Category: Writers

Greetings, programs!

It’s been a while since I updated my progress and/or linked some other stuff around the Writersphere, so…I’m now going to update my progress and link some stuff around the Writersphere. Wow-za!

:: I think I have a title for Lighthouse Boy. I’m not sure yet; I like to live with titles a bit before I decide if they’re right for the books. Kind of like breaking in new shoes, I guess.

As for actually writing the book, I’m closing in on the end. I think I’m two or three chapters away — more likely three, but you never know with these things. I’ve been promising a long book, and this one is certainly that. The manuscript currently stands at just under 200,000 words, and this is only Book One! (Never fear; this is going to be a duology, not an extended series of doorstops. Just two doorstops.)

::  Editing Forgotten Stars III has been a real task. A lot of heavy lifting, with some wholesale rewriting of entire chapters. Part of the problem was that I had to literally insert an entire subplot from the get-go (which has to be there, because it solves a lot of the book’s original problems), and there are other things I did in the first draft that were problematic and had to be either reworked or jettisoned entirely. I’m well behind where I wanted to be on this book by now, but it simply couldn’t be helped.

::  I don’t know what was in my coffee this week, but I found myself entertaining a lot of new story ideas. Weird.

But enough about me! What are other folks up to?

::  Dawn Kurtagich went to Spain.

::  Briana Mae Morgan updated her editing services. Check her out!

::  Amanda Fairchild posted a short story. I wonder what’s in that freezer….

::  Friend and beta-reader Jason Bennion eulogizes Prince. Jason is a terrific writer.

::  How Jen Fulmer got her agent.

That’s about it for now. Cheerio, chaps, and we’ll see you around the Galaxy!

 

 

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I saw that writer A B Keuser writes a monthly post highlighting the previous month’s productivity, and that struck me as a good idea, so here’s how my month of March went! Some of this has been covered by my update post from the other day, but here are some actual numbers:

This spreadsheet is where I track my daily writing output on whatever it is that I’m drafting at the time, and then I leave notes in the next field on editing progress on other projects. So in March I wrote just over 27,000 words in Lighthouse Boy, whilst getting to the start of Act III in editing Forgotten Stars III. I averaged 876 words a day on Lighthouse, which is above my quota of 500 words a day. (I bump that quota up to 1000 words on weekends and when I’m not doing any editing, which moving forward is not likely to be terribly often, as my projects start to pile up.) Since making 500 words while also editing is obviously no problem, I’ll likely bump that up to 750 a day.

Note that when I forget to enter a day’s total, those words get added up anyway the next time I remember to update the spreadsheet, so the average is always accurate. None of those zeroes indicates a day in which I wrote nothing. Aside from wrapping February up with the flu, I haven’t failed to write at all in quite a few months. Yay, me!

On the editing front: Forgotten Stars III has been harder to edit than the previous two, because I’m finding some glaring character issues and some structural problems with the third act that all require some heavy lifting. The bad character stuff (basically, I had a character act very “not himself” in the original draft, trying to create a “Has he switched sides for real?” suspense, but when re-reading the draft, I realized that not only did it not work, it was conceptually awful, so out it came) is gone, but now I’m face-to-face with the troublesome stuff in Act III. I want to have this book to beta readers this month, so I’ve got some real work to do.

Also, I spent the first two months of this year being very sporadic on the blogging front, and I’m trying to get back in the habit of blogging regularly. I want to post something here at least once a week, and I’ve been posting a lot of stuff to Byzantium’s Shores and to Driftwood Upon the Bosporus, so I’m getting better there.

It’s also looking increasingly like I will attempt vlogging soon, so I’ve been writing notes for that and doing some tech testing. And I even wrote a little comedy sketch about the dangers of procrastination for writers that a friend and I will be filming when the weather here in Buffalo Niagara actually improves (we’ll be shooting outside and the sketch involves me getting a pie in the face), so there’s that. Busy month!

Let’s see what April brings!

