Back again

Luckily, nobody noticed. On the internet, nobody can hear you scream. So I took a year out. There were a couple of reasons, and the whole time I was doing it, all I could think of is that I was giving myself yet another excuse not to write. It was hard. I still don’t know whether it was the right thing to do, but it’s done now.

I had finished my first book. After five drafts, it was as complete as it was going to get without me tweaking it to death. The next step was to get a book cover and get it up. I worked with one person, and then another, trying to come of up with a cover that made the right promises to the reader.

Actually, no, I didn’t. Let me take a step back. I do the language of graphics like King Kong does flower arranging. It’s possible, but you probably didn’t want to see the results. Not pretty. I was trying to find a way to show what the story was about, and I couldn’t do it. I had two tries. Both sets of people - friends who were great at art and drawing - who made covers for me were amazing. And then… real life happened. It’s a thing. The covers weren’t quite finished.

I realised that I needed to find a way to contract out creating my cover. I found out about a person who did developmental editing. A developmental editor? I didn’t even know they existed. It was yet another of the lessons I’d picked up over the last few of those lost months. What about book formatting? I could learn, sure. I need to learn. That isn’t a thing in doubt.

To cut this short, I needed a better job to pay for the incidentals that self-publishing a book (or even multiple books) entail. There wasn’t a sensible way for me to go forward. And that was when I made the conscious and extremely frustrating decision to give it up for a year and concentrate on getting a pay rise, no matter how. So - things happened. I pretty much went all out and somehow it paid off. I have a new role and I don’t need to rob from Peter to pay Paul as the saying goes.

Winter of my discontent

And now, this new year, I get to pick up where I left off. A little wiser, but without the writing habit that I built up over time. I get to do it all over again. This time, I have a plan (no, I am not a cylon). I aim to shoot for actually publishing two books a year this year and next. Then I will aim for putting out four books a year for the next four years. And after that, six books a year for the next six years. For me, who hasn’t even properly managed to get even one book out to the public, that’s a bit of an insane unhinged ambitious aim.

Even I have to back up and pause. I haven’t completed one, and I’m going to do two a year? Oh, and I’m not allowed to count the thing I already did. They’re already done.

The good news (I don’t have any way of scribing this to acceptably convey the amount of sarcasm) is that there are any number of unfinished stories that need to get got. I chose to do a follow-up to my existing story, in the equally implausible hope that people will want to buy and read the first story. If it takes off, then hoorah and all that jazz. If not, so be it. I will have completed the journey of my heroine.

For my second story, I chose something in a different genre that I started some time ago. Yes, I will cringe when I go back to read it and remember the ebb, flow, sentence structure and way of thinking that created it. Kinda looking forward to that bit of stress. I really am. I mean - to be able to pick up one of my older scribblings, wrangle the rest of the story out of the murky firmament that sits somewhere on the shores of purgatory, damnation and what-the-hell-was-I-thinking, and slap a coat of spit on it, only to slap it on its flank and send it onward is going to be… well, I was about to say the word fun. Now I begin to think about it, maybe it should be a phrase that describes being drowning by kissing the sea gods so well that your toes curl, and your hair spontaneously changes colour. Or color.

In any case, I thought the story was somewhere near three-fifths done. I haven’t gone back yet to be able to see it with older eyes, to review the skeleton of a plot that I pray hope think I must have done. Of course, I did. Definitely. This was obviously the right time to check, and the story is currently at 20 000 words. After tapping furiously on my calculator and trying to remember which one carries where, I think I need to do another 16 000.

Oh. Gee. That puts the story at something around 33 and a third thousand words, and that’s a perfect number for…  aww, dang. That’s like wonderfully straight in-between a short story and a novelette. A whutnow!? I mean, that’s like at that stage when you had a growth spurt over the summer, and all of a sudden the boys were looking at you and you start to bump into everything, which makes it even worse, because all the boys keep putting their eyes all over you and they’re stupid.

This is not a good size for a book. Even an ebook. I mean, heck.

So also, the plot I have is now going to be revised. It’s one story. There isn’t going to be a part two, or any other part, section or addendum, sequel, prequel. No more “-uels” on this thing.

Once again, I am filled with joy.

