Baby Evil Writers 101: How Long Does Publishing Take

Baby Evil Writers 101: How long does it take to get published?

Julie Butcher

Write a million words.

So you see my sweet evil babies, it all depends on you. If you wrote one thousand words a day, every day. Then, in one thousand days, you would have your million words. But even the most fervent writer doesn’t work each and every day. The evil children must be fed and if you miss the evil queen mother’s birthday—you’re toast.

So let’s assume that you do not write for two days of the week and that you do write for five days. (Like a real job) Now you’re down to twenty-two days per month or 264 days per year and this doesn’t count holidays. Let’s take away twenty days for holidays and making dinners and birthdays and blowing up stuff on appropriate holidays. Now we have 244 days per year.

“Oh!” You say. “That is 244,000 words or around three manuscripts.”

Not so much. You’ll spend twice the time editing that you do writing—if you do it correctly. It will take a lot longer because you are new at evil. After a few books you’ll only use one day to edit for every day you write. Eventually, you won’t have to edit hardly anything because you learned all of the things. But now, that takes away from your actual working time so you’ll have one book to edit and I’ll be generous and say that your book is 100,000 words.

There’s one tenth of what you need to be awesome. Ten years until awesome hits the shelves.

Unfortunately, most of us are not quick learners. All of your words need to be filled with evil and wonder. Each word needs to further the plot of your book. Add two or three years to learn to plot without holes and to write concise sentences. (At 1.000 words per day it will take that long.)

Now we’re at twelve years if you write 1,000 words five days each week.

So put on your big kid pants, put your butt in the chair, and write. Dreaming about writing will not get you there. Stalking agents and editors on twitter will not make you one word closer. The one and only thing that will make your journey faster is to write.

Baby Evil Writers 101: About Research

Baby Evil Writers 101: Research

Julie Butcher

I’m sure that all of you baby evil geniuses have heard the importance of doing your research. You’ve heard horror stories about how published authors have been lambasted in public because of some little detail they had gotten wrong in their story. They get emails and people leave reviews trying to publically embarrass and humiliate the writer.

I have met writers who have gotten so deep into research that they have still been writing the same book twenty years later. Research is a deep pit that turns into an escape from what you really need to do—write. You can trick yourself into feeling productive by finding out what herb they used on lamb in Scotland in 1354. In reality, this tidbit isn’t important to the story. What the characters are doing and talking about during the meal is important.

Just write the story. Mark in red the things that you are not sure of and MOVE ALONG. You can google anytime. When in doubt, absolutely do not spend hours and hours and days trying to verify a fact. That is the time for a vague description.

Instead of saying:

He held a Sig Sauer P227 Carry Nitron. Its matte black handle fit perfectly in his hand. The 14 Round extended magazine had enough ammunition to take me down before I’d run a block. That was too much death for a seven inch weapon.

Say:

He had a gun—matte black and lethal. Adrenaline made the skin on my face feel tight, and my legs twitched with the need to run. I wasn’t ready to die.

Because no matter how much research you do, someone out there actually has a Sig Sauer P227. If you describe it perfectly, they’ll catch you on having the shell casing flying out the wrong way. Granted, that took me maybe ten minutes of research but the thing is it does not matter. There is a gun. Guns kill people. Your character thought he/she was going to die. It really is not important what kind of gun he had. The emotions generated by the sight of any gun will send adrenaline to limbs and cause a heart to beat faster.

Don’t get stuck in the details. Get deeper into the emotions. Every ten or twenty or thirty minutes of research are words that are never put onto a page.

Also it is a lame excuse to not write.

Writer's Block is Bullshit

Happy New Year, Evil Readers!

Aren't you glad we're back? Well, strap in…I'm kicking off 2014 with one hell of a rant for you. (Don't worry, I plan on resuming the Ask Dr. Dina series soon, but I needed to get this off my chest.)

Today's rant is brought to you by this thing. Some of you may have seen this post running around Tumblr. Others may have read Maureen Johnson's reply to this post. No matter which, now you know the inspiration behind today's rant.

Might want to put in the earplugs, kids. The screeching might get a wee bit loud 'round these parts here in a minute.... You see….

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS WRITER'S BLOCK.

Need me to say it again? Okay, I will.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS WRITER'S BLOCK.

You need it once more? All right, fine.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS WRITER'S BLOCK.

I hear you now. "But Dina…"

No. Don't "but Dina" me. It doesn't exist. Do you hear me? Fucking no. You want to be a writer, you write, damn it. Period. End of sentence.

"But Dina-"

WHAT DID I JUST SAY? Don't "but Dina" me! Listen to me very, very carefully:

EVERYONE HAS ISSUES.

Everyone.

No one is okay.

And just to blow your stupid little petty whiny bullshit out of the water, let me hammer a few things home for you:

1 – Jean Auel, bestselling author of the Earth's Children series, mega-uber author extraordinaire, had five children and a full time job while she was writing her first novel.

2 – J.K. Rowling, bestselling author of the Harry Potter series, started out on welfare with a young child, lost her mother to multiple sclerosis, suffered depression and domestic violence, got divorced, then got re-married and had two more children while writing the other books.

I could go on and on listing bestselling authors and their respective issues, but I'll stop with just those two. Do you see my point here? If you don't, I'll make it clear – those authors didn't give up. They didn't put the pen down. They didn't whine about "not having time to write" or "writer's block" or "I'm too busy" or "I'm unwell" or "I'm pregnant" or "I'm on medication" or "I have a kid to raise" or any other excuse you can think of.

