By John Gilstrap

Full disclosure: some of this post first appeared as a late-in-the-day comment on Brother Bell’s excellent post last Sunday.

Dear Rookie Writer,

No matter what you hear from your writer buddy who heard it from a friend who knows a guy in the publishing industry, agents and editors are hungry and actively hunting for new material. Are they picky about quality? Of course they are. Can it be hard to get an agent’s attention? You betcha, Red Rider. Is it the single most reliable model to make some scratch as a newbie without any readership? One hundred percent.

The vast majority of new writers (read: yet-to-be-published writers) I meet at conferences and such espouse no interest in making a living as a writer. Most just want to see their books in print, whether it be on paper or with electrons. When they hear that their pacing is off or that their characters are flat, they seem not to care. And why should they? They just sat through three sessions on self-publishing that pumped them up on a thrilling publishing world with no gate keepers.

These new writers commit themselves to the indie route because at its face it’s easier. In the end, 90+% of them will spend thousands of dollars in production costs and will complain that they’ve only been able to a hundred copies, mostly at their family reunion. Still, they print business cards pronouncing themselves to be published authors and dare anyone to claim otherwise.

The biggest obstacle to success in indie publishing is the inability for real talent to rise above the noise of the dreck. And when the rare exceptions like Andy Weir rise up and get notice, their careers only get supercharged after signing with a traditional publisher. (Work with me here. There are undoubtedly other one-off exceptions, but they are extremely rare.)

If a new writer wants a shot (nothing close to a guarantee, but at least a shot) at selling thousands or hundreds of thousands of copies of his book, then I believe the traditional route is the only one to consider.

First, there’s the issue of the money flow. It’s a one-way valve. Author pays nothing. Yes, the royalty scale is a minority percentage of overall revenue (a negotiated percentage–thus the importance of an agent), but the publisher has taken all the risk. X% of something is better than 100% of nothing.

The right traditional publisher opens up doors to marketing routes that are otherwise locked for indies (Goodreads, BookBub, etc.). They can get your book into libraries, and they have access to the otherwise locked-away network of sub agents who can sell your book to foreign publishers so your book can be published in multiple languages. Each copy sold is more cash in the author’s pocket.

Then there’s the access to studios for film options.

This is the entertainment business, folks, where the odds of true success are slim. But as a rookie, you want to stack as many of the slim odds in your favor as you can. If you go the indie route first and your book does not sell, you have all but closed the door to future entry into the traditional publishing world. Make your career choices accordingly.

Now, the case FOR indie publishing:

Back in the day, when I had a Big Boy Job, I was the director of safety for an international trade association. In the words of Ron Burgundy, I was a pretty big deal. My particular squint on safety management principles was both unique and effective. I traveled extensively to speak to large crowds. For a brief while, after I left the association, I considered writing a safety management book and joining the speaker’s circuit. (Working title: Safety is Not Number One)

Had I followed through, I would have had to self publish that book because the potential market is very small. I could have sold the hell out of the books I brought with me (or I could have made it part of the speaking fee), but there wouldn’t be enough money to attract a publisher.

If (God forbid) Kensington were to shift its focus and drop my Jonathan Grave series, I would consider continuing it independently, but I would be doing it with a substantial established readership base.

There is no one common path for everyone. But before choosing your path, or dismissing one, I urge you to evaluate your goals and objectives.

By PJ Parrish

In the wee wee hours of the morning this week, I had an idea for a new story. Now, most things that happen around 3 a.m. usually don’t end well, and I should have remembered that, considering that the last time I was startled awake at that hour was when a coyote and neighborhood cat were squaring off in my driveway.

But no, I got up, grabbed a pen and wrote down an opening paragraph. Let me share it here now:

The deep waters, black as ink, began to swell and recede into an uncertain distance. A gray ominous mist obscured the horizon. The ocean expanse seemed to darken in disapproval. Crashing tides sounded groans of agonized discontent. The ocean pulsed with a frightening, vital force. Although hard to imagine, life existed beneath. Its infinite underbelly was teeming with life, a monstrous collection of finned, tentacled, toxic, and slimy parts. Below its surface lay the wreckage of countless souls. But we had dared to journey across it. Some had even been brave enough to explore its sable velveteen depths, and have yet to come up for precious air.

