Tag: writing

More Thoughts on Self-Publishing

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I’ve been seeing a few articles here and there lately, both old and new, about the business of self-publishing.  They’ll come from both sides of the conversation.  Some say the field has never been more robust and user-friendly, so it’s worth checking out; others will admit that it’s a viable avenue, but hint that you’re probably better off building up patience and going pro.  [I usually avoid the oh god don’t do it, you’ll shoot yourself in the foot and will NEVER BE A LEGITIMATE WRITER EVER articles.  In fact I usually avoid any article that hints that Everything Is Ruined Forever.]

I’ll admit, it’s not for the weak, and it’s not for the Day Tripper either.  You’ve got to dedicate time, space, and money to it.  You’re doing most of the work yourself, or at least farming it out to freelancers, and that doesn’t come free.  You’re essentially producing, funding and recording your own album, in musical terms.

But that’s not to say that the non-writing part of it is like pulling teeth, especially if you’re going it completely alone like I am.  It’s career knowledge, and it will definitely come in handy down the road, even if you end up going pro and signing with a publisher and/or an agent.

Formatting can be a tricky bastard, both for e-books and physical books.  Both have their own idiosyncrasies that need to be ironed out and tamed before they should be sent out into the wild.  Editing is just as tricky; there’s a reason writers joke about reading their own work using their Editor Brain rather than their Writer Brain.  The cover may not be tricky to put together, but you certainly need to have an artist’s eye (and again, not the Writer Brain looking at it).   In essence, you’re looking at the same object from multiple and often conflicting angles.

As I’ve said here before, I haven’t been doing all the work on the Bridgetown Trilogy on my own because I don’t trust outsiders toying with my work (or worse, that I think I can do it so much better than the pros).  I’ve been doing it because I want to.  I want to learn how to do it, and how to do it right.  Okay, I admit, there’s a streak of selfishness there, that I enjoy being self-taught rather than shown how to do it, because that’s how I understand it more fully and completely.  But the point remains:  it can be done, if you’re willing to dedicate the time and faith to it.

After all, that’s the whole trick to writing, isn’t it?

 

Year-End: Looking Back, Looking Ahead

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2015 was definitely a banner year for me.  One of my best writing years in a long time.

I trunked a majority of dead story ideas and created a number of new ones to work on in the future.  That was a big move for me; finally letting go of stories that no longer sang to me, and making the decision not to revive them.  That’s always a tough move for a writer, but it has to be done to clean house, so to speak, to make way for newer and more robust ideas.  By retiring many of these stories, I’ve given myself more room to focus on the new Mendaihu Universe story, as well as others not in that universe.

I was more consistent with my other creative endeavors that aren’t exactly for public consumption (yet):  writing daily journal entries, photography, poetry, artwork, and playing guitar.  Are these ever going to be shared elsewhere?  Who knows…I’m not aiming to be a semipro poet, artist, photographer or musician for the moment, as these are personal and not professional projects.  Things I do purely for selfish enjoyment.  I’m able to push myself and get better at them without having an expected plateau to hit.

I hit one of my highest goals of seeing the trilogy out in the wild by self-releasing A Division of Souls as an e-book (and soon to be available as a trade paperback).   I was also included in Uniquely North Quabbin, a collection of essays about the area of Massachusetts where I grew up.   The trilogy was an extremely long term project for me (spanning over a decade, technically over two), so releasing it has very much given me a sense of closure.  I can finally move on to new projects, both within the MU and elsewhere.

 

So what does 2016 hold for me?

On the professional end of things, I’ve already made the choice to have at least three books to be self-released next year:  the second and third book of the trilogy, The Persistence of Memories and The Balance of Light; and my memoir/music book Walk in Silence.  I’ve been working on all three since October, just after I released A Division of Souls, so I’m still on schedule to see these come to fruition.  TPoM should arrive early next year, WiS sometime late spring or early summer, and TBoL by autumn.

After that, my writing calendar will be disturbingly, frighteningly clear for the first time in ages.