Right, let’s get to that planning then. I've scheduled doing all of it to be done and dusted in January.

That’s right, I’m baaaaack!

First times

I wrote this a while ago, I think back in last April. I never realised that this had never been posted. So I thought - why not? This was both an odd and a familiar feeling when I started to read, and hopefully it will be good for me to look back when I finish up. Have I gotten any better at doing this whole regular writing thing in a year? Maybe. I'll read this again and decide later.

In case you were wondering, my money is on that I have possibly wasted a lot of time that I could have been a little more productive. As I said, I'll read and have a think on it. We shall see.

Short changed

I've been working on a couple of short stories recently, as it seems a good way to fail fast and try out new things. I don’t know if short stories are actually publishable, but they’re good practise, they’re a great challenge and they spark my imagination in a way that I know is time limited. Short stories get into the myriad ideas on your mind, and allow you to put them down on paper where they’re locked down for the time being and out of your brain.

Short stories also perform another function for me: they get me writing. I don’t need to do many of them, but sometimes they are a great way to get something off my chest if I have some emotion buzzing around, or if I’m not feeling in the mood. Most importantly right now, they seem to prime me. My fingers are typing, and my ‘writing brain’ gets switched on, or gets back in the groove and I can go back to my main story.

The idea, and it seems to work more often than not, is that I’m kind of jump-starting my fingers-on-keyboard mode. I’ll get to the typing and not worry about getting it right the first time, or a perfect start, or finding the best way to segue from where I've left something (chapter/page/line) to where I want it to go.

I’m also working on a book series at the moment… at least the planning of one. It’s in a type of genre that I’m not used to doing, but it feels like it’s going to be a fun project and I intend for it to be pretty much ebook only.

In fact it isn’t just in one new genre for me, it’s in two genre’s. Why? Because I've written short stories on those genre’s and I think it’ll be fun to mix to two of them. The story won’t be a comedy or a pastiche. I’m really going for broke on these. The funnest thing is that I want them to be relatively quick reads. I want them to be fun for the reader, and I want them to be in the 45-50k range. So yeah, I have some specifics.

At this point in time, there isn’t a lot of meat on the bones. Heck, there isn’t even a lot of bone on the frame. But the genre means that I have to start from the end of the story and work backward to make sure everything fits in. That’s a challenge I haven’t encountered before. I’m looking forward to understanding how the series fit together (loosely planned at 6 books), and then getting down to things and working out how the first book fits together.

This is a completely backward way for me. I usually start with a premise, or most often find myself writing what seems to be some part of the middle of the book and I keep going until I stop and need to figure things out. The ‘why’, ‘what’ ‘who’ and a lot of the time the ‘who’ question pops up. It isn’t a logical way to proceed either. I am aware of this. Sometimes I’ll start with an actual beginning which is quite nice.

But starting from the end? That’s weird. It’s another skill that I know will come in useful on my other stories, but right now its necessary. The series will be way too much work and stress to try to do it any other way. There are a couple of more firsts involved with this, including that this is the first thing that I’ll have written something purely for the ebook audience. If it somehow gets picked up by a publisher, then so much the better, but then again I may win the lottery. It’s probably along the same odds of probability. I’m cool with that.

This isn’t about worrying about finding an agent and shopping around and dealing with contracts. Heck, for a first time author, if I even get a $5000 dollar advance, it would be a minor miracle. I figure that if the book does halfway ok, I’ll be doing ok on the first book and better on the second, etc etc. Nobody jumps into book 3 without checking out books 1 and 2 first. And if they like book 1 enough, they’ll probably give the second book a chance. Hopefully I’ll have learned enough by book 2 that it’ll be a better story. We’ll see how that goes.

I’m not too worried. I still have to finish the story I’m working on, and then I have to leave it alone for a while to be able to come back to it with fresh eyes. The way I figure, the difference between the book I’m working on and the series I’m planning will be enough of a change to feel like something completely now.

It will be something completely new. It will be stretching my wings. It will be longer than a series of short stories, but it won’t be some big horrid saga stretching millions of pages. I’m not ready to go through that again. I need to get better with using fewer words.

