Winding down, winding up, launching

I'm excited to announce the launch of my new website. This will combine my blog, an event schedule, a word count progress report, my twitter feed and all the information you could possibly hope to want about my books. The design was done by the brilliant Jeremy Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios. Come by, enjoy, and make use of this internet thing! I'll still be updating this page, but the website is definitely the best place for the latest information.

That means that this site, long disused and oft-ignored, will be winding down. I may still post things here of a more personal nature, but my professional and publication announcements will be at the new site. Thanks for the decade of angst and dirges and the slow ascent to happiness, everyone! Hope to see you at the new site!

I present to you, TIM AKERS!

Five years, and a strange toll

I spent part of today going through old blog posts, trying to track the progress of my head five years ago. This is because, just over five years ago, Heart of Veridon dropped onto (and through) bookshelves in the UK. My friends and I have often joked that I'm the most famous American born British author you've never heard of. Almost all of my short stories were published in Interzone, and two of my first three books were from Solaris (stationed in Nottingham at the time). So it feels appropriate to celebrate that five year date, rather than the US release, which is still ahead of us.

So. Five years. Let us think.

In a lot of ways, I've been disappointed in myself. When I page through those first three books, I see a lot of errors, not just writerly errors but errors of intent. I wonder what would have become of my career if hurdle after hurdle hadn't knelt down in front of me, if I had been in a better headspace when trying to write those books. If my depression had been better managed. But those things happened, that was the writer I was when Veridon went through me, and so that's the way things are.

I see other mistakes. I struggle with inclusion in my work. Every book I try to get better at it, but every book comes short of my expectations. There are plotting issues. Plodding issues. Problems with language and art and artifice. I keep trying to be different things in my work, and I'm not sure any of them ring true to what I actually am. I'm still not sure about that. I'm pretty sure I'm never going to be as good as I could have been, much less as good as I want to be.

But I go back and read reviews of Heart of Veridon, and they make me genuinely happy. So maybe I just need to learn to be a little lighter. A little less anticipatory of my own failure. Because looking back takes a pretty heavy toll on my head. And there's nothing that can be done about it.

Trade School Paperback

I've been thinking a lot about the business of writing and what it means to be a writer. One of the things that I struggle with is the time it takes to learn to do this thing correctly. I have a degree in Creative Writing, but it took years and years of post-collegiate failure, trial and error, and stress to really learn how to write a book. And while I've sold six novels so far, I still feel like I have a long way to go.

The thing that I find frustrating is that there isn't a lot of guidance. I learn a lot by talking to fellow writers, comparing notes with my friends and generally by word of mouth. But mostly it's just random knowledge that I've managed to accrete over the last eleven years.

And that's a terrible way to learn your life's work. There's no reason it has to be this way. And I think I have a solution.

What this business needs is a trade school. A serious, two year program that teaches you how to plot, how to write characters, how to write dialogue, how to outline a novel. And more than that, it needs to teach you how to write a cover letter, how to write a pitch letter, a synopsis, a blurb... There would need to be a separate course on agents, editors and publishers, and one on marketing and the pure business side of writing.

There are courses in place, scattered across the country and with different philosophies and focuses (foci?), that teach most of these things. But none of it is unified. Plus most of it requires a random time commitment (six weeks this summer, a week next year, three weeks a month from now) all in far flung places that necessitate a disruption of your normal life. It's a luxury to be able to attend these things, a luxury that is generally unavailable if you're making the pauper's wages most writers are making (more on that later). So it's practically impossible to attend all of them, so most people pick and choose and end up with an incomplete education. If you learn some small bit of the business here, and some other bit of it over there, and the rest you're just trying to make up as you go along, you're not going to be much of a writer. Or, at least, you're not going to be as much of a writer as you could be.

There is one problem. The money for this doesn't exist. Most trade schools prosper because they're teaching a task that, once you graduate, you will be able to make a living performing. And that's not the case with writing. With only a few exceptions, most of us are making bad money, and we're doing it without insurance and with the (literal financial) support of our family. We're hobbyists.

I have thoughts about that, too, but I'll go into them later. For now, simply understand that we've wasted too much time treating writing like it's a sacred task, and it's not. It's a business of art, and there are things you can learn that will make you a better writer. Things I wish I'd learned at the start, rather than fumbling my way into discovering.

And I think that if we build a cadre of writers who can efficiently produce books that *readers* want to read, we might be able to take care of that hobbyist problem, too.

New books, new series, new deals

I'm pleased to announce that I've agreed to a three book deal with Titan Books. The titles as they currently stand are:

The Pagan Night
The Iron Hound
The Winter Vow

Nothing's set yet, but I expect the first of these will be out in 2015.

Hoorah!

Introducing The Quiet Front

An American warmage with a demon woven into his soul. A secret mission into Nazi-occupied France, where every order is a lie, and every sacrifice only adds to the butcher's debt. And a Russian agent, leading them deeper into a web of deceit and murder, until the only escape is death itself...

I present The Quiet Front, first in a series of tales about an alternate war in Europe, a war fought between old gods and new, horrible technologies. What sacrifices would the greatest generation have made if the cost was not in flesh and blood, but in the souls of the dead?

