Scott William Carter

Postcards from New Zealand and Fiji (April 2016)

April 30, 2016April 30, 2016Scott William Carter

(A shot of Otago Bay from Larnach Castle in Dunedin, New Zealand.)

Partly to celebrate our upcoming 20th anniversary in August, partly because the kids have wonderful grandparents who are happy to watch the kids for a few weeks, and partly because I’ve come to believe that these sorts of adventures are good for both the body and the soul, Heidi and I spent two weeks touring in New Zealand followed by four wonderful days soaking up some sun on the Fijian Island of Malolo. (A brief aside: A conversation with a workaholic friend years ago when I was about to go on another adventure, who snorted that he couldn’t even remember the last time he took a vacation, made me start using the phrase “go on an adventure” rather than “take a vacation” when explaining a jaunt like this, which is a better descriptor, I think, of why I think it’s important to break free from your routine and shake things up now and then on adventures both near and far — even when, or perhaps especially when, you’re somebody like me who pretty much enjoys all the “work” he does, both in my writing life and my university life.)

Crossing the dateline and losing a day in the process, we flew into Christchurch, a beautiful city still picking itself up from the terrible 2011 earthquake, drove to Mt. Cook, where we stayed in the wonderful Hermitage resort, right in the national park and with a fabulous view of both Mt. Cook and many of the Southern Alps that run the length of the South Island. After that, we drove south along the east coast to the beautiful port city of Dunedin, where stayed in Larnach Castle and managed some close encounters with the Albatross, the Yellow-Eyed Penguin, and other wildlife.

Then it was on to Queenstown, where we made a jaunt to the stunning Milford Sound and went on a fun tour of many of the locations used in the Lord of the Rings films. A short flight to Rotorua, in the North Island, allowed us to visit the Hobbiton tourist attraction — 14 acres that were leased from a family farm in the area, which actually exceeded my expectations in really making me feel like I was in Middle Earth. We also made stops at the Waitmu Caves, to take a boat trip through absolute darkness to see the glowworms, and the Waimangu Volcanic Valley, where we both hiked and boated around geysers, hot springs, and a unique ecosystem that felt like something out of the Jurassic era. Then an early morning flight out of Auckland — where about a third of the 4.5 million people who call New Zealand home live — took us into Nadi, Fiji. A bus, another bus, and a catamaran boat finally brought us to own private beachfront “bure.” Here are a few digital postcards from our trip, some of which might show up a bit better if you click on them for the larger versions:

(The happy couple beginning their journey with a shot from the Botanic Gardens in Christchurch.)

(Another shot within the Botanic Gardens.)

(The one’s from our room at the Hermitage at Mt. Cook.)

(A couple glasses of wine, the biggest mountain in New Zealand, what more could you ask for?)

(This, called the “Clay Cliffs,” was just one of those random stops that wasn’t on the agenda, proving that New Zealand has something remarkable almost everywhere.)

(Not the best shot in the world because of the light, but this is Larnach Castle in Dunedin (where the first shot above was taken — high up in the hills over looking Otago Bay). Most of the locals use the word “castle” with a wry grin; you can read the local history if you want to know why.)

(The view of Otago Bay, from Larnach.)

(Two panoramic shots of Queenstown and Lake Wakatipu. Click for a larger version. The top one was from our room at Hotel St. Moritz, where we learned that many of the cast and crew of the LOTR movies stayed when they were filming in the area. The second is a shot at dusk from the top of the gondola.)

(Heidi standing behind a hot springs in the Government Gardens in Rotorua.)

(Me in the Waimangu Volcanic Valley, waiting for the dinosaurs to appear . . .)

(Lots of shots of Hobbiton, which was about an hour’s drive west of Rotorua. What made the place so remarkable was the landscape around the area, which really made you feel like you were in the Shire. I don’t think I could have afforded Bag End, but I could have been pretty happy in Sam’s hobbit hole.)

(Sunset at Lomani, our resort on the island of Malolo.)

(A shot from within our room, me standing on a fairly private strip of beach, since we were on the far end of the resort, near the point.)

