Confidence

A few weeks ago, my Uncle Rich posted a blog about confidence. I’ve meant to respond to it for awhile now, but finally…er…got up the confidence to do so.

I like the colors

At the moment, barring unforeseen difficulties, Echoes will be up on Nook and Kindle by early October. I was at a birthday party several weeks ago and a couple of friends asked what I was doing with the writing. I said “Nothing,” mostly because I didn’t feel like explaining the whole indie process, and I’ll be blunt, I still felt a mild sense of shame about the whole thing…even though the short story/novella print market is basically DOA and there’s nothing else to do with these shorter works, anyway.

The other day, I finally told one of them what I was doing. “YAY!” she exclaimed. “We should have a book launch party!”

The second part of her sentence paralyzed me with terror. Do indie authors get book launch parties? I mean, there’s not a physical book to look at. Are we going to gather around my Nook? Can I still say “I have a book coming out” even though people think “someone is publishing Suz’s book”? Do I have to provide ALL the indie info upfront so as not to mislead them? WHY CAN’T THE SKY BE PURPLE?

Rather than pepper her with questions about the morality of it all, I asked if we could have cake at this party.

Ironically, this all coincides with my half-hearted idea to have a very, very late housewarming party. I’ll have been here for a year on October 9, and never had a proper housewarming, mostly because wackiness at work erupted soon afterward, and then in November I quit my job, and after that hosting a party was the furthest thing from my mind. So I was already considering some kind of low-key gathering. Might as well say, “Hey, I wrote a book and people can BUY IT!” and make it an event, right?

Which is where the whole confidence thing comes in. Most pro writers don’t get a lot of press anymore—the top tier and their bus advertisements aside—and they’re stuck doing their own self-promotion, too. So it’s not like I’m doing anything overly different. But I have to be my own promoter, and that is not my strong suit. I lack confidence in my ability to do that without coming off as overly pushy or just…obnoxious, I guess.

Strangely enough, Echoes is not the problem. I like the story. I am confident that when it is up there, it will be polished and properly formatted—people may not like the story or my writing or my characters, but no one will have a reason to complain about strange symbols or misplaced apostrophes or sentences that just stop. I guess I’m just concerned about that stigma… “Oh, Suz self-published. She cheated. She’s one of them. And she’s full of herself, too!”

But that’s one of the things you have to get over if you decide to do this. I make it a little easier for myself by recalling that there is virtually no print market left for short stories or novellas unless you get into an anthology, and Echoes is a) not romantic enough for the romance anthologies, and b) too long for the sci-fi anthologies. There is literally nowhere else for this story to go besides the Internet.

So I took the first step in marketing myself by actually going on Facebook and announcing to my…er…70 friends that yes, I am doing this thing. I posted the cover art in progress, which I actually really, really like, although it needs to be lightened a bit and maybe have some additional stars filled in.

Then I revamped my pro site—switched to a simpler template, cleared out all the random entries, just smoothed everything out, really. I like it much better. One day, after I learn proper coding or can afford to hire a designer, I’ll have my own Suzesque site…but until then, this will work fine. It’s clean, simple, and easy to navigate.

In The Iliad, Hektor admits to his wife, Andromache, that he is not a warrior by nature—“I have learned to be valiant.” This is basically what I have to do.

(Now, Hektor wound up getting slaughtered by Achilles and dragged around the city of Troy, but we’re going to hope I manage to escape that sad fate.)

Onward.

Titling

Sat down with a thesaurus, a pen, a paper, and Google last night to figure out a proper title for the debut.

I like the word “Once,” but there’s already a famous movie with the same name, and after rereading the story in an effort to pick out any themes or repeated words…well, once doesn’t really do it.

My second choice was Starside. “Things are better starside” is the pilot’s catchphrase, starside being the slang term for outer space and everything not a station/planet. Until I Googled it and realized there’s already a popular sci-fi series called Starside. Not into potential litigation there. Okay, back to the drawing board.

At one point in the story, one of the characters describes the hazy memories she experiences as being like echoes. Picking through the manuscript, I found other references to echoes.

So…I’m thinking it’s Echoes. Short, sweet, thematic. Granted, there’s other stories with that title, but it’s not quite as unusual as something like “starside,” nor as obnoxiously pretentious “More Things in Heaven and Earth.”

Some of the other titles on my shortlist: Just Dreams, Where Memory Lies, The Star Road (I liked this one, but it didn’t have much to do with the story), Starway, Lightspeed (also liked this one, but Echoes won out), Whisper, Unforgotten.

The next step is updating my author site and getting launch stuff together…which involves marketing…which makes my head hurt.

🙂

Victory!

So, after two hours of fiddling, faddling, and tooth-gnashing, I took my (mostly) completely XHTML-formatted first six chapters and tossed them into Calibre, which converted them for my Nook. I transferred it to the Nook just to see if it worked.

My (pen) name on the screen for the first time.

Voila. 

