When all the research and brainstorming is done, the first thing I do when I sit myself down at the keyboard to embark on my next novel is to come up with a story bible for the book. This is something that people often create for films and TV shows or even shared-world novels or anthologies. It’s a document in which you set down the details of the world so that you can refer to it when you need to.

My story bibles are fairly short. I write up an entry for each major character that’s maybe a half-page long, often less. Then I break down the plot into a chapter-by-chapter outline with a paragraph of text describing what should happen in each chapter.

I started out writing tie-in novels, and when you pitch one of these to a publisher, the editor often requires a document something like this so that he or she has some kind of idea about what you’re planning to write. After all, there are lots of reasons why an editor might reject a novel, and it’s better to kill off a bad idea when all you’ve developed for it is an outline rather than having written an entire book. Still, I’ve used roughly the same procedure for my original novels too.

[By the way, my first original novel — Amortals — just debuted in the UK and Australia on November 4, and it's available worldwide as an ebook too. If you want print copy in the US, that's due out December 28. Please don't be shy. Check it out.]

Having a story bible before you start the actual writing means that you know something about the characters already, what’s going to happen to them, and how they’re going to react. This helps eliminate writer’s block. You don’t have to worry about what you’re going to write about next — and whether it’s all going to manage to gel into a decent story in the end. You already know.

However, I never feel bound to adhere to the story bible. Writing is an act of discovery in which you peel back the layers of the story as you write it down. Sometimes a better idea comes along while I’m writing the book, and I don’t let the outline hold me back from pursuing it.

Instead, I trust my instincts and follow the new path for a chapter or two. When the edge of the rush from that discovery starts to blunt, I stop and re-outline the rest of the book from the point that I’ve reached. I often wind up using large chunks of the previous outline, but this sometimes requires some inspired juggling on my part to make it all happen.

This happens to me every time, and I’ve come to expect it. I don’t fear it. I enjoy it. Better ideas mean a better book, right? Even if I’ve had to re-outline a book three or four times from a series of sequential new starting points. In the end, it’s well worth it.

I’ve written 13 tie-in novels and countless roleplaying game book and other nonfiction titles that have sold well and won awards. On November 4, though, my first-ever fully original novel — Amortals — hits shelves in the UK and e-readers around the world.

(By “fully original,” I mean “not a tie-in.” As in, it’s not based on anything else. I came up with every word of it entirely on my own, without working within the constraints or relying on the strengths of a license.)

In one sense, the hard work is done. The novel is written, and it’s as good as I could make it. My editors have polished it to a shiny finish. It has an excellent cover. It’s ready to go.

Now the rest of the work begins. It’s not enough to just push a book out there and hope that someone with notice it. There are just too many other books out there competing for attention — not to mention the computer games, tabletop games, TV shows, films, music, and so on that vie for our entertainment dollars. If I want someone to know about Amortals, then I have to tell them about it.

Fortunately, I’ve been building up an audience for years, and I hope that some of them might follow me to this new book, which is entirely different than anything else I’ve ever written. Well, it’s still me doing the writing, and it’s all about heroes doing hard things in hard times, so I suppose in that way it’s pretty much exactly like everything else I’ve written. I just have to make sure no one’s put off by the trappings surrounding the tale, as this is a science-fiction book, whereas most of my work in the past has concentrated on fantasy. But my readers are too smart to be put off by something like that, right?

Anyhow, to help out with all this, I’m going to hit Twitter and Facebook hard, and I’m going to do interviews and blog posts anywhere anyone will have me. (If you have a venue for me, let me know!) The trick, of course, is to promote the book and myself without being obnoxious about it. I want people to not just remember me but remember me well. There’s a fine line to be tread there, but I’m going to do my best to dance along it rather than leaping straight over.

After all, I’d like to keep doing this again and again and again. I can’t have everyone getting sick of me right away. That’ll have to wait until I’m swell-headed with success. Right?

In any case, please wish me luck on this new journey of mine. I’ll need all of it I can get.

A frustrated author wrote me over the weekend to ask me how he might be able to get published when most editors won’t look at unsolicited manuscripts these days. Since I hear this question all the time at conventions and such, I decided to post my answer here too:

As an unpublished author, you’re caught in the publishing industry’s Catch-22. No one will look at your book until you’ve been published, and you can’t get published if no one will look at your book. Fortunately, there are ways around this.

The best way is to get an editor to look at your book. Don’t send a manuscript, though, especially if the publisher’s website states that its editors will not consider unsolicited manuscripts. However, you can often send just a single-page query letter.

In paragraph one, state who you are and list any relevant credits or credentials. In the second, pitch your story. In the third, thank the reader for his or her consideration. Keep it simple and sweet.

