Relax! (Go to it)

As previously mentioned, I participated in Sara Megibow's Writer's Digest webinar last week. She had a lot of good points and went over various features of her clients that caught her attention during the query process (all her clients except for one came through the slush pile). Not all the things she mentioned had to do with the author's writing. She mentioned repeatedly how impressed she was with Roni Loren's platform. Roni had started her blog before querying and had 50 followers with regular participation (replies counted in double digits, etc).

For aspiring authors who have not yet started establishing a platform or those of us *cough* me *cough* who can count responses on one hand, these kind of comments can cause some extreme anxiety. Half my twitter followers are spam bots! All my comments come from Ted Cross! Woe is me! Woe is ME!!!!

RELAX!

Stop. Breathe. Ask yourself a simple question: What matters most? The answer will ALWAYS be the same.

The writing.

Writing matters, folks. Sure we need to have a platform. Here I am blogging right now. And that's something to build up over time. But as you are working toward querying and then representation and then publishing, remember to keep your writing up front. There are plenty of things to stress about there (holy crap, this is shit! No one is ever going to want to read it!) that you don't need to pile on with worries that not enough people are commenting on your blog.

And if you want empirical proof, head over to Jane Kindred's blog/website. Jane just sold her epic fantasy in a three-book deal. Check out her followers. 14. Bam, I got her by one!

The writing always matters first.

Oh, Hubris, you so crazy

So 85% of my site migration is complete. I finally visualized how I want to display my writing. I've arranged the menu. Now I just need to handle the code and create the necessary files for that code to work. Bouncing back and forth between JavaScript and an iframe. I had been leaning to the latter, but it doesn't look the best in Blogger.

ANYWAY, that's not really what this post is about. This post is about the 15% of my site that's still missing. Why is it still missing? Answer: because I don't know if it belongs.

Now, context: When I first built my site in 2008, I was wrapping up a very successful run as a contributor to the RPGA's Living Greyhawk campaign (and before that, Living Kalamar). Some people thought listing instructions for convention requests sounded cocky of an unpublished author, but that wasn't there for my novels. That was there for D&D. I got invited to a lot of conventions. Free passes, shared rooms, etc. I toured the convention circuit hard for a few years and had a great time doing it. Let me tell you that I couldn't keep that pace today. I'm too old and busted.

So when I built my website, I was beginning the road toward professional writing. I would begin my first manuscript, BLACK MAGIC AND BARBECUE SAUCE, a few months later and would start querying in just over a year. So, I put everything up. All the writing I had done from my last college-era play to samples of my D&D adventures to a couple of short stories, and some Living Greyhawk-themed flash fiction.

Three years later, and a lot of that feels like clutter. I haven't written a short story since I finished "Galileo Rocks the Baby" (a story I like but that needs revision to reach its full potential). LG is long gone and I don't get invited to conventions any more. I did not follow the transition to D&D 4e and have left the RPGA (and WotC's freelance staff) all together.

What's important now is my novels. But that's the rub. I don't have novels. I have manuscripts. I was okay putting up a faux cover fro BM&BBQ. I made a few of my own (crap) designs for the mss that followed. I put up blurbs from query letters. Yes, they were that crappy. None of this seemed like a bad thing because, somewhere in that arrogant little brain of mine, I figured that this next ms was the one to get me published.

You see, once I had a book to sell, all that would come down. I'd have the professionally designed cover, the back cover copy, links to Amazon, BN, and that awesome local place in Portsmouth. I'd make it super-awesome-professional. And so what if it had a few other manuscripts. I would revise them and make them super awesome ready to publish and they'd all end up there in an official capacity eventually. (And to be honest, I never thought there would be more than three up there before I had an agent. I know you shouldn't think that way, but it was a secret pride of mine that I thought I'd be different. Fool I!)

Ah naive youth. I am now working on my fifth manuscript (the sequel to my third manuscript--which means I can't even query it when I'm finished). The next ms I can query will be my sixth manuscript and by that point the page starts to look like that kid that kept trying out for sports even though he wasn't good enough to make the team.

So the missing 15% of my website is my writing. I don't know what I should and should not post. What looks like an aspiring author ready for success and what looks like an amateur author not capable of reaching a professional level?