(I posted that photo in various social media on April Fools Day, and it makes me happy, so it’s here, too.)

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So what do you do when you finish writing a novel? What happens after you publish it?

I can’t speak for every writer out there, but for me, the answer is clear: I start the next one.

There was a teevee show about ten years ago, called Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. It was created by Aaron Sorkin, and was his first big project after The West Wing. In all honesty, it wasn’t very good, for a lot of reasons, and it only lasted a single season. But there were some wonderful moments in it, including one that’s my favorite.

If you didn’t see the show, it was about two men, a writer and a director who are creative partners, who are brought in to basically reboot a late-night teevee comedy sketch show (basically a fictional Saturday Night Live) that has gone off the rails and whose former showrunner had to be fired after a spectacular on-air meltdown. As they start work, the writer guy (played by Matthew Perry) sets up shop in the old showrunner’s office, and he discovers a digital clock on the wall that counts down the days, hours, minutes, and seconds to the next episode’s airing. It’s a constant reminder, in big red electronic digits, of the next deadline and the constant pace of time draining away toward that deadline. “Oh man,” Matthew Perry says. “No wonder he went crazy.”

The rest of the episode focuses on the production of that first new episode, with lots of struggles along the way, but in the end, the episode airs successfully despite the production difficulties. In the episode’s final shot, Matthew Perry is in his office, watching the show go on, and he’s smiling with his sense of accomplishment…until he glances at the big red digital clock, which is already ticking down to next week’s show.

That’s a little like how it feels to me when a project gets finished. I’m not really one to take long breaks from writing, so usually when I finish one phase of a novel’s life – first draft, first edits, second edits, proofing, design, publishing – I shift immediately into the next one. As soon as I finish something, I can feel the big red digital clock in my head, already ticking down on the next thing. Now, I don’t have a specific deadline in mind most times, but I do move on, sometimes within minutes.

Writing for me is almost compulsive. When I have a rare day on which I don’t write at all, I feel really weird about it – even during the bout of the flu I had this past February, during which I lost two days and felt well and truly awful about it. I suppose, in this regard, I’m wired like Anthony Trollope, whose writing regimen Stephen King describes thusly (in On Writing):

At the other end of the spectrum, there are writers like Anthony Trollope. He wrote humongous novels (Can You Forgive Her? is a fair enough example; for modern audiences it might be retitled Can You Possibly Finish It?), and he pumped them out with amazing regularity. His day job was as a clerk in the British Postal Department (the red public mailboxes all over Britan were Anthony Trollope’s invention); he wrote for two and a half hours each morning before leaving for work. The schedule was ironclad. If he was in mid-sentence when the two and a half hours expired, he left that sentence unfinished until the next morning. And if he happed to finish one of his six-hundred-page heavyweights with fifteen minutes of the session remaining, he wrote The End, set the manuscript aside, and began work on the next book.

Once in a while I think that maybe I should take a vacation from writing, but…well, how could I? I’ve got stories to tell! Some days I find the work harder than others, and some days I do procrastinate a little (I recently skipped an entire day on editing Forgotten Stars III just to finally catch up on some blog posts, so I could have something to post for once). But I do, pretty much, work each and every day, even if just to get 500 words written. Forward progress is forward progress, after all. And like I said, I’ve got stories to tell.

How about you all? How do you handle the “I’ve just finished” blues?

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If you’re a writer these days, you pretty much have to engage in social media in some way or other, unless you are a sufficiently big name that maybe you don’t have to but it’s fun to do so (see King, Stephen and Rowling, JK). But there are a lot of social media options out there, and each one has its own “lay of the land”, so I figured I’d break down each one that I use a lot and describe how I use them.

An opening proviso: While different aspects of my personality tend to show up on each various platform that I use, that’s more by virtue of the nature of the social media things in themselves than some conscious decision I make. I know folks who are active on a number of platforms who expend serious effort in making sure that never the twain meet; folks who are open about their use of, say, Tumblr while uber-secretive of their Twitter handle. And hey, to each their own, but in all honesty, this degree of self-separation always strikes me as more effort than it’s worth. So if you check out what I do on any particular platform and compare it to what I do on another, and you come away thinking, “Geez, that doesn’t seem like the same guy!”, well, it is. It’s just that various platforms are good for different approaches, and therefore different aspects of my personality.

