Scienda Editorial congratulates successful indie author K.M. Weiland on the release of her next novel, Dreamlander.

When not writing, Ms. Weiland is busy running the award-winning Wordplay website and assisting newer authors through materials such her craft book, Outlining Your Novel, on which the Writer’s Digest University course of the same name is based.

Freelancing taught me how to identify publishers with whom I have sympatico, so that I can pitch successfully to them.

It taught me to pitch successfully.

It taught me how to write to a word count and subject matter, in the preferred vein of a target publisher.

It also taught me, whether through direct experience or that of my writing community, that no matter how many smileys the staff uses, there are some harsh realities. And that’s okay. That means it’s taught me boundaries. Here are some things that I or friends of mine have had to decide along the way.

1) The accounting department. When you fail to pay me multiple times in a row, and prefer to treat me like a suspect for invoicing you even though your accounting department doesn’t dispute your error, expect not to see a submission from me again.

Lesson learned: You have to be your own collections agency, and watch contract terms really carefully. If there’s waffle room on when checks go out, it’ll probably come into play, either through benign negligence within the company or due to shakeups and internal changes.

2) On spec. You may be so cool that I’ll write on spec for you under poor terms–once. If the piece gets killed, and there’s no kill fee, then you’re not cool enough for me to use my (or my interviewees’) time that way again.

Lesson learned: Publishing is a roulette wheel, but you can choose when and how to gamble.

3) Token pay. Yes, I would, at least, back when I was newer, just for the love of you and our shared topic of interest. But unless we could save the world by doing this, things are different now. I’m sorry.

Lesson learned: Token still counts. It’s a matter of calculating what your time is worth.

4) Excessive rights grab. Print plus digital rights in perpetuity, including on 3rd-party sites and pretty much anywhere on the web? With no royalty? Way to essentially take over my copyright and render reprint a worthless endeavour.

Lesson learned: Why, yes, there are magazines out there which cater to a relatively naive audience and also tap it for exploitable intellectual property.

5) Submission constitutes permission to hold work on file for future use. No. If you reject it now, you’re SOL, sweetheart. Either take it or leave it. I’m not having a possible conflict over an exclusive first-rights period if it’s picked up elsewhere just when you finally decide to run it.

Lesson learned: Never hamstring yourself for someone else’s convenience. Think about the implications of what they’re asking for.

6) Independent book publishers who shouldn’t be. (There are a lot of small independent startups in the current publishing climate. Note that independent companies are by and large great; but of course there are a few special snowflakes.)

When you:

• pay me a royalty on par with the traditional industry’s lowest going rates,
• can boost my sales through your network instead of asking me to do it all while you take half my net,
• learn how not to be a recurring PR nightmare,
• and can bring me art design that’s competitive packaging instead of hamstringing the product’s sales appeal right out of the gate,

Then:

• it may become worth my time to put up with your crappy personality and negotiate my way through your inability to edit.

Lesson learned: The publishing pond holds lots of other small but highly agile, streamlined fish, who swim like fish, not like a dork.

7) Write for free for a good cause. I have been asked more times than I can count to write for free for someone’s pet project. I am very good at identifying what will or will not save the world. Most things won’t. I wrote previously about being asked to sign on to a rabbit trail of someone else’s ambitions, under the banner of “getting a foot in the door,” or “a great opportunity for starting out.”

The answer is no, unless it makes me really, really happy, or unless it actually qualifies as something that builds my own career as well as someone else’s dreams. If I want to serve a good cause, I can generally find one with almost no effort at all, because I’m a person with passions and convictions just like anyone else. (In truth, I’ve done a good bit of nonprofit writing because I valued a cause or project. But in every case, I volunteered for it myself, under the power of my own conscience and judgment, not the influence of someone who wanted my time for free. That’s an important distinction.)

The thing is, writing involves putting some percentage of life on hold, whether for a few hours or a few months, depending on the size of the project. There are only 24 hours in a day. I could go out to the soup kitchen instead, and talk to real people instead of myself. That would be a good cause.

Lesson learned: You really could spend ALL your time writing. All of it. Except that’s not healthy, which means being selective.

~

And of course, there’s much, much more info on defensive driving for writers at Writer Beware. For self-publishing writers, and anyone interested in the business and contracts side of publishing, another good one is The Passive Voice, which will also lead you to many other sources.

If you are a writer, and you want to stick with it and really do this thing, it’s legitimate and important to value your own time and sanity. Take care of yourself out there.