And like the Cylons, I have a plan. The first three books will be written, edited, proof-read, covered and everything else before I put the first one up. I want the first draft of book four done and in the bag before I even consider talking about book one getting out there. If I can get the first three ready, and if book 1 takes off, and if by some type of improbable set of cosmic circumstances people notice it, buy it, and want to read more whilst telling their friends, then I need to be ready to serve them more. That’s the plan.

'Gotta long way to go.

Say, don't spray

Maybe a week and a half ago, could be a fortnight ago, I was so glad. I thought the final draft was done. I thought I was well and away and I wouldn’t have to look at the thing again. Oh foolish, foolish me. It turns out that there are about three more rounds to go from what I've been learning in the interim, and I think this manuscript needs them. Maybe other stories won't. Who knows anymore?

At this point I’m past caring. I've had to step away for a while because each word or sentence is looking very similar to every other sentence, so I think a break from this story is a good idea. I’ll start working on the outline for the last part of another story I've been working on for a while, and its enough of a change of a genre to clear out my editing head. Once I’m done on breaking down the plot into chunks I can go back and do the last three passes on this one, which at this point I think are a details and description pass, a dialogue pass, and a line edit pass where I think is the stage where I go line by line and make sure there aren’t any stupid typos. I say ‘stupid typos’ because I've got a very uncomfortable feeling that the intelligent typos will be a lot harder to spot; they’ll be the the ones I’m blind to because I’m the one who wrote them - you know the things that sound just fine in your head, but come out a little bit weird on paper. They’re the ones I always have had trouble with, so it’ll be a fun challenge to figure out a system to be able to spot them. I’m not holding out much hope that I’ll nail all, or even most of them, but that’s ok. It yet another step I need to travel on, and I’ll get better over time.

The details/description pass is needed because although the story was intended to go at a fairly decent pace, it's also a little sparse in descriptions of things. In no way do I want to litter the book down with prose that describes every little thing, but a sense of place, or person, or location is kind of required if a story really wants to stand out and live inside the readers head. I’m not entirely sure I could do florid and evocative if my life depended on it, but there should be something. This is the pass where something gets added in. What does home look like? What was the stand-out thing that captured the protagonists attention the moment they arrived at the end of the journey? What was the last thing that stuck in their head before they suffered a tragic setback and now haunts them for the rest of their days?

After that, I reckon its going to be a dialogue pass. I don’t really need one of my characters to have a speech impediment, but I do need them to stand out from one another when they talk. Why not? My best friend doesn’t speak to me in the same way my old school teacher did, so I need a way for the characters, plot or relationships between them to stand out separate and distinct from each other when they open their mouths. Its going to be a tricky one, but its not impossible if I work through the people one by one. At least, that’s the way I’m going to approach it and see what happens.

The very very last thing I will also need to do is go through what I’m going to call a tightening round. This is the part where I think I’ve got to chop about 10% from the whole thing to make it tighter. How on earth do you figure out how to get rid of eight thousand six hundred words and still keep the story feeling like - well, the story?

Not entirely sure, but it’ll be an adventure finding out. If I was able to spray that much wordage down on a virtual page, then I guess its my job to tidy it up into a leaner, meaner beastie of a story. I’m licking my lips in anticipation.

Family time

My sister came to visit over the last weekend. We caught up, drank, talked about stuff, and she cooked, so I have food in the house. Food. Nice.

The funny thing about having family around is that when it happens infrequently enough that it's an honest-to-goodness event, it's important to take advantage of that time. That shouldn't mean I don't do any writing things, but that's exactly how it feels. I had this little 'tick, tick, tick' in my head, letting me know that whatever I'm doing at the moment may be fun, but it's not editing. 

I should be editing. I should be spending at least a little time staring at this pile of words and trying to beat it into submission. On the plus side she finally read my first draft and really liked it. 

And then - at my request - she poked holes in it. Lots of holes. Some of them I have a way to fix, and others I have no blooming idea on how to fix yet. There's still that big horrible plot hole that I need to find and fix. 

I'm glad she came. New things to do once I've finished the thing I'm doing. This writing stuff certainly isn't boring. Now to go do some more editing, and at some point I know I'll need to figure out where I've accidentally left a good third of the printed pages that I left scribbles over. 

Maybe I could have asked my sister.