I want to thank everyone for the great advice on dealing with heat when as sensitive to it as I am. I learned more on how to deal with heat because of this event than I have in the last thirty-five years. And now I’m old enough to remember as well. (I hope…)  Thanks!  And special thanks to Randy for the Kool-Breeze scarf. I’m buying more of those things. Nifty.

I have spent most of this week on two major tasks: Sorting massive numbers of vintage medical books in a storage unit and spending as many hours as my brain could stand on tutorials to learn PhotoShop and InDesign and other Adobe Suite products. Lynda.com is a fantastic site, well worth the $25.00 per month while I learn these programs for this new computer.

Back in the Pulphouse days of 1987-1994, we designed and laid out everything on a MacPlus with extra 20K hard drives and PageMaker. These new programs are just flat amazing. Powerful and detailed does not begin to describe them. Great fun, but three hours of listening to a tutorial and working the program at the same time on a second screen can turn a brain to complete mush. I know, I know, they are not needed for this modern world of publishing. There are easier programs. I know, since in the New Tech workshop next month we are teaching writers how to do covers in about an hour. Just call this desired to learn powerful programs a hobby for the moment before I fire back into writing the next book.

And thanks for all the nice comments on the fiction. I really wasn’t fishing for comments or reviews, just didn’t think anyone had been reading them. If I had just checked my numbers once-in-a-while for hits to this site, I would have known that was not the case. Getting hits here is not why I do this stuff, so I never think to check it.  Thanks for all the nice comments. Much appreciated. And as you can tell, the fiction on Thursday is back.

And next week I’ll start announcing when WMG Publishing gets up some new stories of mine, and also when I have pub dates for the big thriller next spring. Sort of a regular weekly post since I have so much short fiction in my backlist to get up and out for readers to find again. I might even dig up one of my earliest stories called “The Sexual Voyage of the Starship Shirley” and get it back in print. That was published way back in the old days of OUI Magazine. A really strange look at science fiction conventions. As Scott Carter said in his post, this is a wonderful time to be a writer.

Back soon.

The Ghost of the Garden Lounge

The special jukebox inside the Garden Lounge takes a listener back through time to the memory from a song. But sometimes that memory can be deadly for the time traveler. And time-loops do exist, even in the Garden Lounge.

Available in all electronic formats on Smashwords, Kindle, and Scribd.

Published by WMG Publishing.

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THE GHOST

OF THE GARDEN LOUNGE

Dean Wesley Smith

Copyright 2010 by Dean Wesley Smith

I tucked my hands inside my bar apron in a useless attempt to cut down the wind chill.  The cold December wind cut across the open meadow to my right and through the dark pine trees above me, driving small crystals of snow into my face.  In the on-again, off-again moonlight I could see the figure ahead moving through the brush.  His name was Pete Hansen.  Tall and thin, with broad shoulders and short-cut blond hair that almost shone in the dim light.  Tonight, he didn’t seem to even notice the cold or the wind.  I suppose it was because he knew he was about to die again.

He led and I did my best to keep up through the brush on what seemed to be no more of a trail than a deer path.  Ahead, through the cutting howl of the wind I could hear the seasonal song, White Christmas, echoing faintly through the trees and the wind.  I had come back in time six years with Pete to the exact place he was when the song started for him.

With my old jukebox, time traveling back to memories always worked that way.  And the song playing the memory for Pete was White Christmas sung by Bing Crosby.  White Christmas brought us back six years to the night Pete died.

At the moment, with the snow taking small bites out of my face and numbing my hands, a white Christmas was not what I was wishing for.

I glanced quickly around.  Nothing but the dark forest of Northern Idaho, an open, snow-covered meadow barely visible in the moonlight, and a ghost.  Or at least a man who was about to become a ghost again.  And I was here following the soon-to-be-ghost because he had asked me to.

He had asked me to see how he was killed.

Begged was more like it.

I could think of about a thousand things I would rather have been doing on Christmas Eve.

—

(for the entire story go to Dean’s Stories)

And now, in a great blog post, she does a great job of describing the different forms of tackling a manuscript in rewrite and the problems she sees with each form of rewriting.  Note that she agrees with me that it is hard and takes skill to rewrite, but note she also says she has done rewriting. Again, every writer is different.  Take a look at what she has to say at MadGeniusClub. Worth your time to read, trust me. Then come back if you have questions and we can talk.

