Wednesday Update - Tigers, Part Deux

 A Round of Words in 80 Days Meets The Clarion Write-a-Thon

This segment's progress:

Sunday Day 7 - I... don't remember what I did.  Whoops.  I think I did some art, and untangled some upcoming plot mess.
Monday Day 8 - Ep 20 - book version.
Tuesday Day 9 -Ep 21 - book version

I'm doing a sucky job of the rewrite.  Well, not so much that, as I'm not doing what I expected to do.  I expected to "let out the corset" on this, but now that I am into the compressed style of it, I don't feel the need to expand on what I've got. I just edit.  Maybe add a joke or other bit I cut, but mostly not.

Which may be okay, but...I feel like I'm missing an opportunity.

Well, on Monday night, I think I hit on what is wrong.  I need to write the longer, ebook version first.  Then compress for the blog.  Sure, when I compress, I find out great things about what is important in the scene -- but if that happens, it can become a guide to rewriting the long draft. 

Anyway, I'm going to try doing it that way for a while, and only go back to those early chapters after I'm done with these last ones.

Popcorn Tigers, Part Deux, or...

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blog

When I came up with the new plan to throw over everything and concentrate on this serial for a while, I didn't think about the subtext.

All of a sudden, my blog is no longer a distraction from my writing!

All you writers out there, I want you to stop and think about that.

I'm no longer taking time away from my writing to deal with my blog.  My blog now is my writing -- the center piece of it.  No guilt. No feeling of being split in a thousand different directions.  Yes, it's work.  There are also no excuses. Writing is like a job now. I gotta show up every day.

As a result... I will be going back to blogging six days a week in the fall.  (Not sure of exact date: I'll probably trickle material back in over summer.)

Here's what I'm thinking of as a blogging schedule:

• Monday: Story Episode
• Tuesday: Cartoon (possibly alternating with other art, jokes, flash fiction or "Story Notes" posts)
• Wednesday: Thinky Writery Stuff (with quick ROW80 Update at bottom).
• Thursday: Story Episode
• Friday: Friday Favorites -- essays about favorite books, movies and such
• Saturday: (off)
• Sunday: "What's Up on the Blog This Week?" (i.e. coming attractions -- what I used to call "review/preview" -- and the main ROW80 update.)

This is probably insane of me, to even think of blogging six days a week, with illustrations and fiction no less!  And at a time when the workload at school is likely to get tough. We had some faculty retirements in a sister-program, and one of my coworkers will probably be called on to pick up the slack there, and so I will probably need to take up some slack for him.

However, I have blogged every single day before, and done my writing challenges too.  It was a major struggle, but it was two separate tasks. With the merging of two tasks into one, it should be doable.  Maybe more doable than before.

In the meantime....

See you in the funny papers.

Sunday Update - and Popcorn Tigers

A Round of Words in 80 Days Meets The Clarion Write-a-Thon

Wednesday Day 3 - artwork and some notes for the future
Thursday Day 4 - Ep 21
Friday Day 5 - rewrite Ep 4 for ebook
Saturday Day 6 - rewrite Eps 5-6 for ebook

Managed to do four episodes in four days, which was the goal.  I didn't do the artwork I wanted to do.

I also note that I don't feel the need to rewrite as much as I thought for the ebook version. There are a few places (so far) where I have "outtakes" I want to restore. And a few places where the prose is too tight.  Most of my energy is being spent on sorting out the best way to handle the upcoming complications.


The Blog Story Experiment - Changing My Life

I've tried to write this post twenty times.  So far it has turned into The Rambling Incoherent Post That Ate Toledo every time.  (Well, not completely incoherent - I probably have a few very nice individual posts mixed in.)

I seem to have gone from Popcorn Kittens to Popcorn Tigers.  Or something.