Which means that I should look for another project to focus on.  If I’ve learned anything from the trilogy project, it’s that I now understand the level of dedication and focus I should give to my writing.  Whatever project comes next will be given that same amount of dedication and focus.

Do I have ideas?  Yes I do!  There’s the new Mendaihu Universe novel that’s currently on pause while I get its related novels out.  This one probably won’t see the public eye until 2017.  Then there’s the musical family idea (aka The Lidwells Story) that’s also on the backburner.  That one’s a compact standalone, and a very rough draft has already been written via my daily words earlier this year, so this one could very well be another quick turnaround.

But other than that?  It’s wide open.  I’m as curious as you are about what I’ll write next.

Speaking of daily words, I’m hoping to return to writing them via the 750 Words website in the new year, especially now that I’ll have more time for them.  This is where many of my recent ideas have arrived on the scene, so I think I’d be remiss in passing it up.  The key is to not be stressed out about it.  The point is not to ensure I write 750 or more words on a daily basis, but to exercise my imagination and have fun with it.

I haven’t updated my whiteboard schedule yet, but I usually end up doing that on January 1, so you’ll see that post tomorrow.  Oh!  And speaking of updates…I plan to have a much tighter and more frequent schedule here at Welcome to Bridgetown as well as Walk in Silence.  Maybe one or two posts a week for starters, but I’d like to expand on that later on.  I’d like to expand on the subjects I write about as well.  As much as I love talking about college radio or how I write, I’d like to investigate different avenues related to writing and music.  Different genres, different processes, that sort of thing.

Other than that, I’m going to revel in the fact that the road looks much clearer than it has in years.  I want 2016 to be the Year of New Things.  I’m really looking forward to where it takes me.

Busy, but productive!

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Hiya!

Thanks for your patience…I’ve been all kinds of busy doing too many things as of late, but thankfully a handful of said things have been writing related!  To wit:

The line edit of The Persistence of Memories is about halfway done.  This one’s taking a bit longer than expected, but I hope to get this one out sometime early in the new year.  It’s a bit longer than ADoS, but it’s actually shorter than it once was thanks to some heavy editing.

The cover for The Persistence of Memories is still in debate phase.  So many cover ideas, but none are gelling just yet!  The three books have a color theme:  ADoS was to indicate late evening, thus the city glow.  TPoM is to have a much darker cover, signifying past-midnight; The Balance of Light is to be brighter than the other two, signifying morning.  I’ll have a few outtakes for you in the new year once I have more of a solid idea!

The physical book for A Division of Souls should be ready by January.  This one’s been tough, as I had to wait for A. to finish reading and suggest any edits, plus there’s a lot of weird formatting bits that I had to work my way through.  Thankfully I’ve figured them out, so at this point it’s a matter of doing the edits and uploading to KDP.  As an aside, the new (non-format) edits will also make their way to the e-book as well for consistency.

Longhand work on Walk in Silence continues apace, a few pages at a time.  Okay, this one has morphed so many times since its inception quite some years ago, but I’ve finally got it anchored.  This version is most likely the latest and last version.  It’s not exactly the nonfic book about 80s college radio that I’d originally envisioned (that may be a future book), but that music is still the main backbone.  It’s now become a memoir of sorts.

The new (still as yet untitled) Mendaihu Universe story got a reread recently.  It’s got some really good ideas, but it’s still very spotty.  Once I’m caught up with all my other projects, this one gets shotgun.

 

So yeah…all this on top of the usual fourth quarter Day Job silliness and other personal events going on.  It’s slow going, but I’m getting there! 🙂

Post-Release: Remastered Edition

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One aspect of writing and publishing (self, professional or otherwise) that doesn’t always get talked about is the subject of editions.  To tell the truth, it’s kind of a boring subject, not to mention it’s one that the writer and publisher doesn’t always want to talk about, for various reasons.  With professional publishing, the idea of a second edition is sometimes seen as a distant hope; the publishing house only goes into multiple editions once it’s seen that the book is a big seller, and that the original run of however-many copies has been accounted for.  This happens with much less frequency than one expects; this is also why writers are often super-paranoid about possible errors before it has its first print.

