Joseph Lallo, author of Bypass Gemini, Unstable Prototypes, and the Book of Deacon Trilogy, chats with fellow StoryBundler Geoff Morrison to talk about writing, publishing, StoryBundle and more. His books Bypass Gemini and Unstable Prototypes were featured in The Big Bang Bundle. If you missed out on that bundle, you can purchase the books by following the links above.
My first book, which I suppose is technically my first three books, wasn't approached as a book at all. I'd been day dreaming for a long time, developing and abandoning ideas in my spare time until my head was practically cluttered with them. I don't know if this is the way it is for anyone else, but sometimes I can't get something out of my head unless I write it down, so I started jotting down my ideas just to make room for other thoughts. I scribbled down the sum total of my bored musings until I hit the end of a plot, and that's the way The Book of Deacon Trilogy was born.
Yeah. The next book was Jade, and I approached it from a much different angle. Whereas the first story was told from beginning to end, tacking each idea on top of the last, this time I decided I'd try to keep it short by writing just the scenes I thought were interesting. Once I had enough to consider it a story, I filled in the cracks. In retrospect this wasn't a great idea, because by definition it gets the fun part out of the way first, leaving the second half of the writing process a tedious sequence of linkers. I'm astounded I managed to finish that story.
More recently, when I decided to try science fiction, I tried to take a more structured approach. For Bypass Gemini I actually sketched out every chapter with a paragraph or two before I even started writing. For Unstable Prototypes I was a little more free form, drafting a modular storyline centered on the introduction of characters and tasks one by one, so that if I felt it was too short I could add one or two, and if I thought it was running too long I could slice some out. In the end, I ended up dropping a whole character and its associated plot thread.
Even in my best planned out books, there tends not to be a tremendous amount of detail in the planning stage. At the very least, I sketch out a beginning and an end; Point A and Point B. From there, sometimes I have a pile of scenes that I simply must write and sometimes I just go one step at a time, letting the cause and effect take over and only giving it a nudge when it is straying toward a path that won't hit Point B. Only Bypass Gemini had a rigid scaffold to work off of, and even then I found myself adding whole planets to the mix before it was done being written.
My only formal education has been in the field of engineering, so I tend to think of pacing as a rolling average or a graph. I try to keep the overall average roughly even, so if things have been slow for a while, I try to shift the POV or inject some action to boost the average and put a spike in the graph. Frequently I don't have a very firm grip on that until I'm reading through the first draft. Many an explosion or leap of faith has been added on the second pass when I realize that there has been a disproportionate amount of introspection or exposition in a given stretch of novel.
When I'm writing a story, the characters and plot have a tendency to build each other. I've usually got a scene or two floating in my head before I really get down to writing, and the characters start their lives as the people in those scenes. “Okay, I know I want to have these three crazy inventions. What sort of a guy would it take to invent them? Well, they are irresponsibly dangerous, so we're probably dealing with someone with zero regard for human life...” Thus, Karter of the sci-fi series is created. Once I've got a starting point and a direction, I let them wander off and just follow them around. Occasionally a character will just come tumbling out of the story it its own. Karter's AI is a good example. Initially there was just going to be a gag where the control system of Karter's lab was going to sound automated, but actually be an intelligent system. After having so much fun writing the one or two AI scenes, though, I decided it would work better as a running gag. As a result, the passive aggressive computer got a few more lines. Things just snowballed as I realized the sort of functions and roles that AI would have to fill, and how she was likely to react to being treated with respect after having to deal with Karter for so long. Eventually “Ma” would grow to be one of the best loved characters in the book.
The voice of any given character tends to develop along with them as the story goes on, but there are a few things I find helpful as “buttons” to build off of. For instance, many of my characters have names that they prefer to be called. Who does and who doesn’t do them that courtesy goes a long way to establishing the deeper attitudes and interactions. Trevor Alexander — the protagonist of the sci-fi series — is variously referred to as Trevor, Lex, T-Lex, T, Trev, and Mr. Alexander, each for specific reasons. Education or disposition are other big factors to building a voice, as they flavor the vocabulary and phrasing. One of the greatest compliments I've ever received was the claim by a reader that she could identify any of my characters by a single quote.
I think you can go overboard with description if you aren't careful. Setting the scene is important, but if you find yourself doing a six page thesis on specific weave used on the saddle blanket of the third lieutenant’s horse, you might lose your audience. My approach to description is somewhat minimal. I paint a bit of a picture of the setting, trying to hit the key points for each of the senses, then let the reader fill in the gaps. I think that it helps to make the story as much the reader's as mine. Sometimes that can lead to problems, though. I've been getting a lot of artwork, either via commissions or fan gifts, and it is embarrassing how frequently I realize that I've never once mentioned the eye color or hair color of a character who is “on screen” for hundreds of pages.
