When I started writing seriously, I attacked the challenge of the short story.  The first few times out the gate I remember how difficult it was to hit what I considered the minimum length for a serious story – 2500 words. I worked out characters ahead of time, almost like a role-playing game stat sheet for each one – not because I intended to use all of that information, but because if I knew it, it could inform the decisions and dialogue of the character.

I believed that there needed to be a set number of plot twists, and that there was a particular point in the story where you had to be working on the conclusion.  I was fond of twist endings, cliché as they usually turned out.  I read constantly through the pages of Writer’s Digest and The Writer, and I bought all the popular books on writing.  Oddly, what I don’t recall doing is sitting down and trying to emulate a particular formula or style.  Considering all the dissecting, prodding, poking and plotting that was going on, it’s an odd omission.

I don’t want to dwell on formulas just yet, though, I want to talk about the constant desire of authors I have known (myself included) to keep score on the words.  As I said, in the beginning, a 2500 word story seemed pretty long to me.  Over time, I started to stretch them out to 3, 4, and even 5000 words, but throughout that time I managed to hold onto the ability to be succinct.  To this day I can write flash fiction under a thousand words without much effort, and with pretty good results.

Unfortunately, in the world of short fiction, you are paid by the word.  In the world of novels, you often have guidelines you need to fall within – like 70-80k, or “about” 100k.  If you are winging your novel, writing from the seat of your pants, these sorts of guidelines can drive you crazy.  They are one reason that I took up the fine art of the outline a few years back.  I don’t need explicit instructions when I travel – in this world, or one I’ve made up – but I like to know where I’m going and about how far I expect to travel before I get there.

I remember clearly a cruise I took on board the USS Guadalcanal, one of the ships I served on in the US Navy.  I had two computers at the time – I took the older one with me to the ship.  It was an old 386 with Word Perfect 6.0 loaded and ready.  Along with that computer I had a Hewlett-Packard Deskjet 500 – the sturdiest, most reliable printer I have ever owned.  I took a drawer full of ink cartridges, and a case of paper.  I remember sitting down before I left and figuring out that, at 250 words per page, there would be half a million words printed if I used that entire case.  I came very close.

I was the Leading Petty Officer of the Electronics shop during that period.  I didn’t have an office of my own, but I had a UHF Transmitter room that I sort of took ownership of.  Most of the equipment in that room was mine to maintain, and there was a workbench that would hold my computer.  I also had a large “boom box” and a box of CDs.  Those became the soundtrack for several novels; not all written on that cruise, but at the very least revised and completed.  I had floppy disks with all my books and stories, and I worked constantly.  The ship served dinner between 4:00 and about 5:30.  After that, every night that I did not have duty, I was in that room, typing away, until around 11:00 PM – sometimes later.

Depeche Mode and Concrete Blonde were my friends.  I memorized the first two Crash Test Dummies CDs and learned to love a band called Ten Inch Men, whose album Pretty Vultures is still one of my all-time favorites.  The singer from that band, Dave Coutts, went on to sing for “Talk Show,” along with members of the Stone Temple Pilots.   I met Dave, and several other members of Ten Inch Men, when they found my review and comments on their music in my Live Journal online.  Again – another story.

The point is the words.  You just don’t see how they add up until you let yourself think about it.  Most professional writers I know claim about a 2,000 word per day output.  In those days on the Guadalcanal I averaged 3500-5000 a day and had days that topped 10k.  These days I fall in the 1500 -2000 word range, but here’s the thing.

One of my great pleasures every year is participating in the National Novel Writing Month challenge.  50,000 words in thirty days.  When you say it that way it seems like a horrifying challenge.  When you break it down to the reality – 1,667 words a day, you see that a lot of working writers write more than that every month.  If you add in what I do for the Crossroad Press site, and the blogs I write to promote my work, I’m sure I’m still doing the 5k a day shuffle myself.

