So today is "Wild Writers" in Kitchener/Waterloo. I'm cautiously excited about attending... I think it'll be pretty overwhelming, and probably a lot of scathing commentary on both my writing and on my odds of being a professional writer.
Not maliciously, of course. The industry seems to just be full of people who are trying to helpfully direct everyone into any other occupation other than writing. But maybe that's just me? Who knows.
Either way, I do think it'll be interesting to hang out with other people who identify as writers. I'm also really curious what kind of draw will be at the event... I know one of the people from my writing group will be moderating one of the talks, but that's literally the extent I know about the event.
So I guess we'll see! I'll try to come up with a report afterwards about the event.
Hope everyone else is having exciting Saturdays!
Useful Feedback
A friend of mine who is a member of the "Stopwatch Gang" gave me some great feedback on a story I'm working on. Took forever to get said feedback (he's got 2 newborns to take care of!), but it was definitely worth waiting for.
A lot of the feedback revolves around making the characters more personalized, and less characters. Fleshing them out. I also, apparently, don't give sufficient detail for the setting ("The room had a table and four chairs", instead of talking about what the room looks like, what type of table it is, what kind of chairs, etc... etc...).
Anyway! He also kindly gave me a laundry list of resources that I'm going to spend my writing-days next week reading. I am 100% behind homework (most of my "homework" involves reading good sci-fi, so this is a nice change!).
I'll let you all know how it goes!
NaNoReaMo!
So November is "NaNoWriMo" for many aspiring writers. Nothing wrong with that... for those of you not familiar, the basic shtick of "National Novel Writing Month" is 50,000 words written in the month of November. A steep, but achievable goal.
But not for me this year. First off, I've been writing more than 50,000 words a month every month so far in 2016 (I think October may have only been around 40,000). But secondly, I already have about a dozen longer works on the go... I'm in dire need of buckling down and editing my work, not producing more.
I, personally, hope that a NaNoReaMo catches on... as a writer, the best thing is when people buy more books, whether they're mine or anyone else's. And far too few people read these days...
How about any of you? Planning on any new novel purchases? How is your reading list looking?
Video Review of Tintian! Yay!
A guy who happens to hang out on some of the same forums as I do put up a review of Tintian on Youtube, and I'm extremely grateful for it.
Quick word of warning: there are some light spoilers in the review, but otherwise, do give it a watch!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L27kErBFMOI&feature=youtu.be
Almost 50!
It's strange the little milestones we set ourselves. For example, there's no real reason that "10" or "100" are significant numbers, other than they're base-10 numerals that we seem to think are important. I imagine if humanity had evolved with 7 fingers on each hand we'd find 14 and 196 to be terribly interesting.
But, all the same, "Tintian and the King's Claw" is halfway to being downloaded 100 times. And that feels good. It feels nice. I like that a bunch of people have now seen my work, and hopefully are curious about what I produce next.
In another week, or so, I'll release Episode 3, and in a few days I'll have to pick whether to push "How to Train Your AI" or "Starconvoy" to publishers and agents, while the other is polished for self-publishing. In the meantime, I've resurrected a bunch of my backlog of work so that I can finish it up, and then I have a dozen short stories I'd like to try and get published.
It's a lot of work to keep on top of, but hey, it's the life I've chosen, and I do enjoy the majority of it!
Anyway, happy reading! Tuesday I get feedback on an old fantasy story I submitted to a contest years ago and now what to maybe sent out to some fantasy magazines... might throw it down here instead! We'll see!
Tintian Episode 2 Available Now!
Mentioned it yesterday, but Episode 2 is now available on the Amazon ebook store:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MQ07Q5S
Also, as a head's up for my readers: Episode 1 will be going FREE tomorrow for the 5 day window that Kindle lets you offer a book free. Want to read the first 10 chapters of an awesome, epic space adventure for the low-low cost of nothing?
I'll post the link tomorrow!
Thanks for reading!
Monday's Efforts
Hello, gentle readers. Today I'm working on polishing up my short story "Black Box". The feedback from my writing group was extremely useful, and a lot of it focused on the ending and suggestions on how to tighten it up.
Today I'm also posting Episode 2 of "Tintian and the King's Claw" on Amazon, and reducing the price of Episode 1 to "Free". We'll see if that helps get a bit more traction for the story... I'm really proud of it, and the reviews I've gotten so far have been good, but all for naught if I can't get more people to read it! Ah, the trials and tribulations of the small self-publisher!
ANYway, I should get to it! I hope all of you are having great Mondays!
Double Digits!
I know this seems like a silly thing, but I've now sold more than 10 copies of Tintian and the King's Claw (11 copies as of this morning!), and I'm actually really happy about that!
Milestone complete!
So next let's see if we can get it to 100 copies! Thank you everyone for your support!
Three little mistakes!
So about 8 of you have now purchased Tintian and the King's Claw. A humble start, but a start! Of those 8, 5 of you will have small little errors in your edition of the book.
