Okay, then, this is for the science fiction writers in the crowd who don’t actually know how to do that, but want to write convincing, plausible stories set in a future where that, and other imagined high tech, is possible.

Critics have called it “technobabble.” This is dialog that sounds like science and engineering but is just pretend. Sometimes technobabble can be so convincing that at least a few people in your audience actually accept some concepts as real. I’d be willing to bet that there are Star Trek fans out there who think there’s really such a thing as chronoton particles.

These plausible-sounding subatomic particles that have some kind of ambiguous relationship to time and make time travel possible, or are detected in the wake of some kind of temporal disturbance, are entirely an invention of Star Trek’s writing staff, but within the Star Trek universe they make sense, and add to the fun.

After all, the various time travel episodes of the various Star Trek series and movies have nothing to do with the practical realization of time travel technology, they’re about the importance of key decisions and pivotal personalities, the fragility of consciousness and the concept of fate, and other heady philosophical concepts. And it’s cool.

I’ve been working on the Traveller novels I’ve mentioned before and have been putting together material for my own Traveller game (starting this Friday after a last-minute rescheduling). One of the things I felt I needed to get us started was a quick definition of cerulene crystals, which are mentioned sort of off hand in the classic Traveller adventure The Chamax Plague by J. Andrew Keith and William H. Keith, Jr. (originally published by Game Designers’ Workshop in 1981). First, not having an encyclopedic knowledge of crystal geology, I Googled it and all I got were references back to the Traveller adventure. So these things are fake. Cool.

I remember hearing the term “metaconductors,” though I don’t really understand what that is. I just needed these cerulene crystals to be valuable in some way to the technological world of the Classic Traveller Universe. Back to Google I went. And I found this web site, which I did not really understand, but paraphrased as:

Library Data: Cerulene Crystals

Cerulene crystals are naturally occurring metaconductors that exhibit skin effect suppression at microwave frequencies. In their refined state their average in-plane magnetic permeability drops to zero. Unlike conventional ferromagnetic materials, no external magnetic bias is required due to the crystal’s large magnetic anisotropy.

Prized in TL15+ electronics and gravitics, cerulene crystals can not be synthesized and are found only in small deposits in rare locations around older stars.

With apologies to the study’s authors I would normally not be anywhere near this brazen, but in this instance my library data entry on cerulene crystals is for use in my own game and isn’t something I’ll sell, etc. If you expect your work to be published in any sort of for-pay medium, you can’t just . . . well, plagiarize like this, but still, the web provides a wealth of real science that can lend an air of credibility to your pretend science.

And who knows, it might just inspire a future scientist or engineer to develop a synthetic crystal metaconductor for use in high tech gravitics.

Gravitics, by the way, is another bit of technobabble for the engineering discipline concerned with anti-gravity and artificial gravity production.

How does that work?

Not sure, but I can tell you that chronoton particles have nothing to do with it.

Or do they?

—Philip Athans

Truth be told, those self-imposed deadlines remain difficult for me to stick to, though I have written and even published quite a bit of material in the thirty months since writing that post. But the biggest difference is the success—and all the hard work that comes with it—that my then-fledgling business has brought in in the meantime.

So here’s something that may sound like an excuse, but isn’t (kinda).

This week’s post will be a bit shorter than others because I’m just too damn busy!

Though (the unseasonably warm and sunny weather aside) it still seems like Western Washington outside my window, here at my desk I feel as though I’ve become a permanent resident of Deadline Hell.

This is a locale, believe me, with which I have considerable experience.

But the past few weeks, and the few weeks ahead of me, have been a bit off the charts, at least in my post-WotC life.

I can’t be specific with many of these projects, if any, but let’s see where I am right now:

• I’m working with Marc Miller on a line of Traveller novels and have five finished manuscripts currently on my hard drive, calling out for story and copy edits. I have another that has been edited and is waiting for notes and approval from Marc.
• I have two other manuscripts from individual clients waiting for the same level of edit, and which are now officially overdue by any reasonable stretch.
• I have two and a half proofreads to finish. The remaining half of the first one is due tomorrow, and I will finish it today. The other two are both due on the 13th.
• I continue to work on the WotC pronunciation project—and that reminds me, I owe one of the narrators an email.
• I have another client with some material I need to read in preparation for a phone call Friday.
• Tomorrow and Thursday I’ll be getting writing assignments in from my Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction students that I’ll need to read and comment on by class time (6:30 pm on Thursday) and I’ll need to make sure my notes and PowerPoint are ready for class, too.
• I’m putting together another online tutorial for my friends at Writer’s Digest University that needs to be ready to record in a couple weeks.
• And then there’s the big secret writing project which may not be past the publisher’s deadline yet but it’s definitely past mine and why does this keep getting knocked off the to do list? That needs to be finished!
• And I have another really fun novella to write for a friend who’s putting together a cool series I’m excited to be a part of.
• And I have that dark fantasy work in progress that I’m making no progress on because I’m not working on it.

And all this with normal modern life stuff: bills, college financial aid documents to get in, spring lawn and garden care, and other stuff.

Whew.

Really?

Is this what I was asking for that sunny October morning in 2010?

As a matter of fact, yes, it is. This is precisely what I asked for and truth be told, I’m loving every minute of it.

I’m busy, and I love being busy. I’m hitting my deadlines(ish), and doing a wide variety of interesting work, and meeting new people all the time, and widening my net in terms of genre, category, and role.

If October 2010 Phil could see me now, he’d be pretty happy, then tell me, “Get to work!”

Okay, okay, I’m going . . .

—Philip Athans

And you know me, I don’t work on game properties I don’t actually play, and though I am a Traveller fan from way back—as early as 1979—it’s been a while since I’ve actually sat down and rolled some six-sided dice to explore the 11,000 worlds of the Third Imperium. Now I have the new rules, a book line in progress, and this New Years Resolution: PLAY MORE GAMES.

