Over the Finish Line

Her Demonic Majesty is a done deal.  Yesterday morning I started to prep the novel for upload to Smashwords.  When I mentioned to a friend that I was “thinking” of uploading the novel just to see if it made it through the Meat Grinder, she was like, “What’s keeping you from doing it?”  And she was right:  there was nothing holding me back.  As she told me, “Girls shouldn’t fear!”  Which is good advice to anyone who is fearful what they are doing is shit, but it struck a chord with me, because . . . there’s always fear.

Without further ado I set up the file and uploaded it, once again expecting the meat grinder to take a long time, and gaining great surprised when I was through the process in less than five minutes.  So here it sits on Smashwords, waiting to get sent out to other selling locations.

What about Amazon, you say?  Good question.  In the afternoon I started the upload to the Kindle Store, and just like with Smashwords the novel and cover were through the conversion process in about five minutes.  I’ve received notice from Amazon that the book is “live”, but when I try to find it, nothing appears.  I had this happen with Kuntilanak, where it took about a day before it started showing up on the Amazon pages, so I’ll wait until tonight before sending off messages to the Amazon people.

So here I am, three stories published, and this being my first novel.  I feel–well, relieved, actually, because I can move on to other things now.  I was thinking up a building design last night, one I need for a story, because while I’ve seen the building in my mind, I haven’t actually seen it as it should be.  It’s something I want to get done, even if I’m not starting on that particular story for a while.

What I need to do is get the word out about the novel.  I need to pimp it a bit.  I’ve done a bit of that already, but I want to get more going. I don’t expect it to become a best selling, but a few dozen would be a gas.  It’d be even better if it were a few hundred.

We’ll see.

One thing I’m going to do is do a give away, and there will be an interview.  When I mean “interview”, I mean something probably strange and unusual, since I myself am strange and unusual.  Also, I want to have fun, and I think I can come up with something that’ll fit that bill.  I’ve done the author’s interviews many times before, and while they were good, they seemed . . . well, they could have been a little more light hearted.  So something to else to put into my sights.

It’s finished, and with it a year and a half of my life that started at a minute after midnight on Nov 1, 2011.  All because someone told me I should try NaNoWriMo, and that if I did, I’d be able to finish–

And look at me now.  Top of the World, you know?

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 . . .

 

Publisher Row

It was a rough day yesterday.  It was raining, it was cold, it was windy, there were assholes on the road, three whom nearly wrecked me, and one guy who felt that driving over 75 mph in a hard rain was completely legit, and nearly took himself and a few other cars out when he almost lost control.  When I am allowed to mount heavy weapons on my car, idiots like that will vanish quickly . . .

Thus it was that when I sat down to continue my conquest of my current novel formatting so that I can transform it into the epic story that folks will line up to by.  The way it’s suppose to look is good:  I’ve figure out the ways that compile time formatting should work, and I’ve begun employing that process.  I also tried a epub creation, then converted that to mobi, but the phantom pages issue remained.  Hummm . . . phantom pages.  I could use that as a movie title.

One question that I received this morning was, “Why is this Scrivener so great?”  What I did last night is a prime example.  I have a story that I’m trying to convert to different formats, all three which are nowhere comparable to each other.  And yet, I’d make one change in the Scrivener compiler, and off I went, creating a .doc, then a few seconds later creating a .epub, then trying a .mobi format a few seconds after that.  Nothing else was required; information I’d used for formatting on one format was good for information on another, and where I had formatting styles particular to .epub and .mobi, that information was retained when I switched over to .doc.

I could call Scrivener “Out of One Comes Many,” but that is stretching things just a little.

Though I’ve not gotten to the very root of my phantom page problems, I’m learning a great deal about the creation of an ebook without having to do a lot of extra work.  Trust me, though:  I will work this out, one way or the other.  Part of the issue could be that the Windows version of Scrivener is not quite as powerful as the Mac OS version of Scrivener, but it’s getting there.  I’m a programmer, which means I not only understand this concept of “getting your software up to speed,” but I know work arounds.  I’ve created an ebook before, and I’ll do it again using my work around.

I will not be found wanting.

