I wrote a book. A novel. A fantasy novel.
When I tell people this, the reactions vary wildly. Absolutely I get “well it’s about time,” as well as “I want to read it!” But equally absolutely, I get “why would you want to do that?” And “Well that was stupid.”
In many ways this experience is very like telling people I listen to Rush. You get the same spectrum and quality of response. And, like listening to Rush, I don’t think I could really enjoy the process if I didn’t completely understand and sympathize with all the responses. I think you either accept it all, the good and the bad, and just smile and shrug and say “what can you do?” Or you give up. And I’m not giving up.
Todd Rundgren, the brilliant record producer, tells the story of making Meatloaf’s album Bat Out Of Hell a hit. “There’s a badly kept secret in the industry,” he said. “You can take pretty much any competently-made record and turn it into a hit if you just gig long enough. You go out on the road and you play any venue you can get, all across the country and eventually you’ll get radio airplay and you’re on your way.”
Getting published as an author has a similar process. There are communities of aspiring authors, workshops, people who help each other out. There are publishers looking to promote their authors, authors looking to promote themselves, connect with their fans, and they need volunteers to help them. If you bust your ass, and participate in communities and volunteer to help bookstores organize stuff, your name gets out there and your work gets out there and if you gig long enough eventually the right people will look at your stuff. Then you’ve done your job and it’s time for the work to speak for itself.
But that’s a pain in the ass. It’s almost a full-time job and I have career as a game designer, but I still want the book to get out there. I want to attract the attention of an agent or editor, and this site is part of my strategy. Actually, it’s my whole strategy. It may seem underwhelming at the moment, but it’s early days yet. Stay tuned.
This Site
The goal of this site is to attract an editor or agent who understands what I’m trying to do, believes in the book and the series as much as I do, and wants to challenge me to help the book achieve its full potential.
My strategy for achieving that goal is to release the book online, chapter by chapter, and hopefully build an audience. Demonstrate that the novel has appeal and that I and the book are a low-risk, a good investment for a publisher.
Part of that strategy is a policy of Transparency which this post is the first part of. The site is a completely generic WordPress install at the moment and while I’m happy with the layout of my other site, Squaremans, I don’t really have a clear idea yet what this site should look like. My webmaster, Geoff Chandler, and I have some ideas about ways to improve the experience of reading the book online, but we’re also both busy with other projects, so in the meantime, I blog thusly.
Because this site is simultaneously a site promoting my book, and me as an author, I intend to use it as a personal blog. Readers like connecting with their favorite authors and blogs are a great way to do that. Hence, on Squaremans, no stories about my cats. Here, cats all over the fucking place.
Finding an Agent or Editor
Probably my favorite novel of all time is Dune by Frank Herbert. Dune was first serialized in Analog, under the titanic editorship of John W. Campbell. Campbell had a colossal effect on SF, as the editor of Astounding Science Fiction, which later became Analog, he was responsible for identifying and cultivating some of the biggest names in the genre.
He had a rule, “no aliens,” that had a huge impact on written SF. It’s the reason there are no aliens, for instance, in Dune. He thought aliens were cheap and the SF should be about people first and foremost. It’s hard to argue with that given the results.
He also had a colossal effect on Dune. In The Road To Dune you can read the letters between him and Frank Herbert. Dune features a protagonist who can see the future. Campbell didn’t believe in this. He didn’t think you could have real tension in a story where there was a predestined future and the protagonist could see it. He didn’t buy it, and he didn’t think readers would buy it.
Herbert didn’t tell Campbell to go screw, nor did he immediately redraft to change what Campbell didn’t like. I can’t be certain, but I don’t think Campbell wanted him to do either of those things either. Instead, Herbert defended his idea and through that process, rigorously defending his premise through the relentless onslaught of Campbell’s keen insight, he made the book better. He refined the ideas over and over until eventually Campbell had to sit back and say “Ok. You’ve convinced me. There’s nothing I can do to make this book any better, let’s go to press.”
That’s a fucking editor, yo.
As I look over my novel, I see all sorts of problems. You might as well. And, as a writer and editor in video games, I could attack it and try to get it into better shape but a lot of problems have more than one solution, and I do not know which one is best. There’s a vast gulf of experience separating editing dialog in video games from editing fiction at a Publishing house. I’m afraid, in other words, I might edit it in the wrong direction. I believe I have made the right choices as a writer, I have no such confidence in my ability as an editor of fiction.
So, perhaps unwisely, I’m going to release the book chapter by chapter here, for all to read, unedited, warts and all. The crudeness of the technique may turn some people off, and that’s entirely fair and a chance I’m willing to take. If you read the work as an editor, I think it’ll drive you crazy. If you approach it as a reader, I think you may find it a more enjoyable experience. I have friends of mine who’ve been editors in the gaming biz, but they would make choices similar to the ones I would make, and that’s obviously not what I’m looking for.
I’m not putting the book online, in other words, because I want someone to edit it, I’m putting it online because I want people to read it and if enough people do so and enjoy it, I may attract the right kind of editor and/or agent.
What’s it About?
