Reading, Writing, and Publishing Links: 1/23/13

 While you read: I'm not usually into country, but I've heard this song on the radio a couple of times and I really like it.

 
Kacey Musgraves, "Merry-go-Round."  

1. "How To Fight Book Pirates." Jason Boog of AppNewser gives some tips on how to find out if your book is being pirated, and what to do if it is.

2. "PW Select December 2012: Miami Advice: At the Miami Book Fair, a panel of self-publishing experts talks best practices." Writeup by Andrew Richard Albanese.

3. "2012 Writing Income." Fantasy author Jim C. Hines is kind enough to give the internet details about how much money he makes and where each bit comes from. Thanks to Rebekkah Niles for the link.

4. "Six Degrees of Retelling." Post by Marie Brennan of Book View Cafe on what makes a fairy tale retelling work.

5. "20 Books Every Woman Should Read in Her 20s," by Emily Temple of Flavorwire. These all look incredible. I've got a year--think I can get through them?

6. "The Publishing Quest: Hurry Up and Wait." Wendy Lawton of Books & Such Literary Agency discusses the delays involved in traditional publication.

7. "Ownshelf Helps Readers Share Their Digital Libraries With Friends."

 Ownshelf, a free web service that launched in beta Friday, provides readers with a cloud storage platform to share e-books with friends and family. Think of it as a simpler Dropbox intended specifically for e-books, but with a social element built in to foster discovery. Users sign into the service through Facebook and can quickly upload e-book files to create a digital bookshelf or borrow e-books from their contacts' bookshelves.

Via Mashable. So it's like Goodreads but... with sharing? Not quite sure what to think about that.

And that's it for this week! How are you doing?

Reading, Writing, and Publishing Links: 1/16/13

This week's random video: Did anyone know Christina Aguilera had done a duet with a country singer? Apparently the song's been out awhile, but I didn't hear it till Friday. I think it kind of works! I'm glad she still has a career--I always liked her.

 

Christina Aguilera/Blake Shelton: "Just a Fool"

1. "Don't Make Your Book Launch Like a Trip to the Dentist." Dan Blank of Writer Unboxed reminds authors to build their platforms well before the book is due to launch. 

"So how do we avoid this feeling, this panic of the drill in your mouth as you lead up to your book launch? At the most basic level, I would encourage you to answer these questions:

1. Describe to me, in detail what your ideal readers read in the last 12 months....
2. Where specifically can you go – online or off – to meet your readers?...
3. Who manages or organizes these places[?]"

2. "Got a cool idea for a story? Now break it." This is a fantastic post about plot creation by Hugh Howey, author of the Wool series, which I've heard incredible things about and need to read. Thanks to M. David Blake for the link.

3. "The wrong goodbye of Barnes and Noble." In the words of Cathy: "Ack!"

4. Autharium.  New ebook publishing platform; looks like they intend to compete with Smashwords. Some differences: According to the FAQ, it looks like they take about a 15% cut of what you earn from the various retailers (that's after the retailers take their cut). Also, it seems heavily skewed towards nonfiction--the fiction section doesn't even have genre divisions. Still, it's something to be aware of.

5. "9 Tips for Writing a Really Good 'Shitty First Draft.'" Lisa Cron of "Writer Unboxed" gives hints on how to produce a coherent story on the first try (rather than a Gordian knot that has to be cut to shreds and stitched together again before it makes any sense). My favorite tip is #7, the "third rail."

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Had a wonderful time at IllogiCon 2 this weekend, and saw a lot of good friends. What's everyone else been up to?

Reading, Writing, and Publishing Links: 1/2/13

Not too many links today. While you read, here's Iron & Wine's "Flightless Bird, American mouth." Yes, I know it's from the Twilight soundtrack. The Twilight movies have excellent soundtracks.

1. "Loved Your Book, Can't Publish It." Lynn Price at Behler Blog writes about the frustration of trying to sell an excellent book that's not currently marketable.

2. "Just Shut Up." An excellent post about loving problematic media.

I don’t know about you, but when I was a child, nobody sat down with me after I watched Beauty and the Beast and said, “Okay, this is a movie, and it’s okay to enjoy this movie! It’s okay to think this movie is great! But just so you know, if someone in real life did to you the things the Beast does to Belle, that wouldn’t be okay. That wouldn’t be right.”  When my mind was young and malleable, there was no trusted adult pointing out, “This is a movie, and it’s okay to like this movie, but the relationship it shows is unhealthy.” And that’s not because I didn’t have those trusted adults in my life! I was lucky enough to grow up with two intelligent, liberal, kind, forward-thinking, active parents; they didn’t tell me because they didn’t know to tell me. They didn’t tell me because nobody told them. (via not language but a map)

3.  "Research -- All The Layers." An ode to research at YA Highway.