So I went to the 21st century version of the game store corkboard, Meet-Up, and, well . . . met up with some fellow Travellers (pun both intended and enjoyed) to start up a new game.

And wow, did it take me a long time to get back into the old Traveller habits. Back in the day—about twenty years ago—I used to stay up until the wee hours of the morning pouring through Traveller’s extensive rules for creating worlds, starships, robots, and all sorts of other stuff. I was obsessed with designing starships in particular and had a three-ring binder full of stats for all manner of interstellar vehicles. It was part hobby, part obsession, and part worldbuilding school.

Oh, and when I said it took a long time to get back into the Traveller habit I meant I started staying up late within an hour of deciding to start this new campaign. Since then I’ve designed a system defense boat and the small craft and vehicles that go with it, a bevy of characters, a few more vehicles for the first adventure, a whole star system, a robot, some weapons, a space suit (in Traveller parlance: vacc suit), and even a sophont.

Wait . . . a sophont?

This is a blog about writing science fiction and fantasy, not (necessarily) RPGs so here’s where we get into some writing, or at least worldbuilding, tips.

As wholeheartedly as I recommended the out of print and hard to find World Builder’s Handbook I want to even more stridently recommend Traveller5, especially for science fiction authors, but for fantasy authors too.

Now, the Traveller universe is copyrighted material, and you won’t be able to set your own stories there, but what you can do is use Traveller5’s rules for creating things as helpful guidelines for your own monsters, alien races, technology, and vehicles.

Over and over again I’ve preached the vital importance of plausibility in SF and fantasy, and to do that you need to set your own rules for how things like technology and magic work. If those things work consistently throughout your story they’ll be plausible, believable, and your readers will appreciate the effort.

If you’re not actually playing Traveller, you don’t have to get too deeply into the numbers, but the step-by-step processes this massive, 656-page large format book have to offer can help inspire you, and help you think through what you might need to know about these various things to better tell your story.

I’ve been purposefully working through the new rules to help with my edits of the novels, and now even more deeply for my own game. In an effort to try everything the book has to offer at least once, I decided that one of the non-player characters (NPCs) that will join my players as the crew of a system defense boat will be what in Traveller parlance is called a “minor race.” These are the potentially millions of intelligent, even technological species throughout the galaxy who have not independently developed a faster-than-light drive. A few have been featured in various adventures and other supplements over the years (decades, actually) but Traveller’s universe is a big one and it’s assumes that there are more—lots more—than have yet been described in published material.

The new rules set has taken this concept to the next level and provided rules for generating sophonts (sentient creatures) that is simply brilliant.

Here’s what I came up with, using random die rolls by the way (with a few instances of hmm . . . that’s not really going to work . . . followed by a re-roll or just a choice on my part):

First we start with a homeworld, preferably one with a population of zero, since the Imperium doesn’t count natives (they’re like that), and I wanted them to be fairly low tech compared to the interstellar community that surrounds them, so I shopped through the online Traveller Map (which is one of the coolest things on the internet, by the way) and found:

Ovant (Foreven 0840 E577200-6)

Without retyping all the basic Traveller rules, this is a planet with an E-class starport (which sucks), is size 5 (8000 km in diameter), has a type 7 atmosphere (standard, tainted), the surface is 70% water and/or ice, the population is between 100 and 999, there is no government, no law to speak of, and the last digit is the tech level. Six is roughly equivalent to 1950s Earth.

Now that I know where my aliens come from (and I assumes the hundreds of people there represent an Imperial delegation of researchers and advisors) it’s time to start describing my new sophonts, step by step:

They are native to this planet.

They evolved in desert terrain.

They are “walkers,” which means they have legs.

They are omnivore/gatherers.

So far they sound a bit like us!

Now we determine their stats, which is RPG parlance for a numerical value representing certain basic physical characteristics. In this case, I determined what those categories will be (some are different for different species) then I determined how many dice a player would roll to determine the value of each characteristic. Traveller’s baseline is two dice (2-12) for humans.

My species ended up like this:

Strength: 1D

Dexterity: 1D

Endurance: 1D

Intelligence: 3D

Instinct: 2D

Charisma: 2D

This means that they’re half as strong, agile, and hearty as the average human, and that (according to the rules, and a dollop of logic) also makes them smaller. But they are potentially half again as smart as the average human.

Next I randomly generated their genders. Who says everybody comes in male and female?

Turns out my sophonts have three genders: female, male, and “bearer.” This also determined some plusses and minuses to the characteristics of each race. What you see above is female standard. Males are somewhat less strong but have somewhat keener instincts. Bearers are stronger and heartier than females but rather less dexterous, and their instincts are even less acute than females’.

This will get too complicated for the purposes of this post, but I then went on to generate some shockingly specific aspects of their senses (vision, hearing, smell, touch, awareness, and perception).

Then I determined their life stages, which is to say at what point they achieve physical maturity, through to their average life expectancy. For the record, you’re an adult at age eleven.

I then discovered, thanks to a roll of the dice, that they have a verbal language that manifests as whistles.

Then I rolled up what their bodies look like:

They have bilateral symmetry, a head that contains their brain and sensory organs (like us), a torso (which is nice), and four legs. They have a bony skeleton, blood, and a hairy pelt. They, like us, have no natural weapons to speak of. Their characteristic dice places their average weight at 36 kilograms (about 79 pounds).

And that’s it . . . at least as far as the charts and tables are concerned.

Now is when you get creative.

I need them to be able to interact with the other characters on a spaceship, so decided that their front legs end in hands, and their back legs in paws, so they may walk on all fours, but can stand up and use tools, too.

It has a head, okay, but what does its face look like?

It has fur, but is it soft or bristly, and what color is it?

What are they called?

