Anthony Dobranski Online

Category: craft

  • How writers read (sometimes)

    How writers read (sometimes)

    After a month focused on marketing and promotion, I am back to writing my maddening current novel, a science fiction set in a future war-ravaged Budapest.

    It’s maddening because I set myself goals that are hard to square. For one, or one pair in opposition, I want to give the book a pre-modern European patina, but I also want to keep it short and pointed — the formal elegance without the pastiche.

    I clearly needed a little inspiration. I’m intuitive when it comes to getting what I need. Like Philip K Dick’s Golden Man, I have no forethought; only an inadvertent method-acting, the way that some travelers unthinkingly restyle their hair to local norms. I really don’t know myself, at all. Existential panic notwithstanding, it’s a huge timesaver.

    Anyway. Without wanting to or planning to, I’ve lately been drawn to books and audiobooks that feel pre-modern.

    I started with Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris, a heady book with lovely imagery, but I didn’t go far in it. I love VanderMeer’s work but I wasn’t reading to read. My artistic needs were guiding me, and Ambergris‘s thickly-layered lavishness was going to bust open my style if I lingered too long.

    A conversation led me to the audiobook of Christopher Priest’s The Prestige, a novel told from the diaries of two feuding late 19th-Century British magicians.* This might seem the perfect inspiration — my book is also a diary, and its writer discovers a secret — but honestly it wasn’t planned. Despite the interesting excerpt in the bookstore, I actually bought the audiobook wondering why the hell I was doing it; I had work to do and other books in my pile. Eventually I understood.

    The end of my intuitive tour was a very fine audiobook of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which I haven’t read since adolescence, but know well in memory. By now you’ve probably caught my drift — a diary of a trip to a remote castle in Hungary! the discovery of a dark secret! the need to find hidden resolve! Just the hairstyle I needed! I won’t finish it, now that the sailing ship Demeter* has brought its vampire passenger to England. I have work to do, and honestly, Lucy Westenra is annoying.

    It’s terrible to use books this way. If VanderMeer or Priest ever read this, they’ll likely feel like Salieri meeting Mozart in Milos Forman’s Amadeus — bitter and angry at some punk saying “a funny little tune, but it yielded some good things.”

    Alas, I’m just a writer. And, you know, it is what it is. It has always been.

    Long ago in Tokyo, a colleague and friend once told me about a novel she enjoyed,*** about the friendship between a shogun and an aesthete. The scene she retold sticks with me, and I think of it often:

    The shogun gets word that the aesthete has grown a magnificent garden of gorgeous chrysanthemums. The shogun sends word that he wants to see it. When he arrives, he finds all of the flowers have been hacked down. Furious, he marches into the house — and there finds one chrysanthemum, the best chrysanthemum of the whole garden, in a vase.

    Life is cruel but it’s got nothing on art. Cruelest of all, is need.

    *Priest wrote a short book slagging Harlan Ellison for sitting on The Last Dangerous Visions for what was then twenty years (and now will be forty-five when J. Michael Straczynski finally issues it this year). Then, Priest wrote a book about a destructive feud. I wonder if he picked a fight for his own inspiration…

    **My book’s protagonist is named Dömötör, the Hungarian version of the name. This happens to me all the time. Any writer who is not a mystic makes a fetish of empiricism.

    ***Alas the novel had not been translated, I don’t know Japanese, and I have forgotten the title and author. Also forgotten, where I put my own diary of my trips to Japan.

  • Real people in my fiction

    Real people in my fiction

    The recent Steven Soderbergh movie Let Them All Talk tells the story of a successful old writer, hoping to reconnect with two closest friends of her youth — but one friend feels the writer’s exposure of her real-life secrets, in the writer’s most successful book, led to her divorce and subsequent poverty.

    I can’t promise anything, but I doubt that will be a hassle I’ll face. Not that I’m above betraying a confidence, or stealing a shining moment, if I can make good fiction out of it. Writers are not people you should trust.

    Happily, social media has made public a billion bad lies. Just rewrite your friends’ posts the most other way possible, and you’ll have true drama for a thousand novels, with clean hands. “No,” the writer says, “the idea just came to me…”

    That said, I do use real people in my writing, all the time. They’re closer to artist models, or actors. If I were making an amateur film, I’d find friends or colleagues who looked the part, sounded the part, had that special something… and I’d dress them up and put them in wigs.

