Yay, NaNoWriMo is almost over!
Oh, crap--that means NaNoWriMo is almost over.
Yes, I know that sounded redundant, but those of you who've done this extreme writing sport will get the difference.
And nope, I'm probably not going to win NaNo this year.
I mean, look, I know I could. Win it, that is. I'm currently at 37K words, ish, I can probably write 13K words in a single day; heck, I've written 15K words in a single day before. So with a long, long day tomorrow of blasting through words, I could win.
That, or I could cheat. See, I used to teach software tricks for a living. Back when it was Excel 5, I could show you how to get into the flight simulator. Or, was it a maze? I can't recall any more, and any copies of that software have long since been relegated to the trash heap. But yeah, I used to know all the tricks, and even today I know most of them.
Microsoft Word has something ready-made for the NaNo'er who wants to win no matter what. It's the randomizer function. Back in the old days, it used to give you x number of "The quick brown fox jumps over..." sentences in y number of paragraphs, which generates a crapton of words in mere moments. Later they changed it to create a bunch of Latin wordsmut, but these days it's just boring Help tutorial words. It's still x number of sentences in y number of paragraphs, though, and the command looks like this:
=rand(x,y)
G'head, try it. Open a blank document and type it in there, only replacing x and y with numbers. Turns out I need an x of 25 and a y of 30 to finish my NaNoNovel right now. In fact, with an x of 100 and a y of 100, I can get over 200K words, composed in about 30 seconds. Woo hoo! A whole novel, written in 14 keystrokes (fifteen, technically, since we should count the pressing of the Enter key after).
How's that for automation, eh?
Only, it's not a story. It's just words. They're not fun to read. There's really no reason to even waste the bits on my computer, much less pages on a printer, on drivel like that. So yeah, just--.
No.
I'm simply not gonna do it.
That's not to say my story isn't worth finishing, mind you. It's a pretty awesome story, with a pretty awesome protagonist who's going through some pretty horrible stuff right now as I write one of the pivotal chapters. I'm really enjoying writing this, to tell the truth.
The thing is, there's plenty I can blame my not winning NaNoWriMo on. Most of it is external, too. But you know what? The only person who really cares whether I win NaNo or not is me, anyway. Those who read my books don't care; they just (generally) want me to get more out there to read as quickly as possible. Which is, I have to add real quickly, part of why I stopped blogging so much--I've been focusing on getting drafts done.
But this manuscript takes some effort, and some research, and some harsh emotional trauma, to finish. I was in tears a little earlier, in fact, writing about--well, no plot spoilers here. Later, when you read the book, you'll know it when you see it.
So, sorry, but I probably won't be a 2014 NaNoWriMo winner.
Ah, well. You're really going to like this story, anyway.
- TOSK
Saturday, November 29, 2014
Monday, November 24, 2014
The Cover Counts!
I'm so excited!
Most of you reading this know that I've been pretty proud of the learning curve I've beaten down in regards to making my own covers for the books. What started as a pretty pitiful attempt has, I think, gotten better and better, to the point where the cover for Prophecy had some people oohing and ahhing at RavenCon. And so, I was happy.
Prophecy has been well reviewed, too--three of the four reviews to date come from the pros, bloggers who just review books. 4.5 bits of happiness out of 5 ain't bad, then.
So why, then, wasn't it selling?
One of the things I remember learning from my marketing class in the MBA program was that if stuff isn't working--well, change it. Do something. So I started looking, and kept hanging back on where one of the reviewers had called my cover "confusing."
Huh? Confusing? Hey, I didn't count, but I'm pretty sure I spent well over 100 hours on it. I'm not confused. Still, I wondered what that could mean, so I went to my friends on Facebook for their wisdom, and learned that the reviewer was right. The cover was confusing. My daughter, beautiful artist that she is, focuses on anime style, and so the cover suggested an anime type of story rather than the coming-of-age story set in a mystical land of elves that it is.
Oh--yeah--blinding flash of the obvious--I sees it now.
So I redesigned it quickly, working with just the graphic of an object that is central to the story, and it still didn't take off.
*sigh*
Enter my friend, Renee Barratt, of TheCoverCounts.com. Once I'd finally admitted that I couldn't make a
cover good enough to wrap around the awesome story inside the book, I asked her for help. She stepped up in a big way, I think, and I'm excited to brag that today the new cover stands proudly on the "shelf" of Amazon.com, looking for you to purchase it!
Click on the link below the cover image to go see it. Oh, and as a special thankfulness kinda thing, it being that week and all, I'm lowering the price to just $0.99--less than the cost of a soda. But you have to be quick, as Amazon will only let me do that for a short period of time.
Enjoy!
- TOSK
Most of you reading this know that I've been pretty proud of the learning curve I've beaten down in regards to making my own covers for the books. What started as a pretty pitiful attempt has, I think, gotten better and better, to the point where the cover for Prophecy had some people oohing and ahhing at RavenCon. And so, I was happy.
Prophecy has been well reviewed, too--three of the four reviews to date come from the pros, bloggers who just review books. 4.5 bits of happiness out of 5 ain't bad, then.
So why, then, wasn't it selling?
One of the things I remember learning from my marketing class in the MBA program was that if stuff isn't working--well, change it. Do something. So I started looking, and kept hanging back on where one of the reviewers had called my cover "confusing."
Huh? Confusing? Hey, I didn't count, but I'm pretty sure I spent well over 100 hours on it. I'm not confused. Still, I wondered what that could mean, so I went to my friends on Facebook for their wisdom, and learned that the reviewer was right. The cover was confusing. My daughter, beautiful artist that she is, focuses on anime style, and so the cover suggested an anime type of story rather than the coming-of-age story set in a mystical land of elves that it is.
Oh--yeah--blinding flash of the obvious--I sees it now.
So I redesigned it quickly, working with just the graphic of an object that is central to the story, and it still didn't take off.
*sigh*
Enter my friend, Renee Barratt, of TheCoverCounts.com. Once I'd finally admitted that I couldn't make a
Click on the link below the cover image to go see it. Oh, and as a special thankfulness kinda thing, it being that week and all, I'm lowering the price to just $0.99--less than the cost of a soda. But you have to be quick, as Amazon will only let me do that for a short period of time.
Enjoy!
- TOSK
Saturday, November 1, 2014
NaNoWriMo: More On Plotting
More on plotting....
Or is that moron plotting? C'mon, go with me here....
As I sit ready for an explosion of Trick-or-Treaters to come by, and also checking regularly to see my classmates' pictures on Facebook as they all (but me) enjoy the 25th reunion of The West Point Class of 1989, I can't help but think on past and future and present and plotting and--well, stuff.
