Last week Trish went to book club which meant that, for just one evening, I had to watch the kids all by myself. It was terrifying.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love my kids. They’re astonishingly smart and absolutely adorable, and I have a lot of fun playing with them when I get home from work. But watching them? Taking care of them? Keeping them safe and happy for hours at a time? That’s not my strong suit.

I have a trick, though. Whenever I’m responsible for them for an evening, I drag out that same old trick, and it works every time. So we waved goodbye to Trish, watched her pull out of the driveway and head off down the road, and as soon as she was out of sight we piled into the car and headed to McDonalds.

Getting ’em both fed was still a chaotic challenge, but it ended with a mess that someone else would have to clean up, and I turned the kids loose in the play area to burn the better part of another hour.

The nice thing about that setup is that I wasn’t spending any time worrying about what would come later — whether that was washing dishes or putting away leftovers or figuring out how to entertain the kids. Instead, I spent the whole evening either talking with them, or watching them play. That was fun.

On the drive home, we were doing some more of that talking when Annabelle told me her finger was hurting. She started to cry, “Ow ow ow! It hurts!” and I started trying to figure out what could have happened to her finger while playing at McDonalds.

The promise of a bandaid calmed her down enough to talk, and she told me it had happened earlier. At home. We got home and I applied some Neosporin and a bandaid, and then she danced right off to her bedroom to play.

The next day, I got home from work and Trish said, “Did you see Annabelle hurt her finger?” I nodded, told her the story of it, and she shook her head. “Did you look at it?” she asked. I stared blankly, and she said, “It’s a splinter.”

My heart dropped. Annabelle’s got an awful lot of charms, but sitting patiently through a little home surgery on the pad of her finger wasn’t going to be one of them. We brought her into the kitchen, and Trish started explaining to her what it was.

“A tiny pokey stick, inside my finger?” Her eyes danced, delighted, right up until we started explaining that it really didn’t belong there. And it was going to keep hurting until we got it out.

She jerked her hand out of her mama’s grasp at that, eyes growing wide, and shook her head. “No,” she said. “It’ll be fine.” Then she started to back slowly away, like we were some kind of wild animals. I reached out a hand to calm her, and she turned and sprinted off down the hall, to hide in her room.

So Trish and I exchanged glances. I shrugged. We’d have to deal with it, but we didn’t have to deal with it right then, right? I was tired from a long day at work, and surely it would be a good idea to let the idea sink in a bit before we tried to press the girl on what had to be done. And she didn’t seem to be in a lot of pain….

So I left her playing in her room, left Trish washing the dishes, and I went back to my office to do some Consortium work. An hour or so later I came back to get a drink, and as I was walking toward the kitchen Trish called out a hi to me. Then she said, “Hey Annabelle, tell Dad about your splinter.”

I frowned, curious, and went to meet Annabelle who skipped right up to me, holding her finger proudly aloft. The bandaid was gone. So was the splinter.

“Oh wow,” I said. “Were you a brave girl for Mama? I’m proud of you.”

She shook her head, a big smile on her face. “Nope,” she said. “It’s just gone. I did it.”

I frowned deeper. “How?”

“My magic,” she said. “It even works on my fingers.”

And that was all the answer I got. Magic. It even works on her fingers.

That’s my girl.

Okay, I’ve been mentioning my Master of Professional Writing program left and right, but I want to say up front that full credit for the information in this week’s and next week’s posts goes to Deborah Chester. She’s the professor teaching my Writing the Novel class, and a lot of these ideas come straight out of her lectures.

Next week I’m going to talk to you about “Scene and Sequel,” a concept she first introduced me to back in my Category Fiction class last fall, and one I promised a blog post on way back then. To really get scene and sequel, though, you’ve got to understand her rules for conflict.

Trusting the Technique

Deborah Chester is all about rules-based writing. She likes to say, “Trust the technique.” She considers it the zen of writing. We all get into that swampy middle of the writing process (during NaNoWriMo, we call it “Week 2”), where we totally lose all faith in our stories and our writing ability in general.

Chester’s advice, when that happens, is to trust the technique. Learn it, master it, and when you can’t trust your own judgment, you can at least follow the black-and-white rules, and count on them to bring you safely out the other side.

I don’t want writing to be like that. I want it to be a mystical, inspired art. Somehow that makes me feel more special for getting to have stories. But even as I say that…I believe writing is like that. I believe in the rules. They’re the fundamental promise I made the day I started this blog.