4. "How Long Should You Keep Trying To Get Published?" Jane Friedman discusses when not to try for publication, when to start thinking about it, and when it might be good to step back and take another look at what you're doing.

5. "Ten Things I Wish I'd Known." Julianne Lee at Book View Cafe talks about things beginning writers should know about the publishing process.

6. "Prophecies." Patricia C. Wrede weighs in on prophecies, why they often don't work in modern fantasy novels, and why they absolutely can work if used correctly. 

And that's all for this week! Going off to work on the winter story, and then to edit more of WOODS. Hope everyone has had a wonderful holiday season, and that 2013 is your best year yet. : )

RTW #116: Stolen Ideas, and Why They're Okay

This is a post for YA Highway's Road Trip Wednesday. I am posting it late because I am a lazy ass and didn't get out of bed until *mumble* o'clock this afternoon. However, there's still time: if you're interested in the topic and want to have your own say, then write your own post and post the results here.

This Week's Topic:

What SNI [shiny new idea] were you psyched to work on, but discovered it was too close to something already done?

Let me start with a story: When I was in middle school, I fell in love with Patricia Wrede's Enchanted Forest Chronicles. If you don't know them-- and you should!-- they're a delightful quartet of YA novels set in and around the mythical Enchanted Forest. They're full of fractured fairy tales, but the characters are smart and sympathetic and have real, perilous adventures-- and, also, they teach you that you can melt a wizard in soapy water with a little bit of lemon juice.

Dangerous confidence

I went to a book signing tonight. Marissa Meyer was at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, promoting her novel Cinder.  I unfortunately missed the reading, due partly to my propensity for tardiness and partly to a wrong turn at Albuquerque, but it seemed to have been a very nice reading, and the bookstore was lovely. The author herself was sweet and charming and well-spoken, and her signature message is adorable: "May the glass slipper always fit." (The book is now on my shelf, trying to cut in front of the other books on my to-read list. I think it's about to get into a fistfight with my copy of Anna Dressed In Blood.)

---

Seeing people promote their books-- hearing authors talk about their careers-- inevitably makes me desperate to be one of them. I feel like telling people, I'm like you! I'm an author, too! You can't see it, but I'm almost done, and soon my book will be published and it will be on the shelf like yours! Even though it's not finished yet. But it's almost there, and it makes me crazy with anticipation sometimes. And ambition, as well. 

The thing about writing is that until you are published-- until you have an actual, physical, beautifully-bound book with your name on the cover-- authorial ambitions are generally seen as empty daydreams. "Yes, dear, you want to write a book, just like everybody else. Maybe you'd better do something else in the meantime-- you can always write in your spare time!" 

And I want to say, No! Not me. I can do this. Other people might give up, but I'm going to make a career as a writer. Someday I'll have a whole row of books on the shelf, each more beautiful than the last, and people will see them in the bookstores and point them out to their friends. And then their friends will pick up one or two of them and take them to the register, and maybe read them and fall in love with them and point them out to their friends, later. And all the while I'll be writing more.

And on that note:

Neurotically yours

Someday I'm going to be a big, famous, published author, and my agent is going to yell at me for never updating my blog. It's not my fault... really... I'm just not a blogger at heart, I guess. Now, microblogging, yes: I will blog me some microblogs. Facebook, always, of course, and more recently Twitter for all things writing-related. For big blog posts, though, either I take so long to finish them that they're no longer relevant when I'm done, or they veer too far into personal territory and I leave them unfinished and unpublished.

I love you guys. (Not least because right now "you guys" consist mostly of my dear friends, my mom, and my sister.) But I don't think I'll ever be the kind of person to put a lot of in-depth personal baggage into a blog post. Even admitting that I have in-depth personal baggage is getting a bit too personal for me. I do like books, though, and occasionally I'll do a short book review on Goodreads. Should I cross-post those here? Would that help?

I am working on a short story right now that's making me twitchy with excitement. I've come to the (much-belated) realization, lately, that editing is the primary part of an author's job. Producing words is good, but (for me) easy: I can hammer out a thousand words in about ten minutes if I desperately need to. Reworking them into something I can stand behind, though... that takes a LOT of time and attention. "Under Glass" I finished pretty quickly, but mostly because I dedicated the better part of two days to writing and rewriting it. From rough draft to the form I posted here took... let me see... oh, really? Just six days? It seems like it was longer than that. The story I'm working on now, though (it's tentatively called "The Fairy's Kiss") has been in the works pretty much straight-on since October 5, and it's still not done. It's not the length, either: currently it measures just over 3,000 words. It's just... I want it to be perfect.

