When I was first invited to the Sharjah Children’s Reading Festival, I knew nothing whatever about it. My agent, however, did, and strongly recommended that I attend. The Children’s Reading Festival is one of the two book festivals held annually in Sharjah, and according to my agent, they are fast becoming the Bologna Book Fair and Frankfurt Book Fair of the Middle East. (For those of you who’ve never heard of any of this, those two are the premier places that agents and publishers’ reps go every year in order to sell translation rights. The Bologna fair focuses on children’s and YA; the Frankfurt fair covers everything.)

So I was excited. Also nervous – I haven’t done any of the international book fairs before, though there are quite a lot of them and some authors book a lot of Frequent Flyer miles making appearances at them. But definitely excited, both by the opportunity to visit a part of the world I hadn’t been to before and also, let’s be honest here, by the opportunity to get away from the SNOW we’ve still been having here. (I had to shovel my walk the Tuesday before I left; my flight home was delayed because there was a blizzard in Minneapolis and the plane that was supposed to go round-trip from Minneapolis to New York and back had deicing problems and got in to NY two hours late…but that’s a whole ‘nother story.)

Anyway, after a brief false start (I realized one block from the house that I’d forgotten to pack any copies of my books; fortunately, we had time to turn around and collect them), I was off. I left for the airport at 9:30 on Saturday morning and arrived at the hotel at 8:30 Sunday evening. Even with a 9-hour time difference and a five-hour layover in Dallas, it was a very long trip. Luckily for me, Emirates Air Lines is extremely comfortable.

The weather, on the other hand, was a bit of a shock. It was in the upper 80’s every day, with a nighttime low of 72 – that was about 60 degrees warmer than Minnesota (snow, remember? In April! Aaargh!), and it took some adjusting. Then I discovered that the day before I arrived, one of the other writers had had his school visit canceled on account of rain. Like a snow day, only…different. It makes sense when you consider that the streets aren’t designed for drainage, so an inch or two of rain ends up causing two-foot-deep puddles that stall cars, but it certainly drove home that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. Or Minnesota.

Sharjah and Dubai impressed me as probably the most cosmopolitan place I have ever been, and that includes New York, London, and Paris. I shouldn’t have been surprised – after all, the Middle East has been the crossroads of the world for thousands of years. The main reason, I think, is that in Sharjah nearly everything operated on the assumption that there would be people of multiple cultures and languages to deal with. Nearly all the signs and billboards were in both English and Arabic; several also included Japanese. The buffet meals always had at least one Western-style entrée and one Indian, Thai, or Japanese entrée, as well as the Middle Eastern dishes (plus the salads, the sandwich fixings, and the deserts from around the world…I’m amazed I didn’t gain fifty pounds).

The Children’s Reading Festival was similarly international. OK, about 80-90% of the book dealers were Arabic publishers, but many had books in English (I picked up one on local history), and there were several who clearly act as distributors for American, British, or Japanese publishers (possibly others as well; I didn’t manage to examine all the booths as thoroughly as I’d have liked). The art display included children’s book illustrators from Mexico, Sweden, Canada, Germany, and Japan, as well as Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Egypt (which I’d expected).

Monday I was part of a panel on “Great Stories Around the World” with a British writer, a writer and scholar from one of the U.A.E.’s universities, and a well-known Arabic children’s writer. The panel was both the same and different from those I’ve been on before. The similarity was most noticeable in the way nothing anyone said had much to do with the supposed topic. The panel followed the academic model, where each panelist gives a five or ten-minute presentation, rather than the SF-convention model, where the moderator asks questions and everyone answers them. As is fairly common with such panels, the university scholar’s presentation ran at least twice as long as any of the writers’ speeches; what was much less common was that it was thoroughly fascinating, and the gentleman’s passion for his subject (designing books to appeal to as many senses as possible, so as to involve children more fully in reading, especially kids who have trouble with the traditional ways they’re taught to read) came across even in translation.

I had a little difficulty with the translation earphones, which I hadn’t used before. (I found it extremely distracting and disorienting to be listening to someone speaking in Arabic while I was trying to think of what to say next.) I finally took the headphones off when anyone was speaking in English, and put them back on when someone was talking in Arabic and I needed the translation. I found out later that there was an on/off switch I could have used, which would have been much less intrusive.

I did one thing right, and that was to remember to speak slowly enough for the translator to keep up. It was a bit tricky, as I tend to talk faster and faster when I’m nervous. I was glad I’d been warned about that in advance; one of the other presenters went so quickly that the translator kept getting lost, and I missed about 25% of what he said.

