out.

Here is the greatest part, though, to me. I got 120 emails yesterday, and replied to each, sending them a file and a short note. Over 98% of those emails thanked me for offering the book, said I was awesome for doing it and were generally excited and polite and thankful. How cool is that?!

At least 30% of the people who got the book replied to my mail with the file to thank me a second time for, I guess, following through. Y’all are a bunch of polite motherfuckers! Cheers!

There was one guy though. I don’t know who he was… but he seemed to imply he read my blog. So maybe he’ll read this. But the note read as follows: “Good luck on being able to offer this in a dead tree edition or kindle-ish thingee at some point in the near future. For pay even.”

Now he didn’t mean anything by it. I know that. It wasn’t meant to be an insult. But first all of… wow. Let’s work backwards. “For pay even,” gleefully implies that I don’t get paid for my writing. Which, uhm, isn’t true. I don’t get paid enough for it to be a living, sure, but Shakespeare gots to get paid, son. And it’s an insulting line, ya know? To go up to a stranger and be like “Maybe some day you’ll be able to get paid for your skills, kid. *patpat*” But the rest of it, too. Man, Strange Angel’s been out since last year. In print. As a “dead tree edition.” I’m not saying I expect anyone to be aware of my tiny career, but if you read my blog maybe you would’ve noticed by now? Somehow? That I’m, whatchamacallit, a writer? Maybe not. Whatever. It just stuck out, you know?

But let’s not let that one guy spoil our beautiful moment together, chickadees. Come over here. No, leave your pants by the door. Where we were? Ah, right. The thing is that, overall, people are nifty. They’re thankful and polite and appreciate stuff. It makes sending 120 emails over the course of 6 hours a little easier.

So to wrap up, really, thank you, to each of you that partook of the offer. I hope you enjoy the book. If you like it, I have other books out you can also buy, if you want. Also, this has put ideas in my head. So expect other experiments in the future, and fun stuff.

Some nights my brain wakes me up. I mean I sleep badly and tend to wake up a bunch of times every night, regardless, but on certain, random, nights my brain wakes me up with a bit of a shout. You see, it went ahead and wrote a story for me.

I don’t mean I had some foggy loose dream-story that didn’t work out. I mean I will wake up with exacting, detailed stories or associated items, that work and are a bunch of fun. I tend to then, quickly, call D.J. Kirkbride and tell him, because so far, for reasons I don’t know, they’ve also been comic related.

The first pass of one of our stories was sleep written like that. I woke up about 4am and knew I had to get this shit down. That it might suck in the morning, but something was just right about it. So I got up and jotted down detail after detail and suddenly had most of a beat pass for a script. So I mailed it to D.J. and then went back to bed.

When he got back to me with it, having fleshed it out and all, I had forgotten I had written it.

A few weeks ago D.J. and I discussed working up a cover idea for a pitch we’re knee deep in. And we both agreed to think about it and I went to bed and then I woke up, about 2ish, and called him in a hurry. I could see the cover, exactly. He wasn’t there so I left a half-asleep, rambly to all fuck message for him, describing the cover in detail. That cover has been done and we all love it.

Last night I went to bed a bit early due to just sheer exhaustion. And then I woke up. A pitch idea was in my head. Not fully, but the bones were there. Something D.J. and I can shape into a full pitch. But I just woke up with it and grabbed the phone.

I do wonder if D.J. has started to dread having his phone ring past 1am EST. Because it means that, once he sees it’s me, he has to know he is in for half-asleep, excited, rambling. He still answers the phone, so I guess it isn’t too bad, but he is also braver than I am.

Really though, it kinda annoys me. I love getting good, solid ideas out of my brain. I truly do. And I know how lucky I am. But I also kinda want to be awake more often when it happens. Prose ideas come to me when I’m awake. Comic ideas are about 60/40 awake/asleep and slipping. There is part of me that just doesn’t like the idea that comic ideas happen when I’m not looking.

On the other hand it would mean that I could justify naps are working, right? Hmmm… maybe there’s something to this, after all.

