Scott William Carter

Postcards from the Garage: Water Balloon Boys Author Copies

April 22, 2010April 21, 2010Scott William Carter

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.

ROF publishes “The Grand Mal Reaper” Online (Free Reading)

April 21, 2010April 21, 2010Scott William Carter

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.]

Games Writers Play #14: Five Minute Free Write

April 20, 2010April 16, 2010Scott William Carter

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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Spring 2010 Update and the Next Phase

April 19, 2010April 16, 2010Scott William Carter

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.