THEY FUCKING WROTE. Through everything. No matter what else was going on in their life, they wrote.

Do you understand me?

Everyone has issues. EVERYONE. Yes, even that author. You are not special. You are not an exception.

If you want to be a writer, you fucking write. That's it. "Writer's block" is bullshit. It's nothing but laziness, fear, or other excuses. No one "has time" to write. You MAKE TIME to write. I know some writers who get up at the ass-crack of dawn to get some quiet time to write before the kids wake up and their day starts. I know writers who wait until everyone is in bed before they write. I know writers who keep notebooks handy so they can jot their words down on their lunch break at work.

If you want to write, YOU FUCKING WRITE. You don't just sit around and talk about this great and wonderful world you have in your head. Characters you have. You actually write them down. As the article I linked above says, "Nobody's going to buy the book you've got stored in your head."

People who only talk about their writing annoy the ever-living fuck out of me and I don't have patience for them. People who whine about "I wish I could write but I don't have time" just make me want to punch them in the face. What? You think I have time to write? That there is a room of absolute quiet that I retire to so that I may listen to Beethoven and struggle to create?

Fuck you! I don't have "time to write" either. I'm a writer, so that's what I fucking do, asshole! Just because that's my job doesn't mean it's easy or that I don't have to make time to do it. I have issues and laundry and a dirty house and errands to run and everything else that gets in in the way of my writing just like you do. The difference between me and you is that I get shit done. I'm a writer, whereas you're just a wannabe. You don't even get to claim the dubious title of "aspiring writer." You're just a whiny little pretender.

I don't want to hear your excuses. Why? Because they are ALL BULLSHIT. All of it. Everything you can come up with as an excuse not to write, I will refute.

No, not even if you're dead. Because that's what Ouija boards and mediums are for, you lazy ass ghost. (See? Story idea, right there. Someone get on that. Wait, that's MY idea…hands off!)

Knowing Is Half The Battle

I live on the West Coast. More specifically, the Oregon Coast. My town was a popular film location in the 1980s, and one of those films was a kid's movie called "The Goonies." Now, I didn't grow up on the coast, but this movie had an impact on me. I watched it constantly when I was a kid, and when it came time to look at colleges, Oregon was one of the states I looked at, and I only did it because of that movie. (I ended up moving here by sheer happenstance, but that's a story for another time.)

Awhile back, I put the movie on to see all the things and locations I was now intimately familiar with, seeing as I now live in "The Goondocks." Rewatching the movie as an adult, I was horrified that my parents let me watch it over and over. It's full of crude jokes and language they wouldn't have wanted me using and all sorts of things I'd never want a child exposed to at the age at which I watched it.

But the thing is, I never noticed them.

It wasn't until I watched the movie again as an adult that I heard all the inappropriate language and so on. It was like watching an entirely different film. Not only do they make a 30-mile drive into a quick bike ride, I finally got the little in-jokes and pop-culture references they made. It was really like watching something I'd never seen before, even though I knew the story.

I know we've all had experiences like that. You read a book and see something you've never seen before, even though you've read the book a hundred times. You finally get a phrase that you never understood before, even though you've read that line over and over. Perception is limited, and the things you notice or don't vary from person to person. 

It's amazing what stays in your brain, and from what source. Example: here in the United States we had a cartoon called "Duck Tales." It was all about Scrooge McDuck and Donald Duck's nephews and their various adventures. I learned what a "status symbol" was from Scrooge McDuck. They had a whole episode about it, and that's the only one I remember. GI Joe always had some kind of moral to their episodes, and at the end of it before the credits they'd always have a little public service announcement-type clip about it.

He-Man, She-Ra, Thundercats…all those cartoons had some kind of message in them. Most of them were forgettable, but some, like Scrooge McDuck and the status symbols, stayed.

The same is true for everything you write. Your book will be someone's favorite book. Go ahead, roll your eyes, but it's true. Someone will read your work over and over and over again. I can't remember at the moment who said it or where I might have read it (I think it was a writer's workshop, but I'm not sure), but someone once said something to the effect of, "what you believe will end up in your writing, so find out what that is."

Words have a great deal more power than writers think about sometimes. Truth be told, we can't think about how much power they have or we'd never write anything. You can't let fear of how your work will be read and interpreted stop you from writing whatever story you have to tell. Like the movie I watched as a kid, some things will get through, others won't. Some things you intend to have an impact won't, while completely random things you never intended to have meaning will have a vast one.

So write your story and don't get caught up in what it might mean to and for other people. They're going to take meaning from it or not without any help from you, and that meaning might not be the one you intended. So what? Don't be offended if people don't "get" your work. You're not responsible for what they get out of your story.

You're just responsible for actually writing it. So get on that.

I second what Skye said in her blog post about NaNoWriMo, though. If you've just finished NaNoWriMo, DO NOT SUBMIT THAT WORK TO AN AGENT IMMEDIATELY. Agents far and wide are ducking for cover at the moment, because they know an influx of half-finished, poorly-written, unedited crap is incoming. Don't add to that. Put that novel in a drawer and sit on it for at least three months, if not more. Then drag it out, polish it up and see if it shines.

Now you know, and knowing is half the battle. (Say it with me! "GEEEE-EYE JOEEEEEE!")