The Hall of the Mountain Queen

Yesterday, Friday, was a lazy day.  I wasn’t exactly busy, but at the same time I wasn’t eager to do anything.  Like writing–

I work on this blog every day.  I’ve had people tell me that this isn’t real writing, but then again, if it’s not, what is it?  I’m of the opinion that if you write, it doesn’t matter what you write, it’s still writing.  I forget who said it–may have been Stephen King–but he said something along the lines of, “If you don’t have ideas coming to you, or you’re finding it difficult to write about anything, start typing out things.  Songs you like, your grocery list, names of places you want to visit.  Keep typing, and eventually you’ll find get through your block and write.”

That’s why I blog.  If I keep writing, every day, then when it comes time to do something I need to write–like a story–then it’s not a problem:  I’ll sit right down and get to writing.  You’re working on the skill, developing it further, and it will eventually show in your other work.

That’s the hope.  As another writer said–the name escapes me at the moment–if after a year or two, your writing hasn’t improved, you haven’t started to take chances with your work, then you’re not growing.  You’re not trying to improve, you’re just sort of marking time.

This is my little mountain hall, my blog.  I have another, but I’ve been really lazy about going there, and I should do something about that.  But this one, the one I’ve stuck with for a little over two years, is my fortress.  I have my followers, and you’re all very good to me.  A few of you even know me beyond this blog, which is both strange and crazy when I think about it.

I try to think of how I look, sitting in my mountain hall, upon my throne, waiting for my subjects to appear.  I could say I’m like the Lady Death of Blogging, but that could be a bit scary, don’t you think?  Or am I sitting here in my Witchblade armor, pretty much naked, my body all bent and twisted like I’m constructed out of Rob Liefeld’s best imagination?  Maybe I’m more Jean Grey-like, ready to eat a planet on a moment’s notice.  Naw, not that:  she’s been dead for eight years, though she’ll probably come back to life one of these days–again.

Whatever it is, I’m here, in control of my works and words, and doing both as much as is possible.

I had a couple of people tell me that I’m an inspiration, because I work at this craft every day, and I never seem to give up.  It’s not easy–the working part, not the inspiration.  I do this because I want to do this, and I want to do it every day for the rest of my life.  It’s my dream, you know?  But I find it easy to want to give up.  I find it easy to walk away, sometimes forever.  Quitting is easy–

Writing is hard.

This is post seven hundred and fifty, and in another eight or nine months I’ll have a cool thousand to my name.  Sometime in early 2014 I’ll sit down and come up with a cool name for post number one thousand, and recollect.  Maybe I’ll even have some good news to tell you about a novel I’ve just published.

Until then, feel free to hang about the fortress.

The Mountain Queen is always in.

 

Straight On Into the Magic

In a world where people like me are slaves to their imagination, I had some good moments yesterday.  Yes, the day wasn’t the best, and it was cold enough that I came very close to catching a cold, but when the time came to deal with Fantasies, I was back into my normal writing form.

While there have been plenty of distractions for me this week, once I’m writing, I’m back to writing.  I’ve been averaging around eight hundred a night–not a lot, not for me–but it’s been a fast eight hundred.  But last night, I started writing in the early evening, and I found myself knocking off eight hundred and fifty words to end the scene I was in.

Was I finished for the evening?  Well . . .

I said yesterday I was in a bit of a strange mind set, and part of that has been brought on by the contents of the story.  There’s normalcy at the start, then a set up, then comes the magic, then will come the sex–oh, didn’t I mention that before? Yeah, sex.  Lots of sex.  Remember, this whole idea came about as something to take its place next to the unicorn porn that gets self published now and then–though I’m not disappointed to find there is Minotaur breeding now.

I’ve run into this feeling before, where you start to feel as if maybe you’re working on something that’s just a wee bit too silly, and you should be working on something a bit more–serious.  Yeah, if you’re writing, you know this feeling.  It’s different from that other feeling you have, the one that says, “You suck, don’t you know?” but you try not to listen to that one.  This other one–you hear it, because it’s mocking you even more than the other feeling.

I see where the story is going, however, and I’m not concerned.  I like the feel so far, and the fact that there’s going to be some strange things going on is beside the point.  I want to get into the magic now, I want to show what’s going to happen when you get some strange fantasies going, and the become even more real than when we put them on the page for others to see.