It’s about a man who lead the typical Fantasy Hero life for a long time, and the damage that life did to him. A man who, when we meet him, is incapable of living up to the standards he sets for himself. It’s about the awful choices life forces us to make, and how difficult life can be to bear because of that. It’s about how for some people, before things can get better, they must first get worse. There’s a lot of action, some of it epic, a large cast of characters, and hopefully some little humor.
It’s short, compared to most fantasy novels these days, more akin to the typical fantasy novel from the 1980s when books were about 350 pages. There’s a lot of dialog, and it’s my hope it reads fast.
It’s the first book of what I intend to be a series, and the series is about camaraderie. All my favorite movies are about camaraderie, and I felt there was no point writing anything personal, anything that spoke to me, if I didn’t build it on a foundation of camaraderie.
But this first book lacks that element. It’s not about a group, it’s about one man. I rewound the series back to before the heroes get together to show the reader that you can have the bad-ass Fantasy Hero, but there is a price. The things that happen in this book give the rest of the series a much-needed sense of gravitas.
Many of my Beta Readers, specifically and exclusively the ones who are familiar with Dungeons & Dragons gave early feedback about the first few chapters of the book qua Gaming Novel. Given the nature of the work, this is perfectly reasonable and I cannot fault anyone who, at the opening, thinks they’re reading about someone’s RPG character. So far, no one who’s made it to the end, indeed no one who’s made it to the halfway point, has felt that way. There is an obvious similarity, but there are also critical differences, I hope.
That similarity is deliberate. One of my goals, and the reason I hope to find an editor who believes in the idea, is to take the tropes of Heroic Fantasy stories, and make them universal. The template here is Heroes which takes all the tropes from comic books, but makes them universal so they appeal to an incredibly wide audience.
If you’re a fan of comics watching Heroes, you can not only detect the cliches from comics, you can detect specific plots and powers. If you’re not a fan of comics, the show still works. Is a lot of fun, and was a huge hit. Company Man is one of the best episodes of television I’ve seen in recent years, but it was only possible because of the work the writers and producers lay down in the episodes leading up to it.
The Beta Reader Program
About 30 people have already read the book, either in whole or in part. Many are still reading and still giving feedback. I called these people Beta Readers, a term I thought I invented but which I’ve since seen elsewhere.
Some few of these readers were what I called Alpha Readers. People I trust who could read the thing and give me feedback and make sure I hadn’t disappeared up my own ass and wasn’t about to embarrass myself terribly. The Alpha Reader feedback necessitated a substantial redraft, and then it went to the Beta Readers.
It’s my intent, where possible, to put all the Alpha and Beta Reader feedback online, including the chapters I cut from the book because of that feedback, so you can see how people reacted to early drafts, and how that feedback shaped the current draft.
Not all the Beta Readers liked the book, though the overwhelming majority did. Even the negative feedback, even the extremely negative feedback made the book better, as I hope you’ll see. Many of my friends in the Gaming Industry are or have been editors. Key to the Beta Reader experience is, I think, being able to shut down that part of your brain, and come to the book as a reader. I had dinner last night with one of these friends who said “At first I couldn’t get through it. I just wanted to red-line the whole thing. So I put it down and then came back to it later and was able to switch that part of my brain off. Then I couldn’t put it down.”
That may seem like a cop out, but the reality is; this is the book unedited. No matter how many drafts I do, it will remain unedited until it’s in the hands of an editor at a publisher. The whole point of the Beta Reader Program and this site is to get the book in shape so an editor will pick it up and help it reach its full potential.
No matter how you approach it, if you give someone an early draft of a book and say “read this and give the author your feedback,” you’re going to get a different response than if they’d just picked it up off the shelves. That’s the pitfall of the Beta Reader program. People can sometimes give you their honest opinion, but they can never give their unbiased opinion. I went out of my way to get the book into the hands of people who didn’t know me, using other friends as proxies and intermediaries, and get the book into the hands of people who did know me but didn’t know I wrote it. I am tricksy! Unquestionably the most negative feedback came from the people who know me, and knew I wrote it. 
I’m not sure that signifies though, even 30 Beta Readers is a microscopic sample size.
Stay Tuned!
That’s the scoop! At this point, there’s not even a way to contact me via the website, so we’ve obviously got a ways to go. You may also have noticed the book is not yet up here. And we need a way to clearly separate Blog content from Book content. And we need a nice layout and some pictures. Stay tuned!
Some of the stuff we’d like to do is give the readers the chance to write their own Cover Blurbs, those endorsements from writers and critics you see, and then give everyone the opportunity to vote the blurbs (even the negative ones!) up so the top three, say, appear on the front page. Encourage artistic types to contribute art and give users the ability to vote the art up or down, so the pieces people like most become the pieces used to illustrate the characters on the front page and in their bio sections. I want to give the readers a lot of power and I intend to give them free reign over most of this stuff.
I also want to give readers the opportunity to see the behind-the-scenes of the writing process. If you buy a book in a bookstore, you want the experience of curling up with it and become engrossed. But this isn’t that experience. People on the web, myself among them, want to know how things work, see the process. So while your average reader might not want to see the little man behind the curtain, you are not your average reader.
Stay Tuned!
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