Guilty of the third one. It's one of my Resolutions to remedy this.

Posted December 23, 2003 2:05 PM by Kellie

That last one is not just for writers -- it's one of the classic pathologies of programmers.

Posted December 23, 2003 2:13 PM by Claude Muncey

"People say kind things about what I write, but I'm totally unable to interest a publisher in buying any of it. Perhaps I should give up writing altogether?"

Posted December 23, 2003 2:19 PM by Graydon

Hmm. Is the sex scene one a delusion about their quality, or a lack of understanding of why good sex scenes still have to be cut?

Are they only to be cut when they add nothing to the plot (much less the story), like other types of scenes in like case, or is there another reason?

Posted December 23, 2003 2:23 PM by Xopher

Perhaps this one was too obvious to have mentioned:

Author reads title of this post, thinks, "Oh, no. She's talking about me. This is all a subtle stab at me." Reads list. "WHAT? She didn't realize I was joking when I said that about my next advance? Although my last book did earn out and make a few bucks in royalties. More than a few, dammit."

Posted December 23, 2003 2:32 PM by Kellie

Kellie, that sounds like the "I just read about hypochondriasis and I'm sure I have it" syndrome.

Posted December 23, 2003 2:55 PM by Xopher

Oh... my... god... I'm sane.

Posted December 23, 2003 2:56 PM by Dave Kuzminski

It was somebody I?ve never heard of. What can they do to me?

I don't get that one. Explain, please?

I?m writing for an audience that doesn?t yet exist.

I sometimes feel like I'm living on a planet that doesn't yet exist.

Posted December 23, 2003 3:06 PM by Mitch Wagner

Living in the pre-existence days of a better nation?

Posted December 23, 2003 3:07 PM by Xopher

> My first novel took a long time to write, but
> now that I92ve been through the process and
> gotten my feet under me, the rest should go
> much faster.

You mean that's not true? Oh dear, and I was so looking forward to it. :)

Posted December 23, 2003 3:08 PM by Meredith

I /think/ the "no one I've ever heard of" bit is about reviewers, Mitch, but I could well be wrong.

I think what I like best about this list is that it cuts pretty much every which way there is to cut - successful or not, published or not, brilliant or not and so on. Which makes me wonder: are there /any/ sane authors out there? All of the stories I keep hearing come down to "really nice, but a little... uhm... quirky."

Posted December 23, 2003 3:14 PM by Jason

Xopher, are you calling me a hypochondriac? :)

Posted December 23, 2003 3:16 PM by Kellie

Seriously, isn't #3 actually true? My Writer-In-Residence took 3 years to write her first novel, 2 years to write the second, 1 year to write the third, and 80 days to write the fourth. I figure by about 2009, she should be able to write at least one book per day :-)

Posted December 23, 2003 3:24 PM by FranW

Kellie, the question is, do you THINK I am?

Posted December 23, 2003 3:28 PM by Xopher

"My first novel took a long time to write, but now that I92ve been through the process and gotten my feet under me, the rest should go much faster."

This was very, very true for me. YMMV.

Posted December 23, 2003 3:32 PM by Cory Doctorow

Xopher, actually I think you're trying to thwart any and all attempts at wit I may make in this thread. It's very transparent, really. I write brilliant comments. How come you keep trying to upstage them?

This is fun. Do we get points for writing a comment that incorporates as many of these items as possible? Some kind of "Demonstrate Ten Neuroses and Get the Next Ten Free" or something?

Posted December 23, 2003 3:39 PM by Kellie

Wait, you mean they're charging per neurosis now? Oh, man, am I in trouble...they're gonna knock my door down in the middle of the night, I just know it.

Oh, no, now I'm running up the bill some more!

Posted December 23, 2003 3:41 PM by Xopher

I write sex scenes to give editors something to cut. I probably shouldn't have let on, should I? The gig'll be up now. They'll start cutting my fight scenes instead.

Jason: "Writers is nuts." It's positively axiomatic. *g*

A list of truisms if I've ever seen one, although I do think the productivity ones depend on if you're a three-book-a-year-writer or a one-book-every-three-years writer.

Posted December 23, 2003 3:45 PM by Elizabeth Bear

Fran, your writer-in-residence is something else again.

To speak generally, pace is unpredictable and individual. Stephen King's natural speed is so fast that at the end of a novel he has to brake by throwing out a drogue-chute novella. Joseph Heller is very slow indeed. As you heard us say at VP, most beginning writers can write faster than they imagine; but that's relative. Once they get their feet under them, many writers turn out to have a natural working speed. Mike Resnick's is faster than Yog's, and Yog's is faster than Vernor Vinge's.

Even then it's not a constant. Jane Yolen, usually a reliably productive author, found herself taking longer than expected on Briar Rose. That was a difficult book. One of my authors developed a serious medical condition, had to be medicated for it, and found his previously well-established writing speed cut in half. Some years later he got it back, so good on him.

Once in a while, there'll be a piece of writing that just falls right off the tips of your fingers, soaks into the keyboard, and spits back out of the printer as polished text. It doesn't happen nearly as often as the inexplicable delays. There is no justice. Nevertheless, it does happen.

At the other end of the process, writers will sometimes find they've written themselves out, or at least written themselves into a temporarily sparse and depleted condition. Their favorite stage properties and costumes and turns of phrase will seem unutterably worn and dingy. They'll find themselves wondering whether the paragraph they've just typed isn't a near-duplicate of some paragraph of theirs in an earlier work. The writing may or may not take forever, but it feels like it does.

Much variability.

What's the imprudence in #3? Assuming on not enough evidence that the pace of your writing is going to speed up. It may well do so. It may not.

Posted December 23, 2003 3:59 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

"Joseph Heller is very slow indeed." He certainly is. He was also fairly slow, although not nearly as slow as he is now, before he died.

Posted December 23, 2003 4:35 PM by arthur

DATA

Book #1 (really #2): 2.5 months (65k words - Astropilots)
Pace: 26k words (~105 ms pp) per month
Life Factors: Unmarried, f/t job, no kids

Book #2 (really #3): 6 months (60k words - Glass Houses)
Avg Pace: 10k words per month
Life Factors: Married, f/t job, no kids

Book #3 (really #4): 3.5 years (160k words - Greenwar)
Avg Pace: 3.8k words (15 pp) per month
Life Factors: Married, f/t job, mononucleosis for seven months, pregnancy and one infant-to-toddler for remainder.

Book #4 (really #1): 14.5 years (140k words - Proxies)
Avg Pace: 800 words (3.5 pp) per month
Life Factors: Unmarried to married, f/- and p/t jobs, one preschooler and infant-to-toddler.

Book #5: 1.75 years (150k words - Burning the Ice)
Avg Pace: 7.1k words (28 pp) per month
Married, p/t job, one preschooler and one toddler, minimal child care.

Book #6: still in progress with around 65k words after 2.9 years
Avg Pace: 1.9k words (7.5 pp) per month
Life Factors: Married, f/t (seriously sucky stressful) job most of that time, two kids in school.

OBSERVATIONS

1. Working f/t didn't really slow me down, sans children.

2. Having children slowed me down considerably, but not impossibly.

3. Working fulltime with kids has repeatedly had a deadly impact on my pace.

4. Though not reflected in the data, my pace on Book #6 has more than quadrupled now that I'm working part time again.

ANALYSIS

As long as I can continue to work part time rather than full time, it looks like I can count on a pace comfortably above 5k words a month. Say 5k just to be conservative. I've decided to try to avoid writing 150k+ word novels. Say, 120k words or less.

So, 120k words divided by 5k words per month equals 24 months. So, a book every two years? I'd love it if I could do better, but that pace seems iminently doable.