See, popcorn kittens is what happens when new opportunities crop up -- ideas and such go zinging around your head like, well, popcorn kittens.  But the thing about opportunities is that they change everythign.  They tear your world apart.  (You know, the song from Les Miz -- "the tigers come at night, with their voices soft as thunder"?  Like that, only positive.  Because they're Popcorn Tigers, not the Tigers of Oppression.)

I wrote that discovering indie publishing two years ago was like Joe Konrath took me by the arm and said "Duck, meet water."  It was like coming home.  Well, I was wrong. That was just a puddle.  That was the first shoe to drop.  The second shoe (the big pond, if we want to keep both metaphors going) finally dropped this summer with this web serial.

This has caused me to change my plans completely.

THIS is what I want to do with my life.  This is it.  It's the unified field of my life: publishing, web geekery, writing and dreaming -- putting an episode to bed, with  illustration and proper links and all that, twice a week.

You know how writers dream about holding the printed version of their book in their hand? Or looking in the TOC of a magazine and seeing their byline and title?  Well, I get that feeling of satisfaction twice a week now.

Seriously, last night I was looking at my bookshelves, and thinking about clearing out that last shelf of old magazines, and I realized that they were the copies of my own works.  And I thought "oh, uh, okay, I guess I should keep those."

I realized that those didn't actually mean that much to me any more.  I was more concerned about my old original editions of Mother Earth News than my ego-copies of my work.  And that was a weird feeling.

The Smile On The Face of the Tiger

"There once was a lady from Niger
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger
They came back from the ride
With the lady inside
and the smile on the face of the tiger"

The problem is that this is changing my life plan -- or at least my three-year writing plan.

I have a very good three-year plan.  I was going to concentrate on writing my two mystery series and getting a solid base for each series.  I've got people waiting for the next Mick and Casey.  (Not lots of people, but enough that I hear from them.)

That plan has a reasonable shot at making some income from writing.  It's an established business model.  It's sensible -- and it's not like it isn't fun too.

When I started this serial it was something fun to do over summer.  I was planning to go back to regular writing in the fall. Sure, I planned to continue posting a serial, but I would use this other story. One I've already written, and it wouldn't disrupt my sensible, well-thought-out plans.

That might be enough for me, and I still might do that.

But right now that tiger is whispering to me, and I'm thinking that this experiment -- with this story -- won't be done at the end of the summer.  I think I need to go a whole year on it.  Or at least through the end of this year.

What's wrong with this?  Why is the tiger smiling?

Well, first, this new plan is a whole flock of birds in the bush.  No, just the sound of birds in the bush. I don't even know if the birds are really there.  It could just be one of those noisy cat toys.

Since I started this serial, I have seen a record increase in blog traffic -- just raw numbers of views on my blog.  But I haven't seen an increase in subscriptions, and reader response has dropped -- fewer comments, fewer retweets.  Book sales have dropped to zero.

I have a theory -- only a theory, mind you -- that this serial is having more effect than it seems.

This is the time of year when internet traffic of all kinds drops.  Sales slump, comments stop - just as I've been experiencing.  And yet my blog traffic is increasing -- due to people clicking through multiple episodes, mainly.  The lack of comments is partly because writers (my regular audience) tend to comment to support each other, but readers read in private.  They don't want a dialog.

So maybe my writer audience is drifting off for the summer as usual, but they're being replaced by regular readers.  Which would be cool, but I can't tell until this has gone on for a little longer. Is it just another of those weird blips in network data?

I have another, larger theory, which is what I have been basing my strategy on for a while:

Readers can take a long time to get hooked on a story/characters -- especially with certain genres, or with totally off-genre work like I write.  It takes even longer for them to get hooked on an author sufficiently to try her other works.  This is why I wanted to write those foundation books for my mystery series -- so that if someone liked one book, they'd find a couple more books with the same characters.

But those books are slow to write.  Neither series likes to be rushed. I've learned that.  It will take years to gain any traction with them.

