General Q & A Session For The Authors
- Thread starter Kilana2
- Start date
I had a day job for the first few years of my writing career, and I worked in a laboratory - sadly, not the cool kind with cyclotrons or dinosaur cloning tanks. When I broke out and went freelance full time, I kept myself afloat by working on a lot of diverse writing projects - not just tie-ins but also original fiction, videogames, scriptwriting, etc. That's worked for me ever since.
All true. If someone wants to get into this gig because they want to be rich and famous, they're in for a shock...
I had a day job as an editor -- first for Library Journal, then for the late Byron Preiss -- my first eight years after graduating college, but I went freelance in 1998 and haven't looked back.
Having said that, I don't just make my living from writing. In the 24 years since I went freelance, my income has derived from fiction writing, freelance editing (including the seven years editing the Trek monthly eBook line), nonfiction writing (including the last eleven years writing for Tor.com), comic book writing, teaching karate to kids (I've been teaching for an afterschool program since 2014, though there was a pandemic-induced hiatus from March 2020 to September 2021), working for the U.S. Census Bureau in 2009-2010, working part-time at a high school from 2010-2011, and other bits and pieces here and there.
Some years, I've made excellent money. Some years I've made almost nothing. It's challenging...
Having said that, I don't just make my living from writing. In the 24 years since I went freelance, my income has derived from fiction writing, freelance editing (including the seven years editing the Trek monthly eBook line), nonfiction writing (including the last eleven years writing for Tor.com), comic book writing, teaching karate to kids (I've been teaching for an afterschool program since 2014, though there was a pandemic-induced hiatus from March 2020 to September 2021), working for the U.S. Census Bureau in 2009-2010, working part-time at a high school from 2010-2011, and other bits and pieces here and there.
Some years, I've made excellent money. Some years I've made almost nothing. It's challenging...
Well, they might get famous...........
I've been doing the freelance thing since 1998, when I quit my day job at Tor Books to write full-time (while remaining a Consulting Editor at Tor). And, yes, it tends to be feast or famine and you don't get by on your book advances alone; it helps to have various sidelines. Besides writing tie-in books, I also do a fair amount of freelance editing (for Tor and other publishers) and have also written copious amounts of cover and jacket copy for other people's books, which is something I've been doing since 1987 or so -- when I used to get paid $80 a book to write the cover copy for men's adult westerns. ("Slocum rode shotgun on the road to trouble!")
As it happens, today's agenda is editing another western.
As it happens, today's agenda is editing another western.
"Adult" in what sense of the word (dare I ask)?
Well, they weren't porn, but there were sex scenes between the shoot-outs and usually a semi-draped woman on the covers. We're talking Slocum, Longarm, The Gunsmith . . . series like that. Men's adventure novels set in the old west, with lots of smoking guns and wanton women.
True story: the only editorial advice I got from the copy chief was that my western copy needed "more clippity-clop." So for the next book I wrote a blurb to the effect that hero "rustles up a whole passel of frolicsome fillies."
This was deemed much better, so I went with "sultry senoritas" on my next assignment.
Last edited:
Hmm. I find myself thinking of the sex in When HARLIE Was One. Which I read as a rather naive high school freshman.
Last edited:
It can even be done with the 1971 World Book Encyclopedia. I speak from experience.
As to doing it on the Internet, well, at least two decades ago, a random HotBot (or maybe AltaVista) search once took me to a very NSFW snuff-porn short story that left me pale and diaphoretic (and not in a good way). And it was festooned with pop-up ads for other porn, and even browser-traps.
Then again, another random search turned up a picture that, in turn, led me to the discovery that German jazz Hammond-player Barbara Dennerlein had branched out from jazz on tonewheels to jazz on real pipes. (And I highly recommend her "real pipes" recordings, particularly Spiritual Movement No. 1 and Spiritual Movement No. 2.) So random searches certainly aren't all bad.
As to doing it on the Internet, well, at least two decades ago, a random HotBot (or maybe AltaVista) search once took me to a very NSFW snuff-porn short story that left me pale and diaphoretic (and not in a good way). And it was festooned with pop-up ads for other porn, and even browser-traps.
Then again, another random search turned up a picture that, in turn, led me to the discovery that German jazz Hammond-player Barbara Dennerlein had branched out from jazz on tonewheels to jazz on real pipes. (And I highly recommend her "real pipes" recordings, particularly Spiritual Movement No. 1 and Spiritual Movement No. 2.) So random searches certainly aren't all bad.
