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.

🙂

Muddling Along

I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t carry out my plans to go down to San Diego during the worst of the heat wave. Most of the area lost power for most of yesterday, and I would’ve been sitting there stewing about not being able to work.

I keep starting on entries and not finishing them. Ugh. Distracted freelancer is distracted.

I am in the process of reading two books — Rosamunde Pilcher’s Flowers in the Rain (a collection of short stories) and usually something on the Nook. I’ve gotten more used to reading on it, and I can see myself eventually using an e-reader for most fiction. With that said…I think the Kindle is a bit better. It’s lighter, the screen is much more eye-friendly. That’s not to say I’m not fond of my little wannabe tablet, but Nook Color still has a ways to go.

I would like to remark on the crappiness of formatting, though. What really irks me is that the crappy formatting I am seeing is largely coming from the Big Publishers. Yeah, some of the free stuff is shoddily formatted, but most of the indie authors I’ve purchased from have taken the time to format their offerings properly. Big Publishing clearly can’t be bothered. I saw it in the newest Martin book and I’m seeing it with additional titles. My mother said her Kindle version of The Help had some “weird stuff” in it, and after describing it to me over the phone, it also sounds like formatting issues.

There’s really no excuse to do this with bestsellers, Big Pub. You sit and slam indie authors for poor editing and appearance while perpetuating the same bad habits. At least practice what you preach.

After weeks of empty threats, my landlord is finally replacing the doors in our little complex…the contractor was out bright and early, and I awoke to the sounds of buzzing, hammering, and metal screeching. So much for sleeping in. Juno has responded to all this noise by BEING AS LOUD AS POSSIBLE, which would be charming if I wasn’t trying to actually get work done at a reasonable hour today.

Hit about 13k words on That Zombie Story last night. It’s fun to write, but it’s a slightly different kind of heroine for me. I tend to write the kickass alpha female in my longer works, but in the short stuff, my heroines seem more…sedate. Kate in Once is an effective hybrid–competent without flaunting her skills, I guess–but Vibeke, the narrator in That Zombie Story, has no survival/fighting skills whatsoever, so for the first section of the story she’s sort of floundering. She learns as she goes, but she’s one of the quietest of my female leads.

It can be a little bit of a pain when working out action scenes, but this was a decision I made when I first crafted the story. Much as I love a badass taking on the undead, nothing irks me more than someone with absolutely no training and/or survival skills shifting overnight into a badass to take on the zombie horde.

I have no logical endpoint to this particular entry, so I will just say…goodnight.

That Zombie Story

12,557 words on that zombie story. I’m pretty sure I had around 8,000 when I started today.

It’s changed drastically from its original incarnation, though I see echoes of the original tale. In bumping up the zombies, I bumped up the introduction of Tony. He’s ostensibly the male lead, I guess; back in 2006, my heroine, Vibeke, was filching ramen from the third-floor kitchen and Tony confronted her. I’ve had a couple characters stride onstage and just take over stories, but I think the sassy Mr. McKnight is the most memorable. He struts around and spits out his witty one-liners, and he would be fabulous if he weren’t such a pain in the ass.

In bumping up his appearance, though, I ended up adjusting his actual relationship to Vibeke. In the original story, they worked for the same company on different floors, so vaguely knew each other and played the getting-to-know-you game throughout the book. In the new version, they already have a bit of an antagonistic back-and-forth, which actually helps both characters and the story. Funny, the writing process.

Oh, and the undead finally made their appearance. Tony kept his dialogue from the original version: “Just what I need…the living dead.”

It’s still murderously hot in here. Ended up only partially covering Juno, although my bedroom is much cooler than the office.

The Hack’s Progress

The three-day, city-wide frat party that is the Orange Street Fair continues to rage. A drunkard is wailing underneath the tree outside my kitchen, while my neighbors are singing happy songs. Meanwhile, my relatively tidy apartment is locked up securely, and I’m hard at work on my next project.

Copies of Once have been distributed. The goal is to get as many eyes on it as possible, flush out any errors/plot holes/the like. I went over it several times and I think the text itself is fairly clean. So we’ll wait and see on that one.

The next project…zombies. Or rather, a revision of a story I wrote in 2006 during NaNoWriMo. Well…it’s not so much a revision as a complete rewrite (although quite a bit of the dialogue will survive, as it was quite snappy) and a re-structuring to a) make it a proper zombie story, and b) break it into several short stories. Right now I’m aiming for 30,000 words, but when you think about how my numbers usually turn out…it’ll probably be more around 40,000. With that said, I am aiming to write 2,000 words a day, and hope to have a working copy by the beginning of October…which, coincidentally, is when I’m hoping to get Once out on the shelves.

Chapter one is done at 3400 words; dividing 30k by about 3200 and it works out to about ten chapters as a baseline. I’ll give myself some wriggle room and say maybe twelve chapters, maximum.

That seems awfully close. This particular installation is entirely plotted out, so I know what happens when, and what needs to happen, and where I need to end things. I also have a pretty firm grip on the characters, so that helps.

It’s all about treating it like a real job. Declaring public deadlines helps.