    One technique I enjoy using is to cast different people as the same character at different times. There are many women who played Zarabeth, similar from a distance but not up close. When with Gabriel one real person played her, when with Magda another, when in danger another still.

    I recently imagined a movie cast for Demon for a blog tour. It would be a tremendous movie cast, but, I obviously had to work with real actors, whose previous roles somehow touched on elements in my novel.

    When I summon a character to, in Edward Gorey’s lovely phrase, “a fitful and cloudy reality,” I’m under no such constraints!

  • Quarantine Inspiration on The Inner Loop Radio!

    The Inner Loop is a Washington DC live-reading group that hosts fiction, non-fiction and poetry writers at monthly events. I’ve been pleased and proud to read work there twice.

    They also run a terrific podcast on all aspects of writing. This week I’m part of their Qurantine Inspiration Series, with my own 12-minute creative stimulus – motivation, tips, a writing prompt, and a super-short story with my new take on a legendary being.

    For more inspiration, subscribe to their podcast at: https://www.theinnerlooplit.org/radio

  • On being good at sales

    I’m still not totally comfortable with being really good at sales.

    Because, I am. I’m a sales machine. At large comic-cons, my single-title sales are on par with best-selling writers — which is good, because I still only have a single title. (Working on it.)

    Other writers tell me I am good at sales, a complex compliment inside our introverted guild. It helps that, if a reader doesn’t want what I am selling, I will send them to another’s work with equal enthusiasm. I’m good in the booth.

    I have made money in sales, covering all my bills during my year as a ski-bum in Lake Tahoe with a part-time telemarketing job. One of my most treasured compliments was from my manager there, who told me, “You give good phone.”

    I am a fierce fan of my stuff. It’s not for everyone, but it’s for more than might initially see themselves buying it. I see my book becoming ever more relevant to the world outside it. I want the world to know so my subset of it will find me.

    I don’t presuppose any strengths or weaknesses. I say what I have, strongly.

    In a teen-focused genre, I write mature work. At cons and festivals, I say “10 o’clock shows, not 8 o’clock shows.” It’s a happy expression because it’s a fact they differ, it’s not an apology, and it hints at earned privilege, an adult’s welcome relief from explanation or euphemism.

    Demon is a standalone novel. No sequels, except for a Tarot. “A big book, but one and done.” Maybe a fifth of people don’t find that appealing — Vayan con Dios. Most are at least fine if not happy to hear it. We talk about the joys of a certain ending, a lack of commitment, an amuse-bouche while awaiting GRRM.

    While I can spot aligned styles — if you cosplay Death from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, I will sell you a book — even at cons I can’t know my readers on sight, especially since I am winning a few over right there. I assume all bipeds are in play until they make it clear they’re not.

    That said, I know the wrong audience. 1-star reviews never go away, and a good way of avoiding them is keeping your work out of inappropriate hands — or, disappointed hands. I use horror as a flavor, but if you want it as a main course, that’s not my Demon. For action, I have some fisticuffs, but only one drawn gun in the whole book. I have bone-dry acidic wit, but no chuckles.

    I say these things and people buy my books, people of all kinds, in very good numbers for the venue. I don’t know why it worries me, as opposed to the superpower that it really is. Maybe it’s impostor’s syndrome, that I am somehow more appealing than my work.

    Maybe it’s not impostor’s syndrome but honesty, of a kind. My sales self also expresses qualities of my work: unassuming but distinctive, unflinching not crude, erudite not highfaluting, seeking clarity but understanding about the muddle.

    It makes me nervous because it is not sales. It is an art, an ethic — like this blog post, a form of my writing. I can’t pretend it doesn’t matter, because it only works when it does matter.

    Then I’m a sales machine.

