Writing – Page 9 – Teel McClanahan

One thing at a time? Nah…

I’ve heard rumor that other people, especially people who want to maximize … blah blah blah… attention, focus on one project at a time. I know of several authors who spent several years focused on marketing a single book, before moving on to their next project. For some of them, this was a successful way to build an audience. It’s not for me. I’ve put out 3 new books in the last ~4 months, in audio and eBook formats, have combined them for a print trilogy, have created a second edition of the trilogy that preceded those books, and before I even get those new paper books in my hand, I’ve already begun work on yet another new book/project. Here’s a video about it:

I’ve put the Kickstarter widget, which gives a brief image/blurb and tracks the progress of the funding, in the right-hand column of this blog and on the front page of modernevil.com, hoping that’ll increase its visibility. I’m going to be putting a brief audio promo for the project in all my podcast/books. I’m blogging about it. I’m Twittering and facebooking about it. I may become annoying about it in the coming weeks, depending on how funding goes.

To prevent being annoyed, please, pledge today. Tell your friends to pledge. Post the widget around. Surely, you know people who are interested in writing & publishing. Or people who like rainbows, beards, and/or suspenders. Show them my video.

Oh, and there’s still over a week to enter the contests to win copies of my the Untrue Trilogies, on this blog or via Goodreads. Because I can’t seem to do only one thing at a time.

New books, coming soon!

I used the covers as shown, so I’m not going to re-post them here. I worked hard, I found a lot of errors, I made a lot of small changes and tweaks and improvements, and I got 6 books ready for print publication last month. (The official release date isn’t until 4/1/2011.) I didn’t quite reach all my over-the-top goals; I didn’t finish recording & editing the Book Six audiobook in time to listen to it while doing a very-close-read through the text to find even more errors. Though I did use that technique with books one through five, and I did record 40% of Book Six. Plus, I got the books done in time to make the LSI deal for free setup and justified (in my mind) the cost of ordering 50 copies of each of the two trilogies. Continue reading New books, coming soon!

Struggling; beginning writing again

I finally got back to writing Book Six after not making significant progress since … I don’t know… last year? I didn’t finish it in November, as you probably know. I meant to then finish it in December, but that didn’t work out well, either. I got ten or fifteen thousand words written in December, which was an alright start, but then I got stuck. I also ran out of cash for any further writing at Starbucks. As previously mentioned, my writing speed seems to slow way down when writing at home & without caffeine/sugar. And/or varies wildly with my depression. Which is pretty bad right now. …well, this paragraph got out from under me. I’ll try another:

Lightning Source, the printer/distributor of my paper books, is running a promotion I’d like to take advantage of, which ends February 28th. They’ll waive the $75/title setup fee if I order 50 or more copies of that new title. That’s a help toward reaching profitability on any title I can use it on, presuming I can sell more than a handful of copies. At the very least, I need to get the Untrue Tales… Books 4-6 combined trilogy paperback together and released on or before April 1st, in order to hit the release schedule I’ve got mapped out for these three books. If I can get it done before the end of February, that would be nice. If I could also re-do the Untrue Tales… Books 1-3 combined trilogy paperback in February, I’d like to. Both because I feel my ability to layout a book has improved since I put that one together four years ago, and because I’d like to have the opportunity to create a cohesive design that spans both paperbacks (and if it’s quite different, perhaps redesign all the eBook covers while I’m at it). Of course, that would mean ordering 50 copies each of two 400+ page books. Even without the $150 in setup fees, that’ll cost me close to $700. I’ll have to sell 28 books at $25 apiece to break even. Which feels like more than I expect to sell any time soon. I’m not doing the Art Walks any more; the only hand-selling I expect to do this year is at Phoenix Comicon, and last year, which I considered very successful, I only sold 27 books at Comicon, most of them at $14 or less apiece. On one hand: books don’t go bad, so I have forever to move that inventory. On another hand: if I order any fewer copies of each book, I pay the $75/title setup fee. 20 copies of each title would cost me almost $500, for both, or $250 for just the new one. 10 copies of just the one, which I’m pretty sure I could move this year, would cost me almost $200. The trick there being that, if I order 50 before the end of next month, the next 40 copies cost less than just the first 10.

