alien romances

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

What Exactly Is Editing Part VII - How Do You Know If You Are A Writer Or Editor?

The previous 6 parts of this series explored the world from the point of view of an Editor.

The Editor archetype has made great POV characters for Romance, blockbuster films, Intrigue, Mystery/Suspense, and even Adventure, so as a writer, editor or reader of fiction you may find these posts illuminating.

Part One of this series was posted on August 3, 2010,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-i.html

followed by Part II on Aug 10
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-ii.html

and Part III on Aug 17,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-iii.html

Part IV on Aug. 24, 2010
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-iv.html

Part V on Aug. 31, 2010
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-v.html

Part VI on September 7, 2010
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/09/what-exactly-is-editing-part-vi.html

Having described the pressure-cooker corporate politics, bottom-rung-of-the-ladder position of most of the editors with whom the beginning writer might deal, I've also sketched in how the writer can fit into the Editor's world by understanding what the editor is actually faced with. This understanding allows the writer to revise to editorial requirements with speed and efficiency.

And we've looked at what the writer can do to cope with the sudden, often cryptic, mostly unexpected editorial rewrite orders.

Oh, yes, the professional writer expects rewrite orders -- but the particular ones that arrive are always either unexpected or monstrously disappointing.

The Writer-Editor relationship is multifaceted and complex. Few writers, especially beginning writers, feel comfortable with that relationship.

It always seems (regardless of whether it's true or not) that the editor wants to insert their own voice into the Art.

The writer faced with rewrite orders feels trampled upon.

It's usually the parts that the writer treasures, feels best about, felt triumphant writing, or were the actual core of the whole concept, that need changing or even deleting.

That's crushing. It's mind-numbing. And it's always done in haste beyond belief.

Later, fans will complain about this or that glitch -- the writer knows the source was either the haste or perhaps the editor's demand. How do you defend the work without whining and pointing the blaming finger at someone the reader has never met and barely knows exists (especially after the glowing thank-you placed in the Acknowledgments?)

Worse, how do you defend the flaw the reader has found when you know it was actually an improvement? When you know what the editor was trying to achieve, and how you had failed, and you did the best fix you could in the time allotted?

You don't. That's how.

After a novel is published, suddenly the writer's world has changed. The EDITOR is no longer the customer.

Remember, The customer is always right was one of the maxims we focused on in Part II and kept returning to in subsequent parts of this series.

The editor was the writer's customer - but now the reader is the customer.

And the customer is always right.

Listen carefully. Find what's bugging the customer. Don't make that mistake again. Figure out a way to get what the reader wants past the editor. That's the professional commercial fiction writer's job.

So, as a writer you've had your ultimate customer, the reader/viewer, complain about errors, mistakes, that were actually introduced in the editing/producing process.

How do you feel about that?

How do you feel about "being edited?" Did it destroy the work in such a way that the very reason you write at all was erased?

Did getting your novel published dissipate your drive to write more novels?

Was it too horrible? To painful for words?

Maybe you're not a commercial fiction writer. There are other fields of professional writing and other ways to make a living from a writer's skill sets.

How long did it take you to produce that first sale? I mean how long did it take to write that particular novel, not to do your practice for the circular file? The one you sell might be the 5th or 10th you've written - and that's OK. Eventually, you might even sell those prior novels when you have a reputation to exploit.

My point here is, how FAST did you write the words that you put out to license with this publisher?

I hope you kept a record of how many hours you worked on those words before you got the contract and entered the editing process.

Add to that the time spent on the editing process, which should be a minor percentage of the total and keep calculating.

You now know the advance payment. Wait 2 years. See if there are any royalty checks - watch for when the royalties dwindle to a trickle from e-book sales, or the novel is remaindered and taken off the publisher's books.

OK, now you know how many hours it took you to produce those words, and how much money the book made. You also know what you, yourself, spent out of pocket on publicity, convention tours, fan mail, etc.

Calculate the $/hour.

Did you make minimum wage? Did you make what you expected to make? Did you make enough to make the whole effort worth your while (which isn't a number of dollars; very often writers don't work for money). Many times, if you do the figures honestly not the way the IRS demands, you will find you've poured more money into the publication than you got out.

Professional commercial fiction writing can be an expensive hobby.

Here's a valuable blog post to consider on the full time writer's life:

http://www.blackgate.com/2010/07/09/robert-silverberg-on-are-the-days-of-the-full-time-novelist-numbered/

On facebook, I posted the following link:

http://storytellersunplugged.com/johnrosenman/2010/07/13/do-your-lovers-live-hea/

Which is a professional SF writer who includes a love-story in most novels talking about the HEA - Happily Ever After - ending as "restrictive." I commented on that post and it's given me an idea for what has to come next on this Alien Romances blog.

I posted a link to that HEA ending discussion on facebook, and Jonathan Vos Post (a nuts-n-bolts SF writer with a very real, real-science background) commented thusly:

Jonathan Vos Post
My father, as editor, published some Romance novels when I was a child, which did not much interest me. But I have friends in RWA (Romance Writers of America) which is 10 times the size of SFWA or MWA. Supply exceeds demand, driving down average book advances, but sales are huge, amounting to roughly 1/6 of ALL books sold in the USA. In that ... See Moreflood, there are both the competent but forgettable works, and also enduring works of imagination and sparking language about human beings. So -- happily ever after to WHOM?

And that "TO WHOM" has been a core issue with the discussion on Twitter's #scifichat of "Utopia" -- everyone's idea of Utopia is different.

The HEA is a variety of specifically tailored Utopia-for-two (at least).

Now take those 3 posts together.

a) There's never been a high percentage of writers making a full time living from writing, and those that do live fairly low on the economic scale (or in a cheap place) The percentage is shrinking these days.

b) Genre fields have more would-be writers pushing more product at publishers than there are publishing slots. Publishing slots will not become more numerous until there are more readers demanding that genre. The Romance field has more would-be writers who are competent, even excellent, than SF genre does because SF demands an education very few people have, want, or can absorb and entertains like-minded folks. Romance is for everyone, BUT can be written well only by those who have a real feel for human nature and spirit. More people believe they have Romance writing talent (even when they don't) than believe they have SF writing talent. Romance genre writing looks easier than SF writing. It's not.

The $/hour you make as a professional commercial fiction writer is peanuts compared to, say, a grocery store manager (not clerk; manager). Many professional writers are grocery clerks in their spare time.

But the education required of a Romance Writer (or SF writer; Mystery, Western, International Intrigue - any genre, including general Literature) is far higher than the education required to manage a retail outlet.

Librarians and Teachers make a lot more than writers, on average, and the education is maybe equivalent -- but over time, a writer needs far more ongoing education than a Librarian or Teacher.

Librarians and Teachers can pay for ongoing education and deduct it from taxes.

Writers can't do that. It's not "educational expense" to go to three movies a week, or more.

Take the resource you have within you, figure its market value, then figure the return on investment you are making as a writer.

Do the figures work out for you?

Robert A. Heinlein and Marion Zimmer Bradley agreed that if you can do anything else but write for a living - do that instead.

Most full time writers do it because they are physically unable to do the job their education qualifies them for, or because they really can't do anything but write.

Now think about the economics of "being a professional writer."

There is one way to increase your income despite the over-supply of your product in the marketplace and your extremely high overhead expenses (continuing education, market research, self-promotion).

Decrease the time it takes to produce saleable word strings.

Yep, there's that corporate buzzword every employee hates -- productivity.