For the moment, I'm just leaving it empty. It's a little disconcerting, but no more so than a bunch of covers and blurbs for novels that don't exist beyond my own computer.

Words and Games

The topic of custom words in fantasy has come up in a variety of places I visit lately (Book Country, et al.), and while I don't hold it against people who choose to have names for months other than January-December, I find it a distraction and a lot of work for very little return. So I keep it simple. Seconds are seconds. Months are months. And so on.

What I found today is that I'm not as complacent about games. I made a chess reference in my fantasy manuscript and it brought me to a screeching halt. The metaphor is perfect for the situation, but I have trouble accepting that chess as we know it would have occurred in that setting in the same capacity. But choosing a name unique to the setting erodes the metaphor. I may dump the metaphor all together and ignore the problem. It's curious, though, that I'd be okay with measurements but not games.

What I absolutely won't do is use idioms or reference fairy tales or other key phrases that were told to us in our childhood that we continue to use today (no old lady in the shoe or anything like that). As a reader, that kind of thing pulls me right out of a story, so I will not do it as a writer. It may be inconsistent, but I don't care. :)

The Red Pen

Your pardon at the quality of the pictures, but I took those with my phone which does not have the best camera. They get the point across, though. I received feedback from an agent awhile back, feedback I was uncertain about. I never rush right into feedback assuming that a person is right or wrong. I weigh everything on a case-by-case basis. In this case, she pointed out a "defect" that wasn't actually a defect because it was intentional (I had intentionally slowed the pacing as a parallel to the bureaucracy of the setting).

Not to dismiss this feedback out of hand, I pondered on it long and hard. Not just long or hard, but both long and hard together, which is proven to yield better results. What I found was two things. 1) She was correct that, regardless of the atmosphere of the setting, there was an element of the craft that needed improvement. I could do better. 2) Whether I write it intentionally or not, slow-paced books are not the way for a first-time author to get published.

All this meant little until I realized a mistake I had made. I made it in the original draft and thought I fixed it in the final but never went far enough on the correction. This was the key! Not only would I fix the error, but I would improve the pacing and everyone would be happy.

So that's exactly what I did. I set about taking a comb a la Spaceballs in the desert scene. I chopped something like six-eight thousand words, combined chapters, rewrote two entirely, and in the end, the story was so much stronger for it.

So I go back to said agent and say, madam you are wise and virtuous. I have followed your inspired criticism and proffer to you a better draft, should you be willing to accept it. Her response was: send me the first three chapters.

You know that sound effect where the car tires screech and then there's a loud crash? Yeah, that happened in my brain. The first three chapters? But my revisions start in chapter 4!

Again, not to dismiss things out of hand, I ask myself, could these chapters use attention as well? I had already cut some five thousand words from them just during my normal revision process (yeah, they were big). Looking at the word counts and previous feedback, it seemed like chapter two had room to give. There was a lot of cool stuff that established character background and setting but didn't do a lot for the story.

So how do we approach this? I mean, this is serious. This is the time. Make it or break it. Do it or die. We need...THE RED PEN!

I don't use hardcopy much any more. I'm 100 times faster on my computer. I write on my PC. I revise on my PC. I revise again on my PC. But sometimes there is a time when things are important enough that I have to go old school.

Now very few of you (and by few I mean 1, unless you came over from Book Country where I reviewed some others) have ever experienced my critiquing. To put it mildly, I am ruthless. I don't normally offer to review other people's work for a variety of reasons, but chief among them is that they don't like me when I'm done. (That might be an exaggeration. I made one guy cry, but we became very close after that.)

What those people don't realize is that I'm equally hard on myself. And so you don't have to take my word for it, here is my long-form photographic evidence.



Here we go, making changes.




Wow, this needs tightening. Move stuff. Get rid of that. And that.




Okay, really? What they hell were you thinking. Just...no. Just no. Don't do that.




