A friend recently tipped me off to a limited open invite for a shared world anthology paying pro-rates. The trick was that they wanted a writing sample of your best work, and, as much as my Writers of the Future winning piece still ranks among my best, the anthology is Sword & Sorcery, and “After the Final Sunset, Again” is magic realism.

So I went to the Trunk, meaning stories that I’d written before I decided to switch to writing screenplays and graphic novels. These weren’t “real” trunk stories that had made the rounds already and been rejected everywhere. Rather they were good stories that I decided not to waste time on submitting, because I had moved on from short story writing. I wrote six stories at Clarion West and never even looked at them again. Several stories I’d written since CW had only gone to one or two markets.

The closest thing to S&S that I felt showcased my best work was an Asian-themed Magic & Mechanica piece that was my fourth story at Clarion. I’d always liked the piece, and David Hartwell of Tor (that week’s instructor) said that if I expanded it to novel length, it would probably sell. Thing is, I’m a much better writer now than I was at CW and the story needed work. However, I found out from Steve that the call for submissions had an overwhelming response and that the submission window was probably open for no more than a day, so I stayed up all night and wrote a new draft, and darn it, it turned out pretty well (and won me a spot in the antho. Yay!)

That got me thinking about my other CW pieces. I was pretty down on myself after the workshop ended and hadn’t bothered to look at them again. I even went so far as to throw out the crtis I’d gotten. But I feel like I’m a good enough writer now to see what’s wrong with them and fix them. As much as I’m still committed to writing long, I’m probably going to polish these up and get them into circulation.

Looks like I’m going to be a short story writer, novelist, screenwriter, and graphic novel writer by the end of the year. I’ll be a slog, but with my fingers in so many pies, something’s gotta hit!

Author Dean Wesley Smith Lynn Viehl recently shared her royalty numbers for Twilight Falls, the sixth novel in her Darkyn series, which debuted at number 19 on the NYT Bestseller list.

Here is the first royalty statement for Twilight Fall, on which I’ve only blanked out Penguin Group’s address. Everything else is exactly as I’ve listed it. To give you a condensed version of what all those figures mean, for the sale period of July through November 30, 2008. my publisher reports sales of 64,925 books, for which my royalties were $40,484.00. I didn’t get credit for all those sales, as 21,140 book credits were held back as a reserve against possible future returns, for which they subtracted $13,512.69 (these are not lost sales; I’m simply not given credit for them until the publisher decides to release them, which takes anywhere from one to three years.)

My net earnings on this statement was $27,721.31, which was deducted from my advance. My actual earnings from this statement was $0.

Damn. That’s not a whole lot of cash for a bestselling novel. Kind of puts that dream of living as a full-time writer a little more out of reach… Oh well, we can always pin our hopes of selling lucrative foreign rights

EDIT: With apologies, the post above belongs to author Lynn Viehl. I followed a link to it and relied on the linker’s description, instead of perusing the site more thoroughly to double check who wrote that post.

Tags: Dean Wesley Smith

Okay, so my previous post on first person POV raised some hackles. I must explain.

As Andy LeBlanc theorized, that post came from a deep place of personal hurt. As Managing Editor of Every Day Fiction, I’m exposed to an unending stream of terrible, terrible fiction in the form of a deep slush pile. The “rules” that I mentioned in my previous article were, like any rule, meant to apply to beginning authors only. Masters* are free to break them (at their own peril).

For your convenience, here are a few rules about first person POV for you to break:

1) Your narrator cannot die in the end. Otherwise, who is he telling the story to?
2) There should be no scene breaks in first person POV. What do these mean exactly? Your narrator is taking a cigarette break?
3) No meta-narrative. Imagine you`re standing around a barbecue. Your friend is telling a story. How in heck does he relate the meta-narrative?

Anyone want to fire off a few more?

*Special note to Creative Writing Majors. This is not you. Masters have been published in one of the pros.

Hey guys,

Andrew LeBlanc just passed along this link which contains a transcript of the story meeting held between George Lucas, Steven Speilberg, and Lawrence Kasdan (the writer). It’s a wonderful glimpse into how one of history’s most popular film characters was created, and what thought processes were employed in his creation by some of cinema’s most creative talent.

Mystery Man gets it right when he says that one of the most important insights here is that they started not by plotting out Raiders of the Lost Ark, but by developing Indiana’s character.

Tags: Indiana Jones, Lucas, Spielberg

Got the call today that I’ve been accepted to Clarion West for the class of 2009. I’m incredibly pleased by this. I’d actually applied to both Clarion and Clarion West, but CW was a clear favourite because it’s got awesome instructors, a vibrant writing community in Seattle, and is a short three hour drive across the border. I’m going to arrange for a PACE pass so that I can skip the line-ups there and back.

I’ll be posting my Clarion West Application Essay, so you guys can see what got me in (of course, the fact that the story I submitted with my entry placed 1st in Writers of the Future couldn’t have hurt    ).

Tags: Clarion West