You have to increase productivity to make a living.

Isaac Asimov made a great living (lived in New York; very high overhead). He did it by selling FIRST DRAFT.

The man was a certified genius with an eidetic memory. Research was a breeze for him, and writing was simply typing as fast as he could. He had his own editor at Doubleday (hardcover publishing house) and kept that editor constantly busy, too busy to deal with any other writer (I was a Doubleday writer: I was in Asimov's editor's office). Asimov produced a constant stream of fiction and non-fiction best sellers that paid an editor's salary, and enough profit to live on nicely. (constant being the operative word)

And in the process, he shaped the SF field from its earliest days.

The man was a WRITER - a professional writer. That was his identity. (Yes, I knew him, sometimes introduced him at Star Trek conventions, too).

Is that the nature of you?

Take Marion Zimmer Bradley as another example. She lived on writing proceeds, but not so well until she hit the big time, which took decades since SF was at that time an all-male field, and Fantasy didn't exist in the modern form.

She wrote mixed-genre. Can you classify the Darkover universe? ESP was an element forbidden in SF (James Blish introduced it after a fashion in Jack of Eagles, but not using the fantasy elements MZB did). Yet Darkover is a lost colony of Earth, with natives and human-Terran hybrids, so it's SF. Well, no, it's neither. It's cross-genre where one of the genres didn't exist yet.

MZB's novels sold steadily - but not in high volume until much later in her career when she finally sold some mainstream novels and one of them was made-for-TV miniseries Mists of Avalon. She edited an Astrology magazine, wrote true confession stories, and anything else her agent could glean for her, even horror and romance under various bylines. She wrote anything and everything she could get paid for, and the training she got from that improved her SF to best-seller and Hugo Nominee status.

She turned out voluminous words-per-day on a steady basis. 20-30 manuscript pages a day that needed only a light rewrite and touch-up was her usual pace (I know because she took me on as a student and demanded the same pace from me - we exchanged chapters on our current WIPs - wrote a chapter a day, mailed it, picked up the arriving chapter of the other's WIP, and sent back a letter of comment on that work, then read the incoming comment on our own WIP and made whatever rewrites suggested - and that was 1 day's work, 6 days a week for me).

That's a professional working writer's day unless you're Isaac Asimov in which case you write it and send it in. (he did articles and short stories too along with novel chapters, and non-fiction chapters; there was nobody else like him!)

A professional writer produces words-per-day. That's the job.

Words aren't worth much. So to make a living you must produce a lot of them, very quickly and to market -- i.e. not needing much rewrite.

Just as a publisher's overhead expenses are increased by accepting manuscripts that need rewrite orders -- (then need arguments with writers who don't want to conform their product to the market's requirements), so too are the professional writer's overhead expenses increased by having to do rewrites, before or after contract. Fewer rewrites equals increased income.

Maxim mentioned in previous posts in this series; TIME IS MONEY

Here's another glimpse of a professional writer's life.

TV Screenwriters.

When you're working on a weekly series as one of a stable of contracted writers, you write the stories given to you at the story-conference.

The season is planned out by story-arc, and various episode concepts are created and assigned along with deadlines. The 1 hour slot has to be filled by a 40-45 page script - usually shorter than that, or cut-able.

The first draft deadline is inflexible. Miss it, you're fired. Rewrite deadlines are even more inflexible.

The script always comes back with rewrites that conform it to stuff done by other writers working on different scripts of the season and stuff rewritten on the fly by the actors and director on the set. The rewrite usually has to be done over the weekend or turnaround in 24-48 hours. During production you can be working 16 hour days 7 days a week - and more.

Speed and accuracy are of the essence. Do it or you're fired.

You have only days to write that script, hours to do the rewrite - and several of these scripts to juggle through the pipeline every production season.

I had the privelege of having two of the writers for a Canadian TV series ask to meet me at a convention one time. I therefore made it a point to hear their presentation at the convention before meeting them. They collaborated on a production routine like that and had many (many) annecdotes of near-disaster, quick rewrites, mid-night phone consultations, and hair-raising reasons to have good art changed to mediocre or bad art, some reasons expense related, sometimes because an actor was ill, sometimes an effect was in-budget but just not attainable. Commercial writing in TV or any field is not about art. It's about deadlines, production schedules, and union workers standing around idle burning clock time.

And that wasn't the first time I'd had an inside look at TV production writing, so I know their lives weren't unusual. Their ability to explain the kind of pressure the job puts on the writer though was unusual. I wish the presentaton were posted online as a video.

If you can't turn out the sheer volume of publishable (produce-able) words on deadline - TV isn't the field for you.

I grew up in the News Game - I know journalism from so many sides you wouldn't believe they all exist.

I currently know one working print journalist working full time to support just herself - not even a whole family. I know how many hours of research she does, and how fast she has to bat out the stories to very specific lengths no matter the complexity of the subject. It's good training for novel writing, and it is just like TV production writing. No matter what, you make the deadline, you produce the words to order without much need for editing. Take up too much editing time, you're fired. Journalists make better money than novelists - steadier money - but still it isn't a living anyone could envy, especially today with print media disappearing and the Web based journalism not lucrative enough to compete with print.

So in determining whether you are a writer or an editor, there is a short list of attributes about yourself that you should inventory:

a) monetary income requirements - how poor do you want to live?

b) personal attributes of intelligence, memory (are you Isaac Asimov?)

c) alternative places to apply your inventory of skills and knowledge and what they pay. Are you physically able to do something else?

d) supply and demand - if you're going to be a supplier of words, how much competition do you have?

e) how reliable and uniform is your word-production? Can you improve it in time to prevent starvation?

f) do you have a backup plan? What if the publisher's check bounces? (they do) Are you willing and able to write just about anything that pays?

What's the difference between a writer and an editor (other than the steady paycheck, however paltry?)

Basically, any editor is actually a writer.

Any writer has to learn to be an editor to turn professional.

Both writers and editors have consider the 6 attributes listed above.

Both are in the same economically sensitive business - some more advertising supported parts of the industry have bigger swings, but demand is closely tied to the economy, jobs, leisure time available per person.

There is only one point upon which I've seen writers and editors differ markedly as personality types.

It's e) above -- word production pace and volume.

Writers produce torrents and tides and tsunamies of words, every day all day, and aren't happy doing anything else. A lot of those words are typo'd because of haste to get it all down. A lot are parts of wordy-constructions and need rephrasing, and many just plain don't say anything and need deleting. But the torrent of words just never lets up, good, bad, indifferent, and brilliant they just keep pouring out to be shaped to professional standards on the first rewrite.

Editors produce a few words - maybe half a sentence - and spend a month or a year pondering those few, searching for just the right single word. Nothing is ever good enough for an editor.

Editors produce a story idea, and spend five years writing character sketches.

Editors produce a lot of poetry, but slowly and with multiple grinding polishings until all the words just sparkle.

Editors don't produce words at commercial rates.

Editors polish and polish and ponder and choose and re-choose, and grind away wanting everything just so perfect.

I know only one hugely best selling, widely read, greatly admired, critically acclaimed writer who worked like an editor - polishing and polishing for 10 or 15 years to produce a book that was maybe 40,000 words long.

Theodore Sturgeon (a very good friend, keenly missed now that he's gone) worked like that. He was invited by Gene Roddenberry to contribute to Star Trek in the season where they drew upon seasoned professional SF writers (so was Marion Zimmer Bradley but she declined because she didn't like TV as a story-medium and had never seen Star Trek).

