My name is Phoebe Kitanidis and I write things. And publish things.
twitter.com/phoebekitanidis:
My friends’ dog Vanya is so damn keeeyute! This picture cries out for LOLification.
Well, Mom’s in London again for a couple of weeks. In honour of that, here I am basking in the sun. The sun, it is warm and makes me sleepy.
What’s odd about your amazing love story? Enter OddRocket’s fiction contest and let us know!
Chapter 1
THE PROBLEM WITH BEING ALMOST FEARLESS is how quickly you get bored of stuff that used to make your blood buzz with adrenaline.
Case in point. If I still lived with Mom, back in our Longview, Washington condo, I’d be passed out right now on a lumpy twin futon. Rocking my waffle-knit pjs with bed-socks. Glasses haphazardly tossed over my Kindle on the nightstand. School alarm set to go off in three hours.
Instead, I’m at a Vegas casino wearing a violet one-strap couture mermaid gown, fake ID tucked into my thigh strap. Along with my blade.
Clutching my tiny silver purse—an empty prop—I walk with purpose through the glaringly bright gaming floor. Past the canned symphony of computerized bells and whistles. Past zombified seniors parked at their slot machines, shaky trigger fingers pumping the buttons with OCD frenzy.
No one here knows or cares, but my actions over the next ten minutes will violate multiple federal laws. If I nail the job, I could score my first million—without Dad’s micromanaging supervision. If I fuck it up? I’m looking at celebrating my seventeenth birthday in juvie.
Any normal girl would be sweating.
I’m as cool and dry as a rattle snake.
Some would say (and have said, to my face or behind my back) that I’m really more reptile than human. Dad disagrees. He says people like us just don’t worry about stuff like jail, because that’s in the future… and we always assume the future will turn out great.
The quickest I ever wrote a book was three months. It wasn’t a good book. It was shallow and unstructured. The most recent book I’ve written, I believe is my best. I’ve written the first draft. It took four and a half years.
To write a book takes a quite ridiculous investment of time and focus….
God, this is so true:
To write a book takes a quite ridiculous investment of time and focus. You neglect your family, your friends. Whatever work is paying your bills gets nothing close to the attention needed. Your career suffers. Your health too. You sit in one place for hours, shoulders hunched, not exercising, drinking too much caffeine. And at the other end, after months and years, what do you have?
You have something most people won’t like.
…/cries/
Cross-posting from the OddRocket blog:
Much has been written in the last few days on the dust-up between SFWA/Scalzi and Random House over its new no-advance-paying imprint Hydra. But I’d like to speak more broadly in this post, about the advance system and what role it might play in the future of publishing.
Scalzi makes the categorical claim that authors must demand advances. Always. 100% of the time. Publishers who haven’t budgeted for author advances have planned their business “stupidly,” while those who have ready cash but won’t cough it up (a la Hydra) have planned theirs “maliciously.” Authors wishing to succeed should therefore, according to Scalzi, buckle down, write a book with mass commercial appeal, and negotiate an awesome contract for it with one of the remaining five big publishers.
Once (in the days before I qualified for SWFA membership) I would have thought this solid advice.
Now? Been there, done that, and still have a few of the promotional t-shirts.
I wholeheartedly believe that we authors should negotiate for the best terms we can, every time. But I no longer think our battle-cry should always be, “Where’s my advance?”
From a creative perspective: not every worthy book is best-suited for traditional publishing. Trying to shoehorn such projects into blockbuster format would kill them. On the other hand, the current glut of self-published ebooks makes passive discovery a challenge for indie authors. If a publisher can produce your book (so you don’t go into debt to do so yourself), brand it, and get it in front of its ideal audience where it will garner sales and reviews, there is value in that.
From a pure business perspective: I’m not convinced that the practice of advance-paying is in all cases the most sound and sustainable one. Most novels don’t earn out their advances and end up losing money for their publishers. Since this is true across all the majors, we can conclude that either advance-paying publishers don’t know how to predict success OR they are not in the game purely for business reasons.
In my view, it’s a bit of both. Editors buy what they love, and sometimes the rest of the book-buying world agrees with them. Often it doesn’t. Sometimes that author’s third or fifth book catches on with readers and publishers can recoup the money they lost before. But for all the talk about “growing authors” many authors never do break out.