See, the reason I'm not there is that I haven't yet found another job after my position was eliminated last spring. I've come awfully close. I've turned down a couple that weren't good fits. I've taken one, briefly, that I should'a turned down. I have things working--irons in the fire, so to speak--and I'm thinking my situation is about to change. It just didn't change in time to make the reunion.
Ah, well, there's always Facebook, right?
Through the (seemingly) countless job interviews, though, it's been interesting how many times I've been asked questions beginning with "Why did you...." Why did I leave Alaska? Why did I leave Biloxi after only a year? Why did I go to Richmond? Why did I approach a retention problem the way I did? Why would a college think that laying off an Academic Dean was a good idea?
I have to come up with an answer that is truthful while still being positive and upbeat and professional. I can't, in other words, say what I'd like to say sometimes: "Well, I made what was, in retrospect, a dumb-ass move."
Actually, I can. I did, in fact, once when I was feeling overly tired. Not in those specific words, but it was about that level of humph. And, as you can imagine, it went over like an audible expulsion of human gaseous waste during a religious ceremony. *sigh*
But it happens, and it happens to everybody. We all do stuff--in our personal lives as well as our professional lives--that, later on, would be rather tough to explain in a positive, professional manner in a job interview. Right?
I've said other dumb things, too. I nearly had one position; I'd already interviewed with a couple of recruiters, several executives, and others, and was on my very last interview, talking to the guy who was going to be my future boss. Only, I had an absolutely craptastical morning, and wasn't at my top game, and (insert any other excuse you'll grace me with here), and he asked me what I did to relieve stress. Now, I could've truthfully answered all sorts of ways. I take my family on walks in the park. I listen to music. I play computer games. I write. And I actually did say: "Well, I write." That wasn't the most targeted response, since the guy I was talking to was more of an athletic sort, but it would've been fine if I hadn't added, "I like to write so that I can kill people."
The silence that ensued was absolutely chilling.
Now, wait a sec--this is something we writers joke about all the time. Somebody ticks us off, they're going to get killed off in our next writing session. You just have to expect that, if you do something to make a writer angry. You won't feel any effects, of course; it's pure stress relief for the fiction writer. After all, it is, in fact, only fiction.
That said, writers shouldn't ever talk about that outside of writing circles. Especially not on a job interview, where the guy at the other end of the phone is immediately going to put you in the bin with Freddy Krueger. Bad, bad, bad TOSK....
No, I didn't get that job; it was filled by "another candidate." Probably one who didn't admit to writing for the purpose of killing people, I'd say. Life is like that sometimes, right?
So what does this have to do with plotting? Well, see, I've always had this problem. I'm writing along, and my main character really needs to do something stupid to advance the plot line, and I don't want to do it. It's stupid, after all. Who does stupid stuff? Who blurts stupid stuff out at the wrong time?
Oh, right--I do.
I do it all the time.
Why, then, wouldn't main characters behave just as stupidly as I have on my worst days?
I--um--well, I just don't know.
- TOSK
Or is that moron plotting? C'mon, go with me here....
As I sit ready for an explosion of Trick-or-Treaters to come by, and also checking regularly to see my classmates' pictures on Facebook as they all (but me) enjoy the 25th reunion of The West Point Class of 1989, I can't help but think on past and future and present and plotting and--well, stuff.
See, the reason I'm not there is that I haven't yet found another job after my position was eliminated last spring. I've come awfully close. I've turned down a couple that weren't good fits. I've taken one, briefly, that I should'a turned down. I have things working--irons in the fire, so to speak--and I'm thinking my situation is about to change. It just didn't change in time to make the reunion.
Ah, well, there's always Facebook, right?
Through the (seemingly) countless job interviews, though, it's been interesting how many times I've been asked questions beginning with "Why did you...." Why did I leave Alaska? Why did I leave Biloxi after only a year? Why did I go to Richmond? Why did I approach a retention problem the way I did? Why would a college think that laying off an Academic Dean was a good idea?
I have to come up with an answer that is truthful while still being positive and upbeat and professional. I can't, in other words, say what I'd like to say sometimes: "Well, I made what was, in retrospect, a dumb-ass move."
Actually, I can. I did, in fact, once when I was feeling overly tired. Not in those specific words, but it was about that level of humph. And, as you can imagine, it went over like an audible expulsion of human gaseous waste during a religious ceremony. *sigh*
But it happens, and it happens to everybody. We all do stuff--in our personal lives as well as our professional lives--that, later on, would be rather tough to explain in a positive, professional manner in a job interview. Right?
I've said other dumb things, too. I nearly had one position; I'd already interviewed with a couple of recruiters, several executives, and others, and was on my very last interview, talking to the guy who was going to be my future boss. Only, I had an absolutely craptastical morning, and wasn't at my top game, and (insert any other excuse you'll grace me with here), and he asked me what I did to relieve stress. Now, I could've truthfully answered all sorts of ways. I take my family on walks in the park. I listen to music. I play computer games. I write. And I actually did say: "Well, I write." That wasn't the most targeted response, since the guy I was talking to was more of an athletic sort, but it would've been fine if I hadn't added, "I like to write so that I can kill people."
The silence that ensued was absolutely chilling.
Now, wait a sec--this is something we writers joke about all the time. Somebody ticks us off, they're going to get killed off in our next writing session. You just have to expect that, if you do something to make a writer angry. You won't feel any effects, of course; it's pure stress relief for the fiction writer. After all, it is, in fact, only fiction.
That said, writers shouldn't ever talk about that outside of writing circles. Especially not on a job interview, where the guy at the other end of the phone is immediately going to put you in the bin with Freddy Krueger. Bad, bad, bad TOSK....
No, I didn't get that job; it was filled by "another candidate." Probably one who didn't admit to writing for the purpose of killing people, I'd say. Life is like that sometimes, right?
So what does this have to do with plotting? Well, see, I've always had this problem. I'm writing along, and my main character really needs to do something stupid to advance the plot line, and I don't want to do it. It's stupid, after all. Who does stupid stuff? Who blurts stupid stuff out at the wrong time?
Oh, right--I do.
I do it all the time.
Why, then, wouldn't main characters behave just as stupidly as I have on my worst days?
I--um--well, I just don't know.
- TOSK
Thursday, October 30, 2014
NaNoWriMo: Blowing Stuff Up
"Remember, remember!
The fifth of November,
The Gunpowder treason and plot;
I know of no reason
Why the Gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!" - Folk verse
This November 5th, I plan to blow something up in honor of Guy Fawkes Day.
