Harmony is Me

More than a few writers have not only accused of being a plotter, but of sometimes overplotting my work.  I have heard from a few people, who will remain nameless, that I have moments when I get too deep into the story and end up spending a lot of time doing something called “research”.  You know:  that thing you’re suppose to do to make sure you get things right?

I first started hearing this in October, 2011, when I was prepping myself for NaNoWriMo 2011.  I had a few people telling me, “Don’t do that!  This is NaNo:  you just write!”  However, that wasn’t how I worked, and I needed to get a few rules in place prior to getting word into the computer.  Hence, there were a few people who began saying that I was doing it “wrong”, that I wasn’t really following the “rules” of NaNo, and whatever I was going to write probably wouldn’t be that good, anyway.  (Just as a side note:  I heard many of the same things prior to NaNo 2012, with one gentleman even going so far as to say that anyone who did any plotting would end up writing “formulistic crap”.  Well, I never!)

Of course, the nay sayers are still working on their novels from 2011–maybe–and I’m in the last stages of getting mine self published, which means . . . well, it actually means nothing.  It just means I’ve stuck to my plan to not only write, but to publish one way or the other, and that’s what I’m doing.  Maybe what I’m putting out will be crap, but it’s my crap, and it has covers.  You can’t take any of that from me.

Where is this going?  Straight into my next story, trust me . . .

Last night I was, among other things, looking for a place to put my cabin for my next story, given the way-too original title of Cabin Fever.  The idea is for my trio of literary lovely to spend a week in a cabin writing, and then have strange things happen to them, after which–well, you can imagine.  Or not.

In a way I need to know everything before I start writing.  Even something as inconsequential as the location of a cabin might not seem like a big deal, but I have to know where it’s located.  There might no be more than an off-hand remake about where the cabin is, but it’s a touch that I use to ground my story–sort of like how when De Niro played Al Capone in The Untouchables, he had the place that made Capone’s silk boxer shorts make the same for him to wear while filming.  You never saw them, but it was a touch he wanted.

I knew I wanted to have the cabin in Indiana, and I wanted it to be close to water for some reason.  So I looked at sites concerning state parks, trying to figure out which ones had cabin rentals, and then found those places on Google Maps so I could really see the places.  It was a bit of a search, because while some places sounded great, they didn’t look that way.  I needed to have something that fit just right . . .

Then I found it.  One of the state parks that had cabins, and was bordered by a river, and had lots of room–room for a lone cabin, a strange cabin, where three ladies could find their lives changing in very different ways–

And as soon as I had the location, I had the new title:  Fantasies in Harmony.  As I told another writer, you’ll see how that works at different levels.

I spend too much time on my stories?

You have no idea.

 

 

Oh, and it’s my birthday.  Happy me, yay . . .

Backwards to the Summit

A year ago, something strange happened.  I wrote this post.

I didn’t there was anything out of the ordinary about that post.  In fact, I dashed it off early in the morning before heading off to The Hole That Was My Job, located at The Undisclosed Location.  I was up early because I was having trouble sleeping, probably because of the cold that was developing that day, and would remain with me the entire month of May and well into June.

I popped it off, went to work, then went to dinner.  When I returned home and fired up the computer, I checked my stats–

The post had seen over two hundred views, and that day ended up becoming the most on-site views I’ve ever received.

I’ve tried hard to figure out what it was that drew all those people to my website.  I don’t think it was the tags, or how it appeared on Google, or even the subject.  The reason for the popularity is puzzling, because I’ve written far better posts than that, and they’ve had to go begging for hits like an out of work bicycle messenger who hocked his single-gear speed buggy for meth and is now hovering above the rocky bottom.

It’s strange how things like that happen.  You can bust your butt over something that you think is going to set the world on fire, and the collective sighs of a tiny group of readers can be overwhelming.  At the opposite end of the spectrum are those things you dash out almost as an afterthought, and your fans lose their shit in rapture-like ecstasy.