Something else pushed me today:  a meme I saw on Facebook.  It’s very simple in what it says–

 

Peter Dinklage:  Gives speech about masturbating.  Wins Emmy!

 

Damn right he did.  Why?  Well, he’s a hell of an actor, for one.  And two:  he had great words written for him.  Someone–more than likely George R. R. Martin–had the character Tyrion go on about the art of self pleasuring, and those word eventually made their way to HBO, along with lots of breasts and deaths.

Why feel silly about what you write when it’s what you want to write?  Yes, I’m probably not going to write about mastu–oops, too late.  Did it in one story already, and I’m probably going to do it again at some point soon.  I’ve passed that point, so why not keep on going?

Bring the magic, girly.  Stop thinking the world is going to chop to you pieces for writing good erotica.

The Rising Idea

This has started off as a very strange week, and after today I have to say that can’t imagine it getting any stranger–unless someone picked up a contract for my book.  Then my day would be made.  Maybe tomorrow it’ll happen.  One can only hope.

I’ve been working on my story, but it’s been sort of give and take.  Not that I’m not getting in any writing, but as I told someone today my mind seems to be in a strange place when I write.  When I’m working, the words come, they flow like mad.  I can get scenes and conversations down quickly, and there doesn’t seem to be any hesitation at all in getting things worked out.

It’s just getting into the story . . . because it seems like my mind is cluttered with distractions galore.  My mind is wandering like mad, and I can’t seem to get focused on the work in progress because of–well, therein lies a good question.  After all the work I spent getting Suggestive Amusements finished, and Her Demonic Majesty edited and published, my mind is once again wondering, “Is this all worth it?  Am I doing something that, in the end, will pay off?  Or am I just fooling myself?”

I go through this every few months.  You bust your ass to do these things, to move into a realm where you would love to be working, and it seems a constant struggle to get anywhere.  I’ve had friends tell me to take it easy and keep doing what I’m doing, because I’m on the right track.

At the same time, I want to move faster.  I want to get where I’m going now.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of “I’m just not good enough.”  If you know anything about Dunning-Kruger effect, you know it’s not unusual for those who have the talent think everything they do isn’t worth a damn, while the Ed Woods of the world think they are the god’s all might shit when it comes to being the best.  It would be nice if the overtly incompetent would just once say, “I totally suck, and I should let someone else do this.”  But, no:  that almost never happens.  They continue churning out shit, and the rest of us bang our heads against the wall wondering what it is we’re doing wrong.

I have ideas coming to me all the time.  I’m working out a story on my computer, and a world in my head, and at the same time I’m having images of a story coming to me as I go through the day–a story that I sort of mentioned in passing as a strange dream I had a few days back.  It’s how it goes:  these things happen to us to prod us onward to sit before the computer, or your writing medium of choice, and get this stuff out of our heads.

Once you’ve been bitten by this affliction, you can’t lose it.  It will never let you go.  One could give up writing tomorrow, and the ideas will continue to rise, reminding you that something wants your attention–

And it won’t stop until you give it due diligence.

Into Thin Wordage

When you’re not working on a story, what are you doing if you’re a writer?  Well, there’s always Facebook games, and watching DVDs of old shows–or DRVs of current shows if you into that new fangled technology–or maybe some reading, or . . . you get the point.  Anything but writing, yeah?

Sometimes you want to write, even if you’re not working on a story.  Some people do research for stories and get notes, some people write fan fiction, which might seem a bit like spinning your wheels since you’re working with someone else’s work, except now it looks like Amazon’s going to find a way for you to publish that stuff now.  Or some of us might write articles on other subjects for people to read–you know, like blogging about writing and your life and the world, that sort of stuff.

When I’ve had nothing to do I’ve written articles and reviews, because why not?  I like to write, I like to give my opinion on things, and maybe I’ll even bring some information to another who’s never heard about whatever it is I’m penning about.  I’ve had that happen with games I’ve reviewed, and even gotten a thank you or two from the companies that printed smaller, independent games.  It’s when you get something of that nature that you feel good about what you’re doing, and something inside makes you feel happy.

Of course there’s also the flip side of that equation . . .

It’s enviable that if I mention I’m writing an article, I’ll have this conversation with a couple of friends:

“I’m writing an article.”
“Are you getting paid?”
“No.”
“Why are you writing it then?  What the hell is wrong with you?”

