Week 40 - Tossing in the Towel

 

Update – Not much went on last week. Mostly I worked on paid stuff. Did a little work on the detective book, played some games (which I’m not supposed to be doing) and got the lawn mowed. That one knocked me out; we had rain, drizzle and gloom for roughly a week and a half, then finally it cleared up but left some tall, thick green behind. But I got it all done, beating out most of my neighbors. I wasn’t the first, but I was up there in the top five. By the time Monday rolled around we all had our grass nicely clipped again. The weather’s gotten chillier. I’m hoping this means the end of the mowing season. I may need to chop it down one last time as we go into November. I never did get the yard work done. Maybe next year.

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Here’s something else I never got done: a first draft of a book—any book at all—in a month. I was going to do one per month every month this year. I don’t know what I was thinking. Maybe I got some bad eggnog at New Year’s and it gave me delusions. Something gave me a massive block this year, part of the reason (along with work, financial anxiety and depression) I couldn’t write as much as I thought I could. So I’m calling it quits. I’ll continue work on the detective story, even though that’s hit a rough patch. How can you get blocked on a second draft? I’ve got the bones of the story written; I just have to dress 'em up nicer and pick better words than what I feverishly scribbled in longhand in two of those 1-subject school notebooks. But going back over it, I keep running into mistakes and plot holes that I glossed over the first time, and I have to straighten everything out so the story still works. It’s a work in progress, folks. That’s all I can say.

There’s another reason I may have gotten discouraged, and that’s the current market. Assuming I ever get it done, where do I send it? It’s not firmly slotted into one specific genre. It’s primarily fantasy, but it’s also a mystery, a detective story and partially a romance. I tend to refer to it as my Twilight Zone book, which would put it in the fantasy category. If I got the right agent, though, I could probably sneak it into mainstream. That’s where Stephen King’s books were first shelved, even though given the subject matter (psychic powers, vampires) they should have gone into the Science Fiction and Fantasy section, where H. P. Lovecraft and his ilk got lumped in with the elves and the rocket ships. King obviously had an excellent agent.

I’ve already sent a query to a SFF publisher for one of their open calls; we’ll see if anything happens. Other than that, I’m considering Hard Case Crime. Those are straight up mysteries, but they’ve published a couple of Stevie’s books, so I know there’s leeway. I just have to hope mine’s good enough.

Why not just query the SFF publishers? Back when I started, in the distant past, that would have been my go-to genre. But now I’ve hit a road block that I’ve touched on before, and recently saw an article on the Internet confirming my worst fears: SFF has essentially been taken over by the diversity crowd. It’s not just a moratorium on straight white male characters—now they want to block out the straight white male writers. Only female leads written by female authors—preferably an author of color and any gender other than straight—need apply.

(Insert screams and lots of colorful swearing here)

But you’re female, I hear you saying. You’ve got a ticket in. For the cheap seats, maybe. I’m still white and straight, writing about straight white male heroes. The problem is, I was planning on using a male pen name for this book. This book was going to be my entry into the horror genre. Stephen King doesn’t write the type of books that made him famous any more. I was hoping my nom de plume could step in and fill the void. But if white males are being elbowed out of my target genre, what’s a girl-passing-as-a-male-writer supposed to do?

So why can’t I use my real name? Because about a decade back, when I switched over to racy romance, I stupidly used my real name as my byline. Suppose the book sells well and piques people’s interest. They’ll look up my backlog and find my sex books. The ones with two guys, or one woman and two guys, or women with vampires and/or werewolves, doing fun activities together. The kind you don’t want your kids finding out about until they’re at least 27. I can’t use my initials because that’s what I used for my SFF stories, and that one YA romance with the vampires that sold maybe five copies, if that. So my real name and my initial name are both out of the running. And so’s my whitebread male pen name, it seems.

I’m still going to give it a shot, but my hopes aren’t high. My goal for 2025 will be to learn how to successfully self-publish.

Although…

Remember that screed I posted a few weeks back, about the publisher who wanted the male author to make his book “inclusive”? De-age the characters and play up the romance, only make it gay. I came up with a version of my book that did exactly that, eliminating all straight white maleness entirely. I meant it all sarcastically, getting my frustrations out of my system.

But what if I went ahead and actually wrote that version? Then queried both versions to the same or similar publishers? Which would sell? One? Both? Neither? What if I sold one and self-pubbed the other? Would I be sued for plagiarizing myself?

(Don’t laugh; that happened to John Fogerty, lead singer/songwriter of Creedence Clearwater Revival. He was called into court for writing a solo song that sounded too similar to a song he’d written for the band. It all depends on who owns the rights to what, and he didn’t own the rights to his CCR songs, even though he'd written them. The law's a funny thing.)

Might be an interesting experiment. It would make me feel like I’m actually doing something writing-related. I may just fiddle around with that next year, unless the diversity fad passes in the meantime. I’ve heard stories of romance e-book writers who do a traditional (MF) version, then rewrite the story as MM and sell it twice. I considered that, but while plotting I realized I was coming up with two separate storylines. I can’t even plagiarize myself correctly.

