Latest News

Simon and Schuster Author Interview

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.

“A Problem with Polly” Published in Cat Tales II

cattalesII_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?

Games Writers Play #15: Heinlein’s Rules

gwpHere’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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All posts in this series can be found at
www.gameswritersplay.com



Water Balloon Boys: The First Page

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

wbbcoverIf 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.

Want to read more?  You can buy it right now from Amazon.com for only $11.46.

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