So. First, and for me foremost, we have blogging. I now have two blogs: this one, and my personal blog at Byzantium’s Shores. Why two? Well, when I launched this site, the blog format seemed to be the easiest way of maintaining a site whose content would change over time; I didn’t just want a page hanging out there for no apparent reason. Hence the blog format here. But I also didn’t want to ditch Byzantium’s Shores, because I’m kind-of invested over there: I’ve been posting on that blog for just about 14 years now! It’s got its own life. So I’ve settled on this as a division of content: this site and its internal blog is for content pertaining to writing in general and my books in particular, and that’s it (I mean, within reason). Everything else I might want to blog about goes to Byzantium’s Shores, so that’s where I’ll geek out about Star Wars and post music videos and photos of the cats and the dog and pie-in-the-face stuff and all that sort of thing.

I love blogging, and maybe two blogs is a bit excessive, but I think I’ve got it broken out by “focus” in a way that works for me. And if you’re worried about politics (of which mine are distinctly left-of-center), I post no political content on this site at all, and only rarely on Byzantium’s Shores. (Full disclosure: I’m a staunch liberal in my politics.)

I do have a Facebook page, which you can certainly ‘like’ and I’ll thank you if you do, but in reality, all I use that for is to post links to stuff here! By making pages into a source of monetary flow, Facebook has made its Pages not very useful at all, unless you literally pay Facebook to show your posts to followers. I have little to no intention of doing that, so Facebook is just kind of “there” for me as a social media thing. (My page is distinct from my personal Facebook account. I’m pretty selective about from whom I accept friend requests there; basically I have to already have some notion of who you are and have already interacted with you in some way.)

Then there’s Twitter. I hated the idea of Twitter for years, but then I came around, and now I think it’s indispensable. I honestly love hanging out on Twitter (probably a little too much), and I love followers and whatnot, so feel free to follow me there! I can get a bit ranty at times, but in general I try to keep my snarky side to a minimum there. Politics? Yes, sometimes, but not all that often – maybe 15 percent of the time, tops. I don’t really enjoy political argument, and I’ll usually only tweet about politics when something in the news really gets my dander up. I retweet more political stuff than I generate myself, and even that I don’t do very often. I like talking about writing on Twitter, and various geeky observations. Sometimes I feel like I’m missing out on the “conversational” aspect of Twitter, which is mainly because I can really only check Twitter a few times a day, and usually just for a minute or two. It’s only when I’m off-duty and can have a browser running for a while that I can do any real-time conversing. I am starting to explore the world of Twitter chats, though!

In terms of following people on Twitter: I follow folks I find interesting, and I find them by generic use of the medium. I check what people are like if someone I’m already following retweets something I like, or if I see an interesting conversation going on, or that sort of thing. I don’t blanket-follow people, and I don’t use any “follower management” apps of any sort. I do try to follow people back who have already followed me, but I can be kind of slow about getting this done.

I will also mute people who get on my nerves, as opposed to blocking. Like John Scalzi, I enjoy the idea of people who annoy me basically shouting at the wall behind which I am sitting in my room with my earphones on.

Instagram is my “happy” place. I don’t get political there at all, and I tend to get irritated when other people do. I like sharing photos from my daily life, whether I’m trying to take “good” photos or just snapshotting stuff to provide a sort of pictorial commentary on things. I’m generally good-natured on Instagram, which is why my avatar photo there is almost always me with my face covered with pie. For me, photography is an entertaining diversion. I try to take photos that are as interesting as possible, but I’m hardly a trained pro. I take most photos with my phone, although I do have a nicer point-and-shoot camera that I got last fall before our trip to NYC. Who knows? Someday I’ll be able to afford a nice DSLR camera, at which point I could really see photography becoming a big hobby for me!

