Writer Wednesday - In Control

As a writer...

You don't control your readers.
You don't control your sales.
You don't control your reviews.
You don't control your word-of-mouth.

You don't control what other people decide to think...
...about you.
....about your work.
.....about the world.
......about self-publishing or the publishing industry.
.......about spelling, or tense, or word choice, or subject matter.

You don't control your reputation... No, make that, you CAN'T control your reputation, no matter how hard you try.

All you can control is what you write.

When the things you don't control distract you, you take your eye off the ball.... and then you lose control of the only thing within your power.

Keep your eyes on the prize, folks.  Don't get distracted.

See you in the funny papers.

---

Progress report for "A Round of Words in 80 Days"

Sunday Day 63 - 240 minutes (approximately - kept forgetting to set the timer)
Monday Day 64 - 95 minutes.
Tuesday Day 65 - 75 minutes.

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.

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.