Scott William Carter

A few minor things:

• I’ve decided to do an Internet Fast for three weeks, which is basically limiting my personal Internet time to less than fifteen minutes a day. Some mental toxins have crept into my system, and this is my way of clearing them out. The fifteen minutes will mostly be spent checking email and keeping up with writing-related business, but it will also be a challenge to see how much I can keep up on with those fifteen minutes. I’ve been doing it for a few days already, and it’s been good, but it is a challenge even dealing with all my email in that time.
• I turned in the mini-collection to PS Publishing: A Web of Black Widows and Other Stories of Love and Loss. Thirty thousand words. Six stories — four or which are original to the collection. Right now it’s scheduled for an early 2009 release, but we’ll see. I’ll be posting a page with more information about the collection in the coming months.
• Check out the First Book blog: Jennifer E. Smith and The Comeback Season.
• Read Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s Hugo-nominated novella, “Recovering Apollo 8,” for free over at Asimov’s. Wonderful story. Plus if you want to see how a great writer can break the rules (not that there is such a thing in fiction), this is a good one to study. There’s only a few scenes and much of it is told in narrative summary, with the first third almost entirely exposition, but it works beautifully.  It works because it gives you a sense of a small story within the larger scope of history, which was the right tone and approach.

My story, “Stone Creek Station,” has appeared in the anthology Beneath the Surface, edited by Timothy Deal.  Published by Shroud Publishing.  Buy it here.

And here’s the opening:

While cleaning out my office, I pulled the old Rand McNally atlas off the shelf and the book fell open to the two-page spread of the United States. I closed my eyes and made a blind stab at the map; when I looked down at the book, my finger had fallen in the middle of Oregon. The problem was that when I lifted my finger, there wasn’t a town there, just a mountain range and some lakes.

Still, I was determined to follow my method, so I turned to Oregon in the atlas, and located on the more detailed map the spot where my finger had fallen. There were a couple of small towns in the area, but one caught my eye: Stone Creek.

It was impulsive. It was insane. It wasn’t anything like me at all — always deliberate, always cautious. But that was the point. If you’re serious about starting over, you can’t trust yourself to make a clean break  . . .

I have a new longish story (or novelette, if you want to get technical) out in the April 2008 issue of Realms of Fantasy: “The Dinosaur Diaries.” Part ghost story, part romance, part coming-of-age tale — it’s got a bit of everything, and I’m really glad to have it see print. It begins when the narrator, Jerry, finds fresh Tyrannosaurus Rex tracks on his Iowa farm, and only gets more interesting from there. If you don’t have a subscription, you can usually find individual issues at your local Borders. Here’s the cover:

Here’s the first page (and yes, they do break into more traditional paragraphing on the next page).

Click the image for a larger version.

So instead of spending my time writing, as I should, I created a Myspace page.  Check it out:  http//www.myspace.com/scottwilliamcarter 

Plus I created a temporary “cover” for The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys, which you can see both on this site and on the Myspace page.

So I really need to get more writing done.  Really. 

 You see, I’m actually a very disciplined person when I’m not being undisciplined.

In Publishing News . . .

I have a new story out in the DAW anthology, Mystery Date.  The tale, “Motivational Speaker,” involves a man’s rather unusual relationship with a stereo system he purchases from a department store.   Check it out.

In Writing News . . .

I finished a new story — one involving a famous Civil War sword, a ghost, and a black boy who faces a test of character in the face of the worst kind of bigotry.  I enjoyed writing it — which doesn’t always mean it’s publishable, but it’s a good sign.  

Otherwise, it’s back to the novel in progress.  Not writing nearly as many short stories these days, and that’s by design.  While I do love the form, and have no plans to stop writing them, it does come down purely to economics.  That may sound crass, and I guess it is, but if your main goal is to eventually make a living writing fiction, then you do have to pay attention to the numbers.     

Think of it this way.  Except for some of the very best short story markets out there (The New Yorker, etc.), most professional level markets for short fiction pay between six and ten cents a word.  (And there’s a ton of markets, some quite respectable, that pay considerably less.)  If you apply that six cent word rate to a 100,000 word novel, that nets you $6000. 