It should be pointed out, for all the FBI web-crawling butt-munching spiders out there, that I'm a writer. Nothing will actually, physically go boom, I promise.
No, nothing will actually explode. In the prose I'll be composing, however, it shall, and big time. To quote one of my favorite movies of all time, "big badda-boom!"
You see, November is, as I'm sure all of you who've read my blog (or any other writer's blog, probably) recently already know, National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo, for short. NaNo, for shorter. Holy-cow-this-crap-is-insane Month, once we get to about Week 3.
And I'm'a gonna do it. It'll be my fourth experience, and (hopefully) my third win. If you're in there, look for me under the nickname skingcharter.
Why do I do NaNo?To get a book ready to be sent to agents in December, of course As I learned after the first experience, the result is way too crappy of a draft to send anywhere, but at least it's a novel draft done and ready to be revised later, and that's crucial to my desire to put out two books per year. It also helps me focus myself and build the writer's discipline and techniques that make me better at the craft.
I've long ago given up on the "No plot? No problem!" approach espoused by Baty et al. Not that that direction doesn't work for some, but it doesn't work for me. I've learned that, for me, the key to finishing is to start with a fairly elaborate plan. Sure, it changes along the way, and that's part of the fun of writing, but if I at least have a road map, I can follow along through the construction and the explosions.
Which brings me to my favorite topic: blowing stuff up. I actually only rarely do that in the writings that you'll read, because it rarely happens in my stories. But one of the tricks I learned early on in writing is that if you get stuck, blow something up and have the characters react to it. You can always (and I do) delete it after the draft is done, but at least it gets action started. Granted, I've had to do it a lot less since I've developed my own outlining method, but it's still there, and it's still useful.
And I'm'a gonna do it on November 5th, just in honor of GF Day.
Who knows? Maybe some day you'll be enjoying a novel by Stephen H. King titled Life With Bacon, reach a scene early on where something on the farm goes ka-boom!, and know that that's the part I wrote on November 5th, 2014, and that I left it in there.
It'll be just our secret, okay?
By the way--today is October 30th. That's two days till NaNo. If you're going to do an outline for your work, it's about time to get that part of preparation done. If you're going to learn to use Scrivener, now's the time. Because it's coming, and it's coming soon. Can you feel the excitement?
Oh, hey, side note: my last blog about NaNo, I commented negatively about self-pubbing your NaNo project in December because, as I said, it's going to suck too much. I figured you all knew me by now and know that I'm self-pubbed, myself, but I was wrong. For everyone's sake, let me clarify: I wasn't dissing self-pubbing your wonderfully revised and edited book, not at all. I was only dissing self-pubbing crap.
That said: Enjoy!
- TOSK
The fifth of November,
The Gunpowder treason and plot;
I know of no reason
Why the Gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!" - Folk verse
This November 5th, I plan to blow something up in honor of Guy Fawkes Day.
It should be pointed out, for all the FBI web-crawling butt-munching spiders out there, that I'm a writer. Nothing will actually, physically go boom, I promise.
No, nothing will actually explode. In the prose I'll be composing, however, it shall, and big time. To quote one of my favorite movies of all time, "big badda-boom!"
You see, November is, as I'm sure all of you who've read my blog (or any other writer's blog, probably) recently already know, National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo, for short. NaNo, for shorter. Holy-cow-this-crap-is-insane Month, once we get to about Week 3.
And I'm'a gonna do it. It'll be my fourth experience, and (hopefully) my third win. If you're in there, look for me under the nickname skingcharter.
Why do I do NaNo?
I've long ago given up on the "No plot? No problem!" approach espoused by Baty et al. Not that that direction doesn't work for some, but it doesn't work for me. I've learned that, for me, the key to finishing is to start with a fairly elaborate plan. Sure, it changes along the way, and that's part of the fun of writing, but if I at least have a road map, I can follow along through the construction and the explosions.
Which brings me to my favorite topic: blowing stuff up. I actually only rarely do that in the writings that you'll read, because it rarely happens in my stories. But one of the tricks I learned early on in writing is that if you get stuck, blow something up and have the characters react to it. You can always (and I do) delete it after the draft is done, but at least it gets action started. Granted, I've had to do it a lot less since I've developed my own outlining method, but it's still there, and it's still useful.
And I'm'a gonna do it on November 5th, just in honor of GF Day.
Who knows? Maybe some day you'll be enjoying a novel by Stephen H. King titled Life With Bacon, reach a scene early on where something on the farm goes ka-boom!, and know that that's the part I wrote on November 5th, 2014, and that I left it in there.
It'll be just our secret, okay?
By the way--today is October 30th. That's two days till NaNo. If you're going to do an outline for your work, it's about time to get that part of preparation done. If you're going to learn to use Scrivener, now's the time. Because it's coming, and it's coming soon. Can you feel the excitement?
Oh, hey, side note: my last blog about NaNo, I commented negatively about self-pubbing your NaNo project in December because, as I said, it's going to suck too much. I figured you all knew me by now and know that I'm self-pubbed, myself, but I was wrong. For everyone's sake, let me clarify: I wasn't dissing self-pubbing your wonderfully revised and edited book, not at all. I was only dissing self-pubbing crap.
That said: Enjoy!
- TOSK
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
7 Lies We Tell About NaNoWriMo
I know--two days in a row here. But hey, I have loads of job applications to get out, and writing a blog post sounds like a whole lot more fun than revising my cover letter forty times.
Still, I just finished reading another writer's post about "7 Lies" we tell about NaNo. She made them all positive, singing the praise of this little exercise that so many of us have warped ourselves into.
I'm'a gonna present the other side....
Nope. And I really mean this, so listen--er, read--closely. No, it's not fun, fun, fun. Writing is work. I love doing it, not because I love, as Douglas Adams once famously put it, staring at a piece of paper until my forehead bleeds, but because I love the finished product. Well, okay, I do like seeing the bit of linguistic art take shape, then become refined, and finally start singing to me as I read it. Sitting down each day to get my word count, though? Not. Fun. It's just not, really. Trust me.
It's certainly do-able. But not 50K words. No, what you need to do is write a certain number per day. Fifty thousand is--well, I've heard tales, spoken mostly in whispered reverence and in the dark of the night, that it's been done in a day or a weekend, but man, is that superhuman Flash-like writing. Let's just assume you're neither superhuman nor Flash, okay? Don't try it. Instead, write a certain number per day.
