February 6, 2025 / 2 Comments

Cut to the Quick

Well, I offered you all a chance to make requests and not one of you took me up on it. Which means I get to rant about whatever I want this week. If you want rants more focused to your particular needs right now, just let me know down below.

But for now…

Back in November I talked about my drafting process—taking something from that messy, ugly first draft through to something I’m not ashamed to show my beloved or friends or, well, my agent. One part of that was my third draft, where I tighten and cut. And guess what? I just finished my third draft of TOS two weeks ago. And I took a bunch of notes as I was going through, because I was planning ahead for this.

Also, keep in mind this isn’t one-size-fits-all advice. Your story is your story, and your writing process is your process. Like so much stuff I toss out here I’m showing you how I do things with the hope it’ll help you figure out how you should be doing things.

So let’s talk about some cuts I made.

First off, I did a basic spellcheck. I’ve talked about spellcheckers a lot, and about using them correctly. I go through the manuscript one click at a time, examining each and every word the spellchecker flags. I don’t just blindly agree to change everything it says is a mistake because… well, it’s usually wrong. For example, it doesn’t recognize a lot of given names, and definitely a lot of nicknames, so I had to check each of those (or add them to the dictionary in some cases). Then there were words it just didn’t have (cyborg? Still? Really?) and a few where it refused to recognize a more common, alternate spelling (which, if I really wanted to put the work in, could probably tell me exactly which dictionary was fed into this particular spellchecker).

Again, each and every word. Check all of it. I’d guess the breakdown ended up being around 35% actual mistakes, 65% things that were correct but it flagged as mistakes.

Also, a lot of the time while going through, I’d check the whole sentence. Was there a better word to use? A better way to phrase this? Maybe switch a name to a pronoun?

This spellcheck pass took close to a full work day for a 300 page book. Sound like a lot? I mean, it averages out to about a minute and a half per flagged word. Some were easy to zip past. Some took a minute or two as I double-checked spellings myself or considered other factors (like I was just talking about). Plus, to be completely honest, I think I slowed down a bit while I was eating lunch. And I stopped to use the bathroom twice. On company time! I know!!!

Anyway… after this, I started doing passes for passes for different words. Lots of different words.

Adverbs and adjectives are some obvious culprits. I’m not one of those “kill all adverbs” zealots, but I do think a lot of the time they can use a good pruning. I once got to talk with editor Pat LoBrutto and his advice was “one adverb per page, four adjectives.” Like any rule, I think there’s some flex room in there, and different situations will call for different things. But I also think a lot of times we do overuse adverbs and adjectives because we just don’t know the really, really good word we could be using.

Some of the words and phrases I look for are what a friend of mine called “somewhat syndrome.” For me, it usually kicks in when a character says, for example, Yakko stood six foot four. It sounds too precise for a casual observation, right? Weirdly exact. So we write things like “Yakko stood a little over six feet” or “he was around six feet” or “stood a bit taller than six feet.” I used to do this a lot, with pretty much every description of anything, and it still show up sometimes when I’ve got a sort of casual, limited third person POV. So I search for a lot of things like about, kind of, sort of, around

There’s also a bunch of phrases that we tend do toss in, but we’re not using them correctly. Looked like, appeared to be, seemed to be, and constructions like that. These feel like the somewhat words and phrases I just mentioned, but almost all of these are part of an implied contradiction. Yakko looked like he was over six feet tall (but it was all just high boot heels). The door appeared to be made of wood (but was actually a veneer over steel plate). The car seemed to be in working order (but would fall apart if you drove it more than ten miles). See what I mean? What I probably want to say here is just Yakko was over six feet tall, the door was made of wood, and the car was in working order. So I should cut some extra words (that I wasn’t using correctly anyway) and just say that.

Also, there’s a bunch of verbs that have… well, they’re verbs we inherently associate with certain things. I shrug my shoulders. Nod my head. Point with my finger. I mean, it’s so understood if I told you “I pointed across the room”… well, what would you think I was pointing with? Which means those are all extra words. Just shrug. Just nod. Just point. You can probably think of a few, too.

Finally, there’s a bunch of words that fall into different categories and… look, they’re pretty much always good words to take a second look at. Very. Just. Rather. Really. Actually. Of course. Quite. So. Began to. Suddenly. I think some of these Benjamin Dreyer has pointed at (with his finger) as words you can almost always cut.

