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.

Critiquing in Denver

I've joined the Denver Fiction writers and have started sharing critiques with them. They've offered some valuable insight into what worked and what didn't work. I am now back to revising The Lost Art of Magic, and hope to have something even more special as the weeks go by.

Revisions of my Nano book

Early in November, I expressed fears that I would run out of things to say around 35,000 words, then at the end I crossed 50,000 words and estimated another 10,000 to 15,000 words before the book was finished. Both estimates were grossly off the mark, which I think only proves one of me observations just a couple posts ago.

No matter how much I put into my plot, when the actual writing commences, I am a panster, and like the good Captain Barbossa said, "the code is more what you'd call 'guidelines' than actual rules." So goes it with my plots.

And now, in revisions, I am finding places in the early chapters where the characters don't quite agree with the later chapters, so I am shoring up their stories and the chapters are growing in size, just a couple hundred words or so per chapter, but it's still a bit different, or maybe I'm a bit different.

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The hook contest at talebait continues. I have made several entries with the hope of garnering a coveted reading by one of the judges. I need to get that first connection to put one of my books into publication before I can complete my journey to published novelist.

Winner!

The holidays were a major distraction. My daily quota fell from 1800 words per day to 300-500 words per day. But I was close enough to cross the 50,000 word mark tonight. I probably still have another 10,000 to 15,000 words before the novel is really finished. (Then comes revision, revision, revision, then more revisions.)

Thanksgiving Homecoming

No, that's not a remake of some Waltons story, I'm flying home tonight. Woo Hoo! It's been six long weeks in Denver, and my family misses me as much as I miss them.

Not sure how I'm going to keep up my writing quota, I'm hoping to have some quiet time before everyone wakes up. I'll be using paper and pencil on the plane, and in the airport if I can't find an outlet.

I have lots of things to fix when I get home. Apparently, the automatic sprinklers decided to burst something and flood the streets. Not sure I can fix them this weekend, but I hope to identify the problem. I'm hoping we're far enough into the quasi-fall season that the yard will survive without water. Maybe it will be something simple that I can fix. And that is only one of my many chores that await me.

The weather news is predicting blizzard conditions in the mountains that may hamper holiday travel. I may end up with more paper scenes than I would otherwise anticipate.

I just read a NANOWRIMO pep talk from Lemony Snicket. I suspected all along that this madness of writing 50,000 words in a single month was an unfortunate event.

40,000 words and counting, but not rambling yet

The question comes up on writing forums a lot. Are you a plotster or a pantster? Well, I've always been somewhere in the middle. My first two novels were plotted out thoroughly in my head. I mulled over the plots, sub-plots and parallel stories in my head long before I started writing. Then, when I finally sat down to type, I followed my plots but still wrote in pantster mode. I frequently found my plot changing, surprised at what some of my characters did that I had not foreseen.

Somewhere in the middle of the second book, I started using a tool called yWriter, which allows me to plot out my chapters and my scenes ahead of time. It was perfect for me, since I already wrote my first two books in chapters and scenes, only I didn't know it.

Now why do I bring this up? Because, I've been to some group writings and have found that others are have far more trouble reaching 50,000 words than I was (I thought my story was going to peter out around 35,000). They suggested adding flying monkeys and visiting aliens. They were joking (I hope they were joking).

Seriously, however, I think a lot of them, and I am guilty as well, have developed a habit of being excessively wordy, during the month of November. I repeated myself when it wasn't necessary, I did not use contractions to keep word count up. I considered changing my names to Joe Bob and Norma Ray.

But when I read my early chapters, I found I was breezing through the action and the dialog, without painting the scenery. I've thumbed through a couple books about writing a novel, and it is more common to over-write, then edit out a lot of junk. When I tell people my first book was 162,000 words, they assume the same.

Reading this book, I can see that my edits will remove some of the replication, but I will have a lot of fluff to add back into the book.

It doesn't matter, it's just different.