Great news. My wife, Kristine Kathryn Rusch won the Asimov’s Reader’s Choice Award for best novella for her story “Room of Lost Souls.” Congrats, Kris!

For those of you who don’t know, “Room of Lost Souls” is part of the book “Diving into the Wreck” which as a novella also won the Asimov’s Reader’s Choice Award for best novella. And both are part of her upcoming novel Diving in the Wreck which you can order now.

I’ve read the entire book and it’s stunning. And I’ve read the first part of the next book and it also is stunning. She’s creating one of the niftiest science fiction worlds, blending in history and family and lots of conflicts and mystery. Trust me, folks, from a very lucky first reader, this is a book and a series you want to follow.

Below is a picture of the cover of the novel coming out of Pyr Books.

Cheers, Dean

So far in these Paying the Price posts, I’ve talked about a lot of different aspects of how writers have to pay a price to become a professional writer. And even though you might not believe what I’m talking about this time is a price to pay, it is.

Puzzled Looks. Let’s talk about puzzled looks from your real world friends and family and what some of them really mean. As a professional writer, and a writer working to become a professional writer, you will get many, many puzzled looks from your friends and family. Your job is to sit alone in a room and make stuff up. And you have an expectation of getting paid for sitting alone in a room and making stuff up. Now that all by itself will cause looks, but actually let’s talk for a moment about the looks that force you to try to explain, which is just flat impossible, or draw a wall around your work, which causes other problems.

Phone rings. You have not yet learned to keep the phone out of reach of your writing computer, so you answer it. Friend on the other end says, “Hi, what are you up to?”

You respond. “Writing.”

“Oh, great,” the friend says. “I need some help with moving a couch. It’ll only take a few minutes. You mind?”

Now, if you were at a corporate job in suit with a boss, your friend would never ask such a question. But since you are home, alone, sitting in a room making stuff up, you “aren’t working” by anyone outside of writings standard, so you “aren’t doing anything” and thus have time.

So what do you do? Either way, you’re going to pay a price in this situation, and this situation comes up a lot. If you are rude and say, “No, I’m working. Sorry.” you take the chance of losing a friend. (See my post earlier about this topic.) If you say, “Sure.” then you are losing writing time which is a dangerous trend to do.

So, if you value your writing and your writing time, you are rude to your friend and say “Sorry, I’m working.” You have to pay that price, and it will cause a lot of very strange looks. The friend just won’t understand. Often even other writers have this problem if your writing schedule doesn’t fit with theirs. You just have to keep saying “Sorry, I’m working.” and either train them or lose them as friends. It’s a price that will always bring strange looks of puzzlement.

Great looks of puzzlement from bankers. You’ve got great credit, all your bills paid, money in the bank for a down payment from the last few novel advances. You want to buy a house or a car, so you go talk to your friendly banker. The questions go like this: “How much money do you make every month?”

You say, “I’m self employed. I can show you how much I brought in last year.”

“Oh,” the banker says, then after the standard discussion about being a professional writer, the banker says, “How about your tax return?”

“Well,” you say, “I have a good accountant and a lot of my expenses are deductible so my tax return doesn’t show much income, but I’ll be glad to show it to you.”

So, at that moment, the banker gives you a weird look and says, “Well, we can try.” (That always means no.) Unless your spouse has a great job, you aren’t getting the loan. Except for the silly bubble in giving loans to anyone with a pulse the last five years, no freelance writer could ever get a loan from any standard bank and that standard has returned. As writers, we don’t have a standard income, we don’t have standard business models like a store or restaurant does, we don’t pay much in taxes if we’re smart. So when you go freelance writing, make sure you are in the place you want to stay in, because unless you have help from someone with a standard job, you ain’t getting a loan. Sorry, a price you pay. Get used to paying cash for everything.

My wife is doing a wonderful series of posts called The Freelancers Survival Guide on her web site and she has a new entry up about vacations. If you read her interviewing of many other freelancers, you’ll soon see that writers don’t take vacations. In 23 years together, Kris and I have taken one. I often work seven days a week for months on end.

Now, understand, writing is a job (work) that you now do in your spare time, you do because you want to get to doing this job full time. But be warned, once you get here, get to writing full time, doing a job you love, you never really want to leave it, and if you do go somewhere, you take it with you and work while traveling. Just like right now most of you are frowning that I have said something this silly, trust me, as a freelance writer this fact will get you a ton of weird looks from friends. Don’t believe me, read Kris’s new entry on her site. She talks to a bunch of freelancers. Look at the writers. The pattern is clear and Kris and I are not unusual at all.