For my aliens, I remembered they evolved in a desert so used my handy translation widget to come up with something that (I think) means something like “dry people” in French and mashed it together to call them the seclesgen.

I looked at my three genders and my life stages and thought, hmm, wouldn’t it be neat if each seclesgen actually morphs into each of the three genders based on age? So I made the decision that every seclesgen is female at the age of maturity (11) through age 34 at which time they spend a year hibernating and morphing into a male and stay that way from age 36 through 59, then spend their 60th year hibernating and morphing again, this time into a bearer, which is how they spend the rest of their lives, another ten years or so. This mean in order to have a baby you need one young adult (female), one middle-aged adult (male), and one senior citizen.

Then this idea came to me: The species as a whole is known as the seclesgen but refer to themselves as SEClesgen when they’re female, secLESgen when they’re male, and seclesGEN when they’re bearers.

Please keep in mind, though, that if you’re using these rules to spark your imagination for your own stories, seize control of the rules. Let them help you and suggest things, but don’t ever let anything bind your creativity.

I’ll leave it at that, at least for now. I have to sit down and use the ArmorMaker rules to design my characters’ uniforms and the BeastMaker rules for . . . spoiler alert!

—Philip Athans

What You Need

and

What You Should Have

These lists are meant for students who show up to a classroom every week for eight weeks, but looking at these lists again as I began teaching the class for this new term, it struck me that this is pretty good advice for any would-be author.

This is what I believe is absolutely required and what you really need to think about having if you want to do any sort of creative writing, not just science fiction or fantasy. Let’s start with the basic requirements:

What You Need

Creativity

Desire

Paper and pencil (or pen)

Respect

Patience

What’s interesting about this list is how little this will actually cost you in real dollars. The only thing on this list that’s actually a tangible commodity is paper and pencil/pen, and you may well be able to gather that stuff up for free.

Creativity

Okay, we’re talking about creative writing here. You need to tap into the deepest wells of creativity you can find. This is where your ideas come from, and is the source of your ability to convey those ideas. It’s not just what you have to say but how you say it. Creativity is, in many ways, like a muscle. It’s possible to develop it through exercise. There will be some bigger posts on that subject to follow, but think about “creativity,” at least in terms of this list, as the single most important thing anyone can bring into creative writing, which is why they call it creative writing and not . . . I don’t know . . . note taking.

Desire

You gotta wanna. This is a tough business. Writing is hard, and getting published is even harder, and maintaining a career as an author is harder still. If this is just kind of a passing fancy for you, there’s little chance you’ll be able to drag yourself through those dark nights of the soul that lie ahead for you. If this isn’t your life’s passion, think about what actually is your life’s passion and go do that.

Paper and pencil (or pen)

Who knows if those stories about J.K. Rowling writing the first Harry Potter novel with stubs of pencils she found on the street and any little scrap of paper she could scrounge up are actually true. The fact is, you can write the Great American Novel or even a pretty good little space opera, on some pieces of paper and with whatever pencils and pens you can find laying around. I always go to Target (or any discount store will do) the day after school starts in my area. They tend to slash prices on all the leftover school supplies on that day (or a few days later) and you can buy your entire next year’s worth of office supplies for a few dollars. Here’s a picture of some pads and comp books I bought for less than fifty cents each, along with a few pens that I got for free. Please note the entire 6-pack of legal pads I got for ninety-nine cents. Score! These are sitting in a box near my desk waiting to be filled with genius.

Bargains Galore!

Respect

Have respect for the genre you’re writing in. If you’re writing a fantasy novel because you think fantasy is stupid and obviously anyone can do it and get rich quick then, wow . . . *%!& you. But beyond that, read what other authors are doing, and put in the necessary time and effort to research and to really learn how to write. The fact that you’re reading this right now helps. The desire and commitment to write well shows a respect for your craft and your audience. Your potential readership deserves your best efforts.

But also have respect for your fellow authors. This is not a competition. You get no points as a writer by crapping on other writers. You may end up finding that an increasing number of your friends will be writers, too, and some of them might be in a position to help you. Be a member of the community, not an invader.

Patience

How many times have I said this? If you’re sitting down right now to write a fantasy novel because your mortgage payment is due on the first of the month you’re in big trouble. Even if you could write a book in a week (and no, actually, you really can’t) it will take more than a day to publish it, even as an indie e-book, and money will come in slowly over a long period of time, if at all. I’ve written in more detail about the need for patience, so I’ll refer you back there for more.

And in terms of what you absolutely need to write a great book, that’s actually it.

The next list, though, is only slightly less essential.

What You Should Have

A computer with Word (or other word processing program)

An internet connection

A notebook

A sense of humor

This is where you stop exploring writing and start trying to actually do it for a living.

A computer with Word (or other word processing program)

I use Microsoft Word because when I moved to Seattle with what was TSR to work for Wizards of the Coast, Wizards of the Coast gave me a new computer that used Word, which was a million times better than TSR’s ancient and hilariously out of date computers that ran WordPerfect. From then on, I just kept being compatible with what was happening at work. So this really isn’t some kind of Microsoft Office commercial. Like Google Docs? Okay. Scribner? Fine by me. But if you plan to sell your work eventually it will have to be neatly typed and edited in some kind of an electronic form. At least be able to save it as an RTF (Rich Text Format) file. Very, very, very few agents and editors are so Old School that they still require hardcopy manuscripts. The overwhelming majority of the professionals you’ll be interacting with will want you to email stuff to them, or submit work through an online submission portal. You’ll need to be a part of the 21st Century eventually. This is as good a reason as any.

An internet connection

I did just say agents and editors will want you to email them manuscripts, right? Or use an online submission portal? And wow, does the internet help when it comes to quick research. I use tons of online tools including a widget dictionary/thesaurus and Google, Google, and more Google all day every day. And once you’ve actually sold a book, you’ll want to tell people about it via Facebook, Twitter, GoodReads, and so on. Short on funds? Use the computers at your public library.