The table of contents is basically a mystery, but everything else that I changed up (and it took more hand coding than I’d like) went through, and the shizzle looks good. 

What I learned from this headache-inducing experiment is that yes, I can do the formatting on my own. It will take all damn day, but I can do it. I’d rather not contemplate how long it will take to format an entire novel, rather than a little novella.

The magnificent chapter one.

What really smacked me with this particular story is that I use a lot of italics. They turn up for starship names, thoughts, and emphasis…and being a sci-fi story, there’s a lot of starship names. Replacing the italics was probably the biggest pain in the ass. The rest of it isn’t so bad, although you have to also replace all quotation marks (double and single), special characters, and emdashes. Not to mention stripping out previous formatting and…well. It’s a process. But again, it’s doable.

I shall spend some time figuring out this table of contents nonsense while the book is still with its respective readers. Then I can incorporate edits/changes into the Word doc and…do this process all over again. Oh, joy.

Done and Done

Got the last of the updates in, made the necessary changes, and I think we’re good for a printout tomorrow…I’ll give it another look when my eyes aren’t so tired.

Oh wait. Just looked at it and realized I had to add something.

OK, done. My next-door neighbor sounds like he’s attempting to wrestle boxes in his living room. Where was I?

Yes! Once is done. It is 53,194 words. I keep looking at it, thinking you should be shorter, but I’m sort of out of areas to cut. Possibly the betas and editors will be helpful. I did a little cover art mockup after narrowing it down to several pieces from istockphoto…and then when this thing is off with the readers, I’ll be teaching myself formatting (ugh).

And then there’s the back copy. You know, the thing you read on the back of the book (or the inside cover, if it’s a hardback) that tells you what the story is about. My rough sentence, at the moment, is “Two agents protecting an exiled queen must discover why they feel like they know each other–and uncover a web of lies centuries in the making.”

My answer to “But what’s it about?” is “Past lives with a sci-fi twist.”

The actual paragraph will have to be somewhat more interesting. But I shall save that for later.

And then there’s taglines. The little sentences across the front of the book or movie poster, usually in small text somewhere near the title. I may forgo that entirely.

I do feel a bit peculiar, looking at it now. One side of me says You should be shorter while the other side thinks You should be so much more and wants to turn it into a 120,000-word epic. Which…no. This is where the real self-doubt kicks in, where things are otherwise done and I start wondering if maybe it really isn’t being All It Can Be. I think it’s a form of stalling myself; if I send it off into the world then I’ve…well, sent it off into the world.

In the meantime, I’m up way too late, and so I must rest.

The Once Edits

I am on a fiction kick. Not only am I plowing through the Once edits, I also finished reading Martin’s A Dance With Dragons and now I am looking forward to another six long years of staring longingly out the window, dreaming of Westeros.

Dragons has some relevance to this post, actually. I downloaded the Nook version, and it’s…buggy. Plenty of typos and formatting errors. It sounds like the same thing happened with the Kindle version. Typos I can forgive; every book has mistakes, no matter how thoroughly it’s edited. That’s just the way the world works. But the formatting errors bug the hell out of me—that’s exactly what the publishing industry points out when it attacks indie authors: “But our books look better!”

Not this time, kids. I don’t mean little formatting errors, either. For example, an entire page is inexplicably cut off in the middle of one of Tyrion’s chapters, among other things. I’m guessing the novel had only a cursory edit to start with, and then they just jammed it through the formatting process and hoped for the best.

Now, regarding editing…Dragons is a book that desperately needs it. Not necessarily line editing; the copy was clean enough, but actual removal of content. This book and the one before it, A Feast For Crows, started out life as one book, probably way back in 2001. Eventually it got too big, so Martin and his editor decided to split it. Except they didn’t split it logically, via timeline (maybe the book wasn’t far enough along to warrant that). Instead, they focused on a specific group of characters…only two of whom (Sansa and Arya) had been in the previous book. Everyone else was new—and, in the case of the ironmen, really obnoxious. This newest installment, Dance, reintroduces us to many of the characters we haven’t seen since the third book. It also moved us ahead just a little bit, finally, at the end.

Far be it from me to want to shorten epic novels. I’m all about long, detailed stories, and I cringe when I hear authors talk about editors forcing them to cut this or that. But…I think there definitely should have been severe cuts made to this book. One POV in particular does absolutely nothing and takes up some 4 to 5 chapters. The descriptions of all the knights in a particular column and their heraldry and house histories are fine details, but they can be trimmed.

Taken as a whole—Feast and Dance—I can sort of envision them as one book and see what I’d yank. I don’t know. I think it’s definitely a case of what not to do with a hugely popular series.

Despite this, I enjoyed the book; Martin’s a brilliant writer, and I’m slowly moving through his backlist. Am not happy with how the e-formatting skeeved up the book, and am contemplating a letter to whoever handles that at his publisher.