And the story I told about my fantastic writing production even in the grips of la grippe last week…that was all about trusting the technique. That was all about having my ducks in a row well beforehand, and then following through a step-by-step process even when my brain wasn’t working. And it worked.

Setting Up the Scene

So…what are these rules? They’re manifold, but the ones that meant the most to me in my most recent writing escapade were conflict and catastrophe. I’ll start with conflict.

Per Chester, every scene (for a very specific definition of scene, which we’ll get to later) exists as a flurried exchange of stimulus and response (one character speaks or acts, and another character speaks or acts in response, which elicits its own response, and so on). And this stimulus and response is tightly focused around a single conflict. Ideally, it exists between only two characters.

One of these characters is the Scene Protagonist. Often, it’s also the Story Protagonist. (In my recent books, which only have one point-of-view, it’s always the Story Protagonist).

Regardless, the Scene Protagonist starts the scene with a clearly stated goal. There is something he wants — something that can be expressed in a straightforward yes or no question.

• Will he subdue the villain in a fistfight?
• Will he convince the police officer to go along with his daring plan?
• Will he win her heart with a big romantic display?

That’s easy enough. It makes sense. But then the ironclad, black-and-white rules come slamming down. The corollary to the Scene Protagonist with his one, clearly-defined goal, is this:

Every scene has a Scene Antagonist whose goal is precisely the opposite of the Scene Protagonist’s.

That’s your conflict: directly opposing goals.

• It’s the villain who wants to escape unscathed.
• It’s the cop who wants to keep the hero from starting any trouble.
• It’s the girl who would really prefer that this creep just left her alone.

Answering the Scene Question

And there’s a good reason I phrased the protagonist’s goals as yes/no questions. It simplifies the next step.

See…a story is all about progress toward a final goal. But, at the same time, we make that progress by raising the stakes. We make that progress by eliminating options. In other words, stories are kind of unique in that they achieve incredible, heartwrenching progress through the unlikely method of constant setback.

If every scene is built around a yes/no question (will the protagonist achieve his goal), the answer to the question is predetermined.

Unless it’s the very last scene in the book, the answer to the protagonist’s scene question is always “no.”

Simple as that. Well…not really, of course. We spent ninety minutes of lecture one day discussing the nuance. But that’s a fair approximation of it. And not just a “No” most of the time, but a “No, and furthermore….”

Chester’s rule is that every scene ends with a catastrophe. The end of every scene is big and devastating — devastating enough to raise the stakes, to propel the hero to try something he wasn’t willing to try before. Sticking with our quick little trio of examples:

• The villain not only escapes, he knocks the hero unconscious and drags him off to his lair.
• The cop decides the hero is a total loony and throws him in lockup overnight to cool off (risking everything).
• The girl reveals she only agreed to meet with him at all as a chance to present the restraining order.

Catastrophe, on every page! It’s brutal. It’s so mean to these characters we love so much….

Oh, but it works. It works wonders. Come back tomorrow, and I’ll tell you more.

I’m pursuing a Master of Professional Writing degree at the University of Oklahoma. This semester, I’m taking one of the program’s three keystone classes, “Writing the Novel.” It involves two lectures on writing technique every week, but the core of it is the semester project. Over the space of just four months (almost five), I’ have to write thef irst draft of a 50,000-word novel.

That’s where I have to pause and let you chuckle. Just four months? I do that every November!

I thought of it that way coming into the class. I even considered waiting until April and just writing the whole novel then. The professor complicated that a bit, though. Halfway through the semester, she wanted us to turn in the first half of the book. In other words, I had to provide 25,000 words of a new novel — consecutive, formatted in proper manuscript format, and printed out looseleaf — to my professor at 1:30 yesterday afternoon.

As you’ll recall, I spent the first six weeks of the semester rewriting and publishing another novel. During that time I did work in a bit of prewriting — even scribbled down a few thousand words of story — but at the beginning of Spring Break (ten days ago now), I had just a hair over 8,000 words in my manuscript.

Spring Break. It has a good sound to it, but it’s deceptive. I work a full-time job, after all, so most of the time freed up by my Spring Break (four or five hours down in Norman) just went into technical writing for the Federal Government.

Still, that left me ten days to write 17,000 words. That’s 1,700 words a day, which is barely more than the 1,667 needed to finish NaNoWriMo. And I do that year after year, even with the day job. I could do it. I could tear it up. I’m good at writing fast.

But then I caught a cold. Or a flu. Or something vile. It hit me hard the day before Spring Break started. It wasn’t exactly debilitating, but I play everything so close to the line anyway that once something started to trip me up at all…everything came crashing down.

