July 24, 2013

I had such plans for this summer. The time has gone by so quickly.

I had an interesting conversation last week, too. The book I'm currently writing... well, so far it's not fitting neatly into the usual genre conventions as I understand them. I'd like to hope it will find an audience, but I'm also wondering how big that audience is.

But then, maybe five people are meant to read it, and maybe those five people will find it.

Writing with the intention of publishing is a little different from writing and then deciding to publish. I know that I will publish what I'm working on right now, if I'm able to complete it to my satisfaction. But I haven't done the thing that scares me. I haven't studied bestsellers on the Amazon charts and broken down the books into a sort of algebraic equation, tried to follow it, and hoped that the end result would be enough money to help me retire in my mid-thirties. There is a difference between art and commercial art. No one's begging me to publish my books. No matter how long I write, I can't shake the feeling that if I were to stop writing, no tears would be shed over it. Oh, my unfinished fanfic series stories might be granted an unofficial ending by other authors, possibly... but otherwise, it's a little comforting to think that I could safely vanish beneath the surface, unmourned.

My mental state might be informing my writing a bit more than I should want, but for this story, I think that probably works.

Once I have it finished, I'll post the beginning, because I think readers will know fairly quickly whether they're interested and will want to read the rest or not.

And now I'm going to try to get a bit more done before I go to bed... although the book I'm currently reading is really absorbing my attention.

July 13, 2013

I'm close to finishing my rewrite of a 16,000-word segment of the story. That's just under 30 single-spaced pages on my word processing document. The current version is just over 36,000 words.

I'll be so happy once I've finished rewriting that segment so I can start on the part that I haven't been able to write yet.

May 21, 2013

I was asked on a survey last week whether I'm a published author, and I replied with "No."

Technically, in the weakest possible sense, I'm not. I'm writing under a pen name. Very few people I see in my daily life know that I've made ebooks available. For 95% of them, if I even identify myself as a writer (which does occasionally happen), when asked what I write, I respond with "Not very well." Oddly enough, in my public persona, the person who would be most closely identified as "me" to anyone else, I imagine that "I" would write terrible dramatic poetry, and the rare short-short story, in awful purple prose.

I have written a grand total of probably ten poems since I clawed my way out of my teenage angst phase, and I love to focus on form instead of content. I wrote a sonnet last year because I could, and published it in a small magazine; note I didn't even say "submitted it to," because there was very little in the way of a submission process. I handed it to the editors and said "If you don't want to take it, that's okay."

I seem to have developed some sort of preemptory knee-jerk reflex to dismiss my own writing as awful. I don't know when this began, and I think maybe I need to work on that. I'll put on an outfit that I like and not give a damn what anyone else thinks of it, as long as I like it. I'll refer to watching something on Lifetime Movie Network without a qualm. And yet, when it comes to my writing, when I allow people to see it, I end up apologizing before they read the first word: "I'm sorry, it's really not very good." I suppose I'm waiting for them to say, "You're right—it isn't."

Half the time I believe that apology is a lie. Half the time I think, "No, I'm very proud of what you're about to read. It represents a lot of time and energy I spent, and even if it isn't to your personal taste, I hope you enjoy it in some way."

The other half of the time, I think, "This is me being Ed Wood. This is totally me being Ed Wood. Anyone who has ever said anything nice about anything I've written was just trying to save my feelings. Secretly they all hate it. Why am I trying? Virtually any author is so much better."

But I don't honestly believe that every single positive review and piece of feedback I've received was just a total lie. Not honestly. So this is, at its heart, a self-esteem issue.

I'm supposed to be a cheerleader for my books. If I (electronically) hand a book to someone I've never met with an apology in my voice and a cringe on my face, that isn't going to sell anyone anything. "Well, if you have no faith in this, why should I bother even giving it a chance?" they might think. "I have a thousand other things I could be doing."

Would that there were some pill I could take that would temporarily give me self-confidence—without inebriation, anyway. I'd need a clear head for this, after all.