That paragraph got away from me, too.

Getting done with editing the Book Five audiobook, with writing and editing Book Six, designing the book or books, inside and out, possibly doing a series of pieces of art (maybe eBook covers, maybe B/W illustrations, one per book, to put in the new editions) to sell to cover the cost of publishing, re-editing all six books for the new editions… it all seems to be looming, especially with the end of February coming up fast. It’s driving me a bit mad. Yesterday, when I sat down to try to get back to writing, it involved quite a bit of crazy and not a lot of actual writing. But the pressure of the deadline did manage to get my butt in the chair, in front of the typewriter.

Have I mentioned that I somewhat loathe the Untrue Tales… series, the last few years? When I’m actually sitting down working on it, I enjoy the work, but almost as soon as I stand up or switch tasks I’m right back to loathing it. Working on the audio version isn’t so bad, but for the last several thousand words of writing Book Six I’ve also been running up against a feeling/worry of not having enough words. I’m writing in the middle of a big blank spot in the structure/outline of the series. It’s roughly 10k words long, and until this week, I had roughly two sentences worth of idea how to fill it. I managed to write seven and a half pages of pretty good stuff over the last couple of days, but what I wrote was supposed to fill 14 pages. So now I’m in a position of when I’m not actively working on it, I don’t want to be, and when I am I’m half-frozen because I’m worried there won’t be enough words. (Self-fulfilling, that.)

And really, I know that if I can just get me to sit down and write, and keep writing, the words will come. They always do. In fact, another motivator for my getting back in front of the typewriter this week has been that my mind has already moved on to the next books; I’m developing ideas, characters, structure, themes, setting, et cetera for a dystopian/vampire duology. Almost every time I’ve tried to figure out how to fill in this blank in Book Six, my mind has rapidly moved on to work on the vampire books. And if I let my mind wander much further, it gets back to the alternate history / zombies series I still need to do a huge amount of research for. The words are there. When I actually set myself down before the blank page, the words came. Two and a half pages yesterday, twice as much today, and a few ideas about the next seven pages, along with them. All beautifully structured according to the same Euclidean geometry Abraham Lincoln used to win the Lincoln/Douglas debates and the White House (though, since I’ve just learned the structure/geometry, not anywhere near as beautiful as Lincoln’s later work), which I just read a good book about; I couldn’t have written those pages that way (or half as well) more than a few days ago – it’s a good thing, I now see, that I didn’t finish Book Six last year. Everything in its right place, at its right time.

…one struggle I have with these books, with this series, is the problem of spoilers. Most of you have not read these books. Even of those of you who have read or listened to one of them, or even the first three, almost none have read or heard Books Four and Five. So I can’t freely write about Book Six. At all. Every single thing in it is a spoiler if you haven’t read Book Five. Most of Book Five is a spoiler if you haven’t read Book Four to the end. I want to be able to tell you what it is I’ve been having trouble writing about, for example, but not only is this a spoiler if you haven’t read the first half of Book Six, but even being vague about it would spoil the end of Book Five. I want to be able to tell you about my super-vague/I-have-no-idea-how-I’ll-get-5k-words-out-of-it idea for the section after this, but I’m pretty sure that, in addition to potentially being a spoiler, it flat-out wouldn’t make any sense without your having read the end of Book Five and the beginning of Book Six. My own family, who have read them all, doesn’t like me discussing this stuff with them, because they don’t want anything spoiled. When the whole thing is done, and especially as I try to consider how to write copy for Book Six (for its eBook) and worse for the second trilogy, and worse still for the full series, I have no idea how to talk about Untrue Tales… without being totally misleading and/or totally spoiling half the series. You may be aware I have trouble concisely describing “what’s it about” re: even single books I’ve written. One of the things I’m struggling with re: the vampire duology right now is that I’d like to be able to actually have an answer to that question in mind both before and during the writing of them. I generally have no such idea in or near my mind with regard to any of my books or stories. For Untrue Tales… this is true on a title-by-title basis, but it is further compounded by the fact that in any way trying to explain what the series is about requires that nearly every single twist, turn, reveal, or character development be laid bare… which isn’t a great way to try to convince someone the series is worth reading. This also relates to the dwindling number of Beta Readers I can share Book Six with when, hopefully within the next week, I finish writing it; most people haven’t read the entire series. Sigh.