I am deep into edit mode here at Casa Suz. I actually took yesterday off from paid work to grind through Once, and I think the worst is over. The first two chapters needed the most work, as I actually set out writing this thing for a romantic anthology, and it…well, it a) decided not to be a romance, and b) got too long and weird, anyway. The opening chapters in most of my work seem to be a little sparse; as I get a feel for characters, locations, and plots, things get richer as they go. Happened with Trojan Age, happened with Lusitania, and now with Once.

Funniest part? Realizing I didn’t actually describe my characters at all. I have images of them in my head, but never bothered mentioning it on paper. So I had to go back in and do that. After I finish chapter two, it’s just a matter of plugging in small notes I made to myself while doing the big edits (“Mention this earlier” or “Does she actually do that?”). Then it’s off to Staples to make printouts for the beta readers, because my dear printer is out of ink and won’t just print with only a black cartridge—oh no, I need to refill all four cartridges, to the tune of fifty bucks. Blow me, injket printers. Come September or October, I’m going to get a very cheap laserjet.

Before I head into revisions, I like to inspire myself by reading up on the process. Holly Lisle’s How to Revise Your Novel is a course I got a lot out of; there’s also Manuscript Makeover by Elizabeth Lyons. Last night I was reading Becky Levine’s The Writing & Critique Group Survival Guide, which helped me look at my writing as a reader might. I particularly like her list of things to critique (in my case, edit): Plot, character, point of view/voice, dialogue, and scene structure.

Scene structure turned out to be a big one here—my opening chapters were structured very differently from how the rest of the novella turned out. That took some fixing.

They are still doing some tree trimming outside, so I’ve been waking up sneezing. This inexplicably delights the bird, who starts dancing around when I get into my marathon sessions. The apartment is also pretty much in order; papers are filed, old writing notebooks stowed, things basically in their proper places. Just need to dust and vacuum and the place will be in great shape.

Done!

“There is no end of the ladder.  You just appreciate every step and try not to look down.” 

I would go on more about this particular quote (courtesy of Linz), but today I would like to say the Once ladder is climbed. There’s a couple tweaks to make, a few changes, then it’s off to the printer for a handful of readers. Then, hopefully, on to greater things. And I’m still not entirely thrilled with my final line. But still! Done! And I don’t hate it!

For now, I am walking the hell away from the manuscript and just sacking out on my couch for a time with A Dance With Dragons, which has been sadly neglected while I whittled away at Once. 

Total verbiage is 52,000 words…which I guess is par for course; my stories tend to run 12k over what I initially gauge them. It may end up slightly trimmed, depending on what cuts I make.

It is also something like 95 degrees in Orange. I’ve got both my fans going and my blinds mostly drawn; this is the first time I’ve really “felt” my lack of AC. Ugh. Trying to stick it out until after Labor Day, and if it’s still hot then, I may abandon ship and bum down to San Diego for a couple weeks until the heat wave breaks. Which will take me away from the glory of my desktop and its giant screen, but needs must, people.

Now, the couch calls to me. Cheerio!

Coming Along

Busy few days. The novella is coming along; it may clock in at slightly over 40,000 words, rather than the 40k I was going for.

I don’t have much else to say at this weird hour of the morning, save Once is basically my imagination’s sci-fi response to a late-night reading of John Donne’s “The Computation,” which has been my favorite poem since an AP English teacher read it aloud in class and my jaw dropped.

I’ve always interpreted it quite literally — she died, he’s a ghost discussing her many, many years into the future. That’s where the story idea came from. I guess there’s some interpretation (maybe the correct one, who knows) where the guy is just over-exaggerating being away from his lover for a day. I prefer the despairing version where he’s been hanging around for a thousand years missing her.

Once Once (now there’s some awkward phrasing) is off with a few beta readers, I will set into novella the second — tentatively called Ice Blink — and novella the third, which is happily all about zombies. I may write those two concurrently (Ice Blink is already about 8k through; it will be much shorter than Once). The zombies don’t have a name yet. But they’re going to be awesome.

I fully intend to get Once and one of the others out on Kindles and Nooks by mid-October, latest; that’s including time for horrific computer explosions, cover art nightmares, and formatting horrors. The third will come after that.

I feel like I finally have a game plan here.

Dammit it’s almost 2 AM.

The Hack’s Progress

Interesting writing session tonight.

I set out to get my 2,000 words and wound up with 2,800 (maybe a little bit more, if I have them explore the Stygian Drift). I have found I tend to do my best worldbuilding (or galaxy-building) when I don’t really overly plan out the universe…Kate, my female lead, led us straight to a crashed starship and now they’re off to hide in a particularly poisoned part of space.

Overall, 23,600 words out of an estimated 40,000. I think I’m right on track, but we’ll see if further developments ensue. Overall, very happy with this little novella so far.

I’ve been calling it Once, but I think I’m going to have to change that. Just not sure to what. Some of the words I’m playing with in it include “echoes,” “memory,” “ghostlight,” and “shadow,” none of which are lending themselves to titles right now.

I should get to bed. Alas, I am cranked. Might as well write more…