Category: Uncategorized

From a Porch, With Earphones. . . .

“I saw a meme today, on some social site or another, which basically said ‘turn off the news and love your neighbor.’   It sounded like excellent advice.  I now have a black eye and a few restraining orders pending against me.”

“Mona Lisa must’ve had the highway blues. . . you can tell by the way she smiles.”

God almighty, that Bob Dylan.  I think about the level, about the plane of existence, he must occupy, differing at different times, and I sometimes shed a tear over it.  There are some things that just. . . some music that. . . I can’t. . . I simply digress.  It’s like liquid Kerouac, distilled through filters of Eliot and Pound above a blue-flame of Faulkner, with guitar.  That’s what I say.  But the man himself would say simply Guthrie, only in a past life and not this one.  Never this one, because for talent like Dylan, this one hasn’t even been solidified yet.  We’ll know more about 2017 Bob Dylan in 2021, after time to digest it and spit out some sort of media-conforming descriptors.  Rest assured, those descriptors will be trendy at the time.

Anyway, good evening out there in Blog-and-BlogReader-Land.  I hope all fares well with each and every one of  you.  As for me, yesterday was a bust, which put immense pressure on today.  But it’s all gonna be okay now, because I surpassed the 2600 and hit 3148.  I won’t spend too much time patting myself on the back, though.  Is it really an achievement when you had it coming?

Instead, I’ll spend my time (and by time I simply mean my post) whining, because everyone loves to hear some whining.  It must be true, or half the news wouldn’t exist and if that happened, that other half of the news would seem so stale and utterly factual.  I saw a meme today, on some social site or another, which basically said “turn off the news and love your neighbor.”   It sounded like excellent advice.  I now have a black eye and a few restraining orders pending against me.

I kid, of course.

So, what is it I’m whining about?

Basically just that I have committed myself, for now, to this series. . . this oceanic adventure thing.  And I want to also explore other things, other avenues.  I want to “stream out” as I call it, like Faulkner, like Eliot.  Like the words of Bob Dylan.  Oh hellz naw I’m not claiming I have even 0.5% of their talent.

I’m just saying I have that desire. . . that almost trendy-hipster desire, to sit outside at some downtown café in the near-future Autumn and just write about whatever the hell.  There’s a crisp-ness to it.  A literal coolness, palpable to the skin first and the spirit inevitably.  Autumn.  The best.  A cigarette.  A friend or two perhaps.  An afternoon of un-obligated freedom that rolls over into evening like a slow train from the Smokeys.  That Nashville meets New Orleans vibe.

Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing. . . what I’ve gotten myself into.  I enjoy the oceanic adventure genre.  It has a uniqueness to it, and I do love my characters.  When I first conceived of the series, I saw it as virtually limitless in terms of the directions it could go and the plot-lines that were possible.  I still think that’s true.  There’s a certain beauty to that, all its own.  But sometimes, just sometimes. . . it can be like pancakes.  I want that first bite excitement back.

I’ll get it.  I know this.  The series is still a blast. . .  to imagine, to work on.  First-World problems, man.  It’s time to veg out with some 3DS.  It would seem that the fate of all of Valentia is in my hands.

(Me): How’s it Going?; (Also Me): I Could Kick My Own Butt

“My friends are very dear to me (as is my family).  I wouldn’t trade time with them for anything in the world.  And yet, yes, I could kick my own butt for not putting in my thousand words for the day.”

A thousand words a day!  For any writer deep in the trenches, this probably sounds like nothing.  Hell, to me it sounds like nothing!  So why was it such a hard number to hit today?

My plan for the Blue Daunia series goes thusly:  Publish an issue on the 15th of each month.  From the 16th to the following 15th, write a thousand words a day, for twenty days.  For the next ten or so days, re-read, revise and edit like nobody’s business.  Voila, 20,000+ word novella disguised as an issue!  Put it on the Amazon Kindle Store for a couple of bucks.  Done and done.

And now, just for the fun of it, here’s a cat telling a joke to a paper towel dispenser. . .

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Anyway. . . .  As I’ve said, a thousand words a day is nothing, really.  Until things like going to the bank, going grocery shopping with the family and then going to hang out with friends in the evening until, oh, 10pm, when ya gotta get up and be at your day job at 7am the next morning.