  • Recovering technophiliac

    I use a MacBook Air 2012, second version of the Air line and model for all that follow. It’s a perfect size for serious work, with a screen that usefully shows a half-dozen apps in a single desktop space. It’s substantial yet light, easily portable, fine in a lap or a desk. It has local storage so no need of wifi for work on the go, and cloud backup the moment it connects.
    At my desk, it runs two HD+ monitors, a backup drive, and any peripheral I need. Home and away, from apps to settings to bookmarks to the structure of the folders, everything is the same on it, wherever I take it. It’s the most useful thing ever.
    Drives me crazy.
    I have an addiction. I like new computing gear. I like to get better gear that does new stuff. A perfect computer can do everything – but that.
    Every other year, I spend good money on e-trash, some quirky machine with a clever feature like a touch screen or small size. Each time, the affair is short-lived, and soon the device ends up housed in a cabinet, so backlogged with updates that I fear to turn it on. My last one went three days from unboxing to reboxing.
    It’s as if I drive a McLaren sports car, every day, but I keep buying new Cadillacs for the bigger cupholders.
    It started out innocently enough. I got into computers as a teen, as a writer, at the dawn of word-processing, still a hobbyist’s preserve but even then superior to typewriters. My then-rare comfort with the technology dovetailed with the dawn of online connectivity as a consumer business. I was rewarded with a prestigious international career.
    If you bought your winning ticket for the mega-lottery at the liquor store, how would that affect your alcohol abuse?
    The same for my success and my need to poke at new gear – even in this new career where (from a gear perspective) I merely key words in empty spaces, and there’s no more technology to master.
    Meanwhile my MacBook Air just works. It’s got another four years at least. Four more years of perfection, of comfort and familiarity and a natural flow.
    Maybe longer.
    The itch is stressful. I am trying to realign it with better pursuits, like the ambulance-chasing lawyer in Banks’s The Sweet Hereafter, proud to have a good use for his anger. When my dad’s old desktop needed its final backup, I taught my son the basics of computer architecture. We rebuilt it at modest cost with new drives, cards, and memory. We did such a good job my dad demanded it back.
    Of course, I spent two afternoons after thinking through and researching how to build powerful desktop machines for different uses from parts at low cost.
    But I didn’t buy anything.
    That’s something.

  • Destroying Budapest

    My science-fiction work-in-progress is set in a single city, and I needed to see it to imagine living in it. Welcome to Pest! Only walk on gray parts….
    Pest, the White Lake and the Soft Lands
    Budapest was a proxy in the One-Day War between Greater Russia and Umoja East Africa. Buda is now the White Lake, a boiling toxic waste of microscopic robots that eat carbon dioxide, and anything else, to make diamonds that wash on its shores. Both embargoed no-person’s-land and boomtown, Pest houses thieves, smugglers, engineers, and skaters, daredevil gladiators who jump and spin over the Lake in maglev boots, just one fall from death.
    I suppose I could have done any old thing to ruin a city, but I wanted a dusting of Science! in my fiction. I thought a fractal would make a believably consistent result small enough for microscopic robots to store. I used FractalWorks, a Mac app, to generate a tiny portion of the celebrated Mandelbrot function, and overlaid this on a large screenshot of central Budapest, so its finer arcs and whorls were the length of city blocks.

    Budapest map and Mandelbrot sliver
    Budapest map and Mandelbrot sliver

    I didn’t think at the scale of blocks it could ever be so precise – if nothing else, land would collapse – so I cut out the Lake using an image editor’s predictive selection tool, to make the edges sloppy and eroded.
    Both the pink and white areas are products of the fractal. The white is the Lake itself, while the pink represents Soft Lands, areas of shifting underground streams through which nanites recharge, around which smugglers tunnel.
    It’s been a huge help to have the reference. Putting my characters on a literal map lets me figure out relative distances, and helps me imagine the land and the city that might grow from it.
    I also thought further about my mechanical monster’s makeup. Where Lake meets land has always been seductively quiet, since earliest drafts. Instead, let the meeting of Lake and Soft Lands be a place of churn and upheaval, the turbulence of nanites going into and out of dormancy around the buzz of other nanites quantumly-uncertain just where their strange fractal stops. I have a heart murmur too.
    It’s easier to name things in the context of the city’s weird sense of humor now, and I’m looking at it as more impressively built than previous drafts. Where before it was falling apart and hastily erected, now I see it as printed and reprinted, strange but regular, by the same artificially-intelligent drone “taxibots” that run the city services. This has new virtues and a very different look. And some rewriting.
    If this map gets reproduced in the book, I don’t want the plain line drawing quality of most novel maps. Rather I’d commission a graphic artist to generate a cityscape, degrade that so it looked like a 12th-generation-photocopy of an old image, have all the landmarks written in sloppy marker. At top: “Welcome to Pest where you will likely die.” At bottom: “Wanna know more? Live and learn.”