Other highlights? Though remembering to drive on the left side of the road was always going to be challenging for an American like me, I really loved just driving through New Zealand, in all its beautiful and varied landscapes. Like a lot of people, I became intrigued with the country after the original Lord of the Rings filmed came out over ten years ago, and I have to say that it didn’t disappoint. Heidi and I even started joking, when we came around a corner and saw yet another amazing site, that “yes, it’s beautiful, but by New Zealand standards …” That’s right, it’s a country so beautiful that it needs its own scale to measure it. In many ways, Oregon is like a “hobbit size” version of New Zealand, at least in terms of the variety of landscapes (the total land area is almost the same, about 100,000 square miles, and our populations are about the same, too). Oregon has more variety in climates and topography than just about any state in the union; New Zealand just has greater extremes of it — and of course a lot more coastline.

Two weeks was far too short a time for New Zealand — we barely touched on the North Island, for example — which gives us a very good reason to go back, and I’m sure we will. The question, of course, is when. So many other places to see . . .

In other news, I’m back writing the third Vale book. A lot of you have emailed to ask when the next Gage book will be coming along, and all I can tell you is that there will be another, and it won’t be too long, but I can’t say more than that. When it comes to the books, I don’t do deadlines these days. I just write my five or ten pages a day and let the chips fall where they may. That may change someday, I certainly recognize the value of deadlines as a motivational tool, but with the family and the university work, I’ve got enough stress in my life without adding a bunch more for no reason. The writing’s the thing for me, after all. Publishing, as important as it is, and as much as I appreciate my readers (and boy, do I, after many years laboring with very few of them), is in some sense merely a byproduct. So as long as I keep plugging away at the pages, eventually a book emerges.

Since I don’t have a publication schedule, I do encourage you to take two minutes and sign up for my “no spam ever, new release email newsletter.” You won’t get more than a handful of emails a year, and I make sure my newsletter subscribers — over 2000 strong now — are the first to know when a new book is published.

It also looks like I’ll be teaching a new online course for the educational technology master’s program here at Western Oregon University this summer, one called “Publishing in the Digital Age,” focusing heavily on all the changes in how information and entertainment is distributed — not just with the printed word, but with music, video, and even comics. I’m still fleshing it out, but it should be a lot of fun. There’s no better way to further your own learning on a subject than to teach it.

Two Reasons I Love Oregon, a Brief Update, and a Helpful Metaphor for Writers (And Other Creative Professionals) Struggling with How to Spend Their Time

March 25, 2016March 25, 2016Scott William Carter

Reason #1:

Reason #2:

The two pictures above were taken about a week apart, both in the heart of winter here in Oregon. The first was at Cape Lookout, a two and a half mile hike that juts almost straight out into the Pacific Ocean. We took the whole family in early January and it was warm enough, even with the breeze, that most of us were shedding our jackets before too long. At the end, not far from where this shot was taken, we spotted quite a few whales making their migratory journey. The second shot are the kids playing in the snow a few days later in Sunriver, a resort on the Eastern side of the Cascade Mountains.

Sun on the coast one weekend, snow in the mountains the next, both within a few hours of the house. That said, you’ve got to be able to stand often weeks and weeks of near endless gray and drizzle, and we’ve certainly had that in spades. But if you want a different climate or topography, you often don’t have to go far in Oregon to find it.

The fourth Garrison Gage book, A Shroud of Tattered Sails, has been selling very well. It seems with each Gage book I release, the audience grows a bit more, and for that I’m quite thankful. Right now, I’m working on the third Myron Vale book and it’s coming along nicely. After that, well, I don’t like to think that far ahead if I don’t have to, and I have the luxury of being a writer who doesn’t have to. If I start to think I’ve got my writing projects all planned out, that takes a lot of the fun out of it. But rest assured, there will be another Gage book before too long. I’ve been working on being a bit more prolific going forward, something I’ll discuss more in a moment.

Astute readers may have noticed a slight change in the website. A series of vicious hacks forced the issue (all automated hacks exploiting weaknesses in the WordPress platform), but I took the opportunity to revamp the look, modernizing it and cleaning it up a bit. It got me thinking about promotion, about how little I really do, at least as most writers would define it. I don’t really blog, usually only updating my website when I have news. I don’t podcast. I don’t spend much time on social media. I don’t do many book signings, conferences, or workshops. Because of my day job at the university and my busy life with a wife and two kids, I’m very much a self-promotion minimalist. In fact, the past two years, as I was getting a Master’s degree, I spent very little time on the marketing side at all.

