2011 has been an interesting year for me.

• I’ve had a couple of publishers ask for a full of my last novel (in late 2010)… they still have it.  I’m sure they’ll get to it eventually.
• I’ve been working more and writing less.
• I’ve lived through a renovation that went 100% past schedule (overlapping another renovation that started in 2010).
• I got my office back, after a year of a half.  It’s nice to have a place to work.
• I’ve made a couple of new friends.
• I’ve lost a friend.

Basically, the year has been a bit of a write off.  I’ve been under renovations since August 2010, and that can throw a serious wrench into the best laid plans.

Bring in 2012.  I’ve got big plans for you!

We had to go to using reCaptcha to separate bots trying to be users from real users.  I know it’s a pain, but the bots were taking over.

Well, it’s been awhile since I posted anything here. The good news is that I’ve been busy. The bad news is I haven’t been busy writing.

Just to let you know what I’ve been working on, take a look at this: (This used to be a fully finished basement, until we got some water leaks)

We’re getting there…

You’ve done the research.  You’ve done the plotting.  You know your characters.  The outline is (mostly) complete.  Now it’s time to get your butt in the chair and do the real work.

And it’s so hard.

Every word on the page oozes a disgusting odor of pure and utter crap.  Each sentence is dull and uninspiring.  The paragraph sits like a blob on the paper, having no true form or substance or reason for its existence.

Yes, you took so long in research and outlining, that your skills have gotten rusty.  You no longer remember the difference between an adjective and an adverb.  You plod forward anyway, replacing every existence of ‘said’ with a more colorful word… ‘gasped’ would fit right there, or maybe ‘yelped’.  Thirty seconds later you remove it and place the hidden said right back where it belongs.  When did writing become so hard, you wonder?  When did the flow of words that moved from your mind, to your fingertips, to the keyboard, and finally to their deserved place on the screen, stop?  Who shut off the damn tap anyway?  Ah, yes.  It was the months spent on research instead of writing that did it.  Type something in on Google, hit Wikipedia.  Heck, go to the damn Library.  It’s easier than doing any real work.

Well, the time for that is over.  Sure, you might do a quick search here or there to fill in a detail.  Maybe Solitaire isn’t such a time sink after all.  But at the end of the day, you must have accomplished your writing goal, whether it’s a single page, 1000 words, or just 10.  Set the goal, meet it, and progress shall be made.  Before you know it, the rust will have disappeared, the tap will be turned back on, and the story will be written.

Then you can start revising.

I’m a member of a fabulous on-line writing group called Backspace.  Many of our members are published authors, and I made an offer to them.  Write a guest blog, on (almost) any topic you like, and I’ll post a link to their book(s) in the side panel.

It’s The End Of The Publishing Industry As We Know It

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about the death of the publishing industry.  There are those who applaud its supposed imminent demise, those who decry it, and those who deny it’s happening at all.

It’s no secret I have no great love nor admiration for the traditional publishing industry.  I believe they have gotten old and stodgy and way to settled in their ways.  Their emphasis on the bottom line has given rise to a  lot of same-old-same-old garbage taking up space on bookstore shelves.  While they shower their big name authors with support and riches – most of whom, in my humble opinion, couldn’t come up with a fresh idea for a story if their lives depended on it – they toss their mid-list and debut authors into a shark filled pool with neither life vest nor spear gun and expect them to survive if they hope to get a contract for another novel.

This emphasis on the bottom line has also narrowed the hoop of fire any aspiring author must jump through to the point that unless you’ve written something that’s been written a dozen times before, your chance of even getting an agent, much less a book contract with a major publisher, are somewhat less than that snowball’s chance in hell.  I doubt that some of the great ones like Vonnegut or Heller could even get published today.

Recent technological advances have begun to rock this boat of complacency and rocking it hard.  eBooks, eReaders, Publish On Demand, book reading applications for cell phones and the ability to get the book you want when you want it from the Internet is taking its toll on the publishing industry just as it did on the music and movie industry.

In addition, the ability to self-publish has opened the floodgates to all the wannabe authors out there.  I’m pretty sure this last is not a good thing.  A lot of really crappy books are going to get ‘published’ but then, a lot of crappy books already get published by the traditional publishing houses so I suppose it’s a toss-up.  But that whole can of book worms is not the topic of this post.  If you’re interested, I’ve touched on this subject briefly , and will no doubt touch on it again at some point on my blog.

The point I’m trying to make here is that I don’t believe the publishing industry is dying.  Some of the big six publishing houses may bite the book dust, which may or may not be a good thing, but the industry overall is not dying: it’s changing.

