Recently author/podcaster Tee Morris’s wife Natalie died unexpectedly, leaveing Tee struggling with the personal and financial burden that comes with the sudden death of a loved one. I don’t know Tee well enough to give you any more details, but I can tell you all that Tee Morris started this whole podcasting fiction thing. He was the first. He has been a pioneer in making the internet one of the greatest tools at the disposal of writers everywhere.

I’ve mentioned The Survival Guide to Writing Fantasy on my blog before and I can again recommend it for Tee’s interview skills, insights and slightly strange sense of humour. Tee gives all of this stuff away for free, and now he’s in need of some help from the community he was a big part of starting.

That’s us.

So here’s what I want you to do. Go to the widget at the bottom of this post (when I do another post I’ll repost it there) that says Chip In or go to the Chip In page to help Tee out with the immediate costs he’s going to have to deal with. I say immediate costs because there is also going to be a trust fund set up for his daughter, but he will need help now.

Once you’ve donated, post a comment for me so I know when and how much you’ve chipped in and at the end of each month (Up until April) I’ll select someone at random and buy them one of Tee’s books from Book Depository. They ship free anywhere in the world, so feel free to enter no matter where you are.

You get an entry no matter how small an amount you donate.

It sucks when bad things like this happen, but we can all help out a little, and as a community, help out a lot.

Go to it.

****UPDATE**** If you want to keep the amount to yourself, I don’t mind at all. Just let me know you donated and I’ll put your name in the hat!

I have new review up, and if you’re an author looking to make a living getting published, you need to check it out here.

This is the first book I’ve given a 10/10 score to, because of the huge impact this one book can potentially have on your career.

I’m afraid last month, I was made of failure.

I got just over 28,000 words. If I hadn’t been aiming for 50,000 then I would have called that a good month, but I fell off the writing wagon. I spent exactly one minute on self pity, then I let that go, because despite the fact that I didn’t hit my goal I still got a lot out of that month.

What’s more, as a result November and NanoWriMo are going like you wouldn’t believe. I’ve averaged 2,022 words per day and I don’t think things would be going nearly as well. Of course not all of Novembers current happiness is down to my abject failure in October. I’ve also got a few other bloggers to thank for actually getting my act together.

First up, Carrie Heim Binas has an excellent writing advice blog. If you’re doing NanoWriMo, then you owe it to yourself to go and check out Heim Binas Fiction.

You probably all know Mur Lafferty of I Should Be Writing, but if you don’t and you need a kick in the pants to inspire you, an intelligent mind to advise you or some of the best interviews available online to keep you interested in writing then I Should Be Writing is the place to go.

Want to know just how good a podcasted novel can be, then go check out JC Hutchins’ website and join the clone army. His novel 7th Son: Descent has just gone into print, and it’s beyond good. If you go to the site, you can listen to the whole thing for free. While you’re there check out Project 777 for a good cause that gets you goodies while you’re at it.

I need to get back to work, but if you’re floundering on your novel, or you just want to see some damn good blogs, go check out the authors above, you won’t be sorry.

JC Hutchins’ book 7th Son: Descent is out.

This makes me happy.

Not just because it’s good (it’s superb), not just because he’s got a damn snazzy website (although it is pretty damn snazzy), but because any new author trying to make it in the business should take a look at JC Hutchins’ way of doing things.

Hutchin’s has taken the “give it away free first” model and run with it. On his website you can literally try the novel before you buy it, listen to a prequel written just for 7th Son (which is awesome in its own right) and fill yourself up on all the juicy details your infovorous* minds can handle.

You can do all of that at his site jchutchins.net.

This means you (and by you I mean “me too”) can whip yourself up into a state of frenzy for the story before the book even reaches the shelves. 7th Son: Descent is so good that I think it would have done well even without all of the online attention that JC Hutchins’ media savvy/general awesomeness has generated, but combining its quality** with a genuinely inspired approach to new media and internet marketing will push this book through the roof. It’s not a novel for the faint of heart, but Hutchins’ writing grabs hold of your eyeballs from the very first sentence.

