500 Words a Day?

Sep 7, 2010 Daily Writing

Didn’t have much time this morning, but I did manage 500 words on a new story. I’m not really sure it will wind up anywhere, though. I just sat down and started writing dialog, and out they came. I’ll take it.

Here’s something Lisa sent me a few days back. Interesting (and, as she said, Cute!)

The Publishing Industry: Take II – The Work

Sep 6, 2010 Business

Okay, I’m back to talking about how the industry is changing, and how it affects newish writers like me–guys who hold down day-jobs that take a bunch of time while working on their craft and struggling to “break in.”

Here’s my thing with the modern age of e-publishing–I love the ability to go work directly with my supposed audience. I love the concept of skipping the middle-man. I enjoy the sense of immediacy associated with this kind of conversation.

But, you know, I’ve just spent a bunch of this three-day weekend working with files and figuring out how to do clean epub books. And I’ve fiddled with graphic design to arrive at what I think is a semi-respectable cover–though my computer graphic skill could use some sharpening. And I’ve done some book design, and worked on the raw HTML of each story in my collection to ensure italics are properly done, and the special characters I’ve used are adequately represented. And I’ve done a little experimenting with how the final product actually appears in a couple readers. So I’m about ready, I think, to make my collection available on Amazon.com. Of course, to put it up on Smashwords, I’ll now need to do the whole thing again, but now fiddle with the raw Word files (which technically may be a bit easier–I’ve done it before with a few short stories just so I could figure out how it’s done).

The bottom line I’m getting to is that this is one helluva lot of work.

Yes, it’s interesting. Yes, I could probably get away with doing a little less work. But the fact is still the fact. In order to get to the point where I’m only nearly ready to make my work available for the public has cost me nearly three days of writing time.

That’s a lot of time for a guy with a lot of things to do during a normal week.

I said in
an earlier post that some of my thoughts with regard to the New World of publishing would sound like complaints. This is one of them. I don’t feel like I’m complaining here, though. I UNDERSTAND that this is something close to the wave of the future, and I UNDERSTAND I can’t stop it. I don’t even know if I would stop it if I could. I don’t think I want to stop it. But I am saying that this is a game changer for the part-time writer. It’s a serious business question that I’m facing today that I never faced ten or fifteen years ago. Back then the answer was: write, write, write. Now it’s a different equation.

So, what does this mean for the future of publishing? Or, maybe better asked, what does this mean for the future population of writers? Will we see a reduction of guys like me, who come from real jobs? Will we see more full-time writers who are now able to make a semi-real living off their work? I don’t know. But it feels like the future is currently slanting toward the kinds of writers who are willing to (and are better able to) put more work toward the non-writing side of their business.

Tangential Aside: Here’s an interesting fluff story on the reading decisions facing the world of readers.

Second Aside: The observant of you will note that my collection of short stories is now available in physical form from Amazon.com.

Lesson of the Week

Sep 5, 2010 Life

I remain as allergic to poison ivy as I ever have been. Enough said.

Story Sentience?

Aug 24, 2010 Daily Writing

I woke up early this morning and was unable to get back to sleep despite trying for at least a half-hour. Finally giving up, I decided to get out of bed and get something productive done. So I turned to my novel in progress–which has been coming along pretty cleanly so far.

But today nothing seemed to want to come.

Then I struck on a sentence that did not have anything to do with this story I’ve been working on. Not having anything else to do, I opened a new file and wrote down the sentence. Then came another sentence, and another and … well, you get the idea.

So now I’m a thousand words into a story that I have no idea where it came from or where it’s going. Really strange feeling. Is this what woke me up? Did this story demand that I refrain from going to sleep again? Did it know that if I lost consciousness again it would be gone for good? Was it fighting for its life there in the early hours of Tuesday morning?

Am I just over-analyzing the snot out of this?

Maybe the answer to all of these questions is the same.

Time Supply

Aug 20, 2010 Daily Writing, Life

I love the “new world,” this place where everyone is connected all the time, this thing that the internet has gradually morphed into that allows such close and constant contact. It’s a glorious place.

But it’s also a major time sink. And given that time sink, it’s also a major worry. that worry being this: if I’m not participating, I’m not succeeding.

As you can tell, I’ve been away from the keyboard often recently. The day job has been monstrously huge for the past six weeks or more, and there have been vacations and events and travel both within the US and international. I barely have enough time to write a little, better yet read, and better yet keep up with the blog and my fledgling attempts to absorb what Twitter can do for me. And that’s the order of priority–family & work, then writing, then fitness, then reading, then socializing, then anything else.

I admit that I’ve gotten a bit worn down the past couple weeks, and allowed the “anything else” to step in front of socializing–just because it’s easier to sit like a lump on the couch than to actually think.

Regardless of any particular order of priority, I wanted to take a moment to say that one of the things I don’t like about this new and wonderful world is the aspect of competition that seems to be inherent in this social element of the game now. By that, I mean that by stepping out of the blog for a week or two, I find myself feeling that I’m losing ground to everyone else–that going silent is akin to not swimming in the tides required for success as a writer in today’s new world. The intellectual side of my brain says that writing a good story is still the main element of success in this field–that if you write as well as you can write, the rest will take care of itself. But that’s not what the emotional side of my brain says (and I’m apparently one of those weird people who is not dominated by one side of my brain or the other, instead they just bicker back and forth until settling on some compromise).

The intellectual side of my mind says this world of writing fiction is not a competition, but my emotional brain looks at the intellect and semi-calmly calls bullshit.

This is my current little paranoia as I settle back down into something that almost resembles a normal cycle of life and working. I’m sure I’ll recover just fine, and be back to it around here in no time flat.

In the meantime, I suppose I should not that I’ve been progressing moderately well with my efforts on the latest novel. I have one issue that needs to get resolved before I can say I actually know the full story, but these things have their ways of working out.

So fear not, those few of you out there still wandering around here, my silence does not mean that progress has stopped. Only that time is in short supply.