So…in reality…if you concentrated, you should be able to churn out 3-6 novels a year with some regularity, although broken up by short stories, essays, reviews, etc.  Writers write, and though there are certainly times this is less true than at others, a steady stream of words produces a prodigious output over time.  I have been at this a very long time, and have determined that I do not – at this point – want to know how many words I have written.  In fact, I cringe at the thought of it and want to run away, pulling out what little hair remains to me and go screaming off into the night.  I’ve written so much, and yet, I feel as if there is so much still to accomplish.  There are so many stories waiting, and now they are piling up against the end gate as I plow into them, trying to fight my way through in the allotted space of a lifetime.

You can get buried in the words.  You can get lost in worrying over the numbers.  In the end, those that can’t be held back will escape your fingers, and your personal mountain of words will grow.  I’ve decided to make mine tall enough to touch the sky, beautiful enough to attract climbers and wildlife, and solid enough to withstand time.  Foolish, simple dreams that make me smile, and keep me working.  I have always loved the mountains.

1. There are times that I have sat and watched words which *I am typing* appear on the screen in front of my eyes… and not recognised them. That’s how much my characters – or sometimes just my story – take over when I’m in “writer mode”. I sometimes think it’s a mild form of possession.

2. There are characters I have created that I actively dislike (no, I’m not telling which). There are times that it’s HARD to be fair to those characters. I like to think I generally come out on the side of the angels, but I don’t know…

3. In my stories, people *die*. Sometimes they do so for a really really good reason, or a good cause. Sometimes they do it willingly, in the hopes of achieving something with that death. Other times their death may appear meaningless or wholly arbitrary. But see, this is the way things work in the real world, too, and I don’t think that my fictional realms should be any the less “real” for being created by my mind.

4. I don’t work from outlines or write-by-scenes (which is the literary equivalent of paint-by-numbers, I guess) or to rigid pattern. My stories are as organic as they come. I stick a story seed into the ground, water it copiously, and it sometimes astonishes even me when something weirdly exotic comes up out of the good earth. Having said that, I do have to admit to one amendment to this – for the kind of complicated stuff that I write, keeping a timeline is kind of… essential. All of these characters exist and live and work and play and plan independently, and it sometimes matters that one of them has to be a certain age before another meets them – it really will not DO to have a wonderful romantic relationship happen, and then discover that in your original timeline one of the two lovers has to be three years old…

5. There is a time, after the completion of every single one of my books, usually after it’s “safely” out of the house and in the hands of someone who has influence on its future (such as an editor), that I wander around the house chewing my nails and driving my poor husband nuts with the generic whine of “Nobody wants my book!” He usually counters, once some sort of positive reaction has come in, by putting on his “I told you so” face. But for a while, there, things get sticky. They do. I go through phases of absolutely believing that every sane reader out there simply HAS to hate this thing I have just completed.

6. I flinch at bad reviews, despite trying to train myself into the mode of understanding, on an intellectual level, that there are bound to be people out there whose cup of tea my work ISN’T. Silence, however, is far worse than even the worst of bad reviews. At least a bad review means that someone has READ the book, even though they hated it. Resounding silence makes an author wonder if the book actually does exist, or if the previous couple of months of frenetic editorial activity and galleys and copyedits and proforeading have all been just a figment of one’s imagination. (All this means, usually, is that the reviews arrive in a clump six months later, having been collected by someone in the publicity department and then gathered dust in their inbox for a while before they got sent out. But tell yourself that when you are sitting in your bubble and waiting for something, ANYTHING, to happen…)

7. There is something frankly terrifying the first time you see your book in the hands of a complete stranger.

8. You never stop learning in this game. Even when you start teaching, you learn from the people who call themselves your students. That’s because writing is as individual as people – it’s almost like a mental fingerprint, people have pet words, pet phrases, a way of painting an image or an emotion, and people will ask the damndest questions in a workshop or classroom scenario, questions which sometimes make the *teacher* stretch in order to answer them. That’s absoltuely wonderful.

9. There are times that it’s a royal pain in the ass, being a writer. You learn to THINK like one. You sit down to watch a TV show, or go to a movie, and the rest of the people watching the same thing will sit rapt for an hour or two and then drop their jaws in utter astonishment at some twist ending… which you worked out halfway through the story and were waiting with increasing impatience to be vindicated. And you usually are. You learn fast not to open your mouth when other people are watching anything with you, because objects get thrown at you otherwise.