Stories are like that.  You put your heart into something that seems to speak to you in special ways, and it seems the indifference is suffocating–then you have some fun with a story that’s not meant to be taken too seriously, and you watch the money roll in.  Now, I don’t think that’s going to happen with my next story, but the way things work in my life, who knows?

I started putting my next story together last night.  Right now the title is about as original as it gets:  Cabin Fever.  As in, “I gotta fever, and the only prescription is hot women having sex!”  It’s the sort of simple title that can catch an eye, though it seems as if there are way too many cabins with fevers on Smashwords, so I’m going to need to rethink my approach.

I have the names of my characters, and a short outline of their lives.  It was while I was playing with this that I discovered something about the Scrivener Name Generator:  once you have your selected names in the “short list” box, you can transfer that list to an existing card or folder, and then play with the contents as you see fit–or even append the name at the end of a line currently being written.  That’s a function that I’d not played with, and now that I know it exists, when I need a quick name, and I throw it in and create a character card for that person at the same time.

This is how I go about getting a story ready:  I develop, I do my research, I lay things out.

And then, when I’m ready . . .

I see to things really get laid.

Cake or History

When you have little to do, your nights get a lot longer.  I ran into that last night, while I looked for something to occupy my time while I had . . . nothing to . . . write.  *sigh*

There was some good news, however:  the woman looking at the full manuscript for Her Demonic Majesty told me she found one typo per page for the first few pages, then didn’t see anything for like a full chapter.  After all the freaking out about how I was a total failure at getting my editing done, this made me feel a hell of a lot better.  At this point I just wait for her to finish her reading, and her markings, and do what is needed when the manuscript comes back.

So I played around.  One half of my mind was trying to figure out how to import images into Scrivener, and the other was working on an idea for a story.  It helped that I was in my Story Ideas project, where I jot down ideas when they come to me, and try to flesh them out little by little when the mood strikes.  So I was in the right place to mull over two ideas . . .

One of the ideas has to do with a . . . lets call it “fantasy smut” story I wanted to write for Camp NaNo July.  It all came about during a discussion with another writer, where we were making fun of some of the stories that show up on Smashwords–you know, stories about incestuous stepkids, werewolf breeding, and horny unicorns looking for wimmin.  It was during one of those discussions that I went, “Screw these losers:  I can write something like this, only it’ll be Better!” and then my mind started working.

I used to write strange, fetishy fiction, so coming up with something that would involve sex and fantasy shouldn’t be a problem.  I have the characters in my mind–borrowing liberally from friends I know, and who have already been told they’ll be in a story–I have the location set, I have the sex ready to roll.  I do need a title, though, and a set up, which is what I was thinking about last night.  And a little bit this morning when birds woke me at four AM.

I’m considering just “doing it” and writing the story the month of May.  It shouldn’t take much to do, and shouldn’t be that long.  Actually, I’m going to keep it short, or as short as possible.  It’s going to be all about Teh Sexy, so character development is out.  Okay, maybe a little development, because I don’t write smut.

The other thing I was working on was a time line for another story idea.  I posted it on my Facebook wall last night, because I do things like that.  What I was plotting out was a “What If?” sort of alternate history of space from the 1960′s through the 1970′s.  I didn’t include everything in the time line; I was mostly adding missions that never flew but could have, so that I could establish a different history for those who grew up in that time–namely, the characters in my possible story.

I love doing alternate history, and while it might not be something that a few people would consider realistic–hey, it’s my universe!  Get your own alternate space history!

Don’t you just love having an imagination?

Firmly Upon the Upward Path

Here we are, the penultimate weekend.  As of last night I had only ten thousand words remaining in my edit of Her Demonic Majesty, and given that I have a whole lot of nothing ahead of me today, that means that by the time I return her tomorrow, I’ll have but one chapter remaining, or I’ll awaken feeling bright and shiny, and there will be nothing left but to compile the story into a Word document and created the Table of Contents.

Either way, I finish the edit and format within the next thirty-six hours.

