But I don’t just want to look like I’m pushing my own book. So that’s why today I’m talking about a really cool event being put on by a friend.

Gift one, get one is a promotion set up by Thomas A. Knight, the author of The Time Weaver, in order to mark the occasion of his birthday. You can find the details at his website – http://thomasaknight.com/blog.php?id=88.

The premise is simple:

• Buy a copy of one of the participating books as a gift for someone else: there are 12 books contributed by 6 different writers.
• Forward your receipt from Amazon to Thomas, as well as a selection from the list of 12 books.
• A free copy of the selected book will be forwarded to you.

 Simple. Fun.

Any kind of puzzle. Word puzzles. Number puzzles. You name it, I’ll try it.

I love sudoku. I like the way you gradually fill in the gaps, so the more numbers you put in, the more numbers you can then slot into place.

I love crosswords. I especially like cryptic crosswords, where each clue is like a little riddle that needs to be solved. It’s one of the most satisfying feelings when you can look at a cryptic crossword after every word has been successfully filled in.

I love jigsaw puzzles. Even really easy ones. If I see one, I’ll always try to do it. Except those really difficult ones where half of it is just sky – now that’s not fun, partly because it’s more like trial and error than real puzzle solving.

I think it’s just something about how my brain works. I see most of the things I do as puzzles that need to be solved.

It definitely affects my writing. I suppose thinking about a story in this way is one of the simplest methods around. You have a character + they have a problem + they find the solution to the problem = a story. Simple. Clear. If I analysed most of my stories, I think you’d find they conformed to that structure.

What I find really interesting though is that while my characters are busy trying to solve their problems, I’m in exactly the same position as a writer. I’m constantly writing myself into tricky spots, then having to figure out how to get out of them. Sometimes I think that I spend just as much time on problem-solving as my characters do – and that’s what I really enjoy about writing.

So far, I’ve always managed to figure it out. Sometimes, it’s been just in the nick of time. There have been many times when I’ve sat down to write a critical chapter with no idea how it’s going to pan out. And I refuse to allow myself to cheat. No additional characters coming in at the last minute. No deus ex machina. It’s up to the characters to figure it out based on what has already been established in the story. Often that’s even harder for me than it is for the characters.

I think that when it comes down to it, I see life as one big jigsaw puzzle, and the purpose of life is to put it all together. I know we’ll never have all the pieces, so it will never be completely finished. But you can still end up with a pretty good picture.

The Future of Independent Publishing

The digital craze that has grasped the minds of potential writers the world over appears to be something more nuanced, more original than at any other point in publishing history. That much is not in dispute. What is fascinating about such an idea, and all ideas that center on what publishing is going to do next, is something more foundational.

What do we mean when we say publishing?

Is there an entity to which we pay homage like the idols of the past (or present)? Or do we mean what is the normative trend in how writers publish their works at this given time? If it is the former, I hope that you can see through my thinly veiled sarcasm and see that it was meant as a jape. I imagine, if I am to correctly collect the collective consciousness of writers united, that we mean to work out the trend that currently afflicts how we seek out the publication of our stories––the great labors of love into which hours, day, weeks, and years are poured.

I see the future of our great collected endeavor doing what it has done since the inception of thought to print: it will continue. There is but a single constant in this vast universe and that is change. Independent publishing will change; hark, it has already changed from the black mark of POD and vanity publishing to something more promising––a participatory jungle of would-be writers swinging about on vines like Burroughs’ brilliant character before Disney turned him into a grunting hippie.

Writers in this climate must examine themselves first: understand what it is about them as individuals that make them worth listening to. When we have overcome the suffocating fear of introspection, the deeper examination of what skills we might deploy to achieve our goals become forefront in our mind. There is much more, but that is the stuff of another book that a business colleague and I are writing.

To sum it up: success comes from within mediated by sound and calculated choices executed toward a clear end. The fine proprietor of this blog was kind enough to allow to rant from a spell, and I have done so, albeit briefly. Here are some tidbits that this writer would like to see you help with:

I have launched a Kickstarter that at this moment is a far cry from being funded. A science fiction and fantasy epic with proper illustrations from a frustrated and brilliant artist is what awaits you, were you of course to extend the most meager of donations.

A Kickstarter Needs Funding

With that, I bid you adieu.

If you wish to learn more about me and my ramblings, search no more.

About the author

A psychologist, author, philosopher, freelance editor, and skeptic, Dan O’Brien has published several novels and currently has many in print, including: The End of the World Playlist, Bitten, The Journey, The Ocean and the Hourglass, The Portent, The Path of the Fallen, Book of Seth, and Cerulean Dreams. Follow him on Twitter (@AuthorDanOBrien) or visit his blog at http://thedanobrienproject.blogspot.com.

He has recently started a literary and publishing consulting business to help writers navigate the digital jungle. Find out more about Amalgam: http://www.amalgamconsulting.com/

Did it make any difference? Did all of those posts describing the various rules and regulations for writing disappear on the spot? Did it immediately stop the posting of any further advice of this nature?

Of course it didn’t. Since then, I’ve seen lots more posts of this nature. Do this and do that. This is what makes good writing. And so on and so on and so on.

So, in the spirit of ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’, I’ve decided it’s time for me to post my five key rules about writing.

Here we go:

1. Don’t give your books cryptic names that don’t help readers make sense out of them. Names like Doodling and Scribbling and Magnus Opum. Let’s face it, they’re just plain silly.
2. Don’t confuse people by mixing genres – especially adding humour into the mix. Think of fantasy for instance – we all know it’s meant to be big and grand and serious. Adding jokes just makes it all sound silly.
3. Don’t write something with broad appeal across age groups. Adults read adult books and kids read kids books. There’s no crossover allowed. As for all those grownups reading Harry Potter on the train, well they’re obviously a figment of your imagination.
4. Don’t write the things you want to write. There’s a whole audience out there. Actually, it’s not an audience, it’s a market (or so I’ve been told). You better go and find out exactly what they want to read before you begin writing a word. Maybe you’d better ask each one individually. And there sure are a lot of them, so you’d better get started.
5. I couldn’t think of a fifth rule, but everyone knows rules have to come in multiples of five. You can’t have four rules of anything. Nobody’s going to pay attention to that. So just to ensure you pay attention to the rules above, I’ve added this non-existent fifth rule.

There you have it. The five clear, inarguable rules for writing. Now that you’ve read them, please feel free to completely ignore them.

In that post, I mentioned that I wasn’t having any problems with writer’s block. In fact, at the moment I seem to be having the opposite problem.

I’m not sure what you’d call it. Writer’s unblock? No, too boring. Writer’s diarrhea? That’s kind of disgusting.

Whatever you might want to call it, it’s still a problem. I just can’t stop the ideas flowing. At the moment, as I’ve already mentioned more than a number of times, I have three works in progress:

• The new Neville Lansdowne story
• My detective story
• My other YA-ish fantasy story (to be honest, I’ve got no idea how to categorise it).

That’s three different stories that are constantly percolating through my head. Three different sets of ideas. And that’s not all.

Every day, no matter what I’m doing, I’ll get more ideas coming in. Ideas for long stories and short stories and stories of any length in between. When I’m sitting down to eat or travelling on the tram or (especially) when I’m trying to get to sleep, they just creep up and pounce.

I don’t know what to do about them all. I try to keep records and write them all down, but I know I’ll never get the chance to work on them all. And when you get so many, it gets really hard to figure out which are the good ones worth following up and which are the ones better left alone.

I need more time. I need another me, so I can get more work done. I need my brain to just slow down a bit and stop throwing all these new ideas at me.

I think what I really need is a good dose of writer’s block.