On the other hand, this serial does seem to be gaining a tiny bit of traction already.  (It makes sense that it would because the episodes each have a new chance to hook the reader -- there is time and volume involved.)  However, I won't know, can't know, if this actually is gaining traction until I let it go through a full cycle.  Let it run in fall and winter, when blog traffic is high.  See if people will buy the first book while the second story runs.

To stop at the end of this story would mean to lose momentum and never know what that momentum could bring.  (I do know, from experience from my other books, what it means to lose momentum.  It ain't pretty.)

So I'm going to continue with this serial, at least through the second story (The Case of the Misplaced Bomb, I think) this fall.  I'll see how that goes. Maybe I'll do a third in the series after that, maybe I'll take a break and start that other series for a while.

I won't stop working on my other books.  There should be time. It'll just be slower and lower priority.

So what else is new?

See you in the funny papers.

The Unique Issues of Exposition in a Serial

I originally conceived The Misplaced Hero to be like a serial, not to be an actual serial.  And originally the story was to start with what will happen in Thursday's upcoming episode -- a conversation between Alex and his professor, Old Thorny.  All that you've seen so far, in the first three episodes, was covered as exposition within the discussion.

And I think it worked that way in a regular story.  I have a screenwriting background and I love dialog and a chapter-long conversation can be fun.  However, if I'm going with 600 words (or less) per episode, I can't do it that way.  A conversation has an arc, and a flow, and it just wouldn't break up well.

Furthermore, even though conversation can be efficient in conveying simple facts, it can also add a lot of overhead in terms of subtext and emotion.  If the audience already knows something -- has already seen it happen -- then a good portion of the subtext is already there for them.  They know how the character feels.  You don't have to wave a flag, for instance, to indicate that a character doesn't mean what he's saying.  The audience already knows that.  A writer can be more subtle and natural.

And I can also be more efficient, and more focused.  In Thursday's episode, the audience will already know what Alex thinks, so they can just concentrate on figuring out the conflicting emotions within his professor.

That's an interesting side-effect to doing a short-episode serial: To make these small scenes work, I have to dig out each dramatic element and give it its own separate moment in the sun. Even the boring stuff has to work all by itself.

And that is a cool opportunity.

Well, a challenge, anyway.  A learning opportunity.

The dramatic element in yesterday's episode was very abstract.  It was about literary theory, of all things.  Can literary theory make a good episode in an adventure story?  There are no swashing of bucklers, no swinging on ropes; just the sparking of synapses and the opening of an envelope.

And yet... and yet....  The sparking of synapses in the brain is where it all happens. 

Like Alex, I read Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man in college, and it had a similar odd effect on me.  My response was not cynical though.  Ellison's book illustrated to me that superheroes and reality are not mutually exclusive.  Invisible Man is an origin story.  The superpower involved is truth.  The invisible man is hidden, buried in the insincere meaningless hollow crap of society, and the recognition of truth is like being bitten by a radioactive spider.  The synapses of this anonymous guy are firing.  And though I was never really sure if that man would get out of the place he was in, or if just his story would, but I felt like when he comes out, he won't be anonymous - they'll call him Mr. Tibbs.  He'll be Samuel L. Freaking Jackson.

If you want to talk about a real Inciting Incident, in life or in fiction, it's when the synapses fire.  That's where change begins.  Sometimes even when the actual thought itself appears trivial or impossible.

So I don't know if Episode Three is a very good episode in terms of being the most interesting episode, but to me, it's a great outcome for the experiment.

See you in the funny papers.

Blog Story Experiment - Presentation

One of the surprising things I've noticed when I browse around on many successful web serial sites is that an awful lot of them don't seem to care about new readers.

If you come in on Episode 57, you are just plain out of luck.  There is no information about how to get to the start of the story, no "about the story" page where you can see a posting schedule or find out anything about the world or plot or the characters. There's often some chatter about a special feature or something, which assumes you already know all about it. (Like "Don't forget to vote for the Dubgaggle of the week or I won't do it!" with no link and no explanation of what a Dubgaggle is, or what will or won't be done if I don't vote.)