That means next week is filled with fun and frivolity.  I know I’m going to be interviewed, but it’s going to be an interview the likes of which many of you have never seen.  I’m thinking up a book giveaway, But I want it to be something different–which means I’m not sure how I’ll do it, but I’m investigating means.  I had considered asking people to guess what color I look best wearing, but one person would walk away with everything then . . .

The interesting thing I find is that I’m overly excited.  Worried, yeah; I’m always worried that something will show up wrong in the story, that it’s not going to sell, that it’ll be rejected after all my hard work.  But that happens, you know.  My friend Jo Custer said yesterday that she was told that the movie she’s trying to Kickstart into existence is “filthy”.  Many jokes were made of this comment, not the least was that someone should tell Lars Von Trier there’s a new bitch in town.  Though if you want to get into Lars Von Trier territory, you need a leading lady to come up and spit on you every morning and tell you what a horrible person you are, because she knows she’ll be spending the afternoon her standing naked in a mountain stream masturbating while being yelled at to “Look natural!”

We creative times, we do our own thing.  We love praise, but be usually get criticized to hell and gone.  As I’ve said many times, the non-creative out there don’t get us.  Yes, they want to be entertained by us, but they don’t get what we do, and why.  If you’re like some of the people I know, their notion usually boils down to, “You wanna make money.”  Well, yes, dude:  I would like to make money.  I’d like to make enough money to do this full time.  There isn’t a one of us who wouldn’t love to spend their days crafting stories or making movies or producing pretty pictures.  And I’m not talking talking making mad J. K. Rollinbucks cash here, either.  If I was making fifty thousand a year writing, I’d be home all the time writing.

Why do we suffer the pangs of criticism,  though?  I think part of it comes from the un-creative being unable to build their own works, but damned if they don’t know what a good work should look like.  There are things out there that are broken, that is true, and creative works that are totally Teh Suk.  But the hate does seem to come at everyone and everything, and it’s almost impossible to avoid.

The trick comes from deciding if the criticism is of the good kind . . . and if you can learn from it.

As for the other kind . . .

Write your own stories, then get back to me.

The Outside Looking In

I am a fan of Zen Pencils.

I’d never heard of it before last September, just as I was in the final stages of preparing for NaNo 2012.  I don’t remember who posted this strip, the first that I saw, but I remembered it vividly, so much so that I went back to read it many times.

Why did it touch me?  It may have had something to do with NaNo, with some of the people revolving around NaNo, or some of the people revolving around my life.  I was posting excerpts from my project, showing my chapter layouts and my time lines, and there were more than a few snipping remarks about how I was doing NaNo “wrong”, that I needed to “just write”, and that all this prep meant I was incapable of writing anything “imaginative”.  There were a couple of people who objected to the title of my work, and, of course, a few who were like, “Why are you even bothering?”

The “Why are you even bothering?” crowd are always easy to figure out, by the way:  they’re the ones who feel since you’re never going to make big money off your work, why don’t you do something else–you know, like clean the house, or pay the bills, or something?  These are usually the sort whose most imaginative thought of the day is wondering if they should change their underwear, and if so, what should they wear.

In other words, they got no idea what makes a person like me tick.

Since that first encounter with The Zen, I’ve not only visited the site often, but I’ve showed it to others.  Some have ignored it, some have loved it.

This last one brought back way too many memories.

I have written many times throughout my life.  I’ve tried a lot of things, actually:  I’ve always loved art, loved reading, loved music, loved writing.  I was never content to do things that were–shall we say, easy?  I was never a good artist, but on a couple of occasions I let my imagination go, and the end result was to get some intense praise from the instructor.  I didn’t just read, I was off into advanced stories and concepts long before high school.  I didn’t just listen to music:  I found things that made me think and wonder, and devoured the sources.  And my writing?  I was doing nutty stuff even in the mid-1970′s.

However . . .

There were always people around me who thought my art was “strange”.  By the very fact I read I was considered a “weirdo”, and I even had one person who’d been a friend for years stop talking to me because he thought I was “nuts”.  I was always being told I listened to “freak music”, and that I should stick to stuff more popular.

