writing

Finding the Process

I think I’ve figured out my way forward in the book, though it requires backtracking a few chapters to make some adjustments to set up what happens later.

This probably needs to be built into any schedule I make going forward. I’m going to need a day midway through the book to review what I’ve done and plan the rest. I can count on that. It’s happened in almost everything I’ve written, no matter how much plotting I’ve done up front.

Figuring out your process is a big part of writing. There’s a lot of advice out there about how you “should” work, but it comes down to what works for you, and you need to take that into account when you make plans or set deadlines. You figure it all out by trial and error. Try something, see how it works for you, incorporate it into your process if it works, don’t worry about it if it doesn’t, but maybe keep it in your arsenal for when the time comes when it might work for you.

You might be an edit-as-you-go writer who does one draft, but that means each part is revised and rewritten along the way. You might be a fast draft writer who dashes off a quick draft, then spends a lot of time afterward revising, rewriting, and editing. You might be a plotter who has a scene-by-scene outline written before you write the first word. You might be a pantser who just starts writing and sees where that takes you. You may be somewhere in the middle, having a broad outline and sense of where the story might go, but figuring out each scene as you get there. It’s all good, as long as you end up with a book.

I seem to fall in the middle for everything. I do a lot of planning and plotting and still end up figuring the story out as I go. I write a fast draft, but I usually have to stop in the middle and backtrack before moving forward to the end, and then I do a lot of rewriting.

I do feel like the more time I spend thinking about a book before I start writing it, the better it goes. It’s like I need to write the mental fan fiction before I can write the book. I imagine all kinds of scenes with the characters, most of which will never make it into the book, but that helps me get to know the characters and their world, and that helps me figure out the story. If I skip that step and just start writing, it’s more difficult.

And, of course, as soon as I figure out a process that works for me, something changes and I have to adjust all over again. It’s a constant evolution.

writing life

Productivity

I’ve been doing a lot of reading and research on how I can turn this writing/publishing thing into a more viable business that meets my financial goals, and something I read last week was rather eye-opening. The author of the article said he was going to try to release a book every month, since that does something in the Amazon algorithms to give him higher visibility. He figured he could do that easily by writing 2,000 words a day.

I was immediately skeptical, since my typical writing day is 3-4,000 words a day, and I can’t begin to imagine writing 12 books a year. He was talking about a 40-50,000-word book, though, while mine tend to be at least 70,000. But I started doing math and realized that it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility for me to write three shorter mysteries in the 50,000-word range and three longer fantasies in the 70,000-word range a year at my typical writing pace, if I’m really diligent and consistent. That would only take 2-3 hours a day of actual hands-on-keyboard work. It would end up being about 3 weeks worth of drafting for a mystery and 4 weeks for a fantasy (which I have done before), so in total for three books each, that’s 21 weeks, less than half the year.

But that’s first drafts, and I tend to do a lot of research/preparation and a lot of rewriting. But that still gives me about a month per book for revision, and since it only involves a couple of hours a day of actual writing time, that allows the rest of the day for research and preparation on other projects.

So, not outside the realm of possibility. But I ran into something today that shows what kind of snags can arise. I realized as I was falling asleep last night that I’d made a wrong move in Friday’s writing that pretty much means that writing is useless and I need to start over at that scene and do something different, and when I woke up this morning I realized that it was true. Because I’d set a deadline for finishing this draft and going back to rework would mean either missing the deadline or really having to buckle down this week, for a moment I resisted the idea of rewriting, telling myself it was okay the way it was and I had some fun scenes. That’s a dangerous way to think because it means I’m putting an arbitrary deadline ahead of quality.

In the past when I’ve written a fast draft, I’ve become really optimistic about what I could produce if I kept up like that, and yet I never have managed to sustain it. I put in more hours last year than this schedule would entail, and I only drafted two books (plus did a couple of rounds of revisions on another and thoroughly revised two books, as well as developing and researching a book), so it’s not as though I’m slacking. I just don’t seem to have been all that productive with the work I’ve put in.

But it is an interesting idea, and I think I’m going to try to at least pretend to have this kind of production schedule for a while. Getting a lot of books out rapidly is a good way to build a name and a readership, and then once you’ve got a good backlist going, it starts to snowball.

And that means that now I have to figure out what I should do instead of the scene I wrote on Friday.