I always make time for existing clients, so if you’ve hired me before, feel free to bring me any upcoming needs throughout 2013. Your wish is my command, my friends.

Again, thank you, one and all, for a fabulous 2012. I look forward to continuing to meet new writers and their stories when my schedule opens up again.

~Cat

Kristen Lamb pinpoints how writers feel about using language like “target audience” on our beloved readers. And what alternative ways of thinking we can use.

Amanda Luedeke talks about using Facebook when you don’t have a book out yet.

I have some fun with K.M. Weiland when her Writing Question of the Day becomes an impromptu story brainstorm on Twitter.

And especially not when that stress is somehow related to writing.

In defense of the art, it’s never the project’s fault, but sometimes the people or circumstances associated with it have detrimental effects. Sad, but true.

So after a decade of wordsmithing, I’ve learned this is vital: Stay away from people and things that cause unhealthy stress.

Which, as an introvert, is everybody some days. Ay, there’s the rub. But there’s normal stress, the kind that kicks a person into gear–like getting feedback from a trusted editor (see entries Andy, Jeff, Meredith in the Handbook of Cat’s Personal Experience)–and there’s undue stress, the kind that eventually leads to psychological exhaustion. So it’s about time I tacked a list to Scienda’s fridge.

• Avoid underpaid work and underfavorable contract terms. They devalue the effort and cause the writer resentment sooner or later.
• Avoid work that’s not truly enjoyable. Crime doesn’t pay, and neither does writing, so it better be fun. The reason? Any serious un-fun spills over into my primary career, which is my family life.
• Avoid underpaid work on underfavorable contract terms that’s not truly enjoyable. (Signed, Captain Obvious.) This often comes disguised as “a great opportunity for starting out,” so sometimes it’s less obvious than one would think. I learned that by starting out.
• Avoid relationships that may cause one to fear for one’s professional credibility due to association. This is huge, but sometimes difficult due to qualitative factors. However, the gut instinct counts. There’s enough stress available already without adding untrustworthy conduct to the list.
• Avoid relationships that ask one to compromise convictions. Over the years, there’ve been three instances where I’ve chosen to discontinue working relationships due to the philosophy presented by the publisher. Each time, I felt buoyant with relief.
• Avoid relationships that demand more than they give:
  • Time.
  • Knowledge and skills.
  • Trust.
  • Respect.
  • Courtesy.
  • Grace in misunderstandings.
  • Right to opinions and personal boundaries.

That last has a particularly bad side effect, for me: When I’m dealing with a bad relationship where the right to one’s opinions and boundaries are getting infringed, it deeply, deeply affects my ability to write. Creative writing is self-expression, after all. And boundaries are what we use to guard the vulnerability of self-expression. When I feel like my boundaries are getting trampled, I go silent.

Besides that, excessive demands of any kind–underpaid writing, non-reciprocal requests for favors, or misuse of my time and knowledge–drain my energy and take up my day. I already have four kids, and they, not others, are my designated dependents. No energy equals no writing.

What about “taking every opportunity to work one’s way up”? Well, a lot of available options don’t lead to greater experience and connections. There’s no ladder involved–just a rabbit trail of someone else’s ambitions, into which one is being asked to invest without return. Therefore:

Avoid settling for poor terms of work or poor relationships on the notion that nothing else is available.

Good work and good relationships come along in due time. Good work gives a return. Good relationships don’t offer clonelike agreement; they do offer constructive support, so that one can give freely without having to defend one’s natural limitations from overtaxation. There is no point burning out by spending one’s resources on others’ ambitions. And there is no point jeopardizing the ability to make good connections by getting one’s name tarred with other people’s less-than-good ways of operating.

In the beginning, reputation is all there is. In the end, too. And that’s a great thing, because it says money is not the defining factor in one’s hopes and dreams. Integrity and skill are primary currencies as well. It’s a basic principle of human communities, no more a product of our time and culture than the blueness of the sky.

So, in many ways, writing has become my mental health. I never realized it but it acts like a personal barometer. Every passing year, I have more incentive not to tolerate the clutter of unproductive work or stay stuck in friendships-that-aren’t. I get older. Life gets busier. Energy gets lower. And ultimately, it could cause me to lose my words. As someone who doesn’t talk out loud very much at all, that’s serious stuff.

1. Due to lack of standing.

2. Due to lack of credibility.

(Read the post for further clarification.)