And no one gave a shit about my writing.

I finally took up writing in a serious way in the late 1980′s, and kept at it for a while.  I once brought my spouse to a writer’s group I was in–more a collection of friends than anything else–and I read what I was working on at the time.  On the way home I asked my spouse what they thought, and they comment was, “It was crap.  I hate when you write stuff like that.  The only good story you ever wrote was your first.”

My first story that they knew was a quick, fast, first person horror story that was filled with so many clichés that H. P. Lovecraft would have killed it with fire.  But, to my spouse, it was the best thing I ever wrote, and they were of the opinion that I should go back to writing stuff like that.

Between a life time of hearing stuff like that, and having to deal with my other problems, I gave up on writing for a long time.  You start believing that everything you do is crap, that you’re never getting ahead.

You become a willing participant in killing your dreams.

These days, I write in a vacuum most of the time.  I know there are few people around me who care about this work, but screw them:  I do this for me.  I have a daughter who wants to be an artist.  I encourage her to draw, and to draw as much as she can.  She posts some of her work on her Tumblr, and has gotten great feedback.

I don’t have to tell her to do anything differently than is being told here.

When I am down, when I feel I am wasting my time, when I feel that all that I do will be for naught, I think about what has come before, and what could be next.

And then I use my time.

The Great Gig on the Side

Last night was a time for editing, but never once did I bring up my work.  Say what?

I was chatting last night.  I was chatting with a friend who writes as well, for it seems that I’ve made a lot of writing friends over the last two years–almost three since I restarted everything with a class in the fall of 2010.  I was in the mood to chat after driving for over any hour through a torrential downpour that is still going on this morning.  So the brain wasn’t doing what it was suppose to do, and I was relaxing until it could.

As I chatted with my friend, the discussion turned to a story she’s writing.  She’s been inspired of late, and has pushed her tale into Novelette County, which is only slightly less sleazy than the Country of Novella, where I find myself hanging out a lot.  (If you know your Stephen King, you’ll get the joke.)  After a few minutes of talking about it, the question came:  if I was sent a copy of the first few chapters, would I be interested in looking it over and giving my opinion?

This has been happening to me a lot of late.  In the past month I’ve done a bit of beta reading for some friends, and from time to time I’ve been asked to look a story over and see if it needs some polish.  Now, I’m not an editor by trade.  If anything, I’ve developed my skills, such as they are, over the last couple of years, since it became obvious that if I needed to get my stories polished, I’d learn how to do it myself, or start paying people a considerable amount of money to do it instead.

But I’m a nice person, so I do what I can to help those who want to get ahead.  The people I know aren’t vampires thriving on drama and attention:  they are writers.  Beside, the vampires have all defriended and blocked me, so it make the selection process easier . . . anyway, I looked the story over, and did my little turn on the catwalk, marking up a few things, and leaving a comment or two where needed.

In doing this act I helped my friend a bit, which is always a good thing because we need that karma boost in our lives.  But wait!  There’s more . . .

A week back I was contacted by another writer and asked if I’d do a big favor:  would I help them edit their books.  They’re making a push to get their old stuff cleaned up and their new stuff in similar shape, and asked if I’d join in the band and help them out.  Naturally I said yes, because I’m good.  And I believe I can help get their stories whipped into the shape they desire.

What about your own work, Cassie? I hear you say.  Nothing is going to fall behind there:  Demonic Majesty is coming along, I’ll get back into it tonight, but I will help others where I can.

Who knows–maybe there’s something here I can turn into a worth-while vocation.

It beats slinging code, let me tell ya.

Coolness Factoring

There can be much joy in editing, though, as a writer, it’s one thing that we all seem to hate with white-hot passion.  For the longest time I avoided editing, thinking my first drafts were so good that I never needed to worry about editing.