The school visit I did later in the week was much like any school visit. I’d worried about needing a translator for that, too, but evidently many of the schools teach English by immersion, and I was sent to one of those. The students were very bright and eager and asked lots of good questions, and I was able to present their library with some of those books I’d nearly forgotten to bring.

The rest of the trip, I split between napping (I never did adjust to the time change), doing touristy stuff, and hanging around the Festival. I signed an enormous amount of stock for the dealer who had copies of my books, sat in on a couple of other panels, watched some of the demos and presentations (the storyteller sounded amazing, even if I couldn’t understand a thing he said, and he must have been good because the kids in the audience were absolutely enthralled).

The other foreign authors who, like me, had been invited to present at the festival were from all over – Sweden, Germany, England, Wales, Egypt, Jordan … and those were just the ones who were there at the same time I was. It was both fun and frustrating to meet them, as we were all on different schedules, so half the people I met Monday were leaving Tuesday morning, and new writers arrived every day. After a while, I lost track of who was coming and who was going.

And then, just when I was finally starting to adjust to the time change, I had to get up at 4:30 a.m. to catch the flight home. If I ever go again, I want to stay longer (and start adjusting to the time change in advance, so it’s not so much of a shock).

Conjecture was great fun; I recommend it to the attention of anyone in the San Diego area around this time next year. The hotel was a big of a maze, and their internet was “undergoing upgrading” and therefore wildly unreliable, but the staff was very nice and the convention space worked really well, I thought.

Among the standout moments were the Chowder Hour in the consuite, the joint Star Wars Reading (in which voice actor Mark Biagi and I, with some helpful volunteers from the audience, did a joint reading from the Star Wars novelizations, with Mark doing the voices and me reading the narration), the Iron Hack event (in which four of us composed a story on the fly, incorporating various people, places, and objects suggested by the audience, including Conan the Librarian, the Ark of the Covenant, William Gladstone, and Captain Nemo’s Hideout, among other things), and the Enchanted Tea, to which everyone was encouraged to come in Regency costume (I really must get around to making myself something more suitable to wear to such an event).

Following the convention, we had a long and very wiggly drive home, with stops at White Sands National Monument (where I was pleased to discover Green Glass Sea, Ellen Klages’ excellent YA about Los Alamos and the development of the first atomic bomb, on sale in the gift shop) and Carlsbad Caverns, where we got to walk around the cave and then stayed to watch the bats come out. Dad allowed as how White Sands was a lot more interesting now than it was when he was 18 and thought it was just a lot of sand and kind of boring.

One of the things I did during part of the drive was listen to the first part of a batch of recorded lectures I purchased recently. As many of you know, I never took any English, Literature, or Creative Writing classes after I got out of high school. I was a Biology major, and while my college required a certain number of distribution credits, English was in the same group as History, so I filled mine in with classes in the history of places that my high school didn’t cover, like China and India. I figured that reading books was something I’d do anyway, but I’d have a lot harder time figuring out what the best history texts were without a bit more background.

On the whole, I’ve never been sorry I made that choice, though I have often wished I hadn’t needed to make it. It would have been so much nicer to have had enough time to take both sets of courses… Anyway, after years of complaining about what I missed, I finally decided to take advantage of the availability of lectures on tape and the internet to fill in a bit of what I missed.

So I’m now about halfway through a lecture series that’s about twelve hours of what I’d call an overview of English Literature and the way college-level classes look at it. It’s been enlightening on a number of accounts, mostly in understanding how academics, who are by and large not themselves creative writers, view fiction, and how it is and isn’t helpful to people who actually want to write the stuff.

For starters, the first three lectures are mainly about authors and their relationship with readers. It’s very clear from the references and terminology that the lecturer is throwing around that this is considered a normal, maybe even fundamental, aspect of thinking about literature. He even poses (but does not answer) the question: How much does the reader need to know about an author in order to appreciate their work properly?

Now, I can see that sometimes it is useful to know things about an author, specifically when a) the author makes a habit of including in-jokes and references in his/her work that no one unfamiliar with his/her life can get, and b) when the book was written far enough in the past that it takes a certain amount of historical knowledge to understand it because things that were common knowledge at the time no longer are.

But does knowing stuff about the author really make a difference to a reader’s enjoyment of a book? If so, why don’t all books come with an authorial biography before or after, in order to enhance every reader’s experience? Oh, a lot of folks are interested in what their favorite authors are like, and want to meet them or read their blogs or send fanmail/email to express their appreciation, but that’s not quite the same thing. The “favorite author” part – reading and liking the books – comes first, and the interest in the author derives from that. Also, there are far more people who just read the books and don’t much worry about what the author is like.

