The Strange Business of Being an Author

I managed to finish my book (at long last) in December of 2017. After that I took a break and traveled to my parent’s place for the holidays and provided the family with IT support (ah, Christmas traditions). When I got back home, I set about writing query letters to agents.

I decided that this is an oddly depressing activity. I’ve made the effort to write an entire novel and now I’m faced with begging someone to read it in the vain hope that this same mysterious someone thinks they can make money from it.

My depression wasn’t helped by reading this article in The Atlantic: Why I’m Still Trying to Get a Book Deal After 10 Years

I cannot imagine spending a decade trying to get a book deal. Especially when the article’s author managed to score a literary agent on multiple occasions only to be dumped when the agent couldn’t sell the manuscript. I’m going to lose interest in six months. Probably less. (A Writers’ Digest article suggested that an author should query 80 agents. To which I say, “I’m too lazy. Also, I have better things to do with my life.”)

Also, querying agents is an oddly bizarre activity. I’m hard pressed to think of other careers/jobs that come with these types of rules. Can you imagine other industries working in this way? “I’m sorry. You have years of experience, and you graduated with good grades but we won’t consider you a chef until you have an agent. The agent must have negotiated a deal with one of the big five restaurant chains that we consider legitimate producers of approved meals. And sure, you could be one of those chefs that starts their own restaurant and produces imaginative and innovative meals but we all know you wouldn’t be a real chef.”

Or a band producing their own music and loading their songs to iTunes and Spotify. “Well, you know, they’re not real musicians. Self-producing their own music is proof of that.” Or some poor actor. “Well, sure you worked on Broadway but we only consider you a legitimate actor if you’ve got an agent and you were in a movie made by one of the top five directors.” I should qualify this by saying that an actor’s life is pretty tough but at the moment I don’t think actors are stopped from auditioning on the ground they’re not ‘legitimate’ because they’ve never worked with Steven Spielberg.

Anyway, the pointless task of querying agents will continue for a few months at least. I’m just not sure I have the patience to wait around for an approval e-mail that somehow legitimizes me as a writer.

Wise Mothers

(Note: The was written before it was revealed Dave had been unfaithful to his wife and was a baby daddy with another woman. We haven't heard much from him since but the advise from his mother still applies.)

I am a big fan of Dave Grohl. He’s a man that’s weathered some difficult times but seems to remain an optimistic, down to earth guy. His mother Virginia may have had something to do with it. In this interview with Stephen Colbert, Virginia talks about her book, and about having the wisdom to let her son pursue his music instead of insisting that he keep going to school.

Frustration is the name of the game

 An excellent interview with Professor Richard Walter at UCLA who talks about the fact that all writers end up frustrated and miserable during the act of creation. The thing that trips up all  writers (and especially new writers) is that they think the frustration and misery part is unique to them and only them.

Nope, it’s everyone. He also mentions the book The Art of War by Stephen Pressfield. I have this book and I’ve been trying to take his advice. There is resistance. Always resistance. Do it anyway.

Post script from 2025: It's obvious that this man does not work a 40 + hour a week job with a one hour commute  each day as well as having to do chores like grocery shopping, cleaning the bathroom, and taking his car to the mechanic.

MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and why you should worry about it

 I work in the IT industry and a phrase I hear time and time again is, “we just need to deliver the MVP.” MVP stands for minimum viable product. The software industry has a long and proud past of failing to delivery anything, or delivering something that the customer didn’t want. This is normally because the customer asked for things that he or she thought he or she wanted but didn’t, much like a three-year-old getting to eat ice cream all day long and crying when they wind up with tooth decay and multiple visits to the dentist. One of the cures for the industry’s unique ability to charge millions of dollars for failure has been the MVP. This makes perfect sense when the customer is going to change their minds anyway, and, like a toddler, they want everything now. The MVP gives a customer something that mostly works and then makes changes based on their complaints about using the product in real life.

Sadly, there now seems to be a crossover occurring between the software industry and fiction writing. Software industry workers who’ve charged off to make their millions in self-publishing have turned the technique to writing. So, rather than trying to deliver they best book they can, they deliver a MVP. They write the book quickly, get it on Amazon, wait for reviews before changing it. Or they use the feedback for their next book. Or, they release as rapidly as possible, and wait for someone to volunteer to edit the book for free.

They’re all about, “hacking the process.” They’re about producing quantity, not quality. Because, as per software development, quality doesn’t matter. You just need something that kind of works. It’s also becomes all about quantity so the author doesn’t drop off the Amazon Thirty Day Cliff of Despair everyone keeps talking about. By keeping themselves in the thirty-day zone, they use Amazon to sell more books. Worse, Amazon’s algorithms encourage the behavior. Amazon wants product as fast as the can get it, and as much as they can get. But this need for product creates a feedback loop where an independent author can’t write at a considered pace because suddenly six months is too slow. There are (apparently), unicorn authors out there churning out a novel every four weeks.

