ieva melgalve

This week, I didn’t do particularly well writing-wise (two days I didn’t write at all due to death in husbands family and funeral) but on the rest of the days, I fared sufficiently (even today, when I was slacking for the most part of the day and managed to pull my act together rather late). I did almost everything I needed to write and learned a couple of things, both personal and writing-related.
- I got a small notebook for noting small glimpses of ideas, this seems to be working just great. Some ideas come from books I read, some from dreams.
- Got un-afraid from writing slow and literary (however, the simple tricks of raising stakes and sticking with people that matter seem to work here, too).
- While editing, I discovered that I actually make more sense than I thought (namely, some of my scenes that seemed pretty useless plot-wise actually are about critical character development stages. I’ll have to change them but at least now I know why I wrote them in the first place).
- Personally, I found out a marvelous thing: that you can communicate with people way more rewardingly if you open up and give them back relevant information, connect with them on levels that aren’t normally in place within first communication with a stranger. Well, that’s a weird thing to discover when you’re almost 30 (normal folks figure it out at 7 or so), but better late than never.
- Also, I found out that (except today) I waste little or no time at all. That’s sorta cool, but also a bit frustrating (it means that I cannot free up more time for writing, I must focus on doing more in shorter amount of time instead, and use a short-short breaks more effectively).
So all in all, this has been a fulfilled week.

Yesterday, I did a quick math about how much would I be able to accomplish if I worked slowly/fast/very fast over several years, played with my speed and varied the planning, writing and editing lengths and frequency to figure out how would I accomplish more without burning out. As a result, I got two years planned out (quite satisfactory) and I also felt incredibly bored by the prospect to write in that time frame.
“Writing isn’t fun,” I decided. “It doesn’t have to be fun. It hasn’t been fun for two months or so, and it probably never will. That’s fine. It doesn’t have to be fun, has it? Granted, I stopped writing when it stopped to be fun last time around, but I was not this determined then.”
Then I stumbled on this article in Seth Godin’s blog and realized that I’d been wrong and I’ve been hurting myself for two months. (Go ahead. Read that article. It’s good.)
Read the rest of this entry »

The job I’m doing right now with Virgin is clearly experimental, switching between different perceptions of time, focusing on nuances instead of the obvious, and going slow, having no major stuff happening (yet). This is probably what could be named “literary fiction” if I wrote better, or “high literature” in Latvian (actually, Latvians have trouble even accepting commercial literature as “literature”).
This is enormously delightful. This is also scary for me personally, and not just because the market for mediocre literary fiction is incredibly small.
This goes back to my personal history. Namely, I used to write literary fiction a lot. I was told to; all other kinds of literature was called trash. Besides, there was that myth going on that it’s impossible for somebody from a small country with a tiny language to write commercial fiction. And writing literary fiction was fun and it got me recognition that I thought I enjoyed. I published a book where every story proved a point: there was a story where no two sentences were interlinked in any way (not even sharing a protagonist…not that it had any protagonist), a story with no emotions named, a story where the protagonist is a time-traveling, reincarnating ghost, a story that was repeated many times, decomposing in the process, and a couple of surreal stage plays.
Then, at some point, I realized that there are–cannot be–any rules for experimental writing. If I write to prove a literary point, it will not work for most of the people. And I stopped writing because I lacked that point of evaluation. I stopped writing because I wasn’t thinking “outside the box” since I didn’t have a box at all.
After a few years, I started researching, studying and writing genre fiction because it had a box. I learned what “scene” meant and that my protagonist had to have some sort of personality and needs, and obstacles. I chose to write in English primarily because I didn’t know the language well enough to pull fancy literary stunts. I learned a lot, and I still have lots and lots to learn. I survived the shock of the discovery that instead of requesting stories, editors were actually rejecting them.
Right now, I’m trying to combine both features: the box and the outside of the box. I have scenes and protagonists and antagonists, needs and complications. I am re-evaluating the rules I learned and bending them when I think it could make sense.
Am I ready to do that?
I don’t know.
But this is exhilarating, and it’s scary and it’s what I’m doing right now.
My only consolation: that in any case, I’ll learn a lot in the process.

