Two weeks down and four to go, and what have we learned? How about the difference between means and ends?

My impression is that many, if not most of the writers who have entered the Inkshares/Nerdist contest are making their writing public for the first time (many with their first written novel). They see the contest as an end in itself: win and you’ll instantly become a wealthy and successful writer.

As if.

For those who win, (I presume) there will be months of intense editing. After that, there will be months of intense promotion (reviews, interviews, maybe even some public appearances). All you’ll be winning is the chance to do a lot of hard work.

But, wait. There’s more. Because then you’ll have to produce a second novel (they are notoriously difficult to pull off). Wash. Rinse. Repeat. And, if you’re lucky, more novels will come over time. When I submitted my second novel to my publisher at Elsewhen Press, I said, “Here’s my next novel.” His response was: “Wait until you have several under your belt and you can say, “Here’s my latest novel.” Some people will find the possibility exhilarating (I have, and my experience has shown me that he was right); others will find it the scariest proposition they have ever heard.

What if, as the vast majority of us will, you lose? Do you have a plan for what to do with your novel beyond that? Are you ready to make the rounds of publishers (with all the delightfully soul-crushing rejection that implies)? Are you willing to polish your story until it shines brighter than a star…and then start the whole process again with a new one? If you’re tempted to give up, you probably weren’t cut out to be a writer. That may sound harsh, but I believe it was Richard Bach who said: “A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.”

For my own part, being in this contest has proven in my mind what great friends and family I have, no small feat in itself given my generally timid and distrustful nature. In forcing me to get outside of my comfort zone and ask others for help, it has pushed me to make contacts which may help me in my career beyond the contest. Finally, my poor showing so far is a reminder that a career in the arts is a long slog full of hard, hard work; there are no shortcuts to success.

My advice would be to remember that the Inkshares/Nerdist contest is not an end in itself, it’s a means to the end of furthering your writing career. I think a lot of the writers here might benefit from that perspective.

I like having friends.

I was a loner growing up, the sort of kid that the weird kids in high school didn’t want to have anything to do with. As a result, I’ve never really known how to relate to other people, but I’ve always had the nagging suspicion that if I presumed too much of them, they would immediately and irrevocably drop me out of their lives (betrayals by people I was close to when I was younger greatly fed this fear). Spurred by a tendency towards introversion, I’ve been aloof, not willing to get too close to others.

(Un)fortunately, when you’re crowdsourcing a book, you have to approach everybody you know for help. And, to my surprise and delight, most of the people I know have been incredibly supportive.

I was thinking about this because of two boons I got yesterday from people I know. Lloyd (of the Steampunk Penneys) is somebody I know from a monthly get-together called First Thursday and science fiction conventions; not only did he preorder a copy of Both Sides. NOW!, but he sent word of my being in the contest to his contacts. Good man, Lloyd. Then, I had a delightful dinner with author Shirley Meier and her family. Great food and great conversation – it was a wonderful evening.

I’m planning on tweeting about these, and other kindnesses my friends have shown me in the recent past. I will be using the hashtag #ilikehavingfriends . If you’re on Twitter, consider taking a moment to tweet about the good things the people in your life have done for you. Maybe we can make #ilikehavingfriends a trending topic!

PS: I’d like to give a big shoutout to Lori Lightfoot-James and Krista Crowder Davis, people who are not friends (yet) who preordered a copy of Both Sides. NOW! in the past 24 hours. At a time when readers have so many choices of books to choose from, it’s heartening to know that some people are willing to take a chance on a writer they’ve never heard of, especially one who isn’t exactly a member of the mainstream. Thank you.

Both Sides. NOW! is the fourth novel I have written. Because I don’t write traditional heroic narratives, one of the things I find is that each work has a structure suited to the story I want to tell.

For example, Both Sides. NOW!, which is about what happens when everybody in the world changes sex, contains five chapters, each timed to the event. The first takes place the day of the change, then one week, one month, one year and, finally, one century later. The first chapter was meant to show how disruptive the change was; the second to fourth chapters were meant to show how people slowly adapted to the change, and; the final chapter, which takes place much later, was meant to show how traditional sex roles began to reassert themselves when most of the people who had lived through the change had died.

The structure of the novel is more complicated than that, though: each of the first four chapters is divided into ten sections. Each section within a chapter contains a different set of characters in a different place (to help unify the novel, some of the characters and motifs appear in more than one chapter). There were a couple of reasons for choosing this structure. The obvious one is that I wanted to capture as many different responses to the change as I could (since there would be as many responses as there are people living on the planet). Even so, I feel I have only scratched the surface of this fascinating subject.

The other reason has to do with a failing that I have found in some science fiction. Have you ever noticed that stories that deal with worldwide phenomena tend to focus almost entirely on North American or European characters and settings? The fact that people from other cultures would likely have different reactions to SF premises seems quite interesting to me, but we rarely see that in fiction written by western authors. The complex structure of Both Sides. NOW! allowed me to set parts of the story in places like Japan, China, India and Israel, in addition to a wide array of North American and European countries.

I think of Both Sides. NOW! as a kaleidoscopic novel, one that reflects this way or that depending upon which facet you’re reading at the time. It’s an odd structure, but one that I believe results in a very rich reading experience.