The zombie story doesn’t have a title. Neither does the proposed series. For a very, very long time, I called the original draft The Evil That Men Do after the famous quote from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.” Except there’s already a movie, a book, and an Iron Maiden song named after it, so I’m not sure I can swing it as a title. During my earlier revisions this year, I called it Purgatory, but that didn’t quite work, either. Now…

Now it’s just “that zombie story.”

Hmm. Maybe I can work that angle. Another Damned Zombie Invasion or something like that.

Back to work.

Midday Musings

Hello, September.

The heat wave has finally tapered off, and in a few weeks it’ll feel like fall. I’ve lived in this apartment for almost a year (believe I moved on October 9th). Come mid-November, I’ll have been a full-time freelancer for a year, which is startling as hell to think about.

Interesting upside of working from home: I get sick a lot less. Well, let me rephrase that. I haven’t had a proper cold since I left the office arena at the end of 2010. I’ve had food poisoning and stomach bugs, and some days I’ve felt crummy, but the only nasal problems have been my allergies. I firmly believe this is because I’m not sitting in a freezing building with recycled air and 150 people made ill by said recycled air, the bunch of us constantly reinfecting each other.

As for work-life balance…I’m happiest when I’m doing some form of work, ideally working on fiction, but occasionally editing fills in the void, too. As I get older, I become less inclined to go out dancing or partying, and prefer quiet time with a good book and the bird…provided the bird doesn’t try to eat the book.

With that said, it isn’t a balance yet, and probably won’t be for a long time. Not the ideal balance, anyway. I’m starting to think you need to be really wealthy to have the real balance…or at least more successful than I am (granted, that’s not difficult in my present circumstances).

I promised myself I wouldn’t noodle around with Once anymore, but…we know how that goes. Clarified a few things here and there. Need to change out a word for computer that came too close to the “datapad” of the Star Wars universe. The editing side of me wants to revamp, revise, redo; the writer side of me shrieks stop, you’ve done enough already! 

While we were at a cousin’s wedding several weeks ago, Aunt Tia (yes, I realize it’s redundant, but I called her Tia long before I realized it meant “aunt” en espanol) told me the way she continues to thrive is “never stop trying.” I remember reading a quote about that in one of my writing books, and it specifically had to do with revision…something about the writer always improving and never being fully happy with his work. You can be content with a book: “This is a good story” and still think of a frillion and one ways to change it, update it, fix it, kill it. The key is figuring out when something needs work vs. the inner editor just wanting to tinker for tinkering’s sake.

Clearly, I haven’t figured that out yet. I do blame my line of work; over the years, I’ve grown more critical of every kind of writing, including my own.

I did take a recent step closer to learning when to listen to the editor vs. telling it to shut the hell up. Cordeilla’s opening chapter from In Fortune’s Hall took 3.5 rewrites before I was happy with it. That’s not adding words here and there, or revising a couple paragraphs; that’s changing up all her opening scenes, moving her from one location to the next, changing who she interacts with…because it just didn’t feel right. I knew it wasn’t right.

Whereas I look at Once and want to tinker because tinkering is fun–not because something doesn’t feel right.

So if I can successfully learn to distinguish between the two with all my work, I might actually get something out there one of these days.

Taking a break from work to read a chapter of Neverland by Douglas Clegg, then it’s back into the Gulf of Paid Work. I think tonight I might run to Staples and print out hard copies of Once. Then I think I’m going to switch gears and work on my zombie story for a bit…oh, and practice formatting. Yes, that will be a hoot.

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!

Allergies and Covers

San Diego is apparently the second-least allergenic city in the country. I am not sure who came up with that figure; Mother read it somewhere this morning. I promptly laughed and popped my Zyrtec. There’s many things I like about visiting my parents in SD; the open area, the breeze, the amount of light the house’s many windows let in, my wildly entertaining family.

Waking up with a nasty sinus headache is not one of the things I enjoy about this place. I think some of it is due to the dog; I’m not allergic to her, per se, but she’s got all kinds of fluff and dander and it gets in the air and leads to further nasal aggravation. I actually tend to do better in OC with just the bird.

Had a lovely post-birthday dinner at the 94th Aero Squadron Restaurant. I went for the sirloin (you only turn 28 once) and had a couple glasses of wine. Oh, and the beer-cheese soup. Shall we discuss the beer-cheese soup? It may be the greatest invention of all time. I think I could live off beer-cheese soup and be very happy (and probably 200 pounds heavier…also, there’s that whole lactose intolerance thing that might make things difficult).

As I creep toward the end of Once, I’ve been debating covers. This is probably something I’ll try to hire out. I have passable Photoshop skillz, but probably not enough to make it look professional. At the moment, I’m leaning toward purchasing some stock space photography photos and just going for name and title…maybe apply one of those “mystic” filters to it. I’m not particularly interested in having people on the cover, or even spaceships, so right now most of the stock art I’ve bookmarked consists of stars, nebulae, and some fantasy-type “planetrise” composites.

My website is still a horror. I may cave in and hire someone to do something with it until I have time to train myself, particularly if the shorts are done before I can get around to that. I guess if it comes down to it I can link to people through here, but…hoping to get things sorted out before then.

I was explaining the plot to my mother while trying to enlist her for some basic proofreading. She was relieved there were no zombies. I pointed out that I have written other stories that don’t involve the living dead. She said I never showed her them.

Whoops.

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.