Theodore Sturgeon wrote the original script for Amok Time that introduced Pon Farr, the Vulcan mating drive, to Star Trek and by that changed the world.

The final broadcast version was different from the version Sturgeon wrote (I have copies of both scripts), but the concept of the mating drive survived and shaped our notion of Vulcan culture and Spock's place in it.

But unlike Harlan Ellison, a natural screenwriter, prolific SF novelist and editor, wildly best selling shaper of the middle-history of the SF field, Sturgeon didn't go on to work in television. He kept on working, perfecting a novel titled Godbody which was finally published in 1986. A jewel.

I've known many editors and agents (interchangeable roles; they both try to fit an artistic product into a commercial market), and all of them do write, or want to write, but don't produce enough words/day to make a living at writing.

Some editors and agents just give up, acknowledging their tropism toward stories but knowing they can't make it as professional writers for lack of the word-volume production.

As far as I know, that's the only difference. Librarians and Teachers likewise may have a book in them - one. They may write on the side. But they stop to polish and grind and end up condensing everything to near poetry. It's just not enough words to make a living when you get paid by the word.

So, turn your eye inward and judge yourself.

Do you have what it takes to attain and sustain a words/day volume rate that can bring an income large enough to satisfy your lifestyle requirements?

If so, you then have to consider the competition. What if you don't make it? What's your backup plan? What are the odds that you will succeed where thousands of others have not?

Are you willing to take that chance?

And it's the same problem for editors. For every person who has the talent and training, the ability and determination to make it in editing -- there are 10,000 more just as good. But only 1 job that pays steady.

Today the number of paying jobs in publishing is shrinking, and the corporations are again playing the game of firing the senior staff because their salaries are too high, combining the positions so 1 person does the work 3 did before, then hiring kids just out of college to fill the 1 vacancy and paying them entry-level salaries. They then tell the shareholders and Wall Street they've increased "productivity."

You can't live in Manhattan on a Manhattan editor's salary. That's economics. Check it out.

Why are you even thinking of getting into this game?

If you're not an editor or a writer, then maybe you're actually born to be an AGENT?

Here's a blog entry by an agent on the role of the agent.
http://chipmacgregor.typepad.com/main/2010/08/what-is-the-role-of-an-agent.html

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Next Tuesday we'll look at a blog post by a writer who asks, "Do Your Lovers Live The HEA" (the Happily Ever After ending)

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Place holder

Saturday, September 11, 2010

9-11

In case you aren't familiar with it, here are the lyrics to the best 9-11 song I've ever heard, Alan Jackson's "Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning":

Where Were You

This song acknowledges all the conflicting emotions of that day but in the end focuses on hope and reconciliation. Remember how, just for a while, we all came together and recognized the matters we usually fight over as trivial by comparison? (As Miss Manners sardonically wrote some months later, we knew the terrorists hadn't won when we stopped being nice to each other.) Too bad our fallen human nature is such that it often takes a major disaster to remind us to love our neighbors.

Margaret

Thursday, September 09, 2010

Language and Thought

Here's a recent article on whether language shapes thought. The hard-line theory that grammar and vocabulary rigidly constrain a culture's perception of reality has been overturned. Yet the structure of our language does obviously influence our world-view, and it does so in more nuanced ways than simply preventing certain types of thought:

New York Times

Fortunately, Newspeak as designed in the dictatorship of George Orwell's 1984 probably wouldn't work the way its inventors hoped, to ensure that "heretical thought. . . should be literally unthinkable." In Orwell's afterword to the novel, he wisely adds, "so far as thought is dependent on words." The lack of precise terms may make a thought harder to shape, but the human mind is creative enough to get around that problem. We speak in parables and metaphors or invent new words.

What interested me most about that article cited above was the point that our languages force us to *notice* certain things. For example, a French speaker can't refer to a generic cousin, as we can in English. The gendered ending of the word forces the speaker to specify a male or female cousin. Some languages have different words for grandparents, aunts, or uncles depending on whether they belong to the maternal or paternal side of the family. And some languages have a very useful feature that requires every statement to indicate the source of the speaker's knowledge—eyewitness, hearsay, opinion, etc.

Although many people mock what's sometimes called "political correctness" in speech and writing, being careful about the terms used to refer to other people has a valid point. When "man" could mean either "human being" or specifically "adult male," it wasn't hard for phrases such as "the rights of man" to blur with ambiguity at the edges. Latin could avoid the ambiguity with "homo" for the former and "vir" for the latter; English doesn't have that distinction. Changing language doesn't magically change attitudes, but who could deny that language does help to shape attitudes?

And then there's the ever-shifting quality of euphemisms. "Retarded" (implying that the child is just developing a bit slower than others) began as a polite substitute for harsher terms such as "feeble-minded." Nowadays "retarded" has become perceived as an insult, to be replaced by phrases such as "developmentally disabled." The trouble with euphemisms, as the history of "retarded" illustrates, is that new ones eventually pick up the taint, so to speak, of the old ones, so yet another replacement has to be invented. The change in Maryland law from "disabled persons" to the subtly different "persons with disabilities" is an example of this trend.

Metaphors shape thought more powerfully than vocabulary and sentence structure. Consider the implications tucked inside metaphors such as "war on drugs," "war on poverty," and "war on terror." In war, violence is justified, and absolute victory is the only acceptable goal. In fighting against poverty or drugs, who are the enemy combatants?

Here's Orwell's essay about Newspeak:

Principles of Newspeak

He mentions that Newspeak aims to diminish rather than extend the range of thought and, as far as possible, make speech independent of conscious thought. Notice Orwell's sly references to the ways twentieth-century political discourse was already tending in that direction. Just the opposite of what we, as writers, aspire to do with language!

Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt

Tuesday, September 07, 2010

What Exactly Is Editing - Part VI

Monday, September 06, 2010

Peter's Evil Overlord List

Peter's Evil Overlord List

With apologies to Linnea, whose "day" it is, but I couldn't resist sharing this link.

Sunday, September 05, 2010

Immigration and Alien Romances

From time to time, I blog about how much there is in our everyday news to inspire speculative thinking, idea-based fiction, and world-building for all types of science fiction/fantasy romance, and especially for one of the "punk" genres. (Steampunk. Cyberpunk. Etc)

In recent posts, I've looked at pollution and man-made disasters, volcanic eruptions, and the potential for disastrous mistakes if we become unreasonably dependent on the products or services of pharmaceutical companies (or any other enterprise, whether for our physical comfort -- the power companies-- or for our spiritual comfort.)

Immigration seems to be a hot topic from the Antipodes, almost to the Arctic. In fact, one eHow Contributor opines that Iceland's Immigration laws are among the most rigorous of all the Western Democracies. I expect that some of my colleagues will pay greater attention to immigration and the treatment of "illegal aliens" in their future alien romances.

I've always been fascinated by the local treatment of foreign royal spouses throughout European history. "Alien" wives haven't always been well received, and I had a little of that sort of thing as a sub-subplot in my alien romance "Knight's Fork" (no longer available unless through private vendors or second-hand).

However the wives of the rich, powerful and influential are probably not put through the frustrations, humiliations and stresses to which GI brides, mail-order brides, and ISP wives are subjected.... to say nothing of the hurdles facing regular good folks who wish to adopt a orphan child from overseas.

