Rescuing Books On Goodreads (Urgent)

(UPDATE! A Goodreads librarian on KB is saying that the books published by the KDP program -- that is, self-published on Amazon -- will not be affected. However, Goodreads IS marking KDP books as in need of rescue. It might be good to wait for the rescue until next week at least. -- but it would still be a good idea to set up that page on your own blog.)

One of the many reasons you might want to be on a site like Kindleboards is that the writer's grapevine is fast and furious. Even though I stopped hanging out there, I pause back to check to see if anything exciting is going on in the indie world.

Today I discovered that Goodreads is going to delete a whole bunch of books as of Jan 30 (but you can "rescue" your books by entering new data).

This has caused much panic, paranoia and anger, because Goodreads has only said that they will delete all books which have their data entered from Amazon. And they don't say why.

I'm going to go out on a limb, and guess that Amazon just accused them of data theft, and they are no longer allowed to get data from Amazon. I suspect this because they require you to swear you got the data legally. They wouldn't say that if they weren't suddenly paranoid about being accused of stealing the data.

This may actually be a good thing (depending on how the new system is implemented). If you set up book pages on your own site, you can use that as the source, which means people can have links to all possible purchase points. And that means maybe you can have a little more control over how your book appears on the site. (The question will be whether you can update and correct mistakes, or if you have to a 'librarian' to do it -- which was always a problem with Goodreads. Maybe it's good that not just any user can edit data, but the author should automatically be considered a "librarian" for the work.)

If you have books on Goodreads, you can check to see if they need rescuing by going to your author page and clicking on the link to each book. It will have a banner over the books that need fixing. Click on that and write down all the data you're going to need to re-enter the book.

They will want the following information:

• Book Title (required)
• Author Name (required)
• Source URL (required)
• Cover Image
• Description (I notice this field is not available for all books)
• Format (hardback, mmpb, ebook, etc.)
• Publisher
• Publication Date

As far as I can tell, that "Source URL" must be a NON-Amazon link, and it should be the verifiable sourse for your info. You could just use Smashwords or B&N, but I'm going to make my own page for it all. This is something we all should have anyway -- a central repository for all the info, including all those links for all those different stores. It would be a good idea to have a different page for each book, but just one detailed catalog page would do.

Or you could just let them delete it, and re-enter it anew later later. I think, though, that if you want to keep all the ratings and review data, you may have to rescue it by the deadline.

Me, I'm going to use this as incentive to update my blankety-blank webpage.

See you in the funny papers.

Friday Favorites - Bullet For A Star

Sometimes I think that if Stuart M. Kaminsky had been super human, I might never have become a writer.

See, Mr. Kaminsky wrote stories that I really wanted to read. And my motivation for writing was because I couldn't find enough stories that I really wanted to read. So if he had only been able to write even faster than he did (and he was prolific) maybe I wouldn't have needed to be a writer.

But he didn't write any faster than he did, and he didn't write the stories that were in my head, so in the end, he had the opposite affect: he didn't turn me into a writer, but he sure as heck accellerated the process.

He made me want more.

Kaminsky was a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master, won an Edgar and was nominated for nearly every other mystery award. He had a madcap absurdity, and a gentle pathos to everything he wrote, whether it was comedy or drama. Even his police procedurals, set in the harsh world of Chicago, and the harsher world of Soviet Moscow, had a redemptive sweetness to them.

Much as I liked his police procedurals, and other series, my first love is and always has been Toby Peters -- a down and out private investigator in Hollywood in the 1940's. Toby was his first fiction series, and his longest, at 24 books. I have all of them and I tried to limit myself to re-reading only three in a year as I waited for the next one to come out.

And they've been out of print and hard to find, and that has sorrowed me deeply....

Until this month, when I discovered that Mysterious Press/Open Road is releasing the first sixteen or so books in ebook format. And even though I already own them all in paper, and even though the price is a little on the high side at $9.99, I'll be re-buying them all over time.

And I'll be reviewing them as I read them. Because I want you to know how cool these books are.

Bullet For A Star

The Toby Peters saga begins in 1940. Errol Flynn is being blackmailed, and the studio needs somebody to handle the pay off quietly and cleanly. They call on Toby, an aging PI with a bad back and a smashed nose, to handle the transaction. Toby, who was fired from his job as a Warner security guard at the studio several years earlier, is out of cash and happy to get the job. However, the job doesn't go so well, but that's par for the course for Toby. Getting beat up, shot, framed for murder, beat up again, framed for another murder... that's pretty much Toby's daily life.