It’s a tricky question, because I have noticed that for a lot of folks, knowing the author does change their judgement of a work…but not predictably. For some, knowing the actual author makes them less critical and more tolerant of flaws that would have them tossing a stranger’s book in the discard pile; for others, knowing the author makes them pickier and more inclined to object to minor problems they’d never notice in a random library book.

For myself, I don’t write novels in order to “create a relationship with my readers.” I write to tell stories, and it’s the stories that matter, not me. Thinking too hard about “the audience” is absolutely deadly when I’m writing. It’s a distraction I don’t need.

Actually meeting people at conventions and autographings and so on is fun and I certainly do enjoy it. Talking to people through this blog is also fun. But it’s not the reason I write novels, and the relationship that I have with the fans I meet here or at cons has nothing to do with how and why and what I write.

I’ll probably have more to say about this series of lectures as I work my way through the course. There are some on plot and subtext coming up that look interesting…

There’s rather a lot of family scattered around; my Dad’s family has been keeping track since umpty-great-grandpa James decided to quit being a British spy after the Revolutionary War and stick around the new U.S.A. instead (I’ve always thought that maybe umpty-great-grandma had something to do with that, but there’s no family lore to back it up).

Be that as it may, I’m not in a position to lose two and a half weeks of writing time right now, especially since I’m still in the development phase. If I take that much time off now, dire experience tells me that I’m likely to find the whole project not merely cold, but encased in a three-foot layer of ice when I get back to it…which is another way of saying I really, really had better not do that. So I’m going to be writing on the road.

Writing on the road means planning ahead. It’s not enough to haul the electronics along, though the laptop is essential and the iPad is convenient for reading in the car (I thank my stars that I am capable of doing that; lots of folks can’t). I know from more experience that the Internet is not always reliably available when one is driving cross-country, no matter what they claim…and anyway, roaming charges are expensive. So I also have to consider what I want to make certain is on the electronics in the way of software and reference materials, as well as what sorts of non-electronic things (hard copy books and notes, CDs) I also want to haul along.

Since there’ll be a lot of driving on this trip no matter how many stops we make, I’m planning on bringing a fair lot of reference materials. This weekend, I’ll be combing Project Gutenberg for free primary-source downloads that look interesting, as well as ripping a couple of CDs I just bought of lectures about writing and literary criticism. I already have the gadget that plugs into the cigarette lighter socket (do they even still call it that?) that you can plug your laptop or iPad into to extend the battery. And I have a number of gadgets, from the wireless mouse to the portable external hard drive, all of which fit handily into the giant laptop bag. (The bag is really for all the externals; the laptop itself is small enough to fit in my handbag. OK, it’s a big handbag, but it’s not that big…)

No matter how much preparation I do, though, writing on the road is never easy. When I drive alone, I obviously can’t read or type, and I’m no good at dictating. I do carry a recorder to grab ideas on the fly, but it’s a pain to transcribe when I’m done driving (and I know from experience that if I don’t type them onto my laptop that night at the hotel, they’ll probably never get transcribed at all…or by the time I do get around to it, they won’t make any sense to me). I can, however, listen to whatever I want (usually audiobooks or podcasts). Driving with somebody is different. I still don’t have much luck typing in a moving vehicle, though I can read if we’re not talking. On the other hand, I have to negotiate what we’re going to listen to.

Destinations are just as difficult as the driving part – there’s a reason why I’m in Texas or New England or California or Washington, and it’s not to spend my days laboring over a hot laptop. If that’s all I was going to do, I could just as well have stayed home. There are things to see, people to meet up with, dinners to have out…

What it all boils down to is that “writing on the road” nearly always ends up meaning writing in a hotel room, either early in the morning before everyone else is up and about, or late in the evening when one is exhausted and only wants to get to bed. Either way, it takes even more discipline than usual to forego that extra hour or so of sleep and put the time into writing instead. If one is setting one’s own schedule (or if one is traveling with people who have the opposite biological rhythm – they sleep in while you like getting up early, or they go to bed early while you like to stay up), one can sometimes carve the writing time out of one’s daytime schedule, rather than from one’s sleep, but it still has to be carved.

Usually I can keep a rhythm going on a trip by using the trip itself as material – writing descriptions of what I saw or did that day, or bits of ideas, or overheard conversations that work as idea-triggers can keep the habit going even if I’m not seriously working on pay copy for a few days or a week. Sometimes, though, the book is at a critical stage, or there’s a deadline, or an editor has a last-minute request, or there’s some white-hot scene or short story that has to be grabbed right now, and there’s nothing for it but to squeeze in some serious work regardless of time, place, and general convenience.