It’s back into cleaning up the chapters tonight.  I think I’ll throw Scrivener into Outline view and just pick chapters and go through them, so that I get a feel for how that part works.  I love my Corkboard, but trying the Outline view is something I’ve wanted to do for a while, and tonight is just as good a time to play as any.  Besides, with the change I’m going to try with my story, the Outline will work better than the Corkboard.  At least that’s how I see it at the moment.

Editing is boring?  Are you kidding?

I’m having a blast.

Mercurial Rearrangements

In a much better place this morning, since the drive in wasn’t nearly as insane as it was yesterday, and I’ve had some munchies that have put me in a happy place.  It shouldn’t have been that way; I should have little depression going, because I had some rather depressing dreams that culminated with me going to place where I believed I’d interviewed once before, and trying to get another interview, and having to deal with some smarmy punk giving me the glad-hand all the way out of the building without telling me if they wanted to interview me or not.

After doing the Walk of Shame through what appeared to be a bombed-out T.J. Max, I took a left turn into another building, and then–darkness.  Lots of darkness.  As I walked onward, it became darker, and then everything was pitched dark.  That’s when I woke up because it almost felt as if I were pushed out of the dream.  Not a good feeling, mind you, and I laid there for a while trying to gather my wits about me before heading into the day.

Last night’s writing was, to say the least, interesting.  I finished the second of the two new chapters for Replacements, then headed in to edit the first of the new chapters.  I finished the edit, looked at the chapter that came before the new Chapter Six–and realized I’d screwed up.  The chapter that was before the new Chapter Six was suppose to come after the new Chapter Seven.

Oi.

However, Scrivener is good for fixing screw ups.  What I did was move the note card that is the chapter from the front to the back of the new chapters, then relabeled them, changed the titles inside the chapters, and there you have it:  screw up all taken care of.  Now all I have to do is rewrite part of the new old Chapter Seven, because some of the things I said in that chapter I’d set up in the old new Chapter Five, and I want the follow up chapter to deal with what comes after, well, what comes after the end of this second new chapter I wrote.

I already have in my head how I want to fix that chapter, which I’ll likely do tonight after Project Runway, ’cause first of all, I’m about the fashion.  At this rate I’ll likely finish up the Replacements this weekend, then it’s a combo of finishing up some descriptions for Windows 8 themes, and maybe start an article before getting into the finial edit of Her Demonic Majesty–for which I have seen a set of possible covers.  That means I also have to get back to the designer and tell her what I think . . .

No, I’m not feeling down today.  There’s a lot going on, and it’s making me feel that I have some hope of keeping ahead of all this.  If I can get my cover finalized in the next couple of weeks, no reason why I can have my novel ready for publication by the first of May.

Yeah, a great way to celebrate the second anniversary of this blog, don’t you think?

Q1 and Done

It’s the end of the month as we know it, and I feel fine, save for the soreness in my legs.  Too much time on my feet, too much time laying on a bed that hurting my calves for some reason.  Or maybe it’s me:  maybe my weight is pressing down on my lower extremities and causing problems.

Last year this time I was lamenting over writers, people who usually make things up for a living, being unable to make up the names of towns and people.  I read this post over last night, and was struck by the fact that most of the people who I’d written about don’t seen to write these days.  When I joined a few writing groups on Facebook back in 2011, it seemed as if there were  hundreds of people posting about what they were going to write, what they were writing–and then, how they couldn’t finish what they started.

Today, those same groups seem to be inhabited by a few dozen hard core members, and a few dozen more people who flit in and out when they decided to pick up their book and get back into The Great and Not So Loving Game.

Writing wears you out.  I managed to edit two chapters of Replacements last night, maybe twenty-seven hundred words total, and when I was finished I wanted to write something new, but couldn’t.  I was starting to nod at the computer, and trying to crank out anything that would have made sense wouldn’t have made sense at all.

In his March 30 blog post, Neil Gaiman offered a few simple words for writers:  ”Write.  Finish Things.  Keep Writing.”  Sure, you’re thinking, “That’s easy for you to say, Mr. Last Cybermen!”, but at one time he was just like everyone else, working hard to get into the biz.  He’s now in the biz, and he still works hard, only now he does it full time, whereas most of us need another job to play the bills.