A while back (about a year) I posted an entry about how you can build a career writing and being a creative type of person and at the end I summed it all up with a big ol’ list. I’m gonna forego the whole rambly part of the post and put the list up again, with updates and such. Here then is what you need to do (generally) if you want to write/create in a serious fashion:

• Do the work.
  • Write every day, even just a bit.
  • Deconstruct stories you love and learn from them.
  • Read every type of book, comic and non-fiction you can,
  • Listen to as much music as you can.
  • Watch movies and TV.
  • Anything with story at all is part of your job.
  • Not that you have to read/watch/hear it all, but be open to it.
• Act like a professional.
  • Don’t demand things from others, only yourself.
  • Be prompt.
  • Hit deadlines.
  • Don’t start fights for no reason.
  • When you make a mistake own it and apologize. Don’t lie and hide it.
  • When in confrontation, remain calm, screaming never helps.
  • Never make an empty statement. If you say “If X then I’ll do Y!” for good or bad, if X you better do Y.
  • The above applies twice as much to any sort of threat.
  • Try not to make threats, it always backfires
• Think like a businessperson.
  • Advertise yourself.
  • Take smart chances.
  • Don’t push without thinking, push with aim and timing.
  • Don’t be a douche.
  • Remember the only person to care about your career is you.
  • Don’t be shy, but don’t be annoying. Find balance.
• Help everyone as you would like to be helped.
  • Be kind.
  • Offer your help, with no catches.
  • Follow through, every time.
  • Be honest.
  • Do the right thing, even if people don’t do it for you.
  • Never forget the guy at the bottom probably used to be you. Remember how you wished you were treated, then. Exactly.
• Do whatever work you can.
  • There is no work beneath you.
  • Do whatever it is you are doing to the best of your ability.
  • Use every job as a way to show your strength.
  • Use every job as a way to work on a weakness.
  • Start at the bottom and be grateful for getting there.
  • Enjoy the work for what it is.

I just had this smack in the face realization. On Feb 24th I will be participating in the POPGUN Vol 4 release party/signing event at Jim Hanley’s Universe (details here).

Now I’ve done some signings before for my books and worked the back-end tables at cons and all of this so I didn’t really think of it deeply. Until just now. It hit me, in a funny way.

See, I used to go to Hanley’s when I was in High School. I remember the original store, when they moved, all of that. They used t be where I went, week in and week out, to get my comics. Even after I stopped going there weekly, I would still drop in and I still do consider it the comics store in NY, though I do also love others. Hanley’s is the place, in my brain.

And on the 24th I will be there for a signing. Not the first time I’ve been to a signing at Hanley’s. I remember being the first in line for the kick-off of Warren Ellis’ Oktober Revolution tour (pure chance we were first in line, not planned) and often have seen other events there in the store.

But this time? I’ll be on the other side of that table. At the comic store I first think of when I think of comics stores. I’ll have other big moments in my career, if I’m lucky, and many of them will be memorable as fuck. Shit I’ve had a huge list of them already that I could go on and on about, but this. This.

I’ll be participating in a signing at Hanley’s. From the “person who is signing things” end. It really feels like “making it” on a whole new field. And yeah, I know it isn’t “making it” in any real sense of the word or whatever and I can dismiss it all I want and play it down and make sense rule the day. But…

For two hours on the 24th I’ll be watching people walk by (and, uhm, hopefully stop to buy Popgun and get shit signed) and see some of them think “One day I want to be there.”

And they can be, if they want it enough and put in the work and move toward that goal hard enough. They can be. I can be. I will be, in fact.

Wow.

Schmutzie asked about fear in creativity the other day and instead of answering her I put it on the back burner to get to in a much longer form. Which is here. The truth of it is that everyone fears when they create, to some degree. Mostly it fades with time and experience. Not all of it, though, never all.

Still, all the fears about writing boil down to “Does this suck?” no matter how many different ways you find to slice the question and rephrase it.

Is this working?
Is it on track?
Am I saying what I want to say?
Will anyone like it?
Will anyone else see what I’m trying to do here?
Can I finish this?
Should I finish it?

They all boil down to Does this suck? and everything ends up wrapped up right there. I mean, what if it does suck, right? And you’re showing your ass to the world, humiliating yourself, turning out crap and people will laugh and think you suck and brush you off as not worth their time and all that time of your own that you wasted and and and and…

There are only two things you can do with that fear – give in to it or accept it and move on.

If you’re going to give into it you won’t ever get anything done. Taa-daa. End of story. If you write, and let that fear consume you, you will not finish things, and even if you do they won’t be up to par. Letting the fear win is never going to be the answer.

Courage isn’t living without fear. It’s living with fear and not letting it stop you. Yes, of course, what you’re working on may very well suck. The thing is there’s only one way to find out.