Professional writer Scott William Carter did a fantastic blog called The Ten Reasons Why This is the Best Time to be a Writer. I could not have said it better if I had worked at it and did a hundred rewrites.  Fantastic post, worth the read.

First off, a sort-of failed experiment.  I tried posting a free story every week for about seven weeks this summer and got one comment privately about them, so figured no one was reading them. So when I went fishing into my little trip to heat exhaustion, I decided to just drop the free weekly story. Putting a story up for a week seemed like a good idea at the time, but it clearly hadn’t worked.

Then yesterday someone at our lunch actually asked what happened to the free Thursday story. For the moment the answer is “gone with the summer.”  I’ll see in the future. Maybe a serialized novel. Maybe I’ll bring the short fiction back. We’ll see.

New post in the  New World of Publishing series that I started this summer coming in the next day or so. Things are shifting so fast in publishing, it’s hard to even land on a topic to talk about in that series.

I’m nearing the end of Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing. The book is almost 100,000 words long and I don’t want to do what Kris did with her Freelancer’s Guide which topped out at around 200,000 words. I’d rather start a second book. Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing Again. Or something like that.

By the way, Kris tells me that the monster Freelancer’s Guide is almost done and being proofed and such. Getting that book will be worth every penny to any freelancer. And I know she’s going to be sending it free to those who donated while she was writing it. It will also be a trade paperback at some point. A very large one. (grin) She also finished a new and wonderful Diving into the Wreck universe novel called City of Ruins. And this summer she also finished a brand new Kristine Grayson funny romantic fantasy novel which is also wonderful. I think both are coming out next year. Watch her site at www.kristinekathryrusch.com for ongoing details on all three books.

I spent my summer on the writing side doing a large science fiction/fantasy novel that I can’t talk about because it was a ghost project. But let me just say it was a great deal of fun. I took less money than I normally do for writing it because it was so much fun. Now I’m back on the next thriller under a pen name. And no word on the book I wrote in the early spring coming out anytime soon. I might be able to tell you all about that one if it happens.

However, I have a deal with WMG Publishing, a new publisher, to bring out all my short fiction backlist in e-book format and also a number of collections in both e-book and trade paperback format. Also next year sometime I’ll have out a large thriller set in the world of gambling  and poker under the name Dean Edwards. I’ll announce that this winter as it gets closer.

Except for the problems making it to Writers of the Future in LA a couple weeks ago, this has been a fun summer. Lots of work, lots of learning new stuff.

This fall a lot of writing and learning and a few workshops in October. Great fun. Stay tuned.

Go read it right here.  Worth the time, trust me.

This chapter will follow that chapter in the book, so what I am saying here will build on that. Please go read it first.

Okay, this chapter came about because of an exchange in the comments on the last chapter about not worrying about writing what is hot, just write your own stuff. It suddenly became clear to me that when Heinlein and others, including me, tell writers to not rewrite, there is an assumption that without rewriting, the manuscript is sloppy and full of errors.

Or flipped over, new writers and many professional writers and I’m sure most non-writers think that to make a clean manuscript, it must be rewritten a number of times.

This is, of course, just silly because no writer is the same. All of us work differently. (I’m going to be saying that a great deal in this chapter.)

If a so-called professional writer turns in a sloppy manuscript full of errors, they are not being professional. But that does not mean they must rewrite beyond a fix-typos draft. Let me try to explain how that works.

First some background about the very, very general types of professional selling writers.

1) Rewriters. This type of professional writer usually does a fast first draft, usually thin, then goes back in second and third and more drafts layering in more and more and more story and detail and everything. This type of writer is called an adder-inner and the drafts are done with creative voice in control, not critical voice. This is a learned skill and from my observation almost always fails with new writers because they don’t know what they are fixing.

2) Three-drafters. This type of writer fires hard all the way through the manuscript, putting everything they can think of at the moment. Then in a second run-through, they take out what is repeated, often shift chapters around like a puzzle. Then a first reader reads it and they fix problems and mail. This method only works for professionals also because that second draft must be done in creative mind-set as well, and that’s flat hard to do. These folks are often called taker-outers.