Weird looks. Those come a great deal from the poor people sitting beside a table of writers talking. What do professional writers talk about when they get together? They talk about their cats. A LOT! The reason is that those poor creatures are the greatest contact with have with other living things during a normal writing day. Right now, as I type this, I have a big yellow cat asleep beside me and a black and white cat asleep on the couch nearby, waiting for me to do something besides type. When I go up to my writing office, they have their spots up there as well.

When writers get together at conventions in big bunches at tables, especially after conventions, we tend to chase other patrons out of the room. A table of writers is always the table you never want to sit near. And the looks are priceless from those other poor people. Once, Kris and I and Walter Jon Williams and a couple of other writers were having a discussion about exploding cows at a table in a restaurant. Finally the women at a nearby table scooted her chair back and said to us about Walter’s comments. “You really don’t believe him, do you?” Then disgusted, she went back to her table. Welcome to the world of writers in public.

But caution: In this modern age, if you are with another writer working on ways to poison someone in a story while shopping, watch out for who is listening. You will get far more than just strange looks. Trust me.

Another price we pay. We get very sensitive to our surroundings. We like, while we are writing, things to be the same all the time, that way we don’t notice. I didn’t think I had this problem much until a few days ago a car alarm was going off about five blocks away. I could barely hear it, but of course, while writing, it was breaking into my thinking. Something wasn’t the same around me. I almost went up the street to find the car. Kris calmed me down.

In general, and in almost all areas of the world, full-time fiction writers are a strange group of people. We spend massive amounts of time alone, inside our own heads, so when we get with other writers, we tend to be silly. We tend to focus on our pets, we tend to make our friends angry because they don’t understand how the next page could be more important to you then they are. Our spouses have to be saints, our kids well-trained.

You don’t have to be weird to be a fiction writer. But you will become that way as far as the real world around you is concerned. Get used to it. Get used to the looks. No one really understands this job except for other writers.

And have fun. It really is the best job on the planet.

Cheers, Dean

On my continuing battle to discover if Twitter is going to be worth my time to check, I discovered a great research site posted there by a friend. (Thanks, Rebecca!) The site is called GodChecker and I have put a link to it below in my links.

Amazing information for any writer writing any kind of story that would need this kind of basic information. I have a paranormal romance out under submission right now that if an editor ever wants me to write, I’m going to really need this site.

New Paying the Price post almost done.

Cheers, Dean

Over in my links, I added a link to Query Shark. It is an interesting blog run by an agent tearing apart query letters to help writers make them better. I agree with a lot of the basic information she is saying. Not all of it, of course, since much of the advice is personal taste, but still good stuff to help anyone interested in learning the art of writing query letters.

Thanks, Pati, for pointing that out in a Tweet. Much appreciated.

Sigh…., yes I am on Facebook and Twitter, but I seldom say anything, so I’m boring to follow.

New Paying the Price installment coming soon. Anyone have any questions about the Paying the Price topic, just ask. Comments are now open again here.

Cheers, Dean

Lynn Viehl posted her entire royalty statement here. And her post about it is right on the money and very clear. You ever wonder what it takes to hit the New York Times extended bestseller list? You want to have a few myths crushed?  Go read this post. Great information.

And make sure you click on her link and look at the actual royalty statement if you have never seen one. They are different from every publisher.

Cheers, Dean

Kris just put up another installment of her Freelancer’s Survival Guide on her web site. This time it’s about dealing with illness. If you have any thoughts of ever being a freelance writer, or are one already, or are thinking of trying to make a living selling on eBay because you lost your job, run over to her site and read these posts. She has four of them up now. Great advice.

Click here to get there.

Cheers, Dean

So far over this series of posts about Paying the Price with your fiction writing, I’ve talked about time, about family, about money, and some other general attitude problems that writers must face to become regular selling fiction writers. If you haven’t read those posts, scan down and read them. This one sort of builds from those.

So exactly what do I mean by paying the price with taxes? Well, actually, I meant that as a joke, actually, since in the early years of writing, the biggest check you get every year from your writing is your tax refund. But I got your attention, didn’t I? Actually, taxes are the nice thing about the early years of fiction writing. They get tough, later, but early on they are a bonus.

I am not a tax lawyer and am not giving advice here. But I can say a few basic pieces of common sense. Keep a record of every expense you have with your writing. That includes travel to workshops or conventions, costs of computers, costs of internet, costs of seeing movies, costs of books and magazine subscriptions and so on. Keep good records.

