If you don’t know about Jake Shimabukuro (as I didn’t two days ago), you should. Because this man is an artist. He doesn’t let anything stand between him and his art—not the difficulties of his chosen craft, not assumptions about any particular piece of music, not preconceptions about his instrument. He just dives into it, invests every single ounce of energy and talent and sheer dogged hard work he has in his body, and smiles with all his heart.

He’s an inspiration in pretty much all possible directions.

And I’m pretty certain this is the way the Bohemian Rhapsody sounded inside Freddy Mercury’s head.

Happy New Year 2010 to you all! I hope you had as peaceful a New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day as we did here at our house, ensconced by the fire by a lovely (dying) tree all lit up, towers of new books next to everyone’s chair, sleeping cats on every lap, and Billie Holiday singing “A Fine Romance” over the rumble of an electric model train chugging industriously around and around under the tree.

While I was tipped back in my rocker with my chocolate and Brandy Alexander (thanks to a book called, appropriately enough, Happy Hours by Indian author and columnist Bhaichand Patel—take note of the reference to the novel he’s working on at the end of the interview in the link and ask yourself, “I wonder who he’ll get to edit it?”) reading all five hundred pages of the first ever full-length detective novel, Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (published in 1866 and still RIVETING). . .as I say, while I was doing all this, other more dedicated bloggers than I continued to come up with fascinating stuff about writing, which I will re-direct you toward today.

First and foremost, Mira points out on Mira’s List that from now on the IRS is going to be casting a much more jaundiced eye in your direction. Yeah, YOU. I hope every spec of your taxable writing income is all recorded and properly filed, because they apparently feel you guys have been less than utterly and trustingly transparent in your dealings with them in the past. God only knows why.

Cory Doctorow gave a speech in November on the digitial ownership of books, partly transcribed and posted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “How To Destroy the Book.” I don’t necessarily adhere to all Doctorow’s theories on copyright, but he’s doing some very heavily-promoted work in the realm, and I’m interested in seeing how it pans out. We’re all groping blind right now—the ground keeps shifting under our feet—but light is being cast more and more on the issue from different angles by some very smart people. (Except for what he named his daughter. That was kind of mean.)

Wil Wheaton wrote a stirring piece on self- (excuse me, “independent-”) publishing with Lulu. This is important to you, personally, because independent publishing is beginning to earn some real spurs in the industry. This past year has seen in the change, and traditional publishers are now looking more and more to independent publishing as the front-line testing ground for salable books. It is a great idea? It is properly executed? It is WELL-EDITED? And is the author 100% personally invested in marketing it, so that sales are already hefty before a traditional publisher ever has to shell out dime? Of course, like Wile E. Coyote, the next thing they’re going to notice is that if all this is true, independently-published authors don’t actually need traditional publishers. But we’ll keep our lips zipped and let that one be a special little surprise.

This is also important to you because. . .drum roll. . .we are going to independently-publish my first book in 14 years, The Art & Craft of Fiction—that’s all the old in-depth blog posts on writing that you miss so much and wish were still posted, edited into a book! Yay! It should go up for sale on this blog sometime in February or earlier, as soon as I finish getting it cleaned up and writing a few extra pieces to round it out. I looked into shopping it around to agents and, by extension, publisher’s acquisitions editors and, by further extension, publishers and, by even further extension, readers, and compared that to the amount of editing, marketing, and promotions work authors are now expected to take responsibility for even if they get past all those hurdles, and, well. . .you remember the special little surprise.

And on the subject of author marketing, Alan Rinzler re-posted (or else it came to me in a dream) an excellent post from 2008 on what criteria a traditional publisher uses in determining what advance to offer an author, with some eye-opening advice about email “direct mail” and speaking to your Kawanis Club.

Speaking of websites (yes, I have been, a LOT), George Revutsky and Dustin Kittelson of the soon-to-be-launched online marketing company MyNextCustomer gave an interview on—not the demise of Search Engine Optimization, as I originally quoted the headline—but the state of online search issues and social media marketing.

On a more casual note, Lauren Leto has analyzed readers by their favorite authors and posted this exhaustive list for those of you too lazy to do it yourselves. Are you on it? I don’t necessarily agree with all of it—I’ve never even heard of some of these authors—but it does appear I should be reading more Jorge Luis Borges. I will be starting my own list for all of us here to contribute to (I think I’ll put Kathryn in charge of the YA section), but not until I get through the rest of my chocolate.

This has nothing to do with writing, but it does demonstrate beautifully that it’s the juxtaposition of essential details that creates action and dimension.

This also has nothing to do with writing, but it does provide a nice excuse for why novels are so much harder to write now than they were ten thousand years ago.

Also, as you’ve probably noticed, we here at A. Victoria Mixon, Editor, have re-designed the website. We have plans—big plans.

• A new interview series, beginning with literary agent Donald Maass and independent editor Lisa Rector-Maass, followed by the second half of my interview with Carolyn Cassady (in which she talks in-depth about making the movie Heart Beat with Sissy Spacek), and then an interview with Guggenheim-recipient, Yaddo artist, five-time O. Henry award-winner, and biographer of both Jane and Paul Bowles, as well as dual-biographer of Isadora Duncan and Mary Cassatt, Millicent Dillon—just to start.
• A new Free Edit event, like the novel HOOKS event of last August, in which I will do Free Edits of your novel CLIMAXES. I hope to start that later this month.
• A secret parallel universe for griping, for those of you who like to gripe, on all subjects relating to fiction, including but not restricted to best sellers that should be lining bird cages, authors who should not be allowed near keyboards, and publishing horror stories from those of you with the scars to prove it. It’s not up yet, but if you keep your eyes open you’ll notice when it does go up.
• More in-depth discussion of the state of the publishing industry, leaning heavily on the way licensing and copyright have already played out in the computer industry, what’s happened in the music industry, how online communities, networking, and marketing are developing even as we speak, and the secret assumptions that lie behind a lot of the opinions being pushed out here regarding what aspiring writers should do to succeed and where and when and how and why.
• And an exciting way to get you some of those old posts back on this blog in a new less-easily-lifted format. They won’t replace the book, but supplement it, as it were. And, as an added bonus, you’ll get to see where I keep my rejection letters.