That’s it. The way I see it, the whole book business is going full-speed at a direction nobody really knows much about. That’s scary, of course, but that’s the way progress always has been. Not only scary, but hard to figure out and hard to reason with, and impossible to stop. The Pandora’s box is open, and all you can do is to catch on with the good things.
All that “e-books should cost something (a bit less than trade paperbacks, but not much less)” business? Well, I think that there will be e-books that will cost 15 USD and people will buy them. Not all people. Not even majority, I guess. The people who will very badly need that particular book at that particular moment, and probably, yes, for this price.
However, there is no way of stopping free e-books (or degrading them to “oh, that self-published crap”). There is no way of stopping e-books that are priced 2 USD or, say, 5 USD.
E-book is an excellent format for generating exposure, recognition and reader basis. Especially DRM-free e-books are easy and fast to acquire, convenient to store, easy to share and easy to have with you at every moment. The owner of the e-book doesn’t have to lose or even risk anything by sharing it. (Not so with paper books–nobody in their right mind is going to lend his or her favorite book, unless they have an extra copy of it.) The advantages of an e-book as a marketing tool are too great to forego them just because of fear to devaluate e-books, or to make people think they are entitled to free e-books. (That is, actually, all about marketing and positioning. People are still willing to pay, and pay often and a lot, for things that are available free or almost for free. Think water, for example: how many people purchase bottled water when they could easily boil or filter the tap water and have essentially the same thing?)

What I think will happen with books quite soon (in next five years, which is soon enough for me) is that people will have big big bookshelves again. This time, virtual. I remember my childhood when all the rooms I knew were crowded with bookshelves (and even now, a room without a bookshelf feels empty for me). Modern interiors often don’t have bookshelves, both because people don’t read that much any more and because books have become more expensive and people don’t buy books just to leaf through them once in a year if they’re bored and don’t know what they would want to read.
I think e-books will bring these “casual bookshelves” back; more and more people will have virtual bookshelves with hundreds of free or very cheap titles, and they will glance at a random page from time to time to see whether or not will they want to read that book.

Yes, more and more books will stay unread, simply because people won’t have invested much in them and they wouldn’t feel guilty for not reading them.
More and more, people will figure out what to read from the actual pages of writing. More and more, they will stop reading after first ten pages, figuring they’ll better spend time on reading the next free book in their library.

I think it’s a good thing. I think it gives enormous opportunities for new ways of distribution, marketing and selling books.
I think it’s a good thing also because more and more will depend on author’s voice, style and uniqueness.
I think it’s a good thing also because when people are accustomed to having books nearby all the time, they read more. And the more they read, the smarter, the more picky they will become; and also, of course, the more they will buy.

An interesting, well put and opposite opinion I recommend to read: E-books and issues of entitlement.

Do you have a blog? If you do, probably you’d be interested in a casual cross-blogging thing.
The gig is this: sometime in February, I do a guest post in your blog, and you do a blog post in mine.
Why? Well, because it’s fun, and we would both benefit from that.
What can I offer? A guest post on any of questions you might ask me about themes I know something about (writing, some marketing, raising kids, divination, living in Latvia) or know nothing about but that doesn’t stop me from expresssing my opinion (almost anything else).
What makes you eligible? Having a blog in a language I understand (including Latvian and Russian). I don’t care if I barely know who you are. I don’t care if the blog is obscure or private, or unrelated to things I know something about.
What to do? Drop a comment that you’re willing to do this, with a link to your blog. Noting what would you be interested in or what you might blog about over here helps, but isn’t required. If you’re normally writing in Latvian or Russian, it’s fine, I’ll just try to provide an English translation.
How will I choose a guest-blogger (provided that I get more than one request)? I guess it will be some sort of random decision, based on whatever I want to base it on. At any rate, if I don’t choose you, it won’t be personal. And even if I don’t choose you at the present time, I’ll remember you later if this thing goes well.

Are you in?

On January I had one false start on Virgin. I got the protagonist wrong–she was one of those whiny creatures thinking that all the society had wronged her; and even though she was right, I hated her. So I stopped to regroup and figured out the right start in the last quarter in January. The 4K I have now seem to indicate that it’s more or less fine now (although I really should do some character sketches and planning!). Also, I’m doing fine with 250 word challenge. 250 words seem to be an amount I can easily write under almost any circumstances, so good for weekends too.

Editing is jumpy, some days I work like crazy, some days I’m not approaching my index cards at all. That’s something I intend to improve over February, or else the edits will take forever.

Plans for next month: I’m hoping to write (or edit to a good second draft) a short story, get Virgin to 10K and keep on editing. Since I will have a lot to do at work, no big plans yet, just not to lose whatever momentum I have now.

Lately, I’ve been reading Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle, snickering from time to time about expressions like “I ejaculated from the depths of my heart”, weird story composition and so on. There’s a certain nasty pleasure in reading a book way more popular (and way better, but that’s conveniently forgotten) than whatever you’re writing, and noting various writing “mistakes”. It makes one feel, well, better.

