Christina Baker Kline has posted a round-robin interview on self-publishing that took place on Facebook when Matthew Nadelhaft queried a few authors through Facebook’s email. Participants included Minister Faust, Stephen Dedman, Eugie Foster, Jennifer Stevenson, Michael Stackpole, and myself. Go check it out–lots of good stuff.

I self-published my first fiction collection, The Book of Frog, and also The Surgeon’s Tale & Other Tales (with Cat Rambo)–the context for each consistent with my views on self-publishing as it exists today. If you can’t get traction in the publishing world with a first collection despite having had stories in good publications, I think it’s okay to self-publish. If you’ve got books out from major publishers and you want to do a less commercial project, I think it’s okay to self-publish. That said, within five to ten years, self-publishing in general will probably lose its stigma altogether and we’ll have a situation closer to what you find in indie music.

Anyway, some of what I set forth in the conversations piece is also in my forthcoming Booklife: Strategies & Survival Tips for the 21st-Century Writer, like this bit:

It’s also good, in a time when “book” means a lot of different things, to boil down the book lifecycle to the following:

• Creation and perfection of content
• Acquisition of a platform (or format) for the content
• Creation and perfection of the “skin” (aesthetic) and context for the content
• Accessibility to the content
• Visibility for the content

(One version of the cover of the book; mine is green, but there wasn’t a good image online.)

I first discovered Revising Fiction: A Handbook for Writers by David Madden when I was 17 or 18, and it has been by my side ever since (I’m 40 now). I recommend this book at every workshop I’ve ever taught. Why? It changes as you change as a writer–sections that seem too complex reveal their meaning over time while easier sections that apply to any beginning writer provide a good refresher when you plateau.

But the truly wonderful thing about the book, besides the good advice, is that Madden has divided it into 185 sections that he calls “practical techniques for improving your story or novel.” And in each section, he provides not only the fruits of his own experience but examples from famous writers. Sometimes these examples are just samples of the technique under review. But he’s also done a great deal of research to unearth the rough drafts of various works, so that he can show you how someone iconic solved a similar problem, presenting both the flawed text and the final text. In so doing, Madden provides an invaluable service.

For example, under “123–Considering the context, should some metaphors be turned into similes, some similes into metaphors,” Madden writes:

In a version of The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane wrote “He saw that he was a speck, raising his tiny arms against all possible forces and fates which were swelling down upon him like storms.” “He was a speck” is a metaphor, but Crane wanted the effect of two metaphors, so he struck out the simile “like storms,” and substituted the metaphor “in black tempests.” In “Miss Lonelyhearts and the Dead Pan,” Nathaniel West wrote: “May 1932–And on most days I received more than thirty letters, all of them alike, as though stamped from the dough of suffering with a heart-shaped cookie knife.” West cut “as though,” thus converting a weak simile into a strong metaphor.

Sometimes Madden’s examples take the form of summary at a higher level, as in this paragraph about a Thomas Hardy novel, taken from “61–Are the relationships among the characters unclear?”:

An excellent example of the overall impact of changing and clarifying character relationships is seen in a comparison of Thomas Hardy’s early manuscript of The Return of the Native with the published version. For instance, the reddleman goes from very clear relationships with local characters to being a man of mysterious origins. The boy Johnny was originally not the son of Susan Nunsuch. The heroine, Eustacia Vye, originally lived with her father instead of her grandfather. Thomasin Yoebright was originally the sister of the hero, Clym. The shifting of relationships forced a massive reorganization, the cutting and adding of all types of passages, including narrative.

In the very next section, “62–Do you need to clarify the underlying motives of your characters,” Madden discusses James Jones’ The Pistol. Madden explains that in the second draft of the novel, Jones explains a character’s “motivation for struggling to keep his pistol and offers motivations for the efforts of others to buy or steal it” in this passage:

It was interesting to speculate upon just why everyone was desirous of possessing this particular pistol…Perhaps…he had not yet, at nineteen, acquired the equipment with which to speculate deeply enough to find the real reason. All he knew was that everyone wanted it, wanted it badly, and that he was having a hard time keeping it…The sense of personal safety it gave him, the awareness that here at last was one object which he could actually depend on, the almost positive knowledge that it would one day actually save him, all of these comforted him as he lay rolled up in his two blankets and one shelterhalf with the rocky ground jabbing him in the flanks or as he toiled backbreakingly all day long at the never-ending job of putting up barbed wire. The world was going to hell in a basket, but if he could only hold on to the pistol, remain in possession of that extra margin of safety its beautiful blue-steel pregnant weight offered him, he could be saved, could come through it. Obviously, a lot of other people seemed to feel the same way.