3) Cyclers. This is often a one draft writer, but the draft is cycled through a number of times. I fit right here. I start and go for a ways until I bog down, then cycle back and run at the place I stopped, often tweaking and fixing as I go until I get up to speed and keep typing new until I bog down again. When I get to the end I have a first reader read it, fix the mistakes they catch, and mail. This method is a little easier for newer writers because they naturally stay in creative voice more often. The difficulty they have with this method is not touching it after they are done. Trust in your own craft and voice comes from a lot of years of writing and success.

4) Pure One-Drafters. This is where Harlan Ellison and others working on manual typewriters fit. This type of writer is a master of storytelling and craft and sentence structure and everything else. They make few mistakes because when they type, they are clear on what they want to put down. Computers have killed this type of writer for the most part, and replaced it with the Cycler types like me.

SO WHAT IS REWRITING?

What have I been talking about anyway when I say follow Heinlein’s Rules, including #3? What is the definition of rewriting in fiction, because it sure seems that the examples above are mostly of professionals rewriting in one form or another. Well, sort of.

Notice a couple of details in my above examples:

1) I am talking about professional writers.

2) All are working solidly in creative voice.

Creative voice is the white-hot heat you feel when creating. Sometimes, granted, it burns like an ember and it doesn’t feel so hot, other times it is a rushing fire of words. But the words always come out of the creative side of your brain. That is the key, learning how to stay completely, no matter what method you use, in the creative side of your brain.

Long-term professional writers like me can turn the creative voice on instantly. I call it a “switch on my butt.” When I sit down in front of my writing computer (different from my e-mail computer) I automatically just drop into creative mindset. It takes time to train that switch, but after millions and millions of words, it becomes automatic.

The critical side of your brain is where you English teacher lives, where that awful book by Strunk and White lives, where your workshop and all their voices lives. The critical side of your brain wants you to write safe stuff, wants it to not offend anyone or go outside of any rule. The critical side of your head thinks your own voice is dull and will always work to take it out.

No professional writer I have ever met writes quality fiction out of their critical side. No matter how many drafts they do. All drafts are done in creative voice except for the last draft of fixing mistakes found by a first reader.

Stages of Writers:

Stage One: A beginning writer is only concerned about proper grammar and pretty words and wouldn’t understand storytelling if it bit them. They think perfect grammar and spelling makes good writing and are just confused when their attempts at stories get rejected. This writer will polish and polish and polish to make sure every sentence is perfect with no regard at all for story.

In Stage One if a story is written in white hot creative voice, the writer instantly gets worried about it because it seemed “too easy” and it was written “too fast” so it must be garbage and therefore the writer polishes all the good stuff out of it to make it “perfect” sentence-by-sentence writing.

(Yeah, I know, that hit home. We all did it in the beginning. I was no exception.)

Stage Two: A second stage writer is still concerned more with sentences than with story, but slowly the idea that character development must come in, that pacing might be important, that storytelling is what sells stories starts to dawn on this stage of writer. But the focus is still on polishing those words to a shining examples of “perfect” writing.

More stories in this stage are written in creative voice than in stage one, but the writer has yet to learn to trust that voice, so they polish all the good stuff out in critical voice. Also the writer still doesn’t understand enough about story to not take out the good stuff. Rewriting is a learned skill and at this level a writer doesn’t know how to do it. And in this stage any attempt at rewriting comes out of the critical side.

Stage Three: This is where most early professionals live, selling professionals with under a dozen novels published. Here the writer has made the jump from not worrying so much about sentences, but more about storytelling and character and setting and emotion and pacing so much more. This jump is made somewhere around a million words, different for every pro, but it takes some sort of awakening to make this jump.

By this point most stories are written in creative voice, and the writer is learning what method works for them. At this point the different styles of professional writers start to separate out as each writer finds what works and sells.

Also at this stage the focus on story and other pacing and such by the writer causes rewrites to remain mostly in creative voice. However, when a newer professional in this area, such as the ones we teach here in workshops, get worried, they drop back to stage two critical polish and hurt their own stories. They have the skills, but they don’t yet trust them under pressure and drop into critical voice rewrite, which always dulls down a story.

Critical voice rewriting, called “polishing” by beginning writers, always kills or dulls a story.

Stage Four: This stage includes me and Laura and Kris and other pros who drop by here. This stage is full of the longer-term professionals. We know how to write stories that sell. We know how to rewrite in creative voice if we need to or want to. We are focused only on story.