And yet I had the best two years of my life as a writer.

This isn’t to say that I think marketing is a waste of time. Oh no, far from it. I really believe in loss leaders, for example, especially when it comes to writing in a series, and especially in a digital marketplace where the cost of production, at least for the writer, is nearly zero. (Writers still applying twentieth century brick and mortar thinking to a twenty-first century digital marketplace are seriously handicapping themselves.) There are lots of other things worth doing, and even more things that aren’t. But I do think that any professional writer — really, any professional artist, musician, or entertainer in general — should be clear about their choices, about where they spend their time, and about the actual impact those choices have on their long-term success.

That brings me to a little metaphor I created, one I designed to help me get better focused about what I’m trying to accomplish. It was so helpful to me that I also plan to use it the next time I teach a writing class. I call it the Professional Writer’s Table, but it could just as easily be a professional artist’s table or a professional musician’s table. Just change the word “write” to “create.” It looks like this:

The main question I’ve been asking myself is this: What do I have control over? Or at least, what do I have the most control over? Where do I have choices, and how do those choices affect my success? Basically, the idea is that there are four main areas that a writer has the most control over that directly affect his or her success, each of these being a leg of the table:

What you write
How much you write
How much you learn
How you market

Rather than abstract terms like “content” and “productivity,” I prefer concrete words that are more actionable — which, of course, is a fairly abstract word, but we’ll let that pass for now. There are so many ways for a writer working today to spend his or her time that it’s easy to get overwhelmed. These four legs are what I think constitutes a very sturdy table. If you are negligent in any of the legs, well, it can make your table pretty shaky after a while. A lot of writing with a poor marketing strategy often results in lackluster sales. A lot of learning without actually producing much — like the workshop junkie who goes to lots of classes but doesn’t actually write unless compelled to do so by a teacher — is equally out of whack.

Let’s take them each in turn.

1. What you write. Do you write mysteries or romance books? Do you write short stories or novels? These are decisions about content and format. How much control you apply here will depend on your view of the creative process, and your particular make-up as a creative professional. Some people prefer to just let a story go where it wants to go, starting with a title or an intriguing idea and imposing little control over the process in the beginning. Others do market research and try to pinpoint what they feel is an under-served market (say, romances featuring werewolves). I don’t think either approach is wrong, but I would say if you’re not having the kind of success you want (notice how I phrased that), it’s a good place to start questioning your assumptions.

2. How much you write. Pages written, words typed, books finished. At the university, I work around people who think producing one book a year is lightning fast. Most of my professional writer friends think that’s painfully slow. It’s the simplest leg of the table to fix, and the hardest to actually do. Just write more. And yet, it’s usually the leg of the table that’s the weakest for most people. But focus on this area, and options open up in the other three. You have more choices about what you write. You have more opportunities to practice and learn, and of course more possibilities when it comes to marketing your work.

3. How much you learn. If you want to have more success, you have to keep learning, not just about the craft of writing, but the business side of things as well. This might mean taking a class, attending a workshop, reading a how-to book, or keeping up with publishing news. It might mean simply spending a lot of time studying master storytellers (hopefully people succeeding now, not twenty or fifty years ago). This changes from person to person, and even for a single person during different points in their life. For example, I used to take a lot of classes and workshops, but I eventually hit a point where I felt that approach was hurting more than it was helping, and I now I spend more time studying on my own. That may change in the future. Every writer is different, but it never hurts to keep asking yourself a simple question: “How can I get better?” From my point of view, it’s one of the great joys of the creative professional. If I didn’t think I could get better, I’d probably stop. And if you’ve hit a plateau with your creative life, focusing heavily on learning is a good place to start.

