I finally started working on the manuscript for my novel Memory, getting it ready for conversion to ebook and print-on-demand. The process involves cleaning up the styles, converting manuscript punctuation to print punctuation, and adding in the copy editor’s changes—which means going through it page by page.

In the process I’ve been re-reading a lot of the story and it’s left me feeling very sad today. Not because it’s a sad book. Memory is poignant at times, but it’s not written to leave you weeping. The dedication sums it up: “A quest, a puzzle, and multiple lives.” This is an action story set in a unique story world. My sadness is for the book itself. Memory may well be my best book and I think it deserved better than it got. I’m also sad because I honestly can’t see myself ever attempting to write anything on this level again. There just doesn’t seem to be any point to it. Here’s why:

Memory was originally published in April 2003 by Tor. Below are the most recent sales figures I pulled out of the file, as of June 2007. (I’m sure I have more recent figures, but they were probably sent as PDFs and I didn’t bother to print them out and I’m not going to look them up. The figures likely just got worse anyway as more returned books came in.)

Hardcover: 1822
Ebook: 50
Trade paper: 1574
Mass Market Paperback: 7097

That’s 10,543 total units four years after publication—a spectacular market failure by any measure. (On the positive side this means there’s a huge potential market that could still be persuaded to buy the book when it’s resurrected by my publishing company Mythic Island Press.)

I used to want to write a great novel. Now I just want to write an amusing one.

I truly respect the person who wrote Memory, but—you knew this was coming right?—that earlier version of me is just a memory now. I’ll be writing shorter, simpler books for the foreseeable future, hopefully in more viable genres.

I still can’t bring myself to write about zombies though.

Sorry.

The most useful post on writing that I’ve read in recent times is here: Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing: Book as Event

Thank you Dean Wesley Smith!

I don’t agree with absolutely everything in this post of course, but most of it makes perfect sense to me. The core thesis is, and I quote, “Myth: All books need to be events, need to be something special.”

That was my belief for essentially my entire writing career. If the story wasn’t big/meaningful/ground-breaking/a potential home run, don’t bother starting it.

This worked for me for a while. I produced six novels that I’m still quite proud of. And then all of a sudden I wasn’t producing novels anymore. I started developing novel ideas several times, but either the ideas went nowhere, or I could see no way of doing the research, or the idea just wasn’t big enough to bother with.

Then I read the article cited above, recognized myself, and decided to try something new.

In mid-December (yes, this past December) I spent a couple of writing sessions developing a plot for a story idea that had just popped into my head. It’s an off-the-wall kind of fantasy in a vaguely medievalist setting. Editor self sneered: “You have got to be kidding me.” New experimental self replied: “Leave me alone. It’s just a story.”

The goal was a 60,000-word novel in three months, aiming at 1000 words a day. (FYI: words-per-day math follows its own obscure rules.)

My first serious writing session was on December 21, but I only managed another couple of sessions before year’s end. In January I got serious, and started writing nearly every day.

I hit a wall on January 27th. Here’s the blog post: For Me, Writing Fast ≠ Writing Well

February 24 was another roadblock. I spent most of this day re-plotting the last part of the story. By the evening I had short, very sketchy versions of every remaining scene in the book.

From there everything just worked. As of yesterday I had the last chapter in place and my word count was 60,300—so close to my goal it astonishes me.

I still have holes to fill in, but not a whole lot of them. I still need to fix some terminology. And yes, I will read it all over and clean it up. Oh, and no one else has read a word of it yet.

But the point is, I wrote a novel in slightly over two months, I had a lot of fun doing it, and I like the result.

So again—Thank you Dean Wesley Smith!

My iPod nano is stuffed with music spanning four decades and sometimes the random “life soundtracks” it puts together amuse me. This is what I heard this morning, with no skips until noted.