With the self-published writer, especially for one like myself that’s just starting out, one might not want to tell one and all, “Hey, I have a new edition of my book/e-book available!”, for the reason that it could be read as “hey, I just uploaded the latest version of my book, which doesn’t have bad formatting and other embarrassing mistakes!”  It’s better just upload the new version and just keep it on the QT, and hope no one noticed.

 

But new editions of your self-published e-book don’t necessarily have to be a bad, embarrassing thing.  Well — for the first edition of the physical book you should at least make sure that the formatting is tight and there’s no weird errors, but that’s another post entirely.  [This is the main reasons A Division of Souls is still e-book only at this time.  I’m about to start in with the Big Galley Fix starting today, so hopefully within the next few weeks it will finally be available at Amazon.]  But future uploaded versions of your already-released book doesn’t always have to be a bad thing.

So many ellipses, so little time...
So many ellipses, so little time…

Upon finishing her reading of the ADoS galley, my wife stated that I have to go on a strict diet of NO ELLIPSES.  I will totally cop to using that punctuation WAY too much (that, em dashes, and italics), to the point that I’ve trained myself to cut them nearly 99% of the time in future editing projects.  The Persistence of Memories doesn’t have nearly as many as ADoS did, but I’ve managed to quash nearly all of them.  Most of them are hiding in dialogue, where I want the client to…well…you know…kind of avoid having to reveal something they need to reveal, but it can also slow down the flow considerably.  I’ve learned to use when and where necessary, and only then.

She also mentioned that, since it contains a large cast, some of which are mentioned early on but not mentioned again for some time.  I’d been on the fence on this one, to tell the truth.  Luckily, among all the notes and outtakes for the Mendaihu Universe is a solid dramatis personae that I can add before the main text.

The next edition of ADoS will contain a few formatting errors I missed (such as the Case of the Curiously Vanishing Pilcrow), some minor edits, a dramatis personae, as well as the deletion of a number of said ellipses.  The cover will remain the same for the e-book, but still want to toy around with the spine for the physical book, as I’m still not happy with it.

Will this lessen the worth of the book?  In terms of self-publishing: not entirely.  The mistake made here is the belief that once you have the book out there, for good or ill, it’s out in publish and any mistakes will be points off your credibility.  I made peace with that some time ago; I still find glaring formatting and editing errors in professionally published books, which just goes to prove we’re never dead-on perfect the first time out.  While it’s great to want your best work out there, focus on the story and the execution mostly, and do your best with the editing and formatting.  We readers will forgive you if your character’s name is spelled Rbfrit instead of Robert in exactly one place on page 276.  It happens.

Again with the music parallel:  you’re re-releasing your album because it’s been remastered, not because you hated your vocals on a few tracks and chose to completely rerecord them.  You’re reuploading the album because Jimmy hit a bum bass note on Track 8 and a quick ProTools edit made it go away.  In short, you’ve already uploaded some of your best work to date; you’re just making it even better this time out.  [And believe you me, there are some fans out there who will buy the ‘remastered’ version — and I’m talking books now, not music.  If they enjoy the story that much, they’ll have your back.]

So yes — don’t be afraid if you see a minor error in your self-published book.  Go right ahead and make those fixes and reupload the file to whatever platform you’re using.  It’s totally up to you if you want to make it publicly known that it’s a new edition, but don’t fear it.  Use it to your advantage.

Onward and Upward!

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*barely contains squee*
*barely contains squee*

I’ll be honest, just the mere fact that I’ve already got over two hundred downloads at NoiseTrade Books makes me an incredibly happy writer.  Thanks to each and every one of you!  I went into this gig knowing I had a good book that I think people would enjoy, but had little to no idea how well it would go over.  Seeing that many downloads over the course of one week confirms that whatever I did with the book, it looks like I did it right!