Now, 50K divided by 30 is 1,667. With, of course, a little rounding error, but go with me. You won't want to stick to that, though, in part because of the counting issue I'll get to soon, but also because there will be some days when the dog will feel sick and the baby will barf on your favorite chair and the washing machine will quit working and--well, and so on. Some days, trust me, you won't write at all. I hit that point in the third week, usually. That's why I always go for 2,500. That number, if I hit it consistently, isn't a great deal more than 1,700, and yet it allows me to slack off for 10 days.
But here's the deal: you have to do it. When writing is fun, and fast, and the words are flowing, you have to hit your word count (and even go beyond on those days). When it's not fun, and it's slow, and the creativity is murky, you have to hit your word count.
Two tricks: first, don't stop at the end of a scene. Instead, write on past that into the beginning of the next scene. That allows easier pickup the next session. Second: if stuck, blow something up. It might not work with your plot, but you can always edit it out later. Besides, plot transition points are all about challenges, and what's more challenging than a great big explosion, right?
Chris Baty started this little zinger with his book "No Plot? No Problem!" It's a good book, really, about how to get your word count up, and the basic idea that you could start a book off with no real idea where it was going to go sounded really good to me, too, till I'd done it a few times. My initial NaNo--a failure--was a careening space opera with humans vs. bugs, but because I had no plot when I started it veered right off toward being Yet Another Ender's Game. I still believe I was doing the world a favor by giving up at what I've come to learn is the fairly standard quitting point of 27,000 words.
Granted, I was creating something that had goodness to it. The one friend I sent the draft portion to loved it and begged me to finish. I now have a plot for it, and it's in my "to be finished" pile. Still, at that time, I was doing the best thing for everybody by quitting.
I mentioned "a few." Both Cataclysm and Ascension were written without plotting. In fact, as I originally imagined it, Ascension was gonna be the third book, with the series ending on--well, no. That book only has one plot arc in it, and I'm not gonna spoil it.
So--yeah. I'm not saying you can't create something beautiful without a plan. Stephen King (the other one) reportedly does it all the time. Several people in the groups I'm in swear by it. But it's hard, and I suspect if you did an actual study on it you'd find a minority who succeed that way. You might be one--? Best, though, if you're doing this the first time and actually want to succeed, that you try starting with a plan.
Now, I'm not going to knock Microsoft Word here. I've made a lot of money over the years teaching people how to jazz up perfectly good documents using that bit of software. I have some good friends who still swear by it. Heck, I used it to write my first three novels. I still use it for short stories, in fact.
Now, though? I'm a Scrivener fan--a big, big Scrivener fan (hey, easy on the weight jokes!) I tried it a few years ago for the new NaNo effort and I haven't looked back since.
There's three specific reasons I'll recommend NaNo'ers use it. First, if you're a fan of outlining, it makes that very, very easy. No longer do you have to keep two separate documents open--though you can!--instead, you can keep the outline in a separate text. You can even leave it in there the whole time, and just not compile it into the final document.
Second, there's the word count thing. 50K words is near impossible to write, but 1.7K words isn't, as I already pointed out. You do it each day, and you win. Scrivener has a nice little tool that tracks both overall word count and session word count, and for that it's priceless.
Third is the scrolling relief. The thing I hated most about writing a novel in Word was scrolling hither and yon to discover stuff I'd forgotten, and you no longer have to do that with the "Texts" feature of Scrivener.
Fourth--yeah, I know I said three, but I just thought of something else--you can't afford not to try it now. It's free at: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/nanowrimo.php. Download it and give it a try, I'd recommend. Then if you don't like it, no harm, no foul. If you do, then at the end you get a 50% discount. Yes, you have to win NaNo to get that discount (otherwise it's just 20%), but who goes into NaNo to lose, right?
The thing is, Scrivener isn't difficult to use at all. It does, however, use different terminology from other document creation apps. That makes sense, too; I mean, let's face it, the act of putting letters and spaces and punctuation all down on a "page" in the right order isn't complicated, right? But different software packages use different terminology. The software designers probably have different ways to think of the process, after all--if they didn't, they wouldn't write the software in the first place. Meanwhile, the software designers' lawyers probably insist upon working hard to avoid copyright infringement.
So all that said, a) get your free copy, b) tell yourself it's not hard to use, and c) invest some time before November 1st going through the tutorials to learn the terminology.
No, it's not.
Fifty thousand words isn't even fifty thousand words, actually. For my first NaNo win, I stopped right at 50,000, proud as heck of myself, typed "THE END" jubilantly, and exported that sucker straight to Word. Only, then Word told me it was a little smaller than Scrivener had--well, you know how size is subjective and all *ahem*. So I beefed up the final scene with a bunch of "he blustered and she cried loudly and so on and so forth" kind of crap, knowing I'd delete it when I edited the document, and exported it again. Nope, 49,800, Microsoft's champion word-counters said. So I added another few hundred pretty boring words, and exported again. Okay, Word finally said. It gave me a word count down on the status bar of 50,005. Yay!
Ecstatically, I uploaded the document into the NaNoWriMo site's Novel Verification form. Sorry, it said! You only have 49,800 words, so nyah nyah nyah and write more and come back later, you loser! Well, it didn't really say all that, but by that point I was thinking it.
I did eventually get to over 50K words with all three counters, but that prompted me to go look at how words are counted. Fact is, nobody really counts them, in part because some things are rather subjectively identified as words/not-words. Some apps count spaces and divide by a number they think is close to accurate. Some use a more sophisticated algorithm regarding the number of characters and the number of spaces and so forth. Publishers just look at the number of pages and multiply by 250.
But who cares, right?
Have you ever read a book and thought, "Well, that was a great 89,500 words. I just wish the author would've given it the additional 500 words it needed"? No, I haven't either. Baty et al. looked at the question of "what is a novel" and decided that 50K was the right number to use, and in my opinion, it is pretty good. It's not long enough for most genres, but it does represent the minimum for the smallest genres, so that's a nice start. It also represents the normal dividing line between what's considered a "novella" and a novel. Finally, it's well past the normal quitting range of 27K words.
That said, my first series ended up all between 88K and 100K words, and Prophecy weighs in even longer. One common criticism of the first three books, too, is that they're too simple--not enough additional plots. So yeah, longer is better. *ahem*
Bottom line: if you're looking at this 50K piece of words as an actual novel length effort, I hate to break the news to you, but it's not. It's a great start toward one, but it's not there yet.
Yes, I admit, I actually thought this once upon a time.
Fuhgeddaboudit.
