Why Your First Novel Shouldn't Be Volume One of a Trilogy

.

It snowed last night, something like eight inches of mingled snow and sleet.  We were dug out from Friday's big snow and now we're halfway dug out of last night's . . . and they've upgraded the weather watch to a blizzard warning!

Which means I'm not getting around much these days, and have nothing to report other than that I am, as ever, typing away.  ("Always tappety, tappety, tappety!  Eh, Mr. Gibbon?" as the Duke of Gloucester once remarked.)  So I thought I'd offer some good advice for any gonnabe writers out there:

Why Your First Novel Shouldn't Be Volume One of a Trilogy

Three reasons, basically.  One is artistic, the second psychological, and the third pragmatic.

The artistic reason is that at the beginning of your career, you're learning faster and improving more than you ever will again.  That, and the fact that the mere act of publishing a book makes you a better writer, means that the prose styles of your first and second volumes will probably be different.  Most readers won't pick up on this.  But the best ones will.  And your very best reader is yourself.  It's going to bug you to your dying day.

The psychological reason is that nine chances out of ten, no matter how much you love your first novel when it's fresh out of the oven, several years down the line you're going to end up disliking it.  It may not deserve your dislike.  But this is an observable phenomenon.  Writers wind up being embarrassed by their first.  And if your first is volume one of a trilogy, that's three books you're going to end up unhappy about.

The first two reasons are trivial, really.  But the pragmatic one is desperately important.  Here it is:

The timing of publishing is such that the "numbers" for your first book -- the sales figures, basically, the book's profitability -- won't be available by the time you turn in the second volume.  Since your editor liked the first book, the second one is a pretty sure sale.  But by the time you've finished writing the third volume, however, your publishing house will know the numbers.  And if the numbers aren't good, the book will not be bought.

Which means that book will not be sellable.  No other publisher will want to buy volume three of a trilogy whose first two volumes are owned by another house.  You'll have to wait until your first two books are out of print, revert the rights, and try to sell the trilogy anew.  But that will take years, and your dream-child will at that point be damaged goods.  Unless you've subsequently become extremely popular, it will probably still be unsellable.

Imagine how it must feel to have two published novels under your belt and then find you can't sell your third.  It must feel exactly like being fired for incompetence.  It is going to discourage the hell out of you.

I'm sure there are plenty of people who have started out with trilogies and gone on to have perfectly respectable careers.  But my best advice?  If at all possible, don't.


Oh, and there's a coda . . .

But if you simply must write a trilogy, then go on ahead with a clean conscience.  All the best books are books that the the author had no choice but to write.  And all writing advice is like pantyhose -- anybody who tells you that "one size fits all" is lying.


Above:  A cat in a lap, and an example for all who are experiencing a snow day.

*

A Product I Would Buy

.

No blog today.  Just a note on a product I dream-wrote last night, which I really do wish existed in the real world:

EGO-SELTZER  -- Reduces Swelling Fast!

*

White Smoke Rises . . . We Have A Winner!

.

The Blue Ribbon Panel of Incorruptible if Nepotistic Judges met Sunday to go over what I'm pretty sure were literally hundreds of suggestions.  Some of them were greatly admired as words but, the consensus was, wouldn't work in context.  They were set aside with enormous reluctance.  A couple may surface when Darger and Surplus visit Italy or Spain.  Several looked good on paper but sounded smutty or misleading when said aloud.  And so it went, until we had a final ballot of perhaps twenty words.  All three of us agreed that one worked best.  But to be absolutely certain, I then went down the final list word by word, to make sure we all agreed it was better than each one of its rivals individually.  As it was.  And the winner was . . .

. . . serviles, which was contributed by Zamzummim.

The word was chosen because it's instantly recognizable, easy to say, won't cloy with repeated usage, and carries a little edge of cruelty.  Everybody felt that last bit was important.  I am ninety-nine and forty-five hundredths percent sure it will be used in the novel, which is better odds than you'll get that a bar of Ivory Soap will float, and one hundred percent sure that Zamzummin will get the very first autographed copy of the Darger and Surplus novel when it comes out.

Zamzummim, please send your mailing address to me at miswanwick["at"symbol]aol.com so I can mail your prize to you just as soon as it exists.

Everybody else, thank you!  This was a lot more fun than trying to sweat up the word myself.

Coincidentally . . .

"Zamzummim," meaning mumblers or whisperers (it comes from the Bible), was another of Zamzummim's submissions and is an excellent example of a word we all thought was inherently nifty.  But not right in context.


Above:  The cover of my next-to-most-recent collection.  Because the Darger and Surplus doesn't exist yet.

*

A Rare Saturday Post

.

Snow day!  Marianne snapped the above shot of our small back garden this morning.  I'm posting it here to remind everybody that just as in the midst of life we are in death, so too in the midst of winter are springtime and summer immanent.

That last word is not a typo, alas.

*

Old Man Winter

.

I'll be on the road for most of today, driving back to Philadelphia from Pittsburgh.  What makes it tricky is that Marianne and I can't start home until around about noon, which is when the snow is scheduled to start.  They're expecting a foot of snow in Philadelphia.  So I won't have the time to do any substantial blogging today.

 For which I apologize.  But you know what they say:  If you're going to blog, don't drive.  And vice versa.


 Above:  There he is, Old Man Winter himself, photographed in my back yard.

*

A Cat's Breakfast

.