 

Followup on that Wisdom

Today is the last day to download the two stories I released for free earlier this week. If you want to have a chance at winning a free critique of your work (honesty is the only currency I can offer you) then you need to get on that action. I'm just saying. The links are right here:

Memory Analog

Memories of Copper and Blood

I have contacted the first winner of the weekly critiques, and will hopefully be providing them a critique by the end of this week. If you didn't win this week, don't despair. I'll be accumulating the submissions and selecting the best from the lot each week. The earlier you enter the more chances you'll have of winning so, once again, get on that action.

Finally, and this may seem a little harsh, but I can see how many downloads there have been of the stories, and I can compare that to the number of submissions I've received. I included the critique requirement on this offer because I wanted to establish a threshold of effort on your part. That's important because writing is difficult. Not just the act of writing, which is difficult enough, but the business of writing. The environment of the writing life is not easy, not for the writer, or the editor, or the various people associated with the business along the line. The verb you are going to see most often used in this business is 'Rejected'. The mental state you're going to most often face is disappointment. Unless you are rarely gifted or even more rarely lucky, you are going to expend a great deal of effort on things that will eventually fail. Sometimes spectacularly.

The thing that separates successful writers from aspiring writers is perseverance. Failure itself is inevitable, to some degree, for every one of us. The difference between the names you see on the bookshelf the names of your friends who have been in the same writing group for the last ten years and have stopped submitting to magazines but still talk a good game is the willingness to fail, to fail spectacularly, and to keep at it. To keep writing, to take criticism without taking offense, to overcome their pet weaknesses and professional hacks, and get up that fucking hill. That's all it is.

So. All of you who have downloaded the stories but not submitted critiques. Get off your ass. This is a good opportunity you've been given. If it's too hard to put the time aside to create an intelligent critique, or you're scared of having a professional give his honest opinion about your work, stop trying. Stop telling yourself you want to be a writer, and settle into the business of hobbyist. Because this is probably the easiest thing the writing world is going to ask of you. Stop putting it off.

Get up that fucking hill.

Free stories and wisdom!

Ten years ago (and a couple days, I missed the actual anniversary) I made my first professional fiction sale. It was to Chiaroscuro Magazine, a lovely market out of Canada that is still producing some of the finest, darkest fiction you're likely to find. The email came while I was at my first Worldcon. All in all, it was a good weekend, and a good way to start a career.

When the story came out a few months later, I did something interesting, something brave, especially for someone as socially averse as I am. I sent a link to the story to my three favorite writers at the time (Corey Doctorow, Peter Watts and Richard Morgan) and said 'Hey, listen, don't panic. I'm a real, professional writer, and this story is my first professional sale. I love your work, and I was hoping you'd take a few minutes out of your day to read this, and let me know what you think.'

Crazy, right? To my never ending shock and gratitude, all three of them responded. They all had good things to say, and poignant things to say ("this should have been a book") and were all three gracious and kind in a way that I never expected. Since then I have been amazed at the unrelenting kindness of this industry, the sheer grace with which newer writers are accepted into the fold and ushered forward by their elders.

In memory of this event, I'm doing two things. I hope you'll take advantage of both of them.

First, I am offering two stories for free on Kindle Direct. The first is Memory Analog, the short story that started my career. The second story is Memories of Copper and Blood, a novella set in my Wraithbound Universe. These stories will be available for free for the next five days to download on any Kindle device. If you don't have a Kindle, you can download their free app and read them on anything that runs on alternating current.

My hope is that you'll read both stories and see some kind of progression. Maybe you'll see things that I'm not doing as well, or things that I've changed that you wish I hadn't. Maybe you'll decide that I really should stick to novels. Even better, maybe you'll see things that I can improve. We never stop growing as writers.

The second thing I'm doing is a little risky for me, because it's a time commitment. But I was deeply moved by the sacrifice of time given by those three writers ten years ago. I need to pay that forward. Hopefully to you, dear reader.

For the next ten weeks, I will be offering free critiques, one a week. I can't commit to reading anything longer than, say, 20k words, though that limit is fuzzy. I have to warn you that if you submit something to be read, know that I will be completely honest with you. I hold myself to some pretty high standards, and I will hold you to nothing lower. That doesn't mean I'm going to tear your story apart, but I'm not here to simply encourage you. Writing is a fire that you pass through.

Here's how this is going to work. If you want a chance at these critiques, go download those two stories and offer a critique of your own. Send it to my Gmail account, at j.timothy.akers and keep it fairly short. I'll review the critiques and each week I'll offer one of the submitters a critique in kind. I'll be looking for critiques that are insightful and honest. Don't simply praise the work, that's not going to get you on to the next round.

But wait, you say. Aren't the people who need your help the most the ones who aren't necessarily going to be able to provide good critiques? Maybe. But I honestly believe that you need to learn how to be a good reader before you can be a good writer, and that's something I can't teach.

So. Read the stories. Write me a critique. Send it to the email address above. Wait forever for my response. Do not send me your story for critique along with your critique of my work. Let me say that again:

Do not send me your story for critique along with your critique of my work. I'll just delete them.

I don't know what kind of response I'm going to get from this. If it's overwhelming, it may take me a little while to get started. But I'll try to churn through them and each week, contact one of you for your story.

I hope this works out. I hope you get something out it. I hope I can help you half as much as I've been helped by others.

Thanks for your time. Here are the links to the stories. Remember, the first rule of publishing is patience. The second rule is something that we'll have to get back to you on, after the editorial meeting next month.


Memories of Copper and Blood

Memory Analog