While I will say that I seemed to get the story write on the first draft–you know, characters names are right, the plot flows as I want and doesn’t have huge holes in it–there are still a lot of errors popping up here and there.  Can’t be helped:  we are imperfect creatures creating imperfect creations.  Really, if I were producing tremendously fantastic stories that were nearly perfect, I’d stop driving sixty miles to work each day and live Neil Gaiman’s life.  Until then, I work at this writing craft until something come in the way of sales.

But I was struck by something interesting last night.  Shale I share it?  Am I writing here?

I was editing the last chapter of Part One for Her Demonic Majesty.  It’s a long chapter, a bit over fifty-eight hundred words, and it’s at the point in the story where I start turning up the drama a bit.  It’s a good chapter, it sets the mood for what’s to come, but . . . as I’m editing, I run into a few lines spoken by my lovely but dangerous succubus character, and there’s something about what she’s saying–

No, it more than that.  It’s how she’s saying the words that is making me feel a little strange.  As I’m setting up the format, what she’s saying just doesn’t feel right.  It doesn’t feel like here.  Someone is speaking, but when I imagine her in my mind, and she says those words, they sound like they’re coming from another person.

This is where you look at the line, think about what a character should be saying, and then have them speak the words.  It sounds easy, but it’s getting those words right that’s tricky.  So I looked at the lines, and imagined the sentences changing, rearranging, and I did  a little cut and paste here, added something there, and deleted a couple of things that didn’t fit my succubus.

When it was finished, the paragraph was far cleaner than before.  It hadn’t actually been reduced or expanded in size:  if I remember correctly, I believe it became one word longer after the edit.  The thing was . . . when it was finished, I was taken by how what she was saying now was far cooler than before.

Do I mean she ended up sounding like a character from a Tarantino movie?  Far from it.  Her words now seemed to flow from her effortlessly, as if this is how she would handle this particular emergency, how she would express her displeasure, and how she’d get the attention of the other two people in the room, and let them know that, right now, shit is deep and extraction is necessary.

I did this a few times last night, and while it is not my intention to try and create some “coolness factor” for each of my characters when they speak, the editing did prove one thing:

I can still be surprised by this craft.  And that’s a good thing.

Paloma Dreamtime

It seems the yesterday’s post touched more than a few people in ways I hadn’t suspected.  About a year ago I had someone start following the blog, only to send me the following comment two days later:  ”This isn’t just about writing, is it?”  He stopped following me the next day because, yes, I don’t always talk about writing, and this upset him greatly.  Probably had something to do with him being a nutso control freak, which manifested in a couple of online writer groups I was in, but that’s another story.

While I write about writing, I also write about how I feel about writing, and how it makes me feel.  It’s not always good, and it’s not always pleasant  but it’s usually honest.  As a writer we have to be honest with ourselves, at least that’s what I think.  You can spend all your time writing stories that involve having sex with your step-kids, but at some point you have to be honest and say, “This is really sort of crappy.”  If you aren’t saying that, well . . . you’re not me.  Which probably isn’t that bad a thing, come to think of it.

I try to pay attention on everything these days.  As Johnny Cash said, ”You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don’t try to forget the mistakes, but you don’t dwell on it. You don’t let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.”  That’s me these days:  I look ahead, but remember what has already come before.  Because I do know what it’s like to be pinned down by your past, and how it can gnaw at you until you can’t move forward any longer.  It sucks hard, and I don’t need that negative energy in my life these days.

So what is this about Paloma, you say?  A dream, I say.  After editing two chapters last night–editing and formatting, I should say–it was off to bed, because it’s not like anything else is happening in my life.  It was raining lightly last night, and I love to hear soft rains, so I was off to sleep pretty fast . . .

That’s when the strange stuff happened.

Whatever I was dreaming, I was in world burning mode last night.  It seemed as if things were really crappy, that things weren’t nearly as good as they are today, and yet, it wasn’t entirely a crapsack world.  Tre Funky, yes.  But I still had a car and internet, so it wasn’t a total hole.

For some reason I was trying to move a bunch of kids from my part of the country to a new job in . . . Paloma, California.  For some reason I thought this was a great idea, because I’d have a fantastic job and I’d be able to take care of everyone, and so forth and on.  It stuck with me so much that after I got onto the computer this morning I did a quick map look for Paloma, California . . .

