What will the proposed Penguin/Random House publishing merger mean for readers and writers? Although it's tempting to predict the coming literary apocalypse, the actual answer is that it's too soon to tell.

Each of these publishing houses is vast and convoluted in its own right. Penguin, regarded as the junior partner in this deal, itself has a fistful of well known imprints, including Viking and Penguin Paperbacks, along with audiobooks, the Rough Guide travel series, and the very highly regarded Dorling Kindersley children's books imprint. These brands are unlikely to disappear, because this kind of name recognition isn't to be discarded lightly. Random House, the merger's senior partner, bills itself as the world's largest English language trade publisher, and I doubt you could find a lot of evidence to refute that.

What's most likely to happen in the short run, over the next year, is that the editorial staffs of both houses will be consolidated, and that means layoffs. I speak from my own experience as part of the copy editing department for Harcourt General's school department during its merger with Houghton Mifflin back in 2007. Within a year of the merger, the Harcourt copy editing department was dissolved in favor of HM's department. Similar whole-scale layoffs happened throughout the editorial departments of both companies, resulting in a final, greatly reduced editorial staff. If this business plan is put into place in the Penguin/Random House merger, the resulting smaller editing departments may mean that some of the two publishers' similar imprints (for example, Del Rey or Roc) will be combined in fact if not in name.

Prior to their merger, Harcourt and Houghton Mifflin were competitors in the textbook market. The textbook market is finite, and unrelated publishing houses vie for the purchasing power of the increasingly limited number of school districts that still rely on hardcopy textbooks as the primary instructional medium. Consolidate these publishers, and there's no reason to put out more than one product in each specialized area. Trade publishing (fiction and nonfiction) doesn't have this kind of direct competition, but it is susceptible to the same economic and manpower pressures as any other company. If, as I saw happen with Harcourt/Houghton Mifflin, the editorial staffs of Penguin/Random House are combined and downsized, there will probably simply be less incentive to put out books in less-profitable genres. This may mean that the larger, combined publisher will actually be putting out fewer genre titles (cookbooks and juvenilia as well as sci fi and fantasy) than both did separately. But without knowing what kinds of changes to the imprints are coming, or seeing a 2013 publishing schedule, there isn't any way to predict what kinds of genre publishing will be affected, or to what extent.

What the merger probably does mean is that a downsized combined editorial group will be a smaller conduit for the same pool of potential manuscripts. As big publishing contracts, it will offer fewer opportunities for unknown or midlist authors. But this has been the case in big publishing for a decade or so. The Random House/Penguin merger isn't going to bring the sky down on our heads just yet. All of the tools at a writer's disposal for getting work in front of readers still exist; new and midlist authors will be affected by this merger, yes, but perhaps by a statistically minuscule amount. Most of us weren't going to sign with Viking, anyway.

Keep writing.

I also got some very good advice from the greatly admirable Rob Heinsoo. Rob told me that you need to be able to write the middle and the end of the story before you get there, so that you know where you're going as you write the parts that connect them.

I get that there are writers who feel that outlining leaches the creativity out of writing for them, but I find this idea very appealing, and challenging. It's not outlining; it's having the story firmly in your head as you write it.

Recently, I've gotten astonishingly good advice from people I respect greatly as writers and as human beings.

Erin Evans (who, I'm excited to learn, is taking freelance editing jobs now) sent me this advice in response to my moaning about how nobody wants to buy my work and I'm cranky and I've gotten stuck trying to write a story for a dieselpunk anthology and writing is just hard, dammit!

I feel like, in my development as a writer, I have noticed phases where my critical faculties outstrip my creative ones and shit gets super frustrating. I know it's happening because I hate just about everything I read. Often I also hate everything I write--but sometimes I just feel like I am spinning my wheels while no one gets what I am clearly saying. During the very, very worst bout of this I was in a critique group and remember having this maddening conversation about a piece I was basically mangling into nonsense because I couldn't articulate what it was I wanted this character to do. Around the same time I was slamming some really well-regarded authors, not really realizing who they were or why they were well-regarded.
 
BUT all that awkward nonsense was a prelude to a serious jump in my writing abilities once I worked through it. So now, when that shit starts and I'm all like "What is all this garbage Asimov's is publishing these days?" and I keep rewriting the same fucking scene because I cannot make it look right, I know it's probably another jump coming.

Encouraging, isn't it? I'm struck by the idea of my critical faculties outstripping my creative ones, because that's exactly how I feel right now. I'm reaching for a voice and a flow of language that I know is inside me; I just have to keep chipping away until it comes out. Or write my million words or crap. Or something.

And then she gave me some specific advice for getting past the parts where I feel stuck writing crap, or not able to write at all.

What usually works for me in these patches is:

1) Write something totally throwaway. Rewrite something as something else (switch POVs, switch tenses, write it as flash fiction, a poem). Do a writing exercise that's got nothing to do with what you're working on. Just write that story as BADLY as you can. PUSH OUT ALL THE GARBAGE. 

2) Make yourself figure out why people like the awful thing you're reading. Especially if it's popular. Because seriously, people don't like shit because it's shitty, right? SOMETHING in there is working. Put those hyperactive critical faculties to work. 

3) Whine a lot. And get somewhat gentle feedback.

I've been thinking a lot about #2 in that list. Why do so many people read 50 Shades of Gray, or Bridges of Madison County, or anything written by Dan Brown?

What? No, I don't have any answers for that! But thinking about it is a useful exercise, and makes me realize that maybe what really counts is writing a good story, whatever your genre or voice. After all, as readers aren't we willing to forgive a little POV overlap, or some passive construction, when we're reading a ripping good story? A perfectly crafted story is what we think our writing groups want, or what we think the magazines or the open calls we submit to want. But this might not be the most important thing to readers, who are (remember?) our real audience.

Tell your story as well as you're able. Write more. Get better.