You can try this novel without spending any money. You can avail yourself of delicious details on JC Hutchins’s website, and you can check out Hutchins’ other (spooky) novel Personal Effects: Dark Art while you’re at it.

What are you still doing here?***

* I have Tycho Brahe of Penny Arcade Comics to thank for the word infovore, which I’ve twisted into infovorous. Making up words is fun, even if you’re not the first to think of it…

** Yes, no matter how great your marketing/website/interview style is your book still has to be good. JC Hutchins is a very very good writer and he’s platformed the rest of his stuff from that. Bear that in mind.

*** I would consider it a personal favor if you purchased 7th Son: Descent because novels like this should be encouraged and nothing encourages writers more than being paid for their good work.

I’d like you to fast forward yourselves to the end of November.

You, sweaty and stained as if you’ve just emerged from a coal mine, are stared at a pile of printed paper. You choke back some tears and wonder about having another coffee. You silently curse and praise NanoWrimo at the same time.

You’re looking at your novel.

50,000 words in just one month, it’s an incredible achievement, one that you can brag about for months. Your future self reaches out to stuff the first three chapters and a query letter into an envelope. Printed on the front of this envelope is the address of your favorite literary agent*.

I want you step out of the time stream and punch your future self in the back of the head. As your unsuspecting, caffiene ravaged clone falls to the floor for the first rest they’ve had in ages I want you to take all of the envelopes addressed to agents and burn them.

Of course all this flitting about the time stream may bring about the end of the world, but it’ll be worth it to stop your future self from sending those chapters, or worse, whole novels out to agents they respect. Why is that?

You can’t write a saleable novel in thirty days.

You can get a first draft. You might even get a full length first draft but there is no way that you’re going to be able to get a proffesional standard, agent ready draft in thirty days. I know there are rumours of super ninja authors that can do it, but that’s not us. I think  you should do NanoWriMo, but you must keep in mind that if you think, even for  second, that you’re going to be able to get out a full sized novel (80,000 plus words) and make it professionally acceptable in a month you’re kidding yourself.

This goes double if you have any kind of a life outside writing.

So save the universe our potentially damaging trip to the future. Set the idea in your head that your NanoWriMo novel is a first draft, and when you’ve recovered from November’s insanity you’ll keep working to make it good…

Not just finished.

*You researched your agents and have found a favorite that fits with your novel and genre…right?

Serial Agent Pimp Nathan Bransford (I love coming up with titles for people, it’s going to get me in trouble sooner or later) has finished the mammoth task of reading 2,500 plus entries and come up with a short list of ten finalists.

I’m not one of them.

I’m not bitter about this at all, for starters the ten finalists have some up with some excellent first paragraphs, I want to know what happens next in their stories. The other reason I’m not bitter is that if I couldn’t handle losing out in an online blog contest, I’d have no business at all being a writer.

Rejection and failure are all part of this writing business. You will be rejected, your masterpiece will go unappreciated and often unread, you will lose contests, you will be hunted down by pitchfork wielding peasants.

Actually that last one’s just me.

My propensity for attracting lynch mobs aside, every writer goes through both internal and external rejection. Luck plays a huge role in any creative endeavour, especially publishing. Even if you get an agent or a publishing deal, there is no guarantee your book will sell.

There are a few things that can get you through the down times:

Persistence:

Don’t quit. If you stop writing your chance of being published instantly drops to zero. The more you write, the better your writing will get and the better chance you will have of being the person who’s in the right place at the right time. We all know that J K Rowling got rejections before Harry Potter made her one of the richest women in the world.

Flexibility:

You might have to make some changes. None of us really like changing our stuff, after all we’ve written it, edited it (you did edit it didn’t you?*) and loved it, surely it’s golden?

No. Not even a maybe.

It could well be that your book just hasn’t found the right agent yet, but if you’ve hit up every agent that handles your genre and there are still no bites, there could be something that needs changing. You need to be open to the idea that you can change your book, even if it means a re write or even starting a whole new story. be stubborn about keeping writing, not about making changes.