And the way you do that is…you just do it. You get up early and crack open the laptop (or stay up an extra hour or three, if it’s the white-hot thing), and you sit at it and write. Sometimes, you’re lucky and being in a different place shakes things loose in a good way; sometimes, it’s harder than ever. You do it anyway.

Really, it’s not so different from writing at home, whether you feel like it or not…

The thing that 4^th Street always does for me, and this year especially, is to remind me how much fun it is to talk to people who are real, deep experts in their particular field. Writers tend to have an extremely broad range of knowledge, because we have to, to make stories work, but it’s not that deep expertise that you get from digging into, say, the development of Han dynasty bronzework for twenty or thirty years. It is a Good Thing for me to be occasionally reminded of just how much I don’t know.

Friday night, a bunch of us went to the Chinese restaurant around the corner – Elise Matthesen (art jeweler extraordinaire), Ellen Klages (auctioneer an author of The Green Glass Sea), two Swedish visitors who’d read one of my Swedish translations (it was really nice to find out that the traslation was good), and me. We had a yummy meal and lots of good wide-ranging talk, and of course at the end, they brought us fortune cookies. I was busy talking and waving my arms around as usual, so I ended up with the last of the fortune cookies. It read:

“You will become an accomplished writer.”

I laughed so hard I couldn’t even read it out to the rest of the table. Still, it’s good to know I’ll get there eventually… 

I don’t think I’m going to try to talk about the panels, but the list of books that got recommended, by panel topic, is here: https://sites.google.com/site/4thstreet2012/ along with a couple of good quotes from various people. I forsee another bookshelf (for the new to-be-read acquisitions) in my future…

Most of what I remember clearly is conversations – there was a really good one about ways of looking at viewpoint, several what-are-you-working-on-now things that got off into various eras of history and how much most people don’t know about them, one on families and accounting, one that I overheard part of that seemed to be about color perception and anthropology. LizV and I missed two panels and the lunch break talking about query letters and synopsis (which I will be addressing more in future posts, by request).

It’s interesting to me that the more stripped-down 4th Street gets (no GOH, no dealer’s room, no art show, no media room, etc.), the more intense and interesting the discussions seem to get. It isn’t for everyone, but for me…well, there’s nothing else quite like it. And there were scores of people I wanted to talk to and didn’t get the chance – even in three days, you just can’t get around to an in-depth conversation with 100+ different people.

Ah, well – there’s always next year.

One of the interesting things this year was that there were three (!) panels on worldbuilding, and that’s not counting the ones on specific bits of worldbuilding, like the panel on “Designing a Magic System.” I was on the third panel, “The Joy of Worldbuilding,” which suffered a bit, I think, from being at the end of the run of panels on the topic. Nevertheless, we had a good crowd, and that tells me something about the interest of readers and writers in the topic, especially since they’d already had (potentially) at least three related panels in the previous twenty-four hours.

The topic was supposed to be about the sheer fun of worldbuilding for its own sake, but the discussion drifted (as such things are wont to do). What I ended up taking away from it was neither a list of recommended books (though there were quite a lot on display), nor tips and tricks for doing worldbuilding (though a few of those ran by as well), but a number of thoughts about process and utility.

For at least some fans and writers, inventing a coherent, consistent imaginary world is immense fun. Yes, even doing the math-and-science bits (sometimes especially the math-and-science bits). Yes, even when you know perfectly well that 99.9% of your readers are never going to notice that the orbital mechanics of the space station or the plate tectonics of the land masses are right (as far as scientific theory as of the copy-edit date knows). Yes, even when it’s a totally-imaginary fantasy world and the notion that there even are plate tectonics or fossils is never even going to occur to them. Getting it right, making it work within the rules-as-we-know-them is fun. So is making up a bunch of one’s own rules and then figuring out as many ramifications as possible.

In spite of the fun and the intellectual puzzle aspects of it, worldbuilding for its own sake has a bit of a bad rap in an awful lot of fan communities. I think that this is because so very many fans want (or think they want) to be writers, and worldbuilding is perceived as both a vital necessity for writing science fiction or fantasy and as a snare that can easily sidetrack the would-be writer into spending years doing worldbuilding instead of producing stories.

What people forget is that J. R. R. Tolkein spent forty years working on the worldbuilding for Middle Earth…for fun. Yes, eventually The Lord of the Rings came out of it, but the goal, at the start, wasn’t to write a bestselling fantasy. The goal was to make up some cool languages and then some neat people/elves/dwarves/ents/hobbits/etc. to speak the languages and then some poetry and history and cultures for the neat people/elves/etc. The story came last, almost as an afterthought.

