I switched over to a Wordpress site, which allows me to update it from anywhere without having to use specialized web editing software.  Anywhere I can get on the Web, I can update it, and I like that.   I did some behind the scenes work to customize it a bit, and that was a fair amount of work, but it should be easy from here on out.  It’s not all that fancy, but it’s easy to use and it accomplishes the primary goal — which is to let people know about me and my work.  Whether you’re a bestseller or just someone with a few story sales, I don’t think there’s a good excuse for a writer to not have a website these days.  It’s the lowest form of soft sell advertising, and once it’s up and running, the time commitment is pretty minimal. 

I still don’t think of myself as a true blogger, and I don’t think I’ll ever be one.  I stand in awe of those who do it well (here’s one and here’s another), and I have no doubt it helps certain writers expand their audience, but I’m always trying to find ways to get myself off the Internet since I waste too much time on it as it is. 

Yet I also know that no one will ever take a writer’s career as seriously as the writer itself, and if there’s going to be information out there about me and my writing, then there should be at least one place where there’s no middle man between me and getting the word out.  Plus I wanted to have a tool that was easy to use and I think I found one. 

Either that, or I just wanted another way to avoid doing any writing, which is often the case.

Tentatively titled A WEB OF BLACK WIDOWS AND OTHER TALES OF LOVE AND LOSS, the collection will most likely feature four all new tales and two reprints. The reprints, “Front Row Seats” and “The Woman Coughed Up By the Sea” appeared in the excellent online magazine Chizine several years ago, so they have never before appeared in print form. They also both received honorable mentions in the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror.

The title novelette is a dark tale involving a grieving tattoo artist on a cross-country road trip to see the Pacific Ocean as a way to pay tribute to his deceased wife, who meets a pregnant woman on the run from her disturbed husband and strikes an unusual friendship. A little bit of suspense, a little bit of horror, and a little bit of magic realism thrown in for good measure — this one doesn’t fit neatly into any category, and I’m thrilled it will be the focal point of this collection.

The other tales will all involve love and loss in its various forms, all of them set in the modern world with a bit of a fantastic twist — a great purchase for a little Halloween reading. Or Valentine’s day, if you’re feeling a little blue and all the red hearts and candies aren’t doing it for you. I’ll post more details on the website as the collection comes together.

That said, I happily note that I’ve finished a new novel. I also finished a novella in the last few months, and that’s now out on an editor’s desk. And my story, “The World in Primary Colors,” just hit the stands in the September issue of Ellery Queen. I don’t want to give anything away, but this is one of those rare stories where the whole thing came to me all at once, as I was helping my (at the time) two-year-old daughter navigate one of those tunnel-like play structures you sometimes find at fast food joints. Often ideas need molding and shaping, coming to me like a slab of potter’s clay, but this one hit me like a punch to the gut, so much so that I actually remember sitting down for a moment, reeling from its impact.

That’s a nice feeling. I wish I could have it more often. Of course, that doesn’t always mean the story’s any good, but I think it often does. I guess you’ll have to go read the story to find out. Why, you don’t even have to subscribe. You can get an electronic copy from Fictionwise.

Now see how sly I was, working in that plug?

I lump everything related to writing into these two categories to help me stay focused on the right things. Production is really just one thing: writing. However, it’s not just any writing, but specifically fiction. Blog entries, nonfiction, emails — those all might be an integral part of my life as a writer, but none of that falls under the Production side of things. Only fiction. It’s where the vast amount of my effort, energy, and mental focus must go.

Process is everything else that’s necessary in being a professional fiction writer. Market research. Story research. Mailing manuscripts. Reading. Studying other writers. Going to conferences or workshops to further my learning and career. I lump it all together as Process, because they are part of the process you must follow if you hope to take your writing career as far as it will go. Calling it Process also helps me remember not to worry or stress about things I have no or limited control over; I just follow the process, knowing that if I do, things will work out for me in the long run. It’s too easy to obsess about minutiae that don’t matter, to pin your hopes on details that don’t pan out. Marketing short stories is a perfect example. I print a story. I come up with a market list. I mail it to the best market, in my opinion, for that story. If it comes back, I mail it to the next one on the list. In between, I try not to think about it at all. Hard to do sometimes? Sure, but I’ve gotten better at it over the years.

The fact of the matter is that nothing in the Process category matters all that much if you aren’t producing. And if you want to do one thing that helps you find success more quickly, then you should produce more. Write another page a day. Or five. Or ten. Most aspiring professional writers don’t write nearly enough, a lot of them falling prey to the thinking that landing a great agent or making that contact at a conference is the key to success. If you go to a conference, sure, try to make contacts. And when you’re actually mailing your work, put some time in to thinking about the best places to send it. But most of the time, you shouldn’t be thinking or worrying about those things at all.

Whenever I find myself worrying about things outside my control, I tell myself to just produce and let everything else be part of the process I follow. Not only has this helped me become more efficient with my energy and time, it’s made me happier, too.

