1. How long have you been writing?
Depending on what you're asking: long time, or
not long at all. With a real name of Stephen King, it was my greatest
desire to stay away from writing fiction. For the past several years as a
Dean, though, I've written tons of stuff, including multi-thousand-page
accreditation applications and both policy and disciplinary correspondence of
all sorts. Is that writing? Of course it is. It's not
creative, certainly, but years of technical and official writing have taught me
a great deal about word flow and grammatical structure.
I've only been writing creatively for several
months. I tried a NaNoWriMo back in 2007. I began by buying all
sorts of fancy pens and notebooks as well as a few books on writing, and then I
went to work with a novel idea. I failed. I got halfway in and
realized I was writing another version of Ender's Game. Now, I like
Ender's Game, but the world only needs one instance of it. Instead of
fixing it I quit, and I stayed in a "quit" status till February of
this year when I decided it was time to dust off the writing hat again.
Since then I've completed a novel and a novella, and I've also completed early
drafts of another one of each.
2. Are you published and if so, how long have you
been a published author? If not, what’s your plan?
Nope, not yet. It's funny that you ask
about my "plan" as though I had one. Originally, I'd planned to
write a book, send it to an agent who would, of course, fall all over himself
to sign me up as a client, and he would hand the manuscript off to a publisher
who would read it overnight, send me a contract and a six figure check, and
toss it onto bookstore shelves post-haste. Yes, I know that doesn't
happen to most authors, but I'm better than most, right?
That's what I thought, anyway. The current
plan, if I withhold my giggles long enough to call it that, is
two-pronged. First, with the novel, I'm continuing the joyful activity of
sending out queries, as many as possible as fast as possible, to garner as many
rejections as possible before the James River Writer's Conference in early
October. Hey, if I get a yes that's great, but by now I know better than
to plan on it. At JRWC I managed to get my name in the hat early enough
that I'll be meeting with an agent, and a great one at that, in one of her
One-on-One slots. That should be a defining moment. If she says
"meh" I'll give up entirely, at least for the time being, on
traditional publishing.
The second prong of my plan uses the novellas and,
if the agent in October says "meh", the novel to become self-published. I'm
lucky, in that my past experience has taught me how to run a business (which
being an indie is an example of) and how to market. Books are different
from colleges in the marketing, of course, but there is plenty of information
out there to help.
I started out with the notion that traditional
publishing is the only legitimate way to get a book out to the public, because
that's the route with access to the bestseller lists, the bookstore shelves,
etc. It was also the route I knew of; to me, self-published works seemed
to only be done by people who didn't qualify for publication the
"real" way. Shows how little I knew of the indie world, doesn't
it? I'm still trying to find an agent, because if nothing else the agent
helps build an author's career and gives contractual advice, and once I become
rich and famous it's the agent who will negotiate my speaking
engagements. Meanwhile, I still want at least one book to be
traditionally published because I want to be a member of SFWA and they don't currently
accept self-pubbed authors. With my luck, of course, by the time I become
traditionally published they'll change that rule.
See, that's why I started a blog about the
process early on (http://theOtherStephenKingOnWriting.blogspot.com).
It wasn't that I figured my exploration of the writing craft would make for
particularly gripping reading; it doesn't. I did, however, hope and pray
that someday somebody would be interested enough to ask me something relevant
like you just did. Now I can just go to my blog and figure it out.
The first blog post was on 2/28/2011, and it reports that I'd started "a
couple of weeks ago" and was up to 32K words. Then there's the post
on 3/20/2011, titled "Finis," in which I describe the indescribable
(yeah, it's kinda silly) feeling I got when I tackily wrote "The End"
at the end of my 68K-word novel. Incidentally, as nice as it felt to type
them, those words are gone, now, bled to death by an unamused editor's
pen.
