Here’s something neat. Simon and Schuster, the publisher of my first novel, has started a new online marketing effort for their authors — a sort of “author portal.” Everyone who participated answered the same questions, I believe. If you’d like to see mine — which includes my answers to such things as, “If you had a super power, what would it be?” — you can check it out here.  I’m my normal snarky self.

You can even preview the first 50 pages of the book, if you want to sample The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys before deciding if you want to buy it.

Some stories take longer to get into print than others. I sold “The Problem with Polly” to Award-winning editor George Scithers — who sadly recently passed away — for his Cat Tales series three years ago.

It’s now made its way into print, in the book Cat Tales II: Fantastic Feline Fiction, which you can buy from Amazon and other places. The story is about a man who has a problem with a cat named Polly.  Actually, more than one cat . . . Well, you’ll have to read the story to know what I mean.

And hey, my name even made the cover.  Neat, huh?

Here’s some powerful rules, originally created by noted science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein, which have helped lots of writers get out of their own way.  The longer you’ve been doing this — and by this I mean writing aimed at professional publication — the more you realize that though writers like to complain about the brutal reality of publishing, and about those nasty gatekeepers preventing their masterpieces from reaching readers, the truth is that the biggest impediment to success for most writers is actually . . . themselves.

“Oh, I didn’t finish that story.  It wasn’t any good.”

“Mail it?  Why mail it?  They wouldn’t want this piece.  It’s not right for their magazine.”

“Yeah, I’m almost finished.  I just have to do a couple more rewrites and then it’ll be perfect.”

How often have you heard yourself, or another writer you know, saying something like what’s above?  Well, Robert A. Heinlein had too, which is why he laid out some guidelines for achieving success.  Here they are:

1.  You must write.
2.  You must finish what you write.
3.  You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.
4.  You must put the work on the market.
5.  You must keep the work on the market until it’s sold. *

Very simple rules, but trust me, very tough to follow.  Each them addresses a common pitfall — not writing, not finishing, not mailing, and giving up too easily.  The 3rd rule has caused by far more outcry and disagreement than the others.  Rewrite?  How can I not rewrite?  Isn’t that what our English teachers told us was the secret to success?  Well look, each writer has to decide for themselves how to apply these rules, but you might want to give them a shot before ruling them out.  If you haven’t achieved the kind of success you want as a writer, what do you have to lose?

* Hat tip, of course, to Robert A. Heinlein.  Originally appeared in the 1947 essaying “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction.”

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Well, tomorrow my first book, The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys, is officially published, meaning it’s the day that I go from being an almost published novelist to a published novelist.  How am I feeling about that?  Pretty darn good.

So I mentioned to a friend of mine the other day that while my first book may not be the kind of book that flies off the shelves right from the get go — hey, there’s no vampires, wizards, or other strange paranormal activity going on here, just two boys who steal their Principal’s car and end up on a life-changing adventure — I really believe it’s the kind of book that if people read the first page, they’ll have a hard time putting it down.  Maybe not everyone — taste is a subjective thing — but a lot of people.

Of course, my friend challenged me to post my first page online to back up my words.  So here it is, the first page of my first book:

The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys
by Scott William Carter

If I’m going to tell you how I killed this kid, I can’t start on the day it happened.  It won’t make any sense, and you’ll just think I was some psycho teenage boy with glue for brains.  No, the whole thing really started three days earlier, on Monday, which made it bad straight off.  It was also raining, which made it even worse.

In fact, it was raining so hard that my tennis shoes were soaked before I even walked two blocks from our house.  Not just kind of wet, either, but really soaked in that way your socks get all squishy and your feet make those mucky sounds each time you take a step.  Muck, muck, muck, all through the halls, everybody staring at you like you’ve just turned into a human squid.  Back then, before all the crazy stuff happened, most kids looked at me as if I was a human squid anyway.  I figured that’s what they’d put in the senior yearbook, if they remembered to put anything in there about me at all:  Charlie Hill, Most Likely To Be a Human Squid For the Rest of His Life.

If it sounds bad, that’s because it was.  If you want to read a nice, happy little story where everything turns out all neat and tidy in the end, you should go read some Hardy Boys or something.  This isn’t that kind of story.

Not that everything that happened that Monday was bad.  About halfway to the school, I realized I had probably missed the bus on purpose.

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I now have in my hands the author copies of my first book, The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys.  I can’t tell you what a great feeling this is.  What a beautiful hardback book.  As a former owner of a used bookstore, and one who’s sold a number of antiquarian books, I gotta tell you it’s a real pleasure to open this one up and see the words “First Edition” there on the copyright page.  I would have been fine with my first book being a paperback original, but it gives me an extra thrill for it to be a hardcover.