King Henry VIII's blind date with Ann of Cleves worked out pretty well for Ann, considering the fate of his other wives, and what the Princess's life might be like if she'd been sent home, rejected.

But... back to the futuristic fiction. I seem to recall that there was some sort of quarantine policy on Babylon 5, but Babylon 5 was more of a way station than a permanent destination for most of the characters who passed through its ports.

Much of the alien romance fiction that I've read hinges upon either conquest, colonization, or the forced importation of desirable captives who possess an ability, talent, skill or gift that is in demand in the aliens' world. If there is a shortage of breeding stock, for instance, local immigration policy is likely to be accommodating.

Lawbreakers and smugglers find themselves in trouble. There's a practical difficulty in terms of cost and logistics in deporting or repatriating inter-stellar stowaways and illegal immigrants. The local authorities' solution in Maria Doria Russell's The Sparrow to the problem of an unwelcome missionary was to use and abuse him for entertainment.

Jack Vance had an interesting and plausible mix of border controls and air traffic control in The Demon Princes.

What immigration policies have you seen in action in your science fiction and fantasy travels?

Best,
Rowena Cherry

Footnotes and Links

German Immigration Law
http://www.workpermit.com/news/germany4.htm

Japanese Immigration Law
http://www.ehow.com/about_5117692_japanese-immigration-laws.html

Russia's Immigration Laws
http://www.ehow.com/list_6165747_russia_s-immigration-laws_.html

Iceland's Immigration Laws
http://www.ehow.com/facts_5150933_icelandic-immigration-laws.html

Pakistan's Immigration Laws
http://www.expatforum.com/articles/visas-permits-and-immigration/pakistan-visas-permits-and-immigration.html

Current Controversy in Australia about Australian Immigration
http://www.embraceaustralia.com/the-australian-immigration-debate-7566.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rA9dgq2RPbg&feature=related

An anonymous correspondent's summary of Mexican immigration laws:

1 There will be no special bilingual programs in the schools.
2. All ballots will be in this nation's language.
3. All government business will be conducted in our language.
4. Non-residents will NOT have the right to vote no matter how long they are here.
5. Non-citizens will NEVER be able to hold political office.
6 Foreigners will not be a burden to the taxpayers. No welfare, no food stamps, no health care, or other government assistance programs. Any burden will be deported.
7. Foreigners can invest in this country, but it must be an amount at least equal to 40,000 times the daily minimum wage.
8. If foreigners come here and buy land.... options will be restricted. Certain parcels including waterfront property are reserved for citizens naturally born into this country.
9. Foreigners may have no protests; no demonstrations, no waving of a foreign flag, no political organizing, no bad-mouthing our president or his policies. These will lead to deportation.

10. If you do come to this country illegally, you will be actively hunted &, when caught, sent to jail until your deportation can be arranged. All assets will be taken from you.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The above laws are the current immigration laws of Mexico

American Immigration Laws

http://www.ehow.com/about_4828639_current-immigration-laws-us.html

"In order to become a citizen, a person must be able to speak English, pass a United States Citizen test, and have a favorable opinion of America, among other qualifications."

~Caitlin Kelly, eHow Contributor.

American immigration information:

http://www.hg.org/immigration-law.html#1

http://space-snark.blogspot.com/

Thursday, September 02, 2010

Is Consciousness Necessary?

The TIME article I wrote about last week mentions the theory held by many philosophers, notably Descartes, that animals have no consciousness. These people believed nonhuman animals were fleshly automata with no self-awareness, emotions, or capacity to feel pain and pleasure.

Recently I also read an anthology of essays called ZOMBIES, VAMPIRES, AND PHILOSOPHY: NEW LIFE FOR THE UNDEAD. One author, Dale Jacquette, proposes a thought experiment in which zombie-like human beings exist, "people" who operate entirely on instinct and have no consciousness, no inner mental and emotional lives. The difference between the zombies in this essay and those in voodoo tradition or horror movies is that the thought-experiment creatures look and behave exactly like the rest of us. They perfectly simulate not only the behavior and speech of ordinary people but even the outward signs of emotion. Yet we know for a fact that they are automata. Would it be morally acceptable to use them in gory gladiatorial combats to the death? Jacquette concludes it wouldn't, because of the desensitizing effect on the spectators.

What about intelligent beings who have no consciousness? Could intelligence exist without awareness? Peter Watts creates aliens like this in his novel BLINDSIGHT. When they accidentally pick up communications from Earth, they find the evidence of our self-awareness so alien that they consider Earth a threat that must be obliterated. You can read the entire novel on the web (warning, it's heavy going in places, at least I thought so), and Watts also includes his notes on the story's background and the research sources he used. Scroll down to the section on sentience and intelligence:

Blindsight

Here's an excerpt from that section:

"But beneath the unthreatening, superficial question of what consciousness is floats the more functional question of what it's good for. BLINDSIGHT plays with that issue at length, and I won't reiterate points already made. Suffice to say that, at least under routine conditions, consciousness does little beyond taking memos from the vastly richer subconscious environment, rubber-stamping them, and taking the credit for itself. In fact, the nonconscious mind usually works so well on its own that it actually employs a gatekeeper in the anterious cingulate cortex to do nothing but prevent the conscious self from interfering in daily operations. (If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from DILBERT.)

Sentience isn't even necessary to develop a "theory of mind". That might seem completely counterintuitive: how could you learn to recognise that other individuals are autonomous agents, with their own interests and agendas, if you weren't even aware of your own? But there's no contradiction, and no call for consciousness. It is entirely possible to track the intentions of others without being the slightest bit self-reflective."

And here's another quote that I find quite unsettling:

"It turns out that the unconscious mind is better at making complex decisions than is the conscious mind. The conscious mind just can't handle as many variables, apparently. Quoth one of the researchers: “At some point in our evolution, we started to make decisions consciously, and we're not very good at it.”"

How do we know people other than ourselves aren't mindless androids like the zombies in Jacquette's article? How do we know they have conscious minds? We assume they do because they have the same body and brain structures we do and display the same outward signs of thinking and feeling. So we accept that they probably have inner lives similar to ours. In the absence of telepathy, though, we have no proof of this hypothesis. We have to accept the consciousness of other people on faith.

The protagonists of the Marquis de Sade's fiction use this situation to justify what most of us would consider inhuman behavior. If there's no way to be sure other human beings have the same emotions and sensations we do, why go out of our way to try to make them feel good? With no direct access to their minds, we have no certainty our efforts are successful, so why bother? If cruelty to others makes US feel good, go for it. Scary.

As for Peter Watts, I have to give him credit for creating truly ALIEN aliens in BLINDSIGHT. I still have trouble getting my mind around the concept, though. Acting and reacting without consciousness can be imagined, but how can the communication of abstract ideas necessary to produce a space-traveling civilization occur without self-awareness and a theory of mind (the hypothesis that other individuals have thought processes like our own)?

Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

What Exactly Is Editing - Part V

Part One of this series was posted on August 3, 2010,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-i.html

followed by Part II on Aug 10
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-ii.html

and Part III on Aug 17,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-iii.html

Part IV on Aug. 24, 2010
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-iv.html

I started this series on Editing actually in response to a question I got on Twitter, but I have forgotten who originally asked.

There was an exchange with a professional writer who had a rewrite order and a deadline and was just going nuts over it, and some others who chimed in. Finally someone asked what were the most rewrites other writers had to do.