They've all been fixed now (so anyone who buys in from last week onwards will see a completely corrected version), but I somehow missed the chapter heading for Chapter 4 (oops!), and there were 2 small typos (both missed by myself and my editor. It happens).
Oh, and a few "m/s2" with the 2 not being in superscript. Fixed those as well.
Still, frustrating that I only found these out from feedback from one of you lovely readers. I really, really appreciate the email they sent me, pointing out the errors, and I quickly corrected them for future readers. Just a perk of being a small self-publisher, I suppose! Either way, will try harder to avoid those problems for the next book!
Speaking of which, "How to Train Your A.I." is coming along slowly, but surely. I'm rewriting the first 3 chapters (again!), and then reworking the majority o the body of the work, but the framework is good and the story is strong, in my opinion. And tonight I'm getting feedback on "Black Box", so we'll see about that one too!
Lazy Sundays
So yesterday I had a bunch of friends over for games, food, and general frivolity. I managed to burn the chicken but did a passable job on smoking the pork (thereby saving the meal), and we played several of my favourite "light" games (Monikers, Codenames, RoboRally).
Today I have a podcast to edit for a few hours, and then I'm going to write a few thousand words on my third novel ("How to Train Your A.I.") to try and get it up to snuff before the end of the month.
Hope everyone is enjoying their weekends!
Heavy Revisions. How I Loathe/Love Thee...
So for the next week (or so) I'm going to be working on an old story (well, "old" as in "I wrote it in March"). It needs some pretty heavy revisions and a few more chapters to flesh out the universe and setting. It's around 50,000 words right now, and I won't be happy with it before it hits 85,000 so that I can trim it down a little.
Problem is that heavy revisions are the bane of my existence. Revision, I can do... mostly cutting, occasionally trimming, editing, that sorta deal. I can do that. But adding in whole chapters, or cutting whole chapters to then add bits and pieces of them throughout a story is really rough.
But, gotta get done! And I do really like the story itself, it deserves to be told, which means it deserves to be properly edited and written.
Wish me luck!
Polished Up, On to the Next!
So "Tintian and the King's Claw" is now available on both Amazon and Kobo, and I've cleaned up 2 errors that somehow snuck through the formatting changes (Chapter 4, for whatever reason, didn't show up as a chapter, and I managed to put the superscript on a "2" in m/s2). Minor fixes, but vexing that I missed them in the hours and hours of editing and formatting work I did.
Regardless, all fixed now!
I also finished writing "Black Box" (weighs in just over 5,000 words), and submitted a short story to SFReader ("Joys of the Colonies"). Tomorrow I think I'm going to start working on the revision work I need to do to "How to Train Your A.I." (working title), since it needs some pretty hefty rewrites, and I'd like it to be edited by December so I can decide to send it or "Starconvoy EH-76" (also working title, which I'm less enthusiastic about) to agents and see if I can drum up some interest.
So good news! I can write again! Yay! After over a month solid of not-writing, that's a very welcome change.
Boom! Published!
And just like that, I have my first 2 books on the Amazon bookstore. Incredible.
I won't say "easy", since it was a metric tonne of work (writing, editing, revising, sending out for professional edits, more revising, learning enough HTML to format the story, more revising...), but it was at least somewhat seamless.
And now my book is out! Which means I get to split my time between all the writing I'm doing, all the not-writing I'm doing, and now promoting my book so that people buy and enjoy it! One more task for the list, but hey, at least I'm doing what I love.
Thanks for joining me on this journey!
Next up is finishing up "Black Box" by tonight to submit for revision before it goes off to Asimov's. Work, work, work!
Happy Turkey Day!
Okay, I pulled the trigger: both Episode 1 and the Omnibus of "Tintian and the King's Claw" are awaiting review and publishing through Amazon. I've done everything I could (I hope!), and now I just have to wait for Amazon to give me the thumb's up that they're available.
I think that's it for today. It's Thanksgiving in Canada, and so I'm going to hang out with friends, eat ramen, and try not to let the dread that I messed something up overwhelm me.
We will see... we will see...
Happy Turkey Day to all of you!
So Close!
So I managed to finish that nightmare Find-Replace I was doing yesterday (you can read yesterday's Chatter Post all about it if you want!), and my book is finally ready to go!
Almost!
I still need to slap a cover on it (I have the cover, as you probably know, having seen part of it on the front page of this very website!), and then copy in the back cover copy (which is written, which you also know) and then come up with a final page that links to here, my Patreon, and my Twitter.
That's the last step! Should be possible (I hope). But I am on track to release on Monday, and that's a very good feeling.
Find, Find, Replace
Find, Find, Replace.
Find, Find, Replace.
You know the funny thing about writing is that it's a remarkably expensive barrier to entry if you want to do it right. I mean, most writing software is pretty expensive, especially if you buy specialized programs.
Find, Find, Replace.
