I love my job

There can be a lot of work involved when writing.  Perhaps not for all writers, and maybe it shows in their work, but for me, I can sometimes spend days trying to figure out how I will work my hero out of a predicament, or how I will work them into that situation in the first place.

One of the great joys for me, as an author, is to write something that gives myself shivers.  Over the past couple years, I have completed the revisions on two novels.  I went over them relentlessly catching grammar and spelling errors and reworking the phrasing to get the images just right.  I knew I was doing the right thing when I didn't tire of going over it again, and when the ending still brought shivers and sometimes even tears to my eyes.

Now, I am back to creating again, and I just had the same experience as I found a wonderful way to bring the heroines driving motivation and the great obstacle she will face, forward into the early pages of the book.  It's a great feeling that I know I will relive when I do my revisions, and when I get everything just right, I know the readers will feel the same thing.

Sometimes, I really I love my job.

How do you write?

How do you write?  Do you plot out your work or sit down and type from the seat of your pants?  How is it working for you?

I've done both, and here is what I think I am learning.

My first two novels started with a basic plot, but not a heavily mapped out plan.  I knew approximately where the story would go and just started writing.  During the process, I discovered many new things about my characters.  This is vastly different from plotting out the story and knowing every detail of your characters and locations up front.  It can be challenging to keep the continuity when writing this way, but I kept notes as I went along.

My next novel started as a NanoWrimo project.  So I proved I could write 50,000 words in a single month. I plotted this one out and started filling scenes with words.  It wasn't my best work.  I wasn't sure at this point if the failing was from trying to cram 50,000 words in my spare time, while working a 50-60 hour a week job, or if it was from the scene plotting.  Perhaps I'm too critical, but it just lacked the depth and richness I feel I brought to the other two books.

My next project was picking up the pieces of something that had started as a short story.  I developed an obnoxious but naive character that I grew to like, so I plotted out a bunch of scenes.  I thought it might make a nice novella.  As I started filling in the scenes, I again came to feel they lacked the richness of my first two novels, or even the richness of the first half chapter where the character really shines.

I am not ready to throw in the towel yet, it could be a Muse issue or it could be something more basic like trying to cross the realms of the right brain with the left brain.

I put that work on the back burner, and started up the sequel to The Lost Art of Magic.  I started writing.  I had an idea what kind of peril my heroine would face, and I plan a cliff hanger for the ending, but I did not plot out the story.  The richness was back.  I'm still making notes of some of the milestones I want in the book, but I'm writing it like I watch a movie.  I try to guess the ending and see how it turns out.  (By the way, if you're like me, you can probably write a better ending to half the movies you watch.)

I thing the whole left/right brain thing may be what's at work here.  So I am trying to vaguely plot out my story without diagramming every event.  Time will tell if it works for me.

100 word challenge #73: The Arbitration of the Strings

I just came across a neat idea, the 100 word challenge.  It resides on this blog: Julias Place.  The idea is to take a starting phrase and write 100 words around it.

This is week #73,  the phrase is …the notes from the piano…

How have I missed this for so long?

The Arbitration of the Strings

The notes from the piano buzzed off the old worn strings, rattling decades of dust off the soundboard. The discordant fusion of quarreling strings leapt mercilessly out of the piano and beat indiscriminately upon the arbitrator’s eardrums, but he was prepared for this. He turned the screws one by one, pitting one string’s cries against another’s.  They screamed only for themselves. He turned the screws again, forcing them to cry out with their neighbor.  Good or bad, their voices were music to his ears.  He continued turning the screws until their howls melded together and sang out harmoniously as one. The piano was tuned.

I've completed editing of my third book, The Beat of a Different Drummer.  Now I am returning to The Diva of Mud Flats, a book which I have already started a couple chapters.  I breezed through the partial chapters, still in edit mode but also catching up with where I left off, then hit a chapter with instructions, "add something about the phone call here."

I came to a screeching halt.  I need to change hats from my editors hat to my more creative writers hat, and found I wasn't quite prepared.  Maybe some caffeine will help.

Ever have one of those days?  Or two of them maybe?

Yesterday, I completed the creative revisions on my upcoming novel, The Beat of a Different Drummer.  Now I'm ready to start formatting it for publication.