I mentioned that my first award winner was published as 5th draft, a record for me that I never equaled again. And I said something (in 140 characters or less) about how quickly other rewrites had gone for me -- even extensive rewrites. And then came the question about how I did that.

I intended to write answer that question - then lost the questioner.

Recently, I decided I had to write up the answer I had so far (this is Part V, and there could be more), and asked on twitter for Questions I could answer in How To Rewrite To Editorial Specification On Deadline.

In response, I got the following from @DreamsGrafter

1)What is your process? What do you look at/tackle first?

2)Apparently the trick is to dig deeper. How do you do that when the scene structure already works? How do you enrich a scene?

3)What is the biggest lesson you've learnt over time re editing to a deadline and how do you deal with it now?

4)How do you know which notes to follow? What if your instincts are telling you something else?

And from another blogger on aliendjinnromances, professional SF/F Romance writer Rowena Cherry provides the following:

A) Is there a standard etiquette for attacking revisions? Is there a formula for how many hard-to-take edits you swallow for every one you argue against?

B) Is there a length of email that is optimum for making your case, but ensuring that the busy editor "gets" it without tuning out or getting annoyed?
----------

Now if you've read Parts I-IV of this little blog series, you may see where these questions lead you astray.

Look again at the questions. Think about the focus, the implicit subtext.

Remember that in solving any problem, phrasing the question correctly is at least 90% of the solution.

Remember all the word-problems you did in grammar school math? You have cherries, and apples and boats on a stream, and you have to make an algebra equation out of it all.

If you get the initial algebra expression wrong, you'll never get the correct answer.

Phrasing the question is most of the solution.

Are these questions phrased in such a way as to get the answer you need in order to look at an editor's rewrite orders (or what screenwriters call "Notes") and know immediately what to do to make your manuscript publishable or producible?

Do you see that I've already answered all those questions in the first 4 parts to this series?

No?

Do any of those questions take into account what an Editor's job is?

Do any of those questions focus on what the editor is trying to accomplish?

Do any of those questions address the real key issue to figuring out what to do with your story to make it "acceptable" to that editor?

No, they don't.

They look at the rewrite order, and at the story -- totally ignoring the Editor's PROBLEM.

Here's a glance at the problem the Editor knows this novel will face in the marketplace.

Again from twitter, a random selection of comments from a chat on publicity.

@BookMarketChat Another thing I think is true - get help. You may not see yourself, your work as clearly as a coach, publicist or honest friend. #bookmarket

--
@BookMarketChat Yea!RT @publishingcoach: Things change so quickly these days, and peoples memories are short. You'll lose some fans, gain others. #bookmarket
--

Two key take-aways: CHANGE and a perspective on yourSELF, what you're doing and how you're doing it. Keeping your eye on a changing market, and changing your behavior as that change happens is a major key to understanding the rewrite orders an editor is sending you -- even though you wrote exactly what the contract required!

Between the time you sign a contract or even seal the deal with a handshake via email -- things have changed in the editor's office!

When an editor (or producer) takes time to give you "Notes" or a rewrite order, direction, or marginal notations on a manuscript, the editor is asking you to finish doing your job, and to solve a problem the editor has, not a problem you have, and not the problem the editor had when you signed the contract.

The editor is not asking you to solve YOUR PROBLEM.

The editor (or producer) is asking you to solve THE EDITOR'S PROBLEM.

Worse, you have to solve the new problem IN TIME to get the product into the pipeline before things change again for the publicity department.

Consider that the way those questions that were sent to me are phrased focuses the attention on the writer's problem ignoring the entire issue of whether the editor has a problem and what that problem might actually be and how it's changed lately.

In those questions, the Editor and the Writer are talking past each other, not even at each other. Certainly there's no communicating going on.

These questions are by are professional writers who have done this work with professional editors. And look what they're asking.

Let's frame it all another way.

A) What exactly is this Editor asking me to do?

B) How do I figure out what the Editor really means by this note?

C) What should the finished product this Editor needs look like?

D) How do I figure out what part of my manuscript to change to get the effect this editor needs?
----------

A) You can tell what the editor is asking you to do by looking at other books in the line the editor is editing for. The editor is asking you to make yours "the same but different" - to conform to the better selling novels in the line.

What does it mean "conform?" It means to use the same structure, the same trope, that has sold well before, but be fresh, original and different in theme, twists, character quirks, details, background.

In editor-speak "conform" means be different.

B) To figure out what an editor "really means" you have to know this editor a little bit at least. But it's usually safe to start with the assumption that the editor is an editor not a writer.

The editor will spot and flag a section, character, element, or detail that isn't "on beat" -- a pacing flaw, a bit that's foreshadowed (set-up) but never happens (pay-off).

The editor checks the emotional-tension of scenes to see that they are placed in the correct order - that climaxes (you should excuse the expression) come in the right places.

Some publishing lines have actual page-number formulas for internal climaxes, a set number of pages for sex scenes, action scenes, etc. But most don't have that strict a formula. Still, every genre (even Literature) does have a structure that determines the BEATS.

Blake Snyder showed you, in the SAVE THE CAT! series, exactly how to reverse engineer products aimed at different audiences to determine the best selling beat structures. Good editors know the beat of their line. The others don't stay in the job long.

What the editor "really means" is that "this "beat" right here where I've made this marginal note or on page-this of the MS is "wrong"."

It isn't the editor's job to tell the writer HOW TO FIX IT. The editor isn't a writer. They often suggest what to change into what, but usually are just trying to express what's bothering them without actually, consciously analyzing what's bothering them.

It's like a computer user calling tech support and yelling "It Doesn't Work" and tech support asking for the error code number, and the user just yelling IT DOESN'T WORK!!! How should I know why???? And tech support says "Well what did you do before it did that?" And the user says "I don't know, that's your job."

The editor is the USER, and you are her TECH SUPPORT. It's up to you to figure out why it doesn't work and fix it. It's only up to her to tell you THAT it doesn't work, not why or how to fix it. Don't call her and ask.

So if you're going to tech-support your own manuscript, you have to know its "computer language" (the symbolism in which it speaks; it's theme) and you have to know how it works, and where the drop-down menus are where other choices can be made.

You have to know the BEATS, the genre, the conflict, and all the moving parts of the composition.

Then when the editor points and says "this doesn't work" -- you don't call the editor up and defend your ART, you figure out why it doesn't work for that editor's line, and that publisher's purpose.

The reason it doesn't work on page 152 probably lies on page 1 -- maybe page 5 -- of a 400 page manuscript.

The editor can't tell you where the problem IS, only where it became noticeable. If you put the manuscript together, you should be able to take it apart, fix page 5 and see how that changes page 152, and it'll satisfy the editor. The editor doesn't care how you fix it, or how you figure out the problem is actually on page 5. The editor only cares that it be fixed and that it work, on deadline.

C) What should the finished product this editor needs look like? Do your homework. Read other books, novels, stories, in that line. If you're in film, read Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT! series. In fact, if you're in text, read that book anyway. It's all there. It's in the beat. If you can see it in a film, you can see it in a novel!

D) How do you figure out where to make changes to get the effect an editor needs? Again. The editor may not know WHY there's a problem on page 152, or what to do to fix it. But it is the editor's job to know what overall effect the novels in a line (or a film from a production company) should be.