What I’m seeing is the rise of small, independent publishers like my publisher, .  These small publishers straddle the fence between the bottom line and publishing exciting, creative books from new authors with new ideas and a fresh perspective, a perspective the traditional publishing industry has lost.  As newspapers and magazines are dropping their book review sections, I’m seeing the rise of high quality book review blogs like Book Slut, Book Wenches, Un:Bound, Clover Hill, Women24, Author Poppet and Will Write For Love.  Sites like , and are out there connecting authors to the most vital part of their, sometimes insane, urge to write: readers.

For the last few decades, the marketing department’s of the major publishers, with their voodoo logic of what the reader wants, have been the gatekeepers to what actually gets to those readers.  This is changing and that, I believe, is a very good thing because, in the end, it is the reader who is truly the gatekeeper.  Write a good book, get it edited by a competent editor, find a graphic artist to create a great cover, get it reviewed in as many places as you can and the readers will find you.

That is the way publishing should be.

Here: http://www.ejknapp.com/2010/09/for-want-of-an-editor/

Rebel e Publishers: http://www.rebelepublishers.com/

Books Slut: http://www.bookslut.com/

Book Wenches: http://www.bookwenches.com/

Un:Bound: http://hagelrat.blogspot.com/

Clover Hill: http://cloverhillbookreviews.blogspot.com/

Women24: http://www.women24.com/

Author Poppet: http://authorpoppet.wordpress.com/

Will Write For Love: http://www.willwriteforlove.com/

Good Reads: http://www.goodreads.com/

Author’s Den: http://www.authorsden.com/

Red Room: http://www.redroom.com/

Author Bio:

EJ Knapp has published several short stories in obscure on-line magazines, most of which no longer exist, though he insists this is not his fault. Besides Stealing The Marbles, he is also the author of a non-fiction work, The Great Golden Gate Bridge Trivia Book – not his idea for the greatest title in the world – published by Chronicle Books in 1987. It has been reissued as an eBook titled Secrets of the Golden Gate Bridge and is available at Smashwords, the Amazon Kindle store and other fine eBook retailers.  For a more detailed bio, see http://www.ejknapp.com/about-ej/

The article is on World Building in fantasy.  The author goes into research and using the real world in his world building.  The video is fantastic!

From: Worldbuilding Fantasy, Using Reality



Carl Sagan was a Professor of Astronomy and Space Science and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University, but most of us know him as a Pulitzer Prize winning author and the creator of COSMOS. That Emmy and Peabody award-winning PBS television series transformed educational television when it first aired in 1980, but now, thirty years later, it’s gone on to affect the hearts and minds of over a billion people in sixty countries.

No other scientist has been able to reach and teach so many nonscientists in such a meaningful way, and that is why we celebrate Dr. Sagan, remember his work, and revel in the cosmos he helped us understand.

http://www.centerforinquiry.net/carlsaganday

It’s an ad for a chain store in Arizona: Bookmans

(Image from 2008, sorry)

Honestly, I can’t say it any better than my friend EJ: Banned Books Week

If you plan on buying or reading a book this week, make it one of the ones on the list.  Don’t let a minority few decide what we can and can’t read… make that decision yourself.

I sent out my last novel to a wide range of readers for critique.  My writing group of 2 (myself and Sherry) was a bit too small of a cross-section to get good feedback.  Sherry was the only one to read the first draft, but the final (ha!) draft needed more readers.

And the end result — well — wow.  Boy did I get a cross-section.  Two readers never finished.  They both got about 40 pages in (more on that later) and called it ‘first draft material’ and ‘needs a lot of work’.  Neither are published (which isn’t that big a deal), but more importantly, neither read in the genre.  Reading that back, it makes it sound like genre writing is somehow ‘less’ or ‘lower quality’ that other writing.  That’s not what I’m saying at all.  What I am saying is that there are certain tropes that don’t need to be explained in detail if you are already familiar with the genre.

Two other readers greatly enjoyed the book.  One to the point of forgetting she was supposed to critique.  That makes a writer feel good.  The other almost cried at the end.  The ‘almost’ kinda got me.  I’ll need to work harder to get that from an almost to a definitely.

My fifth and final critiquer (sp?) also never reads in the genre, but she approached the critique from more of a line-edit/consistency point of view.  Very helpful!

The end result is that I need to strengthen the opening, add a bit of detail to make a stronger image of the city in the reader’s mind, and tweak the ending and a few conflicts in the novel, so that the ending has a more emotional impact.

It sounds like a lot, but it’s really not.  Just tweaks here and there.  Sheila Gilbert from DAW has asked for a full, so once I get these changes done, and have two new readers look at it, it’s off.

Now, back to my previous point of two readers only making it to page 40…  Before I send out my work, I ALWAYS spell check and re-read it.  I want to make sure things are as good as I can get them.  I don’t know what happened, but the document I checked is nowhere to be found.  I didn’t discover that until some of the beta readers came back to me with comments.  None of my spell check corrections were in there, and page 40 started a scene that was a duplicate of one on page 200 or so.  The thing is, it belonged on page 200.  The readers read it on page 40, and became completely lost.  And for good reason.  That scene needed the previous 200 pages in order to make sense.  It was embarrassing, to say the least.  And I still can’t find my good copy.