10. It never gets old. Okay? It just never gets old. Every time a new book arrives, it’s like the first time. A flutter of the heart, a burying of the authorial nose into the pages to inhale that fresh new book smell, a strange and silly smile that won’t leave your face for the next forty eight hours. Every book is a little piece of a dream come true. It’s a little bit like sitting outside on the porch just as the clouds break on a gray day and the sun streams through, and everything that was monochrome is suddenly part of a bright and vivid world, and you understand perfectly just why you were born – simply to be the one to see those colours come to life before your eyes.

Given the number of novels that have plots involving deaths, it would seem useful for writers to understand just what death is. Offhand, it might seem that it would be a relatively simple matter to determine if someone is dead or alive. Years ago, it was much easier. A determination of death involved the termination of the functions of certain organs, most notably the lungs and heart. If persons were not breathing and and their hearts were not beating (a state medically referred to as clinical death). they were thought to be dead.

If a person’s heart stops and blood no longer flows to his or her brain, oxygen has no means of reaching and keeping their organs, especially the person’s brain, alive. Under normal conditions, depriving a person’s brain of blood will reportedly result in unconsciousness within a period between a half-dozen seconds and a minute. Within 4 to 6 minutes following clinical death, brain damage is possible; and it is likely after that. After 10 minutes, irreversible damage is certain. Biological death follows as more and more brain cells die.

If a body is exposed to freezing conditions or is suddenly submerged in cold water, the functions of major systems are drastically slowed so that only a fraction of their normal oxygen consumption is required. Also, blood flowing to appendages is restricted to provide blood flow to organs more critical to prolong a person’s survival. This biological mechanism enables aquatic mammals such as seals, penguins and whales to spend long periods underwater. Vestiges of this mechanism were found in the 1950s to have survived in humans, especially in children. (The following ADDITIONAL FACTS provide more details.)

But how is death actually defined? Especially since organ transplantation has become commonplace, a definition of death has become evermore important. Frustratingly, as medical and biological knowledge increased, the problems encountered in defining death, contrary to what one would expect, actually increased also. Why doesn’t cessation of a heart beat and breathing still define death? It doesn’t because science has provided the means to restart breathing and hearts by applying CPR and defibrillation. Even without a functioning heart or lungs, life-support devices and organ transplants can sometimes sustain life.

Brain death as a definition of death has been challenged by the fact that persons diagnosed as being brain dead have been maintained by mechanical ventilation for long periods. During these periods, circulation and respiration were sustained. The body was able to maintain blood and oxygen circulation and perform such functions as maintaining body temperature and excreting wastes. Almost unbelievably, pregnant, brain-dead women have been able to gestate fetuses.

Persons with severely damaged brains but intact brain stems can be left in a vegetative state. Such persons can breath spontaneously, change their facial expressions, open and close their eyes and swallow; but they display no signs of awareness. (A brain stem is a small portion of a brain. It controls respiration; and, if it is dead, its owner will be unable to breath spontaneously or regain consciousness.)

A popular definition of death is that a person is dead if consciousness has ceased. That has the problem of defining consciousness, though, which has been attempted by, in addition to scientists, psychologists and even philosophers.

Not having a clear definition of death creates legal and ethical problems that, for example, make it difficult to determine when organs can be removed for transplantation and when a person can be removed from life support. A legal death in the United Sates refers to a “legal pronouncement by a qualified person that further medical care is not appropriate and that a patient should be considered dead under the law.”

“To provide a comprehensive and medically sound basis for determining death in all situations,” the Uniform Determination of Death Act has been adopted by most states. Section 1 of the Act contains the following definition: “Determination of Death. An individual who has sustained either (1) irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or (2) irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem, is dead. A determination of death must be made in accordance with accepted medical standards.”

ADDITIONAL FACTS:

Estimates place the rate of human deaths in the world at 150,000 persons per day.