That means a page quota of 20 per month. So I'll commit to this starting in January.

(Go girl, go!)

-l.

Posted December 23, 2003 4:43 PM by LauraJMixon

Sanest author I've worked with to date? That would be James White. He was an author, so that probably means I failed to notice whatever was loony about him; but for all practical purposes that's indistinguishable from sanity.

Posted December 23, 2003 4:49 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Claude Muncey writes: "That last one is not just for writers -- it's one of the classic pathologies of programmers."

Also the next-to-last.

"I'm coding for an audience that doesn't yet exist" is a pretty good description of the people who keep insisting on creating 3D interfaces so that your computer use can suffer from all the limitations of a meat body, like having to slowly walk around and explore a library, instead of using a mundane 2D display of titles and instant search.

Posted December 23, 2003 5:13 PM by Jon H

I92ve set my novel aside because I92m working on a nonfiction book about [some complex, recondite, and divisive subject where even the experts tread softly, about which I92ve very recently conceived an obsessive interest] that will finally Set Everyone Straight.

You scare me sometimes, Teresa. Just getting way too close on that one....

Posted December 23, 2003 5:16 PM by John Farrell

> No one shall ever touch my text again, no matter how much it needs it.

My favorite version of this was an author screaming "I don't need a f***ing editor!" at my one-time boss. When it became my job to copyedit his work, every time I found the slightest error in his text I gloated privately. :)

Posted December 23, 2003 5:41 PM by Tiellan

Which makes me wonder: are there /any/ sane authors out there? All of the stories I keep hearing come down to "really nice, but a little... uhm... quirky."

I was taught that the technical term is fruitbat, as in, "All writers are fruit bats."

In fact, I believe that term derives from an issue of Izzard.

Posted December 23, 2003 5:45 PM by Lydia Nickerson

"I want you to publish my next book under a pseudonym so I can find out whether it’s my writing or my name that’s selling."

Doris Lessing actually got to try that with her Jane Somers (?) novels. I don't know how the sales were.

"I’m writing for an audience that doesn’t yet exist.

Yes—but when I do it, it’ll work."

I think Delany got away with that one with _Dhalgren_--or were there other similar books to show that the audiance existed?

Posted December 23, 2003 5:49 PM by Nancy Lebovitz

Nancy, you mean you think Delany was writing for an audience when he wrote that?

Seriously, I was an instant Delany fan when I read Dhalgren. Yes, it was my first Delany novel and still my favorite.

Posted December 23, 2003 5:52 PM by Xopher

"Oh, come on. I know there couldn't be more than X months' worth of manuscripts in front of mine", where X = ([number of months since submission]-1).

Usually uttered while thumbing through the day's mail, before even leaving the mail delivery area of the apartment building.

Posted December 23, 2003 6:03 PM by Jaquandor

A lot of the really successful stuff is written for an audience that doesn't exist; "Paradise Lost", "The Lord of the Rings", whatever the first successful Western was.

It's just blessed unlikely that one's own book is one of those books.

Posted December 23, 2003 6:09 PM by Graydon

I want you to publish my next book under a pseudonym so I can find out whether it92s my writing or my name that92s selling.

I'm sure you're aiming this at the Richard Bachmans of the world, but it's too damn close to the reason many authors reluctantly adopt pseudonyms:

Bright New Author sells first novel; it does respectably well, i.e. comes close to earning out its advance.

BNA's second novel doesn't do as well as first novel

Advance orders from Barnes&Noble and Borders of BNA's third novel are miniscule. The book falls through the floor 96 despite the fact that as a writer BNA is beginning to hit her stride and turn out something that is really worth reading.

After conferring with her agent, BNA adopts a pseudonym, Luminescent Novascribe. Her fourth book gets a 1st-novel advance, and 1st-novel attention from the chains, and sells rather well, because it's significantly better than the typical first novel

Luminescent Novascribe's "second" book's sales take off from the first one, and the chain store's database takes note. LN's career is on an upcurve to long-term sustainability, while BNA's has crashed, burned, and is unrecoverable.

It's almost enough to make one want to publish one's early work under a pseudonym so that the chains' computers don't hate you when you switch to your real name with your mature work.

Posted December 23, 2003 6:11 PM by Alan Bostick

May I please link your list to the livejournal community I started, cranky_editors?

Thanks for a laugh at the end of a LONG day.

BetN, medical editor

Posted December 23, 2003 6:26 PM by BetNoir

You know, if you substitute "teacher" for "editor," and "paper" for book, I've heard pretty much all of these from students . . .

Posted December 23, 2003 8:04 PM by Lisa

I was reading through all these neuroses thinking nervously "I don't do that, do I?" until I got to the last: Yes97but when I do it, it92ll work when I snickered happily and yelled "Bingo!" I do that.

Posted December 23, 2003 8:07 PM by Yonmei

I dunno how many authors who've "made it" come up with this one, but my favorite pathology from assorted writer's groups and mailing lists I've lurked at (and from one or two real-world associates) is:

"I'm going to write something in [insert genre here] to show all the poor benighted idiots who work in [insert genre here] how it should be done. What? Of course I don't read [insert genre here], because it's all crap."

Corollary:

"Because I don't read [insert genre here], my conception won't be diluted or influenced by the established conventions of [insert genre here]. Therefore, I won't repeat the mistakes that writers of [insert genre here] always make."

Posted December 23, 2003 8:18 PM by Scott Lynch

95I have a friend from my church/school/local bar who knows all about editing and is going to typeset/copy edit/proofread the book for me, so I don't need to deal with your production staff.

Posted December 23, 2003 8:53 PM by Robert L

I got a bad copyedit. No one shall ever touch my text again, no matter how much it needs it.

The phrase "no matter how much it needs it" doesn't belong.

My books need copyediting, surely. However, the amount that they may be improved by a good copyedit is only a small percentage of how much damage a bad copyedit will do to them.

Why risk it?

Posted December 23, 2003 9:41 PM by James D. Macdonald

As we can see, Our Jim is still in recovery from a Very Bad Copyedit. The doctors say he'll be sitting up and taking solid food in just a few months.

Posted December 23, 2003 10:00 PM by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Graydon makes an excellent point about how a lot of really successful stuff really is "written for an audience that doesn't yet exist." Transcendently good work does sometimes call its own audience into being. Good trick if you can pull it off.

And speaking of Dhalgren, for all the crap that novel took inside the SF field, it sold nearly a million copies over a period of ten years. That isn't a flash in the pan of literary faddism. It's word of mouth--people who love it telling other people about it, who turn out to love it too.

(The Pan of Literary Faddism, of course, hangs on the wall of the Kitchen of Plain Old Storytelling, from whence it is frequently heated up on the Stove of Popular Demand. All of this taking place in the House of the Seven Gables, or perhaps the Rising Sun. It's certainly been the ruin of many a poor boy. And God, I know I'm one.)

Posted December 23, 2003 10:06 PM by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

There's something I should have said from the start. Every one of the misconceived ideas on that list has been independently invented by two or more authors. Three of the items are word-for-word quotes from specific authors, but they're not far from being word-for-word quotes from other authors as well. I apologize for not making that clear. I also apologize for my failure to foresee the effect my post would have on authors who read it. But most of all, I apologize for omitting several utterly characteristic varieties of auctorial lunacy. I'll be adding them to the bottom of my post.

Graydon, "Perhaps I should give up writing altogether" is one of the classics. It strikes the good and the bad, the marginal and the wildly successful. And -- yipes! That reminds me of another one. This one strikes when the novel is almost done, or done and newly delivered: "Oh my god, this is awful. I have no talent and I'm losing my mind. If I show this piece of @#$%! to anyone, I'll be ruined for life."