My biggest problem was always finishing things.  I’d jump into a story with both feet, burn through ten, twenty thousand words, and then–nada.  I’d get disappointed, depressed, defeated:  the story before me had to be crap, so why bother?  It’s not like anyone’s going to read it . . .

I’d say that’s a mindset that it not just unique to me; I’m almost certain there are others out there who end up feeling the same way.  I even get that feeling still, only it starts kicking in about forty-five thousand words into a novel, and it screws with me until I’m about ten to fifteen thousand words from the finish line.

And then I find the strength to make my way to “The End”.

I’ve told people I know that one of the reasons I keep a blog, one of the reasons I write every day whether or not I have anything interesting to say, is that it keeps me thinking, it keeps the mind going, it keeps me writing.  Without it I might not ever bother pulling out a manuscript and doing anything with it, and just become another of those left by the Writing Wayside.  That’s not completely true, but I do feel as if my blog keeps me anchored and focused on my goal of becoming a full-time writer.

Back on December 1 I detailed what I’d written up to that point over the course of a year and change.  At that point, with everything from the end of 2011, and all over 2012, I’d calculated I’d written approximately 568,000 words.  What I should say is that I wrote and finished that much, because I don’t consider the story worthwhile if I haven’t finished it.  During 2012 I started a story for someone, got about five thousand words into it, and then put it away, because what I was writing wasn’t me; the story didn’t feel right.  And to have went on would have meant doing something that I wasn’t going to enjoy, or take from the work any pride.

Since I wrote that last post I’ve written another novel, and blogged every day.  Suggestive Amusements ended up running just over seventy-one thousand words, while the blog has averaged about five hundred fifty words a day for 121 day, or right at sixty-six thousand, five hundred fifty words.  Add all that up, and at the end of Q1 (the First Quarter of the year, as we call it in the business world), I’ve another 137,550 finished words added to my total.

Plug in the numbers from before 1 December, 2012, and we have a new total:  705,550 words.  Ding, ding, ding!  We have a winner!

Yes, there is marketing and editing and getting a great book cover, but the above is the real heart of the issue:  writing and finishing.  You wanna walk that walk, you gotta do diligence.

You gotta write; you gotta finish; you gotta write some more.

Which reminds me–

I got some writing to do.

 

In Perago Est Hic

Writing is not for the faint of heart.  Sure, you can keep a diary and spill your guts to yourself every day, and hope that no one ever reads it and discovers that you spent a lot of time talking about sex and even giving your genitals a name.  This happened in one of the most famous diaries to be published, although in the original version all that stuff was cut out–about thirty percent in total.

It’s a long. torturous journey that doesn’t always end well.  It’s entirely possible that you’ll spend months, maybe years, working on a story that you need to tell, only to see it rejected by publisher after publisher.  It’s enough to drive you mad, and there have been instances where people have simply given up for a while, or for good, or, in the case of the guy who wrote A Confederacy of Dunces, he killed himself, and it took his mother another eight years to see the book published.

One can find a lot of pain in writing.  It pulls at you, it frustrates you, it takes so much of your time.  It’s exhausting, because most writers are working a regular job, and a lot of times when you have your work in progress before you, it’s about nine o’clock at night, and you’ve been up since four AM, and you only have about ninety minutes to get said what you want to say.  It’s sometimes more of a job than it seems, because maybe times you don’t want to write; you want to call it a night and play games all night, and let your brain become mulch for the vegetables.

Then again, when you reach the end of your story, one that you’ve worked on for weeks or months–or even years–you feel such satisfaction.  You’ve finished a task and you realize what you’ve created, and it’s suddenly like all the emotions you’ve poured onto each page comes back and hugs you hard . . . and you know you’ve done something good.

Yesterday I finished Suggestive Amusements.  Last chapter, a few thousand words to write, I wrote during the afternoon and into the evening, and somewhere past nine PM I wrote “The End”, and it was all good.  As I neared the end, the emotions began manifesting as something real, and I was both sad and ecstatic.  The ending, particularly the last few hundred words, brought forth the tears, but at the same time I was happy the story was finished.