For one thing, agents often close their submissions in December just because of this little myth. Here's the deal (and I say this with some experience): you're going to write your first NaNo, do a few edits in the first week of December, and because it's your first baby you'll think it's the most beautiful, most perfect pile of literary poop on the planet. You'll send it away, and the recipients will all cringe.
Trust me, you will. And trust me, they will.
Even if you did manage to write a wonderful work of art in the first draft (and near as I can tell, nobody does that) and get it to an agent who cares (and near as I can tell, none of them do) there's zero chance you could be published traditionally in that short of a time. It takes months to go through all of the acquisition and editing and workup process.
So what do many people do? Self-publish, of course.
Please, for the love of all that is holy in literature and beyond, don't do this. The crap that hits Amazon's "shelves" in December is a large part of the reason Indies are still shunned. Neither of my NaNo winning projects has been published yet, though both are in the path to being so. But it takes time, and most importantly, it takes distance.
What do you do on December 1? Give yourself a nice pat on the back, download your Winner graphic, buy (or don't, whichever) your 50% off license for Scrivener, consume whatever adult beverages (assuming you're an adult) that you use to celebrate, brag like hell on Facebook, and then--this is crucial--put the file you just finished writing away. Don't look at it again till February or March, because only distance (time-wise) will give you perspective on how "good" it is.
I say Poppycock, with a capital P, to this one. I've won twice and edited as I went each time. I often write at night, and I often get to looking the next day at the stuff I wrote last the evening before and say "this is such total crap." So I revise it. It doesn't take a whole lot of time, and it does allow me to start the day feeling better about my work. That, and it helps me get back "into" the fiction I'm creating.
That said, you shouldn't allow yourself to get mired in editing. Do a little, but only that. Whatever you do, remember that you have to hit your word count in new words put down on the "paper" that day.
Here's another thing I know from experience.
You can't wait to put up that big sign on your Facebook page, can you? "2014 NaNoWriMo Winner!" All your friends will send you virtual cards and congratulations, and the local ones will throw you a wine/beer party to celebrate, right?
Wrong.
The people in your group--you did join a local NaNoWriMo group, didn't you?--will celebrate your achievement, but only gently. There will be a whole lot more people who didn't win, after all. And hey, the logic will go, the important thing is that everybody got some writing done, right?
Yeah, you'll probably leave that party like I've left them--a little bit let down. Door prize in hand, "Winner" sticker on breast, smile no longer on face--yeah, that's how I looked.
HEY! YOU! I FRICKING WON NANOWRIMO!
*chirp* *chirp*
What you'll end up doing is a massive Facebook circle-jerk kind of thing where everybody who won will congratulate everybody else who won, while everybody who didn't will give the half-hearted "yay" from the sidelines.
Face it: nobody knows how hard it is to write 50K words except for those who've done it. And no, it's not that they're all thinking it's too easy. It's the opposite, actually; most folks are looking at you like you've just climbed Mt. Everest in your Speedos(TM) and are probably a little--um, vacant--up there somewhere. Tetched, you know. Special.
"Oh, hey, like, congrats. *yawn* You won NaNoMiWro, or whatever it is. Why don't you just walk from here to New York City in your birthday suit next, just to prove how special you are?"
That's okay. It really is. The most important thing with NaNo, in any event, and in everyone's opinion that I've sampled (admittedly, a small sample size), is that you now know you can do it. You can bust out a plot, holy/holey or no, and display the personal discipline needed to hit a word count on an ongoing basis. That's very, very cool.
It's very, very cool to you, I should say. Nobody else will care, much. Then again, why should that bother you? You did it, right?
Now, go do it.
- TOSK
Still, I just finished reading another writer's post about "7 Lies" we tell about NaNo. She made them all positive, singing the praise of this little exercise that so many of us have warped ourselves into.
I'm'a gonna present the other side....
1. Writing 50,000 words in a month is fun, fun, fun!
Nope. And I really mean this, so listen--er, read--closely. No, it's not fun, fun, fun. Writing is work. I love doing it, not because I love, as Douglas Adams once famously put it, staring at a piece of paper until my forehead bleeds, but because I love the finished product. Well, okay, I do like seeing the bit of linguistic art take shape, then become refined, and finally start singing to me as I read it. Sitting down each day to get my word count, though? Not. Fun. It's just not, really. Trust me.
It's certainly do-able. But not 50K words. No, what you need to do is write a certain number per day. Fifty thousand is--well, I've heard tales, spoken mostly in whispered reverence and in the dark of the night, that it's been done in a day or a weekend, but man, is that superhuman Flash-like writing. Let's just assume you're neither superhuman nor Flash, okay? Don't try it. Instead, write a certain number per day.
Now, 50K divided by 30 is 1,667. With, of course, a little rounding error, but go with me. You won't want to stick to that, though, in part because of the counting issue I'll get to soon, but also because there will be some days when the dog will feel sick and the baby will barf on your favorite chair and the washing machine will quit working and--well, and so on. Some days, trust me, you won't write at all. I hit that point in the third week, usually. That's why I always go for 2,500. That number, if I hit it consistently, isn't a great deal more than 1,700, and yet it allows me to slack off for 10 days.
But here's the deal: you have to do it. When writing is fun, and fast, and the words are flowing, you have to hit your word count (and even go beyond on those days). When it's not fun, and it's slow, and the creativity is murky, you have to hit your word count.
Two tricks: first, don't stop at the end of a scene. Instead, write on past that into the beginning of the next scene. That allows easier pickup the next session. Second: if stuck, blow something up. It might not work with your plot, but you can always edit it out later. Besides, plot transition points are all about challenges, and what's more challenging than a great big explosion, right?
2. You don't really need a plot
Chris Baty started this little zinger with his book "No Plot? No Problem!" It's a good book, really, about how to get your word count up, and the basic idea that you could start a book off with no real idea where it was going to go sounded really good to me, too, till I'd done it a few times. My initial NaNo--a failure--was a careening space opera with humans vs. bugs, but because I had no plot when I started it veered right off toward being Yet Another Ender's Game. I still believe I was doing the world a favor by giving up at what I've come to learn is the fairly standard quitting point of 27,000 words.
Granted, I was creating something that had goodness to it. The one friend I sent the draft portion to loved it and begged me to finish. I now have a plot for it, and it's in my "to be finished" pile. Still, at that time, I was doing the best thing for everybody by quitting.
I mentioned "a few." Both Cataclysm and Ascension were written without plotting. In fact, as I originally imagined it, Ascension was gonna be the third book, with the series ending on--well, no. That book only has one plot arc in it, and I'm not gonna spoil it.