And yes, for the most part, these are going to be small cuts. But small cuts add up. When I was done making pass after pass for all these words and phrases… I’d effectively cut twelve pages out of my manuscript. Over three thousand words.

Want a few quick examples?

I cut 196 uses of very.

Also cut 141 uses of really.

And 139 maybes.

118 uses of kind of.

86 uses of about.

80 arounds.

Going off a standard 250 words per page for a double-spaced manuscript, that’s three pages gone right there.

Now in all fairness, every one of these wasn’t just that specific word. Sometimes while doing a pass and looking at everything (because, like with spellcheck, I don’t want to just delete everything that comes up), I’d realize I could reword a sentence, or maybe reword one and delete another. For example, out of those 196 words that vanished in the very pass, I’d guess maybe only 100-120 of them were the word “very” and the rest were other things.

Also, a small tip. Have you ever done find-and-replace on something and then discover you’ve accidentally created a bunch of mistakes throughout your manuscript? Like, you decide maybe Beth should be named Liz, but then discover her girlfriend now studies Elizalizan playwrights? Same principle holds here. I don’t want to just delete every very, for example, because then I’m also going to mess up every, everyone, delivery, slavery, recovery, and more.

And again… yeah, this is slow work. Slow, boring work. That’s what editing is a lot of the time. But it’s also a chance to sharpen things. Concentrate them. To make this hit a little harder and that get a bigger thrill. Editing might not be as thrilling as that initial raw creation, but I still get some creative joy out of it.

And I bet you will, too.

Also, I just realized I used this title for an editing post about twelve and a half years ago. What a hack.

Next time, unless somebody has a topic or question they’d rather I blather on about, I’m probably going to talk about the first time I saw Yakko Warner.

Until then, go write.

February 3, 2025 / 3 Comments

Weird Decisions and Publishing Math

A few folks on Bluesky recently asked about -14- and why it’s not available in paperback. As I’ve said once or thrice before, it’s a whole weird confluence of things all piling up on this one book, and it’s not easy to explain in a handful of social media posts. Especially when you know somebody’ll jump in halfway through to say “Well, have you considered trying…”

So I figured, what the heck. Bonus blog post.

First, before you read any further here, please go read this post about book publishing. Also, while I’m thinking about it, go read through the FAQ, too. Punishment will me meted out if you ask a question/ make a statement regarding any of this that’s already been covered.

So, first off, let’s have a general talk about numbers.

Whenever a publisher considers a book, one of the main questions they ask is “how many copies of this do we think we can sell?” That’s not shocking, right? They actually have teams that sit down and try to figure this out based off the book itself, but also the author, past performance (if any), market trends, and so on. This is also one of the numbers they use when calculating advances. They’re only expecting XXX sales total, so they’ll offer an advance of X that makes sure they at least break even.

This all makes sense, yes?

Now, these numbers also matter when a publisher decides to pick up a book that’s been previously published—either by another traditional press or self-published. If I tell them my book’s only sold eleven copies in the past year… well, I’m not exactly making a great case for them to re-publish it. Why would they pick up a book that doesn’t sell?

But by the same token, they also don’t want a book that’s sold too many copies. Y’see, Timmy, if all the research numbers say my book’s going to sell 50,000 copies, but I tell them it’s already sold 45,000… well, hang on. How many should they really expect to sell now? We’re pretty much saying 90% of the potential audience already has the book. Sure, there’s wiggle room in there, but… it kind of sounds like this book’s sold all the copies it’s going to sell, yes?

Hopefully this also makes sense. I’m not asking you to like it. But from a business point of view—and publishing is a business—you should see why someone would think this way, yes?

Okay, so, with all that in mind… let’s talk about -14-.

14- started out at a small, traditional press. I feel safe saying it was one of the most (if not the most) successful books they had. By a significant margin. I’m pretty sure it was a factor in the original owner selling off the whole press to a group who put some, politely, less-experienced people in charge.

After maybe two years of fairly questionable decisions on all fronts, the new owners decided to take it up a notch and stop publishing physical books. Y’see, they ran the math and realized physical books had the smallest profit margin, so only putting out ebooks/ audio books meant more profits. For them. Theoretically. If you know the publisher I’m talking about, you may recall this caused a bit of discourse for a few days.