I spent a weekend laid up, trying to rest and regain my strength, knowing I’d have to go back to work (and find writing time) once Monday rolled around. I slept away a Saturday. I missed church Sunday morning (usually one of my most prolific writing times), and spent the afternoon fighting to focus at all. I didn’t get a hundred word written all weekend.

Then Monday I got to work to find out my supervisor was going away on a ten-week leave of absence. Ten weeks. And this less than two months after another of the members of our four-person documentation team had quit unexpectedly. Chaos descended at work, and I waded into it with a sore throat, bleary eyes, and way too little sleep (thanks to the coughing all night).

We had a Consortium Time last Monday night, at my house, but I was barely there. I bailed less than an hour into it, leaving Courtney and Becca to talk storytelling with Trish while I tried vainly to pass out. I didn’t write a word.

Tuesday…I felt no better. And I got to work to find a new emergency, so I was coughing into my elbow and keeping my distance from coworkers even as I tracked them down in the halls to fight a Safety document through our approval process. By the end of the day I was exhausted, totally worn out…and six days away from my deadline, with the full 17,000 words still to write.

So I had a quick dinner with the family, then locked myself in the office with my laptop and a big bag of cough drops. I still couldn’t focus, but I made myself write anyway. I pounded out 6,000 words in one night, and then collapsed onto the futon and did my sad little impression of sleep.

Wednesday went much the same. I spent my lunch break curled up in the back seat of my car, out in the parking lot, trying to catch a quick nap. It didn’t work. I went home, skipped dinner, and then forced my way through the fight scene to end the night with another hard-won 4,000 words.

I didn’t understand the significance until I woke up the next morning. In two days, I’d written 10,000 words. That left just 7,000 more. Not a small number, but things were finally ticking. I could do this. I had four days to do less than I’d managed in two.

I was finally feeling better, too. I wasn’t well yet, but the fever was gone and the headaches were clearing.

I decided at the last moment to take the day off work and finally get myself well. I figured I could spend half the day sleeping, and the other half writing, and by Friday I could go back to work without a worry in the world.

At 10:30 in the morning my laptop died (overheating due to an exhaust fan failure) and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put it back together again. I almost cried. Really, truly.

I did get my rest, and I did feel better on Friday, but I still needed 7,000 words. I went into work, hoping maybe I could get something done on my work computer over my lunch break or something, but we had new emergencies. Closing time rolled around and I went home without a single new word written.

And I went home to a house full of in-laws. I’d like to play that up as another catastrophe, just because it makes the story better, but really they were a blessing. They helped Trish out a lot, after a week I’d spent too sick and distracted to contribute much, and since they were visiting everyone went out Saturday afternoon to a St. Patrick’s Day parade, which left me a whole huge house all quiet. Perfect writing time.

I spent it wrestling with my computer. And coughing. And finally I gave up in frustration and took a nap instead.

That’s how I woke up Sunday morning knowing I had no choice but to write 7,000 before I went to bed. And I still didn’t have a computer to do it. I came up with a plan — borrow the Home Theater PC from the TV in the living room, set it up like a PC on my computer desk, hook it up to a wireless receiver, and write like I did in the old days, pre-laptop.

So I did all that. I’m relatively savvy. I know how to do these things. And I happened to have half a dozen old wireless receivers tucked away in different places in my house. Hah! I spent half an hour setting up my workstation, and turned it on….

And the network connection didn’t work. I ended up having to hack the firmware on an old wireless router, which took me every bit of seven hours (plus a two hour break to watch the kids and grab some dinner). In between tests, waiting for resets, I scratched like mad in my trusty scribblebook, hoping I’d have enough words written when the network was finally available. Hoping it would finally be available. Hoping I’d have time to type them….

It was 9:30 when I finally pulled up Google Docs on the HTPC. I had 18 pages of hand-written story by then. I became a new kind of feverish, fingers flying while I transcribed, and it was just turning 11:00 when I finally got to the end of that 18th page.

And pulled up my word count.

23,517.

I wanted to cry. Really, truly. But I didn’t. I looked over at Trish, sleeping peacefully in our big comfy bed. I looked at the clock on my computer screen. I took a deep breath and let it out.

And then I wrote 2,000 more words on nothing but willpower. Less than an hour. I introduced one of the coolest characters I’ve ever written. I double-crossed my hero with his only friend in a foreign world. I laid a trap and I beat up a Dreamwarden and I turned a girl into a giant copper scales.