Christopher, the one about sex scenes was contributed by a fellow editor. It could refer to the author being delusional about the quality of their sex scenes. It could be that they've misjudged the conventions of the current YA market. And it could be that the deletions are all about maintaining the pace of the narrative, nothing to do with the specific content; a scene where the characters go bowling would get cut too.

Kellie, "Oh, no -- it's all about me" is so obvious that I missed it completely. It's one of the entries I'm adding to the main list.

Dave, does this demonstrate that you're sane, or that you're within the standard range of auctorial lunacy?

Mitch, "It was somebody I've never heard of. What can they do to me?" was addressed by Rudyard Kipling in The Jungle Book:

There is none like to me says the cub,
In the pride of its earliest kill;
But the jungle is great, and the cub he is small.
Let him think for a while, and be still.

I squared my jaw, swallowed hard, and in a small voice said, "I'm the last person who sees your text before it goes to the printer."

He was much more polite after that.

The issue here is the oft-underestimated complexity of the publishing universe. It is very complicated. It's full of people with inscrutable job titles who may have it within their power to withhold favors or do you harm; not to mention the sweeties, college roommates, and former assistants of people with inscrutable job titles. Prudence and discretion ring like silver, and polite manners are good as gold.

We all write for audiences that don't yet exist, living in a world that's yet to come. That's a great truth. But if that's your response to your editor's request for certain specific revisions, you may have a problem.

Elizabeth, when I read your bit about writing sex scenes to give your editors something to cut so they'll leave your fight scenes alone, I'm afraid I felt it being entered in indelible ink on a permanent 3" x 5" card of memory. Is there some admission I can trade you, just to keep things even?

Laura: Of course you feel conscience-stricken. Of course you can lay it all out in terms of periods of your life, relative productivity, wordcounts, and Piagetian stages, along with useful observations, and earnest resolves for the future. That's just like you. It's why, when I first met you, you were living with Steve in a microscopic apartment in Soho, being the Vice President in charge of Environmental Compliance at Salomon Brothers, writing novels, having your first child, and fretting about not being able to get more done.

They were good novels. Good kid, too.

Jon H., I must admit I've wondered about that impulse.

John Farrell, I promise faithfully that I had a different author in mind. No idea you were doing that ...

I've put my foot into it, right?

I think the worst time I did that was at a Readercon, during the early stages of a room party. Only a couple of guests had arrived. One was a skiffy author who's now critically acclaimed, though at just that moment he was smarting over a bad review of his latest book.

"I'm tired of this," he said in his Southern-uplands accent. He'd been hitting the refreshments pretty hard. "I'm tired of the whole SF lifestyle. I'm going back to academia, get myself some respect."

"Oh, don't," I said. (This was back in my time as a litcrit reference series editor.) "You know what'll happen. You'll publish one title every five or ten years, get glowing reviews from all your literary buddies, all very respectable, and it'll sell -- what? A thousand copies? Two thousand, maybe?"

The author's friend suddenly looked greenish and gutted. "Oh god," he said. "You've just reduced my entire adult life to a cliche."

I sucked air, fast. I'd unthinkingly rattled off the standard pattern for an ambitious writer turned academic, and there he was in the room with me. You know the sound of unretractable truth hanging in the air? It was there on both sides.

"I'm sorry," I said. Long pause. "I could pinch my head off and flush it down the toilet?"

"No," he said. "It wouldn't help."

...Enough. I'm going to go watch another DVD episode of a popular serial entertainment with Patrick.

Posted December 23, 2003 10:49 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

"I want you to publish my next book under a pseudonym so I can find out whether it92s my writing or my name that92s selling." [...]Doris Lessing actually got to try that with her Jane Somers (?) novels.

Romain Gary did it. He disliked the Paris literary scene, and felt that his novels were well-reviewed and won prizes because of complex social play, not because of the quality of his writing. So he wrote under the pseudonym Emile Ajar, and for his second novel as Ajar won the Prix Goncourt. The secret was largely unknown until after his death. Basic summary here.

Posted December 23, 2003 11:19 PM by Grant Barrett

See? A common auctorial impulse. I suspect we don't get to hear about the ones whose books tank when published pseudonymously.

Posted December 23, 2003 11:46 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

When I had my first story, "Kayli's Dragon" published, I was working at an advertising agency here in KC. One of our ad writers (they fancy themselves 'creatives,' sorry if I offend, but doing copy on demand from client is very different than being individually creative and writing fiction) disparaged me and said "Oh, you've had a commercial publication in genre fiction." in a condescending fashion and generally pooh-pooh-ed the whole thing. He continued, "I've HAD a NOVEL published and it will be a great literary success. The University of Iowa Press thought it was the best thing they've ever published."

I mentioned this to my sort-of mentor Robin Bailey. He said, "just wait. See what you earn. I'll wager he makes nothing or next-to-nothing on his book." Well, Kayli's Fire made about $3000 over it's life span, in reprints and the LEGAL foreign sales (I've been pirated in many former Soviet bloc countries... plus Italy (gee, publishing it in a text book can't be violating copyright, can it?)) I serously doubt his novel ever gave him that much. And because I work at a regular job for a living, those extra royalty checks were a bonus that I wasn't looking for.

Plus I sold two other stories that were continuances of the first one to Marion. AND may eventually produce a chapbook if I can figure out a fourth story in that world.

And when I asked the guy about what he got paid for it, he looked at me stupidly "advance? What do you mean advance?" When he told me it was a great honor for them to actually publish his book, I just said, "yeah, whatever." And he SHUT UP about me being a genre writer just about completely after that.

So I have a dim view of academic publishing. Especially fiction.

Posted December 24, 2003 12:10 AM by Paula Helm Murray

God, Teresa, sometimes I want to just shoot myself and end the agony. (Kidding. I'm kidding.)

-l.

Posted December 24, 2003 1:03 AM by LauraJMixon

That's okay, Teresa--I'll just have to learn to write *really good* fight scenes. Or possibly bribe you with the comestible of your choosing.

Actually, it's my firm belief--or running joke--that sex scenes and fight scenes work the same way--and don't work the same way when they don't work. i.e., the ones that work are actually plot disguised as action, and the ones that don't work are filler disguised as titillation.

Or in any case, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Ahh, and somebody finally pointed out my particular auctorial insanity: at some point approximately halfway through the MS, every book is unfinishable. And at about 5/6th of the way through, it's suddenly the worst tripe ever written.

Yep. That sounds familiar, all right.

Posted December 24, 2003 1:28 AM by Elizabeth Bear

Paula,

I don't know about Italy, but German copyright law allows quoting a work in its entirety ("Grodfzitat") in a scientific work for the purpose of discussing or analyzing the quoted work, if that purpose requires the unabridged inclusion of the work.

Now, that doesn't cover including a work in a textbook for the purpose of simple duplication, but Italian law may be different again. Continental European copyright law is substantially different in nature from traditional American copyright law. It is generally an "author's right", rather than a copyright. Authors tend to have more protection than under American law, but there are also usually more express limitations on the scope of exclusive rights to balance the author's right over his or her work with the public good. So, it may theoretically be perfectly legal under Italian law to include whole works in limited cases (such as for textbooks).

Posted December 24, 2003 1:34 AM by Reimer Behrends

I am amused and appalled, but not surprised, at how many of these delusions are isomorphic to those of artists and designers. Particularly, I think, designers.

I'm designing for a kind of user that doesn't yet exist. Oh, yes.

And I'm convinced that When I do it, it'll work is responsible for far, far too much consumer-product landfill space.

Oh, look, another convergence device...