If the effect isn't almost right already, the editor wouldn't take the trouble to ask for rewrite. So the necessary change probably isn't nearly as drastic as the editor thinks! If there's a problem with the "effect" (happy ending, crushing low-point for hero in the middle, a "lighter" or "darker" mood) it's either a pacing problem with the BEAT SHEET structure, or it's just choice of vocabulary. Line editing to adjust where beats fall and/or vocabulary changes can fix a lot with "light" or "dark" mood. Sometimes it can be fixed by deleting a scene or character and putting the information conveyed by that scene or character into another component of the story.

Writing is "magic" to editors. It isn't their job to know how you produce emotional effects, but only to know whether you've done it or not.

So to fulfill a rewrite order on deadline and on schedule, you START by structuring the story with precision beats before you write.

In fact, since most of a writer's work is done subconsciously way before "having an idea" for a story -- the smooth, quick, professional rewrite order response actually starts before you have the idea.

If you know what you did, what you chose, how you chose it, and why, and you know the editor didn't "get" the effect you worked for, you have to make a choice.

Either the effect you worked for has to be deleted entirely, in all its parts. Or something else has to be deleted to make room, and the effect worked up into the foreground.

Now, given this approach -- listen carefully to the editor, understand that this rewrite order is an attempt to conform your product to her Imprint's line, understand that it isn't criticism and has nothing at all to do with your Art, and everything to do with marketing, getting good reviews, and starting buzz.

Doing a fast, smooth job on rewrite is all about listening to the editor, and that's just like listening to any other person. Stop listening to yourself and start listening to the other person.

Now let's go through those questions submitted and answer them:

First @DreamsGrafter

1)What is your process? What do you look at/tackle first?

First- listen. Look at the overall pattern of rewrite notes and find the connecting mechanism built into the story while writing it.

Understanding that the actual problem with the manuscript is very likely NOT at the point where the editor noticed it, find the actual problem and fix that. Often 15-20 scattered complaints sprinkled through a 400 page manuscript can be fixed with one or two tweaks.

2)Apparently the trick is to dig deeper. How do you do that when the scene structure already works? How do you enrich a scene?

To "enrich" a scene that's locked into a nice paced sequence of scenes you don't want to mess up, go for SUBTEXT.

Plant a foreshadowing or "set-up" long before the scene you want enriched. Tiny tweaks to the scene you want to enrich will then make it a super-huge pay-off to the previous setup. And be sure to end the scene with a set-up for a pay-off that'll come several scenes later, maybe at the end. When there's a difference between what the viewer knows and what the character knows, you get rich.

Make sure the reader learns something they have wanted to know for an excruciatingly long time in that scene but still knows they don't know everything - and it will be enriched.

3) What is the biggest lesson you've learnt over time re editing to a deadline and how do you deal with it now?

Sounding spontaneous is a matter of careful preparation.

How quickly and efficiently you can rewrite depends on how carefully you prepared TO REWRITE before you wrote.

It depends on how you kept your own notes and what is connected to what and what foreshadows what, and where the tension builds and where it's released.

Rewrite orders that aren't simple story-logic tweaks (he put his hat on twice without taking it off) are almost always related to adjusting pacing to fit the genre.

Understand how you paced it to begin with, and you'll know what you can delete now to tighten the pacing, and what to add to slow it down.

Editors don't always just tell you the problem is pacing. They may say it's uninteresting or complicated or abstract, or I don't like this character or I don't believe that character would do this -- and it's up to you to understand, as their tech-support, that the real problem they are having is with pacing.

A character who would NEVER do this will do it if in a big HURRY.

4)How do you know which notes to follow? What if your instincts are telling you something else?

Then retrain your instincts if you want to work for this editor. Otherwise find another editor.

Actually, that's not all the choices available. The true professional who has an editor whose rewrite orders violate their "instincts" doesn't throw away their own instincts - but rather just acquires a new set of instincts to broaden versatility and increase chances to hit in other markets.

Your instincts may be perfect for one genre, and mean failure in another. Do you have to spend your own life writing one genre under one byline? Or can you take this opportunity to learn what this editor knows - so later you can choose to use it, or not?

And from another blogger on aliendjinnromances, professional SF/F Romance writer Rowena Cherry provides the following:

A) Is there a standard etiquette for attacking revisions? Is there a formula for how many hard-to-take edits you swallow for every one you argue against?

Yes. It's simple. NEVER ARGUE. If the editor is WRONG (and they can be, especially if the MS is badly messed up) then fix what's really bothering the editor, not what they're complaining about.

It's for sure, SOMETHING is bothering the editor. Fix it so nothing bothers the editor. It's their job at stake - and yours too for that matter.

This is a point where sometimes you have to impose again on your beta-readers, or consult a fellow professional writer. But don't take up the editor's time.

When you figure out what the problem really was and fix it -- then never make that mistake again.

It isn't your job to do what the editor wants. It's your job to do what the editor needs. It isn't their job to know what they need, except that this MS has to work, and it has to work by deadline.

B) Is there a length of email that is optimum for making your case, but ensuring that the busy editor "gets" it without tuning out or getting annoyed?

Yes, again simple. "Here attached is the completed MS. Thank you for catching all my mistakes."

How do I arrive at this insane conclusion?

THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT.

The editor is your customer. The editor is always right even when they haven't a clue what they're talking about. Never argue with a customer. Figure out what they really need and give it to them without hassling them. Make them happy and they'll come back for more.

--------

So what exactly is editing?

It's the process of packaging a piece of art to fit into a delivery system with standard sized tubes that whisk the art to the consumer in a frictionless medium.

Think of a Christmas Giftwrap station in a department store. They have an array of standard sized boxes to put your odd-shaped gift object into.

That's what editors and publishers do for a living: put odd shaped art objects into standard sized boxes, wrap them up pretty and mail them off.

The most onerous part of an editor's job is dealing with writers who somehow think their art has anything to do with publishing.

Publishing is the business of mailing off those standardized boxes. What's inside the box is irrelevant to the business model as long as it fits inside the box. Think about the USPS advertisement "If it fits; it ships for one, low flat rate." That's the publishing business model to a T.

Learn to look at it that way, and you'll never have any problem deciding what to do in response to rewrite orders.

The rewrite orders are the editor's attempt to get you to make your product fit inside the box that their schedule says they must fill at a specific date. It mustn't stick out, and it mustn't rattle too much.

If there are a lot of rewrite orders on a single MS, it's because you did something very wrong. Fix it. Learn from the mistakes and never do them again.

It is a process and does take a few times through the system, often with a couple different editors and agents to get the hang of it.

But you'll learn faster if you can grasp this single fact.

What you're doing isn't what they're doing, and they don't care what you're doing as long as it doesn't get in their way.

It's not your job to convince the editor they don't know how to do their job (even if they don't).

It's your job to give the editor what they need to keep their job, and their job is to drop identical boxes into the tubes.

In Part VI on September 7, we'll look at this from another angle.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/

Sunday, August 29, 2010

Advice On Giving Advice

I believe that this alien romances blog was one of the first blogs of its kind, where a diverse group of authors focus on sharing unique, original advice and opinions about writing and our genre.

Now, there are scores of blogs of writers offering advice to writers. Setting oneself up as an expert is a savvy promo and marketing technique.

However... it's not always easy to think of something fresh, insightful, on topic etc to say, week after week, year after year. Problems are emerging (not here on this blog). Here's what I think would-be experts ought to know.

1. If you don't have something new to say, recycle great advice you yourself gave in the past.

The gist of this tip was shared with me by Penny Sansevieri when I asked her how she managed to sustain her free and totally brilliant amarketingexpert.com newsletter, and also to Tweet pertinent advice in 120 characters three or more times a day. Her secret is to repackage tried and true good advice, over and over again. She does that so well, I never notice, and always appreciate a reminder of all the things I meant to do, and never got around to doing!