It’s not the most writing I’ve ever done in a day. It’s not the best writing I’ve ever done. But it’s the most victorious I’ve ever felt. 17,000 words in six days, the last 7,000 in three short hours.

I’m a superstar. No denying it. I did have help, though. Come back Thursday, and I’ll tell you a few of my newest tricks.

This week I’m describing how Consortium Books makes books. In yesterday’s post I talked about the setup — acquisitions, editing, layout, and design. Today I want to talk about production and distribution.

Publishing

In the olden days, the  “publishing” bit involved taking an edited manuscript, typesetting it, offsetting it, then running tens of thousands of copies and slapping glue-smeared covers on them. These days, it involves downloading a file from one website and uploading it to another.

Well…not entirely. There’s still a “printing” phase, but that’s what CreateSpace is for. And there’s a lot more to that “downloading a file from one website” part than it may first appear.

The website in question is one I’ve mentioned here a time or two: BookMaker. It’s a custom, web-based program (written in Python) which my friend Toby wrote for the Consortium. As I said yesterday, it can take one of our project folders in Google Docs, read its contents, and then package them together into an e-Book.

An “e-Book” in this case might be either ePub format (for use on the Sony Reader, iPad, Kobo, Nook, etc.), or the AZW filetype of MobileRead’s mobi format (just for the Kindle).  So, yes, if I wanted to e-publish Ghost Targets: Restraint, all I’d have to do is open the BookMaker site in my browser, log in, and then click the “Download” link under ePub and it would be done.

But for it to make a clean copy, I’ve got to make sure all the files in the project folder are set up properly — otherwise BookMaker’s going to stumble over a misplaced apostrophe and the whole thing will come crashing down.

So that’s my job as the publisher. I do it during layout when I crawl back and forth the manuscript’s HTML code to make sure it still looks the way the writer wants, but it’s all going to validate to XHTML. I do it when I build the project folder in the first place and make sure all the files are properly named. I do it when I update the metadata file to include a link to the cover art image.

And, of course, Toby gets the largest share of the credit. He made this program out of nothing. Without BookMaker, we’d have thirty or forty hours of formatting work to do, minimum, just to get a passable e-Book out of a finished draft manuscript. With BookMaker, and with a little careful setup along the way (maybe an hour or two per project), it does end up as simple as “downloading a file from one website.”

Distribution

I’m not going to talk about the publishing process for print-on-demand e-Books, because that’s the least interesting part of the process. It’s the same thing we’ve all been doing for decades. I pull the copy off Google Docs and into a Word document, and then format it in Word until it’s page-perfect, and then print it to a PDF.

Either way, once the books’ files are made distribution is as simple as setting up project pages at CreateSpace and KDP, uploading them, and clicking “Publish.” I talked about those processes last week, so I won’t go into a bunch more detail here, except as it relates to Marketing and Promotion.

Marketing and Promotion

As I described in that article on KDP, the trick to successful indie e-publishing is hitting the Amazon bestseller lists. Some of the biggest names in indie publishing (don’t laugh, that’s a real thing) insist that paying for ads anywhere is a waste of time.

Amazon is ad space. It’s the most important ad space, and it’s free. The trick is to get that ad right, and everything else will take care of itself. So when we’re putting together a project page, we spend a lot of time designing the message the book’s Amazon product page is going to create.

And a lot of those elements actually get designed much earlier in the process. The most important ones are the book’s cover image (which has to be visually-striking, has to properly categorize the book to the right audience, and has to look good at thumbnail size), and the brief product description.

I already told you that our Director of Art, Becca, is responsible for cover art (and the amazing Amy Nickerson does the final cover design). We’ve also got Joshua Unruh acting as our Director of Marketing, so the product descriptions are his job.

He’s also responsible for the third critical element in hitting that bestseller-list snowball: product categories. Each book gets to be assigned two categories (out of dozens of potential options), and choosing those categories determines which bestseller lists the book is eligible for, and which audiences Amazon will market it to.

That can be a challenge — especially for a book like Gods Tomorrow, which has elements of a dozen major categories, but doesn’t really fit neatly into any one of them. The market requires it, though. As a publisher, our only option is to pick the two best-fit categories, and hope everyone else finds it through word-of-mouth.

There are other tricks, other parts of the process, and I’m sure other contributors that I’ve left out. For one, I’ve said almost nothing about the role of the author in this — but then, I spend another 51 weeks every year talking about that process. I figured the publishers deserved one week of dedicated time.

Still, let me know if I missed anything, or if I’ve raised any other questions. I’d be happy to answer them in the comments.