Posted December 24, 2003 2:26 AM by Jazz

TNH: "The issue here is the oft-underestimated complexity of the publishing universe. It is very complicated. It's full of people with inscrutable job titles who may have it within their power to withhold favors or do you harm; not to mention the sweeties, college roommates, and former assistants of people with inscrutable job titles. Prudence and discretion ring like silver, and polite manners are good as gold."

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got in college journalism classes was that a reporter should ALWAYS BE NICE TO THE SECRETARIES. ALWAYS! The secretary can give you the runaround and make sure you don't get an interview with the mayor by 5:30 pm, in time to make the first edition. Or the secretary can say to you, "Oh, hi, Mitch -- the boss is just wrapping up a call -- I'll let him know you're on the line."

My journalism teacher recommended that you learn the secretaries' names, buy them donuts and coffee, give them a card on their birthday. I don't go that far -- but I'm always nice to the secretaries. Sometimes I write their names in my rolodex, next to the entry for the boss, just so I can say hi to them by name when I call the boss.

In general, I find that you can't work to impress people with how important you are. Either they know how important you are, or they don't, and if they don't know, puffing yourself up will make you look less important, and also make you look like a twit.

Graydon, "Perhaps I should give up writing altogether" is one of the classics. It strikes the good and the bad, the marginal and the wildly successful. And -- yipes! That reminds me of another one. This one strikes when the novel is almost done, or done and newly delivered: "Oh my god, this is awful. I have no talent and I'm losing my mind. If I show this piece of @#$%! to anyone, I'll be ruined for life."

A seasoned author and friend, with a dozen published novels under her belt, who makes her living and supports her family with her income as an author, recognizes this as simply a routine part of the writing process, nothing to get worked up about or take particularly seriously. You wake up one morning when the novel is well along, it all looks like garbage, I've lost all my talent, I'll never write another publishable word again, we'll be thrown out in the street and have to live under a highway overpass and eat garbage thrown out of passing car windows, blah blah blah, nothing unusual here, hey do we have any more coffee?

Change of subject.

I was bitching to another friend, also a successful author, about some changes my editors wanted to make. At the time, I was working for a magazine with too much management, and they drove me crazy sometimes. My friend gave me a great piece of advice: He said editing changes can be divided into three classes. One class is changes that improve your work. Of course, you should agree to those instantly.

The second class is changes that make no difference. You have a character named Jonny, your editor wants the name to be spelled Johnny. Who cares? Agree to the change. It's not worth incremental about, and it gives you some incremental goodwill with your editor -- or, if you don't get any goodwill, at least you avoid being labelled as an author who fights over petty changes.

The last category is changes that would make the work worse -- those changes, and only those changes, are changes you should oppose.

Sounds like common sense, but it's very easy for me to get very defensive about my work, and start fighting the editors about EVERY DAMN THING.

...Enough. I'm going to go watch another DVD episode of a popular serial entertainment with Patrick.

More "Buffy"? I'd sure love to see you or Patrick just post at length about your thoughts and opinions on "Buffy," "The Sopranos," and whatever other TV you've been watching.

Have I recommended "E.R."?

Elizabeth Bear: "Actually, it's my firm belief--or running joke--that sex scenes and fight scenes work the same way--and don't work the same way when they don't work. i.e., the ones that work are actually plot disguised as action, and the ones that don't work are filler disguised as titillation."

Reminds me of the novel "The World According to Garp." His sex scenes read like fight scenes -- the lovers are often angry with each other, they yell at each other and shove each other and fall out of bed and accidently bang their head on the end-table. A cheating wife is performing oral sex on her husband in the car when her husband, in his own car, accidently hits her car and she-- well, what happens next is what you think would happen.

"Garp" is set in a prep school, and varsity wrestling figures prominently in the novel. The wrestling scenes read like sex, with wrestlers locked in an embrace on a floor covered by soft mats, in a closed and sealed room with the air warm and moist with healthy sweat and exertion.

Scott Lynch: "I'm going to write something in [insert genre here] to show all the poor benighted idiots who work in [insert genre here] how it should be done. What? Of course I don't read [insert genre here], because it's all crap."

I have completed two works of fiction -- you haven't read them, they haven't been published. I certainly did take the attitude on both of those works that I would show the benighted idiots how it was done. So far, the only thing I showed 'em was how to finish stories that won't get published.

Now I'm working on Opus #3, and my hopes are considerably more modest. I hope I have the sticktoitiveness to finish it, I hope it gets published professionally. I'd like it if Boing Boing and a couple of other blogs that I admire say nice things about it. If it turns out short length, I'd love to see it included in Gardner Dozois's "Best Of" anthology -- yes, I know that's pretty ambitious, perhaps laughably so, but a boy's got to have dreams, doesn't he?

But mainly, at this point, I hope to FINISH it. If I can get it done, formatted nicely double-spaced with headers and my address on the front page and a cover letter and stuffed in a 9x12" envelope with another 9x12" SASE inside -- well, I'll consider that a success right there, and anything else that happens will be a bonus.

Posted December 24, 2003 3:26 AM by Mitch Wagner

That whole self-doubt thing is so unappealing. Maybe I'll channel Gertrude.

Posted December 24, 2003 6:18 AM by Karen Junker

I think of myself--even after 40 years of professional writing--as incredibly sane. But Gad, T--I have said EVERY ONE OF THOSE THINGS. (Except the sex one. I can't write sex scenes. They make me giggle.)

I have to go and lie down now.

Well actually, I am already lying down, recovering from knee replacement surgery. Maybe they took out my sense of humor at the same time?

Jane

Posted December 24, 2003 7:02 AM by jane

Mitch, we've temporarily run out of Buffy--until they release the sixth season on DVD, at any rate. So we've resorted to methadone.

Posted December 24, 2003 8:14 AM by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

I read the list with a sick, sinking feeling in my stomach, recognizing that I was guilty of at least 30% of the pathologies ... then I remembered that I'm also prone to mild hypochondria. That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it.

On the other hand, it seems like a good idea to use this as a springboard for a list of reference points writers should bear in mind if they feel a little bit frisky. Any recommendations? ("Being edited is not really as bad as being followed down a dark alley and mugged. Seriously. Count the bruises then check your wallet -- what kind of mugger gives you money?" "Once you sell the book you do not own it exclusively any more." "Count your advance, multiply it by ten: that's the amount of their turnover your publisher has gambled on making your book a success. You don't really want to cost all those nice people their jobs?" And so on.)

Oh yeah: on the writing speed front -- the last novel I wrote took 24 days to first draft (91,000 words). But I expect, in a day or two, to be finishing my next novel ... four years and six months and 140,000 words after I began writing it. (And yes, I have been working on it continuously in the background, all that time.) This is why the next person to call me a fast writer will be glared at ...

Posted December 24, 2003 8:50 AM by Charlie Stross

"Reminds me of the novel 'The World According to Garp.' ... A cheating wife is performing oral sex on her husband in the car when her husband, in his own car, accidently hits her car and she-- well, what happens next is what you think would happen."

Hominahominahomina... wait a minute... she's performing oral sex on him and they're in two different cars?

Truly, there were giants in those days.

Posted December 24, 2003 9:14 AM by Kip W

Good morning, all; back to comments.

Tiellan, one does have that reaction. I know of an instance where, for extra-textual reasons, a novel that badly needed copyediting had to be given the kind of kid-gloves treatment where you correct the misspellings and mark the em-dashes, but do nothing else. The reviewers were not kind to it. One major review venue flat-out trashed it, citing exactly the kind of errors a copyeditor would have caught.

Reviews don't usually circulate to Production. This one did, and was much appreciated. That's not the usual reaction. Production may not actually, personally love every book that comes through the pipeline, but they wish it well, and want to make it as good as it's in its nature to be. But in this case, any good they might have done the book had been rejected in advance, and they weren't sorry to see it come to grief for want of it.