2. As long as you have the original authors permission, and as long as you quote accurately with full and proper attribution, share other experts' advice that you have found valuable.

3. If you wish to blog about a topic, and need help... ask. Usually, people are delighted to share what they know in exchange for the courtesy of kudos where kudos is due.

4. There's nothing wrong with the old adage, "If you've nothing good to say, stay silent."

The problem that is beginning to rear its head among bloggers is that of plagiarism and copyright infringement on advice blogs. In some cases --and as is their right-- some original authors are beginning to take action.

It is not okay to cut and paste someone else's expert post on a topic, replace every sixth word with a synonym, and pass it off as one's own.

What is more, there is software that can detect that sort of cheating. Also, in the absence of an agreement, the injured blogger is entitled to send an invoice for whatever he or she deems a reasonable fee for use of his or her work.

Advice blogs that I like include
http://1stTurningPoint.com
http://www.savvyauthors.com
http://www.amarketingexpert.com/blog/

Newsletters that I appreciate include

http://www.writersweekly.com

http://www.ReporterConnection.com/JoinNowFree/

subscribe@amarketingexpert.com

Article about a small blog
http://www.amarketingexpert.com/little-fish-in-a-big-pond-understanding-accepting-and-learning-to-love-your-small-blog/

Please leave a comment with your own recommendations for me to add to this post!

Thanks!
Rowena Cherry

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Animal Consciousness

Here's another article about animal intelligence, from TIME magazine of August 16:

Minds of Animals

And here are some pictures that go with it:

Smart Animals

I'm intrigued by Kanzi, the bonobo who communicates with laminated cards bearing symbols of all the words he knows, because examples of his speech make it fairly clear he actually combines words intelligently rather than simply in a rudimentary stimulus-response pattern, as skeptics about earlier experiments in teaching apes language tend to believe. This article says he can use abstract terms such as prepositions and grammatical endings.

In my opinion, though, these accomplishments don't quite overthrow the uniqueness of the human species' use of speech. Gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos may be capable of learning a certain amount of language, but so far nobody has discovered a nonhuman animal inventing symbolic language. Our position at the evolutionary peak, in this respect at least, still seems secure. If it's eventually revealed that dolphins (for example) speak a true language comparable to ours, then we can start to worry. We would have to acknowledge another sapient species sharing the planet with us, and far-reaching repercussions in philosophy and culture would ensue.

Here's a TIME article about dog intelligence:

Dogs

It turns out that dogs are the only known species besides us who can (consistently, at least) understand the meaning of a pointing finger. This ability is linked to the concept of social intelligence. Creatures who live in social groups (such as dogs, dolphins, bonobos, chimps, gorillas, and us) tend to be smarter than solitary animals. It takes more mental effort to function in a group than to live alone. Crows, intriguingly, are very smart, supposedly for this reason.

About pointing to draw attention to objects, however: Chimps in the wild don't do it. But Kanzi, the fluently communicating bonobo, does. Being raised in a human-centered environment makes a difference.

On the subject of our obligations to animals, this article quotes from bioethicist and animal liberationist Peter Singer, who maintains that the ability to suffer pain confers a right to be spared unnecessary suffering. "Similar amounts of pain are equally bad," he says, "whether felt by a human or a mouse." But does the human ability to remember past pain and anticipate future suffering with fear make a difference? Another scientist quoted in the article thinks so. And even Singer doesn't extend his philosophy to all animals; those that almost certainly have no consciousness are exempt.

But suppose we met aliens whose intelligence was of such a different kind from ours that we didn't recognize them as conscious? Could we safely apply our criteria ("theory of mind" and the mirror test, for example) to beings from a distant solar system?

Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

What Exactly Is Editing - Part IV

Part One of this series was posted on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com on August 3, 2010, followed by Part II on Aug 10
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-ii.html

and Part III on Aug 17,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-iii.html
and now Part IV on Aug. 24, 2010

On the "vehicle" vs "payload" model of story structure, see:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/09/targeting-readership-part-one.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/plot-vs-story.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure.html

We left off in Part III with several adages to ponder:

A) Writing Is A Performing Art (which I learned from Alma Hill)

B) Sounding Spontaneous is a Matter of Careful Preparation (an old stage adage which I learned from Robert A. Heinlein)

C) The Show Must Go On (which we all know).

D) Time Is Money (which we wish we didn't know)

Those who work in the film industry are all acutely aware of the cost per minute of leaving Union crews standing around doing nothing.

Bringing a project in on budget is all a matter of timing, management, thinking ahead, planning, and face it, just plain luck.

What writers don't always take into account is the cost to the publisher of producing their novel, and how that cost counts against their editor in terms of the editor keeping their job, and how each thing the writer does can increase (or decrease) the overhead of the publisher.

All those adages apply to publishing just as they do to film making, and they apply more and more precisely as time goes by.

Editing is more and more just like producing. It's a juggling act, and the most volatile and troublesome element is "the talent" -- actors, writers, director, people who see themselves as creating Art.

The rest of the people in the production process couldn't care a tiddly-wink about Art. They just want a paycheck on time.

Beginning writers often see themselves as selling their Art to publishers.

The Great Awakening into professionalism is the discovery that the publisher doesn't see it that way.

The publisher doesn't value their Art even as much as a film producer values chorus dancers.

For most beginning writers, just getting the contract signed is the goal-post or finish line. They learn quickly that signing the contract is the opening gun in the race not the victory lap.

Here's a tweet from the person running the twitter account for the huge line of Del Rey Spectra:
@DelReySpectra I just had back-to-back meetings, and my brain is now fried. And only 45 minutes to go, now

That's a glimpse of real life for your novel after you sign the contract and deliver. That's the state of the folks responsible for your success or failure as a writer.

That is why it's so hard to "break into" print. Good writers are a dime a dozen. Only a very few are able to run fast enough after the contract to make it to the finish line, to run with the big guys who have back-to-back meetings and can barely sit straight at their desks for that last 45 minutes.

For the publisher, the finish line is not contract signed, or even books in the stores, books in translation, or books made into films. The publisher's finish line is books in remainder and off the shelves, the film made from the book no longer sold in DVD/blu-ray/whatever.

The publisher's finish line is when the property is no longer bringing in revenue and rights revert to the author.

The publisher and the writer live in worlds that are that different. They have goals that are that different. That's why the personalities and character traits of editors, publishers, agents and writers are so different that rarely can one person do all those jobs successfully.

If you're half the writer you think you are, you've just invented a character who can do all those things!

What Exactly Is Editing?

Editing is the process of bringing those disparate goals in line, together, into harmony, or somehow getting them to co-exist.

The editor has a fractious, temperamental artiste on one side and a hard-nosed bean-counter on the other. One is yelling about their characters wouldn't do this or that, and the other is yelling about the stockholders demanding a higher dividend despite taxes.

And then there's the legal department. Those people think differently from anyone in the world (and few read any novels). The lucky writer has an Agent to deal with the legal department. The writer pays the Agent a hefty 15% to deal with lawyers. The Agent will put as much effort into legal work as the Agent thinks the writer's product will be worth. The Agent's business is a time=money business too. Lawyers bill by the hour. Their incentive is to make everything take longer. To the publisher, the legal department is just "overhead" and legal fees are part of every book's cover price.