And was duly unimpressed.

It’s a small collection of buildings in the middle of nowhere east of Stockton.  There’s a church, some roads going elsewhere, and that’s it.  A couple of nice houses, but no business that would make me willing to pack up a bunch of kids and haul them a few thousand miles.

Why did this happen?  Maybe there’s a story there.  Maybe not.

I’ll keep my eyes open, though–just in case.

The Doubt Killer

Yesterday was one of those days where I seemed to be busy from the moment I work up, right until I was ready to fall asleep.  It makes for a long time staying busy, and busy I was, yes indeed.

I’ve spent a bit of time the during last week where I’ve been discussion writing with a couple of writers, and there is one question that always comes up:  why do some people sell, and others don’t?  Or, better yet, why do some writers seem to attract an audience when others don’t?

It’s a puzzle.  You find yourself wondering how someone can come up with an idea that equates to Hillbillies Aliens + Excessive Racism + Locked in a Spaceship = Their Next Great Novel, and people going, “That’s fantastic!”, and when someone points out that the concept of having a multi-billion dollar colonization effort hinging on a bunch of dimwitted thugs who want to kill each is a Really Bad Idea, they’re told they’re being “too hyper-realistic”, you grow a little upset because you know this is something you wouldn’t write, and you think that by not writing this, by concentrating on your character-driven stories, people are just gonna pass you by and concentrate on the story of The Hatfield and McCoy Feud in Space.

Then you look at your sales, and you can’t help but think, “What am I doing wrong?  Why aren’t people buying me?”  Or, as I said yesterday to my friend, “Where is my Stephen King moment?”  Is the novel I’m working on the one that will get me noticed?  Or do I have to fall back on unicorn porn?

I will admit that after editing and formatting two chapters from Her Demonic Majesty last night, I felt as if I were on the verge of tears.  As much as I want this effort to work, there’s a part of me that’s been like a small voice that keeps whispering over and over, “You’re a born loser, so why bother?  It’s not going to sell, and all this time and effort and money are going to waste.  No one believes in you, just pay the bills like everyone else does.”  It really was that sort of ending, and it’s a wonder I didn’t head off to bed and sob my ass off.

But I didn’t, because the reality is I couldn’t.  I couldn’t because before I went to bed I thought things out . . .

The whole publishing game is an ass.  Do you think Fifty Shades of Grey was bought because it’s great writing?  No.  It was bought because some dink at Vintage Books decided this soft core rapey porn (which if you know anything about BDSM, this is) was going to bring the middle aged Twihard ladies to the Kindle Store, ’cause even though the names have been changed to protect copyrights and prevent lawsuits, everyone knows this is Edward and Bella a-boning, and that’s going to separate a certain segment of the population from their money.

Am I doing that?  No.  I’m trying to write something original, something that’s a bit different, something that lets me connect with my characters and, I hope, pass that connection along to my readers.  I want to tell stories, and that’s a lot of work–

It’s not the easy road to follow.  It’s a bitch.  It will make you hurt.

But when you do make it through . . . you’re gonna feel a lot better.

All I want to do is tell stories for people to enjoy.  That’s it.  If I can make enough money so that I don’t have to haul my ass into Chicago every day, then so much the better.  Until then, I’ll kept at what I’m doing, and try to keep the tears back.

Every day you think you suck more than Carlton Mellick, the doubt wins.

Station to Variable Station

Saturday morning, having my coffee at the local Panera, listening to Station to Station, an album that I enjoyed in my youth, and which continued to set me apart from those friends who were still into Top 40 AM pop.  I know I have some work ahead of me today:  a bit of editing, maybe some article writing, a little beta reading . . . we’ll see.  I also have somewhere I need to be at noon, and that’s going to keep me busy for a couple of hours.

Oh, I also have my final cover for Her Demonic Majesty.  Yeah, it’s a good day, even if it is rainy.