Alternatively, you can try to meet editors at conventions, online, or wherever. Ask politely if you can pitch your manuscript to the editor. If they like your short, succinct, and intriguing verbal (or e-mailed, posted, or tweeted) pitch, they may ask you for a few chapters or a full manuscript. Then the manuscript is no longer unsolicited.

There are a number of agents who will consider unsolicited manuscripts, and you can hunt them down too. An excellent place to start is PublishersMarketplace.com, which has a searchable database of publishing professionals you can access for free. Best of all, you can narrow down agents this way by their stated interests. Before you get too far though, be sure to check Preditors & Editors and Writer Beware, both of which can help you avoid the swathe of people who run scams to prey on the hopes of new writers.

Unfortunately, good editors may not have much time for unpublished authors, and you won’t want to work with the bad ones. It’s best if you can get an editor interested in your script first. Then you can wave a nearly done deal under the noses of the good agents, something that usually grabs any professional’s attention. There’s nothing stopping you from attacking the challenge on both flanks however.

Be persistent and methodical about it. Eventually you’ll get through. However, don’t stop writing while you try to sell your book. Start on your next one instead. That way, if anyone says, “I like your style but not this book. Do you have anything else you can show me?” you’ll have the right answer already.

Good luck!

I had all sorts of plans for this summer. At the start of the year, I thought I’d have three novels out in the US within the space of two months, and that meant it was time to ramp up the promotion machine like never before. It’s not often I have that many books to talk about at once, and I was excited about it.

However, the publisher of two of those books, Angry Robot, recently moved from HarperCollins to Osprey Publishing. As I wrote on my blog, I think that this is a good change for Angry Robot and, by extension, its authors, including me. But it also means — understandably — that Angry Robot’s release schedule is going to have a short hiccup during the transition.

Now, instead of my three books blasting out all at once, they’re going to come out months apart. The first book — Ghosts of Ascalon, which is based on the upcoming Guild Wars 2 MMO, and which I co-wrote with Jeff Grubb — will come out this summer, so I won’t be left empty-handed at the big conventions. The others — Amortals and Vegas Knights, my first two originals out of the fifteen I’ll have had published when they release — won’t release until later this year or early the next.

This means that my plans for the summer must change. This isn’t such a bad thing though. Instead of making a huge splash with three books this summer, I can make a large splash with one and then follow it up later with two other large splashes. Think of it as three rifle shots rather than a single shotgun blast.

Making the most of this should be simple though. It makes it easier to position myself as a long-term novelist, to show that I’m a dedicated swimmer in this pool and not just shouting “Cannonball!” before making a single massive splash. I can build on my efforts and add to them rather than massing for triple release.

Also, now I don’t have to ask people to buy three books all at once. Instead, we can start readers off with one and give them a chance to ease their way into the others.

The extra time also means I’ll have another chance to revisit Vegas Knights with the cold, dispassionate eye it deserves. I wrote it in a rabid rush this spring, and it deserves a bit of time to cool off after being baked.

These are all good things.

It might sound like I’m rationalizing my way into liking the new situation, and maybe I am. After all, as the author, I don’t have a lot of say about when and how my books come out. That’s the call of each book’s publisher, which is fair since they’re putting up all the money to get the books produced, printed, and placed on shelves. I can’t alter the situation. I can only adapt to it and make the best of whatever spot I find myself in — maybe even make it better.

This summer’s plans would have been a blast. I’m still going to have some amazing fun, but now I get to watch that spill over into 2011 too. I hope you get the chance to join me.

I’ll fess up. I haven’t been around here much lately. I could parade a litany of excuses out and make them pirouette about in pretty patterns for you, but let’s just skip all that and go straight to brutal honesty.

I’ve been too damned busy. I know. It’s only one little bit of writing once a month. Surely that’s the kind of commitment that any writer could keep. True, but maybe it’s not always one a writer should keep.

Poke around the site here, and you’ll see that I’m not alone. Skimming back through the past month, only seventeen of our thirty listed authors here managed to chip in a column between today and the last time I blew this. Do we all suck? Have we given up on writing? Are we huddled in corners, sucking on shotguns and praying for our muses to return?

Nah. It’s nothing so dramatic. I wouldn’t presume to speak for any of the other slackers, but I’ve been writing — a lot. In the past year, I revised The Marvel Encyclopedia for DK Publishing, wrote a tie-in novel for Guild Wars 2 called Ghosts of Ascalon, and cracked out my first original (non-tie-in) novels for Angry Robot (Amortals and Vegas Knights). Toss in some miscellaneous writing for tabletop games, video games, and columns for The Escapist, and it’s been crazy busy.