Finally: the New Year marks the end of my first year of blogging on the craft of fiction.

Thank you, all of you, for reading. Thank you for commenting! Thank you to all the great people I’ve met in this past year. Without you this blog would have gone the way of so many—six months of excitement and then sudden amnesia—but because of you I’ve leaped the abyss from a dead technical-writing career to doing the most fulfilling work in the world (can I still use that word in this decade? yes, I can, because I’m in California): editing gorgeous fiction, discovering amazing unpublished talent, working with dedicated writers who have completely given me back my faith in literature as a living, breathing, life-changing art in this day and age. And you know the condition of modern published fiction.

It’s a miracle!

Thank you—in all sincerity, from the bottom of my heart. Out of the zillions of blogs begun every year, you’ve made this one a success. You guys are my hope and joy. And you’re going to usher in a new Golden Age of Literature.

Dona Nobis Pachem.

You’ll notice that today we’re blowing our minds with a certain amount of advice on screenwriting. Yes, screenwriting is a close enough cousin to fiction that the serious fiction writer can take enormous assistance from screenwriting advice, without the extra hassle of having to deal with Hollywood.

Alexandra Sokoloff uses Jaws to talk about characters’ PLANS being thwarted by PLANS. Even the shark had an evolving plan!

ChristopherR2D2 chides you about being afraid to write. I almost didn’t include this one because it’s rife with Google ads, but he’s also got a link to a good piece describing writer’s block as simply the decision not to write. (He—as so many others—is a little lost on the subject of forcing yourself to write just for the sake of writing. It may very well take ten thousand hours to learn how to do something, but ten thousand hours of writing drivel that never improves is far worse for your skills than ten years of writing once a year in a concentrated effort to learn the craft.)

Ben Bova reminds us that Donne was smarter than you’d think from the number of writers these days who can quote him. (More aggressive ads.)

And then there are our comrades, the fiction writers, leading the way through the mines for the rest of us with their lanterns aloft:

In a beautifully-written exploration of craft, Alexander Chee describes studying under Annie Dillard.

Morgan Barnhart of the Peevish Penman advises you to write your scenes when you’re possessed by them, not just when you plan to.

Jonathon Karp, editor and publisher of Twelve publishing, is interviewed in-depth in another of those wonderful Poets & Writers interviews by Jofie Ferrari-Adler.

While a new interesting publishing blogger has appeared, Bob Spears on Book Trends, a bookstore owner and book packager covering all aspects of ebooks, Print on Demand, self-publishing, even teaching children to love reading. He’s got a mighty dandy mustache, too!

Finally, you should all be aware of what’s been going on with the Price Wars between Amazon, Target, and Walmart (really, you guys, Walmart) and the American Booksellers’ Association letter to the Department of Justice asking them to step in. If you have any interest in ever being published after this last week, much less any love for independent booksellers (which you’d better), you need to know about this.

So far I have managed to spend almost the entire day wrestling fruitlessly with my website. Always a rewarding exercise.

Today I’m going to highlight stuff off Twitter I wish I had time to engage in long, witty discussion about, like:

Agent Jenny Bent’s unexpected decision to hate sentence fragments.

Comedy-writer Julie Bush’s take on how a joke is a perfect story.

Writer K.M. Weiland’s discussion of whom you should be writing for when you sit down to write.

Screenwriter Laura Cross’s advice on subtext in dialog, thanks to Mystery Man on Film.

And, for those even more interested, Mystery Man’s own massive compilation of 25 posts on subtext in dialog, the never-ending study of this fascinating subject.

Let’s call this Blow Your Mind Monday and look at ways to approach your Work In Progress from mind-bending perspectives. Keep in mind that the more creative you are with brainstorming, the more time and daydreaming and investment you put into knowing your characters and what happens to them both inside and outside your manuscript, the more unique and interesting your novel will be. When agents say, “Send us something fresh!” this is what they mean.

Here are two terrific adaptations from Hamlet’s transcendental suicide speech, still a classic after five hundred years:

Patrick Stewart asks, “A B, or not a B?” for Sesame Street, in full Elizabethan gear.

A Klingon on a dark street delivers the same soliquoy with passion and sincerity.

Study these with care. How do the different adaptations emphasize different aspects of the speech? What do you get out of these versions that you haven’t gotten out of previous versions? How does each unusual angle highlight something in Hamlet’s situation and character that standard interpretations don’t? Finally, can you make a character discuss their doom with this kind of insightful clarity? (Of course not. But you can get a lot better if you pay close attention to how it’s done.) Note how Shakespeare keeps the entire discussion firmly rooted in vivid details!

Here’s a fascinating look at extrapolating a new story from an old favorite. Notice the tie-ins to the old plot and surprising but inevitable perspective on known plot elements. Can you approach your story from a completely different angle? From the angle of a minor character with their own story going on? Remember Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. Note how giving other characters their own storylines adds to the wealth of subtle, telling detail in your protagonist’s story.

And from a recommendation by Maud Newton, here’s a study of metaphor showing we actually do think in imagistic association. If you translate all the common cliches and metaphors you can think of into vivid, concrete terms, how can you apply what you discover to your characters and their behavior?

Blow your own mind like a wad of bubble gum. (If you wind up scraping it off your nose, you went too far.)