The following week, I’ll be home, but I’ll have my entire family visiting.  Liveblogging?  Possible but uncertain.  And the two weeks after that, I’ll be in Portugal.  Probably not liveblogging from there.  So, the upshot of this is, no liveblogging for a while.

Which isn’t to say that you won’t be getting lots of juicy Boot Camp details.  I will try to check in on this blog every night and tell you how things are going in the land of intensive workshopping.

And I’ll be looking good as I do it, since I went to the salon today to get my hair all preened and polished.  Mark said I could put Orson Scott Card on my Celebrity Free Pass List.

I considered.  “Nope,” I said.  “It’s Alton Brown all the way down.”

My personal favorite?

Cynthia had washed her hands of Philip McIntyre – not like you wash your hands in a public restroom when everyone is watching you to see if you washed your hands but like washing your hands after you have been working in the garden and there is dirt under your fingernails — dirt like Philip McIntyre.

And a highlight from 2009:

As Lieutenant Baker shrank his lips back to their normal size, he tried desperately to think of a situation in which his new-found power might be useful, as have I, your narrator.

With my writing group, Wednesday night.  My summation: “I think it’s a path to publication that is opening up for some people, like bloggers and celebrities and other people with existing platforms.  But I personally would not do it.”

With Mark, last night.  My summation: “It’s not the worst idea.”

All this is to say that my attitude toward self-pubbing is rapidly opening up.  Which I don’t think is because I’m crazy, or because I haven’t found an agent yet.  I think it’s because between the blogs and the e-readers and the bestselling books based on Twitter feeds, we’re reaching a sort of inflection point.  Things are changing.  For some writers, they already have.

Now, I am not anywhere near ready to comb through the Lulu terms of service yet.  But, Mark and I did have another “what would we do if the book didn’t sell” conversation last night.  It seemed to me that there were two possible paths: (1) write another book, and hope that when it sold, it would pull this one along with it in a package deal and (2) self-pub.

Just for the hell of it, we talked about how to chart a course down Path #2.  “What if I released it as a blog?” I asked.  “A chapter a week, for about a year.  And if you want to read the whole thing right now, you can buy a self-pubbed copy?”

Mark liked it.  It tied into that whole giving-your-stuff-away-for-free ethos that is such a big part of the web.  “You could be, like, the Jonathan Coulton of cozy mysteries.”

“But my audience isn’t all that webby,” I pointed out.  “It’s entirely female, and I’m not really sure it’s necessarily the youngest, most tech savvy females.  My audience properly includes my mom.  My mom is never going to read a book online.”

“And here’s the real kicker.  I’d be risking not just this book, I’d be risking the entire series.  If my book didn’t take off for any reason, I’d never get it, or any of the sequels I intend to write, picked up by a traditional publisher.  I’m not saying I can’t come up with another idea.  I’m just saying, I’ve got plans I don’t want to torpedo on a whim.”

And yet… the idea still held some appeal.  It was new, it was sexy, and it involved higher royalties.  So when I got home, I looked up “serialized online novels.”  And it turns out that, yes, this is a thing that is done.  And is it successful?  Sometimes.

The really successful serialized books I found were in the horror genre, i.e., they had a primarily young, primarily male audience.  And it’s hard, honestly, for me to know how successful they really were.  Which brings up the whole question: what is success?  How do you define it?

I used to define it as having a book published that was critically acclaimed.  Now I couldn’t care less about that last clause (well, I could care less, just not a lot). But I think that for me success still entails a presence on a bookstore shelf.  Which probably means publication, traditional publication.

So that is what I’m pursuing.  But I’ll be honest: the idea of self-publication still does have its appeal.  On the one hand, everything would be on me: the editing, the marketing, et al.  And on the other hand, everything would be on me.  It would be my baby, start to finish.  I could get started today, and if I didn’t get my feet under me immediately that would be ok, because there’s no one I’d ever have to get approval from.