So--yeah. I'm not saying you can't create something beautiful without a plan. Stephen King (the other one) reportedly does it all the time. Several people in the groups I'm in swear by it. But it's hard, and I suspect if you did an actual study on it you'd find a minority who succeed that way. You might be one--? Best, though, if you're doing this the first time and actually want to succeed, that you try starting with a plan.
3. Scrivener is too difficult/expensive/whatever
Now, I'm not going to knock Microsoft Word here. I've made a lot of money over the years teaching people how to jazz up perfectly good documents using that bit of software. I have some good friends who still swear by it. Heck, I used it to write my first three novels. I still use it for short stories, in fact.
Now, though? I'm a Scrivener fan--a big, big Scrivener fan (hey, easy on the weight jokes!) I tried it a few years ago for the new NaNo effort and I haven't looked back since.
There's three specific reasons I'll recommend NaNo'ers use it. First, if you're a fan of outlining, it makes that very, very easy. No longer do you have to keep two separate documents open--though you can!--instead, you can keep the outline in a separate text. You can even leave it in there the whole time, and just not compile it into the final document.
Second, there's the word count thing. 50K words is near impossible to write, but 1.7K words isn't, as I already pointed out. You do it each day, and you win. Scrivener has a nice little tool that tracks both overall word count and session word count, and for that it's priceless.
Third is the scrolling relief. The thing I hated most about writing a novel in Word was scrolling hither and yon to discover stuff I'd forgotten, and you no longer have to do that with the "Texts" feature of Scrivener.
Fourth--yeah, I know I said three, but I just thought of something else--you can't afford not to try it now. It's free at: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/nanowrimo.php. Download it and give it a try, I'd recommend. Then if you don't like it, no harm, no foul. If you do, then at the end you get a 50% discount. Yes, you have to win NaNo to get that discount (otherwise it's just 20%), but who goes into NaNo to lose, right?
The thing is, Scrivener isn't difficult to use at all. It does, however, use different terminology from other document creation apps. That makes sense, too; I mean, let's face it, the act of putting letters and spaces and punctuation all down on a "page" in the right order isn't complicated, right? But different software packages use different terminology. The software designers probably have different ways to think of the process, after all--if they didn't, they wouldn't write the software in the first place. Meanwhile, the software designers' lawyers probably insist upon working hard to avoid copyright infringement.
So all that said, a) get your free copy, b) tell yourself it's not hard to use, and c) invest some time before November 1st going through the tutorials to learn the terminology.
4. Fifty thousand words is a thing.
No, it's not.
Fifty thousand words isn't even fifty thousand words, actually. For my first NaNo win, I stopped right at 50,000, proud as heck of myself, typed "THE END" jubilantly, and exported that sucker straight to Word. Only, then Word told me it was a little smaller than Scrivener had--well, you know how size is subjective and all *ahem*. So I beefed up the final scene with a bunch of "he blustered and she cried loudly and so on and so forth" kind of crap, knowing I'd delete it when I edited the document, and exported it again. Nope, 49,800, Microsoft's champion word-counters said. So I added another few hundred pretty boring words, and exported again. Okay, Word finally said. It gave me a word count down on the status bar of 50,005. Yay!
Ecstatically, I uploaded the document into the NaNoWriMo site's Novel Verification form. Sorry, it said! You only have 49,800 words, so nyah nyah nyah and write more and come back later, you loser! Well, it didn't really say all that, but by that point I was thinking it.
I did eventually get to over 50K words with all three counters, but that prompted me to go look at how words are counted. Fact is, nobody really counts them, in part because some things are rather subjectively identified as words/not-words. Some apps count spaces and divide by a number they think is close to accurate. Some use a more sophisticated algorithm regarding the number of characters and the number of spaces and so forth. Publishers just look at the number of pages and multiply by 250.
But who cares, right?
Have you ever read a book and thought, "Well, that was a great 89,500 words. I just wish the author would've given it the additional 500 words it needed"? No, I haven't either. Baty et al. looked at the question of "what is a novel" and decided that 50K was the right number to use, and in my opinion, it is pretty good. It's not long enough for most genres, but it does represent the minimum for the smallest genres, so that's a nice start. It also represents the normal dividing line between what's considered a "novella" and a novel. Finally, it's well past the normal quitting range of 27K words.
That said, my first series ended up all between 88K and 100K words, and Prophecy weighs in even longer. One common criticism of the first three books, too, is that they're too simple--not enough additional plots. So yeah, longer is better. *ahem*
Bottom line: if you're looking at this 50K piece of words as an actual novel length effort, I hate to break the news to you, but it's not. It's a great start toward one, but it's not there yet.
5. Write in November, Query in December, Publish in January
Yes, I admit, I actually thought this once upon a time.
Fuhgeddaboudit.
For one thing, agents often close their submissions in December just because of this little myth. Here's the deal (and I say this with some experience): you're going to write your first NaNo, do a few edits in the first week of December, and because it's your first baby you'll think it's the most beautiful, most perfect pile of literary poop on the planet. You'll send it away, and the recipients will all cringe.
Trust me, you will. And trust me, they will.
Even if you did manage to write a wonderful work of art in the first draft (and near as I can tell, nobody does that) and get it to an agent who cares (and near as I can tell, none of them do) there's zero chance you could be published traditionally in that short of a time. It takes months to go through all of the acquisition and editing and workup process.
So what do many people do? Self-publish, of course.
Please, for the love of all that is holy in literature and beyond, don't do this. The crap that hits Amazon's "shelves" in December is a large part of the reason Indies are still shunned. Neither of my NaNo winning projects has been published yet, though both are in the path to being so. But it takes time, and most importantly, it takes distance.
What do you do on December 1? Give yourself a nice pat on the back, download your Winner graphic, buy (or don't, whichever) your 50% off license for Scrivener, consume whatever adult beverages (assuming you're an adult) that you use to celebrate, brag like hell on Facebook, and then--this is crucial--put the file you just finished writing away. Don't look at it again till February or March, because only distance (time-wise) will give you perspective on how "good" it is.
6. It is counterproductive to edit as you go
I say Poppycock, with a capital P, to this one. I've won twice and edited as I went each time. I often write at night, and I often get to looking the next day at the stuff I wrote last the evening before and say "this is such total crap." So I revise it. It doesn't take a whole lot of time, and it does allow me to start the day feeling better about my work. That, and it helps me get back "into" the fiction I'm creating.
That said, you shouldn't allow yourself to get mired in editing. Do a little, but only that. Whatever you do, remember that you have to hit your word count in new words put down on the "paper" that day.
7. All of your friends will be impressed
Here's another thing I know from experience.