The novel was a chore at time.  It was a tremendous undertaking.  It caused a bit of soul searching, and even came close to beating me about enough that I needed to step away a few nights and just enjoy life.  There were moments when I wondered if I would ever finish the story–or is what I was writing was worth finishing.

Now is the time to publish.  Now’s the time to get one of my novels formatted for Smashwords and Amazon, and get a good cover made.  Then edit another story, and get it published.  Then . . .

Write the next tale.

It’s what I do.

The Tarnished Ring

It came in the night, sneaking into my mail box like a virus trying to convince me it was really a cute video of a dolphin–and since I know dolphins are all a bunch of thrill-kill rapists, I won’t ever look at that mail . . . but I had to look at this one.

It was a message from Harper Voyager.

I knew what it was going to say the moment I saw it in my inbox.  There was nothing in the title that made me believe I was going to find a pot of gold inside.  So rather than play the guessing game, I opened it–and within was the rejection.  They’d read my novel, or at least looked it over, and decided it didn’t feel right for the Harper Voyager list, so thank you for the submission, and wish you well on your career.

As I told the two people I know the best right after I received this good news, I’d expected this.  Forty-five thousand manuscripts shows up in the HY inbox, and they were choosing a dozen, or perhaps a little more, so the odds of getting that brass ring were incredibly high.  I didn’t get it, so the world has come to an end–right?

The hell with that noise.

George Clooney is quoted as saying, “The only failure is not to try,” and that’s all the truth you need to know.  I wrote, I edited, I polished, and I sent the damn thing in.  It came back with a big “X” on the sucker, but it was marked.  The try was there, and Yoda can eat a flaming bag of cat poop for all I care, because o say you either do it or don’t is bullshit.  You have to go for it, to take a chance, and if you don’t, then nothing was accomplished.  You ain’t gonna win every time, and it does no good to bitch about how hard it is to, you know, write these damn things, and then clean them up and send them out.

So, the story is still mine; I don’t have to worry about an editor going, “Okay, there’s way too much lesbian stuff going on in this story, can you do something about that?” and throwing out an answer along the lines of, “I’m thinking orgy.”  No, it’s up to me to decide where Her Demonic Majesty is going, so I should start with the deciding, right?

What’s next then?  First comes the ebook formatting.  Then comes the cover–one that, I hope, does not land me on Bad Romances Tumblr, home of Objectified Scotsman Thursdays!  This means I want something that doesn’t suck, got it?  Once that’s all done, then up to Smashwords to take it place alongside the forced dragon breeding porn, then over to Amazon and get it uploaded for the Kindle.  Then promote, and do the interview things on different blogs, then I don’t know what, followed by profit!

Really, though:  that’s the plan.  Finish Suggestive Amusements, then get Her Demonic Majesty ready for self publication.  After that’s finished, then get Replacements ready for self publication as well, because why not have two stories up and ready to go?  And then . . .

You only win if you try.

The Starving Soul

The cold is trying to come back; I can feel it.  I actually felt it last night, sneaking about in the darkness of the bedroom right before I headed off to sleepy-time.  Pain in the ass, it is, but I’m not going to let it get me down . . . even though it’s doing its best to do just that.

But to hell with the cold.  I’ll beat it one way or the other, and tomorrow the Chicago area will find itself somewhere warm, with the temps getting up close to seventy.  Changing climate?  Shirley you jest!  (I know you saw what I did there . . .)

Chapter Seven was begun last night, and I was on a good run last night.  Had Yessongs playing on the computer, and I must have been in a great mood, because I was typing away with few distractions.  I’m at the point in the story where my character Keith finds he’s come home after an evening of sybaritic pleasure with the lovely Elektra, and discovers he’s written something—a lot of something.  Then Erin appears, they have a little back and forth about where she was sleeping, and then . . .

This is where I left off the chapter, almost thirteen hundred words from the beginning.  It was a fast thirteen hundred, too:  I did it in about fifty-five minutes, making this the quickest writing I’ve done in a long time.