I can only assume that these serials have a related community or forum somewhere, and that's where all the readers come from.  This creates a very "insider" and "outsider" dynamic, which might make the insiders more likely to give financial support, but it drives away a lot of new readers.

Like me, for one.

This is one of the two major reasons I have never gotten hooked by a web serial -- even though I like serials and have been actively looking for interesting ones to follow.  (The other major reason is when the text itself is presented in tiny white type on a black background, and also is very dense -- with long unbroken paragraphs that scroll on forever.)

Rule one: Make it easy on the reader!

So I'll start that by making sure every episode links back to the first episode and the intro.  Eventually I may do a "Table of Contents" or an "About the World" page which can be an index and info page for everything a new reader may want to know.

(To that end, here is a link to the introduction to the story I'll be blogging this summer on Mondays.  Also here is some background on the experiment.)

Now, that said, I do think the ideal web serial would be something like a comic strip or TV series, and even if you don't know the history, you can enjoy what's going on right now.  I mean, you can tell from context and behavior that Lucy always pulls the football away from Charlie Brown, and that it's an act of faith for him to try again to kick that ball.  It's funnier if you know all the different ways she has tricked him, and thus you can appreciate what was different this time -- but the joke still works.

Still, a story has an arc, and unless you are doing anecdotes (which is actually an interesting option for an ongoing serial) you do need to respect the fact that your audience will want to catch up with the whole thing.

Nobody Can Do Everything

I also understand the fact that no blogger can serve everyone perfectly.  Not unless they have a full time webmaster on staff.  I mean, I have a number of related posts on this blog which I have not put in links to interconnect them.  Every so often I go back and put in links to make it easier -- but I can't do it all.

So even though there are a million things I could do to make the experience of this web story magnificent and effortless, I'm going to try to keep it simple for this summer.  If I feel the urge to run a Dubgaggle contest, I will restrain myself until I have the resources and attention span to do it right.

And that, my friends, is very often the real secret to success -- don't bite off more than you can chew. 

See you in the funny papers.

Hopes vs. Fears

Whenever you get a new idea, it'll begin with popcorn kittens: your head will be filled with wild, enthusiastic motion, as ideas beget new ideas and you see more and more opportunities.

But then, after the kittens wear themselves out, and head for nappy time, B9 the Robot starts patrolling around.  At first you start having (well-founded) doubts about some of the ideas.  And then you start wondering which of many options would be best. And pretty soon all those shiny new options are looking a little scary and then downright threatening....

And next thing you know B9 is rolling around in circles, waving his useless arms crying "Danger, Will Robinson!"

Fears partly come from hopes.  You hope to succeed.  That success is only in your head -- a wonderful possibility.  But after a bit, you start to own that imaginary success, to possess it like you already have it in hand -- like it's something you could lose.  And suddenly all doubts become a threat to that imaginary thing you own.

Side story: when I was about five or six, my cousin and I got into a terrible fight.  My aunt came running to ask what was the matter.
"She got more than I did!" said one of us.
"More of what?" asked the aunt.
"More pie!"
"What pie?"
"The pie we're pretending we baked!"

Anyway, here is a look at the hopes and fears I've been experiencing on this planned experiment in serialized fiction.  Strangely, every one of them applies to just about any creative endeavor a writer might take on.

HOPE: To get this story out there.

FEAR: I'll be overwhelmed with the deadlines and the format will turn out to be more difficult and less creative than I thought, and the story will suck or I'll hate it by the end.
REALITY: Set reasonable goals, and then the only a problem would be if you try to overachieve.  If you rush, slow down.  If it sucks, back off to work with it more traditionally, with skills you already have.

HOPE: This story will find its audience.

FEAR 1: Nobody will find it without tons of promotion, and probably in places I'm unfamiliar with and don't know anything about.
REALITY: And they'll find it in your head?  Besides, if nobody finds it, you don't have to worry about how good it is, do you?  It's a learning experience.  Learning in private is not bad.