Now and again a creature is described reasonably well, but only once, and readers find themselves overwriting the appearance with one they prefer. There have also been times when I purposely went overboard with the metaphors and imagery, trying to paint a very artsy picture of a character when it wouldn't be politically too correct to emphasize a certain feature. You'd be surprised how often a paragraph dancing around the fact that a certain female character is “pleasantly plump” is instead interpreted as her being “tremendously well-endowed.” Wishful thinking from my beta readers, I suppose.
Music plays a big part in the writing process for me, but more often during the brainstorming and inspiration phase than the actual typing. System of a Down has inspired a few scenes, like the climax of The Battle of Verril or the chaotic entry to Karter's planet. Apocalyptica, Clutch, The J. Giels Band, Metallica, Daft Punk, Fat Boy Slim, Richard Cheese, Rodrigo y Gabriella, and a dozen others have made contributions to my writing in their own ways.
Once the scenes are painted, though, I tend to write in silence, or with instrumentals in the background. Too many lyrics and I start paying attention to what the singer is saying and stop typing, or worse, I start typing what the singer is saying. As you might imagine that can get quite embarrassing in a material world, and I am a material girl.
Too often, I write wherever I can get a spare moment, but if time is with me, I like to type on my bedroom PC with a pen and paper nearby. I don't know what it is, but when I just can't get myself into a writing groove, picking up a pen and trying to write it on paper will almost always jump-start my brain.
I do a lot of editing as I go, usually in the form of going back to re-read the last few paragraphs to get my bearings before a writing session, but for the serious editing, I wait until the end and read through two or three times.
Generally I make an attempt to write absolutely every day, even if it is just a few words. Sometimes I get an idea and have to jot it down, but far more often I start writing and the idea just branches off from whatever was on the page. It can be problematic when it is a busy week and I figure “Eh, I should have been in bed an hour ago, but writing's been slow lately, so it is probably safe to spend a few minutes on the novel.” Invariably, that's when the muse strikes and demands that I type fifteen pages. Lousy muse and her terrible timing...
I'm not inclined to consider any part of my own writing particularly strong, but I've often been told that I craft engaging and deep characters. The best advice I can give in that regard is to spend more time asking yourself what your character would do than asking yourself what you want your character to do. These are supposed to be living, breathing people. If a plot point or a decision doesn't make sense to them, then it won't flow. Every time I've forced a decision down my character's throat has resulted in a glaring and shamefully obvious fracture in the story.
I have a terrible habit of assuming that my readers and characters know my intentions, and thus I fail to spell out some key points or add the appropriate drama and uncertainty. I've had characters shrug off tragedies with barely a tear shed because subconsciously I know that behind the scenes something will be righting that wrong somewhere down the line. Other times I've had whole complex story elements go completely untold because I forgot that the readers weren't there when I was thinking them up. The only way I've found to combat that is to read the story through from beginning to end at least once after I'm done with corrections and see if I ever stop to wonder why such and such a thing had happened, or hadn't happened. If I don't know right away, there's no way the readers will.
I'm a big fan of Jim Butcher, Terry Pratchett, Roald Dahl, Neil Gaiman, and a bunch of others who I cannot seem to recall at the moment.
If I were to even try to ask any of my favorite authors a question, there would just be a long sequence of stutters and hyperventilation. I'm not what you'd call smooth in the face of celebrity. One lesson I'd love to learn, particularly from Pratchett, is how to balance humor with drama. Introducing humor to my writing is a rather recent experiment, and I often feel as though having something farcical halfway through the book makes something sincerely tragic later on seem jarring. Terry Pratchett pulls it off quite impressively.
Oof. I really have difficulty nailing things like that down to a single answer. Charlie and The Chocolate Factory comes to mind, but honestly the Gene Wilder film was more influential on me. I guess I'd have to vote for Good Omens.
I haven't read it, but On Writing by Stephen King has helped me a great deal by way of a distilled version of its wisdom dispensed by my brother Mike and a series of blog posts.
Writing my first novel taught me that a story will get wildly out of control if you let it. As tricky as it is to get yourself to keep writing, for me it is just as tricky to stop when the time comes. My most recent novel, on the other hand, taught me that sometimes it is more important to finish the story than to stick to a planned out length. Unstable Prototypes was about 20% longer than I'd intended, but every time I tried to cut a scene short, I felt it hurt the story. My life has an odd tendency to zigzag with lessons that perpetually undo previous ones. It isn't the most efficient learning process. I like to think of it as the scenic route to wisdom.
There are basically two people who get to read my unfinished stuff. In fact, I don't usually feel like my novel is finished until it has been read by both of them. To this day I am horribly self-conscious about what I write, so I only share it with a privileged few. You have no idea how much I agonize over things like the sneak peeks I put up on my site.
I can't say enough good things about my cover artist. When I started to earn some money, I knew that I wanted to get a really skilled artist to do my covers. Initially a friend of a friend was at the top of the heap. He'd done some excellent art that closely matched the style I had in mind, and he would probably give me a good deal. Unfortunately, being a friend of a friend didn't put me at the top of HIS heap, since there were plenty of folks who would be paying full price, and thus deserved a premium spot on his schedule.
