Writing that guest post for Author! Author! on my thoughts about self-publishing got me thinking about the experience and something I didn’t address in that post: how I came to the decision to go the self-publishing route with my first novel, A Place Without a Postcard.

So, for what it’s worth, here’s how I got there.

I’ve been asked many times why I self-published Postcard back in 2003. Rejected by every agent and publisher in the land? Nope.

It had more to do with my own entrepreneurial streak and maybe some inspiration from the indie films and punk rock albums I’ve always loved. A Place Without a Postcard is about neither of those things, but its journey is related.

It started as a screenplay for an indie film I imagined I’d someday make with a bunch of friends and a stack of credit cards. I never did that, but a few years crewing films taught me my talents, temperament and passions lay with the pen. Well, okay, the word processor, but that doesn’t quite have the proper poetic ring to it, does it?

I submitted it as my writing sample to the graduate screenwriting program at The University of Texas at Austin. I got in and it even won me a James Michener Fellowship from the Texas Center for Writers.

Not bad for a quirky story that straddles the worlds of science fiction, mystery and modern myth.

In grad school, I wrote a number of scripts and work-shopped Postcard in a revisions class. Somewhere in grad school, though, A Place Without a Postcard became a story that needed to be a novel and so after I graduated, the screenplay became notes. Because the protagonist is blind through much of the story, I wrote most of it without any visual descriptions. The experience taught me a lot about how we hear and smell the world, and in the end I had a solid manuscript.

By 2002, and after many rounds of revisions, I noticed new things in the publishing world. Print on demand (POD) technology was going to change everything (and I suspect it still will change a lot by reducing the inherent risks of large print runs) by democratizing publishing. POD only required minimal resources and a firm belief in one’s vision. My friends in bands were recording their own CDs. Filmmakers were making and releasing their own films. All without anyone’s permission. Could POD be the key to allowing publishing to go DIY like music and film?

I learned about xlibris and iUniverse, the two main self-publishing POD companies at the time*, and liked what I saw. Their services weren’t bankrupt-you expensive—they were much cheaper then—because only books purchased would be printed, a fact that also appealed to the tree-hugger in me.

In December of 2002, I made my decision and decided to trust myself. In January, my book was available on the iUniverse website and within a month, it was available through Barnes & Noble online, Amazon, Book People and Powell’s (though with weirdly mis-colored  cover art on those 2 sites) as well as most other online booksellers.

Then the selling work commenced. I got interviews in a couple of local papers, a review here and there, did a radio interview, a reading and signing, and even got a small indie bookseller to stock it. I sold more copies that I expected and even made my money back, which they say is hard for a self-pubbed author to do. I met a lot of people and learned more than I could have imagined.

In all, it’s a decision I’ve been happy with.

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*If I were to do it again, I’d look at createspace and lulu and the many other options out there now.

I’ve got a guest post up over at Anne Mini’s Author! Author! blog in which I share some thoughts about the experience of self-publishing my novel A Place Without a Postcard back in 2003. Here’s the link: Thoughts about Self-Publishing by guest blogger James Brush. Go read it, Anne says nice things about me and my book.

If you’ve not visited Author! Author! and are interested in anything relating to publishing, check it out. Author! Author! is a veritable treasure house of useful information for anyone trying to navigate the world of agents, editors and publishing companies, and Anne is truly committed to helping writers succeed in that quest.

And, since we’re on the subject, if you haven’t done so already, I hope you’ll consider purchasing a copy of A Place Without a Postcard. Here’s the back cover copy:

Paul Reynolds, a photographer who creates fake photos for tabloid magazines, wakes up with no idea where he is or how he got there. He can’t even recall his name. A strange man lurks nearby, breathing heavily and slowly flipping through a book. Paul hears the man’s breath, but he cannot see him. He realizes with mounting panic that his eyes no longer function.

He remembers racing down a desolate West Texas highway. He remembers a cop who pulled him over for speeding. He remembers a shotgun-brandishing cook chasing him out of a diner. And he remembers a life abandoned, but he cannot put together the jigsaw puzzle that brought him where he is: blind, wanted by the law, and in the company of this invisible stranger.

In the backcountry town of Armbister, Texas, where temperatures hover around a hellish 110 degrees, Paul’s memory, intangible as a heat mirage, lies just beyond his reach, and God may be a coyote.

Thanks. Plug over.

I’ve found a lot of great stuff lately, and so, a links post.

Heather wrote a very nice review of A Place Without a Postcard.

Jon Swift included a post I wish I never had to write on his compendium of the Best Blog Posts of 2008 (Chosen by the Bloggers Themselves). Okay, so I picked the post, but it was nice to be invited.

I and the Bird #91 is out on From the Faraway, Nearby, very cool travel/nature/photography site that I intend to start following. Also discovered in this month’s installment of I and the Bird, are some really interesting and compelling sites that will likely become regular reads: Nature Remains, a celebration of the natural world by a gifted writer; the unclassifiable Via Negativa, which is definitely worth a detailed exploration, and Teach me about Birdwatching!!! where I hope to learn more about South American birds.