Worse yet, I fell behind my deadlines. That’s never a pleasant situation to be in, but the internet has exacerbated that problem. I’m not talking about how easy it is to get drawn into the shiny distractions the web brings to your desktop. I mean that it’s hard to justify writing something for free and posting it on the internet when you’re struggling to catch up with your paying work. The fact that your patient editors can see what you’re doing makes it nearly impossible.

In good conscience, I can’t spend much time on a post for Storytellers Unplugged or even on my own website when I’m worried that one of my editors might rightfully resent it. Once someone’s given you a deadline extension, it’s poor form to spend that borrowed time on something other than for what it’s been budgeted.

Fortunately, I’ve caught up this month, just in time to be able to chip in for my monthly portion of Storytellers Unplugged. I’m blowing off sleep to bring this too you right now, but that’s worth it. It’s my time to spend, and I’m free to spend it with you.

Let’s hope that continues. I’ll be working as hard as ever to make it so.

As the death toll from the Haitian earthquake rolls upward and the aftershocks continue to rumble, I’m stunned at how fast people have been able to pull together to offer support for Haiti’s battered people. In just a few days—in some cases barely in a few hours—people and organizations have been able to pull together benefits designed to help charities already on the ground in Haiti and in desperate need of new funds to help pay for the costs of their rescue and relief efforts.

Pop Cap Games, for instance, ran a promotion last Saturday in which the proceeds for their sales went straight to Partners in Health. Under the banner Indie Relief, dozens of independent software developers for the iPhone and Mac gave their proceeds on January 20 to a double fistful of worth charities too. Wired Magazine‘s GeekDad folks just set up their own fundraising drive, featuring prizes from Gunnar Optiks and my pal John Kovalic of Dork Tower fame. The great people at DriveThruRPG coordinated a promotion with their publishers to bring you nearly $1,500 worth of roleplaying game PDFs for anyone making a $20 donation to Doctors Without Borders through their site.

The speed of the response is amazing. I’ve contributed to benefit books in the past. They work well for raising funds for charities going through a normal year, but they’re awful for helping out with emergencies. It just takes too long to get everything coordinated and moving.

I took part in a project to raise money for the victims of the 2004 tsunami. Unfortunately, by the time the people running it had gotten their act together, the emergency had long passed, and the project was scrapped. The Beyond the Storm: Shadows of the Big Easy book—which raised funds for the Red Cross to aid victims of Hurricane Katrina—came out in October, 2005, over a month after the hurricane hit, and that was a print-on-demand project tossed together at lightning speed. It made some money for the cause, but it could have made a lot more if it had been out right away.

With society so attuned to Internet speed these days, instant fund-raisers or projects are far more successful than those that appear run weeks, months, or years after the fact. It’s not just that we have a short attention span about such things. It’s that there’s often already a new emergency to worry about, one that eclipses thoughts about the past ones, at least for a while. Projects that reach the world now, when the spotlight is on them, are bound to do better than those that do not.

The lesson here is that the project doesn’t have to be thematically related to the disaster. You don’t need to come up with a whole anthology of new—or even recycled—material for a book, album, or whatever. You just have to be willing to pledge your profits for a period of time to go to the cause and then publicize it. You get the exposure, the charity gets the funds, and good-hearted people get to sample your wares for free. It’s a win all the way around.

This week, I head out on my first convention of the summer season: Comic-Con. This is a mad media feast that has long since drifted away from its titular purpose of bringing together comic-book fans to collecting pop media fans of all types. Since I work in toys, games, and comics as well as fiction, its a convention tailor made for me.

Next month, I’m off to Gen Con to serve as an Industry Insider Guest of Honor once again. That’s a fancy way of saying that I’m going to sit on a number of panels in exchange for a snazzy free badge and the chance to get together once again with all the friends I’ve made over my 27 years of attending the show in a row. I’ll also get to see the premiere of a proof-of-concept video and live concert stemming from the production of an indie film based on my Brave New World Roleplaying Game, which debuted at the convention 10 years ago.

In September, I’m off to PAX (Penny Arcade Expo) for the first time too. This show is centered around computer games and all things associated with it, another thing I really enjoy.

All this time on the road wreaks havoc with my writing schedule, of course, and there are times that I wonder why I bother spending the time and money on these things. After all, with the internet, I don’t have to be anywhere at any particular place any more, right?

Wrong. While the internet is a reasonable substitute for some interactions, it is not a replacement for it. I have a blast at these shows, as anyone who ever sees me at once could testify, but I go to them to see old friends, meet new ones, get the pulse of my various geek tribes, and—vitally—to drum up work.

Last year at Comic-Con, for instance, I didn’t have much of an agenda. I didn’t have any panels to sit on or signings or seminars to give. I had some fantastic business meetings, though, and I managed to parley stopping by the DK Books booth into a fun gig revising The Marvel Encyclopedia earlier this year.