Not doing something because of your fear of it will never end up with you finding out if your fear was right. It will only manage to teach you that your fear is stronger.
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There is a list in my head of all the things I want to write but never will. Some of them I cling to harder than others, of course, but if I had to be honest, and I am, here, I won’t. This list, this insane menagerie of ideas that will never be born fully, is longer than a list of things I have written.

Blog posts alone, man, so many I want to write but never will. For example, the other night I had an idea strong enough to mail myself a note so I wouldn’t forget it. 99% of the time when I do that I write the post fairly quickly. This time I have stared at that note for a few days and I want to write the post, and I start to write the post and then I stop.

It’s a great idea, I still think. An episode of Planet Earth, narrated by David Attenborough, about the strange and wild lands of the Hipster Douches. It would all be written in that precise, engaging Planet Earth voice, talking about the mysterious culture and habits of the Hipster Douche, and so on and so forth. I still like it. I’ll never write it. I know that. I don’t know why I won’t, something in it just doesn’t work quite right for my head, but I know that I won’t get to it.

There was the post where I was going to take the patterns of an old Norse saga and rewrite it as a quest for a white kid in the suburbs to find good hip-hop in the late 80s/early 90s. I don’t even remember why I really wanted to do that one but I kept trying it for about a week before I gave up and added it to the eternal list.

Numerous books and movies and comics that I mean to review and discuss and just never do until the passion to do so fades and I still want to talk about them but the desire is so flagged that I can’t be bothered.

One time I fully intended to write a nice long post all about tire swings. There were some tire swings in this park near where I grew up, big ol’ tires with heavy metal chains. And how you would ride them, and worry about your fingers, and the whole bit. Swings, man. I had a whole post about swings. I still want to write it. I know I never will.

There’s a four book series (fully plotted) I know I won’t ever write, comic ideas that won’t happen, so many short stories and more blog posts than you can shake a stick at. It’s amazing sometimes, to me, that I still carry this list in my head. I don’t need it. It’s vestigial. Just hanging out there like a rudimentary tail going “Look it me! I’m useless and just kinda poking out in the wind.”

I don’t write more things than I do. Some days that bothers me.

Odd thought. I’ve noticed that writers tend to never use their first names in their works. Book and comic authors really, I’m discounting American TV since writer’s rooms have enough people that I can’t see that being feasible and most people don’t know the names of the writers anyway.

[Side note here for Farscape, which had a character named D.K. and fans thought he was named for David Kemper. He wasn't the pilot script with D.K. in it was written long before Kemper was involved with the show]

I’m not talking about writers writing themselves into a story but just having a character with the same first name. It’s just not done, or at least not that I’ve noticed. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

Do you think this is because readers will assume that, even with only a first name in common, the writer is writing themselves into the story? I’m looking for feedback from both writers and readers on this. How would that make you feel, or would you even notice?

I’m just suddenly, randomly, fascinated by this. I don’t even know why I noticed it today, but I did. And so now I ask you guys.

Thoughts?

As some of you know, I’ve always had a list, in my head, of things I want to write and forms I wish to publish in. I wanted a hardcover book, and I have one. I wanted to write some comics, and I have. That sort of thing.

One of the things long on the list has been porn. I’ve always wanted to write a porn, or should I say adult film and be all nice about it? Now this isn’t because I enjoy porn or watch porn. I don’t It doesn’t tend to do it for me. But still, I’ve always wanted to write it. Which brings to mind the question of why.

See, I like a good challenge. Most porn I have seen has a crappy plot and worse dialogue, if any. You know the sort of stuff I mean:

Cable Repair Woman: Well the problem seems to be with your cable box.

Customer: Oh, really?

Cable Repair Woman: Yes, sir. Let me just fix it. There. Oh, no, while I bent over to fix it, my pants fell off. Now we must fuck!

Customer: Oh. All right. Do I have to pay an extra service fee for that?

And then they fuck a lot. Eh. Sure, I suppose if the point if to get to the fucking then you’ve done that, but really is that all we want? Vivid did a series of movie takes that were, for certain values, perfectly hysterical. Lord of the G-String, Playmate of the Apes and the like. The idea went in the right direction. It didn’t go all the way there, though. Not to my mind.

No. I want to write truly awesome porn. Now, I’m writing this at 2am, off the top of my head, so it isn’t exactly polished but wouldn’t you love to see porn more like this:

Joan: So you see, Bob, the problem is that your base expectations of life are off-center and that leads to endless frustration that you take out on your co-workers and friends.