Alright, I think I’m finally getting drowsy. I’m to bed. Don’t know whether I’ll be able to sleep; I’m also getting a bit hungry, and I don’t easily fall asleep hungry. My schedule has been as off as I have, lately, regarding both food and sleep. This is depression. One way or another, I’ll make it through.

eBooks 2011, addendum 1

I didn’t mention HTML.

Prior to this week, one of the versions/formats my eBooks were available in on modernevil.com (for the books which were available there) was HTML. It was basically just the .rtf dumped into a single huge web page. I didn’t do anything to it to make it more web-readable or web-friendly or whatever you want to call it. I’m not doing weblit. I author the book/story/whatever first, edit it / et cetera, and then I share it with the public. Fully formed. Eight of my eleven novels (including all 6 Untrue Tales… books) don’t even have chapters, and in those few with chapters, they aren’t as short as people expect web pages to be. The only chapter in Dragons’ Truth (a YA book) short enough to be a single web page has always felt like an anomaly. Even the chapters of Forget What You Can’t Remember are almost all ~2500 words (though some of them even further sub-divided), which is about 5 times too long for a single web page (for most people – obviously not me on this blog!). How to make my books easily readable online is a bit of a conundrum, as far as I’m concerned. So I never really tried to do it right, myself.

This addendum to my main post about my eBooks in 2011 is to say that this year I’m thinking about (practically planning, now) going to the effort of putting together proper HTML versions of all my books. I’m only in the planning stages right now (though could be moving forward with this as soon as this week, depending on how sleep and other projects go; I’m also planning on beginning recording of the Untrue Tales… Book Five audiobook this week, but that work requires very specific circumstances) but at this point I’m thinking I need to do a separate WordPress installation for each book, and divide the book up into bite-size/page-size chunks (250 words? 500? same as the paperbacks?) which will each be their own WP post, and possibly use Commentpress or digress.it to enable per-paragraph commenting throughout all my books.

I’m also thinking about deep linking the books one to another, and possibly to outside resources. If I go with the Commentpress/digress.it installs, I can add a link in the comments on a paragraph, rather than in the text itself, which feels better to me – especially in the Lost and Not Found universe of books, I feel that the books are really more of a conversation with one another than directly linked, and parallel rather than serial. With the books so granular, connecting subtle repetitions of a phrase or idea, or even connecting obvious things like the short stories in More Lost Memories with the specific scenes and characters they’re spawned from, would be relatively straightforward.

In fact, building a comprehensive, nearly-chronological version of all the stories in the Lost and Not Found universe (something I’ve been toying with putting together for a limited-edition hardback release, or an expensive eBook, for fans) would be relatively easy as well, once I’ve got everything chunked like that.

I look forward to playing with my options, getting a feel for what works, and seeing where the possibilities take me. Not to another whole-book-dump-single-HTML-file for each book, though. That was silly/terrible. I’m not sure whether the 13% of downloads of the .html versions of the eBooks were ever actually read, or just seen as awful and abandoned for something readable. Hopefully this year I’ll develop a working alternative. Ooh: and once I have that settled, I’d like to use something like the setup I’ve described here to pseudo-live-write my books. Would you be interested in reading them (and commenting on them, pointing out errors, questioning the story/characters/pronouns, as I write them, et cetera) in a setup like that? Heck, would you be interested in reading my existing books in a setup like that?