Isn’t It Romantic? (Not)

Happy Valentine’s Day, to those who celebrate. I tend to find the holiday annoying because it seems so artificial. Celebrate your love on a day that means something to you, by doing something that means something to you, not by doing the expected things (flowers, chocolate, dinner) just because the calendar says so (aided by massive ad campaigns).

The other thing I find annoying is that this is when everyone pulls out the “look at these romantic things!” articles, and most of them are really off-base. The lists of “romantic” books tend to be lists of books written by men that are definitely not romance novels. Many of them are “guy” romances, which means the couple has a brief time of passion before either someone dies or they go their separate ways. The “happy ending” of a guy romance seems to always involve the guy either being single or dead.

Then there are the things everyone thinks of as romantic that really aren’t if you think much about it. Like Romeo and Juliet. That’s somehow become the epitome of romance, but I don’t think even Shakespeare meant it to be seen as super-romantic. It says right in the prologue and epilogue that it’s a cautionary tale about the dangers of a family feud, that when you have two polarized sides that are that entrenched, bad things are going to happen, and it took two kids dying to snap them out of their idiocy. The classical radio station has been playing romantic music today, and of course the Romeo and Juliet ballet music comes up. I may have shouted at the radio, “That’s not actually all that romantic.”

They’ve also played music from The Phantom of the Opera. I recall being rather irked during a recent touring production when all the ads promoted “the most romantic story ever told.” It is kind of romantic if you think of it as the love story of Christine and Raoul, childhood sweethearts reunited, and his love for her helped her escape an abusive, murderous creeper, but I don’t think that’s what they meant. But since the radio station played “All I Ask of You,” which is the romantic duet between Raoul and Christine, I’ll let it count as romantic.

For my celebration today of my most successful long-term relationship (me), I think I’m going to make something chocolate and watch Stardust, which is my favorite romantic fantasy movie. We’ve got a couple who initially dislikes each other, for good reason, then begins to like each other when they have to work together to escape from danger, and then falls in love. I need more movies like that.

Meanwhile, I’m writing while listening to the music the classical station considers romantic.

writing life

Title Woes

I’m halfway through the first draft of the book I’m working on. It took me weeks to get through the first quarter of it, but that was interrupted by all that construction work. Then it took me less than a week to write the next quarter. I guess I’m gaining momentum.

I’m trying to avoid the series burnout factor by working on some other things at the same time. In the evenings I’ve been researching another story entirely, and so far the two things haven’t clashed in my head. Sometimes I’m more fascinated by the potential of the one I’m researching than I am by the one I’m writing, but that’s where the daily word count goal comes in. When I hit that goal, I can play with research. It’s a win-win. I’m making the progress I need to, so I’m not neglecting one project, and knowing I can play with the other project is additional incentive to make progress.

I really need titles for these books and this series, and this genre requires something clever and punny, but I haven’t been able to think of anything yet. I may need to do a good brainstorming session after I finish this book. Titles are so hard for me. Either I start out with something perfect already in mind or I end up just sticking something generic on the book. I guess a couple of times something clever has come to me late in the game. For instance, Make Mine Magic was originally called Some Enchanted Evening, and that was a desperation move to just have something to stick on the book proposal. When even my agent was getting mixed up whether we were talking about that book or an Enchanted, Inc. book, I said we needed to change it. The new title came to me in a dream. I dreamed a scene in which that was said, woke up and wrote it down, then when I still liked it in the morning I suggested it to my editor. My other late-in-the-game title was Damsel Under Stress. That book had gone through edits and still didn’t have a title. We were starting to joke that putting it out with no title would be an innovative marketing scheme. Then one day in the shower, I was thinking of fairy tale related phrases and how I could twist them. I thought about how I was a damsel in distress, stressed about needing a title, and it clicked. I jumped out of the shower and wrote it down, and everyone loved it, though there was some confusion, since it sounds like “damsel in distress” when you say it out loud (which was the point). I had readers unable to find the book because they were searching for or asking for the wrong title, or if they asked for it at a store, the bookseller misunderstood, typed in “damsel in distress” and said the book didn’t exist.