Recommended Reads

• The Undercover Economist by Tom Harford. Great book on applying economics to every life and the bigger world picture.
• Little Earthquakes by Jennifer Weiner. Stirring, multi-viewpoint book about a number of women all dealing with different aspects of pregnancy and being new mothers. Her writing was highly accessible, and she brought all of her characters to life. I loved the structure of the book, too.
• The Lonely Silver Rain by John D. MacDonald. I’ve read five or six of the Travis McGee series, and I’ve loved them all. This was the twenty-first book, the last one published before MacDonald died, and though I don’t think it was written as the capstone of the series, it was a fitting end to it. He’s the kind of writer that makes me want to be a better writer, too.

For years, I tried everything in the book to get myself to write more. Nothing worked well until I realized that any rule had to be tied not to time or place, but to a specific number of words or pages. In other words, I couldn’t say to myself, “I will write for an hour each night from 6:30 to 7:30,” but instead, “I will write 1000 words every day.” Or 500. Or 100. It didn’t matter how small, so long as it was specific and achievable. Because if you tell yourself you will write for an hour, well, you may write, but you may write only a few sentences. If your goals are time-based, rather than production-based, then you’re creating the wrong mindset. You want to condition yourself that when you sit, you write, and not that sitting for any set amount of time satisfies your goal.

If I know I’m not letting myself up out of that chair until I’ve written my five pages, you better believe I’ll get cranking fairly quickly. I don’t want to be sitting there until one in the morning when I know my kids will have me up shortly after the crack of dawn.

Ah, but that brings me to the other critical adjustment I made that helped me go from being a dilettante to a doer: withholding rewards until the work is done.

Or, when it comes to writing specifically, what I call pages before play.

There has to be either punishment or reward tied directly to your goal. Since I’m not really into the whips and chains and the fifty pushups with the face in the mud, I prefer to go with the rewards. What type of rewards are best? Well, that’s for each person to decide, but usually they’re what you’re doing when you know you should be writing. For me, that’s a couple things: 1) reading, of course, which is the big one, 2) movies and television, and 3) Internet and email.

So what I did is lump all of those into the “play category,” and I don’t let myself do any of them until the daily quota is met. No checking email to see if I heard back from so-and-so editor at such-and-such magazine. No reading that John D. MacDonald I find so addictive. No watching that documentary that was getting all the buzz lately. All of that waits until the pages are done.

And this works. It works very, very well, in fact. You have to have the self-discipline not to cheat, but usually the guilt will prevent you from doing that. Because not only do you create incentives to get your butt in the chair (gosh, you really would like to see that romantic comedy you brought home from Blockbuster the other night), you also eliminate most of the easiest distractions.

Pages before play. The trick, of course, is really doing it. But then that’s what separates the wannabes from the achievers — not just in writing, but any pursuit in life that takes discipline and dedication.

Simply put, it means this: I know what I have to do to get where I want to go. Now it’s just a matter of doing it. As far as actual writing goes, I’m making good progress on the novel, but it’s a long road. If a short story is a sprint, a novel is a marathon, and I’m still getting used to the difference.

Publishing News:

• “Father Hagerman’s Dog” appeared in the June 2007 issue of Analog. A college student’s attempt to sell a robotic dog to a defrocked priest. A bit light-hearted, this one, and fun to write. (If you can’t locate an actual copy of the magazine, you can buy it electronically through Fictionwise at http://www.fictionwise.com/eBooks/eBook45191.htm?cached)
• “Road Game,” a suspense story involving road rage and the power of addiction, appeared in the June 2007 issue of Ellery Queen. (If you can’t locate an actual copy of the magazine, you can buy it electronically through Fictionwise at http://www.fictionwise.com/eBooks/eBook45192.htm?cached)
• “The Dinosaur Diaries,” a coming-of-age novelette that begins when a young man finds Tyrannosaurus rex tracks on his family farm in modern Iowa, will soon appear in Realms of Fantasy. It’s one of the longest and most ambitious stories I’ve sold so far. I was told the August 2007 issue, but who knows if this is true. More news when I have it.

Also, you may have noticed a few changes to the website. I decided that the old site needed a little revamp, and since my day job is working in instructional technology for a university, it was a good excuse to learn a little more about PHP, CSS, and other geekery, things I needed to learn anyway to help faculty and students. I wanted to better embed my blog on my site as well as take advantage of tools which allow me to have the same content appear on multiple pages without actually having to update that content on every page. I’m still by no means a professional web designer, and it’s still not exactly what I want, but I’m happy with the progress. Probably more small tweaks, as time allows.

I – 76,944
II – 85,141
III – 107,253
IV – 190,637
V -257,045
VI -168,923

Total: 885,943 words

If we assume that all monies related to the books (movies, toys, etc.) all directly flow from the books themselves (which we should, since none of those things would have happened without the books), then a billion dollars in income translates into the following word rate:

$1,000,000,000 / 885,943 words = $1128.74 per word

All I can say is . . . wow. Most writers would be happy with a word rate starting to the right of the decimal point.

That’s right, a billion dollars, just from writing.