NaNoWriMo 2010

I “cheated” for NaNoWriMo this year. You’re “supposed” to start a new project from scratch and finish it during the month…

Though the focus has certainly shifted significantly in the direction of paying more attention to reaching 50,000 words than to finishing a novel. For a lot of pro- and aspiring- authors, there is much derision of the ideas that 1) 50k words constitutes a novel or 2) 50k words is a lot to write in a month. Still, none of the writers I know who have made such comments have come close to keeping pace with NaNoWriMo this year, and quite a few people I know who have no intention of ever seeking publication (or worse: becoming a professional writer) have kept up or outdone themselves, and while carefully following the rules. Others are struggling, even while including all the words they write for school, their blogs, short stories, grocery lists, anything they write all month.

Of course, a struggle I see every year (my sister & wife, included) is in reaching the 50k word goal but not getting near the end of the story. My sister thought she was about 1/4 of the way through her story at ~30,000 words. She’s revised her plot since then, to reign it in to a reachable target. My wife is about to hit 50k tonight (the 27th), but is planning on continuing to write for the next week or more until she gets to the end of the story. And because the focus of the people in charge at the OLL, and thus of the participants, is on the 50k instead of the finished book… They’re both going to be winners. As a 9-year veteran of NaNoWriMo I have no disagreement with this assessment; anyone who sets themselves an ambitious goal like this and succeeds is certainly a winner. 50k words in a month, a book in a month, a screenplay (Script Frenzy is in April, I think), a long reading list… Set yourself a challenge that you never thought you could beat, then beat it, and you’ll certainly feel like a winner.

Within three or four years of discovering NaNoWriMo, I’d already ruined myself of the idea of writing a book / 50k words in a month being a challenge. Certainly not one I don’t think I can beat: the first year I tried, after setting aside 2 partial manuscripts, I wrote a 50k-word novel in under 8 days. The next year I wrote Dragons’ Truth on a manual typewriter in (I think) 26 days. For my third try, I wrote Untrue Tales… Book One in 14 days. (I intended to write Book Two in the 2nd half of the month, but when my writing stalled, I instead edited Book One, designed its cover, wrote its copy, did its layout, and got it printed & available for sale by Nov. 30th. Because I was already teaching myself to be a publisher by 2004.) Book Two came out of me a couple months later, within about 2 weeks. In September, 2005, I wrote the first 48k words of Book Three in a “single sitting” 60 hours long. So writing a book in a month is… Not a challenge, as far as getting the words down, for me. It makes it so NaNoWriMo isn’t much more of a good/winner feeling over simply finishing a new book, which is something I do 2-4 times a year, most years.

This year, I’d intended/hoped to get the entire Untrue Tales series finished (at least first drafts) by the end of November/NaNoWriMo. I started Book Four in July, didn’t write much in August or the first half of September, then buckled down and finished it by … October 14th, I think. Started Book Five a few days later, hoping to get it done before November, but only wrote 20k words by the end of the month. So the first 30k I wrote was the end of Book Five. Which is “cheating” unless I also wrote the whole of Book Six by the end of the month (which had been my plan), right? Sorta. But not really. Last Thursday night, around 10PM, I began working on Book Six. On a manual typewriter (my ‘new’ Royal Futura, which I wrote the bulk of Book Five on), so these word counts are estimates: I wrote the first 14k words in the next 18 hours, took a 6 hour break for my nephews’ birthday party, then wrote another 6k words by ~7AM Saturday morning. Which put me at 50k total new words in November. Yay!

