The Birds

The rain came yesterday. I can't remember when it last rained around here - not that it's like the Sahara or anything but it's been dry for weeks now. So when it came, it was largely unexpected - and unexpected means unprepared and now I smell like wet dog. That's OK. It's mostly quite a homely smell that I've gotten used to over the years - but you didn't tune in to hear about that. Last week, some weird shit happened.

I've been planning out my next tattoo session for a while now but being out in the U.S. and among the mighty, I found myself making a small adjustment to the plan. It kind of went like this: I had a few quiet moments to myself so I went outside and took a seat in the corner to gather my thoughts with a coffee. Those thoughts turned to the ravens that already live on me and where I was going to go next with it. I looked up to find the biggest damn raven I have ever seen sitting on a fence post not three feet away from me. Slipping out my camera, I hoped to rattle off a few shots at a reasonably close range before he got tired of me and either a) flew away or b) tried to steal it from me to see if it was edible. Truth be told, it didn't seem to bother him at all. It's a pretty cool moment. I like things like that.

Satisfied with my photographic swag, I head back in to catch up with Noon - which I do, only to find he's started work on his next client but he finds the time to point to the booth next to him and tells me to check out his friends portfolio. I flip the cover and what do I find but the most beautiful tattoos of birds. Big birds. Gene comes back to his booth (for it is he) and we get to talking and before you know it, the deal is struck, the design in motion and the time loosely nailed down for a weekend when we are both free.

You don't have to believe in any Gods or be spiritual in any way, shape or form to see that sometimes, magic just happens because you make space for it to happen. I really believe that. Stop for just a few moments to let the world turn. You'd be surprised what can come out of it.

Here's the beast himself being as we were talking about him:

There's a whole bank of close-ups of this big guy. This particular one I hit with the grunge effect on some new app I'd downloaded, but there's some great source material and I'm really looking forward to getting it on. I can wait though. Let's do this thing right.

That said, some things have waited long enough. Raised on Radio comes under that heading - so, as I have a good deal of time off in November, it's time to start collating and editing (and in some cases, just plain start) what will become the next book. In fact, if I can get my head together enough and plan and work far enough in advance with the day job, I might also to be able to make a good start on Almost Human. Maybe even enough to get a first draft run out to see what it looks like. That would really be something - the three books planned for 2012 actually making it out as planned.

I watched some video clip of Dean Koontz being interviewed on a news show yesterday. He sure has a strange way of writing. From what I can gather here, he writes a page a day and then rewrites that page 20 - 30 times and then the next day, starts all over again. While that might seem to be a long winded way of doing things (and my first reaction was 'how lazy can you get') it sure gets the job done. The man has written a ton of books and when I dug a little deeper, I see that he even outsells Stephen King. That's no mean feat - we're talking something like 450 million books. The last Koontz book I read was Odd Thomas which was pretty good - I might check back in and continue with the series. I'm almost inspired to try and write like that myself - you could certainly have more than one book on the desk at any one time. Maybe I'll give it a trial run for a week or so and see how it pans out.

And talking of Stephen King - he has a new book out in the spring of next year. A little different from normal perhaps as it's a contribution to the Hard Case Crime series. I've always really loved those old pulp style covers (which is one good thing about everything from the past coming back to haunt us) and this one is a peach:

There's some more info about the book here. Count me in. I know King doesn't write in the same way as Koontz but even he suggests the same kind of routine. Maybe I should embrace it - simply some kind of routine in which you chip away at the very large stone. I think I'm going to try out a few different things between now and Christmas and log them here. If you give a damn about such things, the tab will be Mr Smith On Writing. I'll try and make them posts that don't mention anything else so that the trail of clues will eventually lead to something worthwhile...

And to wrap up today? You can check out this movie short from the hands of Mathieu Ratthe called Lovefield.

Mr Ransom & Mr Smith on the blogging author.