Which brings us to another important point in the Editor's job description.

The publishing industry is governed more by custom than law.

What's written in the contract is not necessarily how things will work out. Writers who want the written contract to trump industry custom probably won't last long in the profession unless they are Amazon.com's #1 book for 6 weeks with every book they write.

Between the time the contract is signed and the time the final manuscript is put into "production" (sent for copyediting and given a publication date), the specifications for the vehicle that carries the payload - the writer's heart and soul - to the reader can change.

The changes can put an extra, emergency burden on the writer. It's a rewrite order that comes in as "drop everything, even the work under contract to a different publisher despite next week's deadline, and rewrite this and get it to us by Monday morning" work order.

Such an emergency rewrite order is an additional cost of production that the publishing company doesn't pay, doesn't account for, and doesn't care about. The writer must deliver.

The changes in the world that cause these expensive emergencies are not entirely under the control of the publishing company, or the editor.

Some have to do with economics - the price of cardboard in China, for example, determines the price Mass Market paperback printers must charge for paper. The price of ink changes with other non-publishing related events.

Some changes are controlled by upper level management decisions at a Publisher (upper level management of a publisher may be the management of a business that owns the publisher and really doesn't care much about publishing) - how many titles will be printed per month, how many reprints, how much promotion money will be spent and on what kind of promotion, how many colors of ink can be used in a cover.

A writer's publication date might be delayed (or moved up!) because another writer with a larger readership was late (or early) with a manuscript.

The editor who signed the contract might leave and be replaced by an editor who dislikes the writer's novel and bumps it down from Lead Title to 3rd, prints and distributes fewer copies, dooms it to low sales, cancels reprints of prior entries in a series, reaches out for a new writer from the slush pile.

Any of these events could mean the editor (or new editor) will issue new rewrite instructions such as make it longer, make it shorter, make the lead character female, make the lead character male, make the lead character human instead of Alien From Outer Space.

Longer or Shorter are always on the table, and should be no problem to a professional writer.

Major changes such as the gender of the lead or the setting (from alien planet to contemporary Earth, for example) are a totally different problem.

Sometimes, such rewrite instructions issued after the contract is signed are really negotiating techniques for getting the author to back out of the contract. That's what Agents are for.

The Professional Writer would look at drastic rewrite instructions from a different angle.

If massive changes are required, changes in the payload rather than just the vehicle, it isn't cost effective for the writer to invest the amount of time required to accomplish them on a work already crafted.

That's the professional attitude - cost vs. reward.

You don't put into a project more than you can get out of it.

You must get out of it more than you put into it. You must turn a profit.

That's the difference between amateur and professional. Profit. Calculate the effort/return ratio and act accordingly.

The professional writer does not withdraw a manuscript because she thinks she's so great nobody can touch her prose.

Words are strung together for sale at a profit.

Time is money.

The Editor needs 75,000 words that say this, not that.

It took six weeks to write 80,000 words which say that.

It would take another six maybe seven weeks to change that into this.

It would take maybe 5 weeks to write a THIS which is entirely new but exactly what the editor needs.

So instead of rewriting, the professional sends in a chapter and outline for a THIS to replace the THAT which is no longer marketable.

You can fulfill the contract with an acceptable THIS and still have the THAT to market elsewhere (at a profit).

You can do it, but only if you're a professional writer who knows what she's doing and can do it to deadline (and have a really good Agent to deal with the lawyers).

A writer is in business to sell word-strings. Time is money. Provide the editor what she needs when she needs it, and likely she'll buy from you again if she can. (it isn't up to her, remember that) But that can happen only if the sales on the current title pass scrutiny by the bean-counters.

So if the deal comes down to truly drastic changes that require more time than the creation of something new, HAVE that something new in the back files ready to produce at a moment's notice.

Professional merchants have stock on the shelf in the back room as well as out in the showroom.

"Sounding spontaneous is a matter of careful preparation."

It's also true that sounding "calm" is a matter of careful preparation. If you know you can supply whatever the higher management folks demand of the editor, your voice won't squeak when the editor tells you a whole line of novels, maybe a whole imprint, is being canceled and your novel was scheduled for that line, and the advance you received so far is the kill-fee.

Know what a kill-fee is? It's a fee you get when they decide to cancel a contract, especially a contract upon which you have delivered. Usually, if you get a kill-fee for a title, you can't sell that title elsewhere. It's dead. Killed. (there are exceptions to that of course - lawyers live in another world altogether)

So what does an Editor do for a living?

Pull the rug out from under hapless writers, that's what. That's part of the job description, Editor.

Really, tweaking and twiddling text and issuing rewrite orders is the least of what an Editor does. Even the time spent reading manuscripts doesn't eclipse the time and emotional energy spent dealing with the production chain, covers, marketing, blurbs, copy-editing, the accounting department that just doesn't get around to cutting the checks for the editor's starving writers, the power lunches placating the bosses, chatting up agents to get at the biggest name writers, and so on.

The writer never gets to deal with the folks on the committee which ultimately decides whether to contract a certain title, or not.

The editor is the face of the publisher turned to the writer, and the poor editor has to deal with all the changes in the world beyond the control of writer, editor, agent, or sales department, then deal with the emotional basket cases all those disruptions create.

The Editor's job is to orchestrate, manage, and connive, to flimflam all these disparate elements into seeming to cooperate so the higher ups never discover what chaos reigns in the editorial department from time to time (it's mostly pretty organized, but there are moments!)

Thus if the world suddenly changes, the publishing company gets bought, the editorial department head leaves, or the Fed manipulates the value of the dollar, it's the Editor that has to tell you about what that means regarding your manuscript in production, your title on the shelves, or your backlist title that was to be reprinted right before the sequel you're working on now.

It's part of the professional writer's job to understand what the Editor's job is (and is not), and have on tap a product that the editor can use instead of the product that has been contracted.

A cooperative, businesslike writer will ultimately get more work than a prima dona.

Because of that nature of the commercial fiction business, there are few prima donas around. There are, however, a lot of working professional writers in both publishing and film who probably know a lot about the editor or producer's job, but don't think about what they know when crafting a piece under rewrite orders.

Now, I'm being very severe here. Reality is never quite so black and white, and never at all static. What ever's true today will be untrue tomorrow, maybe tonight. There is no "Unified Field Theory" solution for human relationships, business or otherwise. When it comes to establishing and maintaining a relationship with editor or agent, we are all "pantsers" plotting our own success by the seat of our pants.

And we all climb a very steep learning curve. Editors and agents will "handhold" new writers for a while, but expect them to show increasing professionalism.

In Part V of "What Exactly Is Editing" (August 31, 2010) we'll look closely at 6 questions posed by professional writers when asked what they wanted to know about the secrets of rewriting to editorial deadline. And my answers will be extremely severe sounding to beginners.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/

Sunday, August 22, 2010

I'm Back...

I have just returned, having driven from Detroit to California along Interstate 80 via Illinois, Nebraska, Wyoming, Nevada...

And back via Route 66 and also the 40/44 through Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, Indiana.

Elephant seals moulting

Extraordinary golden hills

Lava-like fog off California Coast

Husband's car on the concept lawn at Pebble Beach

Manic Arizona Jack Rabbit On Motorcycle

I'll be baaack. Not!

Along the way, I contemplated a great many things, from the violent sex lives of elephant seals, to geology, to cloud and fog formations. I haven't processed it all, yet....