And if you’ve pre-ordered it, you too can hold it your hands . . . in about five days.

If you want a taste of the sort of thing I write, here’s a great example.  As a promotional effort for my just-published story collection, Realms of Fantasy magazine has just posted my story, “The Grand Mal Reaper,” on their website.  It should be up for about a month, and you can read it for free here.  It originally appeared in the August 2006 issue.

This story actually has a very interesting history.  I’d submitted it back in 2005 and the assistant editor at the time passed it up to Shawna McCarthy, the magazine’s editor.  But then this assistant editor left and a new one took over — Douglas Cohen.  Shawna had Doug review all the stories the previous assistant editor had recently passed up, and mine was the only one he decided to pass up to her a second time.  Which she then purchased and published in the magazine in August 2006.

And of course it’s also included in my collection, The Dinosaur Diaries And Other Tales Across Space and Time.

Check it out if you have a few minutes.  Here’s the opening to whet your appetite:

The Grand Mal Reaper
by Scott William Carter

She stood across from me, hands tucked into the armpits of her jean jacket, the tear in her nylon stocking looking garish in the pale yellow light.  When she glanced at me through the fogging breaths and cigarette smoke, my heart did the skids.

Five of us huddled on the snow-covered sidewalk outside the restaurant, Lenny the manager, a couple of waitresses in addition to Rita, and me, a thirty-year old busboy who’d only been in Oregon a month.  The conversation had turned to our plans for the holiday, and while Lenny and the other waitresses chatted animatedly about turkey dinners with annoying relatives and last-minute shopping for hard-to-find toys, Rita and I hadn’t said a word.

We’d been exchanging glances a lot the last couple of weeks, the kind of glances that often lead to buying condoms and beer from the mini-mart in the middle of the night, but I hadn’t thought about pursuing her until that moment.   I was sure my own eyes had the same look, a what the hell am I doing here sort of a look.  I didn’t know squat about Rita, nothing except that she was about my age and that she lived on the south side of Rexton out by the golf course, but after that glance I wanted to know everything about her.  I wanted to know where she grew up and what movies she liked and why she never smiled.  The conversation was winding down, everybody doing the slow sidestep toward their cars, and I was thinking don’t let her go, ask her stupid, do it now, but then came the death-tugging.  Like an invisible cord pulling at my chest.

[Read the rest here.]

If you’re like me, there’s times when you sit down at the keyboard and every idea that comes to you seems hackneyed.  The well has run dry.  You can’t seem to think of an original idea.

Well, therein lies the problem, this tendency that writers have that everything must be original, and that everything they write should be autographed and framed on the wall. Sometimes you have to plow through thousands of words of practice before the original idea — the one that really gets you excited — emerges.

Here’s a technique I’ve used all the time just to get the fingers moving:  Set your countdown timer to five minutes and write as many words as you can in that time.  Don’t stop.  Don’t judge.  Just keep typing until the timer goes off.  Then add up the words.  If you like this technique, keep a running total of how many words you’ve written at each session. *

Now, you might be thinking, well, I could just type random words, but I dare you to try it.  Our minds actually want to create order out of chaos.  You might be surprised at where your typing takes you.  If you’re pushing yourself to write fast — remember, don’t judge, just keeping pushing, the focus is on the number of words and not on the quality — you’re out-racing the critical side of your brain, the side that censors things for being “too weird.”  But when I’ve used this technique, often those “too weird” ideas are the ones I’ve been able to turn into something I had a blast writing — and usually sold too.

The worst that can happen?  Even if you don’t find anything in your free write you want to use, you spent five minutes — a whopping five minutes — warming up your fingers and shaking the cobwebs out of your brain.  That’s valuable all by itself.

* Note:  If you use Microsoft Word, you can click on File, then Properties to get the word count of your document.

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As far as publications go, this Spring is the biggest one yet:  Last month, I published two story collections – The Dinosaur Diaries, as well as A Web of Black Widows — and here in a little over a week my first novel is coming out from Simon and Schuster.  For the most part, The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys, is garnering great reviews (Publisher’s Weekly called it a “touching and impressive debut novel”), so I’m hoping sales are good as well.  Early next month, I’m having my official book launch event in my hometown.  Lots happening.  And if you plan to buy the book, please preorder and buy in the first few weeks.  Those early sales numbers encourage bookstores to stock more copies, which helps an author’s career.

There’s some things percolating on the writing front, some things that could be potentially very good, but I can’t talk about them yet.  Regardless, I have this sense that my writing career is shifting into its next phase.  What that phase ultimately looks like remains to be seen, but the shift is happening, I think.