Balkabddipagaujgewapgogpejp!!!!!!!1111!!!111111

A Quick Tutorial

It's Memorial Day here in the US, a time to honor those that have served in uniform. We have parades. We grill. We post on Facebook that we honor their memory. What I'm finding, however, is that people don't know how to properly refer to America's armed forces. I see a lot of "in memory of our soldiers" and what have you. Here's a quick list so you don't make this mistake in your writing:

Army = Soldier
Air Force = Airman
Marine Corps = Marine
Navy = Seaman/Sailor

So when that person posted saying he was remembering soldiers, he was only remembering army personnel, which must be a bummer to all the others. (Marines in particular bristle at this mistake because Marines are Marines and they're always Marines.)

A trend that started during our invasion of Iraq is to support the troops! We have replaced armed forces with troops, which is also incorrect. A troop is a grouping of forces (originally at company size, so troops might refer to a battalion or two).

If you want to refer to the armed forces as a whole, call them such. Servicemen/Servicewomen is also acceptable. Or distinguish based on their individual calling if you don't have a mixed group.

If you're genuine about wanting to honor their memory, this little courtesy will help show you mean it.

It's a Code!

Every once in awhile I'm in the mood to write a conspiracy thriller story. So I'm updating a website to a new edition. The editor gives me chapter summaries in a Word doc, which implies they're all new. But they're not. Most of them are identical to the previous edition. BUT not all of them are, so rather than sending me a correlation document that says what I should keep and what I should change, I have to go through them all line by line.

Now the simple short cut to this is to look at the beginning and end of the bullet point. If they match, the rest does too (I tested this theory just to make sure I was correct--which I was). Scan for page numbers that might have changed and you're good to go.

In a couple of chapters, a weird thing happened. The first word and last word of each bullet point, when all points were read in succession, ALMOST formed sentences. Grand conspiracies of world manipulation and domination began to surface. I was part of some grand plot!!!

Oh, no wait, now it stopped making sense. I was ALMOST part of some GRAND PLOT!

But that would be kind of interesting, eh? Not someone who is really good at ciphers or puzzles but is just doing something mundane and stumbles on something that was in plain sight.

Who does he tell? How does he tell? Now he's on the run by what might as well be called the Illuminati! Oh no!!!!

Changes are Afoot

I'm in this rock/hard place situation where Webs.com is not keeping pace with technology, specifically the improvements to HTML like iframes. I have changes I want to make to my website that I simply cannot do with webs. It's showing its age and my site looks much more amateurish than it did three years ago when I first built it. At the same time, having a bad ass HTML5 with JS/CSS rocking your socks doesn't do me any good without a book to promote, as I'm sure I'll want to change it as soon as I DO have a book to promote.

So I'm going to go against what I usually say and start using this blog as a website. I'm in the process of adding static pages. I have not changed my website domain name to point here yet, not until I get things up and running. The links are no longer visible in the right, though, and some pages are there that weren't there before. Others require more work and will be forthcoming.

Please pardon us during our construction. ...and stuff.

And the Blind Shall See

If I had known that I was going to attend Sara Megibow's Writer's Digest webinar today, I would have posted earlier. It was a last minute decision1, and boy am I glad I attended.

It was a seminar on querying. I have attended such a seminar before hosted by her boss, Kristin Nelson. That seminar was geared specifically for sff. I've also followed Kristin's blog for YEARS, so I've heard a lot from the Nelson Agency about what makes a good query. So why did I attend? Because I continue to suck at queries.

Actually, at first, I asked Sara on Twitter whether I would get anything new from the presentation. And while she admitted that their philosophy on queries is pretty similar, there was one fundamental point I was short-selling: Sara isn't Kristin.

It has to be hard for an associate agent to work for a popular and established agent. How easy must it be to assume she parrot's Kristin's opinions or is the "second" option at the agency. Attend a webinar hosted by Sara, and you'll have that misconception dispelled. I will go so far as to say I learned MORE from Sara's presentation (which wasn't geared specifically to sff) than I did from Kristin's.

The part that resonated with me the most is when she took examples of debut authors and showed us how she took their query letters and formulated her pitch to editors2. That made a REALLY big difference in how I see queries and how I will approach them in the future. I rewrote the query for JH but am waiting for the audio archive to become available and listen a second time before I finalize things. It feels like there's a hole in the middle, which probably means it's perfect.