My friends are very dear to me (as is my family).  I wouldn’t trade time with them for anything in the world.  And yet, yes, I could kick my own butt for not putting in my thousand words for the day.  What does this mean?  It means I’ll be playing catch-up tomorrow afternoon and evening.  Yessir, 2000 words tomorrow, after a 9 hour day-job shift.

Normally, I would cringe at the prospect of this. . . the very thoughts of it.  But I’m a writer.  I got this.  (Bad grammar aside, I got this).

So, what makes me so confident?  An outline.  I have one.  A solid, concrete plan of characters, locations and events, in a precise sequence.  And even though that precise sequence always manages to un-sequence itself, the plan is securely in place.  I know exactly what I’ll be tackling next.  All I have to do is write my style (ever-evolving) and bring my craft-hammer down upon the subject matter.

I used to be a pantser.  Did you know that?  Of course you didn’t.  The overwhelming majority of you barely know me yet.  Writers know what I mean though.  A pantser is someone who can just sit down and write, letting the story and their characters take them to wherever fate will allow.  This usually results in a masterpiece which feels quite free-spirited and free-flowing.  I envy pantsers.  I envy my old self.

And yet, I don’t.  Not really.  It’s hard sometimes to envy a style that, for many, can more easily result in the dreaded writer’s block.  I am now what is known as a plotter.  Writers immediately know this as someone who outlines and plans, to varying degrees, what will be happening in the story, and roughly when in the story things will happen.

Lately, and especially with an adventure series, I find it far easier to dedicate an afternoon to brainstorming an idea for the next issue and then doing a few pages of an outline. . . a sort of bone structure on which to hang the prose.  Once the outline is out of the way, writer’s block has one hell of a time clutching you in its evil grasp.  Just try not knowing what to write next when it’s right there in the outline!  It’s almost absurd.

So, does this mean that the pantser method no longer has a place in my arsenal?  No, I don’t think that’s true.  See, pantsing. . . What?  Where did the term come from?  That’s a good question. . . I’m glad you asked.  Pantsing refers to writing by the seat of your pants.  Simple enough, eh?  Anyway, pantsing will always have its place as a great way to brainstorm new story ideas.  Maybe it doesn’t work so well in the context of an established series, but I could see it working as a way to get a new story arc started within the series.

Let’s say I’ve outlined a plot of a story arc that ends up taking up three issues (comic book style).  I haven’t outlined the next story yet, so I sit down and just start typing.  Maybe it’s a conversation between Daunia and her shipmates.  Maybe it’s someone else, far away from the ship, hatching an evil plot which the crew might find themselves all caught up in later.

Pantsing reigns supreme in such instances, and I would be foolish to stifle my imagination and step away from the fun just because I hadn’t previously outlined this particular bit.  When I’ve taken it as far as I can go, and then sit there wondering what to write next, only then would I allow myself to revert back to the plotter I have recently become.

Either way, a thousand words a day really is nothing.  It’s funny to think back on. . . when I first texted my father the link to my first issue, it took him by surprise, because he hadn’t known about it.  It also started a texting conversation, in which I explained to him my plan to write a roughly 72-page issue per month.  He responded by saying something like, “Are you sure you can manage that every month?  That’s nearly two and a half pages per day!”  First, he was going by pages and not by words, and secondly, I hadn’t told him the part about how I was planning on only dedicating 20 days to the actual writing, not 30.  But I did text back “Two and a half pages takes about half an hour,” and he responded, “That’s some fast writing!”

Fellow writers. . . can you imagine a world in which 2.5 pages is difficult to come by in a 24-hour period?  It’s almost unfathomable.  I have to admit, I had a good laugh over it.  At that particular time, on that particular day, I had a good laugh over it.  Not today, though.  Today I could kick my own butt. . . because 2.5 pages would have been a great deal better than nothing!

Rookie Fears: Little Computer Details (pt 2)

“. . . from the research I was doing, it takes a modicum of technical knowledge- the tiniest bit of coding savvy- which, as a writer in the 21st century, I felt almost required to have, and which, as a writer overall who just wants to pound out stories and not worry about computer details, I don’t really possess in the least. . .”

A couple of nights ago, I hammered out the first part of this post, about my worries and doubts concerning the details of just how to get a book onto the Amazon Kindle Store.  As I allowed Mr. Cubbon to illustrate in his video, my fears turned out to be completely unfounded. . . almost comically so.

