You want inspiration? Here's one way.

This print, made by the Japanese artist Kuniyoshi around 1840, was posted on our blog about the Samurai Detective series. It shows a famous Japanese poet, Dainagon Tsunenobu, who lived about a thousand years ago. He has just finished writing this poem:

When the evening comes

From the rice leaves at my gate

Gentle knocks are heard;

And, into my round rush-hut,

Autumn's roaring breeze makes way.

Just then a ghost appeared outside his window and recited another poem, this one by a well-known Chinese poet. (It's on the scroll you see coming out of the ghost's mouth.) I just thought it would be wonderful if a writer's inspiration came so easily.

After a Long Absence...

I really have neglected this blog, but now that my wife and I are starting another one (to present stories and history about Japan that aren't in our books), people have been checking into this one too. Let me say that my intention was to present a series of blogs describing my efforts to write another novel in the Samurai Detective series. I stopped because of some health problems (broken leg, prostate problem that required surgery), and because of various professional setbacks that resulted in our dropping one agent and losing the one that we signed on with after that. Maybe I'll write about those problems at some point, but I don't want this to become a soap opera.

Anyway, all these problems cut into my work ethnic and work time. I remember reading about a well-known author years ago (I think it was Irving Wallace) who said that you shouldn't let anything interrupt your work--illness, hangover, divorce, whatever. I always tried to live up to that, but this combination threw me for a loop. So yes, you can say there is such a thing as writer's block--if you give in to it.

Anyway, I finally got started with that novel again, and posted it online because my old publisher didn't want any more of these books. It is called THE RED-HEADED DEMON and is the seventh in the series my wife and I have been working on for over a dozen years. You can get a paper-and-ink version on the Amazon-sponsored site CreateSpace.com, or at amazon.com itself. You can also download an e-book version at smashwords.com. It has all the e-book formats available, as far as I know. Our daughter, Dr. Hoobler of the art history department of Cornell College (Mt. Vernon, Iowa) was kind enough to create new covers for all seven books. Unlike the original publisher, we NUMBERED the books in the series, and Dr. Hoobler used manga for the artwork.

Our only regret is that we weren't able to get the paper-and-ink rights for the first book, THE GHOST IN THE TOKAIDO INN, away from the original publisher. It's selling too well. That isn't due to any efforts on the part of the publisher to actually promote and sell the book. It's just that luckily, it was adopted by a widely used homeschool curriculum guide.

I think I'll continue this blog with accounts of how Dorothy and I are changing our approach to promoting and selling books now. Our use of various publicity media, and so forth. I'll try to write more often. Stay tuned.

Well, I don't know how many people have waited this long (since last October!) for a new post, but in case anybody is still out there, here it is. Some exciting things have happened, and I won't be able to get to all of them on this post. I did want to announced that my wife/co-author and I have gotten a new agent, and we hope she will be more enthusiastic about our work than the previous one was. We're working on two proposals for her: one, for adults, would be a history of French cuisine from about 1300 when the first cook who was distinctively French wrote a book with recipes and advice. We're going to bring the story up to the present day, when French cooking influences fine restaurants and chefs in virtually every country in the world. A lot of the chefs along the way had very interesting lives.
The second project we're going to pitch is a YA book about Mary Shelley. Those of you who are familiar with our work know that we did an adult book about Mary and the people who inspired her to write Frankenstein. This new book will concentrate on Mary's teenage years, her relationship with Shelley (he was a married man with one child when they ran off to France), and the births (and tragic deaths) of her first three children. Pretty much soap-opera stuff, and we hope a publisher will be courageous enough to publish it. The original book didn't sell as well as we would have liked, so we'll see if this one can do better. It's a great story.
For those of you who are fans of our Samurai Detective series, there's some good news: we forced the publisher to give up control of the e-book rights, and are working on good covers for the six books. When that's done, we'll put them online--at a reasonable price. This would be the first time that the first book in the series, The Ghost in the Tokaido Inn, will be available as an e-book. The publisher started making them available in e-book formats starting with the last book and working backwards. Make sense to you? Of course not. That's why you're not a publisher.
And finally, I put a couple more of my books online. The first was Guns: a Novel, which concerns a topic that no paper-and-ink publisher would dare to touch: school shootings. Our hero arrives at a new school and is assigned the locker that used to belong to the boy who shot up the library, killing six people, two years before. He finds this a little creepy, and then people start warning him not to ask too many questions about what happened. You know that's not going to stop him, right? This book isn't for younger readers--but give it a try if you're in high school. Just don't use it for inspiration, OK?
The other book I recently put online was a science-fiction novel, The Hunters. My friend Burt Wetanson and I wrote this back in the day, when we were working on a trade magazine. One of our drudge tasks was to go through newspapers from all over the country, looking for discount store ads (don't ask why). To make the task a little more enjoyable, we used to hunt for weird news stories, and one day we came across one about a mysterious couple who came to this town in a rural area and started to preach that they could bring everybody who followed them to Paradise. I don't know what happened to those townsfolk, but Burt and I asked each other, "What if...this couple really were from another planet and wanted to lure the townsfolk to a hunting trip. And they wouldn't be the hunters, but the hunted?" Simple premise, but our original book sold pretty well, was optioned seven times for the movies, was finally purchased by a guy who wanted to make a movie out of it--and we're still waiting. It's a good story for all ages. Give it a try at smashwords.com, which will download it onto any kind of e-reader you may have. Let me know if you like it!