I takes almost no attention for writers in this stage to produce clean manuscripts because we have our methods down and we have worked for decades learning how to create clean manuscripts. I cycle, Laura does many drafts working story into shape and cleaning, my wife Kristine Kathryn Rusch is an taker-outer, powering first draft and then putting things together and cleaning. We all do “fix-mistake” drafts, even the pure “one draft” writers. I saw one of Harlan’s manuscripts that actually had three corrections in ten pages. He read it, found three mistakes and corrected them. He had done a basic “fix-mistake” draft.

So, when Heinlein was talking to new writers in his article and came up with the five business rules of writing, he wasn’t talking to long-term established professionals of his day. Those writers already were set and knew what they were doing. He was talking to stage one and stage two writers.

Heinlein’s Rules

1) Write

2) Finish what you write.

3) Never rewrite unless to editorial demand.

4) Mail what you write to someone who can buy it.

5) Keep it in the mail until someone buys it.

Five very simple, yet very tough business rules of writing. They work.

But #3 is where everyone in this myth-heavy world has the most problems.

To a Stage One and Stage Two writer, who has no skills at rewriting, my way of looking at Heinlein’s Rule #3 is this:

In the early stages you are better off just trusting your natural instincts, your natural voice, write on the creative side, and then just let it go to an editor. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Sure, make it as clean as you can with a first reader catching mistakes. I had Nina Kiriki Hoffman catching my mistakes early on, and then Kris over the last twenty-five years.

But trust your voice. Stage One and Stage Two writers and many in Stage Three don’t know how to rewrite a manuscript and stay in creative voice. To those writers, rewrite means a hard, critical eye on the manuscript to “fix” it. Worst thing you can do.

Some reasons why rewriting in critical voice is so bad.

1) Your voice is dull to your ears and your eye. But it is there when you write from the creative side. It is what makes your story unique. But then in critical voice rewrite, your conscious brain takes out all the dullness to make the story better, and thus takes out your voice. In reality, what you are doing by taking what you think is dull out is making your story same and very dull.

2) When you write creatively, you know story because you have read millions of words of story. So you automatically write in story. But then when you switch to critical brain, you drop down to the word and sentence level. You ignore story and start fixing things that take the story, the pacing, the character out of your story.

3) Fiction is not written in perfect Oxford English. When writing creative side, your brain knows this. But when you switch to critical side, your English teacher pops in and puts fiction into perfect English and thus makes it dull and stilted.

4) When in the early stages of learning how to create story, you don’t understand story or character or setting or anything on a conscious level.

In one workshop last year someone asked a question about how to get setting into an example we were looking at. I turned to the board and wrote “Opinion.” All setting is opinion. Can’t be anything else, because all story is told through the eyes of a character, therefore all setting must be opinion. Seemed obvious to me, but it floored a large number of the younger professionals in the room.

When you are early in the learning, you don’t know story or setting or character or character voice or how most everything works. You might understand you need it, but you don’t know how to put it in purposefully from the critical side of your brain.

However, your creative side knows how to layer it in. The key is that you have to learn how to trust it. Of course, no new writer does. The rewriting myth is too strong.

5) A writer is the worst judge of their own work. This is the biggest killer and the biggest argument for not rewriting anything (besides fixing mistakes a first reader finds).

Why can’t a writer see their own work? Because the story is in the writer’s head. It’s clear to the writer because the writer put those little black code marks on the page to tell a reader the story. But to a reader those little black code marks might mean something very different. However, when the writer picks up the page covered in black marks the writer sees the full blown story in his mind.

It takes a lot of writing and feedback to understand how certain words, certain ways of putting words on a page, certain patterns in the black code marks effect readers. A top writer knows how to code these black marks on a page so that a retired woman in Florida reads the EXACT same story as a dock worker in Chicago or a teenager in LA. If the writer did his job correctly, they all read the same story and have the same reaction to the story.

You can not do that kind of work out of critical voice. It has to come from the subconscious and then after years of practice.

But remember, as a writer, when you look at your own writing, the story just appears back in your head. You have no way of knowing if those marks actually convey the story you want to thousands or millions of people. You are the worst judge of your own work.

6) A writer’s experience in writing a story has nothing at all to do with the quality of the final product.