You can't wait to put up that big sign on your Facebook page, can you? "2014 NaNoWriMo Winner!" All your friends will send you virtual cards and congratulations, and the local ones will throw you a wine/beer party to celebrate, right?
Wrong.
The people in your group--you did join a local NaNoWriMo group, didn't you?--will celebrate your achievement, but only gently. There will be a whole lot more people who didn't win, after all. And hey, the logic will go, the important thing is that everybody got some writing done, right?
Yeah, you'll probably leave that party like I've left them--a little bit let down. Door prize in hand, "Winner" sticker on breast, smile no longer on face--yeah, that's how I looked.
HEY! YOU! I FRICKING WON NANOWRIMO!
*chirp* *chirp*
What you'll end up doing is a massive Facebook circle-jerk kind of thing where everybody who won will congratulate everybody else who won, while everybody who didn't will give the half-hearted "yay" from the sidelines.
Face it: nobody knows how hard it is to write 50K words except for those who've done it. And no, it's not that they're all thinking it's too easy. It's the opposite, actually; most folks are looking at you like you've just climbed Mt. Everest in your Speedos(TM) and are probably a little--um, vacant--up there somewhere. Tetched, you know. Special.
"Oh, hey, like, congrats. *yawn* You won NaNoMiWro, or whatever it is. Why don't you just walk from here to New York City in your birthday suit next, just to prove how special you are?"
That's okay. It really is. The most important thing with NaNo, in any event, and in everyone's opinion that I've sampled (admittedly, a small sample size), is that you now know you can do it. You can bust out a plot, holy/holey or no, and display the personal discipline needed to hit a word count on an ongoing basis. That's very, very cool.
It's very, very cool to you, I should say. Nobody else will care, much. Then again, why should that bother you? You did it, right?
Now, go do it.
- TOSK
Monday, October 27, 2014
Being Stephen King
"First you forget names, then you forget faces. Next you forget to pull your zipper up and finally, you forget to pull it down." - George Burns.
Aren't names something? I went through an interview recently with a here-to-be-unnamed community college, and they had--no kidding--fifteen people in the room. Only the first row of five were allowed to ask me questions through the web-based video conference, but it was still one heckuvan experience. They didn't introduce themselves, which is fine. I didn't get called in to the second round, but if I had, I doubt I could've remembered that many names.
I bet they all remembered my name, though.
There used to be a web site out there named "Being Stephen King dot com." It was pretty boring, as sites went, but it had a thousand or so of us who'd entered our personal stories about what it was like being named the same as the famously successful horror writer. It even had one entry from Bangor, Maine, that looked conspicuously like--nah, couldn't be.
It's gone now, in any event.
I used to get tired of being asked about my name, but that was before I met so many others with a very similar problem. At West Point, in the Theatre Arts Guild (yes, we spelled it with that British thang going), I was proud to have been taught to "fly" (i.e., raise and lower the massive pipes that held all the screen backgrounds and the above-stage lights) by a tremendous mentor and great cadet named--wait for it--Tom Sawyer. He, in turn, told me of a year or so earlier, when the Fourth Regiment had been announced at every parade to have been commanded by "Cadet Captain Buck Rogers." And then, soon after I left the service, I helped a Republican named Michael Meyers run for Congress.
That was why I was so delighted to be interviewed recently for a Lifestyle piece on ABC News. Check it out here: http://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/michael-myers-stephen-king-top-list-popular-scary/story?id=26429926
For anyone curious, here were the awesome questions she asked (and my--well, of course they were awesome--I hope?--replies):
Do people often reference him and his books when they meet you? If so, on a scale of 1-10, how annoying is that?
Do people reference the books? Pretty much every day, every time I hand over my ID or credit card, or every time I give a presentation to a new class. If I'm in the mood to start a conversation, it's not annoying at all, but sometimes it's up there at a 9 or a 10, especially because it's nearly always the same thing: "Did you write those books?" or "Were you named after him?"
Once a month, ish, I get "friended" on Facebook by someone I've never met who then tells me how much they love my books.
Have you read any of his work, yourself? Hate ‘em? Love ‘em?
I love The Green Mile, and I also love his book On Writing. Otherwise, I'm not much into the horror genre.
How do you differentiate your own writing from his?
I write fantasy--mythic fantasy and elf fantasy. I also use my middle initial, which it turns out a) isn't enough of a differentiation for everyone, and b) isn't unique itself, as another author in Virginia has published two airplane history books under Stephen H. King. But I've had a couple of reviews saying, basically, "it's a good book, but he's not Stephen King," and that made me cringe a little.
Is Stephen a family name and is there anything else anecdotal you’d like to share about what your experience has been?
Technically I'm Stephen H. King, Jr. I dropped the Jr. out of expedience after my father died when I was 14. So yes, it is kind of a family name.
Hope you enjoyed! Oh, and keep watching--I'm preparing a frightening short story to be published, right here, on Halloween!
- TOSK
PS--Oh, don't forget to check out the new cover design for Prophecy over to the right!
Aren't names something? I went through an interview recently with a here-to-be-unnamed community college, and they had--no kidding--fifteen people in the room. Only the first row of five were allowed to ask me questions through the web-based video conference, but it was still one heckuvan experience. They didn't introduce themselves, which is fine. I didn't get called in to the second round, but if I had, I doubt I could've remembered that many names.
I bet they all remembered my name, though.
There used to be a web site out there named "Being Stephen King dot com." It was pretty boring, as sites went, but it had a thousand or so of us who'd entered our personal stories about what it was like being named the same as the famously successful horror writer. It even had one entry from Bangor, Maine, that looked conspicuously like--nah, couldn't be.
It's gone now, in any event.
I used to get tired of being asked about my name, but that was before I met so many others with a very similar problem. At West Point, in the Theatre Arts Guild (yes, we spelled it with that British thang going), I was proud to have been taught to "fly" (i.e., raise and lower the massive pipes that held all the screen backgrounds and the above-stage lights) by a tremendous mentor and great cadet named--wait for it--Tom Sawyer. He, in turn, told me of a year or so earlier, when the Fourth Regiment had been announced at every parade to have been commanded by "Cadet Captain Buck Rogers." And then, soon after I left the service, I helped a Republican named Michael Meyers run for Congress.
That was why I was so delighted to be interviewed recently for a Lifestyle piece on ABC News. Check it out here: http://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/michael-myers-stephen-king-top-list-popular-scary/story?id=26429926
For anyone curious, here were the awesome questions she asked (and my--well, of course they were awesome--I hope?--replies):
Do people often reference him and his books when they meet you? If so, on a scale of 1-10, how annoying is that?