Whee, doggies! What’s that smell?

Okay, I didn’t really write that. But I had you going for a sec, didn’t I. But someone DID write it. Actually, it was 1,476 people who wrote that, give or take a few. This gawd awful paragraph was created years ago by Penguin Books for a project called “A Million Penguins.”

Maybe you heard about it. The idea was to write a novel with a million collaborators to be called a “wiki-novel”. It was launched by Penguin Books in collaboration with Kate Pullinger on behalf of the Institute of Creative Technologies at De Montfort University.

This is what the Penguin folks said on their website: “We’ve created a space where anyone can contribute to the writing of a novel and anyone can edit anyone else’s writing….we want to see whether a community can really get together, put creative differences aside (or sort them out through discussion) and produce a novel.”

Anyone could call up the site and contribute to the story. Because the site got more than 100 edits every hour, Penguin imposed “reading windows” that froze the novel so that editors could read over what had been changed to get their bearings on where the story was going. Chaos reigned. A month in, Penguin mercifully pulled the plug.

I was thinking about the Penguin project this week after reading an article at Literary Hub about how AI is transforming our business, and why writers should embrace it. To quote the author Debbie Urbanski in part:

So here’s what I really want us to imagine for the purpose of this essay: An AI writes a novel and the novel is good.

This is what a lot of people, and certainly a lot of writers, are angry and scared about right now. That AI, having been trained on a massive amount of data, including copyrighted books written by uncompensated authors, will begin writing as well or better than us, and then we’ll be out of a job. These concerns over intellectual property and remuneration are important but right now, it feels they’re dominating the discussion, especially when there are other worthwhile topics that I’d like to see added to the conversation around AI and writing.

Such as: how can humans and AI collaborate creatively?

Which brings me to a third possibility to consider: Can AI and a human write a novel together?

Sigh. I dunno. She posits that there is a “collaboration” possible between writer and AI. And that’s where I get queasy.

I collaborated with my sister Kelly on 15 books and a lot of short stories. It was at times a fitful process but always fruitful because we were equals and more important, we recognized that there was a third party in the collaboration that was always going to win any argument — the story.

I’ve had a couple other experiences with collaboration. Jeffery Deaver and Jim Fusilli asked me to join 14 other writers for a novel called The Chopin Manuscript, published by the International Thriller Writers. Deaver got the plot in motion and we each had a chapter after that. It was fun, frenetic and in hindsight, not a bad novel considering the inevitable clash of styles and egos. I remember I gleefully killed off one of the main characters in a great chase through the Paris catacombs but Jeff overruled me. We went on to write two more “serial thrillers” for ITW.

Letting another brain into your writing process isn’t easy. It should be approached with only the greatest care and clear-mindedness. When it goes bad — and I know some writers who’ve had it go very bad — it conjures up the Infinite Monkey Theorem:

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, including the complete works of William Shakespeare. In fact, the monkey would almost surely type every possible finite text an infinite number of times. The theorem can be generalized to state that any sequence of events that has a non-zero probability of happening will almost certainly occur an infinite number of times, given an infinite amount of time or a universe that is infinite in size.

Which is how I view AI. I’m a retired Luddite who has no real stake in this brave new world. But I know that I should be paying closer attention. I have a friend who has been asked to write a script about the history of the mystery genre. He is struggling mightily because the subject is both broad and deep. He resorted to ChatGPT. And damned if the thing didn’t spit out a workable script. But it has an oddly lifeless quality, like someone afraid to color outside the lines.

So what happened to The Million Penguins project? The university behind it published A Million Penguins Research Report. It concluded:  “We have demonstrated that the wiki novel experiment was the wrong way to try to answer the question of whether a community could write a novel, but as an adventure in exploring new forms of publishing, authoring and collaboration it was ground-breaking and exciting.”

Groundbreaking. Exciting. Sounds just like what they’re saying about AI. Or is that sound just the thundering footsteps of a million monkeys?

Keep coloring outside those lines, friends.