That leads us to…

Objectivity:

Take a week off from your story, take two. The go back and read it like you just paid twenty dollars for it at Borders. You’ll see mistakes there that you never thought you could make. The key at this point is not to ignore those mistakes. You read books, lots of books**, so you know how a good book should feel. If your story doesn’t feel that way, you will need to be honest about that with yourself and make the changes.

Equally valuable is bringing in some outside objectivity. Recently Julie Butcher*** of Wordathon fame took some time out of her ridiculously busy schedule to give me some feedback on my writing. I took the notes she gave me and decided that my second chapter needed a complete re write. If Julie hadn’t been kind enough to give me that feedback I probably wouldn’t have changed it.

Enjoy Yourself Damn It

It’s really easy to get caught up in how hard writing is. It’s really hard, some days are a horrible mockery of a happy existence. It doesn’t matter. I love writing, I’m happiest when I’m tinkering with my stories, and like cold pizza and sex, even when it’s pretty bad, it’s still pretty good.

If writing does nothing but fill you with pain, why are you still doing it? There is no guarantee that you will get published, and even then no guarantee that you will sell enough books to make a decent living, or even a living at all. Obviously we all want to be published and have so much money that Dan brown turns green with envy, but we have to be able to enjoy the process of getting there as much as we dream of fame and fortune.

Fame and fortune may never arrive. I honestly believe that with enough work and a little talent, anyone can get published if they keep at it, but real success is often down to luck. If that fame and fortune never arrives I want you to be able to look back on every minute you spent writing and say “It was worth it anyway.”

* Didn’t you?!

** Your writing will be better for doing more reading.

*** Julie is the busiest person in the world and still cranks out excellent writing, helps with charity events, organises wordathons, raises six kids and plots daring cupcake escapades. If she can find the time to write so can you.

I have a new reivew up of Larry Brook’s book 101 Slightly Unpredictable Tips for Novelists and Screenwriters.

First 10/10 review on this site, so I think you should go and check it out.

Genre fiction is a funny beast. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing science fiction, fantasy, crime or horror; sooner or later one of your characters is going to do something that you the author doesn’t have the faintest idea about.

For most (but not all) of us the big thing that we write about that we haven’t actually done is killing. My main character isn’t a killer by nature but by the end of my novel his body count is in the double digits. This was a problem for me because I’ve never been there. I know how to fight; I’ve spent a lot of time studying martial arts, I’ve fought in the ring and I was a nightclub bouncer for a few years.

But I’ve never killed anyone.

There’s a big difference between knowing how to throw a punch and knowing what it’s like to take a life. Short of actually killing someone (please don’t) writing authentically about killing takes some research. I’ve hit the books, researched online and spoken to the few soldiers I know about their experiences.

I’ve learned a few things. The first thing I learned was that no one kills without there being consequences. Killing, even for those trained to it, always costs the killer. Even sociopaths and psychopaths are affected by it, albeit differently from the rest of us.

It’s those effects on the psyche that authors need to pay attention to. The technical details on how to kill are everywhere online and in books (some of them are wrong too). We can be as creative as we like with the death itself but our research needs to include the psychological cost of killing, because if our hero doesn’t feel anything when they kill another person, then they’re not the hero anymore.

The best book I’ve found so far is called On Killing by Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman. You’ll learn things you never wanted to know about humanity and the cost of killing, but your story and your characters will be stronger for it.

Every death has a consequence, even when it’s just fiction.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m utterly unqualified to give advice on writing. It doesn’t stop me trying too mind you, but the qualifications to do so are not present.

To make up for this I try to link to people who are qualified to give you the good oil on writing. Bob Mayer is one of those people. He’s had forty books published, been  a Green Beret, taught writing at multiple university and has a dog named Cool Gus.

Now that’s being qualified to give advice. He current runs the Warrior Writer course and can be found dispensing sage advice and talking about his dog right here.