This kills most first and second stage writers, and hurts third level pros as well. The best way to see this is sit down and as fast as you can write a story, not looking back until you get to the end. Then print it out and have a first reader find the typos and such without giving feedback on the story, fix those mistakes and then get ready to mail it. At that moment your experience of writing the story will overwhelm you. The myths will flood in and you will be convinced that because you wrote the story fast and didn’t rewrite it, it will be crap.

On the flip side, you are in a section of a story or book and you struggle like crazy over it and it feels like writing it was like going to the dentist. You found yourself avoiding it and standing in front of the sink doing dishes to avoid writing the scene. When it is done, you are convinced it is crap.

But alas, it might be in both cases, or it might not be in both cases. Your experience writing the words have nothing to do with the final quality of the writing. As Neil Gaiman said, “It should matter, but it doesn’t.” If you start letting the experience of the writing influence you on what you do with your fiction, you are doomed.

No two writers work the same.

Laura Resnick and I are both long-term stage-four professionals. We know how to do this stuff and we know our own methods. Laura knows how to rewrite in a number of drafts holding creativity at the same time. I know how to cycle and finish in one draft. We both produce clean manuscripts. And we both do “fix-mistake” final drafts.

If you talk to a hundred other long term professional fiction writers, you will find there is no one “right way” of doing anything. We are all different.

Where Laura and I have a difference is in what to tell newer writers, the writers who don’t know how to rewrite. That’s just opinion and both of us are valid. Not the same opinion, but both come from our experiences.

So, that said, here is my take (my opinion) on what I think new writers should do to advance their craft and find their own way.

1) Do not rewrite at all past a fix draft. If a new writer doesn’t rewrite will they produce a sellable story after a “fix-mistake” draft? Maybe, but not likely.  Will a new writer produce a sellable story with five rewrites? Never. For the reasons I stated above. They don’t know how to rewrite in creative voice, don’t know story, and will take what little is original out of the story. So I suggest that in the early years new writers follow Heinlein’s suggestion and not rewrite. It’s why he wrote them down and why they have worked for many writers over the years.

2) I am NOT saying turn in a flawed manuscript. Fix the typos a trusted first reader finds. But let the story you wrote in a creative white heat stand. It will show your real voice, your real talent, and then after you get a bunch of words and experience and learning under your belt, you will find which method works best for you in the long run.

3) This trusting the voice will take extreme courage and very few writers can do it. From 1975 until 1982 I bought into all these myths solidly. I thought writing slow was writing well, I thought rewriting a dozen times had to be done. Of course I was a stage two writer and had no idea what I was doing. Then I started reading how long term professionals did it. Not what they said in public, but how they actually did it. And besides a clean-up fix-typos draft, I stopped rewriting and I started selling within one year. I learned to trust my own creative voice because my critical voice didn’t know crap about writing anything that would sell.

So check in with yourself. If you are not selling and you are rewriting, try sending out your stories with only the typos fixed. It will take a vast amount of courage. To do that you will have to overcome decades of English teachers and myths.

In the early years of writing trust Heinlein and his five simple rules of writing. He knew what he was talking about.

Besides, you can always start rewriting later if you really want.

When you know what you are doing.

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Copyright 2010 Dean Wesley Smith
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Because of the new world and technology, my magic bakery got a lot more valuable lately. This is now part of my inventory in my bakery. (Confused on that, read the Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing post about making money with writing.) I’m giving you this small slice as a sample. I’m giving you a taste, but not selling any of the pie.

If you feel this helped you in any way, toss a tip into the tip jar on the way out of the Magic Bakery.

And I would like to thank all the fine folks who have donated. Once this book is done, I will send you a copy. The donations and the comments both after the posts and privately are really keeping me going on this. Thanks!

If you can’t afford to donate, please feel free to pass this chapter along to others who might get some help from it. Every week or so I will be adding a new chapter on the myths and sacred cows of publishing. Stay tuned. Upcoming are chapters on bestsellers, losing control of your writing, having it made, speed equals making money, more on agents, and so much more. This business has a lot of myths. An entire book full.

Thanks, Dean

And it’s just stupid, even though the myth seems to have a logical base in publishing.

Out of the mouth of top professionals this myth spouts all the time in one form or another, and usually with the best of intentions. And it has for as long as I have been in this business.

But lately, with the advent of the slush-reading lower-level agents, this myth has taken on deadly consequences for many writers. Why? Because they believe it.

So as I do in these chapters, let me take a look at the origin of this myth first.