Now that I’m settled into the groove, I’m back to blogging. More tomorrow, but for now I’ll just mark my return with:

Three Things I Learned While I Was Away From Blogging

1. The Atlanta Bread Company has so-so bread but killer wifi.
2. Skirt steak prepared very well and cut against the grain is still skirt steak.
3. The “drainage pipe” can also be called the “sewage pipe.” Note to husbands: If your wife is currently mopping up overflow from said pipe, use the word “drainage.”

Bad News: It’s long.

Good News: I am adding ten scenes and eliminating four. The extra six should easily make up the additional five thousand words I want to add to the book’s length.

Bad News: I have to write them.

Good News: There is now nothing to do but just sit down and write.

Bad News: There is now nothing to do but just sit down and write.

It currently weighs in at about sixty-five thousand words — a good five thousand below my goal. It’s probably publishable at 65K, but it’s definitely a little light, so I’ll be looking to add those extra five thousand words during editing (that’s about fifteen pages to you civilians).

It’s quite a good feeling to have a draft, and I think the last scenes were some of the best. There are still a lot of problems with this draft, but that’s something I can work out in revision. For now, it’s time to celebrate!

One of the things that really makes it work is the trail of tension Patterson lays out for us. I don’t just mean that the scenes are tense, I mean that whenever they aren’t, there’s a little bead of tension drawing us forward, making us read just a few more pages.

One example is when the protagonist, Alex Cross, begins his relationship with the love interest, Jezzie Flanagan. They swim in a hotel pool, chat, and begin to get to know each other. It’s not uninteresting, but neither is it particularly tension-fraught.

But the reader already knows that when Alex gets up the next morning, he’s going directly to the ransom payoff. So if you think you can put down the book during that pool scene, think again.

This happens over and over again in the book, turning it into something you’re not too unlikely to read in one go. It may be an event we know is coming up, like the ransom payoff, the trial, or the hypnosis of the kidnapper. Or it may be an unanswered question: “What did she see that freaked her out?”; “Is someone working with the kidnapper?”; “What’s his long term plan?” Patterson lets us know that there are things worth knowing, which he isn’t telling yet.

And for me, at least, that’s enough to keep the pages turning.

So I decided to mix in some Breakout Novels: books that were such a sensation that they rocketed the author to a spot on the bestseller list and a place in the common consciousness. And the one I’ve started with is… wait for it… Along Came A Spider, by James Patterson.

A bit of background here: when I attended a mystery writers’ conference a couple years back, the words “James Patterson” were pretty much synonymous with “hack.” They also worked their way into a number of pithy comments said with a raised eyebrow and a superior air, as in, “Sure… if you’re James Patterson!” “Maybe… to James Patterson!” or the less common, “That’s what James Patterson said!”

You get the idea. Now, a big reason for all this drama is that Patterson’s prose… well, it ain’t too good. And writers care about prose. We have to. But it shouldn’t surprise any of us that readers often care more about other things, such as character and plot.

(The other reason I suspect is that Patterson is, in fact, wildly successful, far beyond most writer’s wildest dreams. (And unfortunately we writers aren’t above a little professional jealousy (especially when the person we’re jealous of seems demonstrably worse than us (like Audrey Niffenger.))))

So I went into this book expecting, you know, not to be blown away by the writing. But just looking to identify that spark that made so many readers cleave to Patterson, that has made him a bestselling writer for the past sixteen years.

And I think it’s the stakes. Quite simply, on every page we have gut-wrenching stakes. Children kidnapped, then killed, lawmen murdered. Patterson isn’t afraid to turn up the heat. And those high stakes whisk me right along, so quickly that, on page 173, I hardly notice the poor prose anymore. I just want to find out what happens.

Is it the most exciting book I’ve ever read? No, not really. But the stakes are high, and that’s what keeps me glued to it.

(These stakes are actually a little too high for me. I want to live in a world where great dangers are weathered successfully; a world where kids don’t die. So this may be my last James Patterson for a while.)