The Future of Books

Fiction Matters sums up my suspicions about the future of tree books after ebooks become the norm. Tree books will remain, but they will be expensive, high quality objects d’art, mainly for collectors and book lovers. The analogy is to records.

Research

Research — and its counterpart, worldbuilding — used to be my greatest joy in writing. Recently, I often feel so pressured to add beans to the wordcount, I don’t feel I can afford to luxuriate in research as I used to.
The project I’m working on now is research-intensive. I thought I’d done most of the research already, working on a non-fiction piece.
However, as I’ve  started working on a detailed outline, I’ve realized the needs of non-fiction and fiction diverge greatly. For non-fiction, I mostly needed to know when, where and who. With those facts, I can speculate on why. For fiction I need to answer much more about how. How did it smell? How did it look? How did it taste? Only then can I speculate on how it felt.
My outline/draft so far is peppered with notes to myself: [NEED: description of a fishing ship] All of these notes are promises to myself to do research. 
Characters require research too. Names must fit the culture and period. Every character, even minor ones, needs a rough biography, and the major characters need a study with all their likes, dislikes, habits, childhood friends, mannerisms and so on. These character quirks cannot be simply drawn from my own circle of friends or my own imagination. Neither my personal experience nor my imagination is adequate to the task. I need to read real biographies, and draw inspiration from those. More research.
My husband points out I could research forever and never be satisfied. He may be right. But I’ve also found research to be the best antedote to writer’s block. Sometimes, after deep reading of some fascinating culture, historical event or real person, I find myself so inspired I have to write down my own response, transformed into fiction.
How much research do you do in order to write your stories?

What’s in a Pen Name?


An author by any other pen name would write as sweet. But she might not make as much money.

I have a confession. Tara Maya is a pen name. My real name has a lot of syllables. I decided ages ago — in my year abroad in college, to be precise — I needed a pen name. Mostly I was too shy to face the idea of anyone knowing I was an author, but partly I thought a nice, short name could be written in a larger font on a paperback. 😉
I’m over the shyness and who even knows if there will still be paperbacks by the time any of my writing sees print. Furthermore, I discovered the downside to a pen name. It isn’t your real name. I know. Duh. But I wasn’t thinking about the importance of social networking, or any other kind of marketing, back when I decided to start writing under a pseudonym. 

Why not just start using my real name? Well, for one thing, now I’m married, so that’s changed anyway. Another thing, I’ve been participating in writer’s groups, submitting to agents and have even been published under Tara Maya. To the extent anyone knows I exist as a writer at all, they know me as Tara Maya.
Oh, right, unless of course they know me by my other pen name. Yeah, I have two. I’ve published under that one too. I have a blog for the other pen name too, but I hardly ever write in it (what, hardly ever? well, never) because I prefer to write in this blog.
Therein lies the other big problem with pen names. The more you have, the more time you have to spend separately marketing each one. What a bother.
On to my question. Should I write my new book under a different name — my real name, for instance?
I know, I know, I just said it was a bother to have more than one, so why would I want three?
One word: genre.
As Tara Maya, I write science fiction and fantasy. My other pen name writes steamy romance. The new book I’m working on isn’t in either of those genres. It’s a mainstream novel. Historical, I suppose, would be the closest genre, although this particular book only takes place about ten years ago.
Any thoughts?
(The art is by roz-red from deviant art.)
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