Jaquandor, it's not the books queued up in front of yours. It's the other work that's landing on the editor's desk that week. Not only can you not predict it; often the editor can't either.

Alan, wrong end of the stick. Authors who do the name-change thing when their last several works haven't sold well are being brave and practical, not crazy. That item in the list is for the very successful writers who want to publish books pseudonymously so they can see whether people love their writing for its own sake. I expect it's less irritating if the author doesn't have other books under contract, and doesn't expect to get their usual advance, or the kind of marketing and sales support they've come to expect for their non-pseudonymous works.

BetNoir, of course you can. You can also tell me where I can read it, if it's publicly available, and tell the participants that I'll happily take their suggestions on insanities I've neglected to list.

Lisa, so far I haven't had an author tell me the dog ate his manuscript. Someday, one will. It's just a matter of time.

Yonmei, I think may have identified a characteristic human insanity there.

Scott, I deliberately didn't mention the insanities of writers who haven't gotten published yet. Those are for another list -- a very long one.

Robert, that one made me wail reminiscently. I've added it to the list as you wrote it because I figure you'll grump at me if I rewrite it, but I'd have said " I have a friend from my church/school/local bar who knows all about editing and is going to typeset/copy edit/proofread the book for me, so you won't need to do any of that stuff." Authors who say things like that don't tend to be clear on the existence of the production staff.

By the way, I recently had a discussion with a new Tor author, no one you've heard of, who turned out to have everything finished, ready, and in excellent order. He kept saying things like "I've been trying to think of ways to make your production easier," and "I can help with the pre-press, if you'd like."

What's his background? Comics. That industry is so screwy that their freelancers can wind up being the ones who nail the production deadlines.

James, do you want us to clean and return that bloody shirt of yours, or keep it around to wave at peccant production editors?

Paula, I find myself wanting to defend your ad writer just a little bit. Writing good commercial copy on demand is a hard job, and to do it well takes more than a little talent and creativity. Also, the University of Iowa Press is quite respectable. On the other hand, if the guy's going to diss the genre, and the whole enterprise of commercial fiction, then to hell with him.

...

Do I have time to finish this before I have to get washed and dressed and out of here? Maybe. Let me see.

Elizabeth, sex scenes and fight scenes: I'd have said they're similar because in order to be good, they have to be planned out and written even more carefully than the rest of the text; but I swear, half the time you'd think the author wrote them by typing as fast as possible, with both eyes closed and their face turned away from the screen.

...and here the time runs out. More on this later.

Posted December 24, 2003 10:07 AM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Paula Helm Murray:
So I have a dim view of academic publishing. Especially fiction.

Whereas outside of its attempts at fiction, I think academic publishing is one of the coolest things going. Why? Because without academic publishing houses publishing small runs of books that will only appeal to a handful of experts or deeply engaged enthusiasts would never get published. There's no way a trade publisher can justify publishing books like Ancient Literary Sources on Sardis (John Griffiths Pedley, Harvard University Press, 2003); (Andrew Ramage, Harvard University Press, 2004); Peacemaking Among Primates (Frans de Waal, Harvard University Press, 2004), to choose a few from the HUP catalogue. These probably aren't going to be your New York Times bestsellers, but one of them may prove immeasurably valuable to someone's research.

Trade publishers are the best vehicle currently extant for bringing fiction and books of general interest to the general public. They must publish books they think will sell and earn out the advances paid to authors, and maybe even make some money for everyone. So their mandate is generally some variation on "Publish books that lots of people will want to buy. Put the books in bookstores where people will find them. Tell people about the books, so that they will buy them." Academic publishers, subsidized by grants, have a different mandate: to publish works that "increase knowledge" (that's a quote from one of my publishing instructors). If the book makes money, that's a bonus. So they can publish small print runs of books that address the small, poorly populated corners of the readership, most of which get purchased by university libraries and a bookstores, and a few of which get purchased by the handful of experts in the field. Every so often, they publish a book with broader appeal, and it finds its way into the Trade.

So, while one may not ever make a living writing for academic publishers, I'm inclined to think highly of them, all the same. Without them, how would I ever get my Oxford Classical texts, my studies on Mycenean pottery, or surveys of textile findings in Late Roman Britain, my commentaries on Plautus and Vergil or my studies of Troubadour lyrics? How would the physicists and the statisticians get their cutting-edge texts, and the lit crit people their essays? Who would publish the dictionaries of Middle Egyptian?

The moral is, I think, that in a perfect world, every book for which there exists a readership and an author also deserves a publisher. The trick is finding the right match.

Posted December 24, 2003 10:08 AM by jennie

re: authors who publish under a pseudonym to see if it is the writing or name that sells.

Anthony Trollope did this - two novels under another name. They did poorly and he acknowledged that it was his name that sold.

Posted December 24, 2003 10:18 AM by Lisajulie Peoples

"Perhaps I should give up writing altogether..."

I am reminded of Aaron Sorkin saying "I love writing but hate starting. The page is awfully white and it says, 'You may have fooled some of the people some of the time but those days are over, giftless. I'm not your agent and I'm not your mommy, I'm a white piece of paper, you wanna dance with me?' and I really, really don't. I'll go peaceable-like." And this is a guy whose TV show won the Best Drama Emmy four years running, every year it's been nominated. So it ain't just you, bubby.

P&T: if you want the remaining Buffy eps, I'm pretty sure you can lay hands on tapes. Somebody on the list must have them...

Posted December 24, 2003 10:19 AM by Glenn Hauman

Glenn --

I like writing. I hate the idea that no one is ever going to read it. (This may properly belong in Teresa's other, longer, list.)

And, well, ability and the perception of ability are not very well correlated at all.

I'm tempted to propose a reliably inverse correlation, because the very able can see, a little dimly, what someone yet more able might have done.

That tenuous possibility becomes their standard for judgement, without the pause to consider either how effective their own work is observed to be, or how materially possible the degree of ability necessary to execute the dimly seen possibility might be.

Posted December 24, 2003 11:06 AM by Graydon

So, Teresa, do you have any plans to map these various insanities onto DSM-IV?

Posted December 24, 2003 11:15 AM by Alan Bostick

By the way "Insanity Set Mappings onto DSM-IV" is a plausible-sounding topic for a mathematical paper. (You think authors are crazy? Check out mathematicians.)

Posted December 24, 2003 11:17 AM by Alan Bostick

Are pseudonyms always the author's idea? I think I remember reading an interview with Iain Banks, where he said that his publisher wanted him to use a pseudonym for his science-fiction novels-- I forget why, something about audience maybe-- but he (IB) was resistant; eventually he wore down, and chose the fiendishly cryptic "Iain M. Banks" as the false name.

Posted December 24, 2003 11:28 AM by Adam Lipkin

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot about my current extension of Robert Legault's "I have a friend from my church/school/local bar who knows all about editing and is going to typeset/copy edit/proofread the book for me, so I don?t need to deal with your production staff.:

"I've typeset my [unedited] chapters [of a multi-author textbook] in TeX and we can do the entire book that way, and it will make it all so much easier for everyone!"

Posted December 24, 2003 11:31 AM by jennie

Re that author name-change thing . . . .

A number of years ago, relatively early in my career at Tor, I received an awful horror novel submission which was presented by a known agent as a first novel. I rejected it politely.

About two years later, I was reading reviews when I found myself reading a plot summary that sounded terribly familiar . . . it was the book I had rejected, now published under the name of a bestselling author. It became a bestseller, too.

I had to tell Tom what I had done, even though the event was in the past. His response: "How bad was the book?" I said, "it was terrible." He said, "it's okay, then."