The whole gist of the chapter involves what we do for work.  A couple of times Erin, the muse, tells Keith he has two jobs:  one that pays the bills, but doesn’t “feed his soul”, and another that allows him to engage in all the things he wants and loves.  This is nothing new for anyone who isn’t a professional writer; if you’re like me, and you write, you do so with the hope that one day this is all you’ll ever do, and you aren’t thinking about being crazy-ass Twilight rich, you’d be happy if you could knock down high five figures every year . . . though I will take the crazy-ass Twilight rich, because who doesn’t want to laugh at haters who come online just to tell you that the first five minutes of Up tells a better love story than your crap, because after your laugh you’re going to dive into a room full of money, Scrooge McDuck-style.  Haters gonna hate, right?

We all wait for that message that says someone has read your manuscript, and they found it worthy of publication.  It’s after this that you work your butt off to produce another work that will be published, and if and when that’s bought, then you write another, and so forth, and so on . . . and before you know it, people are on Facebook posting, “You’re book suzks!  You should stop righting, because your story is told better by The Host!”  At which point you either flip the computer off (not turn it off, but flip it off, if you know what I mean) and get back to your current work in progress, or you laugh and look for your bathing suit.

At some point you have to ask yourself:  would I miss a day of “work” to work on my story?  I have asked myself that question—

I know the answer.

Waves of Frustrations

So far the morning I’ve been dealing with a number of frustrating things.  I’m out in “the world”, and I can’t connect to the Internet—not knowing if this is an issue with my computer, or the internet around me in general.  I’m tired because I was up at 5:30 after rolling off to bed at 11:00 PM.

It’s frustrating, I’m telling ya.  It makes me want to stay home and do nothing.

Last night I decided to take another Friday off.  I was up at five AM, and on the work computer at six, then off to have to car worked on, then back to the work computer . . . by the time I finished I was dealing with a house that was way too warm—someone decided they needed the heat turned all the way up because they’re cold—and it was necessary to open windows to cool off.

My browsers kept locking up on last night.  I’d try listening to music, and I’d be half way through an album and BAM!  Browser would lock up.  High powered pissed off last night, I was.

Though, suddenly, the internet is up!  I have an address.  It must have heard my bitching . . .

There is something else here, and it’s bothering me too:  I’ve an idea for another story.

I know what you’re thinking:  ”Oh, another idea!  You should be so cursed, you writer, you!”  In a way it is a curse, because I get these ideas and I’m I’m awake in the early morning house, and before you know it, it’s occupying your mind and trying to take over you life like some asshole Goa’uld who thinks it would be a gas to put you through hell while making a complete mess of your life.  I mean, it’s not like he or she will be around after they’ve made you drive your car through a mall; they’ll just hop into the next body that comes along and leave you to take the heat.

Story ideas are like a Goa’uld:  they enter your head, wrap around your brain, and whisper things into your mind.  They dominate your life; they make you listen to things you wouldn’t listen to normally, and if you’re unlucky, they’ll make you act.  I sway unlucky, because if you’re in the middle of something–or even at the begging of something, as I am at the moment–you are tempted to listen to the whispers, abandon what you’re doing, and move over to this new idea, because it sounds to nice.

That Snakehead Idea is lying!  It’s not better; it’s not going to smother you in kisses and tell you how great a writer you are if you abandon that slutty story you’re now doing, and come do me, because I am the true hotness you’ve been looking for your whole life.

This is the reason some writers never get anything done, because they are into a story, and when a new idea comes along, they think, “Hey, that does seem like a great idea, I better write that story–I can also come back to this one later . . .”

But do they?  Usually not, because not only is the seduction too great, but then another lying ass Goa’uld comes along–probably looking a lot like Osiris, which was some niceness, even if he/she wanted to kill you as soon as look at you–and tells you that this time, this story is gonna rock your world.

What does this mean for me today?

It means I gotta write.

My Goa’uld won’t have it any other way.

 

Ninety Days Hath September

It’s time, more or less.  If my calculations are correct, ninety-six days have passed since I submitted my novel, Her Demonic Majesty, to The Great Harper Voyager Cattlecall.  Every day I have scanned my inbox looking for an email from Harper Voyager, sending me congratulations that out of all the submissions fired off in the first twelve days of October, mine was worthy of publication.

Alas, no such thing happen.  It is safe to say that my novel has not been among the lucky to make the cut—

That doesn’t make it, or me, a failure.