However, I stopped myself at the thought that–hello, I’m reading this book despite the vocabulary that makes me feel like an illiterate monkey, despite that I’ve read and re-read those stories before, and despite the hopelessly outdated style. And I love these stories.

So now I’m thinking: there are trends that are taking place at this moment (”ejaculating” your words is stupid; action beats are cool; showing is great; telling sucks; passive voice shouldn’t be used and ditto for adverbs), and in a hundred or even fifty years those years these trends might very well be gone. In fifty years, people will read currently popular books and snicker about the lack of adverbs, overblown verbs and active voice overuse, and the horrible tendency to obsessively “show” everything instead of emphatically telling. And why didn’t those people use omniscient point of view when it’s clearly the best choice for majority of books?

There, of course, isn’t anything we can do about this now–as long as our reader demand what they demand, it’s reasonable to try to stick to these trends if we wish to get our work out of the door.
However, for writers who don’t see publication, recognition etc. as their goals (I tend to think there are more writers like that than we are aware of–they are considerably less outspoken than publication-oriented writers), these trends are not essential. Also, this is a small consolation for writers who tend to break the rules from time to time. For example, I am writing a fantasy novel in present tense right now. I realize that this is a kiss of death publication-wise (since genre readers don’t enjoy this kind of “experimental” writing), but this is how the novel works for me and I don’t see any rational grounds for writing a novel in past tense just because it is a genre novel.
If you, just like me, find some trend to be useless in terms of your story, well, you can always remind yourself that in fifty or hundred years that probably won’t matter.

Wendy just asked me this:

I was wondering how you know when an idea would be better served by one form over the other. I have so little experience with both that I just have to kind of randomly pick…

Really, the difference between a short story and novel usually comes sorta automagically (just like I recognize poetry and stage plays early on). If I break down it intellectually, here are the questions I ask myself, sorted more on less by the weight of them.

1. Is the idea important enough for me to devote a year for developing it?
If it’s a random thing I found interesting or curious, it’s a short story. If it’s problem I need to solve to grow as a person, then it’s more likely a novel.
2. How many sides of the premise do I easily see?
If it’s two sides, it’s a short story. If there are multiple facets and variations, then it’s a novel. Of course, any idea can have a zillion facets. However, in the first few brainstorming sessions, I can see how many of these facets feel essential to me. For example, “revenge is best served cold… and it’s destructive for you anyway” is a short story. “Revenge is best served cold… It’s destructive for you… More than that, you can end up destroying people you love… Or you can find out that you weren’t right in the first place! And what if you are on the receiving end of a cold-served revenge? But on the other hand, can you truly heal if you don’t do actively fight the thing that hurt you?” is more likely a novel.
3. What will living with this idea do to me?
Every story changes me a bit. Sometimes, it’s for the best (even if it’s darned scary… in fact, for me, it has to be darned scary). How I envision this change and am I fine with it? I am OK with writing a short story that runs opposite to everything I believe (that’s a great lesson in empathy), but I won’t write a novel on a premise that I couldn’t live with even if it is true. For example, I could live with “every emotional attachment has a potentional to hurt you” premise in Vega, but I would find it impossible to live with “Embrace attachment, it’ll make you richer!” premise for more than a week.
4. Can I stand the protagonist?
For example, I can gladly write a short story about a marketing jerk because it’s fun and I don’t mind to see the ways I’m alike to the protagonist. But to live a year in the skin of somebody I couldn’t stand for two hours in real life? No thanks. (This works similarly for the protagonists I would love too much.) If I decide to write a novel anyway, I will most likely sweat on how to tweak the protagonist and make her more interesting for me.
5. How many characters face essential inner changes?
If it’s one character, it’s more likely to be a short story. If several characters transform significiantly over time, it’s more likely to be a novel.
6. How much development do I need for the idea to work?
If it’s “establish a problem and solve it”, it’s a short story. If there are several things that need changing/dealing with, then it’s a novel. For example, if I write about dealing with sexual identity of an otherwise “normal” character in contemporary setting, it’s a short story. If it’s dealing with sexual identity in a culture that has radically different views of sexuality, in a world with an unique magic system, then it’s more likely a novel.
7. How easily does the idea hatch?
If the whole thing comes to me at once, I’ll write a short story to keep it fresh. If all I have are bits and glimpses, and multiple versions on how I could explore it, then it’s more likely a novel. It’s very much like baking: either you don’t add yeast and have the whole thing ready in an hour, or you need to add yeast, labour for an hour over dough, put it in a warm place to rise and have something ready after four hours or so.
8. What other projects am I working on currently?
If I’ve just finished a novel, then I’m more likely to write next novel; if I am currently immersed in writing a novel and like that cool new idea very much, I’ll go extra lengths to skim it down to a short story level.
9. Can I handle it?
This is basically for ideas that I think could become a novel. Bitter experience has taught me that I can’t handle all the cool ideas I get. At least not at the moment. So if I know I would be able to develop the full scope of the idea in five years but not now, I will try to chop off a small segment of the whole thing and make a short story out of it. For example, The Keyboy originally was a sweeping idea about people with special skills and their struggle to employ these skills/deal with others, but I knew I couldn’t handle it. So I wrote a short story about a single gifted boy’s childhood.
10. Does the darn thing go away?
If I write the idea down and it flips out of my mind, then I might use it for a short story at some point. If I write the idea down, and then have an idea that is closely linked to this one, and a nightmare about the theme, then it’s more likely to be a novel material than a short story material. Simply because I’d rather write that crap down once and be done with it.

