imagineblog

I’ve been wondering how much about the actual plot and characters of In Shining Armor I should tell you guys about. Conventional wisdom tells me I should keep my big trap shut about the book itself so no one “steals it” before I finish it and find a publisher. There are several problems I can find with this line of thinking.

 

No one steals story ideas. Really. I copyrighted the story behind In Shining Armor in 1990, and I’ve already “published” it several times as an ebook in various forms. So if someone is dumb enough to try to rip it off, I can sue them into oblivion. The one good thing about the 1976 copyright extension was that it made copyright far more inclusive and defendable in court. And if I were worried about copyright anyway, posting the chapters to this blog would provide a court-ready proof of copyright, so in a way I’m actually defending the story by posting it here and talking about it as I write it.

It’s going to be really, really hard to give you guys a behind-the-scenes look at a working writer without talking specifically about what I’m writing. I could bring up topics like plot, pacing and characterization without specific examples from my own work, but that would be even more effort with the added benefit of being less effective.

Print publishers don’t seem to care about online exposure. Scott Sigler’s novel-by-podcast got picked up with no negatives because of the online exposure prior to print publication, so why shouldn’t a novel-by-blog? It might even work in my favor if I develop a following.

Lastly, “conventional wisdom” has never really been my bag. So why not blog about the novel as I write it? Sounds like a fun “experiment” to me.

The only downside I can see, really, is that it runs counter to the excellent advice of Stephen King to “write the first draft with the door closed.” How am I supposed to write real “shitty first drafts” if everyone is looking over my shoulder? Well, the answer to that one comes from my experience in writing serials. The chapters you guys see won’t be the final versions (I’m sure the editor at the publisher will have some ideas) but they sure as hell won’t be my first drafts, either. At the very least, I’ll do a clean up and polish before I post each chapter.

 

As for the actual posting, I’m thinking of posting each chapter as a PDF (it’s just easier to preserve formatting that way, this is a manuscript) and then linking to it from a blog post announcing it and asking for comments. That way people that don’t want to read the actual manuscript for whatever reason don’t see it cluttering up their RSS feeds.

 

So, what do you think? Have I missed anything?