I do all my work directly on a flash drive, and make periodic copies to my hard drive as a backup.  I have been very busy with the final revision and realized it had been a while since my last backup, so I copied the book folder to the hard drive.  (Note: that wasn't a full backup of the flash drive.)

With that done, I took a break and decided to reprogram my fancy schmancy remote control to work with my new bluray player (thank you wife.)  I connected it to the USB port and the computer didn't recognize it, which is odd.  So, being safe, I ejected the flash drive the correct way, and waited for Windows to say it was safe to remove.

It turned out to be a bad USB cord, but when I was done with the remote and inserted the flash drive to work some more, Windows spent a LONG time checking the flash drive, and then reported that all 16gb were empty.

Horror.

I checked my backups and found a full backup from 12/1, which along with my morning book backup, would be pretty up-to-date.  So I started a recovery by copying the saved contents back to the flash drive. It failed and told me the flash drive was disconnected.

More horror.

I rebooted the computer and was pleasantly relieved to see the flash drive was actually intact.

Full BACKUP followed immediately.

DAY 2.
I started formatting today.  Setting the fonts, the chapters, and most importantly the page headings with page numbers.

The fonts I used for the cover were not available to Word (I sometimes use MS publisher or Adobe Photoshop to provide cover fonts), so I chose to grab images from the cover and insert them in the front page.  So far so good, until Photoshop froze the whole computer.

I had to think back, did I save my work?  NO.

A hard reboot with crossed fingers.  May I now say THANK YOU BILL GATES AND COMPANY!

Word opened with the OLD version sans formatting, but after a few moments, it offered up some backups it had made which I could choose to recover.

I'm taking a break for a while.

Reborn

It's been almost two years since my last post.  I had given up on gaining any traction in the blogosphere at that time.  A lot of things have changed since then.  I have NOT returned to nanowrimo, and I do not support their efforts.  It was an experiment and I have concluded that we already have too many authors in the world, why dilute the pool any further?

I have collected many more rejections over the span of the last two years.  Most of them were mechanical automated responses which all insisted "please forgive the automated nature of this..."  Bull crap.  I have also received a few genuine rejections who offered their thoughts on this or that, but no thanks anyway.

My first novel was too long at 160,000 words.  Apparently, my second was also a bit long at 115,000 words.

My wife, tired of seeing me receive the rejections, talked me into self publishing.  It seemed a futile activity, and one that may spell the death of my hopes of ever picking up a sponsor, but I explored the option anyway and discovered three avenues of little financial risk: Kindle, Nook and CreateSpace.

I suppose I could just say ebook, for there are a great many more than just the two, but they are the major players, and I have concentrated on them.

First up was The Lost Art of Magic.  I formatted it for Kindle and found that I wasn't quite done, and went through several more revisions to refine my spelling and grammar.  I consider myself fortunate that all three formats allowed the author two choices: You can format it yourself using one of many formatting tools; You can format it in Word and submit a .doc file.

So I formatted in Word.  I actually was using Open Office, and immediately started finding spelling errors that I had missed before.  I also found that Open Office had some problems reading RTF files (produced by my primary writing tool) so I upgraded to Libre Office.  Since I planned to format a paperback as well, I added headings with the book title and page number.  Of course, the page number had to be on alternating left/right sides of the page.  I also wanted to suppress the heading on chapter headings.  Libre Office broke my document when I got too fancy with the headings.  It actually mangled my text by losing carriage returns which stuck paragraphs together.  I broke down and got the real Word which allowed me to have all the fancy headings I wanted.

So now I have a Kindle version on Amazon.  I since added The Mother of All Viruses and created Kindle, Nook and Paperback versions of both.

I am now represented on Amazon, and on Barnes and Noble and my facebook page has been gaining traction too.

The paperbacks of The Lost Art of Magic and The Mother of All Viruses each have their own websites.

Crossing fingers again

I have four chapters through critiques and The Lost Art of Magic is being very well received. I did not win the Hook contest at talebait, but I did get an invitation to submit my work. I have contacted the agent and explained that I would very much like to send a sample, but I am currently putting it through a peer review and critique process. Hoping she will still want to see pages ASAP.