Then … I’m thinking something in my brain chemistry must have shifted, dopamine levels dropping or something, because my writing speed and quality dropped precipitously. In the next 3.5 hours I wrote one page, in which one of my characters was suddenly and unexpectedly suicidally depressed. Probably a reflection of what was going on in my own head at the time. I knew I probably ought to give up writing, but I was already committed to going to an all-night write-in Saturday night, so I just kept trying to write, all day Saturday, not calling it quits until around 4:30AM Sunday morning. I managed to write about 4k words in around 20 hours trying. Which is slow. And I think a lot of them are repetition of things I’d already written. Or out of character. Or wrong in other ways. So probably that 4k words will be deleted. But… I still wrote 50k words in November, right?

This week I thought I’d try re-reading Book Five and what I’ve written of Book Six before trying to write any more. To try to get a handle on what was repetition, where the story was going, et cetera, and get the rest of Book Six well in hand. Alas, whatever was going wrong with my brain, which began Saturday morning, continued at least until Thursday morning. I couldn’t read my book for very long, I couldn’t stay awake, I felt terrible, I couldn’t concentrate. All reasonably normal symptoms of depression. Not being able to work is a key problem of real mental illness. I managed to get through a day and a half of baking and cooking, getting Thanksgiving ready, and everything turned out good enough. (I still need to work on my pie crusts…) But I’ve decided that, as long as I actually have several months to get all this completed and still be on schedule (a schedule I invented), there’s not really any reason to be stressed out or trying very hard to struggle through to the end of Book Six by the end of the month. I’ll probably get it done in December. After my mind has a chance to recuperate/repair/recover from whatever this is.

Thursday they turned on the NaNoWriMo word count validator. I took Book Five and a few extra words to get what I uploaded to equal my actual (estimated) word count and threw it in. So I’m officially a “winner” again this year, at 54,150 words. I didn’t start a book from scratch & finish it during the month, but I worked on a book I was 40% of the way through, finishing it, and I got another one started and worked on it until it was 40%-48% done, which is mathematically very similar to writing one book from start to finish, right? Once again, I don’t like this year’s shirts. Mandy, who did win while I was writing this post, says she would like the winner T-Shirt if it didn’t have the arrow pointing up at her face. I definitely agree that the arrow makes the shirt less wearable. The only shirt design they have in stock right now that I really like is … only for women? Sigh. Mandy wants me to order it for her, instead. I’ll check finances, but I think the bill for eating at Denny’s tonight (at the write-in, where she passed 50k) ate the money we would/might have spent on that shirt.

Anyway, that’s that. My ninth year, fifth definite win (finished my 14th book & started my 15th). Mandy’s second attempt, second win. My sister’s first real attempt, and it looks like she’s going to win, too. I think I’ve decided not to try to take over the ML duties for Phoenix for next year, but my sister thinks she will, so that’ll be better than either: 1) the main ML they’ve had the last few years, or 2) no one, since both MLs are talking about quitting. We mostly participated in the East Valley region, this year, even though it meant several long drives back and forth from North Phoenix to Tempe and Mesa. The events were awesome, though, even when my writing was going badly last weekend, so it was a good decision. I’ll keep my eye on the situation, next year. It’ll be my tenth year doing NaNoWriMo. The books I’ve been working on this year will certainly be published by then; I don’t know which of the many ideas I have waiting to be worked on will be at the front of my mind when November rolls around again, but I know I’ll work on something. I think the challenge, for me, isn’t in hitting 50k words but in having my mind in the right state with an idea properly matured & ready to go when November hits. Last year I wrote Cheating, Death 6 weeks early, and wasn’t ready with anything else in time for NaNoWriMo. Always a crapshoot, but I don’t think I’ve ever been able to just do 1667 words/day, all month long: Like every other attempt I make at writing, it comes in fits and starts, bursts of writing 5k, 10k, 20k in a day, sometimes several such days in a row, and then days or weeks or months with nothing. …and 1k- to 2k- word blog posts every week or two, too, eh?