It’s also caused me to do a lot of thinking about exactly what my career goals are as a writer.  Up until now, I’ve pretty much just gone by the seat of my pants, my philosophy that I would just keep trying different types of books to see what sticks.  And because my writing is just like my reading — eclectic — this plays to my strengths.  I just write what I want to write and let the chips fall where they may.

And while I may always be a little that way (it’s just who I am), I also want to give myself the best chance at reaching the widest audience possible.  This might mean being a little more careful about what I write and why.  It might mean thinking about the potential audience a little more, as well as how commercial and marketable a particular concept is.  Up until this point, I’ve pretty much refrained from letting the marketing and business side into my creative space, but lately I’ve been challenging that assumption.  And that’s okay.  I think I’m finally at a point where I can do this in a way that augments my creativity rather than hinders it.

It’s a very subtle shift in the way I’m approaching the craft, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a significant one.  I’m also more willing to allow people into the early stages of the creative process to help me gage these factors.  This is the biggest gamble for me, but there’s some things that have happened lately — and we should see in the near future how these things pan out — that give me hope I’m finally at a point that I can do this without jeopardizing my confidence.  I never would have attempted some of these things ten years ago, and I would seldom if ever recommend that beginning writers do anything but just write what they feel passionate about and finish it before showing it to anybody.

But becoming successful at anything involves some amount of risk, and it’s not just in the product.  It can also involve your methods.  I’m starting to take more risks with my methods right now.  We’ll see how it pans out.

With two collections of my short stories published in the last few months, and my first novel due out from Simon and Schuster in a couple weeks, this has been a big year for my writing.  The Salem Public Library has been gracious enough to set up a book signing and reading on Thursday, May 6 at 7 p.m. in their Loucks Auditorium. If you’re anywhere in the vicinity of Salem, Oregon, I’d love to have you celebrate with me.  A local university bookstore will have books on hand for purchase.  I’m considering this my official “book launch” event.

I’ll do a brief reading from my collection The Dinosaur Diaries and Other Tales Across Space and Time, a few pages from my book, The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys, as well as talk just a little and answer any questions.  It should be great fun!  It’s certainly something I don’t plan to do all the time, but after all the hard work over the years, well, it’ll be nice to  take a breather and celebrate — and especially nice to do this in my hometown, where lots of friends, family, and other supporters of my writing can join me.

Here’s more details from the library’s website and newsletter (PDF).   The event is free and open to the public.

If you can’t join me, but you’d still like to purchase my books, you can buy my first novel (a hardcover first edition, no less!) and my collection from Amazon.  Here’s the links:

• The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys (novel)
• The Dinosaur Diaries and Other Tales Across Space and Time (story collection)

And please spread the word!  In today’s publishing world, it’s more important than ever that an author hit the ground running.  Every sale really does help.  Buy a book for yourself.  Buy one for a friend.  Buy extras in case you lose the originals . . .

Cheers,

Scott

“You can’t wait for inspiration.  You have to go after it with a club.” — Jack London

If you’re sitting around waiting for the perfect idea to pop into your head before you put a word on the page, you’re going to be waiting a long time.  Usually you never know when an idea is great anyway — it just happens along the way.  And even when you’re finished, you may think the end product is terrible, but your own opinion is often distorted because you’re comparing your work to some impossible ideal and not really seeing the true merits of what’s on the page.

Anyway, ideas are easy.  It’s what you do with those ideas that makes great writing.

Still, there are times when the ideas just won’t flow.  Here’s a neat game that can give you a jolt: Use a dice and a grid with story possibilities to create the bones of a new story.

This is geared toward fiction, but you could certainly adapt it to nonfiction.  For fiction, the bones of every story can generally be boiled down to a character in a setting with a problem.

A hobbit named Frodo [C] journeys across the ancient land of Middle Earth [S] to destroy the One Ring before the evil Sauron finds him [P].

In fact, you can boil almost every scene down to those essentials too.

Indiana Jones [C] races through a deadly cave [S] to avoid from getting crushed by a giant boulder [P].

To play this game, create a 3 x 6 grid.  The three columns along the top should be labeled “Character,” “Setting,” and “Problem.”  Number the six rows on the left.  Now it’s time to do some brainstorming.  You need to come up with six characters, six settings, and six problems.  Be creative!  Here’s an example:

The next step is to roll the dice three times.  The first number chooses the character.  The second number chooses the setting.  The third chooses the problem.  Once you’ve got those, start your story and see where it goes.  Here’s a tip:  Don’t be too constrained.  If the story takes you in a different direction, go with it.

So let’s say I rolled a “3,” a “1″ and a “6.”  That would give me a lead singer in a hit band who’s in an elevator and must pay off a bet to a mafia man.  My mind is already rolling . . .

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