Posted December 24, 2003 11:36 AM by Melissa Singer

Thanks so much!

If you go to Live Journal and search for the communty "cranky_editors" that should get you there!

Posted December 24, 2003 11:57 AM by BetNoir

"I wrote this specifically to get the Wired/slashdot/MeFi crowd to love it, so you can't change anything or it will all collapse."

"Your copy editors are crap. They're changing much more than the editors at [other publishing house] did on my last book."

"OK, so the whole thing is a bit obscure. Let me just add a new first chapter and see if it makes sense then."

Posted December 24, 2003 12:53 PM by Paul Hoffman

On my way out the door shortly, but:

James Dickey wrote ad copy. He's one of the best poets of our time. The two facts are related.

Two of the best works of fiction I ever read came from academic publishers--and I'm not counting A Confederacy of Dunces in this, which is the canonical "rejected by everyone" story.

Ellen Gilchrist's first collection of stories, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, is as good a book of short stories as I've ever read. All her books are now available through Little, Brown. Jim Twiggs' Transferences is an evil little masterpiece trashing psychoanalysis. I guess it's out of print. Both originally came from the University of Arkansas Press.

God knows, academic publishers publish a lot of crap fiction, and don't get me started on poetry. There's also a lot of very fine work there. These are examples.

I don't think the problem is academic presses per se, but the glut of MFA programs, and the official conceit that their graduates' theses are all, by definition, publishable works.

P.S. I should note that, while I've only spoken to Ellen Gilchrist once in my life, Jim Twiggs is a friend (whom I haven't seen over in a decade)--but I still think he wrote a hell of a fine novel. People with actual agents and novels published by mainstream publishers helped him shop it around. The subject matter was thought too raw and ugly to sell. It is raw and ugly, but appropriately so.

Posted December 24, 2003 1:24 PM by adamsj

What's worst, Melissa Singer, is that the bestselling author probably thinks that his success with his novel under his own name proves that he was right, and that you were a lousy editor for rejecting it.

Please don't fall for this. Without even knowing anything else about the case, I'm sure you were right.

About books written for audiences that don't yet exist - the authors who are really doing this are usually very modest in their expectations, and are writing these books not with an audience in mind, but simply because they can't not write them. It's the ones who make the declaration confidently who are of questionable sanity.

Posted December 24, 2003 1:38 PM by Simon

Mitch - maybe I'll read Garp after all...

(The Pan of Literary Faddism, of course, hangs on the wall of the Kitchen of Plain Old Storytelling, from whence it is frequently heated up on the Stove of Popular Demand. All of this taking place in the House of the Seven Gables, or perhaps the Rising Sun. It's certainly been the ruin of many a poor boy. And God, I know I'm one.)

When I read stuff like this, I think it's a crying damn shame that you're editing instead of writing (as much). But then I think of the editing work you do, and instead honor your sacrifice.

By the way, Patrick, if you haven't also watched Angel, it's worth a go. Not quite as cosmic as Buffy, but at the very least the crossover eps would be of interest.

Posted December 24, 2003 1:41 PM by Xopher

Glenn: I am reminded of Aaron Sorkin saying "I love writing but hate starting. The page is awfully white and it says, 'You may have fooled some of the people some of the time but those days are over, giftless. I'm not your agent and I'm not your mommy, I'm a white piece of paper, you wanna dance with me?' and I really, really don't. I'll go peaceable-like."

You know, I wasn't under the delusion that I'm the only person that gets that kind of tough love from white pieces of paper, but I have to admit that it's nice to know it goes all the way up to the top.

Worse than white pieces of paper, though, are glowing blank white windows on a computer screen. They scare me. I have to dirty up paper before I can face them, which oddly enough helps get over the other neurosis... okay, this is getting pathological. I'll stop.

Posted December 24, 2003 1:53 PM by Jazz

"Important people with inscrutable titles" are a feature of any sufficiently complex profession or society. (Assistant CBAnalyst at the OMB springs to mind -- some guy with a calculator who can essentially thumbs-down near any reg or rule).

And as for "I've set aside my novel to write a highly specialized nonfiction piece", well, one of the ... hazards... of the Genre is the quick translation of that to "Or, I could just, yknow, write a discursive and specialized novel relying upon knowledge of said subject..."

Posted December 24, 2003 2:11 PM by BSD

Kip W - Yeah, what I meant to say is that in "The World According to Garp," "a cheating wife is performing oral sex on her lover when her husband, in his own car, accidently hits her car and she-- well, what happpens next is what you thnk would happen."

Although I agree that the other way is better. Or, if not better, than more stfnal.

Proofreading. We've heard of it.

TNH: Paula, I find myself wanting to defend your ad writer just a little bit. Writing good commercial copy on demand is a hard job, and to do it well takes more than a little talent and creativity. Also, the University of Iowa Press is quite respectable. On the other hand, if the guy's going to diss the genre, and the whole enterprise of commercial fiction, then to hell with him.

What Teresa Said -- I wanted to address that point last night but I was tired and every time I wrote something, it came out sounding more hostile than I meant it to be.

I am a writer, editor and I do production for a couple of webzines, on computer security and open source and general Internet issues. What I do is a hybrid of journalism and commercial writing, and it's hard. You think it's so easy, you give it a try.

Posted December 24, 2003 2:15 PM by Mitch Wagner

And even my last post was still more hostile than I meant it to be. Also, more self-important.

Posted December 24, 2003 2:17 PM by Mitch Wagner

Xopher--

Garp is worth reading.

Teresa--

I would say fight scenes and sex scenes are similar because they're both all about tension and conflict, action and reaction, subtext and advancing the storyline without looking like that's what you're doing.

They also get reread more than the rest of the narrative. Which is another reason why they need so much rewriting. *g*

Posted December 24, 2003 2:21 PM by Elizabeth Bear

And of course SF can give you aliens for whom the fight scene and the sex scene are the same thing. (There are these flatworms....)

Posted December 24, 2003 2:27 PM by Avram

Paula, I find myself wanting to defend your ad writer just a little bit. Writing good commercial copy on demand is a hard job, and to do it well takes more than a little talent and creativity.

I just re-read Dorothy Sayer's mystery, Murder Must Advertise. Large chunks of it are set in an advertising agency in the Thirties, mostly amongst the copy writing staff. Sayers once worked in as a copy writer, and so her depiction of the office is funny, sharp, and somewhat edged. I'm given to understand that it's also a fairly accurate picture of the profession. I have a lot more respect for commercial ad writers now than I did. The copy writers in that book are viewed as loons by the rest of the company, and justifiably so. What they do is enough to make anyone turn into a fruitbat.

Posted December 24, 2003 2:45 PM by Lydia Nickerson

I've done critique group reading (Both amateur and published), and similar, and I swear that every time someone has declared their writing is on the edge, something the Big Name editors (At Tor or F&SF, depending on the length) would never consider because it's too far in left field -

- it's been something pretty typical, actually, and I've read successful books published by Tor or in F&SF that were far, far more outre.

It seems to me that the neuroses that involve we timid writers doubting our own skill are the ones that keep us trying to do our best work, and remembering to actually edit. The ones about over-estimating our own skill are the ones that get the damn book finished, let go, and onto the editor's desk at last. Pity we can't time the fits of self-doubt and self-love to hit only in the moments when they're liable to help instead of hinder the system.

The ones that involve being rude to those trying to help... well, that's another issue. (Note to self: Don't do that if you should be so lucky as to get accepted anywhere big. And remember this no matter what happens.)

Posted December 24, 2003 3:07 PM by Lenora Rose

Charlie Stross wrote:

"Oh yeah: on the writing speed front -- the last novel I wrote took 24 days to first draft (91,000 words). But I expect, in a day or two, to be finishing my next novel ... four years and six months and 140,000 words after I began writing it. (And yes, I have been working on it continuously in the background, all that time.) This is why the next person to call me a fast writer will be glared at ..."

