An Interview: Fellow author Realm Lovejoy and I met via the twitter #amwriting tag-community (which, if you’re a writer using twitter, you should most certainly join!), and while she’s got some great art up at her site for her upcoming novel CLAN, she was also kind enough to give me an opportunity to run off at the mouth during an interview at her site, where she also put my lead antagonist, Paldor, together for the first time in a visual format.  The interview may be more of the usual Finch drivel, but her art isn’t, so go have a look!

Sherlock: I’ve finished reading The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes for the first time, and oh man have I been missing out all these years.  Aside from the stories being individually quite good, the characterizations priceless and my own affinity for Holmes growing as I realize how utterly anti-social and unlikable he really is, I’ve found that Arthur Conan Doyle was, apprarently, as likable and forthright a gentleman as one could hope to be.  I can’t do ACD’s story justice here, but I’ll say that knowing the author of these famous and respected tales was humble, easy-going and generous definitely enhanced my own enjoyment of them.  If you’re not familiar, I urge you to learn more for yourself.

(I also have a personal theory now, that Arthur Conan Doyle and H. P. Lovecraft were the bastard children of Edgar Allen Poe by different wives, but that’s a story for another day.)

Stormbringer:  Now that Sherlock’s on the “have-read” pile, Elric is next on the list.  I’ve already downed two of the seven prime Elric stories, and I’m finding myself enjoying them a lot more than I remembered I did the first time through, many years ago.  Full report when I’m done.

Scriptwriting: This is what I’ve been up to lately; while my super-agent Colleen goes through the latest version of the manuscript for The Grey Knight, I’ve been working on alternate media to tie into the novel’s backstory.  I’m really excited about the script, and while I can’t really go into detail quite yet, it’s turning into quite a serious live-action video production.  I’m very much looking forward to sharing the results with everyone when it’s finished.

That’s it for now; work on the sequel to The Grey Knight continues, but there’s a lot of forward momentum on Knight, and I’m enjoying the oblique approach to the fantasy world in my head, so while I’m still doing a lot of scenework on the sequel… I’m still having fun with Knight now, too.

So yeah, I finally got a really, really important scene of The Grey Lord written. Lord ventures a bit deeper into certain themes, and one scene in particular requires some fairly horrific imagery. I’m happy to say that I’m extremely pleased with the scenework, but I’m really starting to wonder how sane poor Erik is going to be by the end of Lord. He’s starting to slip nicely into the role, though, and assuming he’s able to retain his sanity (and, hopefully, a shred or two of essential humanity), he’ll continue to be a great study well through the end of the last of this first series.

Naturally, my inspiration wasn’t constrained to Lord; some wicked ideas popped into my head for The Grey Lady as well. Fortunately, they were a bit simpler and easier to communicate, so I’ve already incorporated them into the puzzle design of Lady. I’d explain more, but I’d be giving away a key element of a new cipher for the game and I can’t imagine that’d be much fun! Just… trust me, it’s evil and diabolical, and I’ve got it all wrapped up.

But the coolest part so far is just watching the new character emerge. The short story is told as journal entries from her perspective, and she begins very young and very shallow (yeah, it’s a she — didn’t the post title give it away?). She doesn’t have much time to learn about herself or her world before it all starts collapsing around her, and watching her cope with this new information, watching her attempts at shedding her outer skin to tap into her own inner strength is really eye-opening. Her journey takes her from jaded consumerist to fiercely loyal companion at a breakneck pace, and watching her make the decisions that lead her to the end of the story is — well, I’ll let people judge for themselves when they see it, but I’m impressed.

Apparently, I still have a lot of faith in humanity, and this Grey Lady is the proof of it. She’s going to turn my stories a bit topsy and somewhat turvy, but stuff like this is one of the most best parts of writing.

The goofy thing:

Yeah. Me. And Shalila. Only cartoony.

I think this is a critical insight. I may be wrong, and if I’m not published by the end of the year I’ll highlight this as an important misconception, but I’m beginning to think that a modern, commercially-oriented author absolutely, positively needs to understand at least the bare bones of marketing. The market is simply too competitive; there are too many voices clamoring for attention, and too few traditional outlets for the flood of content. I don’t mean that a writer should destroy their art for market share, but I do mean that once the pencil shavings have cleared and the baby’s delivered, said writer had better damn well understand their novel’s potential audience, and take steps to attract them.

But that’s the publisher’s job, right? With 5 years experience now in high-end professional marketing, I can say the answer is qualitatively and quantitatively “no.” Even the marketers who make shitloads of money and who are supposed to know what the hell they’re doing are making a lot of missteps with the modern consumer. Publishers are not, traditionally, on the bleeding edge of marketing theory. Therefore, if you want modern marketing that will really blow the doors off of your niche — unless you have a really exceptional publisher… yeah. DIY.

Anyway. I was going to start this bitching about synopses, but the more I thought of it the more I realized that bitching about a critical part of the process is just dumb. Pitching a novel is a lot like selling a vacuum: the query letter’s the knock on the door, and the synopsis and sample pages are the spiel on the doorstep. If your spiel is good, you get to go inside and show off your vacuum — and dammit, you know that vacuum’s a good one. But if your spiel blows, the door gets shut no matter how good your vacuum is.

Yeah, I’m still working on mine. But I think I’ve got a good perspective on the thing now. I expect to send it out this coming Monday.