Last edited:
I remember stumbling upon a sex scene in a Trek novel as a (late-)teen and giving me pause. It wasn't graphic or anything, and think it was in New Frontier where there was a lot of sex and nudity, but it felt like a rite of passage at the time. Made me think of Star Trek in more "adult" terms for the the first time.Stumbling onto "adult" sex scenes by accident used to be rite of passage for precocious young readers, or at least it was before the internet.
I had a side gig a bit like that back when I first started out... I was hired to write the back-cover text for translations of Japanese anime, and they always wanted us to lean heavily into the hyperbole - "eyeball-searing action!" "high-octane - with attitude!" "nerve-shredding terror!"
I remember being instructed to make a fantasy novel read like "a cross between CONAN and Barbara Cartland."
As I recall, I wrote something along the lines of: "A fiery swordswoman, Gelina could hold her own against the mightiest warriors of the land -- until she lost her heart to the one man she hated most in all the world!" And so on.
Got paid $90 for that. (SF & Fantasy paid $10 more per book than westerns.)
As I recall, I wrote something along the lines of: "A fiery swordswoman, Gelina could hold her own against the mightiest warriors of the land -- until she lost her heart to the one man she hated most in all the world!" And so on.
Got paid $90 for that. (SF & Fantasy paid $10 more per book than westerns.)
Last edited:
You had me at Hammond; then the real pipes!? Sounds great, thanks a bunch! (And you seem to know a Hammond is a Hammond, and not an organ, too!)
And, authors, thank you very much. I love learning about others’ lines of work! I think this is my favorite thread. Unless someone bumps a tunic color one.
I'm surprised how well it goes. May it be alive a little while longer. Readers tend to come up with new questions as we go along.
Don't be too pleased: I'm the one who first coined the phrase, "Laurens Hammond's Noisome Little Noisemaker™"
When I first noticed the picture (Dennerlein, whom I'd recognized from having thumbed through a coffee table book about jazz artists, playing something that had drawSTOPS instead of drawBARS, and looked like it was probably tracker action, to boot), I emailed her about it (this was back when you could email a celebrity and expect an answer!), and she actually replied, and said that she was working on a "real pipes" album, on a tracker organ. I told her that while Hammonds give me the collywobbles, I would "line up at the truck" for her "real pipes debut" album. She didn't hold my loathing of Hammonds against me, and when Spiritual Movement No. 1 came out (and her U.S. distribution channel promptly dropped her like a rock), I promptly bought a copy through a gray-marketer (it was either that or deal with any import red-tape myself), and subsequently was one of at least two people who lobbied the Organ Historical Society to make it available through the OHS Catalog. Later, when she made her first appearance at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in San Diego, I had the pleasure of meeting her, at which point she autographed the booklet from my SM1 CD.
(Here is a link to one of her videos, a performance of her New York Impressions [with a few more Bach quotations than the version on her Spiritual Movement No. 2 album] on the 1994 Weimbs organ at the Annakirche in Aachen.)
But to move back on-topic, I, too, am fascinated by the authors' answers and anecdotes, not the least because I'm an aspiring novelist myself.
Last edited:
A bit of both, really. You write what the story needs... If it needs showing, show it, if it needs telling, tell it.
Generally good advice. Something lands better with an audience if you can make them experience it rather than just describing it to them. If they realize it themselves from the clues you give them, it's more internalized than if you just tell it to them in words. Like, instead of just saying, "The couple had been happily married for thirty years," show them acting like it, finishing each other's sentences, playfully bickering over old habits, laughing at the barest mention of shared past experiences. Instead of digressing for a paragraph about how an alien city was destroyed by flutronic bombs in the ancient Dingricitan War, describe what the ruins look and sound and smell like to the characters now as they explore the city and realize the weight of the tragedy. Exposition is more effective and engaging if you can ground it in the personal, the emotional, or the visceral, rather than just dry text infodumps.
As an extreme example of telling over showing, I recently re-read a very bad 1990s indie comic in which the main characters' personalities were described in a text column inside the front cover but we were barely shown any of those traits in the entire 4-issue story, so the text column was the only way you'd know what their personalities and backstories were supposed to be. If you're going to give your characters personality, it has to go on the page or on the screen, to inform their actions and interactions in the story.
Similar threads