A few weeks ago, I discovered two really good sites: Flint Hills, Tall Grass and Coyote Crossing. And, let’s face it, blogs with coyote in the name are just cool.

Today, I learned from drivelocity how to put a favicon on my site.

Well. That all makes for a good day of reading.

Way back in May, when the world was cool and the grass was green, Heather tagged me. At long last, I respond.

Here are the rules:
A) The rules of the game get posted at the beginning.
B) Each player answers the questions about himself or herself.
C) At the end of the post, the player then tags five people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog.

1) Ten years ago I was…

Just married, getting used to being a homeowner, trying to decide where to hang my newly acquired master’s degree, running a mailroom in downtown Austin, and starting on the first draft of A Place Without a Postcard, which <shameless plug> you should purchase if you haven’t </shameless plug>.

2) Five things on today’s to-do list:

I actually had one for today: pick up replacement ipod at the Apple store, get passports out of safe deposit box, drop off old light fixtures at Habitat for Humanity Re-Store, get mealworms for the wrens and titmice, get a new journal at Book People.

3) Things I’d do if I were a billionaire:

Purchase an island in the south Pacific and build a network of research stations to better understand and harness its unusual magnetic properties.

4) Three bad habits:

Candy, cookies, cake.

5) Five places I’ve lived:

Portsmouth, Rhode Island; Springfield, Virginia; Subic Bay, The Philippines; Naples, Italy, Austin, Texas

6) Six jobs I’ve had in my life:

Teacher, Project Manager, Mailroom Supervisor, Migrant Film Worker, Pizza Cook, Busboy.

I tag nobody specific, but feel free to use this meme if you’re reading it and feeling like listing.

I’m off to London. I’ll put up pictures when I return.

This was taken at Wupatki National Monument near Flagstaff, Arizona.

My dad’s side of the family came from Phoenix and so when I was growing up, we visited Arizona whenever we had the chance. I guess the desert air got to me because as an adult, I’ve gone back many times to what I think is probably the richest state in terms of natural beauty and pre-Columbian history.

I also really like driving through the desert, especially in a place like Arizona where so much of the land is public and a person can just pull off the road and explore.

In 1996, my wife and I took a trip to Arizona and New Mexico. We went without a plan and just zig-zagged around the northern part of the state, camping and visiting as many of the national parks as we could, including Wupatki where I took the above picture.

The structure was most likely built by the Sinagua people sometime around the 12th century, but was abandoned by 1250 AD.

Ever since I first heard of the Anasazi people and saw their cliff dwellings at Montezuma Castle, I’ve been fascinated by the history of the region. The great thing about deserts is that so much is preserved.

I don’t know what it is about ruins in the middle of the desert, but there’s something about them that captures my imagination. Perhaps it’s because in the desert you can really see and get a sense of things like time and the infinity of space. You can feel the Earth’s long slow processes, the geology happening all around. Seeing ruins reinforces that and reminds me of how short a time we’ve been here.

Deserts create perspective. At least for me. That’s probably why my book is set in the desert.

I’ve also posted other photos of more recent desert ruins from a trip in 1992.

We have a guest speaker program at school, and last week I was asked to be the guest speaker and give a talk about writing.

I wasn’t sure what to talk about at first, but then I decided that I’d talk about the process of writing and publishing my book, which is what people always want to know about when they find out I’ve written a book (by the way – shameless self-promotion here – feel free to click over to your favorite online bookseller and purchase a copy). That led me to thinking about answering some of the questions that my students frequently ask about writing. Such things as: “Where do characters come from?” and  ”How do you make up your stories?”

I decided to talk mostly about making up stories and thought it would be useful (and hopefully entertaining) to read a short story I’d written and then use that as a frame of reference for discussing how a story develops.

The story I chose to read is called “Yawgoog.” I wrote it during the summer of 2000, and it was published in The Sound Of What?, a now vanished online literary journal/community. “Yawgoog” is about two boys who find a bunch of money out in the woods near a Boy Scout camp.

My short stories sometimes originate in real life, little moments that emerge from memory, scenes vividly recalled years later. I sometimes tell my students to try starting their stories with the everyday moments that they all know from firsthand experience and then build the story around those things. The story doesn’t have to be true; it just has to feel that way.

That’s how “Yawgoog” started. While watching an electrical strom come in one day a few summers back, I remembered another summer day, long ago, when I was in Boy Scouts. I was at summer camp, out on the pond in a canoe, or maybe a row boat, just drifting and fishing with a friend named John. An electrical storm suddenly appeared and we had to head in fast. We couldn’t make it to the docks so we put in at the nearest land, which was away from the camp and waited out the storm. It didn’t last long and when it moved out, we went back to the camp. End of story.

The scene was vivid in my mind: two guys on a canoe outrunning a storm. Generally, when I think of scenes like this I write the scene as it appeared or felt at the time, but then I usually people them with invented characters. So I wrote the scene and got to know the characters in the canoe. The storm cames up, they paddle to shore and while waiting out the storm, one of them notices an old trash bag. I was as surprised as they were when a whole bunch of money fell out of that bag, but I ran with it, asking myself what these guys would do. That wondering about what they would do with it ultimately became the point of the story. Enjoy.

