Nikki Kimberling's Log

So, the latest installment of the Bellingham Mysteries is on sale today from Loose Id. It's called One Man's Treasure.

For those of you unfamiliar with that series, it follows investigative reporter, Peter Fontaine as he shines a light on the people and peculiarities of the City of Subdued Excitement, while simultaneously attempting to forge a lasting relationship with painter, Nick Olson.
 
Here's the thrilling blurb!

"Four years ago, Peter Fontaine made a name for himself as Bellingham, Washington's premiere investigative reporter. Since then he's got an award, a cat and good-looking artist to come home to every night.

Nick Olson, Peter's long-suffering lover has a lot of reasons for wanting Peter to stop investigating the many and varied crimes committed in the City of Subdued Excitement. Peter's nasty habit of getting held at gunpoint by lunatics has Nick wondering if any story is worth losing the man he's decided to “everything-but-marry.”

But when a famous ceramic artist drops dead at the Bellingham Farmer's Market, Nick agrees to help Peter dig deep to unearth the secret rivalries and dirty deeds done at Green Goddess Farms. And then they're going to have another long talk about these bad habits of Peter's."

My bi-monthly column on Reviews by Jessewave is up. This month, I talk about how many moneys it takes to make pretty books!

Come by to hear my opinions about Snape!

Today I'm over at Reviews by Jessewave blogging about how to critique writers without making them want to stab you. Come over and join the fun!

Hi there, just a quick note to say that Ginn Hale's new novel, The Rifter is available for preorder on weightlessbooks.com.

The Rifter is a 10 part serialized novel. We will release one episode per month from March until December 2011. You can either preorder the first episode, The Shattered Gates for 3.99 or subscribe to the entire event for 29.95.

We're really excited to be able to bring this wonderful romantic epic to our readers.

Cheers!

Today we’ll be talking about my needs. Here they are, in a nutshell: I need a book.

 

Which is to say that I, Nicole Kimberling, editor of Blind Eye Books, need to acquire a manuscript for publication in 2012. This manuscript must be between 70 and 120K words long, be science fiction, fantasy or paranormal romance and have a gay or lesbian protagonist. It must also contain a positive overall message. In addition to that, this mysterious book needs to be absolutely complete by January 1, 2012.

 

Where, I wondered, will I find such a book?

 

I thought here might be a good place to start looking, since any writers following this blog are already familiar with our line.

 

And because I am notoriously picky about stories I just thought I’d include some hints and tips about stuff that I’m interested in seeing and stuff that I’m not.

 

The kind of stuff I’m not interested in at the moment:

 

Vampires/Werewolves--I think that the market reached saturation on these guys a while back.

 

Sex Magic—I prefer almost any other form of magic.

 

Irish Fairies and Greek or Egyptian Mythology—Again, these have been kind of played out at the moment.

 

Single Gender Societies: It would be hard to beat Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite for this one. And male single-gender societies always involve mpreg which I’m just not a fan of at all.

 

Urban Fantasy set in North America or London—I don’t actually have anything against this, but I’ve just acquired a different book about that very same thing, so for the diversity of the line, I shouldn’t really buy another one.

 

The kind of stuff I really want to see:

 

Urban Fantasy set anywhere else in the world BUT North America and London: Beijing? Rio de Janeiro? Oslo? Heck, what about the United Arab Emirates? (How weird would it be to have an urban fantasy set in Dubai?) I really loved Sergei Lukyanenko’s Night Watch series, partially because it’s set in Russia and deals with Russian mythology. How fresh! How new! Howzabout some of that?

 

Space Opera: I really don’t think there’s enough space opera in the world. I would seriously consider purchasing a story that could be described as “Gay Star Wars” so long as it wasn’t just thinly disguised fan fiction. (I don’t want George Lucas’ lawyers to come looking for me.)

 

High Fantasy: While I could do without elves and dwarves or anything resembling an orc (especially all in the same story) I really do like Sword & Sorcery stories. I mean, that’s why I bought Ginn Hale’s Lord of the White Hell.

 

Genuine Cyberpunk & Future Dystopia: Oh, how I love Blade Runner. Rutger Hauer wins my vote for best death scene speech ever. “I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.” Wow! Gives me shivers every single time.

 

Secondary World Stories of all kinds: this just means “Not Earth.” Not future Earth, not past Earth. Not Earth At All. Hardly anybody ever sends me these. But when they do, I almost always find them worth a read.