While I haven’t figured out my Phantom Pages issue for mobi and epub compiles, Scrivener reveled itself to me while I was trying to figure out why some of my text files wouldn’t page break when I was compiling my novel into a Word document.  After some playing with the document, I went into Scrivener mode . . .

Let me explain.

Within Scrivener, you can examine your story in one of three ways.  There is the Corkboard, which is my favorite.  The visual for this is as you’d expect:  it’s like a corkboard you hang on the wall and tack up note cards.  As you can see on the right, the corkboard is an easy way to lay out your story, tell you where you are as far as what you’re doing with each section, and give you a little metadata so when you look at Chapter Ten, you know that’s the chapter where your characters get together and flog each other with chicken legs they bought an hour before at KFC.

Then there’s the Outline, which gives you a top to bottom review of each section you’ve created, and you can show as little or as much meta data as you’d like.  One of the nice things you can show in Outline mode is the word count for each chapter, as well as target word counts, and your progress towards reaching those counts.  If you have your metadata set up correctly, you can see if your story is progressing as you expect, or if you’re way the hell off the rails.

Lastly, we have Scrivener mode, which lets you see the whole store in one long scrolling document that also shows you where each section starts and end.  If you’ve set your metadata to break for each new text file, then those dashed lines indicate where your story is going to start at the top of another page, just as it would in a novel.  Also, if you show the hidden characters, you’ll see where every space is, and each carriage return, aka your Return/Enter key.

I went into Scrivener mode and started looking for hidden characters that could be causing my “not page breaking” problems in Word.  Didn’t see anything, so I went back into the corkboard and started moving cards around–which are, in reality, my chapters and part titles–and ran off another compile to check.  I didn’t see anything, at least not right away . . . but an idea started to form, because the more I looked at my troublesome sections, the more I saw they were different than my chapters–

I was using two carriage returns to drop the “Part” titles from the top of the page.  I removed those returns, and–ta da!  Problem solved!  Really, it was that simple.  After I figured that out, I went into the compile formatting, told the compile to drop the titles six lines from the top of a page break–and just like that, when I looked at the word document, everything was as I wanted.

With that out of the way, I looked for the “very” word, because it’s a weak word, and it looks stupid when you see it in the story.  Still in Scrivener mode, I set up the Find, located all my verys, then hit the Replace to remove them from the story.  When I was finished I’d removed sixty-eight “very” from the story, either deleting them, or putting another adverb or adjective in its place.  In an eighty-six thousand word novel, finding the word “very” sixty-eight times may not sound like a big deal, but in the year and a half since I wrote Demonic Majesty I’ve learned a bit, and using “very” is one of the things I’ve learned not to do.

Today I’ll look for my “suddenly” words, and superscript those suffixes that require the format, then start on a read through, because I believe the story is formatted well, and all I’m checking for are errors right now.  This may take a couple of weeks, but with everything else in place, there’s no need to hurry.

It’s all coming together faster than I thought.

And you know what they say about a plan coming together . . .

 

Transformatting Station

As Replacements is no longer the work in progress, it became time to, shall we say, find a replacement.  What is a girl to do, then, when she needs a project?

She goes demonic.  And with majesty.

After weeks of getting Replacements ready, it was time to bring out the big story:  Her Demonic Majesty.  With a cover on the way, and Harper Voyager out of the way, I’m free to publish Demonic Majesty as I see fit.  As such, last night began the almost final leg of this novel, nearly two years in the making.

The editing is out of the way, but getting into Chapter One again, and what do I find?  A couple of typos.  Which pissed me off because I wonder:  did HV see those few errors and think, “What a tool.  The reject pile for her!”  One can never tell, because Harper Voyager will keep their secrets, and they gave me no pointers when they told me, “Next time, Chickiepoo.”

But the editing is minimal; it’s the formatting that’s important.  What does one do to get a story ready?  Let me tell ya–

First I bring up the “Show Hidden Marks” in the document.  When you’re formatting for an ebook, you need to make certain there isn’t a space at the start of a paragraph.  This does strange things to your document once it becomes an ebook, and you only want strange in your stories.