I will take a moment to point out the publisher was 100% in their legal rights to do this. It was an incredibly stupid decision in so many ways (again, one in a long chain) and all of the many, many authors they’d signed over the past two years were very rightfully furious. But it was absolutely the publisher’s stupid decision to make.

And while -14- was one of the very few books they kept in physical print… they also stopped pushing it. Because, y’know, profit margins. They had a loose distribution deal with a larger house they let kind of wither away. People would try to order the book from their local bookstore or Amazon and be told there weren’t any copies available. When the contract ended and I got the rights back, the publisher told me they had almost 250 copies just sitting in their warehouse. No, seriously.

Okay, so I’ve got the rights back now! Super-easy to find another publisher who wants this book, right?

Well… remember that math?

Y’see, even though it’d been effectively out of print for almost two years at this point, with ebook and audio -14- was selling phenomenally well, even seven years after it’d been released. Like, I’m pretty sure 99.5% of the people reading this would be seriously jealous of the royalty checks -14- was still getting from Audible when their contract ran out a few years ago. And your heads would explode if I told you what they offered me to renew that contract for another ten years.

But other publishers looked at that and said… oh. So it’s already sold that many copies? Hmmmmm…

Hang on, my agent and I said. There’s still a huge market for the print book, though. I’m constantly getting requests from folks who want to own a physical copy of it.

At which point the publisher would usually ask how many physical copies it was selling under the old publisher, before their rights expired, and we’d have to say “Well… none. For a couple of years.”

And that’s where we were kind of stuck. Because, yeah, it makes absolutely no sense that a publisher would stop selling copies of their most successful book. None. So the real answer has to be that the book has run its course and doesn’t actually sell.

Despite all the sales it’s still racking up to this day.

Does this mean -14- is doomed to never be in print again? Maybe? It all comes down to something changing that math and pushing that number higher. If my profile radically increased for some reason or the book got notably more popular. Heck, if someone announced a Netflix series tomorrow there’d probably be publishers fighting over it.

But right at this moment, for the foreseeable future… we’re probably not going to see it.

Sorry.

January 28, 2025

January Newsletter

As always, rather than waiting until the end of the month, you could subscribe to The Uncanny Cosmic Horror Zombie Almanac and get the newsletter delivered to your inbox on the 15th. Or, y’know, close to the fifteenth. Within a day or two…
>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Well, here we are in the far flung sci-fi future year of 2025.

The year of Pacific Rim. No, seriously. If you go off all the dates in the film, the main story is set in 2025. Seems kind of silly, in retrospect, doesn’t it? The idea the whole world would overcome differences and join together to fight a major threat. Ha ha ha ha haaa genre stories are so funny…

<<sobs>>

Anyway…

I hope you had a good holiday season and a peaceful New Year. Wasn’t quite as restful here as I’d hoped, but I’m feeling a bit more recharged and ready to deal with things.

And, wow, there’s already so much to deal with.

Let’s start with one of the easier (ha!) ones. Social media. Yeah, social media again.

I deleted my Facebook account seven years ago. It was getting harder and harder to do anything work-related there, and even social interactions were suffering because of the all-mighty engagement algorithm. A friend of mine died in a car crash and I didn’t know about it for almost six months because Facebook decided to hide all those posts from me. I figured she was just taking a social media break after the election, and then found out her family had been begging for help to pay for her funeral. But who wants to see downer stuff like that, right? Thanks, Zuck!

So, Facebook, gone. Elon made it very easy to delete everything I could and lock down Twitter… wow, like 20 months ago now. Almost two years. There was absolutely no way I was getting on Threads. And holy crap, with these new Meta-wide policies that are just bad for… well, 90% of people? With those in place there’s a good chance I’ll be deleting Instagram in the near future, too.

And on one level… yeah, so what. It’s just social media. It’s not like it’s something important. It’s like getting worked up about signing someone’s yearbook. Is it really worth getting so worked up over something so small?

But I think it’s important to note that. It is a small thing. And if I’m not willing to do the right thing over something so small, especially over something as minor and unimportant as social media, am I really going to do the big things? If I can talk myself out of going for a walk around the block, there’s no way I’m going to the gym. If I can’t write a few pages, there’s no way I’m writing a book. And if I’m not willing to stop using Instagram over their parent company’s absolutely horrible policies… well, what am I willing to do to protest horrible policies?