Now back to work.

Keycon 2010 is over.  Three days of interesting fandom, meeting old friends, making new ones, and being Patient ’0′.

Canvention (the Prix Aurora Awards) was part of Keycon this year, which usually means a fabulous writers track.  Things went a little wrong, and many of the visiting writers ended up with no panels.  I can’t complain though, because I wouldn’t be able to do the programming, so kudos to all those that try — they are better than I.

Robert J. Sawyer won the Best Novel Aurora for Wake, beating out the 4 other nominees.  I’d read 3 of the 5 nominees this year, so I felt good with voting this year.  Sorry Rob, if you read this, I voted for Hayden Trenholm.  At the rate Hayden is going, I’m sure his third (and final?) book in the series (Stealing Home) will be nominated next year.

The awards banquet was well done.  Thankfully they ran out of desert before they got to Sherry, Adria, (and here) and I.  We all had a fruit plate instead, and were the envy of all.

Sheila Gilbert , editor at DAW was there.  A pitch session was scheduled, which was great.  It wasn’t incredibly well done, those of us waiting to do pitches could hear the people making pitches.  Not great.  We tried to keep our conversations a bit loud, to create a bit of privacy for those pitching.  My pitch went okay.  Sheila asked for the full, but I have a feeling she asked for a full from anyone that pitched something that was completed.

Conventions usually drain me, and I end up sick for couple of days after the con.  This time, I went in with a sinus cold.  I was patient ’0′.  If you got sick at Keycon, it’s my fault.

Along with the regular panels, I managed breakfast with Hayden and his lovely wife Liz, a ‘before banquet’ drink with Rob Sawyer, Virginia O’Dine of Bundoran Press, Edward Willet, Hayden Trenholm and Liz, Sherry, Adria, a couple more I can’t recall right now.

Overall, a great weekend.  I had fun.

May the Fourth be with You!

I was introduced to WordStar many, many moons ago.  I built myself a Ferguson BigBoard CP/M based computer (the system came with a board and parts.  I had to buy my own soldering iron), bought a Hazeltine 1400 terminal and two 8 inch floppy disk drives.  The terminal is so old, I can’t even find an image of it on the Internet.  That computer eventually fried… don’t ask.

The one thing I truly got from that system, was a deep love for WordStar from MicroPro.  I took to the command sequences like a fish to water.  Even after the BigBoard died, I stuck with WordStar and it’s command sequences.  Turbo Pascal used the WordStar keys, one of the text editors I use today has a WordStar mode (joe).

I’ve even remapped my Caps Lock key to be a Ctrl key to make keyboard navigation easier. That being said, I do seem to have gotten into the habit of using the cursor keys for navigation.  Hmmm.

I missed my WordStar.  Oh, I always had a DOS or CP/M Emulator available that would run WordStar, but then I couldn’t print quite right.  The files couldn’t be read by other apps for printing.  It was generally a pain.

So, I decided to double my pain… I wrote a WordStar ‘clone’.  It’s got most of the command sequences in it, it’s missing most of the dot commands, and has only rudimentary formatting support.  Still, it’s getting there.  I can pretty much read and write WordStar 4 and under files.  Wordstar 5 and up is coming.

My next steps from here (once I get out of novel revision mode) is to

1. complete printing
2. complete the command keys
3. complete the dot commands.
4. add RTF read/write abilities (write for sure).
5. read and write all WordStar files

Then I’ll look into adding macros.  I’ve never used WordStar macros, so it’s a new one on me.

WordTsar (yeah, bad name) isn’t a WYSIWYG wordprocessor, but it does try make things look close.  For example, the screen width is the printer width (hard coded to 8.5 x 11 for now).  The screen shot above uses Times New Roman as it’s font, so variable width fonts are displayed correctly.  Bold, italics, etc are displayed as is as well.  The main code base can deal with font changes and display the correct font, but a user can’t change the font yet.  These font styles do not yet follow the WordStar font table.  I’m not sure if they will.  I’ve added a full screen mode, since I hate distractions when I write.  The program is UTF-8 throughout, except reading and writing of WordStar files, that’s still 8 bit ASCII.

It’s currently at version 0.0.1 Alpha, but it’s pretty stable and usable.  It has one crashing bug that I’m working on (weird delete problem).

I use wxWidgets to code it, so it’s cross platform: Windows, Linux, and OSX.  I currently only have the Linux version running, but next month, we’ll see.

Ahh, what I do to keep my programming skills up while I write!  Fun fun fun.