Now, if you're counting pennies and this kind of topic doesn't seem worth the expense, I will also point out that the webinar ends with a QA session3 and then you get to submit your query to Sara for critique. This is like a free swing. Here's my query. *feedback* Okay, here's my revised query, no harm no foul!4 I have heard from other people that sometimes the expense is enough for this fact alone. Basically they're buying a query critique and the rest is just icing.

For me, querying truly is my biggest weakness5. I want to improve and I feel that I have. Looking back at previous queries, I definitely have. *shudder*

If this sounds like something that may be helpful to you or if you've been on the fence about this kind of thing, I strongly recommend it.


1 Okay, technically it was a last sixty minutes decision. I went and grabbed lunch and then came back and participated.

2 She even spoiled Roni Loren's big reveal of her new cover. I know a secret!2 1/2

2 1/2 A secret until tomorrow when Roni reveals her new cover.

3 Sara saw a question I submitted and said hi to me. I squeed like a tween fangirl. :D

4 The query I submitted after Kristin's webinar led to the closest I've been to signing an agent.

5 Shut up, Liz! I like my pacing just fine.

Malcolm Castle/Richard Reynolds

I was watching an episode of Castle recently (in itself not surprising since it's the only show on right now where I watch weekly [Psych being the other]) and I made a startling realization. Nathan Fillion is playing the same character he played in Firefly.

I will not explain to you what Firefly is. You should know this by now.

Now you may think, "How can you claim Richard Castle is the same character as Malcolm Reynolds?!?!?!"

And I say to you this: Watch the pilot, Serenity, and then have the independents win the war. Who is Malcolm Reynolds if he didn't suffer the horrors of defeat and the aftermath of Serenity Valley?

He's Richard Castle.

Ooooo *shivers* Do it again!

I just had one of those moments. I love those moments. Back in the day, the reason I never finished anything was because I tried to plot things out. I might get a ways into it. I tried to get a feel for it and then write an outline, but I was convinced I couldn't go forward without an outline. What that meant is I never finished anything. 40,000 words on a manuscript and then three days working on an outline and I threw everything out.

I don't outline any more. Now I write by the seat of my pants. The pants/plots paradigm (p3) is a well established discussion on the tubes and I'm not going to tell you to do things one way or the other. Find what works for you and then do it. I will say, however, if you're not finishing anything you start, you may want to try an alternate writing method.

No, the reason the topic comes up today is because I had one of my favorite moments as a pantser. You're writing your chapter and you know where you're going and you just have to craft it to have some kind of competent literary end to the chapter. And then you get to the end of the chapter and your fingers keep typing and all of a sudden something you never considered before has appeared on the page. And not only is it good, it's awesome. The reader inside you screams, HOLY SHIT THAT'S AWESOME! Let's call that tickling the reader.

I suspect (but have no evidence and no inclination to prove my claim) that pantsing allows you to tickle the reader a little bit more because you're engaging in a higher degree of discovery along the way (I won't say you don't know where that's going because such a claim is insulting and usually only made by plotters that don't know better or bad writers who have no actual substance to their work). *deep breath* It's a matter of degree. I may not know the exact route I'm taking, but I know where I'm going and when I need to show up. Sometimes, though, you see that there's a road you thought closed that is actually open so you take it to see where it goes. And that's when your reader gets tickled.

That's a good moment. I like me the tickles.

Flashback

So there's a lot of chatter on Twitter lately about blog designs and website builds and etc etc. If you have not been to my website, this is the minimum level of quality I expect for a user-created website. Blogger and like services are expanding their styles to blend the boundaries between blogs and websites, but for the moment, I continue to contend they serve two different purposes. There are different graphical designs and interfaces that best accomplish those purposes, and as such, the two should be separate entities. I am in the minority on this one. Most new authors and aspiring authors seem to think blogs are enough. Established authors have blogs integrated into their own sites, so either way you get a single-platform delivery, though the latter is an achievement that most of us could not do and most services do not make easy for us (or if it's easy, it's not cheap).

I saw a really nice website today and my first thought was, "How pretty. Too bad it's crap."