Then file a Schedule C with your tax return.

You must also keep good records as to how you are trying to make money with your writing, meaning keeping track of rejections and keeping any submission log you have current. Keep the rejections. Do not throw them away. If you are making a consistent effort to be published and sell your writing, you need to have those records to show the IRS if they ask.

In other words, treat your writing as you would treat any other home business. Keep track of everything, including the miles to and from the post office. Then, when you have all these deductions on your Schedule C and you lose money on your writing, (which you will lose some nice chunks of money in the early years) it comes off your taxes and you get a refund from the money you paid in on your day job check. Nifty, huh? But it does take a little time and a tiny bit of organization. Start it now, because when you become a full time writer with a corporation, trust me the paperwork doesn’t get easier.

And one more side point on this organization topic. Start filing everything now. Don’t let it stack up in boxes because then the job of filing and putting everything in order gets crazy. Start a file for every story or novel and keep the rejections and contracts with that file as they come in. You will thank me later.

So, to something that writers tend to actually pay a price on in their lives early on: Hobbies. When you start looking for that extra bit of time (see previous posts), one area to look at is other hobbies or sports. I used to be a professional golfer, and I still love the game, but taking five hours out of a day to play golf has become tough, to be honest. I need the writing time more. Some friends who started with me, but who didn’t make it early on stayed with their music hobby or kept their regular visits to a bar, or kept signing up for sports leagues. I cut all that stuff and gave the time to my writing.

Another price we all pay is friends. A relationship with a friend that depends on so many hours per week often gets cut back to find more writing time. Or a friend who doesn’t like the fact that you are starting to sell will start making comments that are negative. They won’t mean it and won’t realize they are doing it, but the only choice you have is to ease away. Confronting them never works, but go ahead and do it anyway. It cuts things even quicker.

To be blunt, the friends you have as a beginning writer, for the most part, won’t be the friends you have as a professional writer. Now, understand that I have a couple of good non-writer friends from junior high who have stuck with me through everything and been supportive. Shaking their heads at times, but supportive. Those are the friends you make sure to keep. But anyone who tries to slow you down or stop you or tells you that you are working too hard, let them go. It’s not a fun price to pay, but one that just happens I’m afraid. To make this less painful, see my post on getting out to writer’s conferences and classes to make new friends, new networks inside your writing.

Paying the Price with exercise. You must exercise, somehow, some way. You must find a little time to do the exercise. You can’t let that go. Writing is sitting alone in a room and making stuff up. You do that for too many hours and too many weeks at a time without exercise, you will hurt yourself. So as you set up the time to write, give a small percentage of the new time to exercise. Get the heart pumping at least five times per week, keep the pounds down. In writing you are young at 50, but if you let the health go bad, it’s going to stop your best years of writing. Start early, like with filing.

Exercise. This, for me the last ten years is a pot calling the kettle black. But as I near 60, I’ve set a goal to lose the last 40 pounds (already down 45 from my highest) and run a marathon sometime during my 60th year. The training will take time away from my writing, sure, but I will have more energy, and be a lot healthier and live years longer, so I sort of figure I’m paying the time away from writing now into a time bank for writing later. I suppose on Facebook, I should do a running track of this year-long project to get ready for a marathon. I might do that.

During this series of posts, I got a couple people asking me why not talk about the good things of being a full time fiction writer? I more than likely will at some point. For example, last year about May I posted a picture from this internet computer of my back yard here of my office building and the ocean view beyond. Right now, behind me, the sun is shinning on the ocean and the rhodies are starting to bloom. One really cool thing about being a full time writer is that you can live anywhere. Kris and I picked the place we always went to vacation to live full time, and after 15 years or so now, we have never regretted getting up every morning and looking out over the Pacific Ocean.

So, when you pay the price for your writing on a minute-by-minute basis early on, when you scrape the money together you don’t have to make a trip to learn, when you give up that friend time this week in the bar to do five more pages, just keep in mind that there is a wonderful world at the end of the sacrifices. And any full-time writer who tells you otherwise is just nuts.

If you would have told me, as a beginning writer with three jobs, living in Moscow, Idaho, that I would end up with an office building overlooking the Pacific Ocean making my living at fiction writing, I would have laughed and said, “Yeah, don’t I wish.”

But I paid the price and I’m sitting right here. Trust me, it was worth it.

Cheer, Dean

First off, if you haven’t read Kris’s new post, the first in many concerning how to be a freelancer of any type, go to her site and read it. Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Amazing information.