While in the middle of edits for my upcoming novel scheduled for release in October, 2025, the development editor we’ll call Francis (because I just heard that name on the television)  had several questions about how and why I break chapters the way I do. He also wondered about the placement of character viewpoint breaks within a chapter, and had several suggestions about both. I have to admit, I ignored them after explaining why.

Considering those questions, I started wondering about freshmen authors, who tend to overthink everything and find they, too, are unsure when to break chapters. I’m afraid you’ll see the word “chapter” wayyyy to many times in this post.

The truth is, for me, these breaks come naturally both between chapters and character viewpoints. I don’t consciously say to myself, “Self, I think I’ll stretch this action scene for a few more pages, and wrap things up with a little witty banter before moving on to a different scene.”

If you dig around in books on writing, or the internet, you’ll likely see where a chapter break accentuates a change of place, point of view, or plot. The new chapter tells us we’re in a different place in the novel and the stage has been reset to advance the story.

It also gives the reader a break, kinda like a commercial on television, so we can go make a sammich without missing anything, risk becoming disoriented about the plot after we put the book down to feed the dog or get a grandchild off the roof before they fall into the pool like last time.

Our attention spans are getting shorter, and I like to blame the internet and social media, because social media should be blamed for most of life’s problems, and of course the internet is just a place to noodle around between repeated news stories and Best Of lists.

But there’s this thing called pacing that has to be considered, and it’s all tied up with the chapter above.

We can’t simply cut off a conversation in the middle of a sentence or thought, or can we?

Carlton the Doorman points at two men in blue seersucker suits. “I know you’re both innocent of fashion murder, and it was only by chance you put on these matching suits this morning…or is it?”

His eyes drifted to the body stuffed behind the palm tree, and wondered why the interior decorator decided to use a Queen Palm, instead of a Date Palm. It was all so mysterious, just like those two men who were comparing pocket squares.

Now we have a cliffhanger, and the reader starts the next chapter, which is a shift in plot or viewpoint.

Dammit! I wanted to know how those two put on such garish suits, and now we have a renegade interior decorator to deal with, but the author wants me to read about Elizabeth and her challenges in digging through a file cabinet full of incriminating evidence on the third floor.

So now that chapter plods along, and it’s essential to the plot, but does it have to so long?

My development editor might think so. Maybe he wants it to be a shift in viewpoint within the chapter. It could have worked, I guess, but I like a fresh start and broke both chapters at those specific spots to build tension and anticipation for the next one. It also ends the scene, because I’m tired of writing about it and want to move back to the Seersucker Twins after finishing with the antagonist’s viewpoint.

The truth is, my chapters are long enough to play out the scene without putting in stuff people don’t want to read and will skip ahead. Be they short or long, I break at a point that feels natural.

“Sonny Hawke found himself in an aloha shirt on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande without a gun or badge, and wondered if anyone would take him for a Texas Ranger . Maybe there was a way to play this out before the cartel leader figured out that not all Rangers look alike.”

There we have a break, making the reader wonder the same thing and anticipate the next time Sonny appears.

Then I’ve had copy editors ask why my chapters in the third act are substantially shorter. By the time we’re racing toward the end, chapters are even shorter. Why? Because it subconsciously builds tension. There are times they’re only a page or two, but those quick breaks make readers feel like they’re on a rapidly descending roller coaster.

This is also a technique to keep tired or sleepy readers engaged. We want them to sprint toward the end.

“It’s nearly midnight, but this book is moving right along.” Sleepy Reader flips a couple of pages. “Wow, these are short. I can read another.”

We imagine the reader propped on pillows while a spouse snores quietly. “I’ll turn off the light in a second, but dang this chapter is brief, too. I feel like I’m on a roller coaster and this thing is moving fast. This is like eating potato chips. I can have another, and another. I can finish the book tonight and it won’t be too late when I’m finished.”

The truth is, I’ve heard this from more than one fan, who tells me they slogged through the next day because they stayed up past one in the morning, because they had to finish the book, and it was a good read.

Don’t be concerned about word or page counts, just end the chapter at a natural break. You’ll find them easy enough.