I hope this helps!

Since writing The Virgin hasn’t been easy (considering that I’m editing on the side etc., probably that’s understandable), so I needed a little nasty whip to urge me on. Hence the nice little “250 word challenge” widget from Inkygirl.
For the record – I’ve written 400+ words yesterday and 500+ words today (edit: Whoa, I just checked my spreadsheet and figured it’s 900+! In 45 minutes!). This far, I like what I’ve done but I have to brace myself for days when I write something that I know is a drivel just to move things forward.

I can do this though.

Lately, I’ve been thinking who the most important reader of mine will be when (if) I publish a book. Yesterday the most obvious characteristic suddenly dawned on me: my first future reader is a person who reads A LOT.

Consider: there are lots and lots of people who read a book or two a year. What do they read? Classics, super-bestsellers (think “Lost Symbol” or “Twilight”) and books that are specifically recommended for them. (I think that the assumption they necessarily read trash is unfounded; they could read “Catcher in the Rye” or “Fight Club” as well.)
Then there are lots and lots of people who read, say, ten to twenty books a year. How many of these books are debut books by new authors? I am guessing no more than 10%, and only if somebody has recommended this book beforehand.
Sounds unlikely? Do you think that a casual reader could easily choose book based on cover? Well, then imagine–if you are a voracious reader–that you are allowed to read just one book a month for the rest of your life. (I know, it’s a horrible, horrible thought.) You’d choose something by an author you like, or something you know you should have read ages ago, you would cheat and say you’re choosing War and Peace or that The Lord of the Rings is one very-very-big book instead of nine. You would probably read something your best friend gave you, or a new book in your favorite genre that had 4.5 stars on Amazon. You wouldn’t choose a fiction book because of a nice cover or a blurb if that was the only book you’d be able to read that month.

So basically the first reader and the first word-of-mouth generator for a new author comes in two kinds: 1) Somebody who reads at least two books a month and is devoted to new, interesting things in a certain genre. 2) Somebody who has a more versatile taste and reads or at least flips through hundred books a year.
(Here, I am not putting into equation the book bloggers who get free samples as a part of marketing campaign–that’s another story altogether, as marketing is prone to be.)

What sort of person is this reader?
This reader might not be a writing professional and he might not use all fancy terms. However, during the year before reading my book this person has read, say, thirty other books in my genre, or a hundred or so books in mixed genres.
In other words, this reader knows good stuff from bad stuff even if he doesn’t have the words to tell why exactly he likes or dislikes the book. More often than not, this reader will have the words to write an elaborate treatise on how exactly I messed up.
So whenever I’m thinking “ahh, I’ll let it slip because an average reader won’t even notice”, I’d better think again, because the first reader, the word-of-mouth generator will notice and he won’t hesitate to announce his findings because the ability to notice and prove that the author messed up makes him an expert.
Suppose that this reader is “not an ass” and doesn’t announce all his worst findings? Well, that’s even worse. Generally, you don’t write good things about books you consider crap; you either write bland nothing or you don’t write at all. So there would be no meaningful word of mouth from the all too nice reviewers would have thought my book is crap. As I see it, lack of opinion means lack of discussion. All things equal, I’d rather purchase and read a book that has a 1-star review than a book that has none.

My final, ideal reader might be that average person who reads a book a month and doesn’t have a “where to put my fifth bookshelf” problem. My first reader, the reader that will matter the most in the first steps of my (hypothetical) book, well, THAT reader will be a pro, and I have to pay him all the respect a pro deserves.