Anything at all?

And I get it. I’ve talked at length about how much of a pain it can be to start over somewhere new. My friends and family are all “here,” and so are my favorite artists and sports teams and pundits and toy companies (okay, that last one might just be me). Will they follow me? Will they find me somewhere new? Will I find them?

And the answer is, yeah, probably. Heck, if you explain why you’re doing it, a few folks might even join you. And then it’s all of you moving somewhere new together.

Plus, let’s face it. Sometimes starting over is good. It’s a chance to change how we do things and look at things. To shake off all sorts of bad behaviors and mindsets and form new habits. And isn’t that the big goal? To be better people than we were before?

It’s my goal, anyway.

This is probably where I remind you I’m currently on Bluesky and Cara. I also just opened a Pixelfed account, so we’ll see how that goes.

What else do I have for you…?

Just before everyone went home for the holidays. my editor, Toni, and I worked on some marketing material for God’s Junk Drawer. Well, she did most of the work and I offered maybe half a page of suggestions/ edits/ corrections. I haven’t heard anything different from anyone, so I believe the book is in copyedits now.

I’ve also been planning out a (currently very tentative) signing tour for when the book comes out. Probably up and down the west coast. Maybe five or six stops in New England. Again, all very bare-bones right now because I can’t really schedule anything quite yet. But if you’ve got a favorite bookstore in that area, let me know. Or let them know and they can let me know.

As for TOS, I think this editing draft is almost done. I have maybe a page and a half of notes to myself left to tweak/ double check/ fact check. Maybe another week of work? This weekend I was going to be nudging the usual suspects and seeing if they’d be interested in reading it.

No, you’d know if you were one of the usual suspects. Let’s not make this awkward for both of us.

And then I’m going to do some serious work on the comic project I swore I was going to do, ha ha ha, almost exactly a year ago.

But seriously… there’s a ton of stuff I want to get done this year. My birthday’s in May and the goal is to have TOS done and out making the rounds by then, the comic book project done and making the rounds, and me… well, either second-book deep into the huge potential project I mentioned last time or working on another thing I’m going to be bouncing off my agent in the next week or two. And all that will decide how the second half of the year goes.

We’ll talk more about all that next time.

Oh, also– Combat Monsters is out in a little less than a month and you can preorder it from your favorite local bookery. It’s got my new Carter & Kraft story, “The Night Crew,” and if you live in southern California I’ll remind you that a few contributors (including me) are going to do a sort of mini signing tour. We’re going to be at- Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego (1pm, Feb 15), Dark Delicacies in Burbank (3pm, Feb 22), and Artifact Books in Encinitas (3pm, March 1). Preorder the book through one of them and get it signed by us. Or you could be there and talk with us about it. And if you’re a few hundred miles away and can’t make it, I’m pretty sure they all deliver.

What else do I have for you…?

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Watching
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl has to be one of the absolute best movie-watching experiences I’ve had in ages. My beloved and I were laughing and excited and giddy through the whole thing. It’s just fantastic. I also binged all of Dan Da Dan in about two days, and it’s the best kind of complete, ludicrous madness—like someone jammed fifty genre tropes in a blender—but somehow it works and it’s so much fun. Skeleton Crew was delightful—good for kids, some fun deep-cut references for hardcore Star Wars fans.

Cool Stuff I’ve Been Reading
I ended last year with The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed. I know it’s gotten tons of hype and praise, but… wow, it’s so much better than I could’ve imagined. Just seriously fantastic on so many levels. Somehow stumbled across Pixie Trix Comix online and binged all of their main strip plus Menage A 3 (a sort of spin off or shared universe strip) over two weeks. They’re basically soap operas about artists and wrestlers with some geekiness and a fair amount of sex (fair warning). Read a screenplay for a friend which was really fun and hopefully we’ll all get to see it on the screen someday. Currently in System Collapse the latest Murderbot book from Martha Wells.

Cool New Toys
Santa, my beloved, and my friends were all very kind to me. My friends gave me Road Pig, the supersized Dreadnok. My beloved gave me a Spider-Man (in his “spraypainted” suit from Into the Spiderverse), an Animal Warriors Feral Beast to join my Scavengers squad, a gorgeous sort of Mayan jaguar gladiator, plus the LEGO set for the Hoopity, Captain Marvel’s ship. And after Christmas I shamelessly took advantage of a few sales to grab myself a small squad of Chunari (more Animal Warriors) and a few other things that haven’t show up yet. Oh, and a beautiful big allosaurus (it’s actually 12” scale!) for business purposes. Really.