So, where to go from here?  Well, the subject line has been a bit of a mantra over the last few weeks for me.  The behind-the-scenes work for a writer (and especially for a self-published one) has been that there’s no downtime at all.  We’re constantly moving forward.  We’re juggling the writing with the promotion with the Day Job with the other mundane yet important things in life.  And let me tell you, the schedule has been rather busy as of late!

Fear not, dear readers, I am working hard on editing the book’s sequel, The Persistence of Memories, and hope to have it released via the same channels by the beginning of next year.  I hope you’ll enjoy the second book; it’s my favorite of the three, and there’s a lot of interesting and surprising stuff that goes on within.  Heck, I may even give you some spoilers once I’m further along!

What else do I have on tap?  Well, I do have my music book/personal memoir Walk in Silence, and I’m aiming for a late April 2016 release date for that one.  There’s quite a bit of work to be done on that one, so it’s going to need some serious TLC this winter.  [For those of you unfamiliar, WiS is about my love for college radio and how alternative music shaped me over the last thirty years.  I talk more about it on my other blog of the same name.]  I’m also working on the next Mendaihu Universe story in my spare time.  That’s been put on a brief hiatus while I work on self-releasing the Bridgetown trilogy, but it hasn’t left my mind!  I will definitely return to it once I’m caught up with the production end of things.

So yes…onward and upward!  I’m busy, but in an awesomely good way. 🙂

Editing the Beast

Jon Chaisson2 Comments
It never ends... *sigh*
It never ends… *sigh*

I feel like I’ve been editing the trilogy for half my life, to tell you the truth.  Sure, I’ve revised and rewritten it multiple times over the last decade, but there are days when I wonder if I’ve hit or gone past the point of Needing to Let It Go.

Well, to be honest, that’s one of the reasons I sent A Division of Souls out into the world already.  I knew that I went as far as I could with that as a whole; it did not need any more revision or rewriting.  The first edition might still be full of piddly errors, of course — a formatting error or a typo — but that can be easily (and quickly!) rectified by fixing them and uploading the newer version.  This is why I’m doing a galley edit before I set the physical book out into the world…that one needs a bit more fiddly TLC than an ebook, and I don’t want to kludge it.

Am I flirting with danger, doing everything DIY and not hiring an editor?  Well, maybe I am.  I’m sure I could use more than a few extra eyes to find egregious errors and lapses in judgment.  I won’t say I’m a special snowflake who thinks he’s above editors and beta readers.  I’m sure I could use them more often.  Perhaps on future works I shall do so.

At the same time, though, I’ve committed myself to seeing just how far I can go without the extra help.  It’s not me being a cheapass to save money, or making myself out to be some kind of indiepub wunderkind…or being subconsciously afraid that I actually might suck as a writer, and that someone will tell me so to my face.  It’s me wanting to learn the entire process, from start to finish, both as a writer and as ‘producer’, as it were.  I want to understand how to write a successful story, but I also want to know how to edit my own work.  I want to know how to make an eye-catching cover.  I want to know how to format the novel to different platforms.  I want to know how to release it into the world.  I want to know how to promote myself and my work.  And I’m willing to dedicate time and brainspace for all that.

It’s been a very instructive and busy couple of months so far.  At last count, I’ve had nine downloads since it went live a month ago.  That’s pretty small, but it’s actually more than I expected at this point in time.  [No, really.  I was honestly expecting crickets.]  This is a huge learning curve for me, but I’ve been able to ride it and learn from it.

Onward and upward!

Is This the Future?

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This morning I was listening to a compilation I’d made back in January of 1994 called Nocturne.  At that time I’d originally planned on completely rewriting the Infamous War Novel, re-envisioning it as a far-future SF novel, less as a Cold War-inspired story and more as a Future War one.  For inspiration I latched onto a lot of familiar genre tropes at that time –revisiting Blade Runner, reading space operas, picking up a lot of interesting anime, and so on — while at the same time briefly returning to my music collection as well, just as I had with the original.  This little gem from Sigue Sigue Sputnik, found on the back end of their sophomore album Dress for Excess, seemed to fit the post-apocalyptic mood of my story perfectly.