It’s one thing to write, and it’s another to get some kind of compensation for your work.  I’ve adopted a personal creed that if I feel like writing and sharing something, I don’t mind if I don’t get paid, if–  If I can get some kind of feedback on what I wrote.  Because as much as writers enjoy getting paid, they also like to have people talk about their work.

I don’t like to hear bad things about my work, but I’ll take it.  Because if people are making comments–even if they are somewhat inane and/or bad–it means they probably read your work.  I want people to read my stuff, and to form an opinion  or, if nothing else, to tell me they either liked it or it sucked hard roots.

When you get nothing back, when there is only the soft, quite hiss of a breeze where their should be comments, you wonder if you wrote something for the right audience.  You wonder if you were completely off the mark, or if people just looked at the title and went, “This is gonna suck, forget it.”

It makes you wonder if you wasted your time.

I know the argument, though:  it doesn’t matter if you’re not getting paid, it’s exposure.  But you know what some writers say about exposure, don’t you?  That’s what mountain climbers die from if they stay in the elements far past the time they should have gotten into their tent and zipped up in their sleeping bags.  And if your work is out there, lingering in the Internet Death Zone, with no one reading it, then exposure means jack shit, dude.

You’ll die.

What is the answer to all this?  Maybe it’s time to build my own mountain top . . .

 

Extended Tea Time

I am suffering from a rather dramatic drug hangover today.  I took some sleep aids to knock me out and give me a good night’s rest, and what time do I wake up?  The normal time, what else?  I swear, I’d give just about anything to sleep to about eight AM, and not crawl out of bed before six.

So the drugs are lingering with me, and it’s not a good feeling.  I sort of feel dizzy all the time, and if you’ve ever had vertigo, it’s not a pleasant feeling.  The mind feels like it should shut down and rest a while, but the body is like, “No, dude; we got things to do.”

And I’m stuck in the middle with these clowns.  This is where I wish I could download my mind into another body and just get on with the day.  Screw flying cars:  give me the Black Widow clone body, stat!

I only managed to get in seven hundred words on Fantasies in Harmonie last night, due in part to discussing matters of an article with someone last night.  By the time they vacated the Internet it was past nine my time, and I was starting to have a sleepy.  Still seven hundred words was pretty good, especially when I spent about fifteen minutes considering how I was going to get my lady writers together for a week in the woods.

The thing that’s coming out from this is that I’m getting wordy again.  I’m already twenty-two hundred words into the first part, and I’ve not even gotten to the magic.  Most of the stories like this have people stripping to their knickers at this point, and I’m rambling on about month-long writing camps and word counts.  This is why I’m not as good at erotica as, say, someone doing werewolf porn:  I gotta do the set up and make my characters look like read people in unreal situations.  The people writing the werewolf porn have psudo-wolves banging away by the fifteen hundredth word.

This is how I want to do it, though–it’s how I have to do it.  I try to do more than write characters who vanish when they turn sideways.  I’m sure I could write porn and, as one of my friends says, have them “bang at a thousand (words),” but if I did that, then one would never feel a connection to the girl who feels herself changing all over . . .

Naw, not gonna tell you.  You just have to wait for the story to show up on Amazon.

This made me think about the dream I wrote about yesterday.  After one friend read the post they said, “Sounds like a story there.”  Oh, does it now?  Actually, I’d sort of thought of the same thing, that maybe there’s a story in them there REM waves.  A sexy story?  Sure.  A kinky story?  You betcha.

The question becomes, do I write it?  And what is it about besides latex clad women with multiple limbs getting their freak on?

Wait–do I really need more than that?

All Hail the Spider Queen

Well, isn’t this an interesting start to the week?  Actually that happened last night when I was working on Fantasies in Harmonie, and I started working things out in the initial scene . . . then again, maybe it started with the dreams last night, which were very bizarre.

Lets get this in order, shall we?

First off, I didn’t think I was going to write a lot last night.  I thought, “Yeah, did five hundred words last night, maybe do the same tonight.”  Right.  So I started writing after I got some information out of my ideas file and put into the current project.  I looked at the layout of the cabin, and started in with a question asked and answered.

I had no real idea about what was going to be in the scene, what was going to happen, and yet, the moment I started writing I didn’t feel as if I was going to need to search for words.  I knew what would happen, and I didn’t need to go into a lot of discussions about the why of being in the cabin–that’s probably left for tonight–but rather I wanted to show the ladies together as a group.  It doesn’t get simpler than that.

