Cory Doctorow has helpful writing tips.

You know when Obama used
this photo filter it looked
inspiring.

I found these on another blog while looking up some things for my latest magazine article, and I thought these were actually very helpful tips for writers.  

Cory DoctorowAuthor of With a Little Help, For the Win, Makers, and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

1. Write every day. Anything you do every day gets easier. If you’re insanely busy, make the amount that you write every day small (100 words? 250 words?) but do it every day.
2. Write even when the mood isn’t right. You can’t tell if what you’re writing is good or bad while you’re writing it.
3. Write when the book sucks and it isn’t going anywhere. Just keep writing. It doesn’t suck. Your conscious is having a panic attack because it doesn’t believe your subconscious knows what it’s doing.
4. Stop in the middle of a sentence, leaving a rough edge for you to start from the next day — that way, you can write three or five words without being “creative” and before you know it, you’re writing.
5. Write even when the world is chaotic. You don’t need a cigarette, silence, music, a comfortable chair, or inner peace to write. You just need ten minutes and a writing implement.

Item 4 is the most helpful to me.  I already do 1 and 2 and 3 and 5.

I've read a couple of Cory Doctorow books, and they always make me think, plus they are amazingly creative.  I'd recommend starting with Down & Out In The Magic Kingdom, which you can buy or download for free from his site. But my favorite book of his is the wildly inventive Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town. You can also download that for free. I can't wait for the day I'm successful enough to let people have all my books for free.  

Tips to eBook Success

There was an old article Nigel Mitchell linked to on Twitter last week, but I think unlike a lot of other articles there was some good practical advice in it.  Too many of these articles suggest that the author should spend hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of dollars on covers, editing, and marketing.  At least this author is smart enough to realize your average indie writer isn't flush with cash like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg.

Since everyone here writes "speculative fiction" I hate to agree with the point that thrillers, mysteries, and romance are the best genres to write in--but it's true!  Those are the ones that make the most money, along with YA.  Sure certain sci-fi or fantasy books, or speculative stuff concerned with zombies and the like can make money, but most don't.  So if you're simply trying to get into it for the money, those big three genres are where you should put your chips.

And it is good to write lots of books.  It's kind of like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.  You don't know which books will do well and which won't if you don't put them out there.  And I guess some people like to know there's more by the author for them to buy, though as a reader that never really enters the equation unless I really like a book.

The social media point I don't really agree with.  I haven't found social media to be all that useful, though I suppose it is better than nothing, which is what I can afford otherwise.  Part of it is probably that like that other point I can't invest my whole day in it, nor would I want to.  I do have to work a real job for money to live on yet since I'm not making $100,000 a month like Konrath.  Other people have kids and spouses and all that too that means they can't be Tweeting and Facebooking and so forth all the time, or even most of it.  And that is why you fail, as Yoda says.

I was intrigued about the idea of selling books myself to cut out Amazon and the like.  When I was setting up my new website on Wix I got thinking about that because it has the kind of tools where I could probably do that.  An advantage is that then you get 100% of the money instead of only 35-70% of it like going through an intermediary.  The idea of then being able to create a customer database didn't occur to me, but that is an interesting idea.

The only problem is when YOU become the seller that means you essentially have your own business.  This could lead to much greater complexity concerning taxes.  In theory you'd probably have to collect sales tax, though Amazon gets around this.  But you're not Amazon so you don't have that kind of market muscle.  My operation is small enough that it's probably better not to worry about it, even if that means I don't find out what random lunatics buy my books.

Hopefully now you've learned something.  Want to know more?  Check out my author blog!

Is your story a story?

Probably everyone knows that story, there, right? Supposedly written by Ernest Hemingway (but probably not, as shown by this Slate article) it is said to be the shortest story ever written, just six words long.

So: is it a story?

It's sad, to be sure, and it's just six words long, so it's short, but  is it a story?

I try not to get hung up on labels for what I write, especially as what I write has gotten more experimental over the past year, as part of an ongoing effort of mine to become more creative and stretch the boundaries of the stories I tell. So in one sense, if you say your ... thing... is a story, it's a story.

But in another sense, it matters a lot whether your story is a story or not. As I go about my merry rule-breaking and attempts to write different kinds of stories, from time to time I pause to consider whether something is a story, an essay, a poem, or something else entirely, and I think that the labels we apply to stories have some merit to them, that there is a benefit to some categorization, and the benefit is that by having rules you can determine exist, you can also decide not to apply those rules, which should only be done for a reason, and that reason should be because it serves the purposes you are intending with your work.

Stumped? Let Big Bird help you learn to write a story.

Priceless, and timeless, advice from Big Bird, as he and Snuffy work on their first story; video after the jump.

I Probably Owe These Guys Royalties (Briane Pagel)

This is "Indie WRITERS Monthly" and though I rarely give writing tips or even discuss my writing process, I've decided to open up a bit and see where that leads.  Most likely an embarrassing amount of oversharing and then you'll grow distant from me because every time you look at me, you think "Seriously: that many Cool Ranch Doritos?"

But for now, let's pretend we're still friends and we'll therefore be more than willing to discuss

Where Ideas Come From, Or I Seriously Hope Andrew And Rusty Don't Talk To Lawyers.