FEAR 2: The wrong audience will find it.
REALITY: So? 

FEAR 3: The audience will be put off or frustrated by the format.
REALITY: That's a valid fear.  But that's why it's an experiment. You have to try it to find out if the format suits the story.  If it suits the story and the audience doesn't like it, then see Fear 2: they're not the audience for this story.

Plus, you don't have to offer it in just one format forever.  Or even for now. That's a part of the learning curve -- find the formats and delivery methods that work for it.  Experiment.

FEAR 4: I'll lose my existing audience, because I will do less of what I have been doing and more of something new.
REALITY: This is a major issue for writers. All of us do it, usually without realizing it:  You write for the person giving you feedback.  Even if that person is a teacher being paid to give feedback, or a fellow writer who is ONLY giving feedback because she gets it in return.

I love you guys, but I honestly have no real idea what draws you here or not. I don't know how many of you are even real people, or just server 'bots or spiders checking links across the internet.  Even if some of you express an opinion, I have no idea if I change the content whether you'll love it or hate it, or if the silent majority will be enthralled or run for the hills.

The worst mistake any writer can make is to let an imagined audience limit you.  Heck, not even a real audience.  Seriously.  It's a trap. To quote Ricky Nelson: "You can't please everyone, so you've got to please yourself."


He wrote that song in response to an oldies concert at Madison Square Garden where people booed him for being different than they remembered.

I think one of the key lines of that song is "If memories were all I sang, I'd rather drive a truck."  If you want to be an artist -- or just a happy human being -- you have to have the strength to walk away.

HOPE: This could lead to something big.  This could attract readers. This could be a massive success!

FEAR 1: I'll be successful, and things will grow too fast, and I won't be able to keep up!
REALITY: So?
FEAR 1: What do you mean, "so?"
REALITY: So how is this worse than not doing it at all, may I ask?
FEAR 1: I'll have made commitments! I'll... I'll let people down. I'll....
REALITY: Be embarrassed?  So nu?
(Have you noticed that Reality is sounding more and more like a Jewish mother?)
REALITY (cont): If you're worried about being too successful, then don't be so successful.  If you're worried about promises, don't make promises.  Look back to the top of this article for the bit about the fear of being overwhelmed.

FEAR 2: What if I get caught up in the success, and go chasing after promotional opportunities and stop writing for the audience that loves this?  Or let it interfere with my writing?
REALITY: You'll get over it.  And if you don't, you'll have to remind yourself stop doing that.

FEAR 3: What if I make a wrong choice, and I miss out on the success I could have had!
REALITY: So you can't try again?  It's an experiment!  You try something, it doesn't work, you try something else.  Why is this so frightening?

This last fear tends to seem very complex when you're in the midst of it -- we have thousands of choices to make, and they seem all so critical. They all seem like a crossroads which will lead you on an inexorable path to somewhere.  But the solution to all of them is really simple: you make a wrong turn, you go around the block and try again.  If you get lost a lot, you will get to know the neighborhood really well, too.

I once had a student aide who insisted on using the wrong software for any task.  He did his word processing, for instance, in Adobe Illustrator, page layout in Photoshop, and his drawing?  He did it in Pagemaker -- with the box and line tools.  In the end, he knew all of those programs way better than anyone else did.

So, when fears rise up, confront them.  Look them in the eye with the flat cynicism of a Jewish mother and tell them to stop being silly and eat their soup.

See you in the funny papers.

Hmmmm, blogs ARE serials, aren't they?

A long time ago in a land not so very far away, I decided to write something off the top of my head.  A wandering story.  A serial.

It would be called "The Perils of Lady Pauline," and it would begin as high fantasy with flying unicorns, and outlaws and rebels and magic trees, etc, but at any moment, if I got bored with it, I could have the characters kidnapped by aliens and ported off to the modern day U.S. or off to Star Wars land.  Just whatever I felt like writing that day.