In other words, worldbuilding does not have to have a utilitarian purpose in order to justify doing it. If one’s goal is to write a novel, well, then, yes, one does need to do some worldbuilding, whether one enjoys it or not, and one does have to be a bit careful that if one enjoys it, one doesn’t get too distracted from the ultimate goal (writing the novel). But if one just wants to have fun making stuff up…why not? You don’t have to be a writer to enjoy constructing an imaginary place.

The other point is a process one. We had two writers on that panel, and we represented the opposite ends of the worldbuilding process. I need to have a certain (fairly significant) amount of the worldbuilding done in advance in order to keep my story and my characters in line and everything consistent. I didn’t need to make up every single magical creature on the Great Plains in Frontier Magic (though I did make up quite a few), but I did have to know that I wanted an entire magical ecology that existed simultaneously with the non-magical, real-life one…which meant making sure that I talked about magical plants and insects and birds as well as things like dragons that you’d expect to find in a fantasy. I need a fair bit of foundation laid before I start working on the story, even if I don’t actually use most of it.

In contrast, the other writer on the panel apparently did much of his worldbuilding as needed during the writing of the story. I have a good friend who works similarly; where I need the structure and foundation to keep things in line, she needs the freedom to come up with an emergency escape detail on the fly that can get her characters out of a sticky situation. I don’t recall her actually having to do this, any more than I actually use the specific details I come up with in advance, but just as having a foundation is necessary to my process, being unrestricted and able to make up details is necessary to hers.

The last thing about worldbuilding is that we use the word in two different ways. On the one hand “worldbuilding” is that pre-writing or hobby-like invention of a coherent imaginary place, in as much detail (or lack thereof) as the inventor happens to want or need. It’s independent of story, just as real-life places exist independent of the people that live in them and the things that happen in them. On the other hand, there’s the worldbuilding that takes place within the story – the accumulation of details and bits of description and information that the characters find out about the history of the place(s) they move through, all of which creates an image of the world in which the story takes place. This kind of worldbuilding is a writing and storytelling technique, and it applies as much to modern mimetic fiction as it does to the most surreal of fantasies. The existence of real-life New York, Capetown, or Bombay does not make it easier to convey a sense of them to a reader than it is to evoke the feel of an imaginary place like Hobbiton or Edoras.

It’s the second kind of worldbuilding – the in-story techniques for conveying the look and feel of a place, whether real or imaginary – that is vital to fantasy and science fiction. The pre-writing make-it-up sort of worldbuilding is optional, depending on one’s personal process.

As some of you may recall, back in September I had a three-day visit from a team of video and publicity people, sent by my ebook publisher to shoot footage for some publicity/informational videos. Those vids are now up on YouTube, so I thought I’d post links here for anyone who’s interested.

The first one is the “Meet the Author” video, which is mostly me blathering on about writing. It has a couple of great shots of Cazaril, who is far more photogentic than I am.

Meet the author = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3xiJXLVSe8&feature=related

The second one is about the closets my sister Carol painted, and has some great shots of the Oz closet, the Narnia closet, and the Peter Pan closet – that’s the one they had me walk down the hall and into (they must have really liked that shot; it’s in both videos).

Closets – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhVRGVgj_WQ

Have a great day; see you again on Wednesday!

Much as nobody believes it from outside the process, getting published is not the pinnacle of achievement. It’s the bottom rung on a whole new ladder. It’s like graduating from high school; you may have been a Big Shot in the senior class, but now you’re either a freshman in college or the lowest replaceable flunky in an entry-level job, and nobody cares that you were voted Most Likely To Whatever.

In addition, the ladder isn’t a nice straightforward one; it’s more like those drawings by Escher with the stairs that go around in an endless square that you’re always climbing but never getting to the top. This is because there’s no real definition of what “the top” actually is. Is a book that sells two million copies closer to “the top” than one that wins a Pulitzer Prize? What about one that gets really good reviews but flops at the cash register? If you get a movie deal, does that make up for six reviews panning the book and a bunch more saying the movie is “even more treacle than the book it was made from”? And what if you get a mega-best-seller…and then your next book is a total flop?

That last bit is the thing a lot of people don’t count on. There’s a saying in the industry: You’re only as good as your last book. And every book is a whole new thing, with all the problems of attracting people to an untested new product. Yes, even if it’s the second book in a trilogy or the eighth book in a series.

Which brings me to promotion and publicity.