And I guess every writer wants their work to be perfect. And I guess every parent wants their child to be perfect. (I have committed to using "their" as a gender-neutral singular possessive pronoun, y'all-- just as I have committed to the Oxford comma. I AM AN AMERICAN REBEL.) And sometimes, as I'm working on this story and I rearrange something and it just clicks into place, I think that it might closely approach the vision I had of it in my head.

And sometimes I look at it and think it's crap.

I think this is just the artistic life in general, after all. I'm sure actors and painters and composers have the same neuroses. I know singers do. And maybe it's a part of human nature, to simultaneously be proud of and disgusted by what is, in essence, a representative of YOU.

Or maybe it's just me.

But I am really excited for this story to be done, and I am really hoping that it lives up to my dreams of what it could be.

So I guess I got some goopy personal baggage in here after all. I hope you guys are proud of me!

XOXO, and happy Thanksgiving--

Kate

More on the slow evolution of my writing process, huzzah.

I'm working out a kind of assembly-line process for my stories. In case anyone is interested-- and for my own documentary purposes-- the current process is as follows:

1) Start with a twenty-minute free-write of whatever's next in the outline, dictating the story to myself as I type it.

2) (This is a new step.) Add in significant sensory details, from the least to the most obvious: taste, smell, touch, hearing, sight.

3) Read through the new material once, cutting excess as I see it.

4) Go back to the beginning again and read the whole thing aloud. This brings a lot of needed adjustments to mind.

5) Read through the whole thing one more time, then save it for later revisions and move on.

I tend, however, to do most of the editing in between looking at interesting links from Facebook, Twitter and Blogger-- look at a page, fix a paragraph, etc. This makes the process much slower, of course, but I've tried just not surfing until I finished my page count and it failed dramatically. Anyway, everything is research. *shifty eyes*


So that's what I'm doing. I'm at 7500 words on Dwellers now, and I expect the word-count will go up a lot more now that I've added descriptions to this draft. I know this all probably sounds weird and backwards to a seasoned writer, but I'm in an experimental stage right now. When I finally reach the end, I'll put the draft aside for later revision-- may or may not try to get through a first draft of the next (unrelated) project before revising this one.

Still trucking through Middlesex. I'm past the halfway mark now. Woot!

Writing process, cont'd.

It's a funny thing, writing seriously. As I told my friend Brittany a while back, I feel as if I've simultaneously leveled up and leveled down. I'm getting a much better sense of what works and what doesn't, what's unnecessary, what's cliche. I'm starting to know what's not going to untangle in the edits-- and I feel compelled to do something about it.

I never mentioned her that, at the beginning of January, I decided to start over on Dwellers Below. Scrap it. The 82,000 words on the side of the page are a memorial to what once was. The current total is closer to 6,000-- and that's after three weeks of steady work. Sure, the words are better, and I'm much closer to the story I originally wanted to tell. At the same time, though, it's pretty discouraging to go in a day from "halfway there" to "just getting started."

I've had to relax a bit on the short story I'm writing, though-- if I'd kept up the inch-by-inch perfectionism there I'd never have finished it. I've finally finished writing the first draft in a grand sweep, and just started the first pare-down. This story was inspired by a dream I had six or seven years ago, so I'm pretty excited to get it polished and move on to the next thing.

Frustrations aside, though, it's been a lot of fun figuring out my writing process. I sincerely hope that the fun will continue!

(P.S. I finished Green Rider about a week ago, loved it to death, and am dying to get on to the next book in the sequel. The problem: I've forbidden myself to buy any more ebooks until I'm at least done with the next book on my reading list.

Which is Middlesex.

At least these behemoths are easy to carry around on a Kindle!)

At least she's learning something.

More procrastinating. I've been working on this evening's words for at least two hours now. Of the 2000, I still have 800 or 900 to go. Could it be that I'm more productive when I'm surfing the web?

Of course, this is also the first time in a while when I haven't used Write or Die to get my words done. (I didn't want it to become a crutch.) That's probably skewing the results. I've also doneg some productive procrastination: three characters have new names (including the protagonist), and I now know more about gout than I did when I sat down. I tried researching embassies, too, but the one in this story is so fundamentally damaged that reading about real embassies doesn't help much.

Anyway, I'm glad I don't have to be anywhere super-early tomorrow.

Oh-- the reason for this post! Right.

Jim Butcher hasn't updated his blog in over two years, but his Story Arc post is really interesting. I kind of want to try this kind of planning now.