Two posts down I put up a new Paying the Price blog. And the comments are open and I am answering questions in the comments. I have at least one more Paying the Price blog to do this week, so stay tuned.

Now, some information for the workshop Kris and I are doing in June that is open to writers of any level. We are also doing the same workshop in September. See the Workshop tab. And we are also offering this workshop to writer’s groups and organizations around the country, so if you are interested in details on having us come to your town and do this workshop, write me for details.

Here’s the basic information:

————

WANT TO SELL A NOVEL?

Come to
A FICTION CAREER
From First Sentence to Publication and Beyond.

An entertaining and informative two-day workshop about how to sell a story or novel, how to be a professional fiction writer, and so much more.

Instructors: Bestselling Novelists
Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith

Kristine Kathryn Rusch is the international bestselling author of over 90 novels and hundreds of short stories. She’s the only person to have won a Hugo Award for both professional editing and for her writing. She spent six years as the editor of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Her mystery novels and stories have been nominated for three Edgar Awards, and she has won the Ellery Queen award three times. She writes mystery novels under the name Kris Nelscott and romance novels under the name Kristine Grayson. She’s been a full time fiction writer for over 20 years. You can see a ton more about her at www.kristinekathrynrusch.com.

Dean Wesley Smith is the bestselling author of over 80 books and a hundred short stories. He has over seven million copies of his books in print and has written comics for DC and scripts for Hollywood. He has been an editor and publisher and for ten years he edited the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds anthology series for Pocket Books. He won the World Fantasy Award for his work on Pulphouse Publishing. He is hired regularly by New York publishers to ghost novels. He writes thrillers and paranormal romance under pen names. He has been a full-time fiction writer for over 20 years. For more information go to www.deanwesleysmith.com.

Saturday, June 13 and Sunday, June 14, 2009
Cost of two day workshop: $300.00
Location. Lincoln City, Oregon, on the beautiful Oregon Coast.
For more information, contact Dean at dean@deanwesleysmith.com
or write to Dean Smith, PO Box 479, Lincoln City, OR 97367

My wife, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is writing a fantastic guide to freelancing on her web site. While I’ve been talking about motivation and goals and paying the price here, Kris is writing a series of articles to help those who are freelancing, or thinking of going that way in these tough times. Don’t miss it, folks. She has the introduction and first chapter up already. I got something to help my structure out of her first article when she handed it to me last night, so no matter how much you think you know about being a freelancer, read this series every week.

And comments here are now open. I answer comments under each post, so check them out.

Cheers, Dean

It’s time to talk about time. So far in this series of blogs, I’ve talked about Paying the Price in general, with your family, and with money. If you haven’t read the ones before this one, scan down and read them now.

Time. Any long term professional writer’s eyes just glaze over when a newer writer says to us, “I’ve always wanted to be a writer, but I just can’t seem to find the time.” I can’t even begin to tell you how many thousands of times in the last twenty years that sentence has been said to me, in one way or another. Now understand, normally I’m a pretty nice guy, or at least I pretend to be, so I just nod to the person and say something like, “Yes, that’s the hard part all right.”

There is never any malice from the newer writer in saying this, but if you look at the statement closely, it’s like walking up to a brain surgeon and saying, “I could do your job if I just had the time.” It’s flat insulting, to be honest. It assumes that the only reason I am where I am at is because I had nothing else to do.

So let’s get to a fact. I am a professional fiction writer because I paid the price in time.

With every minute, with every hour, with every day, with every week, with every month, with every year, and with every decade, I paid the price to do this job. I’m where I’m at not because I was talented to start with. I wasn’t. I am here simply because I worked harder than everyone else around me. I spent more time at it than anyone else who started off with me. It really is that simple, and yet that hard.

Now, I can hear the sighs out there. The thoughts. “Oh, where will I find the time? I have a job, I have a family. There is no time.”

Hogwash. There is always time. You just have to want to be a writer bad enough to find the time, and be clear enough in what this business is to understand the time you are using and make the time productive.

So, back to some basics. A writer is a person who writes. (An author is a person who has written, but that’s a topic for another blog.) And it is completely normal for writers at any level to NEVER (and yes, I shouted that) be happy with the amount they are writing. Never seen it happen. So how much writing, how much time spent makes you into a writer?

Depends. Go back and read the goal series of blogs I did in December, look at your own goals, and then decide what you are planning to do this year. Now, as I did in the December blogs, let me do a little math for you to blow up this “If I could only find the time” issue you might have.

