Kickstarter page has excerpts. A measly $5 gets a PDF copy for you crazy kids with your e-readers, and a published dead-tree version is only $20. I spent more than that for Halloween candy.

Desamours felt a hand around his ankle, heard a low, wet giggle.

“Like I say, focus on the future,” Kalfu said. “You’re back, you’re in the game. You need anything at all, let me know.”

Desamours woke up suddenly, a hand over his eyes. He smelled rum and rancid fat, heard Kalfu’s gunpowder hiss as the hand receded.

“Because, the way it’s looking now, baby,” Kalfu said, fading into the shadows of the room, “you could use some friends.”

I found the room where they kept the brain-dead donor on machines. Cassie had been about her age when he slaughtered her. My hands shook as I injected her with blood from Cassie’s dog. He died of rabies yesterday.

Soon the transplant doctors would arrive. He would get her heart. And it would come with a parting gift from Cassie.

First, because if you are at all familiar with Mamatas and his writing style, you know that he’s blunt, opinionated and not given to telling people what they want to hear. This can be annoying if he in fact tells you something you’d rather not hear, but is very refreshing if you’ve ever gotten the feeling that vague, happyish advice about writing was perhaps not entirely truthful.

For example, here’s Mamatas on the belief that only a select few can actually make a full-time living as a writer:

It is true that only a very few writers do nothing but write; it is not true that they must have another job. Writers choose to have other jobs rather than live humbly. This brings us to the first hidden assumption involved in the question: writing isn’t a job, it is a middle-class profession that should earn the practitioner both petit-bourgeois status and a comfortable income.

A significant fraction of writers who have a day job or a side gig as a teacher could live on their writing; they just don’t want to, as it would mean a smaller house, a less pleasant neighborhood, fewer vacations, or less (perhaps even no) health insurance. That’s an entirely valid choice, of course. Nobody gets any artiste point for eating beans and living in a garret. But wanting to live comfortably is not the same as being unable to live on one’s writing.

Second, because the book is not (as most writing advice tends to be) focused on Writing That Novel, but instead focused on writing short stories and non-fiction articles. Shorter pieces can be finished faster, are easier to market and most importantly, bring in money faster; in the time it takes to write a single novel the writer can most likely produce and sell many shorter works, and possibly even sell them. A hundred dollars today to keep the lights on is better than a theoretical six-figure advance years from now.

Mamatas also talks about work that is profitable, but which most people who want to be writers likely wouldn’t think about or want any part of, unless they were driven by money, like writing term papers (very lucrative, apparently, and the chapter on this work has some exceptional insights into the market; no, the customers are not all bored overprivileged Ivy League kids who’d rather not waste precious kegger time on a term paper). He also warns away from markets that seem like a good idea but aren’t, like content mills.

The only disappointment was the chapter on POD and vanity publishers, which is admittedly many years out of date. It would have been interesting to see an updated take on new incarnations like Smashwords and Lulu.com, even though the underlying structure probably hasn’t changed enormously.

Highly recommended for anyone who would actually like to write and sell their writing. Not recommended for anyone who just wants to sigh about the novel they’re going to write “someday” or whose entire writing output consists of a couple of stories that got shelved after Asimov’s rejected them.

Meghan Cox Gurdon, a former conservative columnist for the National Review and the Washington Examiner, somehow managed to slither her way into a berth reviewing children’s books for the WSJ.  Predictably, her complaint is that YA fiction these days is just awful and ugly and brutal, not like the gentle, sun-touched fiction for teenagers of our own youth.

Which, setting aside the pearl-clutching, is really where I stopped. Our youth? Yes, you heard that right; as with everything else worthy in life, children’s literature was destroyed by those awful 1960s, and children’s literature turned to the Dark Side forty years ago. Apparently Gurdon’s outrage has affected her math skills; the “46-year-old mother of three” she fusses over in her opening paragraph would have barely been in kindergarten in 1967, and would have been exposed to that “dark” YA literature in her own teenage years. As would all, if not most, of Generation X. You know, the people who are now getting middle-aged and raising kids and thus supposedly having to worry about the terrible YA literature that awaits our young’uns, and the same people who grew up with that “dark” fiction of the terrible post-1960s lurking in the bookstores.