 

A couple of other things to keep in mind if this call for submissions interests you:

 

I cannot acquire any MS that has previously appeared online in any form, ever. The publisher just simply does not allow me to do this, period. And it’s too bad, because there have been things that I was interested in that authors have posted sequentially on their websites as they were being written. But previously released material is a dealbreaker for us, I’m afraid.

 

This last part is a little confession: I am a very demanding editor. There! I’ve said it. I ask for things like complete scene rewrites. I request the summary deletion of whole pages of text—sometimes even into the double digits. I have asked authors to change the whole beginning of a story and other authors to change the entire ending. (Though never both.) If the idea of revision of this sort makes you want to barf with anxiety, then we might not be a good match for each other. That said, most authors who work with me still like me (I think) and once their books were finished, and they could once again happily engage solid food, they seemed pleased with the end result.

 

So after that fair warning, here’s what Blind Eye Books offers: a nationally distributed offset print book that looks pretty enough to be suitably displayed by your mom. We pay 10% of cover on print and 50% of net on digital sales.

 

And because I have recently decided that I care about trees, I am now allowing electronic submissions, which I’ve avoided in the past. So, if you would like to submit a story, please send me an email containing salient information about yourself, including previous publication history, and a short synopsis of your manuscript. Then attach your manuscript to this same email and send it to me. (Keep in mind that I use a mac so you’ll need to send an .rtf file or I won’t be able to read it.) My address: editor@blindeyebooks.com

Josh's book, Strange Fortune, has been chosen for the American Library Association's Over the Rainbow list!

Over and out.

Let's just be honest here. No creator likes to receive mixed reviews. It means that there is a substantial part of the reviewing audience that didn't like their work, which means that that particular work isn't going to be stalking up the NYT bestseller list any time soon. But one thing I've noticed is that virtually every single piece of creative work that I love receives mixed reviews. A great example of this is one of my most favorite movies of all time, Takashi Miike's Happiness of the Katakuris. This film is a Japanese comedy horror musical. It's kind of like a mugwort/green tea soft-serve twist cone. Not everyone will appreciate the mingling of these flavors--the resulting cone is lilac and murky green--but those who do will never forget having eaten it. Or watched it.

I am a huge fan of the TED lectures. If you haven't heard of them, they're basically short talks--not more than 20 minutes--given by various people on subjects ranging from business to technology to art and beyond. There are even live performances. I've watched dozens of these short pieces both for entertainment and to try and expand my ideas about how to run Blind Eye Books.

Today (among others) I watched Brene Brown speaking about The Power of Vulnerability, and about the paradox of how the most connected people are the ones who are able to tolerate vulnerability.

While I can usually find an oblique way to relate anything to either selling books or writing, I found this particular lecture to be particularly applicable to writing.

Back when I was at Clarion in 2004 I had a one-on-one meeting with Gordon Van Gelder, editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Wait... That sounds kinda weird. I should explain.

The way the Clarion workshop works is that around 20 of you go hang out on a university campus for six weeks and in between cocktails and impromptu soccer drills, you try to write the masterpieces that will jump start your writing career. Every day you rise at the fiendish hour of nine a.m. to sit in a critique circle talking about the various manuscripts that had been turned in the previous day. In the afternoon, you read other new manuscripts for the following day and then attempt to write your own during the down time after dinner. Every week or so the instructors get switched out. And every week each student gets a one-on-one with each different instructor where they can talk privately about their work. This is why I was in a meeting with Gordon.

He wasn't into my stories. I wasn't that surprised. But the great thing about a really good editor is that even if they aren't into your stories, they can usually tell you why and that's always helpful if your goal is publication. In my case, Gordon told me that he felt like I was hiding from him inside my prose. He also paraphrased Chip Delaney remarking that, "if you're going to screw the pooch, you might as well put it all the way in."

It took me a long time to figure out what that meant. Not the pooch part--I got that right away. I even understood what he was saying about hiding inside my prose, but understanding how to connect with readers more authentically took a long time. Not only did I have to figure out how exactly to stop hiding, but I had to figure out why I was hiding in the first place.

Two years of pulling my hair and howling into the dark and unforgiving night and driving my wife crazy with questions that she could not answer ensued.

Then, as with most quandries of this sort, once the answer was found it seemed simple. I could not be authentic because I did not want to be vulnerable.