Allow me to explain.

Writing seems to be a lot of “doing”.  If you want to make a story, you have to do the writing.  If you want to finish the story, you have to keep doing the writing, day after day.  If you want to get it published, you have to do the editing, and do the submission package.  If you want to self publish, you gotta do the cover, and you gotta do the special editing that ebooks need, and you gotta do the upload and get it out on all the different ebook sellers.

It’s a lot of doing.

This is something that people who have already played this game, the writing game, know.  They’ve been here, they’d happily danced in the moonlight, and they’ve shuffled their feet through fallen leaves of disappointment.  They understand this game, they know the insides and outs . . .

If there is one thing they know, it’s that you are not a failure if you are trying to make your goals become real.  If you are hard honing your skills, developing your craft, then you are not the failure people will make you out as—and trust me, they will.

I’ve one rejection; I’ve may have another (what is this?  Read on . . .).  Both are for the same novel.  Does this make me a failure?

Are you kidding?

See, I’ve done my work.  I’ve went from A to Z, and filled in all the points between.  I’m put my package together, and I’ve sent it off with my fingers crossed.  I’ve done of the “dos”, and someone looked at it and gave it thumbs down—

But they looked at it.

The harsh truth is, there are a lot of people sitting on various Facebook groups going on about finding people to sprint with so they can get their five hundred or seven hundred, or even a thousand words in for the night, and then they’re off doing whatever the hell else it is they’re doing.  And a year later they’ll sitting around bitching about how no one realizes what a great writer they are, and if they could find someone to sprint with, they could finish this novel they’ve been working on for the last year . . .

That’s failure.  That’s someone waiting for opportunity to not only knock, but to escort them to the limo and drive them to the salon for a mani-pedi and hair styling before taking them shopping for the dress they’re going to wear to their book signing.

It’s all fantasy fulfillment, thinking that if the right person sees their novel, they’re going to be The Next Big Thing.

About a week ago I posted a quote by Dwayne Johnson.  Say what you will about him, but the guy pretty made himself after coming very close to hitting bottom.  There was another quote I saw attributed to him, one that I will say many people I know should take to heart.  It’s simple in its pronouncement:

 

Hey, stop saying, “I Wish”, and start saying, “I Will”.

 

Wishing works in many an interest story:  I know, I’ve written a few.  But in real life there are no jinn who are going to make your life easy.  There are no magic coins to give you what you want.  You wanna publish, you need to stop wishing and start willing.

There is a quick update here, however.  Apparently Harper Voyager had so many things sent in that they discovered it was going to be impossible for them to get notifications to everyone by 15 January.  In fact, they’re saying they’ll actually send out rejections, instead of not saying anything, which is what they’d said a while back.

This means there is still hope.  This means it’s still possible Her Demonic Majesty may be picked up.  It’s a real possibility.

The only thing I know for sure . . . I ain’t a failure.

I leave that for the wishers.

 

 

Giving a Name to the New Voice

Today starts off the last long weekend of the year 2012, and the beginning of the next in what could be a few more years walking uneasily upon this planet.  2013 is just a few days away, and I’m facing it with a lot more optimism than I did this current year.

But we aren’t about to speak of what is going to happen in the year to come.  There are things remaining for this year, and one of them will be accomplished today.  That event will be the start of a new story.

The last week has seen some commiserating about what I’m doing next.  I have names–most of them–and I think I have a title for my story, though it’s not exactly lighting a fire in my mind.  I’m strange this way, in that I like to have a title ready to go before I start writing–another in a line of bad habits I picked up from Harlan Ellison.  I don’t want it to be cute, but I don’t want it to be something like Father Breeds the Bride, which was one of the titles that popped up on Smashwords just now when I checked what was new on my dashboard.  I don’t know, that sounds like a story that could be fun for the whole family . . .

This is something I seem to struggle with when it comes to stories.  I’m pretty good at finding a title for my blog posts–I mean, I do this every day–but when it comes to stories, I’ll sit for hours trying to get something that feel “right”.  Then I make that my Scrivener project title, put it at the top of my story, and away I go.  This is one of those times, though, when my mind is refusing to cooperate, and it’s leaving me struggling to find something that is going to leave me happy.