I'm laughing as I read this because Charlie warned me about the potential time suck of novel #2 shortly after I sold novel #1, and I kind of shrugged him off. Now, of course, I'm writing #2 and it's taking far longer than I want it to. (You were right, Charlie! I owe you a beer. )

Perhaps amusingly, I noted to someone in e-mail that hopefully after writing #2 I'll have internalized some of the new writing techniques I'm doing it in it so it'll take less time the next time around. Of course, then I see a very similar comment in Teresa's list. But in my case, you see, it'll be *true*.

Paula Helm Murray wrote:

"Sorry if I offend, but doing copy on demand from client is very different than being individually creative and writing fiction."

Different, yes. Mutually exclusive, no. As I write both I can say that each has helped the other -- my business clients like that a lot of my writing for them comes in from a different angle that the usual copy they get, and that has to do with writing fiction. From working with clients, I get the advantage of trying out a lot of different writing voices, which informs my individual creative work.

And sometimes the two coincide quite nicely; in one scene in my upcoming novel (#1, which is done, not #2, which is not), there's a scene where a character reads from an informational brochure for a particular product. I guarantee you the brochure sounds absolutely authentic.

On my personal Web site, I got into a tussle earlier in the year with another writer about whether writing from other disciplines can inform writing in other disciplines (particularly when they seem as disparate as novel writing and ad copy). I believe yes; he believes no. I won't caution to guess which of us is correct, but I will note that to date I have sold both ad copy and novels, and the other writer has sold neither.

Posted December 24, 2003 3:25 PM by John Scalzi

I've done both, I think ad copy is more like poetry.

I've done poetry too.

I don't know if I over-rate or under-rate or what, I'm too close to it to see that. Thaank goodness, because thinking about that is one of those centipede things.

The only insanity I know about that I didn't notice is "My son/daughter/aunt/cat can draw and has done a terrific cover for the book".

Posted December 24, 2003 4:18 PM by Jo Walton

My first novel took a long time to write, but now that I92ve been through the process and gotten my feet under me, the rest should go much faster.

What, are you telling me this isn't true?!

*weeps*

Posted December 24, 2003 4:27 PM by Ivy Blossom

Lydia: I was taught that the technical term is fruitbat, as in, "All writers are fruit bats." In fact, I believe that term derives from an issue of Izzard.

You mean, they all sleep hanging by their feet, and piss from that position without fully waking up?

No?

But T said that's what fruitbats do....

T: wonderful description of Stephen King's speed. (I remember when Crays were considered fast computer -- so fast that they allegedly required three HALT instructions in a row in order to stop.)

Posted December 24, 2003 4:40 PM by CHip

I'd write if I had time. I guess we'll never know. One day it'll run out and it won't matter.

Every so often I've forced the time to be there, and some of those times I've batted something out that I showed to people who enjoyed it, and when I've sent it out, it came back, and that was it.

For the last couple of years, I've been trying to get organized to send some cartoons out. I could do the creative stuff, but I'm a terrible agent.

Posted December 24, 2003 5:30 PM by Kip W

Something to add to the list, maybe:

"How can you reject it? Don't you know who I am??"

Applies more to the authors I see submitting papers to my office (I work for a scientific journal) than for novels perhaps, but could be a crossover.

Posted December 24, 2003 5:38 PM by Adam Lipkin

Sadly, sane, except for the fact that I have this writing Jones that keeps throwing ideas into my head which I feel bound to submit to publishers even when they reject those words. Hurts worst when the rejected submission is the first part of what became a series. However, that's what you get for writing even when it's not like anything you've ever read, yet there's got to be something out there like it already. Isn't there?

Posted December 24, 2003 5:44 PM by Dave Kuzminski

TNH:My first novel took a long time to write, but now that I92ve been through the process and gotten my feet under me, the rest should go much faster.

I found that once I figured out how to finish them, they all proceed at approximately the same pace (for me, it's ~1500 wpd. I know people who write much, much faster than that, of course). The trick is actually getting the butt in the chair and doing the ~1500 wpd. They pile up a lot faster than you'd think.

But it does seem that each writer has a more or less consistent rate at which he or she puts words on paper, and attempting to vary that rate either up or down for other-than-negligible periods of time has Consequences.

Of course, fire, floods, divorce, acts of god(z), crying babies, neurotic cats, armed insurrections, and rewrite requests can all have an impact on that.

Jazz:You know, I wasn't under the delusion that I'm the only person that gets that kind of tough love from white pieces of paper, but I have to admit that it's nice to know it goes all the way up to the top.

And somebody also mentioned the acceptance of what a friend of mine calls the "I Suck week" as a hazard of the profession. I think it's more than a hazard of the profession (the writer's equivalent of tennis elbow?): for me, at least, it's an essential step in getting better. One must acknowledge the suck to improve away from it.

I believe, in a Zen sort of thing, that one must have "I suck" and "I rock" both at once--as someone noted above, the I suck keeps one working to get better instead of stagnating, and the I rock keeps one's head out of the oven.

Posted December 24, 2003 6:48 PM by Elizabeth Bear

John: I must now confess that I just finished the current novel ahead of schedule ... by all of 24 hours!

I will extract that beer from you next time our paths cross, but only on condition that you let me return the favour.

Posted December 24, 2003 8:38 PM by Charlie Stross

Patrick wrote:
"Mitch, we've temporarily run out of Buffy--until they release the sixth season on DVD, at any rate. So we've resorted to methadone."

By "methadone," you mean "Firefly?" The box set's wonderful. Especially the bit where Whedon goes off about French existentialism for an hour while commenting on "Objects in Space."

"Theresa's gone missing."
"Quick, get me the 'Hardware' section of the Lubbock phone book."

Posted December 24, 2003 9:34 PM by Jame Scholl

Here are some of the insane things I've said about book-length manuscripts I've completed in some form or other (several of which were published):

* It's only a contract for the U.S. Air Force, my employer got paid over $1,000,000 but I get no royalties and nobody will ever read it, so forget about it... [spawned sequels]

* It's only a contract for NASA, my employer got paid over $1,000,000 but I get no royalties and nobody will ever read it, so forget about it... [spawned sequels]

* I co-authored this, but a more manically self-promoting author not only paid me my share of the advance, but paid me extra for removing my name as co-author, and he rejected my favorite scenes anyway, so forget about it... [my favorite scenes showed up anyway, it spawned a movie for which I got nothing]

* I co-authored this, but the seriously demented co-author balked at the contract which had the routine clause about either author being able to complete the work if the other dies, and split all proceeds with the other's estate, because he read this as an incentive for me to murder him
[listed by the publisher, but I think he was wacked out enough that it never got published]

* The editor who requested it was Terry Carr, and Robert Silverberg returned it to me when Terry died, but my copy vanished in the mail, and it was the only copy of that version after the diskette messed up, so forget about it...

* My wife liked it (she co-authored) but she thought it too long, so I let her cut it; then the German publisher liked the cut version except wanted it longer; then that publisher stopped buying SF, so forget about it (although Greg Benford vouches for thre astrophysics)

* Several respected editors wrote that they personally liked it, but thought it was over the heads of the typical audience, so forget about it...

* Nobody wants to buy a Hard-Boiled Lord of the Rings, so forget about it...

* Stan Schmidt liked the pitch, didn't like the 9,000 word expanded outline, and then independently Bill Gibson and Charles Sheffield wrote something else with an identical premise, so forget about it...

* I got the $2000 for signing, the editor didn't like the draft, SFWA arbitrated, and I got to keep the $2,000 in return for giving up on the next $6,000 for delivered and final, and now its obsolete, so forget about it...