There are two pieces to this: the public appearances (which a lot of folks think of as the glamorous part), and all the prep work and support effort that goes into making them happen. The public appearances are enormous fun for writers of a gregarious temperament, but they’re pure torture for those who are shy or solitary, or even for those who are not wildly social. In either case, they are an energy drain (how noticeable depends on how much energy one has to begin with). One has to be “on” for hours at a time – not merely socializing, but socializing to a purpose (i.e., persuading people you have never met that they should buy, read, and hopefully talk favorably about your latest book to all their friends).

Speaking engagements require the most preparation – you have to write a speech (duh). Readings are simpler; all you have to do is pick out a passage that you can cover in the amount of time allotted. In both cases, there will almost certainly be questions afterwards, which is a bit scary the first couple of times until one has done it enough to have been asked the standard batch of writer questions and developed answers for them. (Where do you get your ideas? Where do you get your characters? Who were your biggest influences? What is your favorite book? Do you ever put real people in your books? etc.)

Some speaking engagements pay a fee (which can range from a token $25.00 for gas to several thousand if you’re a famous author giving a keynote speech at a prestigious conference. In the YA field, you also have school visits, which generally involve speaking to one or more groups of students (which can mean anything from the advanced Young Creative Writers class of fifteen to an all-school assembly of a thousand kids or more). Often, several schools and libraries in a particular area will get together to bring an author to town, splitting the travel fees. If the author isn’t wary, this can result in a schedule such as: arrive in town at 5:30 p.m.; check into hotel; dinner with school and library board; 7 a.m. breakfast with School A librarians; presentation to School A literary club at 9:30; all-school assembly at 10:20; drive to School B; lunch with School B teachers; presentation to School B classes in the afternoon; autographing at local bookstore; dinner with adult book group; public library presentation at 7:30 p.m.; breakfast and morning presentations at School C; dash to airport to catch 1 p.m. flight. If you’re really unwary, they’ll try to cut expenses by scheduling you to leave on a 6 a.m. flight, arriving at 8 a.m., race to School A for the 9:30 literary club presentation and proceed from there, thus reducing their costs by one night of lodging and two meals.

Mixers and parties require the least advance preparation; about all you have to do is make sure that you have a stack of business cards, an intriguing two-sentence summary of your book memorized, and a really clear idea of what your tolerance for alcohol is. You also have to remind yourself not to hole up with all the other writers in the corner; it’s the bookstore owners, book buyers, teachers, librarians, and readers that you’re supposed to be there to talk to. Even though you know that the writers won’t ask the Standard Writer Questions (see above) and everybody else will.

Science fiction conventions don’t pay (except room and meals if you’re the Guest of Honor), but they tend to be friendly and more laid-back and off-the-cuff than school visits and speaking engagements that pay.

Autographings come in three varieties, plus the hideously embarrassing “signing stock,” which is where one slinks into a bookstore, checks to make sure they actually have a copy of one’s book on the shelves, and then walks up to the cash register to tell the clerk “I’m an author, and I notice you have some of my books; would you like me to autograph them?” This is almost as bad as the normal autographing, where the author gets to sit in front of a small mountain of books for two hours, while an average of five people stop to get copies signed (three of them employees of the bookstore).

Then there are the special autograph sessions at some of the giant teacher, librarian, or bookseller’s conventions, where the publisher is giving books away free as publicity. This nearly guarantees that there will be a line (though that is “nearly”…and it’s really embarrassing and depressing when you are giving away books and nobody is interested). It also means that a lot of the folks in line will be there because they are getting a free book, not because they know anything about the book, or you. (Which is, of course, the whole point.)

And then there are the rare, precious times when everything goes right and fifty people show up at the bookstore to get your new book signed. Even then, however, there is always someone who insists on telling you in detail about some mistake you made in the previous book…which holds up the line and makes everyone else crabby.

In short, all of the public-appearance after-writing publicity stuff involves talking to and being polite to large numbers of strangers, most of whom are not going to view you with awe simply because you are a published writer. The teachers, booksellers, and librarians make up the largest part of the audience for public appearances. They are sharp, finicky customers; they often admire authors, but they’re seldom overawed by them. The readers are, by and large, much better for the authorial ego (barring the ones who seem to think that the more holes they can pick in a writer’s work, the more the writer will appreciate their honesty and diligence).

So here, unattributed and in no particular order, are a few things that caught my attention during the course of the weekend. Should this inspire anyone with interest in next year’s convention, the link is here.

On to the quotations:

I’ve been artificial for over a year now.