So I have the set up, the witty banter, the insinuation that one of the women is into My Little Pony fan porn (we’ll call it “Fifty Shades of Flutershy”), the unsaid feeling that something isn’t right with one of the characters–it’s all there.  It’s getting things set up for the big bangs to come–no pun intended.

I know tonight the words might not come out as easily as they did last night, but it felt good to be creating again.  It’s a silly little story, but so what?  It’s my story, and I feel for my characters.  Maybe you’ll feel them, too, when you read this.

As for the dream–hey, lets spend some time with this madness now . . .

Of late my dreams haven’t been that important.  They’ve been there, but nothing that has stood out, nothing that made me wake up and think, “What the hell was that all about?”  That doesn’t mean I haven’t had my semi-waking moments, but it’s been nothing like the dreams I had last year.

This time, though–let me tell you.  First I was out shopping, and no big deal there.  I was in a modest skirt, sandals, tee shirt, the sort of thing one wears on a warm, sunny day.

That somehow transitioned to ending up in an adult clothing store, and I was trying on this black latex mini dress and boots combo, and the girl who was waiting on me was pretty much drooling as she watched me in the mirror.  She kept calling me “Spider Queen” for no reason that was then apparent–

Then I was back home, and I was with someone I know, and she was having trouble containing herself.  At one point she says, “Take me, Spider Queen,” and before you can say “Metebelis III,” I’ve got six arms and I’m doing some rather strange and kinky things to my friend, who is more or less mumbling “I love you” between moments of ecstasy.

I mean, what the hell?  Me, the latex clad Spider Queen?

Maybe there’s a story in there–

Camping on the Story

I hit my goals yesterday; yes, I did.  I blogged, I wrote an article that took up much of my afternoon, and then, after Doctor Who was over and done, I got down to working on my story, because these stories just sort of languish and do nothing on their own.  It’s like you have to write all the words for them.

The first part is sort of strange, because I was free forming as I went along.  I have a feeling that when I go back over this story, I’m going to end up rewriting a lot of this part.  But it’s a good set up; it gave me the feeling that something is different about this place in the woods, so when things happen, the reader shouldn’t be taken by surprise.

There was one big change that I had to do before heading off to bed, though.  I was looking something up–research, you know–and I just happened to take a closer look at the name of the place where my story takes place.  And that was when I discovered (let me say this in my Hermione voice), it’s not Harmony, it’s Harmonie.  Oops.

Hey, even the best research can be wonky when you’re looking at Google Maps at ten at night after being up for seventeen hours.

A was a bit bummed out, but not so much that I went into a mental tailspin from which I couldn’t recover.  No, I was level headed about the matter, since all I had to do was change the name of the story and rename the project.  Ergo, the story is now known as Fantasies in Harmonie, which gives it an even nicer ring than what had gone before, don’t you think?

there wasn’t a whole lot of writing last night; when I was finished with the scene I’d only written around five hundred words. I wasn’t looking to do a lot of writing last night because I was doing a set up and I knew it was going to take a little finagling to get the words right.

Also, I’m a bit more careful when I write these days.  I found myself writing then stopping so I could look over what I’d written.  If it looked good, I went on.  If I didn’t, I read the lines until I knew what I wanted to write, and then wrote that.  It’s sort of editing on the way, which slows you up, but ultimately helps me keep the text as clean as possible.

I checked my timelines, because if there’s one thing I am, it’s attentive to the time it takes to do anything.  From the time I finished Suggestive Amusements to the time I published Her Demonic Majesty, about seven weeks went by.  That time was spent in edits, getting covers made, and setting up my accounts on Smashwords and Amazon.  As I told a friend the other day, writing is work, and publishing things correctly takes even more work.

So the more I get right up front, the less I have to react to in order to finish my work correctly.

Slowing down now so I don’t have to rush latter is a great idea.  Just like finding a good cabin in the woods, you gotta take your time.

 

Early to the Cinema Show

I was tired last night and thought with nothing going on today I could sleep in.  I was wrong:  up at five forty-five with nary a bird in sight to wake up as the sky brightened.  There are times when I do wish I could sleep until nine in the morning and crawl out of bed refreshed and ready for the world.

Screw that:  I’m up.  The world will have to deal.

This week has been a combination of getting Her Demonic Majesty published and uploaded to various platforms.  With the exception of some tweaking here and there, it’s a done deal.  With that out of the way I’m onto the next big thing–or whatever passed for that.