Vroom.

Interestingly, they’ve also asked me if I’m simultaneously submitting the manuscript elsewhere. I do seem to remember that this is a no-no with publishers and not so much of a no-no with agents, but until I completely fall off my top-ten list I don’t expect I’ll entirely follow that advice. I’m most seriously interested in Agent A and her fellow top-ten, so I’m going to focus my attention on each individually and in serial, not parallel.

In any event, thank you, Agent A! Here’s to finding out if we’re a good fit. *clink*

On extremely rare occasions, it’s violent, and it blows your mind.

I’ve been working on my mongrel media marketing campaign for the last few days, and it wasn’t long before I made an uncomfortable realization: one of the characters from the marketing has insisted on joining the story.

At first I resisted, even knowing that these sort of out-of-nowhere developments tend to lead to the best stories. There’s no place for her in the saga, I griped. She complicates things, I whined. She dilutes the message, I grumped. (Grump, grump, grump.)

And then I relented, and the stars aligned.

It’s perfect, I now realize; it’s the ultimate fusion of my “real-world” stories and my other-world stories. Characters that have always threatened to straddle worlds now do without apology. I don’t have to worry about where the lines start and end; they’re all part of a cohesive whole now, part of a much, much larger story.

Freed by this revelation, the story for the campaign surged. I’ve done more story development in the last couple of hours than I’ve done during entire weeks where I thought I was focused on the campaign. It was always intended to be story first, marketing second, but it’s mutated beautifully into full-on story first, marketing as a distant second, and I’m really enjoying how it’s taking shape.

And, as often happens when the stars truly align, there are other fascinating forces in play to aid and abet this story, from all sorts of unexpected directions. I don’t know how it’ll all turn out yet, and I really can’t say anything specific, but the possibilities are incredibly exciting.

Watch out. This is the year.

The new challenges are in this new media crap. I’ve got some great stuff to deliver storywise for the marketing push, but the trick is distribution — not just specifically distribution, but the actual path people will take between chunks of media — yes, it’s going to be what I call a ‘mongrel media’ production — it’s lots of chunks of various media instead of one consistent experience. Long story short, it’s really a lot more complex than I thought it was, and I thought it was complex. Right now it’s doing my head in. I’ll get through it, but the infinite variables are still throwing me for a loop, so I need to compartmentalize better and narrow each step down to its component parts. Big pictures are scary, you know?

See, in my day job, I work for one of those ad firms, so I’m continuously exposed to all of the weird new-age marketing hype. Not only do I see the cutting-edge stuff that they end up doing, but I see the bleeding-edge stuff that they end up shelving because it’s too risky, or too niche, or too inaccessible, or too client-unfriendly. And that’s cool, because some of those out-there ideas are the ones I like the best — and since nobody else is gonna do it… well, it’d be a shame to let them go to waste, right? Right? Right.

So, with that as a given, obviously, I’m marketing my book. Obviously, the reason people buy a book is because they want a good story. The inevitable, logical conclusion, then, is: in order to successfully market a book, one should provide a significant taste of what your target audience is looking for — which is to say, story.

I’m not giving away what precisely I’m doing just yet, but I’ll say this: it involves a substantial story, one that will be available to everyone for absolutely free. If someone never reads the books, they’ll probably still enjoy it. If they do read the books, it will give them some cool background information on a significant event in the book, and some insight into where the series as a whole is going.

Why am I doing this? Well, I dislike and distrust the motivations of marketing and marketers in general (funny I should end up as one, eh?), in that they take and rarely give (they take your time and force you to watch ads, whether you’ve bought the product, hate the product, or have no use for the product). That’s backwards to me. Any artist is hoping to establish a real, lasting bond with a reader, or a viewer, or a listener, not a quick sale — and to cheapen that potential relationship with nothing more than a sales pitch just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

So while yes, I do want to market my stories — of course I want people to find them, to love them and to tell their friends about them — I want to make how that happens different. I want to make it something people will want, not something they want to avoid. I want to give something entertaining and useful to everyone that stands on its own. Something that’s not just a taste of a story, like a sample chapter on a website — but something to really grab you, pull you in and give you a feel for it all.

So while I poke around looking for artistic representation, that’s what I’m mainly doing: creating this bizarre marketing campaign for the series. I have the linear sequence of events, but it’s not a linear format, so the story path is going to take some work to suss yet — but it’s shaping up nicely already, and I’m lucky enough to have some very talented people interested in helping out.

Well, that and writing the sequel, of course — but that goes without saying!

K, now I wait for a few weeks. To borrow a phrase from the massive multiplayer crowd… /twiddle.

In the meantime, I’ve reinstalled Lotus Word Pro on my laptop — not because I’m going to write in it (as much of a joy as that word processor was to use, I’m an Open Office fan now), but because a shedload of my old research, historical documentation and backstory is in various Word Pro docs, and if I’m serious about continuing to improve the Codex daily, I’m going to need that stuff. Not to mention the rules to the RPG that’s based in the same world as the book.

Lastly, I’m prioritizing time now on developing the promotional materials for Knight — mainly because they’re actually fun, and tell a bit more of a part of the story that really doesn’t have much detail. That and I don’t have to actively try to resolve some of Lord’s stickier problems while I focus on selling the first book. It’s only mulling, though, I promise — there have been some good new bits in Lord the last couple of days and the engine’s definitely on again.