The study of human death and associated subjects including public perceptions of death, the effects of a death on relatives and friends, ceremonies and memorializations is known as thanatology.

When a heart stops beating, the event is referred to as a cardiac arrest. The cause of a cardiac arrest may not always be known; but common causes include heart disease, a heart attack, drowning, an electric shock and choking. During a heart attack, blood flowing to the heart is blocked but the heart usually keeps beating.

It is probably assumed by most of us that all animals that are not killed eventually die from senescence (aging once past maturity). Surprisingly, hydra and at least one species of jellyfish (Turritopsis nutricula) are thought to be exceptions.

A phenomenon known as the mammalian diving reflex allows aquatic animals such as seals, penguins and whales to slow their heart rates under water so they can spend long periods submerged. Seals, for example, can slow their heart rate from 125 to 10 beats per minute. During the 1950s, it was discovered that humans also have a mammalian diving reflex mechanism. Trained divers have slowed their heart rates by as much as 50 percent and have been able to dive on a single breath to a depth of more than 550 feet. In addition to heart-rate reductions, blood is restricted and redirected at the expense of extremities to ensure that one’s heart and brain receive a constant flow of blood. As one might imagine, the diving reflex is subject to variables such as water temperature and depth, lung volume and physical fitness.

To gestate means to carry within a uterus from conception to birth. In a human, an offspring is known as an embryo for the first eight weeks. From that time until birth, it is known as a fetus.

John Rosenman tackled this subject a few days ago, and I suspect others may in the days to come. Here are my rambling thoughts on some recent shifts in the publishing landscape.

Ten years ago, when I was first starting to write for publication, I attended a local writers’ conference. This was a few weeks after Stephen King published “Riding the Bullet” as an e-Book exclusive and sold half a million copies of the $2.50 downloadable novella in the first few days. The editors and agents from New York who were guests at the conference could talk about little else. This was the beginning of the end for printed books, they predicted, and the writing on the wall for the traditional publishing model. Authors could circumvent the big publishers and sell directly to their readers.

I felt my heart sink. I was looking forward to the day when I would hold in my hands a copy of a book that I’d written. To listen to these experts, that day might never come. By the time I finished the novel I was working on and found a publisher, everything would be digital and the only copy I’d ever have would be ephemeral. Pixels on a screen.

King’s second experiment in digital publishing, a serial novel called The Plant that he was writing on the fly and aborted after six installments, was hailed as proof that the public wasn’t ready for exclusively digital books. “Riding the Bullet” had been a fluke.

However, most people missed the point of The Plant experiment. King was testing the honor system to see whether people would voluntarily pay for a book when they had the option of downloading it for free. His experiment proved what we already know based on the music industry’s experiences: some people will pony up the cash for works of art and some won’t. (Back then, Napster was the tool favored by Internet pirates. After being forced into bankruptcy, it’s now an iTunes-like service where you can buy digital music. Ironic, no?)

In the case of The Plant, at least 75% of those who downloaded installments paid the requisite $1 until late in the game. The experiment was a huge financial success for King—like printing money, he said when he published his ledgers for the six installments. He netted nearly half a million dollars after paying for web hosting services and a few print ads. None of this money went to a publisher.

The take-away message from this experiment might have been different if King had simply forced people to pay up front. You know, the traditional purchasing model? In my opinion, the press blew this story. The Plant didn’t fail because people were unwilling to pay for downloadable reading material; it failed because the novel petered out for King, just as it had the first time he worked on it back in the 1980s. Again, the take-away message might have been different if King had tried this with a completed work instead of one he was publishing in installments as he wrote it.

Why does electronic publishing stand a better chance of catching on now, a decade later? In my opinion, it’s because of inexpensive and readily available eBook reading devices. In 2000, if you wanted to read an eBook you either had to print it out (which you couldn’t do with “Riding the Bullet”—the pdf was locked to prevent that) or sit at your PC or laptop. A lot of people, myself included, didn’t like reading for any length of time while sitting in front of a computer.