As I told someone last night, my day looks like this:  I blog (doing that now), then I start work on an article.  I know what I’m going to write, it’s just a matter of writing, editing, and submitting to the website.  And doing a bit of research while it’s going on.  I figure that’ll take most of my morning.

Then it’s time to make the story.  Going back through the milestones on my Author’s Page, I see I finished Suggestive Amusements on 24 March.  It’s now 18 May, which means I’ve spent two months getting my novel ready and published, and I haven’t been working on anything new.  As may be said in Glengarry Glen Ross, “A, B, W.  Always.  Be.  Writing.”  Of course, I’ll won’t be told to stay away from the coffee, and I already know Blake’s name . . .

Sometime this afternoon I’ll start in on Fantasies in Harmony, and get the words going on that.  The pieces are all together, the project is set up, and the map of my mind–if there is such a thing–is inside the document ready to show me the way.  All that remains are to take whatever words come into my head and get them into the computer

While all this is ongoing I’ll have the music playing.  Since getting up this morning I’ve have a live version of The Cinema Show playing, a recording from 1978 of one of the last times Genesis played the song in its entirety before moving the instrumental bridge into a “Greatest Hits” melody they started with In The Cage during their 1980 Duke tour, and played throughout the Mama Tour in 1983.  Yeah, doing this keeps me awake, it keeps my mind running at something close to nominal speed–and it’s enjoyable.  Plus, I hate silence.  I work in it enough that I like to have sound around me when I’m home.

Lurking in the back of my mind is the notion of what I should publish next.  I said I was going to do four things this year, and I’m going to try just that.  One down, and seven months to get three more out.  If I keep things nice and short I should be able to do that–after all, I only need editing and covers and proofreading and a few other things–

I’ve got the accounts, so the hard work is out of the way.

Melding of Minds

When there is no writing, then it’s time to write, yeah?

That was me last night.  The novel was in the can, so to speak, and up for sale.  No more to do there, so what’s next?  As someone may say to me, “Shouldn’t you be writing?”

I’ve spoke about doing this erotic fantasy story just for laughs–and money, don’t forget the money–so I figured, what the hell, might as well get my project started.  That meant firing up the Big Scrivener and setting up the story.  I do this all the time; it’s become second nature for me.

Therefor the project was created, the story named, and . . . well, this is where it gets to be fun.  Most of the time I’ll start plotting things out just a bit.  By “plotting” I mean I set up chapter cards and put some meta data on each card to give me an idea as to what’s going to happen at that point in the story.  It’s not like I’m deciding at that point what’s going to happen right down to the moment, but it’s a good way to figure out the main focus of the scene.

This time, though, I wanted to try something else.  With one of the recent updates of Scrivener came the ability to import mind maps into your project.  I’ve played with FreeMind, which is a great mind mapping tool, and I like using it to see if my ideas for a story–or, like the first time I used it, for a new chapter–are going to work, or if they’re way off base.

A few weeks back I decided to map out Fantasies in Harmony because I knew what I wanted to do, but I wasn’t sure if it was going to make any sense.  So I did a couple of hours of thinking through what I wanted to in the story, and mapped the action out.  When I was finished I had a story, more or less, in mind mapped metadata.

Given that I had a mind map, and given that I could import that into Scrivener, I was curious to see what would happen.  I mean, if it didn’t work out well, I could always delete stuff.  So I found the Import option, selected Mind Map to import, and hit the Okay button–

All sorts of stuff appeared in the document:  lots of note cards with nothing written inside.  I was a bit confused, so I deleted everything and tried it again, getting the same results.  I’m expecting to see the visual map in my document, and here I’m getting all these note cards–

That’s when it hit me:  every card corresponded to an idea I’d placed in my mind map.  When I imported the map, Scrivener broke out every idea and turned them into their own scene–so now, if I wanted to elaborate on those ideas, all I had to do was write up what actually happened.

I’d just opened up a whole new world of possibilities for doing my stories.

All those notes have been moved under the scenes I was creating.  Given how Scrivener compiles scenes, I could actually write everything in short scenes and put it all together in the compile.  Which I’m considering doing–

Hey, I can have my fun while writing, can’t I?

Expiration Infinium

First, the great news:  Her Demonic Majesty is up on Amazon this very moment, so if you want a copy, go snag her here!  It took some fooling around, but she’s up and live.  If you buy it and like it, please leave a review.  If you buy it and don’t like, please leave a review and I can try to do better next time.