A page of fiction writing, for this discussion, in manuscript format, is 250 words. (This blog, at this point is just over 500 words.) Most writers, working hard, can type one page in about 15 minutes. If you do one page per day for 365 days, you will have a 90,000 word novel.

That’s right, you must spend 15 minutes per day writing to do one novel in one year. Now do you understand why professional writers roll their eyes when they are insulted by beginning writers who don’t have enough time? We all know that what the writer is really saying is simply this: “I don’t have the courage to sit down and write and learn. Therefore, I’m going to blame my family, my job, my hobby, and watching Lost this week for my lack of courage and desire to become a writer.”

See why I don’t say things like that out in public to newer writers?

So, for a moment, let’s talk about time in your life by using my life early on to illustrate a few points. Yes, I had day jobs. Actually, I had three jobs if you don’t count going to school or running to Vegas at times to make enough to keep paying for school. I tended bar four nights a week until 2:30 in the morning and five mornings at 5:30 to 8:00 I drove school bus. Five afternoons I drove school bus from 2:30 until about 5:00. And I owned and ran my own bookstore. And I was married to a nurse and student who worked full time while going to school as well.

Yeah, there was lots of time to write in that schedule. Not hardly. But I had decided I was going to be a professional fiction writer, so I looked for the time. I sat in an all-night restaurant for a half hour after getting off work as a bartender to write on a story in a notebook while getting something to eat. I positioned a typewriter up on the desk near the cash register in my bookstore so that when no one was around, I could type in a story. I never went to a movie, I didn’t watch television much at all. I spent every spare minute I had writing.

Now understand something: Not once for those first few years did I ever have an entire day to write (except for my short stint at Clarion). And I would go for weeks and weeks and never have even a complete hour to write. Yet I produced one short story per week and mailed it and kept it in the mail. How? Ten minutes here, fifteen minutes there, five minutes waiting for someone, or something scribbled on a bar napkin in a slow time.

Never once did I say I didn’t have the time.

So some basic help on this problem.

Helpful Hint #1: Right now, stop using time as an excuse to not write. And every time you hear yourself saying that, stop and take it out of your speech. Thinking you have no time is not an excuse.

Helpful Hint #2: Go back to my December posts on goal setting, set your goals, and then come up with some reasonable amount you want to write each day. Many full-time professional writers are happy with four pages a day. One hour per day will get you over three books finished per year. If you take weekends off, you’ll get two books per year done at that pace. (I did all the math in December for you.)

Helpful Hint #3: Look at your normal day, write down each thing you do each day in 15 minute (one page) chunks. You will find a ton of time that is just wasted when you do this. In fact, it will shock you. Say your goal is to write two pages per day, that means you just need to find an extra 30 minutes and not in one chunk.

Helpful Hint #4: Come unattached from a single writing location and a single way to write. In other words, teach yourself to write in notebooks, on your laptop on a bus, waiting in a dentist’s office, and so on. Start telling yourself you can write anywhere at any time on anything. If you think you must only be at your computer with silence and two entire hours ahead of you before you can write, realize you are just making excuses to not write.

Helpful Hint #5: Follow Heinlein’s Rules to the letter.

The truth of this is that you don’t have to quit your day job to be a writer. You don’t have to neglect your family to be a writer. You don’t even have to give up much of anything, to be honest. But you do need to carve the time out of each day and write new words on a story or novel regularly. And you must finish the story or novel and you must mail it and keep it in the mail.

Helpful Hint #6: Take all games, all e-mail, all web sites, all internet connections off of your writing computer. When you sit down with that computer, you are only writing. Computers are cheap these days. Invest in a used laptop for your writing. All you need is a word processing program on it and the ability to take the file off of it and and print it.

Why do this? Simply put, it will make you schedule your writing time and the moment. The 15 minutes you planned on writing won’t get eaten by that Facebook comment, that e-mail, or a giant need to get on Twitter to tell someone what you just ate.

Give the writing a place of importance in your life. Treat writing with importance and those around you, given enough time, will start to respect the writing time and help you find more.

And my last Helpful Hint. Start now. If you wait until you have the time tomorrow, the time won’t come, and then at some point down the road you will find yourself, without meaning to, insulting some professional writer, telling them that you want to be a professional writer if you could only find the time.

15 minutes per day equals 250 words per day equals one novel per year. If you can’t find that amount of time, you really don’t want to be a writer, so either get to work or stop claiming you do.

Cheers, Dean