Yet, while publishers can’t predict which debut novel will be a winner from a business perspective, they could easily be making far more conservative choices to reduce risk. Frankly, if they were bent on sucking up every last dollar, they’d publish nothing but ghost-teamed thrillers, romantica, diet books, and celeb memoirs. The fact that they’re not doing that suggests they actually care about something other than maximizing profits. They care about supporting the arts. Advances are a necessary piece of that patronage. But does that mean it must be a necessary part of all (legit) book publishing in the 21st century?
No one likes to talk about the real reason profit-sharing is seen as a bad idea. I’ll just come out and say it. It’s because, as it stands, there often are no profits. An awkward problem that authors can’t ignore now that publishers face a threat to their own survival… and continued ability to provide those advances. That’s when publishers start to do strange things like slash advances, dump authors, downsize, merge, and desperately experiment with imprints like Hydra and Alibi (whose terms—I agree with Scalzi here—are indeed terrible for authors!). We authors look at that mess and decide they are being “malicious.” And honestly, it’s nice to see us standing up for ourselves—because we do have to renegotiate our relationship with publishers. But to be truly empowered advocates for author rights, we have to understand the whole economic picture.
That picture is complex and constantly shifting, but not always for the worse. Even now, companies like Entangled—with its pure profit-sharing model and ever-growing trophy case of bestsellers—offer the tantalizing hope that there are other ways to succeed. That’s encouraging news, because some major innovations will be necessary to keep publishing going in this new era, and we’re a long way from solving the problems we face together as an industry. As we search for answers it will be vital for authors to balance openmindedness with constant critical evaluation… and never sell ourselves short. But also, as we search for answers, it will help us to look in all directions. Not just backward.
Why an OddRocket?
I’ve always loved books. I hear people talk about the feel of them, the weight, the smell, and yes, I agree with all those things. But for me it’s not the smell, but the spell. When I pick up a book, that tidy rectangular package contains the pathway to somewhere else,…
The writing was slow going today, but here are some things that went right:
1. I baked a sweet gluten-free corn bread—and replaced half the water in the recipe with bourbon. It is a tasty little booze bomb.
2. Pandora helped me discover that baroque and psytrance make equally good writing music. (I was getting tired of my baroque lullaby radio station and switched to an Infected Mushroom one.)
3. I got a teaser/sample from Max, the aforementioned talented voice actor who is recording Chapter 1 of Be My Yoko Ono. It was fabulous! I’ll ask him if it’s okay to post just that teaser so I can share it.
4. I edited my Be My Yoko Ono readers guide and will soon post it on the OddRocket site as well as sending some hard copies to Wicked Grounds cafe if they’ll put them on the counter.
5. Oh, yeah, I made it to half my goal (so far) ANYWAY.
Enjoy the debate, if you’re so inclined.
So you’re probably wondering what happened to my word count update yesterday and today. Well, there isn’t one. And I’m not the slightest bit embarrassed. Why? I had a super productive week (an overachieving week even) but I could not seem to make myself write my 2-3K words this weekend. And once I got to thinking about it, that part of my goal isn’t truly in line with my priorities or philosophy. So I’m revising it!
Even if it takes me an extra 2 weeks to reach my goal, it’s more important to me to fill my weekends with fun and nourishing experiences, taking good care of myself and spending quality time with my family and friends. (Hint: it’s not quality time if you’re sneaking glances at a screen.)
On a personal note, I don’t know about you but for me it’s all too easy to become a writaholic and forget that writing comes third. One way to watch this tendency is to set a clear boundary between on-the-clock time and off-the-clock time. Part of this involves training yourself to think about writing when you sit down to write, not when you sit down to eat at a fancy date restaurant with your spouse. I thought I had learned this a long time ago, but I guess I forgot it in my desperation to produce more words. I admire authors who can (or must) write on weekends and still devote energy to self-and-family care. You’re my heroes. But I’m not there currently, and instead of focusing too much on this problem and losing momentum… I’m just going to acknowledge my limitation and move on.
I’m posting this because I want you to know and understand that revising goals is better than sticking with goals that go against your values. And relearning important lessons is a normal and natural part of life. (I still hate relearning with a fiery passion… but that doesn’t change the fact.)
See you tomorrow night, when I’ll post my next word count. I’m really curious to see how much I accomplish tomorrow after 2 days off.
Not that that’s not important. It’s very important. It’s just not FICTION.
Have a good weekend, all!