  • A quick hello during a busy season

    I am sorry to have been so silent. In between summer travels with family, all my projects have been in construction phases, and I don’t like vague-posting.
    But, news. I have several author events scheduled for this fall. You can find me at:
    The Fredericksburg Independent Book Festival, Fredericksburg, VA, Sat Sep 23
    YABBAFest, Warrenton, VA, Sat Oct 14
    Quest-Con, Mobile, AL, Fri Oct 20-Sun Oct 22
    Philcon, Cherry Hill, NJ, Fri Nov 10-Sun Nov 12
    I have also begun recording The Demon in Business Class audiobook. People who sign up for my mailing list at Fredericksburg or after will get a free copy of the early session recording of Demon chapter 1.
    Want in on the goodies? Sign up too! 
    The third project is of course my new novel, which I finally have come to admit is not going to be fleshed out from the previous manuscript, but completely rewritten. I have however set myself the semi-impossible goal of debuting it next year at Atlanta’s massive DragonCon, which means that next week I get to writing in a headlong Phildickian rush. Well, maybe not, but I have a lot to do.
    I’ll be posting about the book in a couple of days, since I can actually discuss it now and show some concepts.
    A fourth project … awaits much more solid scheduling. Suffice it to say I am working with great artists.

  • Hello Florida Supercon – goodbye wonderful Raleigh!

    Hope to see you this coming weekend, July 27-30, at Florida Supercon in Fort Lauderdale, FL. I’ll be at the Bard’s Tower booth all four days of the con with Kevin J. Anderson, Josh Vogt, Kevin Ikenberry, Keith DeCandido, and J Scott Savage. I have one scheduled panel, on using real world experiences in fiction, at 3:30pm on Thursday.
    I’m pleased that Florida Supercon is under the same management as last week’s Raleigh Supercon. Raleigh was a tremendous event, well-run and with a welcoming energy. I met many enthusiastic people, and even got to join a panel on Religion and Magic.
    I’m very lucky to have Bard’s Tower as a promotional outlet to the world of fan conventions. Bard’s Tower helps me connect to my audience while working in a collaborative way with fantastic and experienced writers. Speaking as a business, tens of thousands of people with hundreds of options and real-world budgets are a brutal lab for direct marketing. As an artist, it’s an incredible chance to find that certain reader my work really speaks to, live and in-person — an unrivaled source of joy.

  • Hello Connecticon 2017 – and thanks!

    Tonight I fly north to Hartford, CT, to join the Bard’s Tower booth opening Friday at Connecticon. It’s the first of three cons I’m doing in July at Bard’s Tower, with other fantastic writers.
    Cons are intense, by design, and they’re also long days standing on concrete. Three cons in four weekends is a heavy schedule, personally tiring and hard on my family. Still, #livingthedream . These are my last big cons this calendar year. I want to connect with every interested reader during my hours in these big convention halls.
    How immediate these connections can be! People know their tastes, even if naming them with difficulty, but they feel. Once in a while I get a visual clue that a convention-goer might be my audience – cosplaying Sandman‘s Death, or wearing an Unknown Pleasures t-shirt – but more often, the readers find me and click. I’ll see an hour of people glancing away, then a delighted voice reads my title aloud and everything brightens.
    Connecticon 2016 was my first con behind the table, learning to connect with readers in person and find their interests, before my launch in Cincinnati. Seeing how little time one gets in the hugeness of a con convinced me to market overtly to a niche sensibility.
    I am excited to come back with my book – and new trading cards!

  • New Demon trading cards!

    New Demon trading cards!

    As a promotion on social media for The Demon in Business Class, I created a virtual trading card deck. For cons, I printed card versions of the nine character pictures. They were done as a last-minute inspiration, made by shoving the cards’ original Instagram proportions into a business card template on Moo.com, the excellent online printer. The cards turned out to be popular at cons and events, and at a better cost-per-item than postcards.
    I updated the info on the back and resent the cards to print a larger order – seven this time, of the original nine, because nine is unwieldy at a con; and extra Zarabeths.
    This time, Moo said the uneven border made for unsatisfactory results, and offered me the chance to do the cards over with new images. They were right of course, and I took the opportunity.
    At my upcoming cons in Hartford, Raleigh, and Ft Lauderdale, I’ll be sharing the good word about Demon with new promotional trading cards!