the future of publishing

The title of this column is one thing everybody in publishing is worried about, and I have a few thoughts that have been percolating over the past four months (sorry!), during which I haven't posted on here. I can only plead that my wife and I have been doing a lot of writing. Unfortunately, very little of it has enhanced our career--at least not yet. I should have continued what I was working on earlier: the next book in the Samurai Detective series. I haven't entirely neglected it; I am about 60 pages along on a first draft, but there's been too much else on my plate to really concentrate on it. More on that in later days.

Back to the title of this column. Today's New York Times has an article that tells how Amazon, the maker of the Kindle e-reader, is signing up authors directly--even paying advances, at least to celebrity authors like Penny Marshall. (A celebrity author is merely a celebrity who puts his/her name to a book, but there are a lot of readers for such books.) Now the significance of this is that it cuts out the conventional paper-and-ink publishers. They're not needed if an author goes straight to e-books. Nor, by the way, are conventional agents, saving the writer 15% of his/her royalties.
Now any author can, right now, publish books as e-books (or even in paper, if that's your thing). I have done it with four books. You can find them all on amazon.com, bn.com, or smashwords.com. One of the four is a rewritten version of a book I published in paper-and-ink. The other three (including the sequel to that first book) are originals. As I've indicated earlier, the big problem with selling your books this way is publicizing them. I still haven't solved that problem. But publishing with Amazon directly would presumably include publicity supplied by them. As one of the writers quoted in the Times article says, "I assume they want to make a lot of money off the book, which is encouraging to me." Because Amazon has the resources.

Now let's suppose Amazon and their authors do well. Presumably their contract is exclusive. In other words, readers will have to buy the book in Kindle format, which will incidentally sell more Kindles and more of Amazon's brand-new tablet. That will force other e-book publishers, such as Barnes & Noble (Nook) and Sony to get into the business of signing up authors as well. At some point, I would imagine Apple will enter the fray as well, just because they're in everything. All this can only be good for authors. And I might add, very bad for paper-and-ink publishers. How about agents? I can see the better agents moving into preparing authors' manuscripts for e-book publication and even marketing them to e-book publishers. Some authors don't like to do those things for themselves. I think this is going to happen faster than you think.

A nod to those, like me, who love bookstores. First of all, there will continue to be used-book stores, and for a while at least, stores that sell certain kinds of paper-and-ink books. Children's books, picture books, maybe cookbooks...  But I think the behemoth kind of bookstore will follow the Borders chain into oblivion. The economics of such stores, i.e., rent, won't permit them to survive.