Writing unique fiction is a vulnerable-making activity. If you put your writing out in the world, everybody's got an opinion about it and not all of them can be good--that's just a mathematical truth. So being the ambitious--yet still defensive--writer that I was, I unconsciously hit upon the strategy of not writing about my actual thoughts or beliefs. I wrote about what I thought might be true to some abstract and amorphous "reader," not what I knew to be true from my own life.

I'll tell you right now that this is the road to nowhere, authenticity-wise.

Writing about your own truth is not the same as writing any old self-indulgent text you want. There is still the craft of writing to consider--things like pacing, conflict, resolution, character development. Those quantifiable elements should be included in any piece. Writing about your own truth pertains to the takeaway of the story. The message. It pertains to who you cast as your villain and who is your hero. Who wins and who loses and most importantly, why the villain deserves to lose and the hero deserves to win.

That's where authenticity shines through. If your writing contains personal truths, you probably won't connect to everybody--but you will connect to the readers who "get" you. And isn't that who you're writing for in the first place?

I know I did. In spite of how nerve-wracking they can be, I actually really like most holidays. More than that, I like holiday-themed stories, especially Christmas stories. I started off reading all those holiday regency romance collections that were released in the early 90's, probably because I was really into the Victorian aesthetic at the time and the Regency was close enough to satisfy my hunger for images of sleighs and country house dances and dark-haired dukes intent on ridding the English countryside of French spies.

Jim Grimsley's Comfort & Joy, one of my all-time favorite books, is a Christmas story. Another film favorite, Tokyo Godfathers, is a Christmas and New Year's story. I even like experiencing holiday stories about holidays that I know virtually nothing about, such as the Eid story Saawariya. I don't know if it's that holidays brim with conflict and drama, or that they're naturally thematic or what. Most likely a combination of those two.

This year I wrote two holiday stories, Black Cat Ink, which was a Halloween story, and The Red Thread of Forever Love--a New Year's story that comes out Tuesday, December 28.

As it turns out, writing holiday stories is a lot harder than I originally imagined. The first one I did was the second installment of the Bellingham Mysteries, Baby, It's Cold Outside. It was my New Year's Story from last year. Originally conceived as a Christmas story, I ended up writing it as a New Year's piece because I was too late with my proposal to get a pre-Christmas slot. I'm glad I did because even though New Year's has a lot of strong connotations, it has nowhere near the natural resonance of Christmas--at least not for those of us in the western world. So it was an easier holiday to start on than a huge one, such as Christmas.

The thing that's difficult about holiday stories, I think, is to keep the (positive) spirit of the holiday strong throughout the story without making it seem trite or cliched. Doing that, of course, requires the author to not only think hard about what the spirit of the holiday actually IS, but to decide what angle to take. It's easy to screw up a holiday story. Elements like cynicism or doubt must necessarily be incorporated into the story (especially a Christmas tale aimed at adults) in order to avoid writing a truly saccharine piece of literature. But it's easy to go overboard and it's even easier to come to a bummer conclusion, which nobody wants. Not even bummed out people want to be further bummed on a holiday.

Bad Santa is a great example of a story that goes really far into cynicism and then actually pulls a positive message at the end, as do most of the Christmas episodes of South Park.

When I got the contract to write a second New Year's story, I started thinking again about the meaning of New Year. I came up with various ideas, relating to broken resolutions and booze and then it occurred to me that New Year is the Christmas of Asia, in terms of importance, family togetherness, strong connotative meanings, and the like. I don't know enough about Lunar New Year to write a story that is set in China--besides which the release date I had was December 28, not late January. So I chose Japan as my venue. First because I've actually been there, and second because they celebrate New Year's on January first--the calendar date, rather than on the lunar New Year.

Then a reader wrote me a letter asking if I was going to write another fantasy story any time soon. I thought, "Might as well just incorporate the fantasy element into this one. I've always wanted to write a story featuring yokai." And Red Thread of Forever Love was born.

I know some writers who would have been annoyed by the number of set parameters for this piece. It had to be: a fantasy, a romance, a gay story, and a New Year's story all at once. It also had to be a profoundly different New Year's story than the one I wrote last year. Somehow though, I seem to thrive when given sets of conditions. The rebellious third grader in me always wants to try and make it through the mental obstacle course.

Anyway, I hope readers enjoy the end product of all that thinking--or at least enjoy looking at the cover. :)

Happy New Year!