Granted, this too was an unfinished draft, for various reasons.  One was that I’d had trouble fleshing out the idea.  I knew I could do something with it, but I couldn’t quite figure out what.  [The other was that I was not in the best of places emotionally at the time.  Being broke and alone just out of college and working at jobs that had nothing to do with my college studies was probably a worse time for me than high school was, come to think of it.  Writing came to me, but in frustrating fits and starts.  There are a lot of trunked ideas from that era.]  Nonetheless, it sowed the seeds of another story, True Faith, which I started later that summer, and a much more successful writing career was finally born.

The compilation is just shy of 45 minutes long, taking up one side of a cassette — the other side was my 1989 compilation for Belief in Fate, another writing project dating back to high school.  I’m fascinated by the mix, as it’s definitely heavy on the atmospherics.  Starting off with Curve (“Faît Accompli”) and Inspiral Carpets (“Two Worlds Collide”) and ending with the above track, it’s a dark and somber affair.  I think what I was aiming for was a feeling of frustration and uselessness within a larger, less tolerating society, which my characters would fight to transcend through the course of the story.  That theme continued into True Faith to a degree.  In retrospect, it’s probably for the best that I trunked that story as well, because I was emotionally and mentally too close to it at the time.  I would start fresh in 1997 with The Phoenix Effect, and the rest is history.

It’s kind of interesting, comparing the original ideas of the early 90s with the present version of the Mendaihu Universe.  There are a few bits and pieces that have survived throughout the entire process — the Vigil group, for one — but the pessimism of the original is nowhere to be seen.  I see now (and I knew even then) that I was not only teaching myself how to write a novel correctly, but I was also using it as a cathartic release.  I’ve given myself a bunch of different avenues for those sorts of things, leaving the personal out of it for the most part.

Did I know that twenty years later I’d be happily married and living in a much larger city on the opposite coast, self-releasing the first of three novels that came out of all that?  Hell, back in 1994 I had no idea if I was going to make next month’s rent, let alone what my future would be.  Sure, I had dreams and ideas and a hazy optimism that I’d get there one day.  I knew it would be tough, but I was willing to work for it, however long it took. That was where I first fostered that stubborn commitment to keep going, despite it all.

And that’s why I’m content with this future me, why my reaction to seeing my book listed on e-book shopping sites has been one of a deep relief and happiness.  That stubborn will took me to this point, and that made all the difference.

Feeling Twitchy

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The problem with going through a major editing/revision/release process is that it eats up quite a lot of time I set aside for my writing.  It leaves precious little time for any new work unless I sneak some time in during the day.  [Which I’m doing right now…this post is being written in the slow moments of my Day Job.]

This makes me twitchy.  I want to write something new, but deadlines loom.  I don’t mind the editing/revising part of the job, but the longer it takes, the more I have that itch to pick up a notebook and start working on a new project.  Not out of avoiding the revision process, but that I start feeling rusty.  I feel the need to write new words somewhere, anywhere.  My personal journal entries (which I write during my midmorning break) are getting more verbose, and I’ve been blogging like a fiend lately.  My brain is clogged with Future Plans for When I’m Caught Up.  I’ve got ideas for the Inktober art meme.  I have a few stories simmering and a new MU story in stasis.

I believe it’s time for me to get creative with my writing time again.

So many words, so little time!

Writing Religion in Genre

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Religion can be a very tricky thing to write about in Fantasy and Science Fiction.  It has to be done reasonably well and for good reason.  It also has to have at most a strong backbone for which to base part (or all) of the plot or a character’s makeup.  The writer should not want to overtly use the religion’s place in the story as a soapbox, either, because readers will pick up on that right away.  Nor do you want to pick and choose the ideas of well-known established religions and use them without understanding at least some of its already-established rules and tenets.

