A new way to be a writer

My whole life, there has not been much of a market for short stories. It was tough, and, except for the select few, it didn't really pay. For most, short story publication was a gateway to novel publication.

Most short stories that went out were either in collections that were released as books, or in 'zines that were full of short stories. Many of these magazines' websites, when visited, would have down-on-their-luck messages such as that they are no longer paying for stories, because they just can't afford them anymore. Worse were the URLs that simply said there was nothing there. The money wasn't rolling in.

Think about it on the consumer end of things. Unless you're a writing professor, you probably don't know a lot of people that subscribe to these short fiction 'zines. The people running them are doing it out of love, and often out of their own pocket. Until recently, there were more short story writers than short story readers, and that's not a good ratio.

Things seem to be changing now, though, because of three things:

1. The e-reader
2. The e-reader's ability to instantly buy books
3. Quick and free digital self-publishing

With these things in play, writing now has a YouTube-level pass. User-generated content, voted for by other users, has been changing the face of media, and it's about time that the world of writing caught up. Like with YouTube, the world's aspiring writers can flood the market with garbage, and those that know how to please the masses will float to the top. Not to mention, if you're putting out short stories, a $0.99 shorty is an impulse purchase for many Kindle users.

You, as a writer, can do this now, today, and you don't have to ask anyone's permission.

Just like YouTube did not kill television, Kindle Direct Publishing and the such will not kill Simon and Schuster or Doubleday. It is valid media, though, and some of it is really good, believe it or not.

Anyway, that was a lot of lip flapping just to let everyone know that I am, myself, publishing short story series' on Kindle Direct, Pubit and SmashWords.

Are you excited? I am.

This week:

Population Zero #1: Allen's Pact

Marijuana Legality: Law is not about morals

There is a bigger push for making marijuana legal in the United States today than at any previous time of my life (I'm thirty as of yesterday). It's not legal, of course, because the push to keep it illegal is also quite strong. And it's already illegal. It's easier to defend a fort than to storm it.

So let's assume, just for the sake of argument, that marijuana is actually immoral. It's evil, it's a sin, it makes baby Jesus twitch when he thinks about it. Even if I believed this, I still wouldn't push for the illegality of it.

From the standpoint of the real world, anti-marijuana laws are painfully ineffective. Rappers have pictures of themselves holding pot in their hands on their album covers and posters, not to mention videos on YouTube of them using it. There is an annual HempFest in Seattle, where people smoke pot openly, in full view of police. There are stores devoted entirely to marijuana paraphernalia here in the states, with the silly excuse that the items are for smoking tobacco. What exactly are your anti-marijuana laws accomplishing?

The problem is, most people think that the law should reflect what's right. If something is immoral, it should be illegal. If something is okay, don't worry about it. Besides the obvious issue that morals are essentially something that exist in our head, and they are different in different heads, there is the issue that laws don't stop things. They just make them more dangerous.

Let me say something unpopular: I don't like abortions. I think that, after a certain stage of development, fetuses shouldn't be intentionally killed. Sorry 'bout that. At the same time, though, I would be upset if the United States were to repeal Roe v. Wade. As much as I dislike legal abortions, I dislike illegal abortions twice as much. Taking away the clean and safe clinics, we would be pushing desperate teenage girls into an underground of unlicensed medicine, at huge risk.

Laws create undergrounds. If cigarettes were made illegal today, this time next year there would be tobacco kingpins warring with each other all over the country. Since cigarettes are sold at the supermarket, there are no cigarette dealers, no cigarette crackdowns, and no prisons filled with inmates who are in for cigarette-related charges.

We need to look at laws differently. Even if a piece of legislation disagrees with your moral compass, you have to realize that the law is not just a representation of right and wrong. Sometimes making something bad illegal makes the world a worse place, and you have to be strong enough to accept that the world we live in is more important than the righteousness of our laws.

Besides, a little pot never hurt anybody.

NaNoWriMo is a Good Thing

The first time I heard of National Novel Writing Month, it was while reading a book entitled Beyond the Best Seller. I don't know the name of the author, and can't find even used copies of the book at Amazon.com, but I enjoyed it.

The author mentioned briefly that there is a group of writers who pride themselves on writing the first draft of a novel in a single month. Of course, the author goes on to say, that's not too impressive, being that he knows full-time novelists who have turned out a clean finished book in one frenzied night, simply because they had to.

I think the author, however much I enjoyed his book, completely missed the point of NaNoWriMo, and there are many people (very vocal internet people no less) who have missed the point since.

For the uninitiated, NaNoWriMo is a "contest" during the month of November where the entrants strive to writea 50,000 word novel, started on or after the first day of November, and completed on or before the last. That adds up to about 1,667 words a day, every day, including weekends and Thanksgiving.

People who dislike (or mislike, if you've been reading too much A Song of Ice and Fire) NaNoWriMo complain that the novels produced during this time are low quality. They must be low quality, since the only requirement for the contest is to write a certain number of words in a certain time. Theoretically, someone could write the word "moist" (a thoroughly misliked word among female friends of mine) 50,000 times, and win. The bot that checks for victory is basically a word count program, after all.

NaNoWriMo is not about flooding the market with quickly written books, though. Most NaNoWriMo novels will never be sold to a publisher, and that's as it should be, because (you'll know this if you've read as much amateur fiction as I have) most writing is just not that good. Most authors are earlier in the learning process than they think they are, and that's fine. It's the natural order of things.

I think that, whether or not founder Chris Baty knows it, NaNoWriMo is about learning to deal with writer's block. Someone who has successfully written the entire first draft of their book in one month has faced, and defeated, writer's block at least once during that period. Probably several times. Having an "arbitrary guideline" (as the demotivational poster above states) puts you in a place where you cannot give in to writer's block. You have to accept that it can be beaten, or else your story will not be completed.

I find that, at least with myself, the most common motivator to stop writing is fear. Fear that I won't be able to get a scene right, fear that the story is going nowhere, or that I don't have the skill to write it as well as it needs to be written. In my modest experience, there is a fairly simple way to get past these fears.

Just write badly.

Write your scene, or your setting, or your character badly, until you can get to a point you're more comfortable with, and you can always strengthen it when you revise. The knowledge that the first draft can and will be ugly and lopsided and have a funny smell to it can give you a lot of freedom. Freedom to just keep writing, and get down the shape of your conflicts and characters. Later you can bring in the sandpaper and woodstain and make it beautiful on the outside.

NaNoWriMo will also show new authors the wonder that is watching a story unfold before their eyes as they write it. Ending the day's writing in a place that they would have never imagined at the start.

The primary lesson to be learned from participating in NaNoWriMo, I think, is that writing is ten times better than worrying. And participation is ten times better than making snide criticisms from the sidelines.

It's about doing.