I am more or less as I write this hard at work on a new story of mine, one that started out as a short story but has hit nearly 50 pages now in just over a week, and that story came to me from the unlikely source of a joke about how few people bother to read my blog, and Andrew Leon's comment about being the man mentioned in that joke.

About 9 days ago, I posted one of my increasingly-rare forays into the world of sports, a guide to the then-not-yet-started NFL playoffs.  They're almost over now, but don't let that stop you from going and reading it, because it has very, very little to do with sports, as is the case with most of my sports posts.

I began that post with a joke about how if someone was a regular reader of that blog, there was a 90% chance that person was Andrew Leon. Get it? Because he reads it and nobody else does? And also because investigation will almost certainly prove that the person/web presence we know as "Andrew Leon" is merely a clever computer 'bot program created in 1997 by the same man who would go on to father nearly three members of "One Direction."  (I say that because although "Andrew Leon" maintains that he has a corporeal presence, has ANYONE other than his family members, friends, associates,neighbors, and people at the supermarket ever seen him in person? I REST MY CASE.)

Andrew, in response to that joke, posted this comment:

 But you're also saying is that there's a 10% chance that I'm -not- Andrew Leon... I don't know how I feel about that. I've thought all this time that I was Andrew Leon but, now, there's a chance that I'm not. How do I find out? Is there, like, a testing center somewhere? I think there's a story in there somewhere, but I'm not going to look for it, right now. 

To which I said:

 I'm not sure R2 is likeable. The more I think about it, the more I DON'T like him. Which is a lot like the Saints. I think there might be an even greater than 10% chance you are not Andrew Leon. If you stuck out a whole football post? I'd get tested, right away. Your right. There is a story there. Like a Philip K. Dick story: Find Out Who You Are.

There's two important points there: first, R2-D2 is not a likeable character. He's a blank, a cipher onto which people project their own emotions, much the way we do with other things that most likely have no emotions or separate reality, like cats, houseplants, 40% of our kids, etc. etc., but that's for another day.

The second part is there WAS a story there: I thought about that comment that Andrew made, and the one I made back, and about two hours later (after letting in the DirecTV guy who was here to move the box from downstairs to upstairs) I sat down and wrote this:

The store popped up one day, in the kind of minimall in which stores were always popping up one day and then disappearing the next: a lunch counter serving real, ‘retro’ sandwiches. A repair shop for servobots. A souvenir stand
 (Souvenirs of what, Robbie wondered)

That store was the "Find Out Who You Are" store, and from that beginning paragraph I've gotten nearly 50 pages, so far, of what (I hope) is a Phillip K. Dick type of story about Robbie and Archie and Louis and their boss (?) Koss Ernst and an unnamed corporation all in the near future, and featuring people who may or may not be who they think they are.

That was not the ONLY time I've gotten ideas from offhand comments people made.  My story for Andrew's contest, "The Electronic Fish Tacos From Jupiter Save The Day??!?" (which actually is a much, MUCH grimmer story than that title would imply) got its title from Rusty's mentioning fish tacos (and features Rusty, Andrew, and PT in cameo roles as near-godlike beings).  Earlier than that, I wrote a story called "This Stupid Pineapple Is..." which again came from a phrase Rusty threw out there.  (Rusty, apparently, is my muse. I hope he's not uncomfortable with that. He shouldn't be.  I'm still maintaining the 500 yards distance mandated by court order and I hardly EVER get pictures of him tattooed on me anymore.)

So the point is, from a trade-off of jokes and a reference to a style of writing -- Phillip K. Dick is a particular style of sci-fi -- I got a whole story idea, one that has grown beyond the 5-10 pages I planned on to become, probably, a novel when it's done.  (That alone is not proof that the idea is good: I could write 10,000 words on, say, building a walk-in closet.)  (My home-repair/gardening posts, like my sports posts, have VERY LITTLE to do with those topics, which I know almost nothing about.  They are, like most of my writing, 90% about pizza and the rest stuff I plagiarized from the second half of John Steinbeck books. Nobody ever reads an entire John Steinbeck book, so I'm pretty safe.)

That's how I get my ideas: something I see or hear or think about sparks something in me, and from there I decide to start writing and see where it goes.  Sometimes it goes nowhere -- I've had stories that I quit on, although rarely for reasons I'll go into in the future -- but mostly it goes in almost entirely unexpected directions.

And I know that I am supposed to end posts like this with a question to get people to leave a comment, so I will do that:

Where do you get your story ideas from, and do you agree that it would be really, really, mean for Andrew and Rusty to sue me?

Links:

Here is the story "The Electronic Fish Tacos From Jupiter Save The Day??!?" 

"This Stupid Pineapple Is..." was the second in a series of sci-fi stories starring nearly-failed UFO Maker Nick and his wife, Other Sexy Cop.  It's not available online anymore, but will be out in book form eventually.  Until then, the first Nick and Other Sexy Cop adventure can be found in a 99-cent ebook, "Santa, Godzilla & Jesus Walk Into A Bar: The Greatest Xmas Story Ever Told."