It seems you can’t turn anywhere these days without running into AI. Although the origins of mathematical artificial intelligence were fifty years past, it’s been the last two where AI has really taken hold in mainstream society. The biggest leap in amplified language skills came with ChatGPT in November 2022, and its evolution eversince has been mind-warping. That includes what AI can now do for fiction writers with both opportunities and challenges.

I’m not going to write an exposé or how-to post about fiction writers using AI for whatever purpose it might serve. That piece has best been done by K.M. (Katie) Weiland in an article she published the other day on her website Helping Writers Become Authors. It’s titled Exploring the Impact of AI on Fiction Writing: Opportunities and Challenges. I think Katie did a great job of covering this evolution, or revolution, we’re in. If you’re interested in reading this informative take, here’s the link.

Kil Zoners — What’s your view on AI for fiction writing or just using AI apps in general? Luv it? Meh? Hate it? Open mic.

By John Gilstrap

We’ve discussed in this space before the burden of the Muddled Middle or Page 200 Syndrome, where the writing process gets hopelessly bogged down in critical exposition that is strikingly un-fun. Today, let’s talk about other un-fun writing: I call them transitional scenes.

Say Detective Jones has discovered what he thinks he will turn out to be a key piece of evidence, and he needs to hand deliver it to Dr. Parker to get his input. The transitional scene in this circumstance would be the process by which Jones gets to Parker’s office.

You could just cut to a new scene where the detective and the doc are in mid-conversation, but if this is their first interaction, in medias res could leave the reader unsatisfied. In my style of writing, the reader needs to know the nature of characters’ relationships. Did they go to school together? Do they like each other? What is Detective Jones’s mode of transportation?

Here comes the balance of backstory and data dump. I’ve got to set up the scene without boring the reader. This means doing the reveal in the midst of some kind of intriguing action. I’ve got to reveal backstory without losing momentum on the front story.

Dr. Oscar Parker knew more about art and art thievery than anyone Flannery Jones had ever encountered. The professor’s tastes had always run toward the modern stuff–the random splashes of color and shapes and mis-assigned anatomy that Jones believed were practical jokes inflicted on the snooty rich. Judging from the ornateness of the gold-tipped iron gates that blocked access to his driveway, his expertise had elevated him from geeky eighth grade nose picker to a gentleman of means and influence. As Jones drove into the frame of the CCTV and pushed the button on the intercom, he wondered if he should start with an apology for the swirlies he’d administered back in the day.

The pacing of some stories require that the reader perceive the passage of time. Early in Nathan’s Run, there’s a section where 12-year-old Nathan decides in the morning that he’s going to execute the next part of his plan that night after the sun goes down. Following that decision comes a chapter about the parallel story of the police who are chasing him, but at this point, the cops don’t have a lot to go on, so the plot is dependent upon them acting on what Nathan does, so there’s not a lot for them to do, either. The trick is to keep these characters alive on the page even when they don’t yet have meaningful tasks to perform. Herein lies the beauty of sub-subplots. In the absence of real action, I inserted political turmoil within the police department itself.

Great. Now, that has to somehow payoff later.

Next came a short scene that might have felt like a non-sequitur at first because it introduces an important character who has exactly one very important task to perform within the story. But he can’t just walk onto the page, do his thing, and disappear. He has to feel real. So, Todd first joins the story as a stressed out professional (I forget what his job is) who’s sweating over a very important presentation that he needs to make the next morning. The reader needs to like him, and he needs to have a reason to be awake at a certain hour the next morning to see the thing that then sets the third act in motion.

Back to Nathan. It’s finally time to pull the trigger on him executing his plan. As the eponymous character, though, people want to know what he’s been doing for the past fifteen or twenty pages.

Now, finally, it was time to get the true action of the story moving again.

As I write this blog post, I am in the middle of a multifaceted transition for Scorched Earth, the Jonathan Grave book for 2026. I’ve got a good guy dead, another good guy wounded and in the hospital, a bad guy in a different hospital, while Jonathan and his team are just now in the process of unpacking who is the power behind all of this. In thirty pages or so, the story valve will open wide for about 50 pages.

And then, I’ll arrive at the Muddled Middle and the joy of writing will once again become less joyful. But only for a little while.

What say you, TKZ family? Have you all walked this same walk? Got any tricks to share?