A couple of weeks ago, I got in touch with Christopher Ransom (see review of his new novel The Fading here) about something so small, I can't even remember what it was but it propelled us into an email exchange on the pros and cons of blogging - on which subject he gave me the thumbs up to repost the contents of here. So in the interest of er... research on how important a blog is for a writer these days, here's the not so contrasting views between a published author (him) and  a 'not-published in the strictest sense of the word' author (me), here's that very conversation - unedited: Hey Sion,

First off, my apologies for being delayed in getting back to you.  I had a good friend in town for 5 days, during which we attended an author event for Tom Piccirilli, hit a Wilco concert at Red Rocks, hosted a bbq for my family, capping it off with one of my own author events in Boulder to promote the US release of my second novel, The Haunting of James Hastings, aka Killing Ghost (US).  Needless to say, after 5 days of work and play, all of which involved copious amounts of beer, I was flat exhausted and needed a day or two to get back on top of my correspondence ... well, enough of the excuse making.

 

I had originally intended to get back to you personally as I was intrigued by your blog response to my almost-blog about blogging.  I thought you displayed quite a bit of good humor and made the discussion interesting, especially considering I came off as a bit of jerk with respect to blogging.  The truth is, when I posted that "news" item on my site, I was lamenting my own crumbling will-power in the face of today's publishing needs and, I suppose, sending myself a bit of a reminder not to slack off on the book writing.  One of the main reasons I have held off on blogging is my fear of losing (wasting) valuable writing time.  I am, by nature, a procrastinator and time-waster when it comes to staring at my computer monitor.  And, in all honesty, I've seen too many would-be writers spend the lot of their time blogging or writing smaller pieces daily when they could have been writing 3, 5 or 10 pages of prose each day.  In other words, in addition to longing for the days when an author could afford to sit back and limit himself to writing novels and sending them off to his editor, with no further promotional responsibilities, I was talking to myself.  My post was something of a last gasp.

 

However, the reality is, that just-write-a-good-book publishing climate is gone.  If one is fortunate enough to have a publisher that promotes one's books (as opposed to simple binding and printing the thing and dropping it off at a few stores), one is EXPECTED to do one's part in flogging the book online, be that in one's blog, on Facebook, on Twitter, through email campaigns, etc.  As any writer or would-be writer knows by now, we are living in frightening times.  The book market is changing, book stores are vanishing, e-books are flourishing, revenue models are changing, self-published authors are riding a wave, mid-list authors are seeing their print deals go up in smoke, publishers are panicking about how to keep abreast of everything, and readers... well, readers are more discriminating than ever.  All this change is inevitable with the current advent of technology, but it does send author and publisher alike scrambling for a foothold.

 

Another reality I hadn't thought of, but which your post called to mind for me, is that we can't really know how the authors of yore, or those favorite authors of mine that I alluded to in my post, would have responded to the current technology and communication channels back in the day - because they simply didn't exist.  Would Stephen King, Dan Simmons, Clive Barker, Robert McCammon, Dean Koontz, and so many other horror, mainstream, or even literary authors have taken to blogging, tweeting, and Facebooking with their fans and the online community (whatever that is) in their day, had they possessed the tools?  I guess we can't know.  Except to observe that many of them are doing it now that they DO have the tools. All of them have formidable online presences, some of them staffed and well-funded.  So much for my notion of the old school, yes?

 

Which brings us back to the point I almost but didn't really make at all: I am in the process of ramping up my own online marketing efforts.  This will include a stronger and more professional Facebook presence, a Twitter feed run by my invisible friend Noel Shaker to help promote The Fading, and more updates on my author site.  I'm doing this for a few reasons.  One, I have realized that I spend too much time dallying online, contributing to other sites, when I could be building something of my own.  Another is, I am grateful for my readership and want to nourish that lest it go up in smoke.  And lastly but not in the least, my publisher has, ahem, 'encouraged me' to boost my efforts at online marketing and offered to boost their own in my service.  So, it's really a matter of playing the game the way the game is played nowadays.  It's making the most of the tools at hand, building a readership the way one builds a business, and meeting our publisher's commitment with deeper commitments of our own.  

 

Time will tell if my readers and new readers really are interested in hearing more from me than what I have been able to publish in novel form, once annually, but I admit I am curious to see where it leads.  I am in constant conversation about books, writing, publishing, movies, random events, ugly trends, and terrifying world developments -- all with my friends, in person and on other authors' forums.  The only real shift for me, then, will be to direct all that time and energy at my own channels.