But, as I was writing the first draft of Blue Daunia Issue #1 back in early June, other fears as a first-time indie author began to creep in to take the place of those that had been placated.  And, as it turns out, there was a collective name for those fears:  “ebook formatting.”

Yes, I had done a modicum of research in the past, and what I knew off-hand from those past browsings amounted to this:  Uploading a Word document to Kindle is possible (and possibly tricky); Amazon uses the “mobi” format, preferably with a hyperlinked table of contents; PDFs are doable but extremely tricky when it comes to Amazon auto-converting to its native mobi; and then there’s epub, which is the easiest format for Amazon to auto-convert.

But, when the time came, how would I get my final draft into one of the better two formats: mobi and epub (I just didn’t want to take chances with the possible conversion errors of Word or PDF)?  And, almost more importantly (to perfectionist me anyway), how would I go about hyperlinking my table of contents, so that, when I finally see my book-baby on the kindle screen, I could tap on a chapter name and be instantly transported to that chapter?

Other authors dabbling in the ebook format had hyperlinked their TOCs… heck, almost all of them!  The small handful of books I had seen on my kindle which weren’t hyperlinked, looked extremely cheap in other ways as well, from typos to poor cover designs to outright public domain rehashes done with very little care.  In other words, early on in my readership of ebooks, I almost instantly began to equate non-hyperlinked TOCs with lousy, time-wasting quality.  Therefore, if my then-“future” self were ever to write and publish an ebook, it had to have a hyperlinked TOC. . . it just had to.  I considered it an absolute necessity!

Ah, hyperlinked Tables of Contents and ebook formatting. . . from the research I was doing, it takes a modicum of technical knowledge- the tiniest bit of coding savvy- which, as a writer in the 21st century, I felt almost required to have, and which, as a writer overall who just wants to pound out stories and not worry about computer details, I don’t really possess in the least.  I had seen programs and apps which would take flat text and convert it to mobi or epub, but the details I craved, like hyperlinking, still required other measures.  But I have a limited attention span when it comes to such things. . . more like an impatience. . . so what was I to do?  I considered it a hurdle I would have to cross.  Where to turn?  Was there to be no “magic bullet”?

Enter the Scrivener program, from Literature and Latte.  I found out about it during that worried fit of research, and I’m here to tell you, it was like a godsend.  One of the best parts was, for a good bit of time, it is actually free!  Here’s the blurb from their own website:

“The trial runs for 30 days of actual use: if you use it every day it lasts 30 days; if you use it only two days a week, it lasts fifteen weeks. Before the trial expires, you can export all of your work or buy a licence to continue using Scrivener.”

And here’s another cool thing about it: although there is a rough tonnage of things you can learn about the features of the program, there isn’t really all that much you really need to know in order to churn out a mobi or epub ebook, complete with my coveted hyperlinked TOC!

When you first open the program, and select the “Fiction” category followed by the “Novel” template, there will be a tab in the upper lefthand corner titled “Novel Format.”  Take the ten or so minutes to read and digest that, and you have basically everything you need (except for text and talent) to get yourself well underway.

At $45 US to own outright, it’s not the world’s cheapest bit of software, nor is it the world’s most expensive.  But, for what it does for you as a hopeful indie author and publisher. . . for all that it can do, this program is to ebook formatting what Mr. Cubbon’s video is to Kindle uploading.  It makes things just that drop-dead simple, and the results are spot-on.  There are things I am still learning (it’s nearly as limitless as the game of chess), but all you need to get yourself up and running are right there on that one screenful of primary instruction.

With the guidance of video content such as Rob Cubbon, and the ease, convenience and near-perfection of tools such as Scrivener, there is, in my inexperience and my humbled opinion, no better era in which to enter into the world of self-published ebooks.

More Scrivener goodness to follow. . . .

 

Rookie Fears: Little Computer Details (pt 1)

“I’m afraid something vital to the process is going to be too complicated for me, and that one over-my-head step will derail the entire dream.”

I didn’t know what I was doing.  As of this post, I still don’t fully know.  As I said in my first post, as well as my home screen, I am admittedly new at this (hence the purpose of the site).  But I’m here to share with you the ins and outs and whys and wherefores of everything I’ve encountered on the short distance up the path I’ve already traveled. . . so here’s a little tale of fear and revelation.