A notebook

This is kind of a repeat from the first list, but have a notebook with you to jot down ideas, another to keep your worldbuilding, character, and plot notes for your current work in progress. If you can keep notes on a device like a smartphone or tablet computer, okay. But have them somewhere safe and accessible.

A sense of humor

You know what really sucks? The first time you read an online review of something you’ve written that really rips you a new one. Something else that sucks? You have this great back-and-forth with an agent or editor and are absolutely sure that you’re “in” then all of a sudden a dismissive form reject from an assistant with no explanation. And yes, this happens all the time. You know what else sucks? Pitching a brilliant idea to an agent then going to the movies and seeing almost exactly that same idea play out before your terrified eyes. That last one happened to me. Damn you, M. Night Shyamalan. Damn you straight to the pretend 19th Century.

Creative writing is a subjective business, and if you are able to maintain an emotional distance from it you’re probably not going to be very good at it. That means it’ll hurt when (not if) this sort of thing happens. A good sense of humor may be the world’s single most effective suicide deterrent.

It’s worked for me, anyway.

—Philip Athans

As I did with my 100th post, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on Fantasy Author’s Handbook, and all the ways that you’ve come to find it, and how we’re doing as a community.

Fantasy Author’s Handbook has been viewed a total of 71,261 times since my first post on June 15, 2009. Since then, y’all have left 553 comments. I know you can do better than that, so consider this yet another invitation to make your opinions known (in a respectful, positive way, of course). The top five most commented-on posts or pages are:

End of Part Two 44

ASK PHIL 29

Philip Athans 21

Don’t be a Snobby Reader 12

MY TEN FAVORITE SF NOVELS 12

I know everybody was really curious about what happened when I left Wizards of the Coast, but come on, people, let’s all move past that and start commenting on other stuff! ASK PHIL, for instance, really needs to pass that up by post 300 . . . please?

Speaking of my leaving Wizards of the Coast, June 23, 2010, the day after I left WotC, remains Fantasy Author’s Handbook’s busiest day with 754 views, leading into the busiest month of all time with 3155 views in July 2010. Gee whiz, would I like to break that record with just about anything else!

Here’s a list of the ten all time most read posts:

Home page/archives 26,949

GALLEY SLAVE 3559

A prisoner of the prisoner 2195

Index 1933

Philip Athans 1767

Welcome to Fantasy Author’s Handbook 1753

In search of the first paragraph 1665

End of part two 1624

MY TEN FAVORITE FANTASY NOVELS 1068

MY TEN FAVORITE SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS 1048

If I correct that list to exclude pages, here are the top ten posts that people specifically visited:

GALLEY SLAVE 3559

A prisoner of the prisoner 2195

In search of the first paragraph 1665

End of part two 1624

MY TEN FAVORITE FANTASY NOVELS 1068

MY TEN FAVORITE SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS 1048

SAKURA-CON 2010 793

How not to open a short story 734

INTERVIEW: JIM MINZ 687

INTERVIEW: MATS MINNHAGEN 624

I can not begin to tell you how delighted I am that IN SEARCH OF THE FIRST PARAGRAPH, which is actual advice on, y’know, writing, managed to nudge out END OF PART TWO, by however slim a margin.

I hate to be negative, but maybe we can gather together to rectify this sad situation: the least visited posts of all time, which is a two-way tie between ON VACATION and MERRY CHRISTMAS with only 14 each. Though, honestly, those were posts more or less about how I’m not really writing a post that week.

And now we come to one of my favorite parts of the WordPress stats, the search terms.

This tells me what y’all typed into Google that got you to me. The 100th post included some really, really odd search terms, and I’m happy to report that the past twelve months (less than 100 posts) hasn’t seen the same level of disconnected creepy stuff as last time. People are actually finding Fantasy Author’s Handbook when they’re looking for advice on writing, lists of the best SF and fantasy books, and stuff like that. Still, the most common search term remains some variation of galley slaves, galley slave, slave galley, ben hur rowing, or charleton heston shirtless, for a total of 2152 referrals. This includes some pearls like: slave fantasy (38) and shirtless slaves (49). I would prefer not to be the internet’s one-stop shop for gay slave porn, but something tells me when some of these searches get to a blog post about proofreading book galleys there are some disappointed web surfers out there. Sorry.

On November 18, 2009, I wrote about how I was watching the original series The Prisoner on On Demand and apparently the internet is lacking in content in regards to that show, and there are a boatload of people out there who need to know more about it. That post has been viewed by people who have Googled all sorts of variations on: the prisoner, patrick mcgoohan, etc., for a total of 1512 referrals for the second place position. It was a great show, and I’m happy to help in any way I can.

Trying not to let my ego get in the way, I have to say I am gratified that I’ve at least come in third in this category, with 821 people Googling some variation of my name to find me here at Fantasy Author’s Handbook. I want to believe that the four referrals for “philip athans sucks” came from the same hater Googling that four times, but if there are four of you out there, I hope you found what you were looking for here. Maybe you can get together and join a bowling league or something.

Like The Prisoner, there must be an unfulfilled yearning for information about The Powerpuff Girls villain Mojo Jojo, resulting in the fourth-place search term: some variation of mojo jojo, with 269 referrals, all ending up on a photo of a Mojo Jojo cosplayer from Sakura-Con 2010.

The fifth-place search term made perfect sense: “fantasy authors” got to me 145 times. Whew.

And then there was the bizarre:

certificate of incorporation business school (3)

fabio nude (5)

fabio on a horse (5)

medieval porn (4)

snaps her neck “snaps her neck” (4)

where to buy a bunny (4)

I’m pretty sure I’ve never written about incorporating a business school, which I have neither attended nor incorporated myself, but Google truly moves in mysterious ways.