What what? Why is it crap if it's pretty. Well, obviously, something could focus on its esthetic without accomplishing its purpose as a platform to introduce users to you and your work. In this case, its splash page was covered with Flash animation. Now, me being of a certain age, I was on computers when the internet first became available to the public at large, so things like Flash animation still dazzle. I didn't just build personal pages in Geocities. I used Angelfire too. These are the old build-your-own page and fill it with animated gifs and blinking fonts sites. Flash? Super awesome compared to the way things were.

Unfortunately, Flash has not evolved fast enough. While you may not be thinking about it now, you need to start thinking about mobile delivery. View your site on an Android and/or iOS phone and see the difference. For me, unfortunately, the template service I used to build my site does not offer fill scripting functionality, so I have to (*shudder*) use tables to format the page to look the way I want it. Tables no worky on mobile platforms, which is why I'm formulating a redesign in my brain. The thing is, Flash no worky either. Sure OSes like Android and WebOS claim to have Flash functionality, and to a degree this is true. But it's not full Flash. It's a mobile Flash and Air support and both are reportedly buggy.

When you do all those snazzy things on your site with Flash like have your name come swooping in front the side? Unless your site is specifically coded to adapt to users that don't have Flash functionality, your name is missing from the page. Or worse, you get a big ass question mark because your phone lacks the necessary plug-in to run the animation. You want your website looking in tip-top shape in any format a user may view it in.

So when next you contemplate a redesign to your site and perhaps think on splurging a little for some professional work, here are some things to think on:

  • No Flash
  • NO tables. None.
  • No frames except for iFrames. Old-style frames are like tables except scroll bars appear at the edge of them, meaning you may have a scroll bar in the middle of your page, which looks dumb.
  • iframes are okay. iframes aren't like old-style frames. They're a little pop-up window that pops up within the page. It looks like a Flash animation but is actually JavaScript
  • If the producer is capable, make the build HTML5 compliant. Capable or not, they should be working with JavaScript (js) and cascading style sheets (css)
  • No files necessary for your site to function (such as .js files) should be hosted on the produces server. Get that thing for yourself and host it with the rest of your site. You are fully autonomous. If they flake out and delete all their content they ever worked on, this should not affect you in the slightest.
  • No audio/video auto-play. Only emo teenagers auto-play music.

New Things

The template for the blog has changed yet again. I liked that last one, but there were too many small things that needed fixing. Date wasn't displaying properly. The manner in which comments were listed was dumb. User pics weren't showing up like they were supposed to. I'll be the first to admit that my JavaScript isn't the strongest, but things I know should have worked weren't working, and I want to have a blog that I can customize to suit my purposes.

So I found this new thing. As good as the last? No. But better than the standard brown world thing and more readable than my original that so many people (*cough* Rich *cough*) complained about.

So we'll see if this one sticks.

Something else I did today is try out Google Documents. Oh, I've used it before, but never for anything that was important. Namely, I've never used it for my writing. So I created a brand spanking new super-secret Google account (you can't hack what you don't know is there!) and ran through some trial documents. I am unsure of whether GDocs is a suitable replacement for a word processor.

Why would I even be considering it? Because of THIS! My Eee PC is aging and the new models don't use XP as their OS any more. A netbook using Windows 7 is counterintuitive. More so when it's Windows 7 Starter (which isn't much of a starter). The Chromebook is a web-paced portal device but it allows you to work offline. This wouldn't replace my Asus laptop at home but my Asus Eee PC that I write on. That thing doesn't have anything on it other than Open Office. So not being able to install applications isn't much of a concern for me. Acer is making an 11-inch WiFi only (well, they're making a 3G version as well but I have no need for that). And with a cell phone that acts as a mobile hotspot, this may be the next logical step in my computing evolution.

The problem with Google Docs is A) the terms for which you have to agree to use it (they're standard stuff, but I don't like terms for my work), B) it indents lines using an indent formatting rather than a tab mark, and most importantly C) there is no custom dictionaries. You can add words to the dictionary, but you can never remove them. And you cannot have multiple dictionaries, which is exactly what I do for my books. What is a valid word in one novel may not be a valid word in another. So I make a new dictionary with each manuscript. I can't do that with Google Docs and that's a really big deal.

Still, the Eee PC hasn't kicked it yet. We'll revisit this proposition once it is gone and I need a new laptop.