Wednesday, September 14th: The Four Day Writing Cycle

Not exactly a status post, but there's one big thing I want to talk about.

Okay, so I've talked briefly about how my thinking shifted when I started approaching my workload on a basis of "X chapters a month" rather than "a chapter on this day of the week and that day of the week" or "X chapters a week". Or rather I've talked about the fact that it's shifted. I'm still in some ways piecing together what that shift means, but I've got enough of a handle on it to talk about a Plan.

Here's the goal in a nutshell: 8 chapters a month. That works out to about two a week, but it's more sustainable than going for two a week. The actual production schedule (and what I'm thinking will become the publishing schedule) is to post a story on the 1st and then every four days thereafter: 5th, 9th, 13th, etc.

Why this way? Because (except at the end/beginning of a month) that gives me the same lead time between every chapter. Four days. At my worst I can slog through a chapter in four days. At my best I can write three chapters in four days. In the normal course of things, this gives me a day to spend conceiving a chapter, a day to take a stab at beginning it (which can be an all-day job, at least beginning it right), a day to flesh it out, and a day to finish it.

So, basically the four days of the cycle are Conception, Stabbing, Writing, Finishing. Sometimes "finishing" will mean "writing the end", sometimes it will be as in "sending to finishing school"; i.e., adding a certain amount of charm and polish.

Some times it won't take me four days even when I'm not at my best. I might hit upon the right beginning in the same moment that I conceive of the chapter, and start writing it right away. Or I might not need a day to finish up. If I finish a chapter, the next day starts the next four day cycle, even if it "should" be day 3 or 4 of the current cycle.

Now, this schedule doesn't allow for weekends. I'm not giving them up, exactly... no stage of the four day cycle requires me to be sitting at a computer typing for eight hours. This is very much a case of working smarter rather than harder. I'm redistributing my work load.

This schedule also doesn't account for anything else I'm doing (side stories, short stories, novels). It's not meant to, though. It's meant to make space for those things by having a manageable yet serious commitment to Tales of MU.

Right now I'm on Day 2 of Chapter 32's cycle, the "stabby" day. I keep finding myself having to remind myself of that, because I keep running into the fact that I don't have enough to go on for the next chapter to write 1,200 or 1,500 or so words today, that I don't know for sure how to begin it. As soon as I remind myself "Today's for figuring that out", I feel a lot better about it. This is the first time I'm going through the whole cycle in a deliberate way... I was playing with it on the last chapter. I hope that after I've gone through it a few times that kind of self-defeating performance anxiety will diminish quite a bit.

Updates by date instead of day might throw people off a little, but I suspect that for MU readers it's been a while since they associated updates with particular points on a calendar anyway. If you can't be bothered to keep track of the dates you could still check the site once a week and always have something new to read (or two things).

My other big task for the day is the newsletter, which is to go out tomorrow. That's more a matter of assembly than writing, so it's something I can do when I get stuck on the MU chapter.

Etta Candy disapproves.

There's only one possible circumstance under which DC's redesign of Amanda Waller - a popular character and an iconic and recognizable character in their successful, decade-spanning DCAU - as a skinny woman with a completely redesigned face and hair is remotely acceptable. And that's if they've offered Angela Bassett a fabulous multi-picture deal to anchor their answer to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the way that Nick Fury does for them. In that circumstance, redesigning her comic character to be more recognizably the same character that Bassett played in Green Lantern wouldn't be my favorite creative decision but I believe it would be justifiable.

Now, I haven't seen Green Lantern but I just did an image search to find images of Bassett as Waller. She clearly doesn't have Waller's frame, but I have to say her appearance in the movie was more in keeping with the classic character than the redesign is.

Far more likely than this being a consequence of the movie appearance is that somebody at DC decided they need to "sexy her up" and didn't even bother to think about how problematic it is to tie sexiness to skinniness and white norms of beauty. And even more likely than that is there was no decision at any level that would register as a decision - drawing a woman as thin and "sexy" (for a very specific value of sexy) isn't the sort of thing that a comic artist needs to decide on. It's the default.

And of course, that's where the "No Malice Chorus" is going to chime in on this. Nobody meant any harm! There's no conspiracy! They took a strong, powerful and large woman with African features and turned her into someone who could pass as a Bond girl, but nobody meant anything by this!

And I can believe that. There was no intended message here.

In fact, they removed a message. That message was "Sometimes, the people in charge look like this:"



And Amanda Waller has always been in charge of whatever she did. Before the reboot, this woman even served as a cabinet-level secretary. (One of two African-Americans in Lex Luthor's cabinet, but I don't think that's what history would have remembered him for if it hadn't been erased.) Like so many other characters, she's been placed by the reboot into her most iconic role: director of Task Force X/Suicide Squad.

But she's been made absolutely unrecognizable in the process. This isn't like Superman's costume change. She's not a superhero. She doesn't have heraldry or an emblem that says "Yes, this is Superman you're looking at." Not only that, but Superman-the-person is still being drawn more or less the same way, within normal variance for differing artists and styles.

DC Comics, this woman



is not The Wall.

She's barely even The Partition.

Don't be fooled by... BRAND X.

