Don't Get Sloppy

I was in Fort Lauderdale last weekend, officiating Beach Brawl 2014 (and yes, I'll write a post explaining roller derby, given the number of times it's been requested), and I left my Flash drive in the business center of the hotel. I don't really use it anymore. Once upon a time, Dropbox wasn't as useful as it is now, and you couldn't sync across multiple desktops with simple internet access. You had to go to a web location, upload stuff, and blah blah. It was the same as a Flash drive except less convenient.

So back in the day, I kept EVERYTHING on that Flash drive. And while it doesn't include the most recent draft of my most recent novel, it has everything as of the completion of FAMILY JEWELS. Why? Because Dropbox could get hacked. Accidents happen. It's always good to have a backup of your backups (and I update my external hard drive even less frequently than I do my Flash drive).

This all sounds like sage advice, so what makes this post-worthy? Well, when I first started saving things on my Flash drive, there was no such thing as Kindle Direct Publishing. There was no black market of plagiarized novels self-published to reap what few sales they can from the ill-gotten work of others. Now, if I lose my Flash drive, EVERYTHING on that drive (which is EVERYTHING) could be posted to KDP by a nefarious neerdowell, tarnishing my reputation and stealing my work. While none of those novels have been published, some of them have strong prospects for future revision (Triad Society anyone?). Those prospects are dashed if someone steals them off a lost Flash drive and throws them up on the internet in their current form.

This is NOT to tell you to ditch the Flash drive, but it IS to suggest that you lock any folder that contains your writing. Sure it adds a step for when you want to access it, but adding password encryption means that if you leave your Flash drive in a business center, you don't have to panic and wait to see your first novel from five years ago suddenly shitting all over KDP.

Lesson learned. :)

2013: A Singular Endeavor

I don't normally do a year in review because my pursuit of publication has been an ongoing effort for over four years now and that story has only changed somewhat. Write a novel -> query, write a novel -> query, start new year, repeat. That was 2009 through 2011. Then came 2012, the year of the great rewrites. I was asked by three different agents to revise and resubmit four different manuscripts, and the entire year disappeared while working on those stories.

And here we are at the end of 2013. It started much like it did every year before it. In February I started and finished the first draft of my most recent novel, FAMILY JEWELS. 28 days almost to the minute. I didn't feel proud. I didn't feel excited. I felt like I had been there before and it wasn't working. 2012 had gotten me "this isn't your best work" plus "this is so close but not for me" plus "I can see how another agent would love this, try sending it to X and Y" plus "This is an amazing story, but it can't be your first novel on the market" all of which equalled being in the same place I had been at the start of the year. Obviously I was improving at my craft, but I still didn't have representation and I still didn't have a book deal, and that just wasn't good enough. And so, we begin 2013, the year of the singular endeavor.

I finished the first draft in 28 days. I spent six months on the second draft. I spent another two on the third draft. And another two on the fourth draft. I did other things in between. I joined a roller derby league. I learned how to skate. I learned how to officiate. I became the head non-skating official of my league. I injured myself repeatedly. I joined a group dance studio with my wife. I wrote the first chapter of my next novel. You know, I lived life. I took all that advice I had always said didn't apply to me and I applied it to me.

And here I am at the end of 2013 and guess what? I still don't have an agent. BUT, I've written the best novel I've ever written since I started taking my writing seriously. It's not my favorite story I've written (that still belongs to WITH A CROOKED CROWN), but it is lightyears better than anything I've put down on electrons. I read Donald Maass' prompts on Twitter and gave more thought to characters that would have otherwise been cliches. I got AMAZING feedback from my beta readers and I applied it to fill all the holes and fix all the failures in logic. I asked myself, what more is there to my character and then I tried to find it and offer it up in the story. (Sure, I've done all that before, but not with the rush I've felt before. It was always, "I don't have any more time to make this better" and that was a mistake. This time, it was going to be better until it was the best it could be.)

How do I know I accomplished that? Well, I started querying this past Saturday (with the twelfth draft of my query) and by Monday, I had two full requests. That's right, kids, FULL requests. Not partials. Stick that feather in my cap, why don't I? I think I will. My query is strong. My synopsis doesn't read like a shopping list. My novel rocks. Even if this doesn't get me an agent, I know that what I'm doing now is what works for me, what makes me the best I can be, and I'm confident that if this novel doesn't have an agent calling me up and saying, "Let's take over the world together," the next one will. Or maybe the one after that. Let's keep going until we find out how many licks it takes to get to the center of this Tootsie Pop.

So happy new year to you, ladies and gents. I hope your past year has been as rewarding as mine and that your forthcoming year is filled with hopes and accomplishments.

Did we put the cart before the horse?

I have a growing number of draft posts. It almost feels like I've been actively updating this journal because I have so many posts started that the interaction was initiated even if it wasn't completed. I've been journaling in one form or another for a decade now, opening my first LiveJournal account in February of '03. A writing journal is not a blog, and I tried to make that clear from the start. A blog is what you get reading Chuck Wendig, Roni Loren, or Janice Hardy, people who actively produce content in a professional manner on a frequent basis. Three years ago, all you heard on the internet was how writers needed to start building their platform even before they published their book. This isn't a bad idea, but what it didn't take into account is the transitory nature of the internet. Three years ago, writing blogs were all the rage. Kristin Nelson, Nathan Bransford, Rachelle Gardner, the Rejectionist, the Intern, Pimp My Novel, and on and on. How many of them are still blogging? Time constraints and new social media turned that messaging to new avenues.

I blogged like that for a while. A little while, and a lot of that information I would now have to revise to accommodate what I've learned. I don't follow my own Rules any more. The Rules need to be revised, but I can't revise them because I'm trying new things. Once I know what the New Rules are, I'll write those up.

So here's the kicker. I didn't want to be a blogger. Go read Chuck Wendig if you want your lists of 25 things new authors should know. I've read that messaging in one form or another for years now, so I find his voice interesting but his messaging not that new. I definitely don't want to write that. I don't want to tell you how to be a writer. Go read Chuck. He's great at that. But you'll eventually learn that lesson and then what? Then nothing. I've entered that in between space where I have no intrest in talking about the basics but have no news about publications to put here. When I started this journal, if you had asked me if I would be unpublished in 2013, I would have said "I don't think so." Mmmm ego. This place was to tell you about the experience of the process and of course news about my forthcoming work. My work is coming, just not forth.

This is NOT to say that I am retiring writing in this space. That's certainly not the case. I like you people. I think I need to redesign my site, however. I need to move away from blogger and make a static page the primary landing page again (like how it was when I still used LiveJournal). You don't want someone looking at your blog and seeing your last post was months before (this applies to you too, agents! A two-year-old unused twitter account does not advance your interests!). I have nothing new to talk about. Well, kind of new. I have all those drafts I need to finish. But most of them have to do with how I'm trying new things in my writing process. I've slowed things WAY down (I've spent three months on the first half of this draft where the entire draft before was completed in a month). I'm not overly investing. I've begun the experiment and when I have the results, I'll share it with you.

I've used WordPress before but I'm thinking of SquareSpace. I think their prices are high for hosting, but I like their tools. I had planned on paying for a guy to work me up a really awesome custom WordPress space, but money this year has been especially difficult with all my injuries and the resulting medical costs.

So, most likely, you reach this place through some kind of blog feed, in which case, I doubt you'll notice a change. But if you visit JosephLSelby.com, that may change in the coming weeks.