Walk a bit to warm up….
Best of My Love – The Eagles
Start run at bottom of Hill #1:
Sunday Bloody Sunday – U2
December – Collective Soul
Omegaman – The Police
Precisely at the top of Hill #1, switch to slow & quiet for Downhill #1:
Quicksand – Incubus
To Turn You On – Roxy Music
Stadium Arcadium – Red Hot Chili Peppers
Somewhere around here, turn around and head back up–Hill #2:
Strange Desire – The Black Keys
Hard to Concentrate – Red Hot Chili Peppers
Give Your Heart Away – The Black Keys
Need something to get me to the top of the hill…[skip][skip]…Ah…
Pain Redefined – Disturbed
Last long downhill:
Elevation – U2
And to take me home:
Lovesong – The Cure

I should probably get around to loading some of the newer stuff…

One of my twitter friends who lives in Europe and buys ebooks from Amazon US has noted some curious pricing. In his experience a title priced at $9.99 in the US sells for $13.79 (in US dollars) when purchased from the Netherlands or Portugal.

On inquiry, Amazon explained that:
[1] Price can vary due to publishers granting different rights to different countries.
[2] “…a number of factors, including the initial publisher price.”
And “Using Kindle If You Live Outside the United States”

(I feel compelled to note that my novels are NOT used in the pricing example above. They are currently priced between $4.99 and $5.95, but they still experience a price differential.)

Googling turned up this two year old article on pricing differences which seems to point the finger at cost of doing business and cost of data transfer: guardian.co.uk

But there’s one more interesting fact in all this. Amazon pays the author or publisher a 70% royalty on ebooks sold in the USA, the UK, and recently, in Canada. But for those books sold to other countries the author gets only 35%–and that’s of the list price, not the higher price.

This seems like an area where competition is going to inspire change very soon.

The importance of Valentine’s Day has definitely gone up in our family.

One year ago my daughter, Dallas–she’s a professional photographer–started a photo-a-day project. Here’s Day 1, February 14, 2010:

Today, he brought me red roses and coffee, then made me breakfast. Later, he left for Afghanistan. He'll be back next year.

When Dallas was nineteen or twenty she infamously proclaimed she would never date a man in the military because she couldn’t handle the deployments. One should not tempt fate.

In December 2009 she met Edward White. From the first night, she knew he’d be shipping out come February. They had a two-month whirlwind affair anyway, and then he was gone.

But with Skype, chat, and text messaging they were together in some sense almost every day.

They were married in July when Ed came home on leave. He had two-and-a-half weeks with his bride before heading back to duty.

Now we’ve come full circle. This is the last post in my daughter’s photo journal, Day 366, February 14, 2011:

Today, I spent the morning doing last minute errands and prepping for dinner. Later, I went to Ft. Shafter and welcomed Ed home. ♥

How the US Army arranged for two such momentous occasions to occur on Valentine’s Day is a question for the mystics. We’re just overjoyed to have Ed back. This couple has paid some dues and earned their honeymoon!

And for all the other military families out there waiting for loved ones to return from overseas, we wish you the best.

When I’m writing a scene it’s not uncommon for me to get the wrong sort of environment stuck in my head. For example, the scene I’m working on now takes place on and around a mountain pass. The piece is fairly brief and I’m not expecting to use the location again, and, since I’m trying to write fast, I didn’t spend anytime at all thinking about the specifics of the setting until after I got going.

Once I did start, I realized I’ve been visualizing an austere, treeless, virtually barren summit area–which doesn’t make any sense given the general environment where this story takes place.

For me, shifting that mental image requires real effort. Sometimes it helps to go to Google and do an image search (“forest mountain pass”). With luck, a photo comes up of a setting similar to what I’m trying to envision. But luck is fickle, and when Google fails me, it’s time to take a deep breath, close my eyes, and try to rebuild the setting in my head, this time with proper features–because if I can’t see the scene map, what hope is there for the reader?

I recently rediscovered the old Linkin Park CD Hybrid Theory. For those who know what I’m talking about, I’m going to horrify you by letting you know it’s now eleven years old.