4. How you market. I use this word in the broadest sense, as in both “bringing your work to market” and marketing as promotional strategies and tactics. I thought about calling it “how you sell” instead, and some people may still prefer that. But whatever you call it, this is such a critical area that it fully deserves its own leg of the table, and it’s the one that also offers the most traps and pitfalls. There are no right answers. There is only what works, and what works for you. Those “experts” who offer lots of restrictive do’s and don’ts are usually saying more about their own biases and blind spots than about what will really work for you. Every creative person needs to figure this out for themselves, and that usually means casting a wide net and a lot of trial and error. But it’s also a good idea to ask yourself what’s working for people now (not ten years ago), and seeing if what they’re doing will work for you.

There’s a lot more that could be written about these four legs of the table, and I know a lot of people will quibble that I’m missing some key areas. What about the business side of things, for example? Doesn’t that deserve its own leg? Well, in my mind, that’s covered under “how you market,” but the truth is that I wanted to keep this metaphor very simple so it helped me focus on what I could do that would have the highest impact on my success. There are so many temptations for my time, so many rainbows I can chase that probably won’t have much effect on helping me achieve my potential as a writer — which is my singular goal right now. Start a magazine? Blog about the changes in publishing? Edit an anthology? Start a business that offers publishing services? Do more paid teaching and presenting?

These are all things I’ve considered, and each of them has that bright and shiny allure that makes them especially tempting, but this tool made it abundantly clear to me that writing more is the best thing I can do for my writing career, which will in turn give me more options in the other three areas. Perhaps this is no surprise, since I’m the one who coined the WIBBOW test (which stands for Would I Be Better Off Writing?), but it still reaffirms what I really believe has the biggest impact on my long-term success.

This metaphor isn’t meant to be all-encompassing, and I’m sure others will have their own take. It certainly started a lively discussion at a monthly professional writer’s group I often attend (If you find it useful, feel free to use, share or modify.) There’s no health leg, or family leg, or fun leg, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to help me stay focused on what will get me where I want to go as a writer, even when that means most of my effort is, as usual, done far from the bright lights and the big crowds. That’s often the way it is. It doesn’t mean those other things I mentioned above aren’t worth doing, or that I won’t do them at some point in the future; it just means I’m making the hard choices to spend my time on what matters the most to me, right now, to get me where I want to go, even if those choices don’t always seem to offer the most enticing short-term rewards.

I’ll finish this post with another picture from our Cape Lookout hike a few months back. Why? Well, just because, that’s why.

A Shroud of Tattered Sails Audio Book Available

February 16, 2016February 16, 2016Scott William Carter

For those of you who love audio books, the always excellent Steven Roy Grimsley has finished narrating the fourth Garrison Gage book, A Shroud of Tattered Sails, and it is now available for sale on Audible.com, Amazon.com, and iTunes. If you like audio books — and why wouldn’t you, when you have top talent like Grimsley bringing a story to life — please check it out.

Work on the third Myron Vale book continues to go well. More on that front hopefully soon. Otherwise, the winter has been full of lots of writing and lots of reading, just the way I like it. Hope the winter has been equally kind to you. Maybe not the writing, unless that’s your bent, but certainly the reading.

New Garrison Gage book published: A Shroud of Tattered Sails

December 28, 2015December 28, 2015Scott William Carter

The fourth Garrison Gage book, A Shroud of Tattered Sails, is now out in the world. I shared the cover and book description a month ago on this blog, so rather than repeat myself, I’ll just link to the book’s page, where you can follow the links to various retailers and also read the first chapter online if you are so inclined. While the paperback, Kindle, Nook, and Kobo versions are currently available, the iBooks version should be available within a week or so. A few people have asked about the audio book, and yes, I plan to have that produced as well, but it will be a few months yet. Check out the series page if you think you might have missed one of his adventures.

It was great fun returning to Gage’s world, and I feel so grateful that he’s picked up so many fans the last few years. After four books, it really does feel like visiting with family you don’t get to see all that often — the good kind of family, of course! Judging by some of the emails readers have sent me, it seems quite a few people feel the same way about him. It warms my heart, which, with the cold and rainy weather we’ve been having in Oregon lately, is definitely a good thing.

I’m knee deep into the third Myron Vale novel and hope to keep up the steady pace going into the new year. Oh, and Happy Holidays!