However, the Kindle and the Nook and other such devices, including the iPhone and its kid brother, the iPod Touch, have changed the game. You can now read an electronic book anywhere you can read a book, with a couple of exceptions. You have to put your eBook reader away when a plane begins to land. Some coffee houses that have rules against computer use (to increase patron turnover) treat Kindles the same as any other computer (these places have no similar rules to prevent people from reading books all day long). And, finally, it’s probably not advisable to read from a Kindle in the bathtub. I have a few soggy paperbacks to show you if you wonder why, as well as a limited edition Dan Simmons chapbook that I forgot was in my copy of Summer of Night. It slipped out from between the pages while I was reading in the tub and took a bath of its own.

There was a panel on electronic publishing at ApolloCon in Houston earlier this year. The average age of the panelists was probably somewhere around my own age. Pushing fifty. Most panelists admitted to owning an eBook reader of one type or another, and most were okay with reading from the device. What surprised me, though, was that few of them could imagine spending more than $1 or $2 for an electronic book, and most of them used the readers for primarily public domain or otherwise free books.

My philosophy is different. At a certain point in my life, I realized that there were few books I would ever re-read. There are simply too many new books to justify re-reading old ones, with a few notable exceptions. I’ll probably reread The Lord of the Rings every decade or so, for example.

Amazon’s marketplace and eBay have essentially destroyed the resale value of hardcover books. Within a week of publication, a $25 hardcover generally goes for $15 used. After a month, that falls to less than $10—much less in most cases. For a while, I would buy a book, read it quickly, and then resell it. My net cost: usually $10-$12. This wasn’t driven by financial incentives, but rather to cut down on the number of books in our house. We never have to worry that the house will be blown away by a hurricane. Why clutter the shelves with books that I’ll never read again? However, if I was only going to get $3 or $4 for a book, it was hardly worth the effort of listing and shipping it.

Therefore, I have no objection to spending $9.99 for an electronic book for my Kindle. That’s approximately my net cost for a quick turnaround hardcover and I’m not forced to read the book quickly. Plus the book is mine to keep forever, without it taking up any real estate. I tell you, if there was an easy way to scan all the books on my shelves into my Kindle the way I have almost every CD I own on my iPod, I’d be a happy man.

I’ve fully embraced digital reading. Every time I request an ARC to review for Onyx Reviews or elsewhere, I tell the publicist I’d happily accept an electronic galley. I have no idea what to do with ARCs when I’m done with them. I’m loath to throw them in the recycle bin, so they just take up more shelf space. A few publishers—very few at the moment—have sent me pdf galleys.

I’m reading classics that I always felt I should read, but never got around to. I take advantage when publishers offer free copies of a contemporary author’s backlist as a way of expanding the author’s audience—I discovered Charlie Huston that way, and now buy his new books as they come out. I even read on my iPod Touch using the free Kindle app. I like the way I can turn pages with the flip of a thumb. Since I always have the device with me, if I find myself somewhere with time to kill I have a novel in my pocket. I’m currently reading Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island. It’s taking me a long time, because that’s not my primary reading, but I’m working through it. I might never have read the book otherwise.

If an old fogey like me can become a Kindle Konvert, then just about anyone can. While I still value books as tangible objects, and I believe that there are certain books I’ll want to buy in hardcover, nine times out of ten I’m more interested in the words than the package.

That’s not to say that I hope I won’t someday hold a copy of my first novel in my hands. But my ego-driven need to hold a physical book with my name on the cover has been satisfied a couple of times already, so I guess I could live with an eBook novel. I may have to.

We’ve all heard the news and predictions.  It’s the beginning—or well past the beginning—of the end.  In three years, or five, or seven, e-books will be the norm, and mass market paperbacks will slouch off to die with the other dinosaurs.  As for traditional books in general, I believe they were recently outsold by e-books on Amazon.

News bulletin: Dorchester Publishing just announced it’s cutting its mass market paperback line to focus on e-books and POD.

Second news bulletin: They’re not the first publisher to do this.  For example, Medallion announced the same thing just a few months ago.

Third news bulletin: Some agents are focusing on selling e-books.