Six grand is pretty much the bottom for a professional-level novel advance.  Most publishers pay considerably more — and it can rise quickly as you establish your audience, whereas short stories won’t net you all that much more even if you become a bestseller (slightly more, sure, but not nearly as much an increase you’ll get with your novels).  Plus you have to remember that this doesn’t include royalties, foreign sales, movie rights, and a myriad of other ways that novels make money beyond the initial advance.  Yes, you can’t count on those, but they’re much more likely with novels than with short stories.

 So if you’re a writer with young children and a day job — which translates into a limited amount of time for your fiction — then you have a choice to make.  Even writing novels exclusively, it’s tough to make a living doing it, and if you write short stories exclusively, it’s pretty much impossible in the present day. 

Does this mean a writer who wants to make a living at his craft should forgo short stories completely?  Not hardly.  Of course, there’s the sheer love of them, but there are other reasons, too.  A reader might buy an anthology for a magazine because it has his favorite author in it, then read your story and get interested in finding books by you as well.  Plus if you do build up an audience for your novels, you can release your short stories in a collection and make more money that way.  And a popular short story can be resold many times, too, appearing in Best of the Year collections and the like.

So there are great reasons — even beyond a love of the form — for writing short stories.   But if you want to make a living from your fiction, you really have no choice but to write novels.  The good news is that squeezing in some short stories now and then is good from a publishing career point of view as well. 

My agent, Rachel Vater, just announced on her blog and on Publisher’s Marketplace that she made a big, seven-figure deal for her client Melissa Marr.  She’s got a number of NY Times bestsellers on her list now.  She really is an agent on the rise, and I’m so glad to have her in my corner.  She has lot of interesting things to say on her blog, so you should check it out.

 She also mentioned my own recent sale:

Finally, another recent sale for a debut novelist: Scott Carter’s THE LAST GREAT GETAWAY OF THE WATER BALLOON BOYS sold to David Gale at Simon & Schuster Children’s and will come out in hard cover spring 2010. This is an author I signed up as fast as I could. His book kept me up all night when I only meant to read the first chapter or two. I loved it too much to stop reading, so I’m very excited and happy to be his agent!

Very happy here.  I don’t think I could have a better agent.

After recently selling my first book to Simon and Schuster, it dawned on me how many first-time novelists are published each year — over ten thousand, according to some estimates.  Most of these books get very little exposure.  To help, I decided to create a blog called The First Book:

http://thefirstbook.wordpress.com/

Along with basic info about the book, there will be an author interview. I’m going to try to do two a month, more if I can.  If you know of any debut authors, send them my way.  The only criteria is that their second book can’t have appeared yet. 

The first interview has appeared and the second one is lined up.  Check it out.

It’s a very tiny bit of exposure, but every bit helps.  How long can I keep it up?  Who knows, but I’ll try to at least do it until my own first book appears in print.  Maybe then I’ll hand it off to another writer — someone like me, who has sold a book and is awaiting its publication. 

Something neat . . . My book got listed on Publisher’s Marketplace, which is a sort of clearinghouse that editors, agents, and writers use to keep up with industry: 

Scott Carter’s THE LAST GREAT GETAWAY OF THE WATER BALLOON BOYS, in which two teenagers make the daring choice to steal their principal’s ‘67 Mustang and end up on a life-changing road trip, to David Gale at Simon & Schuster Children’s, for publication in spring 2010, by Rachel Vater at Folio Literary Management (world).

Pretty stoked.  The good thing about the book coming out in 2010?  I have plenty of time to try to spread the word . . .

Got the word from my agent that I can now officially share the news . . . I sold a book!

The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys, my young adult novel about two teenagers who steal their principal’s car and end up on a life-changing road trip, will be published by Simon and Schuster.  Edited by David Gale.  Expected publication date of 2010.  Kudos to my fabulous agent, Rachel Vater at Folio, who’s been great through this whole process. 

You can read more about the book here.  In the coming months, I’ll add sample chapters and other tidbits to the page.  I’ll also have some more Mutterings about this whole process down the road a bit.  But for now I just want to say one thing.

Whoo-hoo!

Astute visitors to my website may have noticed it’s undergone a change.  For years I’ve basically done all the heavy lifting for the site myself, but now the tools have gotten so good that it no longer seems efficient.  I was also never that good at it; although my day job is working as a technology trainer at a university, I’ve never been a true Web designer.  Plus you have to know so much more these days to do it well — Flash, javascript, etc.  Simple HTML is no longer enough.

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.