It occurs to me that authors and people in the publishing industry (except maybe the marketing types) are possibly the worst people to try to figure out how people actually going about finding books they like.

Because being in the industry means being aware of things that the average consumer, even the average book consumer, isn't. It means you know and care about publishing companies, for one thing. You have a friend who was published through Tor. You always dreamed about being published by Baen. You know people who work at Random House.

And so you're uniquely susceptible to the idea that these labels matter. They matter to you, and probably to a lot of the people in your immediate circle. It seems like everyone you know knows about publishing houses, has opinions about them, and cares about them.

But do you know who doesn't know a thing about publishers, much less care about them?

Everyone.

Statistically, I mean.

Upend a bucket of ping-pong balls from the basket of a hot air balloon over a random crowd and you will not hit anyone who gives serious thought as to who publishes their literature. I'm not saying such a person doesn't exist. I'm saying they're a statistical aberration.

If you don't know folks who work at Random House, you don't care about Random House. If you don't know the history of Baen, you don't care about Baen.

Okay, yes, if somebody corners you and puts the question to you like so: would you be more likely to trust a book that was published by an established publishing company or one that somebody just published themselves, sure, the answer's going to be the established publishing company.

But you know what never happens? Someone recommends a book to you and the first question... or the third question, or the thirty-third question... you ask is about the publishing house because even though you trust this person's recommendations you want to make sure you're not getting suckered into buying a book from Brand X.

Even among people who know and care about publishing houses. They might ask out of professional curiosity, but they aren't checking for that Hallmark emblem to make sure it's the very best.

That just doesn't happen*.

I've been saying for a few years now that in the absence of "Gatekeepers" to separate the wheat from the chaff for us, we'd find books the same way we find blogs and webcomics and so on. It's only occurring to me now that I'm boldly predicting the past here. That's how we've always found books. Most of the reading public don't take their recommendations from editors and agents and publishers.

We read the books we hear about from friends, from family members, from trusted talk show hosts and bloggers... from people who either know our tastes, or who reflect them.

I mean, look at blogging. Blogging has an even lower barrier to entry than self-publishing a novel, because in the first place you don't have to write a novel to do it. Whatever horrors the Unfiltered Slush Pile of Fiction holds, blogs will have times ten. And yet nobody really cares about the vast wasteland there. Nobody's demanding we clean up all the abandoned single-post Livejournals and Blogspots because they're cluttering up the landscape and making it hard to find blogs of quality. We'd think it was ridiculous if someone suggested this would be necessary or helpful. We'd think they were hopelessly out of touch with the times, with reality.

In the past I've said that we could find our books the way we find blogs. The reality is that we find blogs the way we've always found books. Even when we "stumble across" something at random just by clicking links, it's not really random. It doesn't take an officially sanctioned gatekeeper to make sure that the odd links in a random forum signature are pointing at something halfway decent and likely to be of interest to the forum's readerships and not WECLOME TO MY WEDSITE, right?

It's coming up on 1 and I had to get this out of my head in order to get to sleep. In the future, I'd like to write more about gatekeeping from a positive point of view... I think the whole idea of "separating the wheat from the chaff" raises the temperature in any debate about the merits of trad-pub or alt/self-pub. (And yes, I fully acknowledge I've done my own share of temperature raising. I'm a Natural Born Escalator.) Proclaiming oneself to be a gatekeeper in that sense seems like putting one foot on the slippery, gravity-defying slope of Mount Hubris.

Also, it misses the point of what a gate is for and what a gate can do. If you want to keep people out, you shouldn't be keeping a gate... build a wall and be a wallkeeper. Gates are, at a bare minimum, for letting people in... they're a connection that can be opened and closed. They're a channel. The gatekeeping function of an editor or publisher should be used to connect content to receptive audiences.

And that's part of how publishers can keep their relevancy in the 21st century. Keeping up the Gatekeeper As Arbiter Of Quality pose will work for a little while, because as long as writers believe it they'll want the legitimacy. But the more writers make it without that seal of approval, the less the seal will matter. The longer publishers wait to redefine their position, the harder it's going to be for them to do so with any credibility. Those who position themselves most strongly early on as facilitators, as people who bring audiences and artists together in appropriate combinations, are going to weather the changes in much better shape.

Honestly, this is a big part of Amazon's appeal to the indie crowd... it's not just that they enable self-publishing or that they let us keep 35-70% of the money. We can self-self-publish and keep closer to 100% of the money. What Amazon is really pretty good at is helping people find things that people like them would like, at matching content to consumer.

---

*Admittedly, what does happen sometimes in this day and age is that readers will go to a publisher's e-commerce site and browse their offerings. And ordering direct from a publisher/imprint didn't originate with the web. But that's a niche market, as is the people who have actual loyalty to a brand like Harlequin. That latter one is a pretty good sized niche market, but it's a niche in the sense that it's best considered as a separate entity from the general book-buying public. Some people fall into both camps, but you can't assume a Harlequin reader is a book-buyer in general and vice-versa.

This is all beside the point, though; if you're trying to make it big by tapping into the captive audience of people who buy books off Tor's website... um, best of luck?