 

Still, even as I type this, a little red light is blinking in the back of my skull.  Don't forget to write some new pages for the new novel today, that warning light is telling me.  Whore yourself out in all the best possible ways, it says, but don't forget the books.  The books are everything.  To siphon energy and commitment away from them, from their daily creation, is, after all, the first sin of any would-be professional author.

 

See how easy that was?  I think I just wrote my first new blog entry.  Thank you for continuing the conversation, and inspiring me to do so.

 

Feel free to post this on your site.  I plan to put this -- along with your very generous review of The Fading -- on my site, my Facebook page, and then plug it through Noel's Twitter feed @TheFadedMan.  

 

It's what we do now, isn't it?

 

Interesting huh? To which I responded:

These are certainly weird times we live in. Some of my most liked authors are successfully avoiding any sort of online presence at all (Chuck Klosterman, Bret Easton Ellis off the top of my head) and appear to be quite happy letting their publishers run the game for them. But to come full circle with it and to put it in some kind of perspective, I am unpublished with fiction (day job is another thing entirely) and I figured the odds were stacked against me anyway, so I began my journey planning to do absolutely everything myself. I'm kind of OK with this but I needed a great model to base it on - and I did just one thing. I copied Neil Gaiman. I really like his presence and how he deals with his audience, I like the insights into his life (even if it does seem more interesting than mine). So I decided that if Gaiman had a blog, I would too, Gaiman had a twitter account, so would I. It's advanced from this somewhat over the last 12 months but the foundation was there and  - despite still not having finished the book - feel like it's a good place to start if people do happen along to my online space. The one key thing that I think is critical in this is to NOT have a facebook page. I know so many people who are locked into the time-sucking satanism of it, it's frightening. Interestingly, none of them are particularly successful apart from on their own facebook page - which is bad self hype to believe in.

 

And it's weird too because I, like you, am a loyal reader. I will always check out Clive Barker etc... it's just how I am. James Herbert has almost nothing online, King is more info-driven, Koontz makes an effort now and again, but up against Gaiman, nobody is really knocking it out of the park. I don't think anything less of those guys because of it but like you say, that's not the game anymore... what about the readers who are in their twenties? You're going to be their Stephen King/Dean Koontz - what do they expect? I can't quite figure it out but luckily, I really like blogging. Without a publisher breathing down my neck I can blog about Queesryche if it want to or a sandwich and pretend to be on the level of Gaiman (er - that's my big plan - fake it til you make it) - do you think your publisher would expect rather more exact pimping of your own product? It's a tough call.

 

Writing is never what those who aren't writers think it is huh. For what it's worth, here's my overall thought on it. If 'you' (not you personally, obviously) want to interact with me and like what I do, I have a site and you can contact me there. I will answer (so long as you're not being an idiot). If I have something to say, that's where I'll say it. Nobody serious about what they are doing has time to go and knock on each individual 'fans' door to work like that. I am not Santa. If I've said something particularly great, other people can do the networking thing for me.

 

And that sits really well with me. Here are you and I - interacting, with purpose about something important, from an email. I'd check in or add you to my news feed and see what you had to say because I like what you do. That's enough. As a grown up, I don't expect you to drop everything to tell me what you had on your toast this morning... 

 

Man, we all griped when there were rules and gatekeepers. Now they have taken all those things away, we don't know what to do with ourselves.

 

I guess you just need to put one sentence after another and keep going... 

More came after this, but after that, it peters out into 'we have work to do' much shorter paragraphs and a promise to keep in touch and bandy around some more ideas. I guess the point of me republishing it here is this: just because you got somebody to 'print and distribute' your work (known in the trade as 'publishing'), doesn't mean you won't find yourself thinking about these things. Nobody is going to come and take it off your hands. There is no holy grail at the end of the line anymore - I'm not sure there ever was. We may live in frightening times but they can be exciting frightening times too if you care to keep hold of the umbrella when the hurricane comes knocking...

You can find Mr Ransom online here.