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.

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.

Plugging In and On

Saturday was a long day for a number of reasons, which was mostly due to me getting up at five-thirty and not heading off to bed until almost eleven.  Lots of running around, lots of drama, lots of things happening.  It was the sort of day that seems to go on and on, and it just sort of ends with one falling asleep in their chair–which is exactly what I did.

Through all that I had one goal to complete:  getting the Table of Contents created for Her Demonic Majesty.  I created a copy of the novel as a Word document for the Smashwords upload, and started getting all the bookmarks set up, ran thought it looking for errors (of which I found three), and then began linking the chapter headings to the bookmarks.

In all, a solid two hours of work, getting the document ready.  But it’s ready.  Finally.

It remains for me to do the Kindle version today, but that won’t take as long because I don’t need to do a review of the manuscript, just create bookmarks on the chapter headings, and set up the links to the bookmarks.  I may do that after I upload the first document into the Smashwords meat grinder–that checker of all epublishing checkers–and wait to see if any errors return.  I don’t believe it’s going to kick me, but you never know.

This is where I stand this morning:  all ready to go, covers and everything.

I’m nervous as hell.

I remember when I uploaded Kuntilanak to Smashwords, and after reading all the warnings about how long the programs may take to check the manuscript and the possibility of errors forcing me to make additional edits to the story before it could become a real ebook, everything turned a bit anticlimactic when the story uploaded in two minutes.  The day and a half I’d spent getting everything in order paid off, and the week or so I’ve spent with Her Demonic Majesty will, I’m certain, pay off in the long run, also.

Still doesn’t keep me from getting all shook up and nervous.

Oh, and I need to get an ISBN number, which is something the Smashwords upload allows.  You just tell them you need a number, and there it is.  At least I think that’s the case:  I need to check . . . yeah, just ask for a Free ISBN and you’ll get it.  I should look into getting a copyright on the novel as well, because it’s really, really mine then.

So much to do, but not really.  It’s the final crossing of the lines to make sure the novel is truly finished.  Then, once it’s up, I can sit back and watch the money roll in.

Ah, yeah.  If only that last part were true.

If nothing else, I’ll have this novel published this year.  There is more I want put up as well, but this is the start.  And it only took two months to go from the point of “I’m starting to work on this,” to ” It’s up and ready for you to buy!”

Once this is out of the way, I guess I can get back to writing.

Imagination Chainsaw

Some people may say I’m crazy, but that’s just talk.  Do I get a bit obsessive?  Not that much, but it does happen?  Do I worry?  As much as anyone else–okay, maybe a little more in some places.

Is the fear starting to hit me over this novel release?  You betcha.

I’m into the final set of chapters, and by the end of the week I’ll find myself with two or three left to edit and format.  This means that by Sunday Her Demonic Majesty will be ready for the ebook meat grinder, and by May 4^th there should be a new entry in my bibliography.  But the end isn’t here yet, and as I go through the story, I’m seeing sentences here and there that . . . well, they don’t set well with me.

Yes, I know what’s going on:  my mind is in Issac Asimov mode, where I’m editing the story, and I see a different way of doing things, and so while I’m here I’m going to change things just a little bit, and when this is over everything will be hunky dory.  Or so it should, but the Dear Doctor had a problem when it came to editing–namely, he had trouble finding a point at which to stop with some of work.  It has been said that John Campbell once took a story from him, telling Asimov it was fine, and that writers have trouble when it comes to deciding when their stories are “perfect’.

I know the story isn’t perfect, and this is why I’m doing an edit and formatting, and not a simple formatting.  I’m not altering plot, or cutting the hell out of chapters–in fact, I ended up adding about one hundred words to a chapter the other night, because something was in need of a bit of elaboration.

What I really need to do is take a chainsaw to my imagination, and stop seeing problems where they don’t exist.

Sure, there are things that need a bit of polish.  As a writer you should see that, and fix it where it’s needed.  But this morning, as I was on the Trek to the Paycheck, I started wondering if a line at the end of the chapter I was editing last night should exist, or if it should be excised.  This is where I get into trouble:  I see a problem, only it isn’t a problem, it’s a phantom that’s come to shake it’s bootie at me, and giggle the whole while, ’cause it’s only gonna tease, it ain’t ever going to give me a hug and tell me everything is great . . .

I’m close on this.  The novel publication is only a couple of weeks away, and as much as I want to get it right, I don’t want to fall into an obsessive hole where I’m constantly thinking that the novel isn’t perfect, and I’m setting myself up for a big fall.

No problems.  I know what must be done, and I’m doing it.

If I only looked as good as Juliet Starling, though . . .

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.

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 . . .

 

Up the Escalator to Madness

A very quick conversation this morning opened a little window into that thing I call “My Life”, such as it is.  I wasn’t saying much, just what I did last night, and what I’ll do today.  Those things I spoke of?  Writing.  So for yesterday I blogged, wrote a couple of theme descriptions for Windows 8, edited some three thousand words, and wrote nine hundred word of an article before going to bed.  What will I do today?  Blog, edit a couple of thousand words, write a couple of Windows 8 theme descriptions, and finish my article.

Sounds like fun, no?

I made the joke, “When am I getting paid for this?” but I know that will come in time–so I hope.  I’m heading in the right direction, and eventually, maybe with this next novel I’ll get noticed, picked up, contacted, rich, buy an abandoned mansion, and become a Bond villainess, because if there’s one thing Bond needs it’s bad girls who screw him.  Got the cover coming, the editing and formatting is coming, and in a month or so the novel will be a reality.

(By the way, a friend turned me on to a rant by the same person who gets into fights with her fictional characters and loses, and said that she can’t self publish because she’s not rich.  Ummm, last time I checked you didn’t need to be rich to self-publish, you just had to be able to write, edit, work with someone who’ll give you honest criticism, maybe get a friend who’ll make you a cover for cheep, and then set up an account, format your book, then upload and wait.  But then, this person is one of those vampires who lives to suck the life out of you, so the moral of the story is laugh at these people, kiddies:  they deserve it all.)

There is the fear that I don’t have an idea ready for when all this is done.  The mind seems to have shut down with the ideas while I concentrate on getting stories ready.  I suppose that’s the way thing go; you concentrate on one thing, and the mind files everything down in the back until you need them.

There is the fear, however:  what if the new ideas never come?  What if I’m stuck writing lots of stuff I already have imagined out, and nothing else ever comes to mind.  Not that I don’t have a lot of stories to tell:  you’d have to see some of my time lines to know this.  Still, it does bother me a bit–

Which means I’m driving myself crazy with things I need not drive.  I’m on the up escalator to the crazy house, worried that I’m never gonna have a new idea in my entire life.  I already know this is bull, because my ideas have left me with a whole lot of material, and my other fear is I’ll never write it all before I shuck this mortal coil.

You think this keeps George R. R. Martin up at night?