I was rereading some of the Wordplay ‘Hall of Fame‘ posts last night and came across this little gem from Seth:

Metaphorically speaking, an agent is not a fairy godmother. An agent is a virus. They are opportunistic parasites with no ability to survive without the presence of a host organism - namely you…

 … So if you’ve got one blindingly good script and I’ve got three reasonably good scripts, chances are good I will get more notice than you … One big rock does not a career make - an agent needs to know that if he takes a pickaxe to you you’re likely to come up with a few more gems in the rough.

Seth, Stop acting like a diamond and start acting like a diamond mine, on Wordplay.

Love the analogy, love the message he was trying to get across.  Agents rely on writers to make them money.  No matter how good your one story is (Seth was talking about scripts, but it applies equally to novels), it just isn’t enough.  You have to keep producing. Otherwise your agent will jump hosts.

There’s a well-known story about students who paid big money to attend a famous writer’s screenwriting class.  The famous writer gets up at the start of the class and says, “You want to write screenplays.  What are you all doing here?  Go home and write.”

I don’t know if this story is true, or just a myth passed on by people like me who hear it from other people, who heard it in turn from other people.  Still, it makes a valid point.

Everyone has times when writing has to take second place, but it’s what you do with the precious minutes you can spare that count.

This is the difference between someone who finishes a novel and someone who says, “One day I want to write a novel,” but gets nowhere.

For family reasons Calder and I clocked up 700km for each of the last two weekends and will do it again for the next two.

I am working full-time at present, Calder is studying three days per week. In the same two weeks she has had two major assignments to complete, plus a mid-semester test.

What did we do in our spare time?  Calder played Runescape while I read novels.

Neither of us did a scrap of work on any of our writing projects.

That’s fine, if we only do it for a week or two, but if we keep doing it for the whole month we need to take a long hard look at our writing habits and our writing dreams. 

We will never get anywhere if we don’t continually make the effort to write.  As Angela Booth says in a 2003 article on writing …

“You must practise … Use it, or lose it. Sports people know this. So do pianists, ballet dancers and artists.”
Angela Booth, “Five easy ways to become a confident writer“

I’m sorry to hear that Miss Snark is putting away the blogging pen.

Her site was useful and entertaining, and she dispensed a lot of good advice to unpublished writers out here in net space. I have a special fondness for the Crapometers, particularly the last one.

If you have been reading the same sites I have, you will notice that as a writer, eventually you will need some sort of presence on the web.

It seems that even for an unpublished writer trying to get an agent a place on the web is a good thing.

Be warned, however, that a bad web presence can often be worse than no presence at all, so if you are going to do it, you must make an effort.

For a writer, this includes:

• A site that looks professional.  A gaudy site with lots of flashing things on it is the equivalent to turning up to a business meeting in a tatty old track suit
• A site that has few or no typos, spelling or grammatical errors. We all make these, it’s just that as writers people expect us to have less (or preferably none).  We need to be more diligent.
• A web site that is up-to-date.  Even if your website does not include date specific information, ensure it still looks topical by keeping the copyright notice current and removing obsolete references or dead pages.

Despite all this, you decide to go ahead.  What else do you need to think about?

• Cost—Do you want to pay for your own web site or do you want to use something free, such as Blogger, My Space or Live Journal?
• Can you afford, or even do you want, to pay to have your web designed
• How much time can you afford to maintain it?
• How much effort do you want to spend on it?

All these questions need to be considered when thinking about a web presence.

Even if you don’t want a web presence yet, at least think about buying your author domain name.  (We own www.rowandai.com.) It’s relatively inexpensive, and you don’t have to do anything with it, it just saves it for when you do need it.

If you were suddenly transported to another world, as first both Caid and then Scott are in Barrain, what do you think your major difficulty would be?

Once you got over the initial disbelief of being somewhere else, your immediate concern would be communication.  What are the chances people in the other world will speak the same language that you do?  It’s not likely at all.

Maybe the world you go to has magic, which you can use to understand each other.  Maybe it has a universal translator.

Different writers cope with the language issue in different ways.

In Barrain, we have chosen to ignore it.

It’s a calculated risk. We ask readers to believe this is possible, but there is always a chance we will lose them at the start of the book because of it.

It’s a big ask.

When you write a novel the basic premise must be believeable, or otherwise you lose the reader.  It only takes one major flaw to lose the reader. 

I have been doing a lot of thinking about story logic lately.  Barrain has at least one flaw where I know we can potentially lose readers at the beginning of the novel, and that is in the language (another blog on this soon).  But we’re not the only ones who do it.

Vampire novels are big at the moment.  Everyone seems to be reading them; everyone seems to be writing them.  They are popular in both adult and young-adult fiction.

Werewolves are popular too. 

One young-adult story idea that seems to crop up a lot is the 12-15 year old who got turned into a vampire or a werewolf a 100 years ago.  The story revolves around how these ‘children’ fit into normal school life of today.

Leaving aside the impracticalities of vampires attending a day school, what is the obvious flaw in a story like this?

These ‘children’ are 100 years old.

They will not have the same angst and dramas of the average 12-15 year old.  They are long past that.

I have come across three stories (unpublished) in the last two months that base their whole premise on this exact scenario.

‘Six year old’ Claudia, from Anne Rice’s Interview With a Vampire, is probably a more realistic representation of what someone like this would be like, at least, the bad guy version of someone like this, anyway.