advice from a mistress

I haven't posted on here lately, because I had to put aside the Seikei/Judge Ooka book to work on something that had a better prospect of making money. Actually, my wife is still interested in publishing in the paper/ink format, and I have promised her I'd help on new books. So we're working on a project I don't want to discuss just now.
However, I read an article in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine about Amanda Hocking, who is the most successful person publishing in the e-book format--that is, in e-books only. She sells about 9,000 copies of her books every day, and some months she's sold as many as 100,000.
I'll let you read the article yourself, but there was something there that seemed relevant to an earlier topic on this blog: writer's block. Amanda has written ten novels in the past two years, as far as I can tell. She certainly doesn't have writer's block.
Is that because she was born lucky? No. She had written a book by the time she was seventeen, and sent it out to about 50 agents, all of whom rejected her. After that she took menial jobs (no college for her; no writer's workshops) until she realized she wasn't going to be a writer by waiting for it to happen. To quote from the article, "It was January 2009, and Hocking started treating writing as a job. Before it was 'something I always did--like playing video games.' After, she wrote even when she didn't feel like it."
Read that quote again. She treated writing like a job. She wrote even when she didn't feel like it.
Nobody can guarantee that you (or I) will ever sell as many books as Amanda does. But if you want to write seriously, you treat it like a job. Can't give you better advice than that.

characters and plot

I've been working on thinking about characters that might be in this book, in addition to Seikei and the Judge. The original thought I had was that Seikei would be entrusted with the care of a Dutch boy about the same age. I'm thinking that the Dutch boy won't speak Japanese, and Seikei, of course, won't speak Dutch.
First thought I had was that the boy might be the son of a ship's captain. They are guests of the shogun, who did frequently like to see the Europeans, more as curiosities than anything else.
Conflict comes when the captain is killed--but why?
[If I don't have a solution to that problem, I go right on jotting down notes. Usually I find the answer eventually.]
Are there other non-Japanese guests? One of them might kill the captain because he wants to take over the lucrative trade with Japan. Maybe a Chinese, who also came into the port at Nagasaki.
A death in the Shogun's palace is serious, a blow to his honor if a guest is killed there. Death will have to come by poison, or some other method where the killer is not immediately obvious.
So the Judge is called on to solve the case. Maybe he and Seikei are already there, to see the foreigners, whom Seikei has heard are "red-haired devils." He's surprised when they don't have red hair.
Maybe one of the things the foreigners are displaying to the Shogun is Western-style food. The poison comes in that.
The judge cannot hold the other foreigners for long, so he entrusts the captain's son to Seikei, who will escort him back to Nagasaki. Maybe they leave a day or two before the others. The Judge wants to see who will pursue them?
Have to find a route that a traveler took through Japan. [That was Shiba Kokan, the scientist and artist that some call the Leonardo of Japan.]
Along the way, Seikei and the boy will meet interesting people, some helpful, some dangerous. Like to work in a Zen monk. He shelters them along the way? Helps them? How?

Anyway, this shows you how starting to think of characters helps you to form a plot. It works for me. Maybe you'll find a better way that suits you. Kurt Vonnegut once told me he had big charts on the wall where he tried to outline plots before he began to write. But he admitted that he hardly ever finished the story with the plot he had at the beginning.

hunting for ideas

People always ask me how to get ideas for a story. I mentioned last time that you have to create a world, and the world I'm creating is the world of 18th century Japan, where Seikei lives. Now for the past week and a half I've been writing down ideas that come to me from reading about that world. Some people find this boring. To me, it's like fishing. You sit there a lot of the time with your line in the water, but no fish are biting. But you keep your line in the water.

I'm not going to put down here every idea I jotted down. That would be REALLY boring. But here's a page of notes I wrote while looking through a book written by a Dutch trader in Japan.
The Dutch were all thought to have red hair like the demons portrayed in Japanese art.
Some black men from India and Africa sailed with Dutch traders. Maybe first time Seikei sees one, he thinks the man has suffered terrible burns.
Chinese ships also docked at Nagasaki--maybe a Chinese character?
Bird painted on the sterns of ships to speed the journey and avoid shipwreck.
When ships approached the port, they signaled port officials with flags.
The ship fired a gun salute when arriving or departing. This was a signal to furl or raised their sails, done under cover of smoke. Seikei would never have seen this before
Komo-Ryu (school of Red Hairs): the Dutch
Namban-Ryu (school of the Southern Barbarians, the Portuguese, who originally arrived from their colonies to the South.
Dutch doctors were sometimes in the employ of daimyos.
Glass was rarely used by Japanese in Tokugawa times, but the Europeans used it in their "factories," or trading HQs.
Somebody is pursuing them--Seikei meets the boy from the theater troupe in Tokaido Inn book.

See how it goes? You don't use every idea, but you put yourself into the world, so you can write about it, and then (the last line) maybe you get a story idea.
This is just the way I'm doing it. You may find better ways for yourself.