I guess it’s possible for a title to be too perfect a pun. Now I need something along those lines for my mystery books. I may be taking a lot of showers soon.

publishing business

More Market Research

I continued my market research yesterday, and it was rather eye-opening. It turns out that the books I had in mind were classified as “fantasy romance,” and that bestseller list was almost identical to the “romantic fantasy” bestseller list. That category is all over the map. There were things like The Princess Bride in it, along with some fairly traditional fantasy by a Mormon author who’s a big champion of “clean fantasy.” And then there were books that looked like what I have in mind, those with covers that feature a woman in a fairy tale-like gown, usually in a forest or near a castle, with a kind of filigree frame around the cover.

Half of those were classified as young adult (so I don’t know why they were on an adult fantasy bestseller list). And half of them turned out to be what’s apparently the big trope right now, “reverse harem” (and, oh dear, the interesting spam I’m probably going to get on this post thanks to that term). That seems to be about a woman who has a whole team of men serving her in multiple ways (if you know what I mean). Some of them were pretty up-front about it, with that term in the subtitle or series description, but some were more subtle. I didn’t pick up on it from the book description, but then all the reader reviews were swooning over how hot the book was with all those men in the heroine’s harem. There seem to be some code words or phrases in the description that make it clear to those who know. I just thought the mention of four men meant it was setting up a romance-like series where there would be a team of guys who would each get to be the hero of his own book, with one of them ending up with the heroine of book one, and a new heroine for another member of the team in book two, etc. But it seems this heroine is greedy and keeping them all to herself. This would definitely fall into the category of “not to my taste.” Heck, with just one man I’d have to send him off on the occasional quest. I’d feel really crowded with four or five. And I’m probably going to get all kinds of bizarre Amazon recommendations now that I’ve looked at those book pages.

No wonder it’s hard to find things to read if you find “clean” Mormon-written books, YA, and that all in the same category, and they all have fairly similar covers. That also doesn’t make marketing easy. I don’t know if there’s an underserved market of people who want the kind of thing I have in mind and haven’t been able to find much of it or if there isn’t much of it because people don’t want it and it doesn’t sell well.

One thing that’s very difficult about product marketing is that there’s no way to measure unserved pent-up demand. Back in my PR days, I had a client that did supply-chain management, and that included the ability to measure what was selling so that stores could get more of what was selling better and less of what wasn’t selling. I once stumped them in a meeting when I asked how they could really measure that, since they couldn’t count the people who came into a store looking for something and walked out empty-handed because it wasn’t there. I have a problem finding my size in clothes because most stores only get in one or two items in my size, and they sell right away. Maybe that would trigger some systems to then order more if they sold that quickly, but generally it just shows that only two sold in that size, so that’s all they order in the future, and they have no way of knowing how many people didn’t buy anything at all because it wasn’t there in their size.

I think there’s a lot of that going on with books. You can only measure demand by looking at what’s selling, but if something doesn’t exist and people want it, you can’t know. Publishers decide what to publish based on how well the things that are already being published are selling. They don’t know how many people go to bookstores and walk away empty-handed because they don’t find what they want. The rise of independent publishing has shown that there were some underserved categories, usually at either end of the spectrum. “Clean” romances have done very well, since they’d stopped publishing books without graphic love scenes, but then the racier ones that go beyond what publishers were willing to do have also done really well.

It may be a leap of faith to see if there’s a readership for tamer character-driven fantasy. I can’t be the only one who doesn’t want grimdark or harems of any kind.

publishing business

Market Research

I’ve been doing some studying about how to make a living publishing your own books and treat it like a business, since I came to the realization that it would be difficult for me to get a real job, so I have to make this work. I haven’t been very businesslike about it. I’ve just written what I feel like writing and thrown it out into the world. I’ve griped about how the traditional publishers have never done all that much for me, just throwing my books out there with little to no marketing support, but I’m doing the same thing. I’m trying to be more focused and strategic and learn what I can do to make this work as a business.

One thing I’ve never done much of is market research. At best, after I’ve written something I’ll look around for other things kind of like it to get cover ideas. I’ve never really been all that systematic about it. The guide I was reading suggested looking at the Amazon bestseller list that best reflects your subgenre and looking at whether you could imagine your book fitting in there. Then look at the sales rank for the #1, #5, #20 and #50 books. If they’re all really high in the overall rankings, that means there’s a good market for what you’re writing, but it also means it’s a competitive category.

The mystery series I’m working on fits perfectly in a couple of categories, and I could see those kinds of covers fitting it. It’s a moderately strong category, with the top-selling books really high in overall rankings, but once you’re down around #50, they’re fairly high but in a range I’ve hit with some of my previous books. So, that’s good. I seem to be on target there.