In creating the ‘spirituality’ of the Mendaihu Universe — I call it such because it’s not so much an established religion as it is a spiritual state of being — I had to create a belief system that had to follow specific rules.  The First Rule, as it were, was balance.  I had to work within the confines of a yin-yang system, where the Mendaihu and the Shenaihu were not so much mortal enemies as they were parts of a whole.  When one takes action, the other one must respond in kind.  This alone propels the action in A Division of Souls and drives the plot of all three books in the trilogy; when Nehalé Usarai performs the Awakening ritual in the first chapter, the Shenaihu must respond, and do so fivefold.  This will set off even more responding actions from the Mendaihu again, and so on.

This is often where the savior comes in; the character whose life is lived outside of this cycle, who must put a stop to it before both sides utterly destroy each other.  In the trilogy, this is the One of All Sacred.  He or she is not exactly an established deity (in the Mendaihu Universe, that is the Goddess of All That Is), but an outside player of a religious stature who is tasked with returning everything back into a peaceful balance.   The savior often has a somewhat clearer mind than many of the other characters; they’re not wound up in some kind of emotional tailspin or blinded by distraction.  [This can often be their own distraction — their distance from the situation sometimes causes them not to fully understand it.]  The savior’s own story arc is thus not only to Make Things Right Again, but to spiritually ascend in their own way.

What kind of religions have you seen in genre fiction that fascinate you?  If you’ve created your own, how have you worked out the rules?

 

All Kinds of Time

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[One of the best songs about football, hands down.]

The problem with Football Season is that it gives me one more reason to be distracted from my writerly duties. Not that I need more distractions…I already have the music, the social media, the Day Job, and everything else! Still, it’s a pleasurable distraction; as with music, I have it on in the background while I’m working on something else, glancing up at the screen every now and again when someone scores or executes a brilliant play.

Time can be tricky, especially when you’re attempting to balance the finite amount we’re allotted with the infinite number of things you want to use it for.  I dedicate eight hours a day to my Day Job (I try to avoid overtime, and for the most part it’s never needed anyway), but during my breaks, I will sneak a few writing things in.  During my 9:30am break, I’ll sit on the loveseat across the room and write an entry in my daily personal journal.  During lunch I’ll read my writing magazines.  During the afternoon break I’ll catch up on emails and whatnot.  And on the rare occasion that I have a slow day, I may even work on a blog post.  After we both log off, we head to the YMCA and work out on the treadmills for a bit, and have dinner soon after.  This gives me a few hours at the end of each day, purely dedicated to my writing.

As said, the tricky part is what I should be working on, and when.

The thing about being a writer is that you most likely have about three or four different projects going on at the same time, each at various levels of completion.  My current status involves the following:  A Division of Souls is out in the world (yes, even at Amazon now — the physical copies are coming soon!), I’m currently working on the final edit of The Persistence of Memories, I’m writing the new Mendaihu Universe novel longhand, I’m carving out weekend time to pick Walk in Silence up again, and I have a few other fiction and non-fiction projects simmering on low heat in the back of my brain.  And that doesn’t include my daily personal journal, weekly blog posting, popping up on social media now and again, and other non-writing things such as guitar noodling and songwriting.  And there are things that keep getting put on hold, such as doing the daily 750 Words, my artwork and the Drunken Owl music recording project.  So much to do, so little time.

See, this is why I have the whiteboard schedule.  I haven’t been following it as of late due to the massive editing sessions for the Bridgetown Trilogy, and I think that’s a fair enough reason for putting everything on hold as of late.  I don’t mind, because releasing the trilogy myself demands a lot of time and dedication, and I’m not about to do any of it half-assed.  But now that the Big Release date has come and gone and that I’m letting it slow-simmer a bit while I figure out different ways to have fun with its promotion, I find myself with a bit more time on my hands.  Which means my week or so of relaxation and mucking about online must come to a close.  It’s time to refocus and dedicate the time that I have to what I want to get done.

Still, that’s not to say I’m not about to miss out on watching some football this season!  I may be busy, but I’m not about to let that get in the way of having fun as well!