Especially if you're writing a book for National Novel Writing Month, every day of forward progress is vital — and if you realize your book lurched in the wrong direction 10,000 words ago, you're going to have a hell of a time going back and restarting from where you went wrong. But it's difficult for anybody to find that wrong-turn place and start over from there.

So we asked some of our favorite authors to suggest ways to get back on course after your story has done a slingshot around the wrong star. Here's what they suggested:

Brad Meltzer (author of The Tenth Justice, The Book Of Lies and Identity Crisis):

That's just process. Mark Twain said that when you're done writing, you throw out the first half, and what you have left is what's gold. So it's fine to veer off course. As long as you have the thick skin to recognize that everything must be edited and corrected and improved. Of course, that doesn't mean it'll be easy. There is no terror like the terror of realizing that all your work is for crap. But again, if it were easy, everyone would do it.

Cherie Priest (author of Boneshaker, Fathom and Those Who Went Remain There Still):

The most egregious time I ever had a novel go off-track was with one of my more recent books, FATHOM. In fact, it happened twice with that project. I kept getting two-thirds of the way finished with a draft ... and then I'd realize that it wasn't working. The parts just weren't coming together, and my attempts to force them were creating even worse problems. Finally I did what I should've done in the first place — I turned to my editor (who is awesome). I asked for an extension on the project and kept her on the phone for a couple of hours, bouncing ideas off her; and eventually I was able to sit down and hammer out a draft that worked much better — and the finished product is vastly improved for the editorial input and subsequent reboot. If it's broken, it's broken — and for me, anyway, there's nothing else to be done but trash it and start fresh. I'd advise anyone who's stuck to find a patient, insightful friend to ask for help, and try coming at the story from another angle next time. I know a few people who can reshape something from the ground up, but I'm just not one of them ... and that's a lesson I had to learn the hard way.

Rudy Rucker (author of Postsingular, Hylozoic, Mathematicians In Love, and the Ware tetralogy):

Making a major plot change in a novel isn't always as hard as one might imagine. After all, much of a story is descriptions, or dialog, or action scenes — and these tend to stay pretty much the same. The switchpoints where the plot emerges are really rather few and rather short. So changing the plot is maybe a little like acupuncture. You may might find there's only five or six spots that you need to zap, and that the changes may in fact be quite small. This always surprises me. What happens is that my conception of the story looms in the background and seems to imbue every scene, but in fact the stage-magic-fog of the conception is really only emerging from, as I say, five or six little nozzles, and its not so hard to tweak the nozzles. This said, there will be times that a whole scene needs to go, which can be a bit painful. In these cases, I save the excised chunk into my separate "Notes" document so that it's not totally lost. And when the novel comes out, I post my notes online anyway, so the scrap gets a kind of half-life as well.

Scott Westerfeld (author of Leviathan, Pretties, Uglies, Peeps, Midnighters and So Yesterday):

When you've made a huge wrong turn, it's important to broach the subject carefully with your subconscious. Don't sit down saying to yourself, "I'm going to rewrite the last 100 pages!" You'll freak out.

Instead, pretend you're merely taking a closer look at the fateful juncture. Maybe you'll just rewrite that ONE chapter where things went wrong, just to see what happens. Tell yourself that after making a few important changes, you'll be able to salvage most of the 100 pages since. And after those first changes are made, your brain will slowly become invested in the new state of affairs. After a while, you may actually WANT to make all the changes necessary, even if that means throwing out a month's work.

It's like any bad news: Don't come out with it all at once.

Scott Westerfeld and Justine Larbalestier are also giving invaluable writing tips for NaNoWriMo on their respective blogs, on alternate days. (Click on their names for the blog links.) Well worth checking out!

Marc Tyler Nobleman, author of Boys of Steel: The Creators of Superman, sheds light on what really happened to Siegel:

[Gerard Jones' non-fiction history of comics] Men of Tomorrow was the first published source to address the tragic end of Michael Siegel — but the book got a crucial detail wrong. Siegel did die during a robbery of his store, but not by gunshot. His heart failed. No wounds were on his body. A key plot device in Brad Meltzer's novel The Book of Lies (which I have not read) is the missing gun that allegedly killed Michael Siegel — but none of the four reports invoke the possibility of murder. According to the police report, "At no time were any blows struck or any weapons used."

And if you don't believe him, he's got the reports to prove it. While this doesn't change the heart of the creation story (Siegel still created a character who could have saved his father, after all), it does ruin the "torn from the headlines" aspect of Meltzer's new novel that, in part, centers around a search for the gun that killed Jerry Siegel's father. But then again, the novel is called The Book Of Lies.