“Yawgoog”

The paddle cut easily through the water, and the canoe thrust forward a few feet, as silent as a shark. The sun was high, but the air already held the vague promise of coming fall. A gentle wind blew through the trees that surrounded the scout camp on the shore of the small pond. I set the paddle across the aluminum hull and stared out over the glassy surface of the water. Closer to the shore a small fleet of dinghies set sail as boys learned the art of running and tacking. Other than the sailboats, our canoe was the only other boat out. My friend Alexander, who was sitting in the front of the canoe, and I had lost interest in scouts years ago, but we went to camp and we fished and walked around the edges of the small pond while the younger and more eager boys attended to the business of earning merit badges.

Read the rest of this entry »

As is wont to happen when I read the Gypsy Scholar blog, I find that thoughts become provoked and his post about plot and character (provoked for him by an entry on the interesting Contemporary Nomad blog) is one that provoked this response (though I hope my tone is not too provocative):

I find that when I write short stories (and screenplays) plot tends to come first and the characters serve it. With longer works, characters tend to come first and their personalities drive the plot because it’s the decisions the characters make that ultimately affect what happens to them and how the plot unfolds. For me, the plot changes from what I had intended originally more than the characters.

What you said about leaving out details in the interest of advancing story is very true and important, but the writer still knows those details and they inform the characters’ decisions and actions even if they are never explicitly revealed.

I agree with Jessica’s point about being drawn back by character. As an example, I’ll use To Kill a Mockingbird since it’s the last book I read. I keep turning the pages not because I want to know how the town deals with the trial but because I really like listening to Scout tell the story. I enjoy her voice and her sense of humor.

Perhaps this all sounds flaky as hell, but that’s how it works for me.

Now that school is winding down and summer, which is when I do most of my writing, is fast approaching, my thoughts turn to writing and I find that the character/plot issue is still on my mind.

For me and me alone, since writing is a very individual sport with as many methods as there are writers, character is where it starts and character is what provides the excitement and even the magic of the whole process. At the start of a piece, I usually don’t know the characters very well, but I tend to know them better than I know what will happen to them.

These imaginary people (I won’t call them friends) sort of develop, and I let them talk to one another and to me. We like to talk when we drive. These characters often have stories that are never revealed in the course of a piece of writing.

When I wrote A Place Without a Postcard, I wrote out 30 pages of Sergio (whose dog gives this blog its name) telling his story. I only meant to include a few lines, but I really got into this character’s story just flowing along. I had no idea how much there was to him when I first thought of him.

Once I know the characters I start to get a bead on what happens to them. That’s where the story develops and as the story comes together, I generally have no idea where (or even when) it’s going to end. Sometimes I know how I’d like it to go, but usually it ends up somewhere else.

Oftentimes I overwrite a character. My first drafts are substantially longer than than the final draft and those pages that are cut are often character bits: explorations, flashbacks, asides. All of these become parts of who those characters are and wind up informing their decisions, though they aren’t included in the final draft. Sometimes these deleted scenes, to use the language of DVDs, become separate stories.

Once a first draft is completed the plot may shift, and characters might change, but typically the plot changes more than the characters do. I do, however, frequently fire characters when I realize they are only there to advance the plot and whatever they were there to do suddenly seems uneccessary or can be accomplished more organically by another character.

I sometimes wonder if perhaps this stems from ways of viewing the world. Plot coming first feels to me like destiny. Character coming first feels like free will. I tend to lean towards free will and so the plot in any given piece of writing tends to spring more from the choices a character makes rather than what I need for him or her to do to get to the ending that I originally imagined.

That probably sounds a bit high-minded because in reality I don’t think about this at all when I’m actually writing. Besides the end result should be something in which character and plot and all the other elements that make up a whole and compelling tale flow seamlessly along leaving only chicken-and-the-egg musings such as this post.

Ultimately a writer has to be able to handle both. While in graduate school studying screenwriting, I learned about plot, because that seems to drive the writing process for scripts, but plot doesn’t get me writing. Characters do. Of course once I have a character that intrigues me, that character’s story will keep me going as I discover what exactly it is.

Finally, this brings to mind an analogy that one of my film professors used to use when encouraging students to learn both film and video (back when there was a difference): you’ve got to be able to play the piano with both hands. I think plot and character are like that. Every writer will start from a different place, but for the story to work for the reader, the two must be woven together, each supporting the other.

OK. So this is the Coyote Mercury blog, based in Austin, Texas. I don’t yet have a purpose for blogging except that this seems an amusing way for an obsessive writer to have some fun and maybe even pick up a few new readers.

The names of the blog and my main website are derived from a character in my first novel, A Place Without a Postcard. The character is surprisingly enough a coyote named Mercury who may actually be just a plain old dog, or – possibly – God.

Enough for now. I should get back to learning how this blog stuff works.