And I think that’s all I’ve got for you for this month. There’s all this sort of slow-trickle stuff and I’m hoping sometime soon I’ll get to hit you with two or three bigger things. Y’know, make this feel worthwhile.

See you next time. Thanks for reading.

January 20, 2025

First of the Year

Well, here we are in the far flung sci-fi future year of 2025. The year of Pacific Rim, as I mentioned in the newsletter the other day. What? You’re still not subbed to the newsletter? Well, there’s your first thing to do this year.

Anyway, first ranty blog post of the year (and already running late). What to write about? I’ve already planned out a lot of my year, writing-wise, and maybe so have you. Or maybe not. No worries there, either way. This is my job, so I’ve got to schedule things to some extent. You may have a lot more leeway. Heck, writing might be your zero-stress after work cool-down thing. If that’s how you like to do it, that’s great. What works for you works for you.

I’ve had a couple possible topics bouncing around in my head for two weeks now. And in that time I’ve seen a lot of other folks offering their own start-of-the-year advice nuggets. And that got me thinking even more…

So, look, some of you may be thinking of finally writing that novel. 2025 is the year we’re getting it done. Maybe we’re starting from scratch. Could be we’ve had a few false starts. Maybe some of it’s already done and this is the year we finish it.

And it’s possible, as I mentioned above, that you’re seeing all sorts of advice and encouragement from different folks.

They’ll tell you not to worry about how much you write every day. Don’t worry about how often you write. And don’t worry about spelling. Don’t worry about grammar, either. Don’t worry about structure. Don’t worry about getting the facts right. None of that matters! What matters is the writing! Which, uh, you don’t have to do today.

And it may cross your mind after some of this, well, hang on. What the heck am I doing? If none of this stuff matters… I mean, what am I supposed to do? Seriously?

This is a little tricky to understand because technically all of this is true, but it’s true at different points in the process and in different ways. If I apply all of these rules (or lack of rules, I guess) evenly throughout my whole process, I can be doing more harm than good.

For example, I’ve talked about first drafts and forward motion—just getting it done. That’s how I tend to write. I won’t worry about spelling or formatting and it’s really common for me to leave notes to myself about checking if this is correct and how that actually works. So at this point in the process… yeah, don’t worry about any of that stuff.

But this doesn’t mean I never worry about these things. It’s more a question of when I worry about them. Personally, I tend to clean most of this up in my second draft, and I’m usually still adjusting it in my third. Because these things matter. No, really, they do.

A lot of this is going to boil down to what I want to do with my writing. What are my end goals, so to speak. Is it my after-work cool down? A personal project? Maybe something I want to share on a Reddit thread or Wattpad. Am I going to self-publish it? Am I hoping a traditional press will pick this up?

Y’see Timmy, the truth is when I’m at home, the park, the office, the library, on the train, or wherever it is that I do most of my writing… I can do whatever I want. Seriously. When it’s just me and my keyboard, absolutely no rules apply. Whatever I want, however I want, for as long as I want. That’s my process, and nobody can say my process is wrong or weird or whatever.

But…

If I want to send something out into the world, to put it in front of other people’s eyes—especially people I’m hoping will give me money—I need to start seriously thinking about all of this stuff. That’s when I do need to worry about spelling. I definitely want to double check my grammar. And triple-check my facts. And if I’ve got a deadline, I absolutely need to be considering how much I’m writing and how often I’m writing. Because these things will matter to other people. They’ll matter to different degrees for different people, but they will matter.

And the more chances I give people to say “that’s wrong” are more chances they’re going to set my story aside and move on to something else.

So, yeah, write freely. Don’t be concerned about things. Just write.

But be aware we’re just deferring that concern till later. Not saying goodbye to it forever.

Next time…

Well, heck, like I was saying. Start of the year. new projects and new goals all around. Is there anything specific I could cover for anyone? Something that’s been gnawing at you, a topic where you’d really like some kind of advice or tips or encouragement? Let me know down in the comments and I’ll make that happen for you.

And until then… go write.

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