Now, on to the not-so-great . . .

I spend time on Facebook.  Some times I’m there to chat with friends, sometimes to play games, other times just to see what sort of insanity is passing for real life.  It can be a place of bad information, where if you posted as a fact that taping swiss cheese to your genitals for a week would release enzymes into your blood that would help you lose weight, someone would re-post it with a, “Yeah, this could work!” tag line.  It is also a realm of memes, both good and bad, some funny and others not so much.

I happened to check my home wall yesterday and came across a meme, one with a upset looking character in the picture, and the wording explaining everything:  ”I’m still pissed they canceled Firefly.”

Really?  After ten years you’re still pissed?  Please, give it rest and watch your DVDs one more time to relieve whatever angst is gnawing at you, though chances are good you’re still gonna be pissed in 2023.  Maybe you can get together with your friends and hold a “Still Pissed Twenty Years Later!” convention–you know, to remind all the other pissed off people you know that your darkest moment was the day Fox put the ax to your greatest show evar.

Fandom is a strange thing.  I will admit to being a fan of several things, and I will even admit to getting right down to the point where I could recite even the lamest point of trivia for my favorite forms of entertainment.  But when things went away, when they ended on a good or bad note, when things were left hanging because some suit looking over a spread sheet said, “This show is eating up too much revenue can it and put on wrestling in it’s place,” I’ve also sort of went, “Okay, what’s next?” and moved on.

Ah, but there are some people who just can’t let go, who are gonna be upset when something they love ends.  Just last week we heard about how Charlaine Harris, she of the The Southern Vampire Mysteries novels that became True Blood, was receiving death threats from fans upset she is taking their Sookie away.  I remember the forums soon after Farscape was canceled, and Bonnie Hammer got C-worded about a thousand times.  And I’ve suffered through years of the sordid tales of raped childhoods because The Phantom Menace was release–or, worse yet, because Gredo shot first.

As some omnipotent alien once said, “All good things must come to an end,” and these days if it’s a television series, or a movie, the only way that’s gonna happen is if there’s money to be made by doing so.  That’s what happened with Star Trek:  the demographics were underestimated, the the first movie was made, didn’t do what was expected, and someone went, “I got an idea–”, the second move came out, and the rest is history.

That didn’t happen with Serenity.  There was a very loud and boisterous fan base that snapped up DVDs, and the studio thought, “Hey, they want a movie, maybe we can make something off this.”  And the movie was made, and that’s when it was discovered that while the fan base was loud and boisterous, they weren’t as large as was hoped, and that was the reason there wasn’t another movie, and there hasn’t been another series–and likely will never be.

Sometimes you have to let these things go, because they were good in their moment, but when you want to see them again, as they were, a decade later, you’re going to have something that will never live up to the expectations of the fans.  Say Joss doesn’t want to make another billion dollars with super hero movies, and decides to ruin Nathan Fillion’s and Morena Baccarin’s careers (as he said he’d have to do when he was on Reddit).  So everyone comes back ten years later–oh, wait.  Two characters don’t, ’cause they’re dead, and if you know where Joss was going with the story, Morena Baccarin doesn’t have to worry about long term contracts, ’cause she’s going belly up soon.  Simon and Kaylee are probably knockin’ out kids, and do you want those rugrats on a ship, ’cause we all know how well precocious kids and space ships get along.

No, you’re not going to have a continuation of what left the air ten years ago–you’re gonna have a reboot.  Let the childhood raping begin.

It’s never a happy moment when something you love goes away.  But nothing last forever–and if it does, thy name be The Simpsons, which is still on television because it’s a money maker for Fox.  Everything else goes the way of dusty death, and I’ve even planed out the end of some of my stories–

Though it would help if I could get them started first.

Where We Last Left Off

Sounds like I’m coming back from a cliffhanger of an episode, doesn’t it?

In many way publishing is episodic, and can turn into high drama when you least expect things to go sideways.  My experience has been very minimal to this point, as there are only two stories in my collection, but with Her Demonic Majesty being such an endeavor  it was bound to hit some snags.

Snag One:  the novel loaded to Amazon Kindle Direct without issues, and late Sunday night I was told it was live and ready for download.  Only one problem:  every time I tried to go to the novel page, I was getting a 404 message, saying the page didn’t exist.  I let that go for Monday, but by Tuesday the situation was the same, and I was having a not-so-good feeling taking hold in the pit of my stomach.