So if the monsters are human, and the humans are monsters, it’s really a definition problem?

In case you haven’t had breakfast yet, there are cheese blintzes in the consuite.

Some of us write by the seat of our pants.

Point of view solves all your problems.

If the author is being obviously sneaky, this is not a plus.

Genre books are built around secrets.

The author borrows the reader’s brain; if he leaves potato chips ground into the carpet, we have a right to be upset.

History will do what it wants, and so will I.

Cows on spaceships? OMG, the methane!

Yeast-risen bread is hard to make when you’re migrating.

Nobody is going to domesticate a wolverine.

Writers like audiences. They pay the bills.

I’m a writer; I don’t know how to retire.

Is this row knitting friendly?

I am not in this position, but I’d sure like to be.

I was trying to see how many genres I could fit into one series.

Writing about one main character is not limiting if that character provides what the author needs artistically.

Readers come at you from such different directions that it is catastrophic to pay attention to them.

If you worry about making your audience angry, you will bore them, and then it’s time to get a job at Walmart.

You can either leave readers wanting more, or leave them wanting less…and if you leave them wanting less, there is retroactive damage to the series.

People in most fantasy novels are strangely healthy with very good teeth.

I am impervious to your eyeballs.

The world is weirder than we thought.

Oh, are those fingers tasty?

A well executed death makes the world seem less messy.

I don’t write fiction. I’m not that brave.

Sometimes you just have to line your characters up against a wall and ask, OK, which one of you guys is screwing things up?

Not all experiments get you a parade in the streets.

Being miserable in a tent is intrinsic to the teen experience.

If you’re not a control freak, you’re not really a writer.

When society is monstrous, monsters become human.

If you want money, become a banker.

You’re not going to run a whole culture on nothing but mushrooms.

Having two publishers is like being a bigamist who doesn’t want to give up either wife.

Humans use magic; monsters are magic.

There is nothing less interesting than a universe in which no one ever grows, no one ever changes, and no one ever dies.

All of those outlets also give me tons of new ways to publicize my work – web pages, blogs, guest blogs, social networks, Twitter, book trailers, mailing lists, forums…the list goes on and on. I’m constantly amazed at the creative ways more net-savvy writers find to get and keep in touch with their readers.

A less obvious advantage, from outside, is the speeding up of professional interactions. Used to be that if my manuscript was due on Monday, I had to have it finished nearly a week before, to allow time for printing it out and sending it via regular mail. FedEx shortened that up by a day or two…but sometimes, you really, really want that last day. Every writer in town who started along with me can probably still tell you which FedEx office was the one with the longest hours, and more than one of us made it in the door five minutes before closing.

Now, I can work up to noon on the very day the ms. is due and still get it in “on time” with the press of a key. I also don’t get interrupting phone calls that derail my train of thought nearly so often, because people send e-mails instead. It’s not as if my phone was ringing off the hook before, but it only takes one call at exactly the wrong moment to lose that perfect plot twist you’d just figured out after two weeks of cogitating. (The plot twist that gets away is always perfect. It’s a rule.)

Some of the disadvantages of the Internet are also obvious: all those interactions take time, hours and hours of it. That time has to come from somewhere, and there are only two possible choices: either it comes out of our writing time, or it comes out of the rest of our life. (Yes, writers have lives, too…well, some of us do, anyway.) Writers complain about this fairly regularly, so most folks are aware of it.

There are other, not-so-obvious disadvantages, though. With the advent of all those ways for an individual writer to publicize his/her books, a lot of publishers have begun more or less demanding that the writers do so. What used to be an option – heavy involvement by the writer in end-user book promotion – has become very nearly mandatory. If you don’t have at least a web site and a blog or Facebook page, you obviously aren’t really serious about selling your books … justifying, in the minds of many publishers, even more cutbacks in the amount of promotion they’re willing to do. After all, if you aren’t serious about your work, why should they be?

The other big but not-always obvious problem with the Internet is that it offers a seemingly infinite number of ways to screw up your own career. When I’m typing in a blog post or website update, or even a comment on someone else’s blog post, I’m usually alone in my office. It’s incredibly easy to forget that the off-the-cuff remark that I make to a close personal friend is not just being shared with her and the three other people who are part of the active discussion, but with all the lurkers who enjoy reading but who don’t wish to comment…and with even more who may stumble across my words months or years later. As one of my friends said, it’s like holding an intimate tea party in an airplane hanger that could be (and probably is) full of invisible watchers.

