I'm Christopher Husberg, fantasy author (of the Chaos Queen Series), desultory blogger, and zombie apologist. Also Buffy fanatic. Ballroom danced a bit. Etc.
If you thought Fear the Stars was the only Christopher Husberg release this year, think again!
I've also got a short story coming out in the Parallel Worlds: The Heroes Within anthology!
Parallel Worlds is an awesome collection put together by the phenomenal writers L.J. Hachmeister and R.R. Virdi, and as you can see from the cover, it includes stories from a number of exceptional authors, including Jody Lynn Nye, Christopher Rucchio, D.J. Butler, and a new, never-before-seen Dresden Files story from Jim Butcher.
It's going to be awesome.
I'm excited about my entry into the anthology. It is NOT a Chaos Queen story (or a story related to any of the other projects I've been teasing--this is something completely different and new), but sort of an epistolary post-apocalyptic existential crisis story with monsters. So, if that sounds up your alley, or any of the above authors strike your fancy, pre-order the anthology (it'll be officially available 8 October of this year).
Pre-orders are actually going quite well so far--we're already at #1 for Fantasy and SF Anthologies, and #541 of all books sold on Amazon. So, that's neat. (Also, right now it's only available in ebook format, but we're working on a print version if that's what you'd prefer. Stay tuned for more news on that.)
I'm hosting an AMA (Ask Me Anything) over at the r/fantasy subreddit all day today, so if you have any burning questions for me (Who is the Chaos Queen? Why do I like Taylor Swift so much? Whose blood did I drink to become so awesome? etc.!), head on over and ask them! Also upvote the post, if you don't mind, so more people can see it :-D.
And, of course, we've got the release day event tonight at Weller Book Works in Salt Lake City! If you're in the Utah area, come on by! Starting at 6:30 PM we'll do a reading, a Q&A, and a signing. There will probably be official Fear the Stars t-shirts and other swag. It'll be fun time.
I'm very excited for Fear the Stars to reach the public. I love this book, it's my favorite I've written so far, and I can't wait for everyone to read it!
The #metoo movement has started making waves in the publishing industry, and you can find all sorts of opinions on it.
Janci Patterson, author and all aroundawesome human being, shared her experience, and it is worth reading in every way, no matter who you are. She doesn't just share her experience with harassment, but also through the process of healing. I'm grateful for her courage and the change posts like this can bring about in the writing industry, and in the world. This kind of thing heals, and helps us be better.
Well, it’s Tuesday, which means I’m going to post another How I Got Published* thing! Let me tell you, however, that this was not the post I intended on writing. Funny how things work out that way. Either way, here ya go!
~
Writing for a living has been something I’ve had my eye on for some time, now. I’ll spare you the soporific details, but my love of writing began with my days writing fanfiction in elementary and middle school—and, of course, reading all sorts of amazing books.
I wrote a lot growing up, and I started writing even more in college, where the desire to do the writing thing for a living sort of congealed. By the time I graduated with a degree in English, I was pretty sure that’s what I wanted to do for a living. But, I had one major issue:
I still hadn’t finished a book.
Oh, I’d started books. I’d started at least half a dozen between middle school and high school, and in college I’d started (with slightly more serious attempts…that still got nowhere) three or four more. All in all I’d started about ten novels, and other than some scraps of world-building, a few opening chapters, and some character bios, had nothing to show for it.
Which isn’t to say I hadn’t finished anything—in college I remember reading an interview with GRRM where he said that the best thing a beginning writer could do was write short stories. So that’s what I did. I wrote not quite a dozen short stories/novelettes during my undergrad, and not quite a dozen more afterwards.
All of this is to say that, for me, the desire to write had been ingrained in my psyche for quite some time. And while we focus a great deal on the discipline and process of writing (and finishing!) books—as we should, because that’s really where the magic happens, isn’t it?—sometimes we neglect that first, catalytic sentiment of desire. Because I generally don’t do things I don’t like to do. If I don’t like hiking, I’m probably not going to vacation in a National Park. If I don’t like heights, I’m probably not going skydiving. And if I don’t like writing, or if I don’t like reading, or if I decide I don’t like a certain idea that’s been forming a story I’ve been working on, I’m probably not going to write.
So, for me, that was the first and one of the absolute most important steps towards writing a novel, finishing a novel, finding an agent, and ultimately getting published. I had to have a desire to write something. That desire comes from different places for me at different times; sometimes it’s from a story that feels so personal, or so poignant, or so epic, that I can't help but write it down. Sometimes it’s a desire for other people to read and be interested in the thing that I wrote, because it contains ideas or concepts that may be meaningful to me, or because I simply want to connect with others** (writing and reading, I’ve found, is a fantastic way to connect with other people, other circumstances, other ways of life and points of view). Sometimes it’s a desire to reveal the characters themselves, to introduce them to everyone else I know and love, or to people I don’t know simply because I know and love the characters.
What matters is that there’s almost always some kind of driving desire behind what I’m writing. That doesn’t mean I don’t have off days; writing is work, after all, and every day can sometimes be a struggle just to get words on the page. But one of the things—and sometimes the only thing—that keeps my butt in the chair and my hands on the keyboard is this desire.