He also says this:

“People with a history of bad judgment, people who are quick to jump to conclusions or believe in unicorns or who have limited experience in the market–these people are entitled to opinions, but it’s not clear that the creator of the work needs to hear them. They’ve disqualified themselves because the method they use for forming opinions about how the market will respond is suspect.”

This resonates with me, because at this juncture in publishing developments, there’s a lot of opinion. A lot of blueskying disguised as authoritative punditry. But neither idealism nor cynicism, nor any other rampant bias, are the same thing as credible experience.

It may be more valuable to reserve judgment until one’s own hands-on experience (and the body of credible, in-good-standing feedback on one’s experience) has reached a measurably authoritative level. The perception of authority only lasts till alleged expertise is tested by active application to reality.

What I tell my clients about books, for instance, should actually help them write books better and more easily. Being hypothetical or giving my personal preferences won’t cut it. Furthermore, I must offer something quantitatively better than just joe-on-the-street reader reaction or the local critique group. Or else why do I get to charge money for my feedback instead of simply writing Amazon reviews like the rest of the world?

My writer side also says this: It’s okay to stand your ground in the face of vibrant opinions (like Amazon reviews), even if you’re still developing that ground–and maybe especially so, because you’re laying the foundation of your future. And you have to live with it. Others don’t.

That’s why opinion is so darned easy compared to experience, after all. Assign value accordingly.

For a further springboard in your own opinion-taking decision-making, I rounded up a list of who I listen to as a writer over at Scita > Scienda.

1. Inability to make small talk.

In the writing world, this is called “excellent at writing effective dialogue.” There’s no waste space in a story for the “nice weather” chat with the neighbor, unless it’s passive-aggressive “nice weather” conversation with the neighbor. Your neighbors should be more worried when you point out how warm and sunny it is.

2. Tendency to be invisible in a crowd.

The ability to sit back and observe is key to understanding situational nuance, AKA the little things that bring a moment to life. While other people are doing the daily performance to placate and impress whoever’s looking at them, you’re recording the poignant details of why it doesn’t really work.

3. A subversive life perspective.

A really good story turns the world on its head. It helps to be the kind of person who naturally experiences that inclination on a daily basis. And it helps society to be the kind of person who merely records those inclinations on paper.

4. Disregard for social niceties.

The ability to see beyond the psychological gridlock of etiquette and social constraint is what drives insight into character and personal conflict. People who obey the rules are just using surface compliance to hide their real thoughts anyway. And truthfully, they’d be a lot more entertaining if they quit.

5. No internal chronometer.

This is known in writing as “sense of pacing.” It’s vital to the story that the irrelevant, boring trivia go unmentioned, and only the important and life-changing stuff be included. So, if you are prone to performing 18-hour writing stints and only then realizing you’ve failed to bathe, show up for work or feed yourself since before you began, don’t worry. Unless it’s sex in the tub or a fistfight with the jerk in the next cubicle, that boring life-trivia stuff never makes the page either.

6. Paranoia.

Story creates stakes of life-and-death out of the simplest things. It’s only professional to have an instinct for that.

Now that we’ve had our fun playing to the stereotypes of the suspicious and skeptical, go thou and be the beautiful, thoughtful, well-groomed and creative person that you really are. Good writing to you!

“But let’s talk about the act of editing. Some editors do it and some editors don’t. Most modern editors believe that line-editing—going over sentences for consistency—is what editing is all about. That’s the easy job, folks. It’s harder to look at a piece of fiction and see what’s missing or whether the structure needs changing…

“And it’s even harder to tell a writer to start the book again—which most modern editors will not do.

“…Editing isn’t a dying art. It’s a rarely practiced art.”

-Kristine Kathryn Rusch

There are several things in this excerpt that I believe in deeply. One, line editing is not the sum total. It’s not even the starting place. Two, sometimes things need major overhaul in order to make the selling difference–whether direct to readers or via agency to traditional publishing–because that’s what readers need. And three, this is not a dying art.

Perhaps I’ve been blessed in my associations, because “old school” is how I’ve learned it and how I’ve seen it done–in-house, and by pro freelancers with more years than I.

Concept: another word for it might be context. Why your concept matters and what its function is in the reading experience.

Your writing is not stupid. Do you know why? Because Neil Gaiman said so.

Also, because the New York Times said fiction has fundamental human impact. This is why you don’t have to write some epic moral to the story. Just having characters is profound in itself.