Do people reference the books? Pretty much every day, every time I hand over my ID or credit card, or every time I give a presentation to a new class. If I'm in the mood to start a conversation, it's not annoying at all, but sometimes it's up there at a 9 or a 10, especially because it's nearly always the same thing: "Did you write those books?" or "Were you named after him?"
Once a month, ish, I get "friended" on Facebook by someone I've never met who then tells me how much they love my books.
Have you read any of his work, yourself? Hate ‘em? Love ‘em?
I love The Green Mile, and I also love his book On Writing. Otherwise, I'm not much into the horror genre.
How do you differentiate your own writing from his?
I write fantasy--mythic fantasy and elf fantasy. I also use my middle initial, which it turns out a) isn't enough of a differentiation for everyone, and b) isn't unique itself, as another author in Virginia has published two airplane history books under Stephen H. King. But I've had a couple of reviews saying, basically, "it's a good book, but he's not Stephen King," and that made me cringe a little.
Is Stephen a family name and is there anything else anecdotal you’d like to share about what your experience has been?
Technically I'm Stephen H. King, Jr. I dropped the Jr. out of expedience after my father died when I was 14. So yes, it is kind of a family name.
Hope you enjoyed! Oh, and keep watching--I'm preparing a frightening short story to be published, right here, on Halloween!
- TOSK
PS--Oh, don't forget to check out the new cover design for Prophecy over to the right!
Monday, September 22, 2014
The Shift
"Write drunk, edit sober." - Ernest Hemingway
"I hate editors, for they make me abandon a lot of perfectly good English words." - Mark Twain
There comes a time in every author's life when you have to sit back, shift gears, and accept that maybe the crap you wrote in your draft-creating fervor was really just that--crap. Then, if you're really silly like me and write more than one book, you get to do it multiple times.
Nope, doesn't get any easier. Matter of fact, it seems to get a little harder, as every time I plow through a novel draft I figure I'm getting better than ever before, that maybe this time I'm creating good stuff.
Nope.
I'm not sure if it hits every author as hard as it does me. The shift, as I call it, is almost depressing at first. It really is two different sides of my brain being used at separate times. I mean, the revising gets better, and easier, once I've made the shift and am in that zone. In fact, there's really no feeling quite like once you really get that prose revised to the point where it starts singing to you.
Right now, by the way, is one of those times, the shift. I just finished the draft of the second book of the Dragon Queen series, with a draft title of Northern Exposure. It's, I think, a captivating story of Alyssa heading north to seek approval from the Northern Clans, only--well, of course--she finds trouble. You didn't expect me to write that she waltzed up there, had a bit of moose stew, and they said "you're all right," did you? Writing it, I had a lot of fun drawing from my own memories of the Great White North, and I also enjoyed playing around with the relationship between Alyssa and Prince Charming some more. Alyssa is growing up, you see, and so she, and that relationship too, changed a little bit.
*sigh* So I finished it; now what do I do?
The first, negative answer: not create. We're too close to NaNoWriMo (November, for the uninitiated) to start another novel draft. We're also too close to me finishing Book 2 to revise Book 2; I need at least a month of separation between the two activities. I've spent some time redesigning Book 1's cover, and that was fun. I've also spent some time learning more about Internet marketing, and about Adwords vs. Bing Words, and--well, all that other less-than-terribly-exciting stuff.
Trust me, I'm'a gonna build that sales funnel some day. But first, I write.
No, more accurately, I revise. Luckily for my decision process, I have a few works that outright need my attention. There are a couple of short stories that have each been rejected twice, which means I need to look into them again. More importantly, though, my memoir detailing my many trips up and down the Alaska Highway, The Long and Winding Road, needs some straightening out (hehe--get it? Eh, never mind).
So I opened that beast up in Scrivener, and started at the beginning. Three paragraphs in, it hit me.
Oh, crap. This is crap. I must make it good.
Just that fast, I'm back to editing. Time to shift sides of my brain.
And speaking of that, I really do need to get back to editing. Y'all have a great night and a great week!
- TOSK
"I hate editors, for they make me abandon a lot of perfectly good English words." - Mark Twain
There comes a time in every author's life when you have to sit back, shift gears, and accept that maybe the crap you wrote in your draft-creating fervor was really just that--crap. Then, if you're really silly like me and write more than one book, you get to do it multiple times.
Nope, doesn't get any easier. Matter of fact, it seems to get a little harder, as every time I plow through a novel draft I figure I'm getting better than ever before, that maybe this time I'm creating good stuff.
Nope.
I'm not sure if it hits every author as hard as it does me. The shift, as I call it, is almost depressing at first. It really is two different sides of my brain being used at separate times. I mean, the revising gets better, and easier, once I've made the shift and am in that zone. In fact, there's really no feeling quite like once you really get that prose revised to the point where it starts singing to you.
Right now, by the way, is one of those times, the shift. I just finished the draft of the second book of the Dragon Queen series, with a draft title of Northern Exposure. It's, I think, a captivating story of Alyssa heading north to seek approval from the Northern Clans, only--well, of course--she finds trouble. You didn't expect me to write that she waltzed up there, had a bit of moose stew, and they said "you're all right," did you? Writing it, I had a lot of fun drawing from my own memories of the Great White North, and I also enjoyed playing around with the relationship between Alyssa and Prince Charming some more. Alyssa is growing up, you see, and so she, and that relationship too, changed a little bit.
*sigh* So I finished it; now what do I do?
The first, negative answer: not create. We're too close to NaNoWriMo (November, for the uninitiated) to start another novel draft. We're also too close to me finishing Book 2 to revise Book 2; I need at least a month of separation between the two activities. I've spent some time redesigning Book 1's cover, and that was fun. I've also spent some time learning more about Internet marketing, and about Adwords vs. Bing Words, and--well, all that other less-than-terribly-exciting stuff.
Trust me, I'm'a gonna build that sales funnel some day. But first, I write.
No, more accurately, I revise. Luckily for my decision process, I have a few works that outright need my attention. There are a couple of short stories that have each been rejected twice, which means I need to look into them again. More importantly, though, my memoir detailing my many trips up and down the Alaska Highway, The Long and Winding Road, needs some straightening out (hehe--get it? Eh, never mind).
So I opened that beast up in Scrivener, and started at the beginning. Three paragraphs in, it hit me.
Oh, crap. This is crap. I must make it good.
Just that fast, I'm back to editing. Time to shift sides of my brain.
And speaking of that, I really do need to get back to editing. Y'all have a great night and a great week!
- TOSK
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