Fourth news bulletin: Some writers make far more $$$ from their e-books or from self-publishing than from traditional, more acceptable kinds of publishing.

I could go on and on, friends, but clearly, it’s a Brave New World.  Kindle, Kobo, and other e-book readers will soon rule the day, and the schools of the future will little resemble the ones we remember.  Heck, they often little resemble them now. 

My purpose here is not to predict where precisely all this electronic publishing is going to shake out, how dominant it’s going to be, whether an even newer form of publishing is going to emerge after all the constant updates have occurred, or any of that stuff.  To be honest, there are folks who are far more knowledgeable about the subject.  What I would like to do is share with you one experience I had. To me, it shows just how much writing has changed, at least when it comes to publishing.

About six weeks ago, I saw my doctor.  Since an old used bookstore is located just thirty yards down the street, I decided to drop in for old times.  I had done so fairly often in the past, and I loved the place.  To me, musty, dimly-lit, used bookstores are magical.  You never know what priceless treasure lurks in the stacks halfway down the next aisle.  Perhaps it’s bound in leather with engravings by Gustave Dore, or is a SF paperback you could never find as a kid.  To say that I have a fetish for books, and especially old, well-preserved, beautifully constructed books, is not going too far.  I can remember that as early as the second grade or so, the smell of the books in the school library was clean and wondrous to me.  To this day I love the look and feel of well-bound, brilliantly illustrated books, love to smell their pages.

In addition, there are two other reasons this used bookstore is the one I’ve loved the most.  One is that every January 1, they used to have a free champagne and cheese open house to welcome in the New Year.  The second is that I wrote a short story that takes place in the bookstore, and sold it to Brutarian for pro rates.  You can find “Down from Oz” as my Oct. 2006 posting to this site at http://storytellersunplugged.com/johnrosenman/2006/10/

Anyway, I went to the bookstore, but the magic had faded.  The musty, dimly-lit aisles and towering stacks were still there with their hidden treasures, but the place had a deserted, corpse-like aura to it, as if the party had long since moved elsewhere.  On the way out, I stopped at the counter and struck up a conversation with the owner, who I knew casually from previous visits.

“How’s everything?” I asked.

“Fine.”

“And . . . business?”

A long look, as if I should know the answer. 

“E-books?” I asked.

Yes, it was e-books and readers, plus their constant updating and improvements, including the opportunity to download books quickly from a vast library online.  The owner told me that at one time, he used to sell fifteen print books a day online.  Now he averaged one print book every three weeks.

Not only that, he told me about a New York City bookstore owner who came to this area hoping to find a buyer for his much bigger traditional store.  You can imagine how he’s doing.

I was dying to ask the bookstore owner how much longer he could hold out, but felt it wouldn’t be appropriate.  He volunteered the information.  Two months, he said.  He was finished.

Yesterday I went to see my doctor again and paused outside the bookstore.  Closed for good.  Gone the way of the buffalo.  How sad, especially since I wanted to suggest to him that he try to keep up with the times a little and have a multiple author book signing for e-books, plus a demonstration of e-book readers, downloading, and all the bells and whistles and futuristic features that today’s Kindles and other brands offer.

Maybe, though, it’s for the best.  The present moves on and like it or not, you have to keep pace.  When I talked to the owner, he did seem to assume that traditional books were the only legitimate or worthwhile ones, and everything else was like a bastard cousin.  However, there are plenty of people, especially young people, who can’t imagine getting through the day without their readers, especially since they’re capable of storing a decent sized library in the palm of their hand.

In the last three weeks, I’ve noticed an ad for Kindle on local television, a watershed event if I ever saw one.  The ad shows a couple at the beach reading from their Kindles, thereby refuting the smug belief of some critics that because of sand, water, and other problems, people can’t read electronically at the beach.  Apparently they can, and if one swimmer stays onshore while the others swim (as you would do for any valuable items), there should be little risk of theft.

Perhaps print publishing isn’t doomed, but I suspect that in five, ten, or twenty years, it will be a mere shadow of its former self.  The digital age is here, folks, and our children are its prophets.