Titles can tell you everything about a story, or nothing.  Sometimes they’re only marginally associated to a story, but they still seem to fit whatever the writer is trying to get across.  I mean, when you read Flight of the Phoenix, you’re pretty certain that at some point you’re going to see the Phoenix fly.  When you open Dragonflight, you’re pretty certain you’ll find dragons flying.  When you read Twilight, you’re expecting to see a lot of stuff happening right around the time the sun has set–what?  Okay, so maybe not.

I’m a believer in having the right title for a story.  Better or worst, my titles are mine, and I’ll own them to the very end, even if others don’t like them.  More than a few people told me that Kolor Ijo was a stupid name, or was something that had nothing that I was going to do in the story, but I kept it because when I saw those words, and understood what they meant, I knew it was what I wanted.  Somewhere down the line a publisher may not like the title, but it’s mine, and I stick with it.

By some time today I’ll have that title, and it’ll become the name of my project, and my story.  I’ll sketch out the characters and then chapter out the stories.

All that remains after that is the screaming.

Countdown to Expectancy

Blogging, Blender, Scrivener . . . wait, that’s not right.  If only there were something I could use for my writing, then I’d get the Three B’s alliteration, and I’d have a great start to the day.

That was pretty much my yesterday.  Knocked off my blog posts–which went very well–and then editing Replacements, breezing through the penultimate chapter.  I have one more to edit, then one, maybe two, to write, and that story is a wrap. At least for the first edit.  I’ll give the story a better pass through later, and start looking at what I could do as far as a cover is concerned.  Maybe by that time I’ll have this 3D scene stuff down, and I can start working on covers.

One can only dream.

I was tripping through my author’s page the other day, and saw the milestone I placed there for Her Demonic Majesty.  Novel was submitting for consideration on 9 October, 2012.  It’s now, as I writing this, 16 December, and the time is slowly running out.  Given those thirty-one days in a couple of months, I’ve said that if by the end of 12 January, 2013, I haven’t received a reply from Harper Voyager, I’m not getting one.

Ninety Day Hath Submission; Sorry, Babe, But You Ain’t Winnin’.

You’re not suppose to think these things.  You’re suppose to think that by the end of November you’re going to wake up and find a message in your inbox saying that your novel was one of several that were picked for ebook publication–oh, and congratulations!  That’s what you’re suppose to keep thinking; that this is the time I make the big time.

I have a friend over in Second Life.  She’s a therapist, which I didn’t know until about a year ago.  Here I was in that virtual world all this time, and she’s probably analyzing me the whole time.  Not really, but it’s fun to imagine . . .

Anyway, she’s always on me about going the self-publishing route.  She tells me that the reason I’m so eager to get published by an “established house,” is that I’m looking for recognition from someone who I imagine as being a member of an elite community, and this badge will signify that I have “succeeded”.

To a certain extent, she’s right.

Let us face the fact:  just about anyone can self-publish these days.  Ten years ago stories about daughter-stepfather trysts, college girls addicted to giving their instructors–male or female–oral sex, and women being gang-fucked by werewolves would have ended up on various website catering to those particular interests; these days they end up on Smashwords and/or Amazon.

There’s nothing wrong with any of the above–hey, you should see what my first story sale was–but for some writers, it’s does make them feel as if their accomplishments are rendered small because, when they see their book appear on a list of  recommended reading, their science fiction epic is sharing space with a story about a bored housewife who’s used witchcraft to take over her son’s body because she has a fantasy about impregnating his college-aged girlfriend.

Definitely doesn’t feel the same as finding your novel on the shelf next to William Gibson.

The thing is, we need to step beyond this belief.  The real recognition comes from people who by your stories, and better yet, enjoy them.  Even if Harper Voyager were to pick up my novel, does that mean it’ll sell?  Maybe.  The HV deals indicates they’ll edit and format and put up your ebook, and give it a few shots of publicity.  None of this guaranties sales–it just pats your ego on the head and tells you that, yeah baby, you’re there.

But if a book sees the light of day, and yet is never read, does that mean it was really published?

Talk to me in a few weeks and maybe I’ll have this figured out by then.