Snag Two then showed:  all of my work on Smashwords was rejected for Premium submission.  Going Premium on Smashwords means getting set up on Barnes & Noble, Sony, Apple, and a few other distributors.  What happened was this:  I’d altered the name on my Smashwords account to reflect the name on my new cover, but that was a no-no, because the cover names on my other works didn’t match, and all hell broke loose.

So I switched the account name back, and therein appeared Snag Three:  Her Demonic Majesty was rejected for Premium submission because, it would seem, my Table of Contents links were bad.  Could be they were pointing at the wrong thing, could be they were formatted wrong, could be there were hidden bookmarks–  Oops.  Yeah, I remembered that I did that during the creation.

With that in mind, I set about getting things right.

First, I created new accounts on both Smashwords and Amazon for Cassidy.  Then, I pulled up the Smashwords version of the uploaded document, removed all the bookmarks and hyperlinks, and started over, making sure there were no hidden bookmarks this time.  Put them in, linked them, checked the links–everything was super.

Then I uploaded again.

The novel processed in two minutes, because I watched as it ran through the meat grinder.  Everything came out fine, and the novel was at a new home with a new ISBN–yes, I couldn’t use the old one, because that one was assigned to my other name.  Another thing to keep in mind.  Right now the novel is going through review for Premium submission, and I’m hoping that all is well this time though.

What next?  Tonight I’ll pull up the Kindle version of the novel and redo the Table of Contents as I did with the Smashwords version.  Then, once that’s done, I’ll upload it to the next Amazon account, wait for the word that it’s been published, and look to see if it is, indeed, ready for selling.

Then I’ll get the world out.

Of course I could end up with errors I haven’t anticipated, but I’m hopeful that the current snafu came about because of the accounts, and not because the book format was sucky.  After all, the meat grinder told me all was well, and why would it lie to me?

I’ll be right here, keeping my fingers crossed.

Designing the Unseen Imagined

Though the book is up, there are issues–things I should have seen, but didn’t take care of before hitting the “Upload” button.  Never fear; I’ll have everything sorted out this week.  I hope.

In the meantime I’m playing with other things:  concepts, story setups, that sort of thing.  I need to get a Scrivener project set up for my next story, but as one person told me, I should take it easy least I burn out.  Ha!  I laugh at burning out–don’t I?  Already I’m starting to feel like a lazy git because I’m not really working on anything.  That’s a bad habit to get into, because you end up beating yourself up for the silliest things, and before you know it you’re obsessing over every damn thing that comes your way.

Must.not.do.

One of the things I’ve been on about is trying to imagine a school I built for one story–a story that could be called fan fiction of a sort–and how I can bring it over into a new world that it completely mine.  There will be a number of changes to the layout and functionality of the joint, but the one thing I want to keep is a huge, grand building that sits somewhere between small castle and grand edifice.  For now we’ll call it the Grand Hall, and when it was originally conceived, it was part cathedral, part meeting place, part protected school.

It’s really big, is what I want to say.

I’ve always had this image in my head about the building, and the layout.  Entryway; central hall in the middle; Hospital on the second, third, and fourth floors on the left, administration on the right; library to the far end; basements below.  It’s a huge building, though probably not much bigger that most modern buildings.  It’s just that in my mind’s eye, I can see it being a very shadowy place, full of darkness and light beams, and during the evening, enduring silence.  (Not to be confused with The Silence, who may be there anyway.)

As much as I’ve seen this place in my head, I should be able to lay out the floor place, right?  Guess again, Gilbert.

I started a layout last night, starting with the central meeting hall.  That place it meant to be huge, about one hundred fifty feet by fifty. Then I moved outside that point of reference, and . . .

Nothing.

I got as far as laying out where the staircases are–and, now that I think about it, shouldn’t be–and then I looked at the plan on the screen before me and thought, “Shit, man, this place is huge.”  That was as true as anything gets, because it is a big building.  With all sorts of things hidden in its black corners.

And I’ve not even thought of what the basements look like.

Everyone gets those moments when they realize they have hold of something that might be a bit too much for them to control, and this is one of those moments.  It’s not that I won’t figure out the design, it’s just that it’s going to be something that takes a bit of time–just like when I was doing three dimensional designs of spaceships.  Or writing a huge novel.

Don’t rush the scale.  Like a mountain, you climb it slowly.

You’ll get to the summit eventually.