I’m not knocking authors that can produce books as fast as their fingers can type. More power to them. But I have to wonder where the reader fits into this. Is the new norm that readers accept a novel riddled with spelling and grammar errors and if they want a higher quality book, they offer to fix it for the author?

In my humble opinion, a deliberate by-passing of quality seems like the ultimate slap in the face. Here’s this book that sort of works, but the author has decided they don’t want to invest any more time or energy into it until enough people have coughed up the money to pay for the fixes.

It’s an attitude that’s prevalent in the software industry but doesn’t (and shouldn’t) be made to work anywhere else. Imagine paying to see a movie where it was roughly edited, with no soundtrack, and zero special effects but at the end of the movie you had the choice to give notes to the director and then they're- released the movie with a different title (because it’s part of a trilogy) and asked you to pay to see that version as well. It would be insane.

Seeing the bat-shit methodologies of the IT world translated into the world of fiction writing breaks my heart. I don’t want to be around people who regard book writing as an ‘iterative process’ that can be ‘hacked’ so ‘whales’ (a term for people prepared to dish out a lot of cash for a product/service) can pay them loads of money.

It seems inherently wrong, but because I work in the industry I know the battle is already lost. Techniques and methodologies and data analysis will be blithely applied to anything that can make money.

Ten years from now (or less) I predict those same newly rich indie software coders/authors will have figured out how to code AI that can write a sort-of-okay novel faster than any human. And you, dear reader, will be drowning in a sea of MVP novels written on the fly by AI churning out books every 15-minutes, based on whatever genre/topic is making the most amount of money that hour.

God help us all.

And now I await my friends’ feedback, which will include the words, “Hey, you missed something...”

And verily, I doth did complete a novel. It is 107,500 words and I have discovered that novels make writers incredibly paranoid about plot points. Because I keep thinking I’m missing one. I’m sure my plot makes logical sense, but somewhere among the paragraphs will be that one thing that throws the entire book into disarray.

So, I’ve started sending my MS out to some trusted friends. And I’ll wait to hear those magical words. “Did you know that on page 150 you talk about a futuristic doohickey but on page 175 it changes shape, color, its name and what it does?”

Many years ago I saw a Yayoi Kusama exhibition. Standing in a room covered in dots (big dots, medium dots, small dots) with large inflatable sort-of-dots was strangely awe-inspiring. What is also awe-inspiring is that she’s always been determined to be an artist, even in the face of major obstacles.

The Problem of Thinky Day Jobs and Writing

 Let’s face it–most of us in the Land of Creativity need to hold down a day job. We’ve got bills to pay, groceries to buy, and the landlord doesn’t care we that we can’t pay the rent. (And the bank doesn’t care that we couldn’t pay the mortgage.) Daily living translates into a need to be a responsible adult. Apart from the need to earn money, there are also the other regular tasks such as laundry, housework, lawn mowing, gardening and home maintenance (if you own your own home). Being an adult means devoting time to pursuits that are in the Land of the Mundane.

This article from Slate talks about writers that have effectively managed to hold down a day job, raise children and still found time to write–and some that did not. There’s a nice quote in the article, “Any artist who can make up his mind to spend three-quarters of his life being an insurance man and another quarter being an artist is a pretty unique compromise. It is not often done. It is a very difficult thing to maintain the equilibrium, and I think that he fell off it. He couldn’t maintain it after a while.”

Not all creatives manage to put together a schedule and stick to it. (As is often the advice from other creatives.)

Part of the issue seems to be that most careers, professions and jobs of the 21st century demand that our brains spends hours solving an endless litany of problems. Stuck in problem solving mode, our brains don’t know when to stop. At two in the morning it wakes us up to announce that a particular business problem can be solved by reading this document, contacting that person, or writing an email.

Is it any wonder that thoughts about plots, characters and a third draft of the book are driven away? Writing and other creative tasks also happen to be about problem solving and asking the brain to multi-task on multiple problems drains any spare capacity like an off-grid house trying to cope with a lack of solar power in the middle of winter. It’s overcast, and wishing its sunny won’t make the batteries charge any faster.

I’m not convinced we’re asking the right question as creatives. It’s not about schedules or procrastination. I think the question we’re actually asking is: how do we train our brains to compartmentalize our lives? (That is; I only think about work during working hours, I think about my children as much as as I need to, and when I’m writing I only think about writing.)

I don’t have the answer, but I’d like to find it. And if I do, I’ll write a follow up post. In the interim, let’s stop blaming ourselves because another day went by where we didn’t write 500 words, or edit another chapter of the book. We assume that the journey from the Land of the Mundane to the Land of Creativity is a gentle stroll across a meadow–maybe we should assume it’s like battling our way through an army of Orcs instead. And doing that on a regular basis is exhausting...