I supposed that if I could find a picture of Fabio riding a horse in the nude I could make as many as ten people very happy.

Alas, I have no way of knowing if the four people searching for medieval porn wanted porn written in medieval times or set in medieval times, but I don’t have much to say on either subject, likely leaving another four people to move on to “philip athans sucks.”

The 100th post had some creepy search terms, but “snaps her neck” was this year’s most unsettling.

I must say I take some delight in the fact that just as many people read my blog after typing in “where to buy a bunny” as “philip athans sucks”. There may be hope for me yet.

Thanks, everybody, for reading Fantasy Author’s Handbook, however you managed to find it.

Next week: Post number 201.

—Philip Athans

Okay, I’ll back up a little.

For the past couple years I’ve been reading a lot of advice for indie/self-published authors on the subject of marketing, and giving my fair share, too. Though it’s never been easier or cheaper to publish your own work, at least in e-book form, what continues to be a challenge for those of us who are at least partially doing this on our own, is actually selling those books to people.

One of the basic pieces of advice I hear every time is that at the very least you have to get out there in the social media sphere, at least if not especially Facebook and Twitter.

In the broadest possible terms, I agree. But what worries me is that there might be anyone out there who thinks that’s enough. That ghost in the movie Field of Dreams that whispered “If you build it, they will come,” was not talking about your Kindle Direct or Smashwords book. What would be more accurate?

“If you build it, it will go out into cyberspace with as many as a million just like it.”

Even if it’s a fantastic book, it will not sell if no one’s ever heard of it.

I know that’s pretty obvious, but what are we to do about it?

Okay, start with Facebook and Twitter. I have accounts at both, and have my Twitter feed linked to my Facebook page so that when I send a Tweet it copies there. I’ve been on Twitter for about four years or so, and currently have 1478 followers, which I guess is pretty good unless you’re a TV or rock star, in which case you can have millions.

What does that mean? Does that mean when I send out one of my little promo tweets pointing people in the direction of one of my books, I immediately (or even eventually) sell 1478 copies? I wish. The real number is more like 1/1000th of that many.

And what about Facebook? There are a billion people on Facebook, so you only have to sell to 1% of them to move ten million books. Awesome!

But that’s not actually how that works.

Being on Facebook doesn’t make you instantly famous, or get your message out to a billion people, it makes you one of the faceless masses, one of a billion accounts.

I refer you to Mr. Navin Johnson:

Here’s the good news, such as it is:

It’s not just being on Facebook and Twitter (and GoodReads and LinkedIn, etc.) its what you do with that that counts. And you have some measure of control over what you do with these tools.

Let’s start with Twitter:

At the beginning of every month I set up a bunch of scheduled tweets: a new one every day, all of which has some kind of marketing message. This can be as simple as [title of book] now available in [format] then the link to the Amazon page or wherever it might be available.

This is fairly unobtrusive. I haven’t heard any complaints, at least, and every once in a while someone tells me they’ve gone and bought that book, which is nice.

Using a free service called Tweriod I found out when most of my followers were looking at my tweets and scheduled them for those times.

This whole process takes about half an hour each month and I think of it as time well spent, even if I can’t attach a clear dollar value to what it might bring in, what our corporate friends would call an ROI (Return on Investment).

That having been done, the rest of the month I use Twitter to send out little bits of info about what I’m up to in a non-selly way. I forward interesting posts on publishing, science, science fiction and fantasy, and even (though rarely) politics and current events—whatever strikes my fancy. I liberally retweet stuff I find interesting, funny, etc.

I like Twitter. It’s fun, easy, to the point, and most of all, very easy to ignore. If you find yourself getting frustrated with someone on Twitter, click UNFOLLOW and that’s that.

Bt Facebook is a slightly different animal. I was one of the last Americans to start a Facebook account, holding off from what I used to call “The High School Reunion Time Sink.”

Turns out, I don’t have a lot of Facebook friends from high school, but I do spend a bit more time than I ought to “liking” stuff I see from other friends, relatives, and lots of former TSR/Wizards of the Coast coworkers.

But I also use it for actual work. I have groups set up for various consulting projects, for instance.

Most of the time, I guess, Facebook tends to be a way for me not to waste time so much as to be connected in some way with distant friends and family while cooped up in my secluded mansion on the outskirts of Seattle.

But does it sell books?

Nope.

Then what does?

I wish I could give you a list of things that will guarantee your success, but I just can’t, though there will be posts aplenty to follow as we all try to figure this thing out as we go along.

In the meantime, here are a few bullet points to consider:

• Be a part of a community.
• Be friendly, positive, and inclusive.
• Write well.
• Engage the services of a professional editor and a professional cover artist and designer.
• Fill a niche (genre, audience, subject matter, format) that’s either under-served or not being served at all.
• Be patient.

That last one is tough, but only the first two are easy (or should be, anyway).

—Philip Athans

This is one of those parts of being a writer, as opposed to writing, that I think some writers suffer over unnecessarily. Everything, though, comes down to one simple rule:

LESS IS MORE.

My advice has been and always will be: Leave all your creativity in your story, and none in your presentation.

But the problem with that is that everybody has a different idea of what I might mean by “less” and I don’t want you to think that means you should do no formatting at all and send your work to agents and editors as one solid block of unformatted, single-spaced, 9-point text.

One of the things I give every student in my classes is a simple five-page document that I put together to present what I think are the basic rules of proper manuscript format. And now, you can follow this link to get a copy of that PDF for yourself.

Now, the fact is that “proper” manuscript format can vary from editor to editor, market to market, so everybody should be ready, willing, and able to do some quick reformatting before sending your work to a specific market. If “less is more” is rule number one, then “believe the guidelines” is rule number two, and no less important.

If a publisher has a set of submission guidelines on its web site, read them carefully, and follow those instructions as if they were the Word of God. Please don’t think of that as a challenge, either in terms of formatting, genre, content, etc.