If you’re reading this and are looking to write a novel or be published someday, or if you already have been published, I know you’ve felt the desire I’m talking about. The scary thing about this desire is that I, as a writer, have never outgrown it. As far as I can tell, it is always going to be a necessary ingredient to my writing. But here’s a fortunate thing: if I can sit down and start typing, that desire always, always comes. It’s one of the many happy miracles of writing, and being a writer.
** As Stephen King said is his book On Writing, writing and reading are perhaps the only real-world way we have to communicate telepathically: I have an idea in my head, and I sent the general concept of that idea into your head without speaking to you or showing you anything or even knowing who you are. Magic!
Writing, at least in my particular genre, is a wonderful thing. Most writers that I've met, published or not, seem to accept that the business is not a zero-sum game--just because one author does well and sells a lot of books does not mean that he or she takes sales away from another author. While this may be the case on occasion, for the most part the opposite tends to be true: if an author is selling well in a certain genre, chances are that particular genre as a whole is going to sell well. George R.R. Martin exemplifies this at the moment: more people are reading fantasy now than ever, and that's in part because the TV series based on his books is so freaking popular right now, which means his books are selling more than ever, which means fantasy is selling more than ever, etc.
Most authors I've met understand this, and therefore have a very generous, pay-it-forward, give-it-back kind of attitude. Writers who find success--even small amounts of success--tend to give back in many ways, from writing articles online that might be helpful to new writers to teaching classes to attending conferences and sitting on panels to creating podcasts and holding workshops and more. The writing retreat I went to a few weeks ago was a form of this: a great author and an awesome guy decided to open up his home to a few fellow authors, some of them (ok, mainly one of them--me) being rather green, but he had the resources and was willing to do it, and that's pretty cool I know it was something for which I was grateful.
Of course, there are other motives for doing these things than simply helping fellow authors. Like most things we do as human beings, a host of different stimuli drive us to any given action; a lot of the aforementioned things help the writers hosting them them to gain some publicity, network more, etc. While that's certainly a perk, from what I've seen and heard from most writers I know, that sort of benefit is mostly a happy accident. Because everyone, more or less, has to go through the same gauntlet (or a gauntlet of one kind or another)--every author I know got to where they are because other authors before them paved the way, gave them advice, taught them a class, introduced them to an agent, or something. So paying it forward seems to be the thing to do, and I guess that's pretty cool.
Yeah. Anyway.
This leads me to two things: (1) I chose a great business to participate in, so, pat on the back for me! and (2) I suppose it's never too early to start this paying-it-forward stuff, so I think I'll begin my first attempt now.
Basically, I'd like to start a new series on this blog that talks about how I got published. Something I searched for often but rarely found were stories of authors getting published, what exactly they did, how things worked, etc. There is a lot of advice out there, don't get me wrong, but there's not a lot of, I don't know, just people sort of straight-up talking about their experience.
I'd like to do that.
I mean, I'm not going to go into any excruciating detail or anything, or talk specifics about people I interacted with (especially not anyone with whom it went or ended badly). But I do just want to share how the process worked for me--what I did wrong, what I did right, what did and did not help, and so forth. I know I would've liked to read something like that when I was researching the industry, so hopefully this can be helpful to some of those up-and-coming types that might stumble across my blog.
So, without further ado, I present to you my blog series "How I Got Published." I'm planning to put up a new post on this every Tuesday (because hey, at least it'll motivate me to blog more if nothing else), roughly following but certainly not limited to this outline:
Writing a Novel
Finishing a Novel
Revising a Novel
Writing Groups and Alpha/Beta Readers
A Ready (not finished!) Manuscript
Conventions and Conferences
Networking (or: being nice)
Getting an Agent
Waiting
Writing While You Wait
Finding a Publisher
More Waiting
More Writing (and Revising) While You Wait
Getting Published
I'll be honest, I'm excited to explore this series. My experience has been typical in many ways and less typical in many more, and I'm interested to see how that all comes out in writing. I'm happy to share my experience, and hope that it, in some way, does help some of you aspiring writers out there. And, once you get your break, hopefully you can do the same.
Let it henceforth be known that I, Christopher Husberg, shall have a novel, published and in bookstores and on Amazon and everything, in 2016!
I'm ecstatic to announce that Duskfall, book one of the Chaos Queen Series, will hit shelves roughly eighteen months from now, published by Titan Books, and I couldn't be happier about it...
...
...except for the fact that they're actually going to publish all five books in the series*, ZOMG YOU GUYS CAN YOU EVEN BELIEVE IT?!?!
So, basically, this is PHENOMENAL news and everything is wonderful and life is full of roses and smooth baby bottoms no wait that's not right life is as smooth as a baby's bottom yes that's what I meant because a life full of baby bottoms would be weird anyway if a picture is worth a thousand words than a gif is worth a thousand pictures right so that's like a million words so here's a few million words worth of me being excited:
Whew. Okay, I think that's out of my system. Anyway, I'm excited, there will be a whole lot more news to come, everything is awesome (oh, I should have done THAT gif!), etc. etc., yay and such.
* A book a year, beginning next year! Yay! Except...wait...a book a year, that's 150-200k words per book, which means...maths are hard, wait, it means...it means...