It would be great fun, I was sure.  (To write, if not to read.)

I was, I think, in college by this time, but hadn't yet decided to be a writer.  And although I had a highly developed imagination and storytelling ability, I did not have writing skills to match.  My mind flew too fast, and I typed too slow.  (And as I've learned since, I can't even translate what happens in my head into language that fast, let a lone write it down.)

So that story got to about three pages -- solid, single-spaced text, edge to edge, on erasable onion skin. (Which means that even if I'd kept it, it would have dissolved long before now.)  And there it stalled.

The story, as I remember it: Lady Pauline was a noblewoman, a pawn in some evil lord's scheme to take power, and she was a captive who escaped with the help of a band of wild peasants, and a couple of mercenary outlaws (one of whom she would fall in love with when they stopped arguing).  You know.  Standard stuff.  I never got to the unicorns or the space ship that would haul them off to modern day Peoria.

Pauline's story never even rose to the level that I particularly cared about it.  Images didn't haunt me, nor did I get ideas from dreams.

But the concept stayed with me.

Basically, it's exploratory writing -- just letting things go, letting them be illogical if necessary, making jumps if necessary.  But it's different than exploratory writing in that this would would not have any ulterior motive: it would be for its own sake.

And that, ironically makes it harder and less free.  Exploratory writing, after all, is part of a larger process.  It can be utterly disjointed and nonsensical because it's raw material for something else.  It's not finished, and never whole.

But this idea, for all its free-form inspiration, is about bringing a whole story into being.

I've indulged this idea in my journal quite a bit, and the spontaneous stories -- often from dreams and other things -- have become a stockpile of raw material for "real" stories.  But some of these stories have stubbornly kept their identity, refusing to adapt to anything else, especially not something rational or publishable.

Over the past couple of years these have coalesced into a project I've been calling "The Serial."  I decided to develop and write The Serial into a Real Book some day.

Except....

Except something has been happening to my head lately.  I need to break out of a rut.  I have more skills now than I did when I was young.  And I keep hearing Dean Wesley Smith's voice, shouting "Dare to be bad! Write with no plan!"

And then two more things happened.

One is that I started reading John Le Carre, and I rediscovered the joys of the omniscient told story.  The Honourable Schoolboy in particular is so lovely in its pure story telling style.  Summary, exposition, often just dipping into vivid scenes and then out again.  Wry, sly, and yet somehow the truth laid bare.  It'll be logical and puzzling and interesting and then suddenly it'll fly into a beautiful, personal, painful moment that just makes me want to put the book down and lie on the floor and kick my feet and hands like a baby for simple writerly joy.

The other thing that happened was that Kris Rusch wrote a post about how publishing is changing, and someone in the comments wrote about how she'd built up her audience via a blog serial.

Now, a year ago, when you'd hear someone mention the world serial, you'd get a whole chorus of "Eewww!  I HATE serials!"  But this time, there was a whole chorus of "I've been thinking about that too."

And suddenly I knew something.  I didn't want to write a finished story and serialize it.  I wanted to freewrite the draft of this story.  No, not even a draft!  I wanted one of the secondary characters (Lily, a budding journalist) to pour out what she felt like saying about her world and the stories that happen in it.  Not just a story, but something more natural.

In other words, I want Lily to write... a blog!

(Well, not exactly a blog, because she lives in a world without computers.  But she's a would-be journalist and so she see it more as dispatches and memoirs and letters.)

So, next Monday, I'll formally introduce the new feature -- explain a little about the story and what my goals are and what to expect.  Then on May 7, Lily will begin her weekly column, telling of her friends, her foes, herself, her world, and their stories.

(FOLLOW UP NOTE: while this thought did indeed inspire me to jump in and write the serial, I decided to drop the concept of Lily as a blogger.  I found that she just told the story, and other than an awkward opening, she didn't add anything.  However, I still like the idea and I might very well give her a blog later on.)



See you in the funny papers.