I knew the story I was trying to tell.  And I may not be a Nobel Prize winner for literary fiction, but I’m arrogant enough to think that my writing isn’t all that bad, so it wasn’t the technique I was concerned about.  I was also fully aware that thousands of indie authors post their works on the Amazon Kindle Store each and every month, so it wasn’t a matter of an impossible task that had me worried, either.

To be honest, what scared me the most was the technology of it all.  You see, I’m not very gifted when it comes to things like computer code, HTML, formatting and the like.  It’s all like a foreign language to me.  And then there’s my laziness when it comes to having to learn something new, which is itself a form of fear:  I’m afraid something vital to the process is going to be too complicated for me, and that one over-my-head step will derail the entire dream.  So what would I do in that near future when I finally got ready to approach the front gates of the Big A?  How on earth does one traverse those gates?

If you’re a first-time ebook author, still in the early phases of the writing, and the preceding paragraph sounds all too familiar to you, then I want you to relax.  Take a deep breath.  If it was nearly as hard as I built it up in my mind to be, then I wouldn’t be hard at work on Blue Daunia Issue #2.  Heck, if you really want to get down to it, if this stuff was actually technically difficult, I certainly wouldn’t be maintaining a blog site all by myself!  Nope, breathe easy. . . the writing discipline and the marketing and the patience really are the hardest parts, and you are more than capable of tackling those (I believe in you. . . but more on these points in future posts).

So, what, then?  How is it done?  Assuming a writer masters his or her self-discipline and gets an ebook written and assembled, then how on earth does it become part of the Amazon Kindle Store?  Well, before I was even at that point, when I was just starting out on my first draft, these questions were plaguing my mind fairly heavily.  As I said earlier, if any one aspect of the process could creep up to cripple me, then a lifelong dream could very well be rendered pointless.  So, I did what I always do when I’m in doubt about something:  I turned to YouTube.  I sifted through a few dozen tons of videos, so that you don’t have to.  Okay, the second part of that sentence wasn’t really true at the time, but it might as well be for the purposes of this blog.

If you want to know the very best of the best of the YouTube videos on the subject. . . the clear-cut #1 that will guide you step-by-step and walk you by hand through the process, then here it is:  Rob Cubbon’s “How To Self Publish a Kindle E-book on Amazon’s KDP Select — Join the Self-Publishing Revolution.”  Nothing else I have seen before or since is as clear and concise.  Nothing else really even comes close.  I could go into detail, recounting step by step exactly what Mr. Cubbon has already displayed, but what would be the point?  If you want to know how to storm the gates of The Kindle Store, then that’s it. . . that’s click-by-click how it’s done, and although he may never see this, I’d just like to tell Mr. Cubbon “Thank you!”  So, yes. . . watch that video, and then, when you’re ready, click here.

“But wait,” you might be saying.  “That’s pretty cool that I can upload a file to Kindle far easier than I ever dreamed, but how do I get my work into a form that Amazon will play nice with?”

I’m glad you asked, because that gives me the perfect thing to talk about in Part 2 of this post.

Blue Daunia Issue #1

“Set sail with the crew of the Blue Daunia on their harrowing oceanic journeys”

Blue Daunia
Issue #1: Dark Tides of Illunstrahd

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A new ongoing monthly series begins!

Azaria
An exotic world not unlike our own, but entirely beholden to the mythology, legends, and pantheon forged by the almighty sea. With a myriad of cultures that run the gamut from backwater to highly advanced, Azaria is a world whose sole provider of technology is as secretive as it is powerful, at times competing with the oceanic pantheon itself for ideological supremacy. But there is something else beneath the shimmering surface, deep within the Hadopelagic Zone… waters so deep that all cultures unite in referring to them as “the Blue Hell”… something darkly intangible and unspoken. Could there be a third force, ancient beyond all recorded knowledge, vying for supremacy?

Daunia Bluehaven
On her ongoing quest to investigate the disappearance of the brother she barely knew, her adventures aboard her father’s final ship design would lead her crew all across the coastlands of the world of Azaria.

Set sail with the crew of the Blue Daunia on their harrowing oceanic journeys. The swashbuckling monthly serial begins here. Join Daunia and her crew as they traverse a world of towering cliffs and arctic tundras, dense tropical forests, sweeping mountainscapes, cavernous subterranean depths, marble palaces, gothic spires, dusty libraries and raucous drunken inns. In the life of a freelancer, you never know where your next job might take you, or what odds you might face to get it done.