Eventually I decided to do some basic searches on Deviant Art and eventually turned up a masterpiece called “Eowyn and the Nazgul” by Nick Deligaris, but I quickly decided he was out of my league. The guy is Emmy nominated, for crying out loud! A week or so later a friend turned up the same picture and convinced me to write him an email. Not long after that I heard back from him and we started discussing specifics. It remains one of the best consequences of my books so far. Nick was endlessly helpful in guiding me toward good design decisions, he was patient as I fretted over my characters like a nervous mother, and he worked with me with both price and schedule. The spectacular job he did on my covers is responsible for a great deal of my success, and I was lucky enough to have selected an artist as skilled in science fiction as fantasy, thus providing me with a consistent look to all of my covers.
I have done most of my writing in OpenOffice, or these days LibreOffice. When I'm in a particular rut, or more accurately when my real job is eating too much of my time, I use a handful of programs to steal some extra time out of the day. Note Everything, Epistle, and QuickOffice have each helped to convert some of my commute into writing time, by way of my current Android device. Google Docs and Google Drive have also helped me to rescue the odd moment when all I have is a web browser. The MVP of my software suite is probably Dropbox, though. It’s installed on every PC, laptop, phone, and tablet I own. It makes sure that no matter where I am, everything I've ever written is available, and it has on more than one occasion rescued a mostly finished novel from the clutches of a hard drive crash. After the writing is done, I head for Calibre to do some of the post-production.
Yeah, Calibre is a fantastic tool for doing eBook conversions. An up to date version will take an ODT file (OpenOffice’s file format - GM) and turn it into a pretty decent ePub right off the bat, even going so far as to make a properly linked table of contents. In order to correct any minor issues and do the magic incantations that allow the Kindle to find a table of contents or the start of text, I pop the ePub open, edit the files by hand, and convert to mobi, which is then passed through Kindle's own converter. It is tricky, but it is the best way I've found to make sure my files work with all of the kindle navigation methods.
Most of my eBook formatting knowledge comes from the Smashwords Style Guide, but some searches through the Kindle boards have turned up nuggets of advice as well.
I have been slowly adding print versions of each of my books, starting with the fantasy trilogy. I picked CreateSpace for the task. It is print on demand, which is crucial since I don't have any way to provide inventory or fulfillment, and it is tied directly to Amazon, which makes distribution a snap. It isn't the cheapest route for me or the consumer, but it gives a good balance of convenience, cost, and quality.
I try to sell on as many platforms as possible. Aside from StoryBundle, I sell on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Sony, Blio, Apple, Smashwords, and many more. Amazon is consistently the best earner, but Barnes & Noble and Apple have both come close to stealing the title from time to time. Just about the only place I don't sell is the Google Play store, and that's due to potential price matching issues that might be caused by their ability to discount.
I like the idea of KDP Select. A lending system is a great way to give people a way to sample your stuff without risking money on what might be a dud of a title. Likewise, I understand Amazon's choice of making it only available to exclusive titles. It is certainly a good incentive, and it helps to chase authors away from the competition. I'm not a big fan of mandatory long term exclusivity. There is no doubt in my mind that a really strong seller could net enough in borrows to make up for the revenue lost by not listing on other sites, but you are still decreasing your overall exposure by keeping to a single storefront and giving your readers fewer choices and less convenience. It is also a bit predatory as business practices go, but hey, that's capitalism.
I'm not the best marketer in the world. Early on I tried pitching my book to the big bloggers, but most turned it down or didn't reply. Nowadays I focus on keeping in touch with any fans who contact me, and continuing to reward the handful of blogs, like Pure Textuality or Ebook Apothecary, who were nice enough to give me exposure at a time when I really needed it. I've also made the first book in my fantasy trilogy free, which has been a big success for me, and I consider my upgraded covers to be a marketing decision that really paid off.
Being in StoryBundle was a blast. It was easily the highest profile promotion I've been a part of. The press coverage was a huge help, and doing my first Author Chat was really interesting. I think it is a little early to know the impact of the bundle on my other sales. There have certainly been one or two folks who didn't go for the bonus, read my first book, and went right out to pick up the sequel. More useful, though, is the excellent word of mouth and great reviews that StoryBundle has helped create. I think that the viral effect of readers sharing their opinions with their friends will have a trickle-down that will pay off in a big way over the months to come.
Joseph Lallo earned a Master’s Degree in Computer Engineering at NJIT. When not crunching numbers, he owns and operates BrainLazy.com where he posts random rants and editorials regarding the world of humor, entertainment, and technology. His novels and short stories are available via Smashwords.com. You can follow him on Twitter @jrlallo
Geoffrey Morrison is a freelance writer and editor. His first novel, Undersea, was featured in the first StoryBundle. You can follow him on Twitter @TechWriterGeoff.