About the excerpt, Madden writes, “In having Mast ponder his own motives and speculate on those of the other men around him, Jones prepares a motivation for the behavior of O’Brien [another character] and an explanation of the conflict between O’Brien and Mast,” but makes some changes in the final draft:

It was interesting to speculate upon just why everyone was so desirous of possessing this particular pistol…Everybody had always wanted pistols of course, but this was somehow becoming a different thing, he felt…Certainly, a lot of it had to do with the fact that it was free, unattached…[here, Jones put other text between the remainder of what had been the original, now-revised passage--jv] All Mast knew was the feeling that the pistol gave him. And that was that it comforted him. As he lay rolled up in his two blankets and one shelterhalf at night with the rock ground jabbing him in the ribs or flanks and the wind buffeting his head and ears, or he worked with his arms numb to the shoulder all day long at the never-ending job of putting up recalcitrant barbed wire, it comforted hiim. Thy rod and thy staff. Perhaps he had no staff–unless you could call his rifle that–but he had a “rod.” And it would be his salvation. One day it would save him. The sense of personal defensive safety that it gave him was tremendous…The world was rocketing to hell in a bucket, but if he could only hold onto his pistol, remain in possession of the promise of salvation its beautiful blue-steel bullet-charged weight offered him, he could be saved.

Madden argues that while the two versions say essentially the same things, the difference in expression is crucial. “One way to make your characters’ motivations clear is to intrude in the omniscient voice of the author, saying, in effect, “Now here is why my character feels and acts he or she does.” In the first version, Madden finds Jones’ language stiff and formal, “even referring to Mast as an immature nineteen-year-old.” Jones also seems to call “attention to the fact that he is informing the reader of Mast’s motivations.” In the second version, “we see him trying to suggest that Mast is himself sorting out his motives: and such more specific images as ‘beautiful blue-steel bullet-charged weight’ (instead of ‘beautiful blue-steel pregnant weight’) help to eliminate the abstract language.”

***

Sometimes students who happen to write science fiction and fantasy do ask me how a book that does not include many examples of non-mimetic fiction can be valuable to them. The answer is simple: the core of creative writing is the same no matter what “genre” you’re working in; a fantastical element, for example, is often as much as expression of the writer’s view of the world as it is anything that differentiates that writer technically from non-fantasy writers.

Further, it’s arguable that Revising Fiction is more valuable to genre writers because it may expose them to examples and writers they have not encountered before. I strongly believe in Michael Moorcock’s advice for beginning writers saturated in genre to “Stop reading SF and fantasy at once and start reading everything else. The worst thing that can happen to a genre is that it starts to feed on itself and in my experience you can bring a lot more inspiration to your work if you read, for instance, the novels of Elizabeth Bowen, some Maigret (or other) fiction by Simenon and absorb yourself in, say, Walter Scott and Marcel Proust. It pays off a treat.”

Reading Revising Fiction as a teenager radically changed my perspective on revision, and the effects that could be achieved after creating the rush of inspiration and grit that is a first draft. In encountering questions that allowed me to test my fiction I grew immeasurably as a writer and began to exhibit more control. In encountering questions I didn’t even understand at the time, I also came to understand that there is no such thing as “mastery” in writing fiction–that there would always be more to learn, more to look forward to internalizing. These two lessons, and the presence of masters of fiction ghosting through the text, soon made Revising Fiction and me inseparable. And I still return to it every year to see what else I can learn from it.

To give you even more of a sense of the value of the book, I’m reproducing part of the TOC below, because the TOC actually functions as a kind of checklist. I would also note that the Introduction is brilliant, and will change many writers’ perspective on exactly what revision is and how you go about doing it.

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From her livejournal at Talking to the Moon, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, a published writer and student at Clarion West this year, is posting about her experiences at the workshop. I’m not a big fan of students blogging while attending a workshop–it can be distracting to the person posting or fellow students, or worse. But in this particular case, Rochita being the kind of person she is and the kind of writer, the results are insightful, thoughtful, and well worth your time.

(Derek Ford’s amazing piece for the interior of the Last Drink Bird Head anthology)

1.

I dreamt of a falling apart hotel in some tropical location. It was on the side of a mountain and it swayed on stilts like something alive trying to break free of its restraints. Ann and I were staying there on holiday. The help staff had all been former members of the government in that country, but deposed during a coup. They had established their own form of Marxism within the hotel, which meant that the guests had to do the cleaning up along with the maids, help cook the food, etc. At night, the staff became hideous animals that roamed the halls, their cries indistinguishable from the gusts of wind. So you had to barricade your door. For some reason, perhaps because we had no choice, we would pretend we didn’t know that they became animals, even when their mouths were blood-smeared in the morning. We would relax by the pool when we weren’t helping with chores and talk like nothing odd was happening. Some of the other guests couldn’t keep their cool and went mad, so dinners became a strange mix of amazing food, curt staff, and people who could not control their nervous tics and their stammering from the stress of it all. Meanwhile, we could tell that the hotel was losing its bearings–that it was coming closer and closer to just breaking apart and falling down the side of the mountain. There came a day when we knew the end was near. The staff had begun to go feral during the mornings, too, so we couldn’t have breakfast until noon. The varnished wood of the floors had begun to snap and crack. We stood on the edge of our hotel room, now with the whole outer wall having slid down the mountain. Behind us the insane guests and the staff stuck in transformations between animal and human. I asked Ann what we were going to do. She laughed and said, “we’ll just fly away.” I said, “how are we going to do that?” She just cawed back at me, flapped her wings, and then we did indeed fly away, never to return.