Then I tried looking up things that might fit the fantasy series I have in mind. I could swear that I’ve seen books that fit my general category and that have the sorts of covers I envision, but I only saw one or two of these on any of the category bestseller lists I tried. I’d been thinking they’d fit into romantic fantasy, but it looked like most of those books were really dark and sexy, and more contemporary than a traditional historical fantasy setting. Although these wouldn’t be actual fairy tale-based stories, I do think they’d have a fairy tale feel and I’m drawing on some tropes from fairy tales, so I tried the fairy tale fantasy chart, and it fit a little better there. But that seems to be a really competitive category. Everything in the top 50 was way up the overall charts. There was also no real consistency so that you could look at a book and know it was that kind of book. I may need to look up the books I know of and see how they’re categorized, then work backward from there.

I suspect in that area I may have the problem I’ve had with a lot of my other books, which is that they don’t fit neatly into any one category and there isn’t a lot like them on the market. That’s made it difficult for me to sell to the major publishers, since they want comp titles and are leery of something that doesn’t readily compare to something else that’s selling well. And I’m afraid it’s making it harder for me to sell these books independently. It turns out that writing what I want to read but that I can’t find isn’t a great business strategy. Go figure.

I’ll still write these books because I want to and I think there are readers. I may write one series more for money and the other more for love, and I’ll have to be strategic about marketing.

The other thing I’m seeing in everything I read about the business is that you really need to have a mailing list and newsletter. I’ve resisted because I hate them and I feel like everyone is totally bombarded by them, but if absolutely every book on publishing says this is the #1 thing you need to do, it may just be possible that they’re right. So I guess I need to find a mailing service and figure out how to add a link to my web site, and then I need to come up with content.

Finding Motivation

Well, apparently the weather does take requests because I got my rainy Sunday afternoon for listening to music, drinking tea, and reading, and it was divine. Even better, the weather looks like it will be similar next Sunday afternoon.

I don’t have any real obligations this week other than choir, so I’m hoping to make big progress on my book. I had just started to really dig in at the end of last week, probably thanks to me finally turning on the project tracker in Scrivener. Being made acutely aware of how many words you’re writing and how many words you need to write makes a huge difference. The moment I see that red bar on the screen, I’m driven to turn it orange, then yellowish, then green. Then there’s the joy of seeing the next day’s goal recalculated if I go over the goal.

I guess this is the adult writer version of getting a sticker.

It’s a bit sad how well this works. I’d hope that I’d be capable of doing what I need to do without that visual reminder, and sometimes I can, but it’s almost like magic for creating accountability. It even seems to make writing sessions go faster.

Now I need something like that for tracking things like housework. I know there are to-do list apps and things that turn it into a game, where you score points by having good habits, but I tend not to check into those. I want to be online less, not more. This works because it’s part of the tool I use for the task I’m tracking. What I need is a vacuum cleaner that shows you how often you’ve used it and gives you points. A Fitbit would do the same thing for exercise, so maybe I should break down and get one. In the meantime, I am actually giving myself gold stars on my calendar on days when I exercise. It’s surprising how motivating that is.

Books

Jane Austen, Master Worldbuilder

One area of interest that I’ve found a lot of fantasy and science fiction authors and fans share is the works of Jane Austen. I’m not sure what the connection is, other than perhaps the sense of worldbuilding. Austen wasn’t really doing worldbuilding the way we think about it. She was just writing what she knew, the society around her. But it’s such a vividly depicted world that’s utterly alien to modern readers that it functions like reading a fantasy or science fiction novel set in another world. We know exactly how her world works, what the social rules are, what the expectations are for each kind of person and how the different groups are meant to interact. We know what they do for leisure, what their spiritual beliefs are and how they vary from person to person in the way they actually carry them out. We know what their courtship rituals are and what the penalties are for violating those rules. If you’re writing about another world, reading Jane Austen will teach you a lot about how to depict that world in a story and use the rules of the world to create tension and conflict and to drive the plot.

Although there’s a lot more narrative exposition than you can get away with in a modern novel, the interesting thing about Austen is the way she lays out the rules and how they affect the plot. It usually comes through dialogue, and the dialogue happens because those rules are creating some kind of conflict, like Mrs. Bennet’s diatribes about entailment and inheritance laws that mean her daughters have to find good husbands because they won’t inherit their father’s estate. That drives most of what happens in the novel, and you come away from reading Pride and Prejudice understanding how it all works without there having been that much exposition.