That was money and time well spent by any metric. It’s one thing to write. It’s another thing entirely to make the contacts that gets that writing published. It’s important to get out of the house every now and then, to meet people, to make those contacts, and—honestly—just to have a good time.

No one wants to read the work of a dull boy (or girl), so take some time to get out and play. Writers who don’t do anything don’t have anything to write about. Break out of your rut and join the rest of your chosen tribes at one kind of gathering or another. And if our paths happen to cross when that happens, be sure to stop me and say hi.

I hope to see you soon.

I’m still finishing up the novel I mentioned last month—almost there!—so I’m going to keep this short and sweet.

I love to listen to music. Back when I was a kid, I’d pull out my parents LP albums and 45s (that’s a single-song vinyl record, kid, not a pistol) and listen to them over and over again. I’d learn the lyrics, sing along, and then sing them to myself when I wasn’t anywhere near a record player or radio. (This was back before MP3s and things that play them.)

Today, I still love listening to music, and fortunately I work at a computer that gives me access to countless tunes of all stripes. The trouble is that when I’m working I don’t want to listen to most of them. Writing uses the verbal centers of your brain, the ones they always check to see if they’re shutting off accidentally when they do brain surgery, which is why they keep you awake through it and treat you as if you’re drilling words for the national spelling bee.

Songs with lyrics, of course, also worm their way into that part of the brain—unless I’m familiar enough with them to ignore them and treat them like background chatter. Unfortunately, I need every bit of that center that I can draw on when I’m writing a novel. There’s just not enough of it to spare, and if my brain starts latching on to lyrics and singing along—even just in my head—it’s not letting me use what I need to write. In other words, there’s only so much mindwidth getting pumped out of my verbal centers, and I need to give my writing full access to it.

Because of this, I like listening to wordless music when I write: soundtracks, techno, trance, house, things with a beat but nothing to say—at least literally. In fact, I’ll often pick up or adopt a certain album for a new book and then listen to it over and over while I write. When I’m done with the book, I’m often done (at least for a while) with that piece of music too.

The music also helps drown out the other strange noises in my house—I have lots of kids—and lets me focus on the writing instead. Things like screams still manage to poke through, which is likely good for my family’s long-term survival though.

When I’m not writing, though, I really go for great music with solid lyrics that mean something to me. For instance, the ringtone on my cell phone is the opening bars to “Taking Care of Business” by Bachman-Turner Overdrive. As the song says, “If you ever get annoyed, look at me. I’m self-employed. I love to work at nothing all day.”

I am behind on a deadline for my next novel, the first of three I’m writing this year, on top of a couple nonfiction books, a screenplay, and other things I have little doubt will come my way. One of the main rules of writing is to finish what you start, preferably on time.

So, I’m going to go do that and strive to be a better example of how it should be done. Then I’ll come back here and blather on at greater length, hopefully about how I pulled this off. Till then, keep writing!

I know I will. I’m contractually obligated to—and grateful to be so.

Today, likely as you read this, I’m heading to LA for the US premiere of the Mutant Chronicles film, of which I wrote the novelization. I’ve been involved with the world of the Mutant Chronicles since the early ’90s, during which period I wrote or edited nearly every RPG, CCG, or miniatures game book associated with it.

Even back then, the people who owned the games—Target Games in Sweden—were planning on a film. I helped polish the original treatment for the film and even supplied a second treatment of my own for the pitch package that eventually brought Ed Pressman on board as the film’s producer. Before that, Ed’s family at Pressman Toys also produced the original Mutant Chronicles game: Siege of the Citadel. Small world.

Now, about a decade and a half later, the film is finally going to have its theatrical release in the US this week.

With most novelizations, as a writer, you’re pretty much stuck with whatever you can find in the script. The studio executives want to make sure you’re giving the readers the story they’ve developed—no more and no less.

If you look at a novel made into a film, though, you can see how much has to be taken out of the novel to cram it into the standard two hours or less that most Hollywood films run. It stands to reason that transforming the film into a novel would require creating a lot of extra material that just wouldn’t go into a film, but that’s a rare thing to see happen.

Fortunately, given my long history with the world, the people at Paradox Entertainment who hired me asked me to do just that. With their encouragement, I wrote a double-deluxe writer’s cut of the novel that the film could have been adapted from. It features many chapters of all-new backstory, character development, treachery, and big explosions that the novel demanded over and above what the film could provide. And I had a blast doing it.

To make sure that the novelization and the film synced up tightly, the people at Paradox flew me out to LA last year to watch a nearly final cut of the film in a private screening room in West Hollywood. While potential distributors took in the film, I devoured it twice, furiously typing notes on my laptop, hoping to be able to capture everything I could to make the book as faithful to the film as I could.

Now, with the book out since last fall, and the film finally in theaters, I can’t wait to see it on the big screen—again.