If they say they don’t want to read vampire stories, don’t think, Yeah, but they’ll like my vampire story! Send the vampire story to someone else.

If the guidelines say they want the first three chapters, send them the first three chapters—no more, no less.

If they ask for a one-page synopsis, they mean one side of one letter-sized page with standard margins and 12-point type. Don’t think of that as some kind of formatting challenge: How can I squeeze these 10,000 words onto one page? Start cutting text so it fits.

If they ask for an outline and you don’t have one, write one.

And assume unless otherwise instructed, that a “page” is 12-point type on one side of one letter-sized page, double spaced.

And again, if otherwise instructed, ignore anything and everything I’ve told you here or in that PDF, and give that publisher what that publisher has asked for.

It is fair to think, “Who cares what it looks like, it’s the writing that counts!”

And that’s precisely what I’m trying to tell you. You are trying to sell your work, and taking these simple steps, none of which will adversely effect the story you’re telling, the language you’re using to tell that story, or any of the art and craft you’ve put into your work, will simply make it easier and more comfortable for “gatekeepers” to read your work.

Ultimately, that’s what we’re doing here: Getting people (agents, editors, and anyone and everyone else) to read our work. Right?

—Philip Athans

But now <ahem> years later, video games are a story-driven medium, and even casual games tend to have some story element binding them together, even if it’s just kinda fun and cartoony like Angry Birds, or a way to get you from song to song like in Guitar Hero—two very popular games that aren’t known for their rich storytelling but are fun as heck to play.

But coming from a gamer culture, even before I started working for TSR then Wizards of the Coast, I still have distinct memories of a coherent authorship behind those games, the progenitors of the contemporary MMO, FPS, and pretty much everything else. Everybody who played D&D knew it was the creation of Gary Gygax—and those who really wanted to be fair knew it was a creation of Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. When I was in high school, pretty much doing nothing but playing D&D and other role-playing games, my heroes were Gygax and Arneson, Traveller creator Marc Miller, David Hargrave of The Arduin Grimoire “fame,” Jeff “Gamma World” Grubb, and Steve Jackson, who designed some of my first entries into hobby gaming: the (for me, at least) legendary Microgames, including the amazing Ogre.

The title page of my MegaTraveller Players’ Manual, autographed by Marc Miller at Gen Con, 1990.

Let’s fast forward some thirty-five years from my first forays into “serious” gaming (wow, has it been that long? . . . damn) and now I’m not that high school geek anymore, but a grown up geek with kids of his own. My twelve-year-old son considers himself a “gamer” but for him, that means video games. And he’s, like pretty much every twelve-year-old boy in the western world, a first-person shooter aficionado. His sun rises and sets on Halo, Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed, and Batman: Arkham City.

And I’ll be willing to bet his Xbox 360 that he couldn’t name a single person who had anything to do with the creation of those games. But he does know Bungie, Valve, and other studios.

In “The Authorship of the Video Game,” a letter to/interview with 5th Cell designer Jeremiah Slaczka, whose games appear under the credit “A Jeremiah Slaczka Game,” Patrick Klepek wrote:

“The traditional reaction to assigning single authorship is that games are not like other forms of media. You credit J.K. Rowling with Harry Potter because, well, she wrote the whole damn series. A big team may come together to produce the new Steven Spielberg or David Fincher film, but the reason those movies are then touted as new works from a single individual is because those mediums better lend themselves to a single person having enough of an impact on the entire process. In film, it’s called auteur theory, relating to an artist’s personal vision. You know you’re watching an Alfred Hitchcock film because Hitchcock has such a distinctive style. No one else could have made this film.”

In his reply, Slaczka is quick to point out that a game like Hybrid is a collaborative effort, that this authorship brand is not meant to imply that Hybrid was “A Game Solely Made by Jeremiah Slaczka” but still:

“What works for us is to have a very clear vision and direction—and that direction since we were founded has come from me. The games we’ve made and the high level concepts we started out with have always lined up. Every studio is different, but this is what has worked for us. And just because I’m the one directing the vision doesn’t mean only my ideas get in, we always listen to ideas from anyone. If it makes the product better and fits in the schedule I’m all for it. But someone needs to be the person to weight whether or not it does gel with the vision.”

And this matches with what I eventfully came to understand about how TSR and D&D worked, even in the early days. Gary Gygax put himself forward as the creator of D&D but those of us who bothered to read the credits eventually started seeing some names regularly popping up, like Kim Mohan, Steve Winter, Harold Johnson, and David “Zeb” Cook. And for me, and my late-70s/early-80s gamer friends, we added these characters to the pantheon, much like Marvel Comics fans would look at Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (for D&D: Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson), then widen their fan nets to include Steve Ditko, John Buscema, Marv Wolfman, and other stars—other authors—of the growing Marvel bullpen.

We had brand (Marvel) and creator (Jack Kirby) loyalty, sitting side by side.

When I first started at TSR I began hearing weird rumors, which I’ll leave as such—things like the then owner of the company looking to lower the profile of one of the most popular authors because she didn’t want any one personality growing more important than the brand—and this the same woman who pushed Gary Gygax out of the company he created. And one author who was convinced that TSR had purposely made another author more successful than him, as though any publisher has a real measure of control over who a readership will respond to . . .

Authorship can be messy. It can make one person very important to an organization and therefore more difficult to fire. It can make team-mates jealous, and sometimes rightfully so. But no one ever said it was going to be easy. How pissed off do the sound designer or the costume designer get when everybody talks about “the new Tom Cruise movie” they just worked on, everybody knowing full well that Mr. Cruise was just one part of a massive team effort?

What does this mean to video games, which, like movies, can be shockingly expensive and time-consuming to create, requiring massive teams and budgets only corporations can provide?