Then again, the answer to your question is a bit
more complex than my previous paragraph suggests. I finished my first
draft in about five weeks. That's a rockin' speed, by the way; it's by no
means record-setting but it's not bad either. Then I started the second
half of the novel, appropriately named Book Two (now RotG: Ascension), and by
the end of May had 87K words written in it and "The End" typed on its
last page. I set that aside and started the process of revising Book One
(now RotG: Cataclysm) to be something somewhat decent. I even coined the
term "decrappifying" to most accurately describe what I was doing to
it. By late June I was done to the point where I was comfortable letting
a pro look at it, and so I sent it off to Debra Ginsberg, my editor. She
returned it to me with some great comments by the end of July, and I got busy
reworking it.
August 21, then, I sent out my first
query. That's six months and one week, ish, between first using the New
command to create the Word document and reaching the point where I considered
it a complete work.
5. How long did it take you to publish it?
Still working on that. Traditional
publishing, the route I've chosen with the novel, is rumored to take anywhere
from several months out to "Oh, God, I'm gonna need Geritol by
then." The novella is really quick to self-publish, or will be once
I'm satisfied that it's ready. Then again, there is a lot of really bad
self-published stuff out there, largely due to the speed at which you can push
it out. I'm taking my time to do it right. Target date is October
1, 2011.
6. How many times did it get rejected before it
got published?
Still counting. 12 rejections so
far. That's nothing compared to a great many others, as I constantly mope
about on my own blog. Many people get 60 or even over 100 rejections
before they get a yes.
7. Describe your worst rejection letter.
I haven't gotten one that was negative, really,
if that's what you mean by "worst." I did get one that
acknowledged being a form letter yet contained a grammar error, which seemed
pretty silly to me.
8. Describe the best news you ever got in your
writing life and how it felt.
My wife liked the draft. If I never, ever
get published, that's still enough of an achievement to make me smile.
9. What’s the worst piece of advice you ever got?
Well, when I was a young boy, pulling the
trigger on a BB gun with it pointed at another kid (the neighborhood bully, of
course) was a pretty rotten piece of advice, but we all lived through it, and
I'm betting you're not asking about that anyway. I haven't really gotten
any bad advice that I know of that related to writing. Some of my beta
readers suggested some things that I didn't agree with (one guy, for example,
told me to remove the Atlantis chapter from my book) but I just thanked them
for their input in those cases and moved on.
10. Now, tell us the best.
From Strunk & White, transmitted to me first
by Stephen King (the other one) in his marvelous book On Writing: "Omit
needless words."
11. What’s the one thing you
would want an aspiring writer to take away from your personal path to
publication?
Don't quit. Don't quit revising. Don't quit
learning the craft; writing isn't something you can learn to do by watching
others do it. Once you have something, don't quit pushing it. The
first few rejections make you feel like a complete failure, trust me.
Move past them. Don't ever quit. Oh, and don't quit your day
job.
Stephen doesn't have a book cover, but he did provide the following blurb for his Work In Progress:
Book cover: under development
Book: Undercover Truths, by Evan Koenig (pen name)
Release date: 10/1/2011
For details, see www.EvanKoenig.com
Blurb:
A science fiction novella set in a world where
sovereign nations no longer exist, and where all nuclear power generation has
been centralized into the Colony of America, Undercover Truths tells the fast-paced
story of Stacy, the young reactor director, battling off an attack by
environmentalists with the help of the colony's Governor and his strange
assistant. Station and surrounding population safe again, Stacy turns her
attention to determining who is behind the attack, and the answer surprises
both her and her Governor.
I'm excited to see the finished product and can't wait for October 1st! Thanks for sharing with us, Stephen...we'll see you around your blog!
Here's how to connect with Stephen:
Evan Koenig
Author Return of the Gods: Cataclysm, and
Undercover Truths
Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Evan-Koenig/162069773856209
For news, bio, and release data, or to purchase
books: http://www.EvanKoenig.com
E-mail contact: evan@evankoenig.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/skingcharter
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