But even if you use inexpensive software (or buy it on discount, like I did!), there are always hidden costs. Editing is a big one. A good editor is worth their weight in gold. I'm particularly partial to Dee Hopkins (contact info at the bottom) and she has great rates, but it's still not free (nor should it be: they're worth their weight in gold and therefore deserve at least their weight in silver!).
Find, Find, Replace.
But even after all that, there are little things. For example, I found a free How To guide online for turning my manuscript into an eBook for Amazon (or any other electronic publisher). It's all about turning your words into HTML so that they show up properly. The free guide, however, requires you to have a copy of Word.
MS Word, as I'm sure many of you are aware, is currently a yearly subscription for $70CAD, or a one-time expense of $150. Both painful. So I tried Open Office (an unmitigated disaster), I tried Google Docs (my manuscript is too large and constantly causes Google Docs to crash), and eventually turned to my consort to borrow her computer, which has Word on it.
Find, Find, Replace.
The OTHER thing the free How To guide recommends is another paid program for swapping out all the "special characters" in your manuscript for HTML code. For example, left curly quotes are '“ (I have no idea if that will show up). Right curly quotes are '”, and so on. This paid program automagically changes all of those.
Find, Find, Replace.
If you, like me, don't have the budget for another paid program, you can use a free program called jEdit. It does NOT, however, have the ability to replace special characters automatically. What you can do, though, is a standard "Find and Replace". Type " in the Find area, type the HTML code in the Replace area, and then hit Find and Replace once.
Just once! Because you can't replace ALL the quotes with the code for LEFT curly quotes. No, no. You have to do it for JUST the left quotes. And once you've done ALL those, you can do a Find and Replace All for the remaining ones which should all be right curly quotes at that point.
But after you hit "Find, Replace" once, how do you make sure you get the next set of Left Curly quotation marks to replace?
Find, Find, Replace.
Find, Find, Replace.
Dee's contact information:
Website: editorialeyes.net/services
email: Dee@EditorialEyes.Net
Twitter: @_editorialeyes_
More HTML
You ever get the feeling you're making your own life more difficult than it strictly speaking needs to be? I mean, yes, I am choosing to be a writer, a "career" almost universally accepted to be one that will never, ever, ever make any money. I get that, but that's not what I'm talking about.
In this case, it's the HTML coding I have to do in order to self-publsih Tintian. The step by step process I'm following is lovely, but unfortunately I don't have access to many of the (extremely expensive) tools that the gentleman keeps referring to. Word is the big one... I use Scivener to write on my Mac (I bought it on heavy, heavy discount), and I have Open Office for use in a pinch, but neither really have the functionality that the HTML procedure needs. Or they do, but it's buried behind really weird logic that I'm sure makes sense to others, but doesn't to me.
Oh well! I did choose this life, and that means accepting these kinds of struggles when they come up.
Plus side: I slept in until 11am this morning (mostly because I'm still recovering from being sick) and there was coffee when I crawled out of bed. So it's not all bad!
Hope everyone is enjoying their early Autumn weather! It's been lovely 'round here.
Finally Feeling Better!
So it's taken a few days (and, as mentioned before, a metric tonne of tea), but I'm finally feeling better. Throat is still a bit sore, still coughing occasionally, but overall I'm firing on all cylinders and no longer huddled under a blanket all day.
Tonight I'm attending a local writer's group for feedback on my most recent short story, currently titled "Black Box" about a bridge-crew isolated and in complete darkness. It was an interesting challenge to write without any visual cues whatsoever, but I'm feeling pretty confident with how it's turning out so far.
I'm also supposed to get the edited version of Tintian back from Anna this week, which means it can go up for sale next week! Looking forward to that!
Anyway, until then, I'm going to have a bit more tea. Just to make sure. Hope all of you are having great days!
A Little Sick Today
Nothing serious: a bit of a cold/flu thing going around. Lots of coughing, a bit of sneezing, and buckets of tea as a result.
Like, so much tea. I haven't had a coffee in four days, but I've probably had 7 or 8 liters of tea. Oh, and one large mug of "chicken noodle soup". I do love yellow noodles way more than I should.
Anyway! Today I'm doing other tasks associated with writing that are not writing (my life is full of those recently), but with a bit less stress. I got paid a bit of money from a job I did back in 2014, and that'll keep my head above water for a few months.
Christmas is going to be rough. But whatever.
So here's hoping any of you who aren't feeling well are staying warm and hydrated, and that I can get back to work tomorrow!
Quick note (0001)
I suspect this will be the first of MANY "quick notes" I jot down here. But I'm still working on the ebook formatting of Tintian. Downloading free software (thank heavens for open source!) and carefully and slowly working through the process.
I'm really curious to see if I'll notice any differences between Scrivener's "auto-eBook" format options and those I do myself. We'll see, I suppose!
Anyway, that's it for today. Bit of a sore throat, so I'm only working 10 hours today and going to bed early. Luxury!