Actually, the origin is simple. It came about because editors and agents and publishers want to make an easy sale.

Yes, editors sell books as well. They sell a book they love to their publisher, they sell the book to a sales force, and they ultimately are responsible for selling a book to readers. Books that are different, that don’t fit in what has been done before, are very, very difficult sales for editors and publishers and always have been.

And it has been proven that if a reader likes a certain type of book, they will look for that type of book.

Now remember, publishers need so many books per month in this churn of book lists, so they have to find books to buy, and when they can find an easy-sell book, it makes their job easier.

And it’s human nature to want to have your job be easier.

Of course, easy-sell books are usually pretty flat. (Not always, but usually.) They are often following a trend. The books tend to do little if anything new, which is why they are easy sells. Another book bought by a more gutsy editor has already paved the way. Easy-sell books are also easy to promote. “If you liked ‘X Book’ you’re going to love ‘X Book Same.’” Easy sell.

Now understand, I wrote a ton of easy-sell books. Media books such as Star Trek have a pretty set audience a publisher can depend on. So when Pocket Books came to me to write some Star Trek novels, they knew exactly what the book would sell and so did I. Easy, no thought on the publisher’s part. What was a hard-sell book(s) was Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. It took John Ordover years of fighting to get that series going and the fact that Pocket Books kept it going for ten years was not because of sales, but reasons of relationships with readers and Paramount.

Interestingly enough, over the history of publishing, the really monster books, the ones that people talk about and remember for decades, were not easy-sell books. Often they would have fifty or more rejections before finding an editor willing to work for the book and a publisher took a chance. Then when the book became a hit it was called new and fresh and readers loved it.

And then that fresh idea, fresh book would spawn (like a bad horror movie) thousands of “easy sell” books. But no one has made much of a long career writing only easy-sell books, because the target just keeps moving. One day one topic is hot, the next day the next topic is hot. As a writer, if you try to chase that “hot topic easy sell” thinking, you are lost in short order.

But then comes editors and agents sitting on panels at writer’s conferences telling new writers what they are looking for, what’s selling, what isn’t selling. In all honest truth, as an editor, I didn’t know what I wanted to buy until I read it.

And as an editor for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds for ten years, I constantly told writers I hated the character “Q” from Next Generation. But I always ended up buying a “Q” story because some writer wrote one so well, with such a fun twist, that I couldn’t not buy it.

Attempting to write what is hot isn’t a new trend. It has been around since the beginning of this business. And the myth that you need to write what is hot, what is selling is as deadly today as it was fifty years ago.

So why is this myth so deadly?

The answer to that question is back in the writer’s office. Each writer is different. Every chapter in this book I have been pounding that simple fact home.

Every writer is different.

And what makes your books interesting to readers is YOU. I have also warned about taking the YOU out of your work over and over in these chapters as well. You can’t see or hear your voice because to you it sounds dull because you hear it all the time.

And your ideas might seem dull because guess why? They are yours. They are as unique as you are, as how you write the ideas down.

But then you go trying to imitate some other writer, try to write what is “hot” because some editor or agent told you that is what is selling. So what do you do? You take the YOU out of your work and it becomes mundane and just like everything else and won’t sell.

A SIMPLE RULE: In fiction, sameness and dullness do not sell.

Yet when a new writer hears an editor or agent tell them what they are “looking for” in books, the young writer goes home and attempts to imitate the book the editor said they are looking for. They create nothing unique, nothing new, nothing of themselves. They write the same boring old crap that has already been done to death.

So How Do You Solve This Problem?

Simple: Kick all the editor and agent voices out of your writing office and write what makes you passionate or angry or excited. Or as Stephen King has said, “Write what scares hell out of you.”

Some basic guidelines on how to do this:

1) Never talk about your story with anyone ahead of time. Their ideas, unless you are very experienced, will twist the story into partially their story.

2) For heaven’s sake, never, ever let anyone read a work-in-progress. Totally stupid on so many levels I can’t even begin to address. If you want to collaborate, make sure you have a collaboration agreement, otherwise, keep your work to yourself until finished.

3) Never think of markets or selling when writing. Enjoy the process of writing and creating story. When the story is finished, then have someone read it and tell you what you wrote and then market it.