Or I could just go back to writing sex books. I need to do something to pay off the credit card before the interest kicks in. It doesn’t help that more and more outfits are saying, “We accept AI-assisted material.” Great. Like regular competition wasn’t enough, now I have to contend with Skynet’s literary efforts. I predicted that on here too. And you wonder why I’m depressed all the time. I think I’ll go watch TV. See y’all next week.

 

Week 10 - The Fine Art of Cannibalism

 

Update – I’m back on track with the romance, but only up to a point. My realization last week has me rethinking all the characters, not just the coyote shifter. For example, my heroine is one of those annoying “too stupid to live” types, and she deserves better than that. How was she supposed to know the town was run by shapeshifters? Or that they’d mistake her for a spy just because she’s human? This was supposed to be a little quickly-tossed-off romantic comedy, but now it’s acquiring themes and depth. Nothing and no one is/are what they seem to be. I will not be calling it A Comedy of Errors. I believe that title’s been taken. Meanwhile, I got stalled at a scene farther along so I’ve gone back to typing up the longhand Story So Far in the hopes a better idea will occur to me when I hit the trouble spot. Sometimes being a pantser really sucks pencil erasers.

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If you’re sweating over the title up there (not to mention my choice of illustration), fear not. I’m talking about literary cannibalism—re-using an earlier story as the foundation for something I hope I can sell. The romance started life as a serial story I fiddled around with on a writing blog I was on several years ago. Each week we’d post a scene about life in our little shared universe, which included a remote Western town populated by shapeshifters. I had a human outsider show up, looking for a place to use as a writer’s retreat, who started writing her book based on the people around her. The ruling wolf shifters, being wary of strangers, had two of the pack (young, handsome and sexy) follow her around to find out what she was up to. Hijinks ensued. The story progressed through about five erratically-published installments before I lost interest and moved on.

When I decided to write a book a month, I had a different story in mind—an action romance series about vampire slayers, told over the course of eight books. However, as soon as I sat down to write that one, I got blocked big time. My subconscious and I still have issues. But then I remembered all the snippets and flash scenes and ideas that petered out on the blog, just sitting there and moldering. Why not re-purpose them into something that could maybe help me pay the bills?

I’m not the first person to think of this. More than a few fan fiction writers have filed off the serial numbers on their media-inspired creations and turned them into self-published novels. Sometimes they get professionally published; repurposed fanfic is how we got Fifty Shades of Grey, and allegedly several vampire romances starring variations on Buffy and Spike. I went back to the blog—the group faded out several years ago, but the blog itself is still up—and trolled my entries for useable material. This story and another one hit a chord, and here I am writing a book.

What’s the difference between cannibalism and plagiarism? Basically, who wrote/created what. I’ve heard there are romance writers who’ve written and sold the same book to different publishers, only one version’s M/F and the other’s M/M. Same basic plot, maybe even duplicated sections of prose, but the characters and certain incidents would have to be radically different. “Brandon worshipfully caressed Michael’s ample breasts” just doesn’t cut it, not even in M/M.

As for “writers” who take someone else’s book, change the names and nothing else, and publish it as their own, that is plagiarism and is not to be tolerated. You’re basically stealing money from someone who did all the heavy lifting. Stealing ideas from yourself is a different matter. I never read any of Barbara Cartland’s romances, but I’ve heard she wrote essentially the same book over and over, with only minor variations. No wonder she could churn them out so fast. That’s cannibalism on a professional scale. If the readers don’t mind, what’s the harm?

Again, it depends. I’m not stealing from anyone else; these are all words, plots and characters I created and wrote. However, those chapters that appeared on the group blog need to be revised. We were using a shared universe, created by everyone. Other people’s characters could and often did show up in each other’s stories. As I rewrite I need to go through and scrub out anything that wasn’t originally mine. The notion of a remote town populated by (vampires/shapeshifters/aliens/monsters/Nazis) is a common trope, so I’m okay there. I’ve renamed the town and moved it to a different state. I’ve also had to rename my main characters because one of them (the coyote) appeared in a book the group put out as a freebie to drum up interest in our writing. The café where my heroine gets accosted for writing was someone else’s creation, as was its original owner. Both have now been changed. I’m going to miss Sergei, my white Siberian tiger assassin, but he appeared in a book I self-published under the group’s imprint, with permission from the other members. He’s a Russian bear now. He’s dating the local bookstore owner (a widowed bison) because his original girlfriend was created by somebody else. And so on down the line.

Getting sued for plagiarism is bad enough. Getting sued for plagiarizing yourself? That’s downright embarrassing.

If I’m lucky, I won’t have to worry about that. Because something interesting’s happened. With the new names and setting have come new ideas, new inspiration and new characterizations. It’s taking on a whole new life. By the time I’m done I suspect it’ll look nothing like the original. Of course, the original was never officially published; only readers of the blog ever saw it, and I doubt if they’ll remember. Though now that I’ve spilled the beans on this blog, I could be in for trouble. I really should have thought this through. But hey—pantser. What can you do? See you all next week.