In his Kotaku article “The Search for the Video Game Auteurs,” Brian Ashcraft wrote:

“When movies finish, the crew disbands. Maybe the director will bring on the cinematographer he or she used in the last film. Maybe not. Citizen Kane proved Orson Welles’ genius, but it also proved the genius of Gregg Toland. Some filmmakers use the same collaborators for the majority of their career—take Martin Scorsese and film editor Thelma Schoonmaker. When games finish, development studios begin work on the inevitable sequel. The process is seemingly unending.”

This seems to imply that video game studios keep the same staff of people, who move on to the next game together, as a team. But that runs contrary to my own experience of the video game industry, where I have close friends who’ve bounced all over the country, and even all over the world, from one studio to another, in precisely the same way that various artists and craftspeople jump from movie to movie. I know a dozen people who don’t live in the same area code as their cell phones. One of my closest friends has gone all the way to Shanghai to write for video games.

To me it seems as though the video game world is functioning almost exactly like the movie business—for good or ill. And if the movie business can not only withstand but gain considerable marketing traction, from authorship, why can’t the video game business?

Myst made stars of co-creators Rand Miller and Robyn Miller, and Sid Meier will forever be known as the creator of Civilization. And these are some of the earlier  entries in what is now a massive and crowded marketplace. How did the video game move from this early stage of clear authorship to the more studio-centric model exhibited by the majority of the industry? Or was authorship ever really that important? A case could be made that it was brand names like Atari and Nintendo that appeared first, and always have out-weighed the occasional breakthrough creator identity, that the Millers and Sid Meier were outliers even then.

But again, the movies had studio brands like Disney, and still do, while maintaining a healthy star system for both actors and directors, really all of whom are temps. Brad Pitt is a contractor. He comes in, lends his expertise to a movie, then goes on to the next one, as does Ridley Scott. And sometimes these contractors come in and out of existing properties like J.J. Abrams and Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek or Daniel Craig and Ian Flemming’s 007.

For writers, the video game business can not only keep the rent paid but can provide some amazing creative challenges. I would wholeheartedly recommend it and not just as a “day job” for any writer, but as it stands, it’s a business that has a very tenuous relationship with its creative core, and writers often inhabit the bottom of the development food chain.

There’s very little reason to expect that writing a video game will make you “famous,” and for me, that’s a failing of an industry that too often functions in a bottle, with a strange cultural certainty that they’re the first ever to do this, that, or the other thing, including working with freelancers, contractors, and, dare I say it, “stars.”

Attention, video game industry, authorship is not something to be feared, but something to be embraced, and no, not everyone has to be a full time employee. Brad Pitt isn’t, and neither is Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan, J.K. Rowling . . . and so on. And people who bring them onto their team rarely regret it.

—Philip Athans

Everyone should take vacation days, even if, like me, you really love your work, but what about sick days?

In the contemporary office environment people are starting to get more sensitive about calling in sick. When I worked at Wizards of the Coast there was at least one person who always came in when he was sick, and flatly refused to listen to anyone who told him he should go home. And all he was really accomplishing by being there was spreading the evil germs to the rest of us, cooped up with him in a sealed-environment office building. Human resources departments all over America are trying to stop this peculiarly American bit of  work ethic bravado. The lost productivity of one sick day for you is much easier for the company to soak up than the lost productivity of the potentially dozens of sick days you’re generating in others.

But then here we are, still struggling through an ongoing Depression, with unemployment still high, and both companies and employees feeling as though they’re hanging by a thread. If you work in Corporate America now you might actually have reason to fear that if you take one day off, show the slightest sign of weakness, or demonstrate that the organization can function (even if for only one day) without you, then your job may not be waiting for you when you come back.

But then what about me?

My only “co-workers” are my wife, two kids, and the dog. It was my wife—a pre-K teacher—who gave me the germ in the first place. My daughter is sick, too. My son seems to have avoided it, but he’s young and robust. The dog apparently doesn’t get this human-loving microbe. Working from a home office, how do I take a “sick day” any more than I take a “day off”?

Put that question together with the fact that my job isn’t terribly physically strenuous. I work from a seated position, fingers flying across a keyboard, but otherwise all but motionless. What about writing and editing can I not do if I have a cold? And that’s what I have, by the way. All the classic symptoms: stuffy nose, headache, sinuses all messed up, terrible cough, and yesterday afternoon a sneezing jag that seemed to go on for a head-spinning hour. I feel like hell, but have no reason to believe that this will kill me. I have gone to the drugstore and there I have purchased drugs. I’ve got my Tylenol Sinus Severe—the greatest pharmaceutical breakthrough of our generation—and I’m guzzling generic Robitussin by the bottleful. (Okay, not really. I’m using it as directed . . . don’t get all holier than thou on me, people. I’m sick.)

The medicine is working, in that it’s making me feel temporarily slightly less awful, but is actually curing nothing. I think I still have a couple days of feeling like crap, but the show must go on.

I’m officially a day late on a writing project that I must finish by the end of the week. I’m also behind on an editing project, and have another editing project coming in in the next couple days—oh, and four more edits stacked up behind that, and this evening is the last session of my Worldbuilding class. I’m busy, folks, and I can not afford to be sick.

But can we ever?

Just like a year ago, when I said that the scariest to do list is the one with nothing on it, I’m delighted to be busy, and it does seem as though I only get sick when I’m really busy and can least afford to be sick. That’s probably not true, right? It’s just that you notice how busy you are when you’re sick, but you’re otherwise no busier than usual.

Anyway . . .

No more even partial sick days for me this week. I’m going to have to walk it off, tamp it down, get over it, rise above it, ignore it, cough my way through it . . .

I know people who are doing the same, and are a whole lot sicker than I am.

—Philip Athans

This is crap.