4) Follow Heinlein’s Rules, especially #3 about never rewriting. In other words, fix mistakes and then mail it and trust your own voice, your own work. Never rewrite to anyone’s suggestions, especially a workshop. (And never use the word “polish” in front of me. When you take a unique piece of work and polish it, you make it look like all the others.)

5) When an editor says they are looking for a certain type of book, ignore it. They are just trying to be helpful to all the new writers looking for shortcuts to getting published. There are no shortcuts. When agents say what they think will sell to editors, just laugh. They have less of a clue what will sell than anyone in the business bar none.

6) Get passionate and protective of what you write. It’s your voice, your work, for heaven’s sake, grow a backbone and stand up for it. Sure, in the first million words you are going to need all sorts of help with craft and storytelling issues. Go learn that and take it in and study and practice and get feedback. But don’t rewrite it beyond fixing typos and mistakes. When you write a story or novel, trust yourself and mail it. Protect it from all who want you to write what they think you should have written.

So, in summary, I am telling you flatly and bluntly to ignore any advice from any person about what is selling, what is hot, what you should write.

Write your own stories.

And if you do write your own stories and believe in them and mail them to editors, you may be the next big thing and then thousands and thousands of writers will be trying to imitate you.

And they will fail, because there is only one of you.

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Copyright 2010 Dean Wesley Smith
————————————————–
Because of the new world and technology, my magic bakery got a lot more valuable lately. This is now part of my inventory in my bakery. (Confused on that, read the Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing post about making money with writing.) I’m giving you this small slice as a sample. I’m giving you a taste, but not selling any of the pie.

If you feel this helped you in any way, toss a tip into the tip jar on the way out of the Magic Bakery.

And I would like to thank all the fine folks who have donated. Once this book is done, I will send you a copy. The donations and the comments both after the posts and privately are really keeping me going on this. Thanks!

If you can’t afford to donate, please feel free to pass this chapter along to others who might get some help from it. Every week or so I will be adding a new chapter on the myths and sacred cows of publishing. Stay tuned. Upcoming are chapters on bestsellers, losing control of your writing, having it made, speed equals making money, more on agents, and so much more. This business has a lot of myths. An entire book full.

Thanks, Dean

We started on the trip just fine on Monday, made it the eight plus hours of driving to Red Bluff, CA, and stayed there the first night. Coming from the cool Oregon Coast to the hot temperatures of the valley that first afternoon was a shock, but I didn’t think much about it. Then the next morning at 10 in Northern California it was one hundred degrees and I started to remember what real heat was like and the problems I have with it. Even though our car was air conditioned, just going in and out of the heat for packing the car, going to breakfast, coming out, and stopping thirty minutes down the freeway I was having trouble.

By the time we stopped another thirty minutes down the freeway, I was pretty much gone. It was 105 and I have extreme problems with heat. I was drinking fluids, but still getting sick. Kris called a local area doc, got some help, and then after talking with the doctor turned around and got us home, somehow. That part is a blur to me.

Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?

Okay, now a story about how at sixty years of age I have gotten to the place in my life that even brief contract with temperatures above ninety degrees knocks me down.

The First Time: Back when I was a golf pro, I lived in Palm Springs, California. I was the head professional of a nice course there and because in 1974 Palm Springs was beyond boring for a mid-twenties single man, I worked two nights a week at a restaurant called The Cask and Cleaver as a waiter, just for the social life.

One fine June day, the staff and friends of the Cask and Cleaver challenged the staff of El Torito Restaurant to a touch football game. (My girlfriend worked part-time at El Torito when she wasn’t managing the Penny’s Department store. Yeah, Palm Springs for young people in 1974 was deadly dull.)

We started at 7 in the morning and played until 10. Memory serves it was over a hundred degrees by 10 AM, but we were all young and used to it. No issue. I went back to my place, took a shower and then headed for my golf course. When I got there my father called and asked if I wanted to join him for a quick 18 holes of golf. A new (very private) course had opened and was letting local pros on for the day to take a look. (My father was also a golf professional in Palm Springs at the time.) I said sure, made sure my assistant professional had the course covered and headed to play golf. It took four of us until about three to finish and the temperature was close to 120.

Back to my golf course I went and when I arrived I noticed that the kid hadn’t picked up the range balls. Usually in the summer we had the range closed and the balls picked up by eleven in the morning because leaving golf balls sit in 120 degree sun was never a good idea. So with no one else around to do it, I jumped in the makeshift cart with the ball picker and headed down on the range. The cart had no roof.