I confess I still love “In The End” and continue to be fond of “Crawling” thus proving that angst never gets old. On the other hand, much of the rest of it reaches a rather embarrassing level of adolescent whining–but Linkin Park did have a unique and interesting sound for the time.

I miss the energy of those screamer bands. Next up: hunting down that wonderful old Chevelle CD.

I was at Amazon.com, looking at the search results that come up for the Kindle store when my name is searched. (Not ego surfing! Business!) At the bottom of the page I saw the following ad:

Naturally I wondered who was using my name as a sponsored link.

I clicked to open the link in a new tab. This is what I saw:

Okay, so this textbook was written by another Linda Nagata! So I went back to Amazon and pulled up the page for the textbook and this is what I saw:

Notice there is no author name of “Linda Nagata” attached to this book. But there is an author name “Linda Webb”–which just happens to be my maiden name, but which I have never used as a pen name. Coincidence? I sure hope so, because otherwise this is creeping me out.

I don’t mention this here out of vanity or because I’m impressed that my name is well known for selling stuff (quite the contrary, I assure you!) but because it’s just so weird. Explain? Please?

I’m 20,000+ words into my current project. I see this as a short, easy little novel, and not a big event by any means. In fact, my primary goal is to try to write fast. (For those of you who don’t know, I’m a notoriously slow writer.) So the rules were to produce a thousand words a day and not worry about editing or getting it right, but just let the story pour out.

Since I had a rough outline and several scenes and incidents lined up before I started, the rules sort of worked for awhile. I made the word count, or more, on a surprising number of days. But around 20,000 words I started getting unsteady. I began jumping to different parts of the story, and frowning over the plot. I started writing in separate files, and in long hand.

And it all started feeling like a huge mess.

So today I broke the rules and went back to the beginning and polished and refined my opening chapter and added some back story that I’ve figured out since I started.

I’m a lot happier now.

So for a while, at least, I’ll bid the rules good-bye.

But I’m still trying to write fast.

I’m not a fast reader. I might spend a week or ten days reading in the evening before I finish off a typical novel. So it’s ironic how much I can enjoy long, complex, challenging novels. Do you?

Here are some that have stuck in my mind over the years:

Moby Dick by Herman Melville- I keep hearing people say how boring this is, but I read it at thirteen or fourteen, so I guess the boring parts went right over my head. To quote from the novel How I Became a Famous Novelist “Instead of loving perfectly good books like Moby Dick, where a ***ing whale eats everybody, these ***s insisted on pretending to like excruciating books like . . .” Yeah.

The Broken God by David Zindell- I think I read this at least twice, and yet I never tell anyone “You have to read this book.” It’s so dense with detail I just know the readers I’m personally acquainted with wouldn’t be into it. Are any of you?

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson- Long, dense, fascinating. I read this one twice too. I even know other people who’ve read it and like it. And yet I’ve never gone on to read the follow ups. I don’t know why.

The Silmarillion by JRR Tolkien- Despite my utter adoration for The Lord of the Rings, I didn’t read this until much, much later in life. I’ve since read it two or three times, and then picked up The Children of Hurin when that came out, and read it again. It is, of course, classic tragedy.

Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin- I was tricked into reading this. Evidently it was a big deal when it came out, though I had never heard of it. Someone loaned me a copy, implying she had read it and it was a wonderful book. And it is a wonderful book! Rather like a fever dream can be wonderful and engrossing (although this is a bad analogy, since everything in the story is cold). I liked it so much I bought my own copy. The person who gave me the book seemed surprised I had gotten through it, and confessed she’d never read it at all.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad- Okay, this isn’t a long novel, but it is complex in the way it’s written, so I include it here. I’m not usually a fan of stories that focus on the sheer awfulness of people, but this one works for me. I had it on my nightstand for a couple of years and would read it at random. The use of language is astonishing, as in: “The word ‘ivory’ rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse.” And “There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies—which is exactly what I hate and detest of the world—what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do.”

Has anyone else read and admired any of these books?

What are your “long and complex” favorites?