If Gurdon’s column were factual, it would be trivial to point out that there is plenty of YA fiction that isn’t “dark”, and is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff we had available as kids; I’d have loved to have Leviathan or Zoe’s Tale or White Cat to read when I was a teenager, and none of those are exactly on the level of Go Ask Alice as far as “dark” fiction went.

But it’s not. She’s simply regurgitating a pearl-clutching rant about Kids These Days and how much better things were in the innocent days of our own youth, and throwing on a steaming sprinkle of conservative ranting about how the culture imploded once those goddamn hippies showed up. Which is a pity, because it seems like even the Twilight books would be a refreshing breath of air for kids otherwise stuck listening to their mom rant about the culture wars.

Given that the whole point of NaNo is quantity, not quality, I made some deliberate choices that made the process go more smoothly.

Out of the various projects I’ve had bumping around in my head, I decided to go with the “swashbuckling adventure in the age of Louis XIV”.  Really, that storyline half writes itself.  And because it leans more toward mindless fun than deep, complicated themes, it’s also easier to throw on the page. Writing a couple hours of dark horror or complicated emotional interactions is far more draining than action scenes and witty dialogue. Plus, when things start to drag, you can have two guys wielding rapiers walk in the door.

The adventure form also lends itself much more easily to an episodic, chapter-based style, which provides both an obvious stopping point and a motivation to go on. (Okay, I can’t really quit in the middle of the carriage chase, I need to get to the climax and then I can quit for the day.) While the NaNo gurus recommend you don’t show it to anyone until it’s finished, it actually helped to be able to post the chapters when finished and to show them to Samwise, because then I knew at least one other person wanted to see what happens next.

I did a bit of research ahead of time, mostly just to get  a page of names, a vague outline of what was happening when, and so on. It became apparent pretty quickly that writing a historically sound swashbuckling adventure was going to take a large investment of time, not only at the front, but as I went along. That’s deadly to word count, so I had to get some basic details and then make up the rest later. Sorry, History!

By coincidence, I also bought a nigh-vintage MacBook ($50!) and used it for virtually all my writing. It works fine for basic word processing, but it doesn’t have built-in wireless, which meant both that I was prevented from getting distracted by Internet surfing, and that nobody else in the house wanted to borrow it. Once I get it upgraded to 10.4 I plan to keep using it as my primary writing machine.

What I learned from writing, and finishing:

The advice to kill your inner editor and just focus on production is absolutely true. As has oft been said, in NaNo you must be like a shark; swim forward or die. You don’t have time or energy to fuss over the perfect verb, or to go back and change the fact that you got the century wrong in Chapter 3.

While NaNo is a completely unsustainable pace for actually writing and simultaneously having a life, it’s absolute proof of the butt-in-chair principle. If you regularly sit your ass down and write instead of watching TV or playing another round of Plants vs. Zombies, you will, one day, turn around to find out that holy shoes, you wrote a whole damn book. Intellectually I knew this, but I’ve always been more of a short-story kind of person,  so learning that I can keep up a story through a whole novel (even a shortish one) was useful to know.

Whether it’s actually publishable given editing, I have no idea; certainly there’s much worse stuff that got published. I did order my one free proof copy from CreateSpace, because Samwise (who is adorable) is so happy for me that he wants a BOUND copy so he can read it AGAIN.

Which is good because the next time I apply the BIC principle to write another project, it’s probably going to be a genre he doesn’t want to read.

I may post it up here eventually if I can figure out how to do friends-only posts and make everybody register or something, but in the meantime it’s over at LJ.

It’s very weird to write something and not revise it.  You can’t do that and survive NaNo; quantity over quality isn’t a joke, it’s a necessity. As another NaNo’er advises, you have to be like  a shark: swim forward at speed at all times.

Naturally we all made like he was a piñata, but in retrospect, perhaps I was too hasty.  I woke up at about 2 a.m. today to discover that I have totally jacked my neck and my left arm from the shoulder to the elbow*, so with the help of a lot of ibuprofen I can manage to do things that don’t require me to raise my arms or carry anything over a couple of pounds in my left hand. In other words, I’m in fine shape to sit propped up in bed with a laptop and type. This means I am actually getting a little writing done, when the painkillers are working.

So, suffering = Art. When do I get my six-figure advance?

*No, I have no idea how I did this. No, it didn’t keep the kitten from purring directly into my ear like a buzzsaw and demanding to be petted. At two in the morning.