I don’t have to worry about en and em hyphens, because I have Scrivener take care of that while writing.  En hyphens are found when you’re writing something like “New York-to-London-to-Paris,” and em hyphens are used when you’re separating clauses–like that.  Since I learn how to use character codes to put them in place in my story, I never worry about this part, I only double check to make sure something didn’t get messed up while writing.

I then check for three words that I don’t want to use.  First is the word, “So” at the beginning of dialog.  It’s never a good thing to have your characters saying, “So, you’re going to . . .” because it sounds a little awkward.  Then I check for “Suddenly”, and in, “Suddenly, the word appeared in a sentence!”  Whatever is appearing is appearing right that minute, so unless it’s creeping into view–which you’ll point out in your writing–don’t tell your readers it’s there suddenly.  Lastly, I look for “Very”, because very is a bad word.  Very is soft; very is weak, very–as was pointed out in Dead Poets Society–will not get you laid.  So be done with it, and use a word that is far, far better.

After that I need to set up my Table of Contents, but since Scrivener allows you to create .mobi fills for ereaders, I’m going to play with that and see if it builds one for me.  It’s not hard to do, just time consuming.  When that’s done, you set your title, set your last page, and then . . .

Then you upload and put it, as Freddie would say, in the lap of the gods.

If all goes well, I’ll have Her Demonic Majesty published by the end of May.  Maybe before, because with Memorial Day weekend then, too many people will be out and won’t be around to buy the book.  I wouldn’t want to deprive them of the joy of purchasing my first novel.

It’s coming.  No more tall.

It’s really happening, and soon.

Closing Doors

And so it came to be that Replacements was pushed into Final Draft status, and all the remains is the formatting and the cover, and the author saw that it was good, and relaxed.

Or something like that.  Sounds a lot more complicated than it was, but the reality is far more boring than the truth.

With only a couple of chapters left I figured I better get to editing, ’cause chapters don’t edit themselves, as much as writers wish they would.  I’d already edited nine chapters–two of which were brand new–and I was hovering about the sixteen thousand word limit for a couple of days.  I did not want to go over seventeen thousand five hundred words, because then I was on novella territory, and if I got up about eighteen thousand, then I might as well have gone twenty thousand words, because . . . that’s how I roll.

So I edited.  I knew Chapter Ten was about twelve hundred words, so not a problem, I’d burn through it.  What I had forgotten was that Chapter Eleven, the last chapter, was almost two thousand words–hey, though, these things happen.  Besides, I’d done the same thing the night before, so why get serious?

As it was, the last two chapters had been well written, so editing was not a chore.  I did one, then the other, then saved, then sighed . . . and commended myself for a job well done.  For Replacements is the first ready-to-publish story I’d done in over a year.  There’s been a lot of writing, but almost no publishing.  Once I have a cover, Replacements is going up to the big Kindle Store in the Internet, and maybe this strange little tale will get noticed–

I say strange little tale because it is.  There’s sex and some BDSM, but not so much that it’s going to trip the erotica wires.  There’s romance, but not that kind of romance.  There’s drama galore, but if I had to pin this sucker down, I’d say it’s science fiction, because it deals with things that one normally wouldn’t find in real life.

This is something I find myself doing:  I write in genres that actually contain so many other elements.  I’m a child of the New Wave of Science Fiction, and that could get out there in terms of what one might read.  (Check out “Riders of the Purple Wage” by Philip Jose Farmer is you want a great example.)  There might be robots, and murder, and sex, and they might all be together in the same story:  that’s what I used to read, and that’s what I tend to write.

The door is closed on Replacements.  It is, as they say, what it is, and I own it.  That’s one thing I do with my stories:  if I finish them, they’re mine.  If I don’t finish them, then they were never meant to see the light of day.  I’ve had that happen a few times, but only once in the last two years.

The story is ready, the song is over.  All I need is a cover–

Seems like the story of my life of late.