The First Boys Of Steel Tour [Noblemania]

The charity was created by Brad Meltzer as a result of research into the life of Siegel for his new novel, The Book Of Lies, that uncovered just how badly that historic house had fallen into disrepair:

The house where Google was created is saved. The farm where Hewlett Packard was founded is preserved. And Richard Nixon’s house is a museum. But the house where Superman — one of the world’s most recognized heroes — was created? It’s a wreck. It's actually a great old house — painted bright red and blue (really) — and owned by one of the kindest elderly couples in the world. But as the neighborhood sank, so did the house. When you walk inside, you feel like your foot might go through the floor. The roof is flawed. The paint is a mess. When you look up at the ceiling, you see the exposed rafters overhead. It's a mess. Worst of all, the city of Cleveland let it happen. As the owner told me, “They won’t even give us a plaque. Not even a plaque to say, ‘This is where Superman was created.’”

Exactly.

Just heartbreaking.

To correct this, the Siegel & Shuster Society was created - Not only to save the house, but (via the Ordinary People Change The World website) to promote random acts of kindness... just like Superman would do. If that kind of thing isn't to your tastes, however, maybe you'd like to bid on some exclusive items created for a charity auction to raise money for the cause. Created by whom, you ask? Well, how do Stephen Colbert, Jim Lee, Brian Michael Bendis, Brad Meltzer, Geoff Johns, Richard Donner, Joe Quesada, Neil Gaiman, Alex Ross, Dave Gibbons, Jeph Loeb, Murphy Anderson, Ed Brubaker, John Cassaday, Gene Ha, Greg Rucka, George Perez, Michael Turner, Adam Kubert, Andy Kubert, Judd Winick, Frank Cho, Eric Powell, Tim Sale, Walt Simonson, Joe Staton, Eric Wight, Dave Mandel, Mike Mignola, Rags Morales, Bill Morrison, Ivan Reis, John Romita Jr., Jason Palmer, Amanda Conner, Geoff Darrow, Ron Garney, Renato Guedes, the cast and crew of Heroes, Dave Johnson, Chris Bachalo, Mike Bair, Allen Bellman, Dan Brereton, Ernie Chan, Travis Charest, and Ian Churchill sound? Oh, there's more:

Joanne Siegel told Meltzer that before Jerry Siegel died, he signed six Superman t-shirts that no one ever knew existed — and then told her that if their family ever needed money, she should sell the shirts. Instead, she donated one of them to be auctioned off here. The signature is on a Superman: Quest For Peace(!) t-shirt. C'mon, baby, it's Jerry Siegel on a Quest for Peace shirt!

You can find out more about the auction here, with the main site explaining the goals of the society here.

Let's get everyone else's books out of the way first, shall we? Dark Horse ask what may be the unexpected question of the week - "Who wants to relive Pamela Anderson's second-greatest hit?" - with their Barb Wire Omnibus release. But then they make up for it with the particularly awesome MySpace Dark Horse Presents anthology, collecting the best of the first year of their web anthology, including the deservedly award-winning Sugarshock by Joss Whedon and Fabio Moon. Image Comics are offering the first collection of their new-age illuminati supervillain book New World Order, and Marvel continue their alien war story with the first issue of Secret Invasion: Amazing Spider-Man. Much more interesting from the House of Ideas is the first issue of the third volume of Runaways or the first hardcover "omnibus" collection of Brian Michael Bendis' Daredevil run.

But, as I said, DC just plain have everyone else beat this week. They have the collection of mind-bending Duncan Rouleau's time-traveling robot Metal Men, which was completely underrated when originally released and will reward anyone willing to put the time and effort into it. Same goes for the Brave And The Bold: The Book Of Destiny collection, which features time travel, parallel worlds and more super-heroes than you can shake multiple sticks at.

If you're following the Final Crisis storyline, then you might want to check into Brad Meltzer's DC Universe: Last Will And Testament, which shows what happened to your favorite characters on the last night before Darkseid took over. Then skip over to Grant Morrison's sure-to-be-awesome Final Crisis: Superman Beyond, in which everyone's favorite corporate icon breaks free of reality's bounds in order to save his true love. (And if you find that Morrison's take on the Man of Steel agrees with you, then you should definitely pick up this week's paperback release of All-Star Superman, if you've somehow missed it until now.)

More Morrison can be found in the first hardcover re-release of his over-the-top JLA run, which features alien invasions, robots learning about humanity and the trouble with falling for your own dreams, all dispatched with humor and surprising speed. Somewhat stunningly, each of these - well, maybe with the exception of the Meltzer book, and that's only because of my personal distrust of any man who has a crush on Terra - is well worth your time and money. They're the kinds of books that reawaken your love of superheroes, science fiction or just comics that like to tackle their subjects with imagination and a sense of humor. Go forth and spend your hard-earned dollars with only a little bit of fear.

As you may have heard by this point, a full list of this week's books can be found here, and you can take that list to the comic books store closest to you... which you can locate by going here. Just remember to tell your local store clerk that, like Elvis, you were born standing up and talking back.