Posts in the "The story of the book" Category

• Laughing the Panama Laugh

  The story of the book

  My name is Thomas S. Roche and I recently wrote a zombie apocalypse novel called The Panama Laugh. I wish I could tell you how it happened, but honestly it’s still a mystery to me. Oftentimes I felt like the characters were doing the work for me — by grabbing my head and smacking it against the keyboard a few hundred times.

  To put it a different way: Having written literally hundreds of short stories, I finally found characters that didn’t stop talking to me after 10,000  words — or 100,000. The thing ended up longer than I had any intention of it being, and it took the attentions of a very dedicated first reader — and a lot of work on my part — to cut it down and make it a tight, action-driven narrative.
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• The Story of Southern Gods

  The story of the book
  

  This picture has been run through a extensive course of PHOTOSHOP whizbangery.

  We have ever-expanding desires.

  When I was in college – oh, way back in the early 90s – my fondest dream was to become a writer but I was undisciplined and spent the majority of my time chasing girls, playing guitar, smoking pot, growing hair to my ass, and in general occupying space without giving anything back. After college, I cut my hair, put down the bong, and went to work (though I continued to chase girls and play guitar in my spare time). Went back to school again. Got another degree. Chased more girls. Played more guitar. Worked a little.

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• The evolution of ‘Revolution World’

  The story of the book

  Revolution World is what happens when your literary life’s ambition is to write beach books for nerds and you’ve got a burning desire to see ‘Texas Monthly’ review a science fiction book.   And thanks to the excellent cover art, I think ‘Texas Monthly’ will at least take a look at it.  Here, I’ll show you:

  I thinks it’s lovely.  Anyway, I’ll talk about how it got published on a different post.  How I came to write this book?   I am dying to say it sprang from my head full grown.  The muses sang me to sleep and wrote the thing while I was passed out in a pool of tequila and broken homonyms.  What IS a homonym anyway?

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• The Path for Winds

  The story of the book

  I’ll have to admit that Winds didn’t have a terribly exciting path to publication. It was pretty straightforward, actually. It’s the stuff that led up to it that’s interesting.

  So I think in this post I’ll talk about the creative path I followed and then the actual nuts and bolts of the sale.

  After my agent finished reading the ms, he mentioned that he pictured one of my main characters, Rehada, as Rima Fakih. Remember her? She won Miss USA last year and there was a kerfuffle because she was (gasp) a Muslim-American. I replied that yes, Rehada was similar to her, but it was an interesting segue because I already had a picture of Rehada—at least one that I began with when I started to envision the characters.

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• “How are you, Mr. Wilson?”

  The story of the book

  

  “Who in the encyclopedia wants to know?”–Mr. Wilson, from Harvey

  In part, I blame the 1950 Jimmy Stewart film Harvey. That six foot tall–Six feet three and a half inches. Now let’s stick to the facts.–rabbit has haunted the back of my brain since I saw it as a re-run one long ago Saturday afternoon. Of course, there are others to blame. Holly Black for one, and Charles de Lint for another. But the start of this lengthy tale goes a bit farther back. Thanks to the Armadillocon Writer’s Workshop, a totally different story got Jim Minz’s attention. In turn, Jim Minz (an editor at Del Rey at the time) told Charles de Lint. The next thing I knew, I had an email from Charles asking if he might read my short story? Naturally, I sent it to him. He liked it, and that was the start of my first real contact in the urban fantasy realm. While my first ever fantasy novel started its slow grind to nowhere (Jim Minz requested the manuscript but it wasn’t quite good enough) I started on the short story about an Irish púca in Austin, Texas. Charles asked if he could read it. Again, I sent it and again, he liked it. Charles came to BookPeople in Austin (where I worked) not too long after for a book signing. It was then that Charles asked the question: “Where’s the rest of the story?” I pointed to my head, and he said, “Bad answer.”

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• Ain’t No Easy Road

  The story of the book

  I sold God’s War and its sequel, Infidel, twice.

  This may sound like it was the coolest thing that could ever happen.

  In fact, it sucked.

  It sucked big time.

  God’s War has had one of those long, weary trudges toward publication that you find buried in some off-hand hazy past alluded to by a now-famous author who’s signing a six or seven figure deal (because if it’s less than that, you’re not going to be reading about it in some major news outlet, let’s be honest). “Ho-ho, oh yes,” they’ll say, “things are not as easy as they appear. Let me tell you about my last thirty years of failures.” At which point the reporter interrupts them and asks what they’ll spend all the money on. So you never hear the story. And you figure it’s all rainbows and puppies and land yachts. (more…)

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• Breaking the Curse

  The story of the book

  

  I always feel a little weird about saying this, but The Whitefire Crossing is my first novel. Not just the first one I sold, but the first thing I ever wrote longer than a couple pages.

  See, before Whitefire I was afflicted with the perfectionism curse. Every now and then an idea for a story would strike, and I’d pound out a scene in a glorious, white-hot fever of excitement…but then once the initial fever faded, I’d bog down in rewriting the same scene over and over, convinced I couldn’t move on with the story until that first scene was absolutely flawless.

  Do I hear all you writers laughing? Because yeah…if you don’t move on until your prose is polished to divine perfection, guess what? You never move on. Somehow it never occurred to me that words aren’t set in stone, that I could always come back and fix flaws later. Heck, that it makes way more sense to come back later, after you’ve got the whole story mapped out. (more…)

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• The Road Here

  Guest Post

  
  Hi, everybody. I’m Martha Wells, and my first novel was The Element of Fire, published back in 1993, and I’ve had nine novels published so far, as well as some short stories and a couple of non-fiction articles. My most well known book is probably The Death of the Necromancer, which got a Nebula nomination.

  My new book is The Cloud Roads, and it will be released by Night Shade in March of this year. It’s been five years since my last published fantasy novel, three years since my last published book. I feel like I’ve been away a lot longer than that.

  In 2006, even though I had two novels coming out (the paperback edition of The Gate of Gods, and my first Stargate: Atlantis novel Reliquary), three short stories, a non-fiction article, and a reprint I did myself of my first novel which had gone out of print, I was told that my career was pretty much over except for the death throes.

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