Bob: Well fuck-a-doodle-doo, Joan! But what makes you think that I give a damn?

Joan: The inner eye sees what the external can not fathom, don’t you get that?

Bob: But if that’s the case, shouldn’t I wear pants far less often?

Joan: Oh, Bob, a pantless society is the entire point, you idiot!

Bob: But if that’s true…

Joan: It is.

Bob: Then…

Joan: Yes!

Bob: Huzzah!

And then we can cut to some good, down-home fucking which takes place on a bed shaped like a fish. But I fear that until I get to write some truly off-the-wall porn it won’t exist. Not really. And absurdist porn should be done. See also: Steampunk Porn.

Sadly I have no contacts in the industry, no ins and I refuse to write a porn epic on spec. Some things just aren’t done. And so the chances of me ever actually writing porn are slim to none. Hell, I’m not even sure who would finance absurdist porn. There has to be money in it, though. There has to be. The type of porn that people would watch partly for the fucking and partly to sit there and go “Wait, they said what?” and possibly “But in a Jungist modality, they would never end up doing a reverse cowgirl!”

It’s a shame.

I also want to write Children’s Books, though. I’m not doing that, either. Life is full of disappointment, it seems.

I’m going to take you deep inside the world of collaboration. Sometimes I get asked about it. What’s it like to write with someone else, how does it work, all those little questions you just shrug at and keep moving. I do that a lot to people.

People will ask me things, or just say hi, but I shrug and keep walking. If I stop they might suddenly remember they don’t like me. It’s best to keep a brisk and steady pace so that no one has time to take aim, or remember things.

But I was discussing collaboration. D.J. Kirkbride and I write a bunch of comics together. I know you haven’t seen many of them, but if you buy Popgun vol 3 and 4 (when it comes out) you’ll see the short ones. The long form stuff is still in the pitch stages. But I digress!

So what is it like when we work together? It’s like this:

First we sit on the phone and bullshit about everything. We laugh and make fun of ourselves and bitch about rent and talk about Chuck and Dr. Who. Somewhere in there one of us says “Oh, right, so this story.” Which is when we shift gears.

Then we tell each other stories. Seriously, we just each start telling stories, putting together puzzle pieces. “What if they needed the money to buy a rhino?” “Yes! All right, and what if the rhino was mysteriously blue?” “Oh, so they’d have to find out why?” “Well, we could go there, but I was thinking it could just be fun to look at. Sure, let’s make that a mystery!” “So we have a missing child, four cars and a blue rhino?” “So far… so far…”

The important thing we each try to do is to never say no. Every idea is considered. You just never know where that stray, odd-shaped brick will lead you. So you check under every rock and play. This is play time. Remember that.

We then reach a point where we have enough story to deal with and we need to write it. This is when we go back to chatting about movies and comics and shoes and dancing. Eventually we get off the phone. In there, we’ve agreed who will do the beat pass.

I love beat passes. They’re, seriously, just a list of story beats. It’s like telling the story as a five year old. “And then… and then… and then…” tossing in dialogue when you think you have a great line and describing big scenes and so on. Just a sketch toward what this would look like. It’s 55% transcribing what we talked out and 45% smoothing out the edges and making it actually work for paper.

Whomever does the beat pass then sends it to the other person and that person does the first full pass. Panels, pages, structure, dialogue – the works. By the time we’re doing a first full pass we know what the story is we know the shape of it, how it should pace and what it could look like on the page. After that pass is done we’ll toss the script back and forth adding little things, removing and trimming until it’s done. Sometimes that’s one more pass, sometimes it can be four. Those passes are tiny, though, and don’t take up much time.

But the key thing here, to me, is that the first full pass is the first time this might even feel like work. Before that: the building of the story, the beat pass, laying the initial groundwork, those are all play time. They’re nothing but fun and hanging out with a friend And those are the moments where the magic happens. The first full pass can be work, but it’s also the end of the track. Well, the end of the scripting track. Then there’s the art and working with the artists and letterers and that’s more fun time, really. And it’s not just DJ and I, either. When I collaborate with a writer on comics? This is the sound of it. It’s glorious.

So yeah. What’s collaboration like? It’s a big fucking party where you hang out with good friends and create story and play. Yup.

Also: It’s kinda exactly like this, too.