This makes me think that—right now, anyway—I'm not the best person to be writing the product description for my books. I only know what made me write it, and that was because I had these people running around in my head, or a vision of a green sash in moonlight and fingertips drifting along a rough stone wall, and I felt compelled to write it down, and then share it with the internet at large. When I read back over the stories, I see those things again, and a part of me wonders what the stories do to other people. Why are they appealing? What makes you go back and read it again, and if you wanted to convince someone else to read it, what would you say?

Hmm. All good things to consider while I'm on vacation.

Hooray!

People have bought my books! This makes me very happy. :)

It's kind of interesting, though, that I feel the same happiness I do when I see sales, as when someone leaves feedback on one of my free (fanfic) stories. I think it's because I still feel like I'm testing here. My first series was to see if I could do it.

Now, though... now I want to post more books. I'm only going to do one other originally-fanfic story, though. After that, it will be new stuff. I think I'm ready for that.

It's scary, honestly. I feel incredibly out of my depth when it comes to publicity and promotion, although I did decide to make the first book of my series free on Amazon over Memorial Day weekend, just to see what happens. Much like I felt the first time I posted a story online and a reader took the time to comment on it, I just feel amazed. I'm not sure what made anyone read my stories before, but I'm grateful to those who have, and I hope they got something positive out of them as a result.

May 13, 2013

I'm uploading my books onto my Amazon KDP bookshelf right now.

And freaking out.

Things I've discovered:
-Just exporting from Pages into .doc format sucks and doesn't come up right once Amazon translates it. I have to open it in Word once I've exported it, and then save it in .htm format. Even then, Word does a few other minor bizarre things to it. (Maybe I should upgrade my version of Pages; apparently the newer one will export as epub. Mine doesn't.)
-I have always thought a 0.5" indent is too much. It doesn't seem to affect the Kindle preview, but I hate it on the Kindle Fire preview, so I made it 0.25".
-The Kindle Preview app freaks out on my computer and wants to install X11 and all other sorts of fun things happen.

I'm second-guessing everything. Pricing. Covers. My entire life thus far. I'm tempted to ask someone else to push the button for me on it. I finished putting everything in, and at the bottom of the screen I saw a "Save & Publish" button, and... oh God. Oh God.

I'm doing this. I'm going to do this. Yes. I am.

Oh God.

(ETA: I pressed the button. I PRESSED IT. Now I should probably go to sleep... or work on another story.)

(ETA2: Twelve hours after pressing the button, now the status is "Publishing"... which apparently takes another twelve hours. So they might be available for purchase around 1 a.m. Eastern time on May 15.)

covers!

I've been working on covers... and I'd like some feedback. The text is a bit bigger on these than I would design it on a print book, because it still needs to be readable when the cover is a thumbnail. Makes sense. (I went ahead and threw together the cover for the sixth book as well, although I'm still in the process of writing it.) They're in series order.

So... yes? No? Start over with something else? (ETA: I replaced the From This Day On cover; the original was a bedsheet.)

settings

I used to write in Palatino, 12 point, 1.5 spacing, 0.2" first-line indent. I used Microsoft Word 5.0 on a Mac Plus, then ClarisWorks on an SE/30, then AppleWorks on the Quadra.

Now I write in Georgia, 12 point, single spacing, 0.25" first-line indent. I use Pages, despite its hilarious lack of html conversion capability. If I'm unable to use my home computer, I write in some equivalent of Notepad or Wordpad, and use as many of the settings above as I can.

When I open a fresh document, I have to change the settings to match my preferred style, or I feel like I can't write. It's weird.

I also continually edit while I'm writing, which means sometimes when I write the last sentence, it's done; sometimes I go over the whole thing and find a paragraph or two I need to redo, or a few sentences that need to be tweaked. If it's not flowing, though, I'll often delete the entire scene or whatever I need to, to get back to where it was good and build from there.

I write on the couch in my living room, often with my dog snoring beside me, as I'm doing right now; I write until I'm aware that my thoughts are no longer coherent, and then I go to bed. Or I drink some more caffeine and power through it.

Tonight, though, I have to get to bed. Work tomorrow.