PBS is currently showing the series Sanditon, which is based on the fragment of a novel Austen left unfinished when she died. She only wrote eleven chapters, and in those chapters she mostly established the main cast of characters and the situation they were in. The plot hadn’t really kicked in yet, other than setting up that it was going to have something to do with turning a small seaside town into a fashionable resort while a bunch of relatives are campaigning to inherit from a wealthy elderly woman who has no children to inherit. The TV series takes this setup and spins a story from it. I’m not sure it’s entirely successful. I suppose it might be okay if you just take it as a costume drama that happens to be set in the Regency era. It doesn’t really work as any kind of Jane Austen story for me, mostly because I think the screenwriter forgot that one of the keys to Austen’s works was a strong sense of how that world worked. This show goes far astray from any sense of those rules and structures, but also without a sense of real tension coming from those rules or consequences of those rules being violated.

I kind of think Jane is spinning in her grave. I’m watching because I’m curious how it will all play out. The edition of the novel I have is completed by “another lady,” and I may read the rest of it to see how that author sees it. It’s like Jane Austen left a writing prompt and it’s up to us to figure out how to finish the story.

Winter

We had something approaching winter yesterday. It was cold and rainy, with bits of sleet. I didn’t have children’s choir, and they canceled choir practice because there was a chance of it getting below freezing while the roads were still wet, so I had a delightful evening of snuggling under the electric blanket with candles going in the fireplace (I have a fireplace candelabra, which gives the flickering light of a fire without the mess or without having to open the damper and send all the warm air up the chimney), classical music on the radio, and a good book — basically, peak hygge. I even went to bed early.

And because I went to bed early, I seem to have forgotten to set my alarm. I woke up at about the usual time, anyway, then since there was nothing pressing, I let myself lie there for a while, which meant I went back to sleep. I have a thyroid condition, so I’m supposed to be watching for signs of low thyroid, like fatigue. I worried for a moment when I overslept in spite of going to bed early, but then I remembered that more than ten years ago I was using a TV show that came on in reruns at 9 a.m. as a way of forcing myself out of bed in the winter. Sleeping until 8 is actually an improvement. I really am part bear, I think. When Daylight Time begins, I’ll be hopping out of bed much earlier.

Today it’s colder than it was yesterday, but it’s sunny, so it feels less wintery. The annoying thing about this winter (for me) is that it’s been warm and sunny on weekends and the cold, rainy days have always been Wednesdays. On weekends, I could hide under my blanket and read, but on Wednesdays I have choir stuff, so I have to go out.

I’m willing to compromise and take a cold, rainy weekday other than Wednesday, and then I can switch workdays. Still, there’s something about a cold, rainy Sunday afternoon (with the rain starting after noon, since I have to go out on Sunday mornings) with a good book, a pot of tea, and the appropriate music as I lie on my bed or sofa under a blanket. It looks like Valentine’s Day is going to be cold and possibly rainy, so maybe I’ll indulge myself then. There may even be baking.

For today, though, I have writing to do. I’m making headway on the book I’m drafting, and I’ve set a deadline for myself.

My Books

New Anthology on Kickstarter

I mentioned a month or so ago when outlining what was coming up for the year that I’d contributed a story to an anthology that was going to be Kickstarted soon. Well, that Kickstarter is now live.

The anthology is called Where the Veil is Thin, and it’s a collection of stories about the fae from a range of authors, including me. I don’t write a lot of short stories, and if this book ends up happening (it has to be fully funded up front), it will be my first official short story sale.

Here’s the Kickstarter page if you’re interested or want to support it.

I’ve toyed with the idea of doing a Kickstarter for a book, mostly as a way of raising awareness/excitement, but I think for now that it would be a lot of work, so I think I’ll just keep funding the production costs myself and hope that the books turn a profit. It is cool that things like this exist to help people get their dreams out into the world, though.

I should probably try to write more short stories, but I’m more of a novelist and most of my stories tend to grow into novels. I think having a prompt helped. They invited me to contribute to this book, which was a huge honor. I guess it helped that I knew one of the editors. We met at the Serenity premiere event in LA years ago and ended up sitting together at the movie. It’s strange how something like that ended up coming around to something work-related. You never know. The world is a funny place.