The airplane-hanger effect can be particularly insidious when the writer really wants to talk about something they shouldn’t – an exciting new proposal for reissuing one’s out-of-print work, for instance, or a potential media deal. It’s awfully easy to forget that even a privacy-locked entry may have quite a few more folks cleared to look at it than you remember…and some of them may be the very business colleagues you really didn’t want knowing about this until the deal was tied down.

And then there’s plain old bad behavior. I’ve watched more than one would-be or newly-published writer (and some old and experienced ones, too!) shoot themselves in the foot by complaining, on line and in public, about a bad review or a demanding editor or an uncooperative convention or an irritating fan. I sympathize, to some extent (it is far too easy to dash off a fiery rebuttal and hit “send” in the heat of the moment), but it’s a small extent. I’ve had a terrible temper since I was quite small, and I learned a long time ago to sit on my hands until the first rush passes. It isn’t easy, but it’s quite doable, and it can keep you from making yourself a laughingstock or a horrible example.

Probably the worse examples of speaking-before-thinking are the folks who argue with their on-line reviews. It may seem to the writer as if he’s only saying mildly, “I don’t think you quite understand what I was getting at,” but somehow the comments always end up sounding more like “You ******* imbecile! How dare you dislike my golden prose? You *******!” when a disinterested reader looks at them. Being rude to people who are giving their honest opinion only ever makes you look bad.

I like the Internet, and all its advantages. But I do try to remember that there are disadvantages too. Most of the disadvantages, I can compensate for, if I think. So I do try to think as much as possible.

And I spaced it.

I have a list of excuses as long as your arm, and I feel guilty as all get-out, and I apologize profusely to anyone who went expecting me to be there. But that’s not what I want to talk about at the moment.

What I want to talk about is the underlying problem, which is this:  I should never have accepted in the first place.

I like seeing fans, and I like talking about my books and finding out what other people think of them. But right now, I have way too much going on in my life to be taking on any more obligations. I knew this. I’ve been turning down most out-of-town gigs for a good three years now, ever since Mom’s Alzheimers made it necessary for me to start taking over the family finances. I’ve been warning everyone I did accept that I might have to cancel at the last minute. But…

But this was a local event. I know quite a few of the members, and I was looking forward to seeing them. I’ve been to meetings before, when they were discussing some of my other titles, and it was fun and interesting and intelligent. It was only about a 20 minute drive from my house. They promised me tea. I told myself I could use the break (and I could). I told myself it would get me pumped up to write more and faster on the sequel that’s due in June. And, again, it was local – and I haven’t been turning down local events, because they don’t take that much time out of my schedule and I don’t have to pack and travel and blah blah.

In short, I made excuses to accept, because I really wanted to do this.

But a big part of managing one’s writing career is, well, managing it. Which means pacing oneself. Which means not succumbing to tempting offers if they are going to add more stress to an already-stressed-out full-up schedule.

The trouble is that at first glance, my schedule doesn’t look so bad. Minicon is coming up this weekend; there’s tax day and a dentist appointment and my Dad’s 90th birthday coming up in April, 4th Street Fantasy Con in June and Convergence in July (all of which are local). I have to spend a weekend moving furniture and packing up china from the summer house that my Dad is selling. Oh, and take the cats for their annual vet visit in May.

In short, the calendar isn’t empty, but it isn’t crowded with obligations and events. It looks as if I could fit in a couple more appearances, maybe even an out-of-town gig. And I hate telling people “no.” But…

But tax day involves getting information for ten different entities for my Dad (thanks to a bunch of complicated estate planning that my mother and grandmother did). I have a book to write (and do ongoing research for). I’m managing my mother’s estate for the forseeable future, as well as needing to work with my father and the lawyer on what changes need to be made to his estate plan. The family business got caught in the financial meltdown and recession, so we’re all spending time planning how to keep it afloat until business picks up again (and there are lawyer meetings for that, too). I have a couple of students I’m committed to mentoring this spring. I have writer friends who need plot-noodling (and I can’t very well back out, because it’s a trade – I help them, they help me). And of course there’s all the usual life-maintenance stuff, along with the running-my-own-business (i.e., the writing office work) stuff.

Taken one thing at a time, none of it is unusually difficult or impossible to get done. Take it all together, and I have no business adding on anything more, even if it’s just a couple of hours (and I’d take that much time just going to a movie, if I ever went to movies).

Yet I still do. Because I find it really, really hard to turn down things I want to do, even when I know I should.

I’m not saying this because I want people to stop asking me to do things, or in order to complain about my busy schedule. I’m offering it as an object lesson, a cautionary tale. Overscheduling is easy to do, and surprisingly hard to get out of.

And I’m still really, really sorry about Saturday.