What’s especially fun is that there are a lot of ways to post word-based content to Instagram, which is also something I do on a fairly regular basis. But even there, the interplay between visual design and the words used is a fun consideration. I find Instagram a lot of fun! (I’d love it if they would enable HTML links in the photo captions, though, just to make IG a little easier to integrate into the rest of my online life.)

Flickr used to be my primary photo-sharing service, and I still use it a lot, but nowadays, it mainly mirrors my Instagram content. This isn’t all I use Flickr for, but as I began adapting to mobile devices several years ago, Instagram took over because Flickr at the time was not nearly as well designed for mobile use. It’s significantly better now, but there’s a sense to which Flickr is a bit late to the party. Still, I like Flickr’s service and have no intention of abandoning it. I do need to spend some time organizing my photos, though…and that sounds like about as much fun as a long drive on I-80 through Nebraska. (This is not a comment on Nebraska. It is, though, a comment on the I-80 corridor through Nebraska.)

I enjoy Tumblr quite a bit, after being rather confused by it at first. Tumblr is built to make it easy to share content, and it’s quite easy to just sit there, hitting the “reblog” button over and over again. It’s also relatively easy to create new stuff, although Tumblr seems to be a much more visually-oriented service than other blogging platforms. Likewise, Tumblr’s mechanisms for interacting with other users is a bit unwieldy at times. Still Tumblr is fun and offers a lot of flexibility for creative use of the service. I do tend to be more political there than in any other social media platform. If I get a rant in my head about some issue or other, Tumblr’s where I go to let it out. Keep that in mind if you really really really want to avoid my politics. Even there, though, I’d say that my political content is no more than about twenty percent of what I normally post, and at times of slow political news, even that ratio drops.

Let’s see…that about covers them all, doesn’t it? I do have accounts on Pinterest and Linked In, but in all honesty I don’t use them very much at all. I’ve actually started using my Pinterest account more, lately, but I’m still not entirely sure I understand it! Meanwhile, LinkedIn is still the odd thing out. Once in a great while, maybe twice a year, I’ll log on to see what’s going on, but that’s about it. I apologize if I seem like I’m ignoring your attempted interaction on LinkedIn for months at a time, but I just don’t understand LinkedIn and I can’t see where I’m missing out much, and I just can’t be on everything at all times. Likewise, I use YouTube a little, but while I’ve occasionally considered ‘vlogging,’ the fact is…I don’t like the way my speaking voice sounds, and I haven’t figured out yet how to do silent vlogging. So for now, my forays into video will be sporadic at best. However, I do hope and expect that as I get better at self-marketing, I may have to do some video stuff and appear on podcasts occasionally (which is totally a troll for invitations, podcasters of the world!), so I’m just gonna have to get over my speaking-voice hangup.

So those are all of my hangouts and how I use them. How do you use yours?

And feel free to connect! Connection is great. I love connections!

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I posted this image last week to Instagram, and someone asked about it:

 

What do I mean by this? Why would I claim to not be a writer, but rather a storyteller?

What I mean is simply this: I am more focused on the final product than I am the process. Writing is the job; writing is the work. There’s nothing at all wrong with that, because the writing is necessary. But sticking with my metaphor from my post about first drafts, I find it helpful to maintain my focus not on the laying of the pipe or the pouring of the foundation or the running of the wires, but on the final product: the house. Or, in my case, the story.

It’s the story that’s why I’m doing all this. It’s the story whose needs I have to service. It’s the story that I have to do well. It’s the story that readers will hopefully care about, and it’s the story that I hope will bring them back for the next one.

One can write a lot of things without being a storyteller. Writing is a skill with a lot of possible end goals, and the process can lead in a lot of different directions. And I do think about process a lot — in fact, I’ve yet to meet a writer who doesn’t! But in terms of defining who I am, I choose to focus on the goal and not the process.

Mine is storytelling.

What’s yours?

 

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