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(Taken from The Guardian’s feature on Shared Worlds and fantastical cities–thanks, Alison Flood, for picking up the story.)

Rick Kleffel at the Agony Column just ran a podcast interview with me about the Shared World camp that pretty much gives you an overview of what it is and how it works. Great questions from Rick, one of the hardest-working people I know.

Thanks to everyone who ran the Shared Worlds story yesterday, including: Omnivoracious, Warren Ellis, io9, the LA Times blog, Boing Boing,, Maud Newton, Revolution SF, Bibliophile Stalker, Simon Drax, Walker of Worlds, and especially SF Signal for partnering with us on this feature. I know there are others, but this is what’s coming up on my Google right now.

I really appreciate it. It’s a great cause, and getting the word out helps build momentum and lets more teens and their parents know the camp exists as an option. Thanks also to awesome sponsors TOR Books, Wizards of the Coast LLC, and Realms of Fantasy.

I posted the following status message on my Facebook profile page…

Jeff VanderMeer: Writers who don’t read a lot are like musicians who never listen to music. Don’t care how busy you are, you’re stunting your professional development.

…and then this interesting conversation broke out, offered up to all you blog readers not on Facebook. I was going to edit the entries but decided with fact-checking and all…I didn’t have the time. Beside, they read just fine. So here they are in the raw, with just a couple of “I agrees” from Angela Slatter (who has a new post on networking here) and administrative bits flensed. I should note that Steve Hlavac is an awesome photographer, and adds a different perspective to what’s mostly a writer-dominated conversation.

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Er, of his art, that is. Eric’s just about done with the rough sketches that match up to the script I wrote and turned in to him last week. After this phase, once it’s all been gone over and approved, Eric will begin inking for real. (Here’s more info on the project, which is for Tor.com, and Eric’s blog.)

Here are four samples, with the text that roughly corresponds to the image. I really love the looseness of these drawings. Also note that the story itself has changed quite a bit in dramatizing it visually. I’ve had to write new scenes, discard some, compress and expand. It’s been a wonderful experience, because it’s made the story fresh for me again.

Mord and Wick in the strange elevator, but now Wick is facing away from Mord, and you can see Wick is wearing a slug on his back, in the slit in his uniform. Possibly we get closer in to Wick while they’re talking.

[Dialogue:]
Mord: Does it hurt?
Wick: No. It itches.
Mord: Like fleas.
Wick: No. Like a slug. It’s wet.
Mord: Wet’s better than dry, Wick. Dry crackles.

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Today, K. Tempest Bradford is starting her write-a-thon on behalf of Clarion West. As a graduate of Clarion and an instructor at both Clarion and Clarion South, I can tell you that all three versions of the workshop offer an invaluable service to SF/F writers. It’s not just the workshop–although that’s paramount–it’s also about the value to the community, something that I think manifests itself most strongly at Clarion West because of their location in Seattle.

I’m sponsoring Tempest to the tune of $100. You should too–especially since Amazon has given Clarion West a matching grant. Here’s more information, right from Tempest… – Jeff

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UPDATE: I forgot, blurbs are beginning to come in… “Jeff VanderMeer’s stunning Finch opens with a claustrophobic interrogation and with a reluctant detective forced to solve a double-murder. Finch quickly expands beyond genres and beyond the edges of Ambergris–its complex history, its many apocalypses–while remaining a deeply affecting and personal story. Told in a pitch-perfect voice and steeped in the unrelenting menace authentic to the best works of noir, Finch is a wonderful, sad, brutal, and beautiful book. A tour de force.”–Paul Tremblay, author of The Little Sleep

Long before I began to work seriously on Finch, my latest novel, I had fragments of something called, er, Fragments From a Drowned City, which was about a detective who comes to Ambergris seeking a girl apparently abducted and brought to the city. (I worked on it from 1999 to 2001.) It never really came together because I couldn’t at that time imagine the city of Ambergris with the subterranean gray caps in control. I also didn’t really know what happened to the detective. However, in reviewing all of my notes about Ambergris when beginning work on Finch, I realized that hidden in Fragments were many scenes and elements that belonged in the novel–just not in the same style or from the same perspective. In Finch, for example, I knew Finch’s partner, Wyte, had gone through the same experience ascribed to my nameless detective in Fragments. But that same experience needed to be rendered in a totally different way. So, here’s the more-or-less finished anecdote in Finch, followed after the cut by what appeared as “Corpse Mouth and Spore Nose” in my collection Secret Life. I make no claims for which is better, just which is better for Finch. In many ways, it is a complete transformation–an example of the intial spark of imagination leading nowhere, and then another spark coming along to reignite the original material and re-purpose it in a totally different way. The original, including other scenes that didn’t fit in Finch, now reads like Ambergris in an alternate universe. – Jeff

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You might remember a little novel I done finished called Finch, already available for pre-order.

It looked like this:

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