That was the last thing I remember until I woke up in the hospital with tubes sticking out of me and machines all around me and doctors very happy to see me awake.

Luckily for me both the bar and restaurant of my golf course looked out over the driving range. From what the few members in the restaurant and the bartender said happened, I just drove the cart off into the desert where it got stuck in the sand. They thought it was funny until I fell out of the cart face first into the sand and didn’t move.

Severe Heat Stroke.

That was the first time. It became a funny story of my stupidity like some of my other stories that have the phrase in it “then I almost died.” Over the years, as I got older, I noticed that every so often, after working out in high heat, and not drinking enough fluids, I would get sick or dizzy or have some of the other symptoms.

On one of Kris and my very first trips together, I ended up with another bad case of heat stroke and threw up and lay in a trailer for a day while she had to socialize with my friends that she had never met. On another time Kris and I with a couple of friends flew into the Idaho Primitive Area for a backpacking trip. I had forgotten the lessons again and by the end of the first day of hiking in 100 degree heat with a heavy backpack and not drinking enough fluids, I was down sick. That time I had to be airlifted out of the primitive area. Not kidding.

Three years ago, while in the best shape I had been in for a decade, I went with Kris to run an easy 5-K on the beach. For a change the wind wasn’t blowing off the ocean and it got up to about 75, the hottest day of the year here. I had too many clothes on (expecting it to be cold on the beach like usual) and three hours later the doctors in the hospital had me hooked up to a bunch of different machines because they thought I was having a heart attack. It wasn’t until Kris remembered my heat problem and told them to give me fluids and salt that I came out of that one. (Heat stroke can often imitate a heat attack.)

A number of years back I went to a family wedding held in the courtyard of a hotel on a 115 degree day in Boise, Idaho. Yup, you guessed it, I sat in the sun (Kris wasn’t there to make me stay out of the sun or not go) and I was down yet again.

So, over the years, my body, through repeated episodes of my stupidity, has had heat stroke episode after heat stroke episode, usually with the upshot of me ending up in a hospital. And that repeated stupidity has had the expected result of making me very sensitive to heat above 90, or getting too overheated in work or exercise without extreme fluid intake.

Did I have another heat stroke episode on the way to Writers of the Future? Not quite. What I was in was what the doctors call advanced heat exhaustion, which is the lead-up to another heat stroke episode, and with many of the same symptoms.  I was headed for another hospital visit when both Kris and I realized what was happening. (Mostly Kris.) I was already pretty sick and dizzy with heat exhaustion, and that was with only two hours total of exposure to the high heat, plus what I had the day before. And LA on Wednesday was having heat warnings.

For those familiar with heat exhaustion and heat stroke, the older you get, the more you have had it in the past, the more you are open to it.  Also I have high blood pressure, controlled, but still a factor. I now have doctor’s orders to just stay out of 90 degree and above heat. As the doctor said yesterday, one of these times it’s just going to kill me. (Yeah, that got my attention.)

What is interesting is that Kris and I planned this trip with some of this in mind. We decided to not fly because of fear that being stuck in a hot, crowded plane on the runway would really hurt me. And we wanted our own car there instead of being driven around as offered because we wanted to be able to leave if I started having troubles with the heat. So we had thought of this problem. I was a little worried about the high heat under the television lights at the ceremony, but figured I would deal with that later.

What we didn’t have figured was how fantastically touchy I am with high heat these days. I spent almost $1,600 to make sure our car’s air conditioning was working well for this trip, (replaced the entire system actually, because here on the coast we never use it and it had gone south) yet I forgot about getting to the car from hotels, restaurants, and so on, usually across hot pavement.

I live on the Oregon Coast for a reason. Winter gets down to around 40, summer days, like today, are around 55-60 degrees.

As of today, Thursday, I am doing slightly better, but even writing this with a cool ocean breeze blowing over me is tiring me out. Time for another nap. Thanks everyone for all the good wishes on Kris’s blog and Twitter. Much appreciated.

So, again I am very sorry to the wonderful people at Writers of the Future for not making the ceremony and to all the great friends we would have had a wonderful time with. We hope to see you sometime in the fall or winter or spring.

I think summers I’m just staying right here.

Got to go read this one, folks.

http://hannahmosk.blogspot.com/2010/08/agent-story-part-1.html?spref=tw