Though there are people in this world who would not consider me particularly old, there’s another old saying: “You’re only as old as you feel.” If that old saying is true then most of the time I’m in my mid-nineties. But in actuality I’m 48. Maybe that’s not so old, and then I’m a person, too, and not a dog, so maybe it’s this: “You can teach a middle aged man new tricks?”

My new trick, developed over the past couple years, is teaching writing.

For years I worked as an editor and actually put some effort into flying under the radar. To me—and I still feel this way—the best editor is invisible, not forcing himself into the mind of the reader, but acting as an individual mentor to the author. So for a very long time I avoided the “spotlight.”

I only grudgingly attended conventions, as my former bosses at TSR and Wizards of the Coast would attest. I didn’t mind being a sort of emcee on a panel, but I didn’t like the idea of revealing the man behind the curtain.

Author, sell thyself!

It even took some doing for my former boss and current friend and editor Peter Archer to talk me into writing The Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction. We both knew that I would have a lot to say on the subject, but part of my reluctance was this idea of “coming out,” of stepping out from the anonymity of the editor’s desk. I was particularly reluctant about the inclusion of the R.A Salvatore short story and any sort of revelation of how we worked together when I was his editor at Wizards of the Coast, and I sort of danced around that even in the final published book.

And then I was laid off—thrust out into the cold, unforgiving landscape of post-Republican America, staring down the barrel of a thirty-year mortgage and, well, a certain level of “sink or swim” that I hadn’t had to come to grips with in a while.

I also had this new book out, and I knew I needed to be the point person if it was going to get any kind of attention, let alone any sales.

This blog was born, and I took to it like a fish to water. I’ve posted here every Tuesday since June 15, 2009, and it’s become such a part of my life that if it gets to be noon on Tuesday and I haven’t posted anything I start getting all twitchy then start really freaking out, until I sit down and write something.

I started a Twitter account because I was trying to get in touch with someone—a work thing at the time, not worth going into detail about—then found myself actually tweeting. Now I’m this itinerant tweeter, posting nonsense sometimes, snippets of shameless self-promotion other times, and in general throwing myself out into the world 140 characters at a go.

Then, again in an effort to sell the book, I started doing convention seminars of my own. I started small, at Steamcon here in Seattle—a small, but terrific steampunk convention where I spoke to about six people, one of whom was my wife. Then I flew down to San Francisco for Wondercon and did the same seminar, what I lovingly refer to as my “dog and pony show” to about 200 people. I was floored by the crowd in that room. Really? That many people to hear me talk about writing fantasy and science fiction? And they laughed at my jokes and asked smart questions and listened attentively to the answers and clapped for me when it was over?

Really?

Well, that was all it took. I was off to the races then and have been going to as many of these things as my limited budget will allow.

Weekend before last I made my second appearance at Seattle’s Emerald City Comicon, and for the second year in a row the organizers had to cut off the line and some disappointed people didn’t get in to see me. I have to admit that for me that’s half impossible to believe and half dangerously ego-inflating.

And somewhere along the line, as I was studying up on how to make a living as an independent consultant/freelancer, it was suggested that I teach a class—suggested in that, “everybody who’s reading this book should teach a class” sort of way.

I thought, gee, I do like doing my dog and pony show, and get frustrated that I only have fifty minutes to try to teach people anything about a subject that, well, let’s just say requires more than fifty minutes to learn. Maybe teaching a class would be my way of drawing that dog and pony show out for a smaller group of people, and I could actually read what they’re writing and answer very specific questions, and, oh, what the hell, I’ll pop on over to the web site for the local community college.

Before I knew it I had signed on to teach a continuing education class at Bellevue College called, wait for it . . . Writing Fantasy & Science Fiction. Then I was invited back to do it again, then I suggested a class on Worldbuilding, which I’m teaching right now, and a one-day seminar called Living Dialog, and here I am, getting ready for my third term at Writing Fantasy & Science Fiction, and I’ve suggested a class on editing fiction that the college is considering.

And in the meantime, more conventions and writers conferences.

And I love it.

It never occurred to me I would like it as much as I do, even when I first signed on to teach. It’s long ago stopped being a way to sell the book, which is now plugging away just fine, though truth be told it’s probably plugging away just fine entirely because I’m “out there.” This old dog, closer to 50 now than 40, has learned a new trick, and part of what I love about it is that I haven’t learned it all the way yet.

Every term the Writing Fantasy & Science Fiction class gets a little tighter. I learn as much from my students as they do from me—another old saying, this one entirely true at least in my experience.

And in answer to a few in the Twitterverse who’ve seen me plugging my Bellevue College classes but who live outside the Seattle area, I have been trying to get out there online, too, and here’s one that’s enrolling now:

The First 10 Pages: Science Fiction & Fantasy Boot Camp from Writer’s Digest University. Author Jay Lake and agent Carlie Webber and I will be talking about the all-important first ten pages of your manuscript and will be doing hands-on critiques. I recorded the presentation yesterday and can’t wait to dive in to the rest of it in a couple weeks.

Most of the rest of my day today will be spent getting ready for tonight’s Worldbuilding class, where we’ll be talking about geography. Me in a room with a handful of like-minded individuals talking about fantasy maps, and I only have three hours? Not enough time!

What I’m trying to say is this:

If you’re an experienced author or editor—or have something to say about any subject—find a way to get out there and teach. If you’re an aspiring author and you’re looking for ways to improve your craft, invest in yourself and your career and get out there and take a class.

I’ll admit to a degree of cynicism—we all suffer from it from time to time—and I went into the first continuing ed class terrified that I would be confronted with a classroom full of psychotics. I can’t even tell you the nightmare scenarios that played out in my fevered imagination.

But then from day one what I was confronted with was hardly a room of crazy people but a room full of smart, creative, energetic minds coming from all walks of life, ranging in age from teens to sixties, and every one of them with something interesting to say and real talent and drive for writing.

It’s been amazing so far, and I hope to keep doing it forever.

—Philip Athans