Something of a cat's breakfast today.  I'm on the road in the morning and there's a lot of prep to do.  Plus, I'm writing a novel.  I don't know if I've mentioned that recently.


The Color of Dinosaur Feathers . . . 

My friend Daniel Dern, who is a fellow dino fancier, sent me the following link.  Unlikely as it seems, a case has been made for the fossil evidence of the color of dinosaur feathers. Yow.  I dunno if I'm convinced, but it's damnably cool in any case.  Click here to read the item.



My Blue-Ribbon Panel Judge of a Son . . .

Dropped by last night to tell me that he'd gone over all the contest entries so far and only been impressed by two.  "Was [term withheld] one of them?" I asked.

"Naw, I didn't think much of that," he said.

So we're getting closer.  Really.  The Panel will convene again, probably this weekend, after I get back from Pittsburgh.


And the Goon Fleet Delenda Est . . .

There don't appear to be any comprehensive articles about this online. But it's inherently interesting, so I'll give you the digest version:

On the massive online game Eve Online, one of the best (and most unexpected) narratives was the sudden appearance of the Goon Fleet, out of nowhere, to best and humble major virtual-interstellar alliances with, well, goonish stragegies. Enormously game-credit-points-expensive warships were taken out by swarms of trash-talking Kamikazi pilots in fifty-cent spacecraft. Huge swaths of virtual space fell before the Fleet.  They ended up controlling planets and resources that made them virtually indestructable.

And yet they've been destroyed.

How? As my son, Sean, explained it to me, the Goon Fleet's strength was always strategy. Their leaders were organizers, not players. So the leaders never actually played the game themselves. And thus none of them ever saw the automatic messages reminding them that if they didn't pay their annual dues, their properties would be cancelled.

So one day the Goons logged on and found everything they'd worked for, stolen, and conquered was gone.

Can you wonder that sociologists and epidemiologists are studying these virtual worlds seriously?  I wouldn't be surprised if members of the War College were interested in them as well.

Above: Our cat's eating station, with water bowl, food dish, and of course his chutneys. It just wouldn't be kibble without chutney.

*

A Glitterary Brunch

.

My good friend Sheila Williams, the editor of Asimov's, was in town Friday for a talk at the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, and since she overnighted in Philly, Marianne and I threw a literary brunch for her the next morning, before her train trek back to NYC.

A gathering of old friends around a tableful of good food for hours upon hours of laughter and conversation -- what could be more gemutlich?  I, for one, enjoyed it immensely.

Above, l-r:  Tom Purdom, Sheila WIlliams, Susan Casper, Gardner Dozois, Marianne Porter, and Greg Frost.  You'll note that Marianne is the only person present whose hands are unsullied by science fiction.




And I promised to say a few words about J. D. Salinger . . .


So I will.  Most of the postmortem analysis made a big deal about Salinger being a "recluse" because he wouldn't talk to the press.  But he traveled frequently to New York City for theatrical events and for many years the wit and comic novelist Peter De Vries made it a habit to come to Salinger's house for Sunday dinner.

I fail to see how you can be a recluse under those conditions.

Yeah, Salinger was probably a pretty odd duck.  So are most of us -- and I'm not just talking about writers here.  He didn't much like strangers pressing their noses against his window.  But this is a trait shared by most of humanity.  And he did withdraw from publishing.  For which there are two possible explanations.

One is that he simply ran out of the ability to write, which happens, and didn't want to admit to it, which is understandable.

The second is that he kept on writing, but had enough money that he could avoid the critical attention that comes with publishing.  If you want to understand why he would feel this way, you have only to look up a book called Salinger:  A Critical and Personal Portrait.  Editor Henry Anatole Grunwald commissioned more than 20 of the most acclaimed writers and critics of his era to write essays on Salinger, thinking the result would be almost unqualified praise.

Hoo boy, was he wrong!  With only a few exceptions, the essayists seized the opportunity to take Salinger down.  To point out what a minor writer he was, how deficient in all the literary graces, how overpraised, and how pig-ignorant about what Buddhism was really all about.  "I had no idea that New York intellectuals were so religious," I murmured upon closing this book.  John Updike (this was back in his partisan days; in old age his literary criticism mellowed admirably) turned the man's own words on him by writing "Salinger loves the Glasses more than God loves them."

A little literary blood-letting is always invigorating.  I found the bulk of the book so mean-spirited that it depressed the hell out of me.  God only knows what Salinger made of it.

But we can make a shrewd guess from the fact that he never published anything more in his life.

I'm not saying it was that book in particular that drove him out of the public arena.  Just that it was symptomatic of the stunning critical hostility that Salinger had to endure.

His books were successful enough that he could drop out.  So he did.

In the decades since, there have been persistent rumors that Salinger was writing all the while, and depositing novel upon novel in a huge fire safe to be published after his death.  I'd like that to be true, and I guess that pretty soon we'll know, one way or the other.

But no, I don't think he was crazy.  Thin-skinned, yes, he was that.

But then, so are a lot of us.


And the contest continues . . .

I actually came up with two entries myself which, fleetingly, seemed good and which I then ditched.  One was inwit, but the Joycian associations were far too strong.  The other was invert.  But there would be people familiar with the old clinical meaning of that, so that would cause confusion and give offense as well.

What would I have done if I'd won my own contest?  Used the word and then given the autographed book to whoever came up with the next-best suggestion.  Not that that looks likely to happen.

*