* It correctly predicted the fall of the USSR; correctly predicted the missing tons of Communist Party gold; but Russian history then diverged from the novel, and I'm not known for alternate history, so forget about it...

* It's 3/4 done ["Axiomatic Magic"], pitchable as "Harry Potter meets A Beautiful Mind", but I'm bogged down on the ending, and been away from it for too many months...

* Too cryptic, except for Theodore Roethke fans, so forget about it...

* The guy who allegedly had the deal with the infomercial producer got screwed in a big divorce trial, and so the video will not be done, and the book that goes with it is orphaned, so forget about it...

* It's at least 3/4 done, but I don't have an agent who can sell a Self-Help book, let alone one with graphs in it, and I don't expect to write in this genre again, so forget about it...

My wife despairs about my getting done or nearly done on these few thousand pages, and not harvesting the money. I admit that, but find it SO much easier to start writing a new book than sell or do final rewrite on an old one...

And it's SO much easier to post directly on the web, as I've already done for some 5,000,000 words (in writing terms, i.e. 30,000,000 alphanumeric characters), so who needs publishers?

Posted December 24, 2003 9:42 PM by Jonathan Vos Post

Teresa writes:
Elizabeth, sex scenes and fight scenes: I'd have said they're similar because in order to be good, they have to be planned out and written even more carefully than the rest of the text; but I swear, half the time you'd think the author wrote them by typing as fast as possible, with both eyes closed and their face turned away from the screen.

Guilty!

Well, insofar as my one and only sex scene so far goes. I've yet to have anything like a fight scene (not counting arguments), and I don't think it'll give me the same willies.

Also, my sex scene mentions no actual acts of sex. This is because I was too busy trying to write with my eyes closed and as fast as possible, which at my typing speed is fairly fast.

Now the kicker?

I used to moderate rec.arts.erotica.

No. Really.

Posted December 24, 2003 11:24 PM by Tina

And now, in bass-ackwards sense:

I went down the list and was... vaguely pleased, I suppose, to find very little in the way of my own thoughts on it. Except possibly being somewhat guilty of number one and three.

But I think I'm justified in number three, in that, in a sense, it took me 20 years to write my first book, counting from the very first time I ever tried to write a novel all the way up until the very first time I completed one, albeit a totally different one. :)

(Looked at in another sense, it took me 7 or 8 years to write that first one, as its an outgrowth of some prior RPG plots I GMed. Looked at in the probably most realistic sense, it took me two months to get the background and outline settled and 34 days to write the actual first draft, as opposed to book number 2, which took me about a month of pre-writing, a false start that involved scrapping most of 9 chapters after about five months, and then about 45 days to actually write the now-finished draft, which means I slowed down a LOT.)

(On the other hand, I wrote book #3 in 30 days. Hooray for NaNoWriMo.)

(I'm not counting editing time here, though, so maybe I'm being disingenuous. Counting editing time, beta reading, and the real calendar passage of time, book #1 is technically not done at 14 months, though it damn well will be done by the end of the year if it kills me.)

(Now I am done boring you with my needless parenthetical remarks.)

I am afraid I will suffer the second addendum point, however. Probably about 22 seconds after mailing my first query out.

Posted December 24, 2003 11:34 PM by Tina

Jennie: OK, I give up. What's TeX?

Posted December 25, 2003 12:00 AM by Robert L

TeX (and a variant, LaTeX) is a typesetting language, very useful for math formulae. I'd characterize it as partway between a markup language and actual code; other's opinions may vary.

I used to use it to typeset academic books. My current business uses it to create GIFs of formulae to be displayed on the web, in a roundabout fashion (SGML code -> LaTeX code -> dvi -> ps -> GIF).

Posted December 25, 2003 12:07 AM by Tina

James D. Macdonald:
My books need copyediting, surely. However, the amount that they may be improved by a good copyedit is only a small percentage of how much damage a bad copyedit will do to them.
Why risk it?

Well, that really depends on you, doesn't it? This I can say: I have found any number of things that I am supposed to keep confidential, that would have been very embarrassing to the author had they made it into print.
And if what doesn't get caught is potentially libelous, or is something quoted without permission, the harm to the author can be very great indeed.
On the other hand, if the [in your opinion, which may very well be correct] bad copy editor does things to your book you don't like (and I've certainly had to clean up such situations many, many times), there's a marvelous little device on the end of a pencil called an eraser. Or you could do like one author i know and actually have a little rubber stamp that says "STET" made up. A bit of extra labor, but problem solved.

Posted December 25, 2003 12:16 AM by Robert L

For whatever it's worth, my first book took several years to write, but my second one only took six months. So number three was actually true for me.

Posted December 25, 2003 1:05 AM by Rachel Brown

By "methadone," I meant Angel.

Posted December 25, 2003 10:53 AM by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Guilty on a number of counts, but for the most part only in thoughtcrime. (Lots of thoughtcrime, lots and lots of thoughtcrime....)

Rather than the "I Suck" Syndrome, my own stumbling block might be better termed "Salieri Syndrome." I think I'm a "good" writer, with occasional strayings into "very good" territory.

But I want to be more than just good. And those occasional "very good" stories were the ones that seemed to write themselves, almost like I was channeling some ancient High Priest of Atlantis who wrote peachy-keen sci-fi on the side.

I want to be Mozart, not Salieri, dammit!

(And would those writers who seem to be the Mozarts of SF please stop making it look so EASY!, thank you very much.)

Posted December 25, 2003 11:11 AM by Bruce Arthurs

Calling TeX a "typsetting language" is generous ... kind of like calling Windows an "operating system".

Posted December 25, 2003 11:14 AM by Alan Bostick

PNH: By "methadone," I meant Angel.

Harrumph. "Angel" is a fine show in its own right, especially the early episodes with Doyle in them -- the show never quite recovered from his departure, although it is still a fine show.

One area where "Angel" is superior to "Buffy" is that "Angel" has almost no Buffy in it. "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" is one of many TV shows where the eponymous character is the least interesting one of the regular ensemble.

Posted December 25, 2003 2:25 PM by Mitch Wagner

Alan, seeing as how I spent well over a year using it to typeset dozens of textbooks, and the company in question had been doing it for years (and did it for years after I left), I don't think calling it a typesetting language is 'generous'. Simply 'accurate'.

I won't start an OS war here, but I will say that just because you don't like the way something works doesn't mean it doesn't work.

Posted December 25, 2003 2:48 PM by Tina

Alan -

TeX is in sober truth of fact a Turing-complete programming language; people have (for whatever reasons of mad whim) written BASIC interpreters in it.

It is also the case that for many years, Donald Knuth gave cash prizes to people who found bugs in his code. Exponentially increasing ones.

This is a standard of commitment to coding quality that I don't think anything else can match.

Relentless form/content separation and complete disdain for graphical tools and all, TeX does work, and works very well. (As do the LaTeX/TeTex/MikTeX etc. macro toolsets built on top of it.)

Posted December 25, 2003 4:34 PM by Graydon

I'm not sure how the Buffy/Angel conversation wound up in this thread, but I will remark that it's interesting to be in the middle of catching up on both shows, and to be hearing at the same time so many people's forceful arguments about what's good, what's crap, where it all went wrong, why it's good anyway, etc.

No doubt I'll have firm opinions when I'm done watching the run of both shows. Meanwhile, all views Noted With Interest. I haven't actually read very much about either of them (although I'm aware of such enterprises as this). One of the most cogent pieces I have read (leaving out the observations about fanfiction, of which I know nothing) is here.

Posted December 25, 2003 4:57 PM by Patrick Nielsen Hayden