Um... that's all.

Outlining

I've come at the whole NaNo thing in a very new way this year.

Up until now, I've been a firm believer in the seat-of-your-pants method of novel-writing. Sure, outlines are great for some people, but... aren't they boring? I couldn't imagine knowing everything that was going to happen before I even wrote it-- seemed like it would kill my novel.

So I eschewed them. In the past, I've done most of my writing in this way:

1. Start typing.

2. Keep typing until the plot arrives at something that could be an ending.

3. Stop.

4. Let season, and edit when time permits.

5. Finished!

Great. Really. Except that, somehow, Part 1 was about as far as I usually got. Every notebook and computer I've ever owned is literally littered with failures-- fascinating scraps of novels gone wrong.

But then last year-- miracle of miracles-- I actually finished an 80+-thousand word first draft of a novel called Snowberry, during and immediately after National Novel Writing Month. I didn't really start with a plan. I took the first sentence that popped into my head when I sat down to write ("Winter begins on Halloween") and spun it into a first scene. That scene featured two main characters, and I kept typing about them until I hit what seemed to be the end of their first adventure. That done, I put the story aside and waited for it to "cool." A little while later, I went back to edit it.

Failed.

Tried again...

...and failed again.

At first I thought that the problem was with me. Maybe I wasn't putting enough effort into rehabilitating the story. I thought that if I just buckled down and did the work, I would come up with a product I could really respect. I just had to do it.

It took about three tries for me to realize that the story itself was deeply flawed. It had no driving purpose and no internal structure. The plot was weird and meandering: the heroine went places, met people, went other places, did things... Finally, she vaguely saved the world, but I couldn't have explained how to save my life. Trying to "edit" a story like this was like trying to untie a Gordian knot.

When October came around, I decided to put Snowberry on the shelf and try something else for a while. This time I was going to plan. I had a story idea: the expansion of an odd little short story from a year ago. I had a method. I'd always scorned outlines, thinking that they killed spontaneity, but this year I decided to give prewriting a try.


I'd been using a lot of Who/What/When/Where/Why questions in my class discussions, and I thought I could use them in my novel planning as well. I'd already begun to make "multisensory" description notes in earlier projects. I really liked that strategy, and decided to reincorporate it here. Combining those two strategies, I came up with the following prewriting method, which so far has been serving me just fine.

(description in large part cross-posted from the NaNo forums)

1. Condense what you know of the plot into three very general sentences. My final version read: "A young woman is sent as part of a new, experimental diplomatic mission to the Goblin Kingdom. She begins to be seduced by their decadent, selfish ways. When she has almost reached the point of no return, she is summoned back to help defeat the goblins." This plot description will probably change as you write more of your story.

2. Expand each sentence to answer the questions Who, What, When, Where, Why and How. Write down as many details as you know, and make note of anything that pops into your head as you write. Don't worry about consciously making things up-- everything should come to you naturally. These answers will probably expand into paragraphs, and maybe even into whole pages.

3. Make a list of all the characters you've mentioned so far. (A dozen or so popped into my head while I was "answering questions.") Descriptive titles are fine if you don't have names for them yet.

4. Make a numbered list of "events"-- things that you already know will happen in your story. Don't try to fill in the gaps between them-- everything will come to you eventually. Most of my notes ended up being paragraph-long scene descriptions, but a single sentence for each is also fine.

5. Return to your list of characters. Make a character profile for EVERYONE on the list. The way I do it is with "multisensory" descriptions-- tastes, smells, textures and sounds that you associate with your characters, and then finally appearance. This has been a GREAT way of eliciting details I wouldn't otherwise have thought of. As before, make note of everything that comes to mind while you're writing-- even if it doesn't seem related!

6. Make a full list of your planned scenes in their proper order. If you've written long descriptions, the first line or so should be fine.

7. Start writing. Before each new scene, stop and write up a description of the setting-- you can do them all before you start writing, but I got tired of waiting to start the story!

8. Continue until finished. Readjust characters and scene list as necessary. Celebrate victory.

I wrote all my notes in a series of colorful notebooks, but you can write yours anywhere, of course. Mine are full of long tangents and stream-of-consciousness musings, and everything's out of order and difficult to track (one of these days I'm going to get some Post-It tabs and mark all of the important places). I ended up starting NaNo a few days late because of all the prep I was doing, but I quickly made up the difference. (I'm a little behind now, for unrelated reasons, but have high hopes of catching up soon.) I've got a full set of characters, a more-or-less complete scene-by-scene outline, and more time to write than I've ever given myself before. Knock on wood, but signs are good.