In this inaugural issue, embark with Daunia and her crew of “freelancers” as they travel to put a recently-acquired treasure into the hands of a prospective buyer, and to spend some much-deserved time in the company of old friends. The crew soon learns, however, that the sleepy port town of Illunstrahd might hold darker intentions lurking beneath its surface, and a long-forgotten secret which could threaten the fate of all of Azaria.

Oh, That First Draft Magic! (pt 2): Don’t Fear Your Audience

“If your aim is for a handful of people you grew up with to pass around a PDF. . . if that’s your target audience. . . then, by all means, concern yourself with how they might react.”

So, you’ve developed your rhythm and habits, and you’ve finally fallen into a comfortable schedule.  You’re even partway through the pounding out of your first draft.  But then you come to it.  It’s time for a sex scene, perhaps a twisted act of violence, or some recreational drug use without consequences, maybe a tricky rape scene or the implying thereof.  But as you “clock in” and begin the session, suddenly you realize:  “wait… my mom might read this” or “this actually happened to a friend who was horribly embarrassed by it” or “what will my sister think of this?” or even “my pastor might get ahold of this.”

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Here’s the thing:  who are you writing this for?  Do you wish for your project to stay within a small, tight-knit group of people immediately around you, or do you want to put this out there for the masses?  If your aim is for a handful of people you grew up with to pass around a PDF. . . if that’s your target audience. . . then, by all means, concern yourself with how they might react.  If, on the other hand, you have bigger fish to fry, then I’m sorry, but your mother, sister, friend and pastor will just have to blush.  But please keep one thing in mind, if this is proving to be a hangup to you or if it seems to be hindering your pen in any way:  Your sister has seen Game of Thrones.  Your pastor was a RoboCop fan in his younger days.  Your friend has probably downloaded 4 to 7% of the porn he or she has searched for.  The modern world is not exactly a shelter of morality, and neither should your writing have to be.

And it doesn’t have to be a matter of drugs, sex, rape, etc.  Your hangup could be something as simple as language.  Should your characters cuss?  Well, it’s completely up to you to decide, but I urge you to take a listen to the world all around you before you make that decision.  If your characters find themselves in an environment conducive to a few choice four-letter words (a bar, a raging party, the dockyards, a drug bust), then something might seem a bit off if you attempt to scale things back for the sake of sparing your Aunt Edna’s ears.  The rest of your audience might notice that something is amiss too, as though your characters were written in a vacuum or a convent.  And, again, I would be remiss not to say that your Aunt Edna probably wasn’t always the saint you thought she was.

An important thing to remember is that your characters are not you, and your family and friends would be silly to think of them as being so.  Yes, they were born of your imagination, and yes, their words and deeds are controlled entirely by your dictation, but only to such an extent as they are avatars, symbols, representative of the demographics of an imagined society which also shapes their demeanor just as much as your own grasp does.  If you put them into a world of complete fantasy, then yes, you can mandate that said world tends toward a certain mode of behavior, as squeaky-clean as you want.  But if your characters’ surroundings are based on reality, then any effort to write contrary to that reality will come across as artificial, and can be a jarring experience to your readers, even pulling them out of the flow of the text at times.

This having been said, it should also be a matter of your target audience (your real target audience, not your neighborhood church cookout).  Are you writing a work of “young adult” fiction?  If so, maybe you do want to keep things closer to PG-13, but never lose sight of the environment your characters inhabit.  I’m not saying you should set out to get yourself banned from every school library from here to Hoboken, but, on the other hand, you don’t want to ignore the world the modern “tween” is emerging into, either.

My point is simply this:  while you are writing, put your immediate circle of social influence out of your mind. . . completely.  Write the prose you want to write, or better yet, the prose you would want to read!  This is your story, your baby.  Especially if it’s your first attempt at published writing:  do what you want to do.  I leave you, for now, with a couple of quotes from the legendary Bob Dylan.

“Everything passes, everything changes… just do what you think you should do.”

“. . . It is not he or she or it that you belong to.”

And one more quote. . . this one from Laura Dern as Diane in the current season of Twin Peaks:  “Fuck you, Gordon.”

And remember to go check out Issue #1 of the monthly oceanic adventure serial, Blue Daunia, if you haven’t already done so.  It’s only 99 cents, for Pete’s sake!