This first book in the series is a little different from the rest as it is a little more hard-boiled, thought it is still a pastiche. It involves one moderately explicit sex scene, and not as much silliness as the other books. Even so, it is a good set up for the series, because it really does lay the foundation for everything that makes you love Toby.

When we first meet him, Toby Peters seems like a complete loner. He's on his own, on the edge, with nothing more to his name than what's in his pockets, and nobody to fall back on when he (frequently) falls. He's a tough guy, but not a mean one. As a matter of fact, there is a gentleness to Toby that makes him a lot less of a loner than he seems. The fact is, over the course of the book, you find out he has an unexpectedly strong network of family and friends, many of whom want nothing to do with him -- an angry, alienated bully of a big brother, and Toby's ex-wife in particular -- and yet there is a thread of affection which keeps them all in orbit.

This sets up the fact that Toby is a patient guy, who has a lot of affection for his fellow human beings, even those who are greater misfits than himself. And as the series wears on, that affection is like a magnet drawing people into his life.

Aside from the pleasure of the characters, though, this series is also a beautifully researched historical novel too. Kaminsky, before he took to fiction, was a film historian. He wrote one of the great books of academic theory about film and popular culture, American Film Genres. The books all take place at a very specific time and day in history, and Kaminsky gives us great details, down to what was on the radio, and what was in the papers (via Toby's dry ironic hard-boiled narration).

Toby also crosses paths with lots of real characters from Hollywood history, some not so well known, so it can be hard to pick out all the real ones from those he makes up. In this one Peter Lorre gives him advice on the case, and Frank Capra reacts unexpectedly to Toby crashing through the set of Meet John Doe. Bogie helps him track down a suspect on a location shoot for High Sierra, and several scenes take place on the set for the Maltese Falcon -- which ws being built for filming at the time.

The most fun thing about this specificity, though, is that the stories in the series are continuous: at the end of this story, Toby gets a call from Judy Garland, who showed up for a publicity shoot on the dismantled set for the Wizard of Oz, only to find a dead ex-Munchkin. And at the end of Murder On The Yellow Brick Road, Toby gets a call from the Marx Brothers....

If you like humor and adventure, combined with a little dramatic weight and sentiment, you'll love Toby. I really can't recommend these books highly enough. You can get Bullet For A Star at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple's iBookstore and other vendors.

Next Friday I'll talk about Black Orchids -- the first Nero Wolfe I read.

See you in the funny papers.

New Books Finally At Barnes and Noble

This morning The Man Who Did Too Much finally hit Barnes and Noble. , and Apple's iBookstore. However, they haven't got the book description up yet. (You can see that here.)

It was already available at Smashwords, Amazon.com, as well as Amazon's international stores: UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain.

The short story collection 5 Twists hit B&N a little while ago, and is now up at Apple. It's also available at Smashwords, Amazon.com, as well as Amazon's international stores: UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain.

Wednesday Progress Report

Not nearly as much success to report as I'd like, but I am still very happy with the work I'm doing. This book is filling out nicely. I am still trying to juggle a few too many other things, and I need to identify them and get them out of the way.

A Round Of Words In 80 Days Update:

Sunday Day 14 - 85 minutes. Still not sure I didn't have a bug of some sort. Or the super cold dry weather is doing a number on me. However, I did get "widows and orphans" and small caps done on the paper book layout (even if I still haven't done the end material.) I really need to upload that thing tomorrow.

The layout work, though, was off the clock, because it's a writing day. Though it began slowly, I did get a reasonable writing session in tonight, and I brought the old vision into focus with the new one. I believe I have set myself up for a great session tomorrow.

Monday Day 15 - 149 minutes. Some very good work done today, even though I had to stop and make chicken wings, and then eat too many of them -- and that took about three and a half hours out of my day. (I watched four episodes of Leverage, back to back, while doing this.) The story is definitely moving along at an appropriate pace for a novel, as Mick and Casey get conned into doing a whole lot of manual labor in their attempts to do a little forensic investigation.

Tuesday Day 16 - 103 minutes. The new material is going well, but I've had to tear out some threads and reweave a couple of times. I have several bits of information which I have to trickle in and I'm trying to figure out the best place. I'm not sure if I should just delay some of it. I think I need to start skipping things, and write it forward, and then drop those items in later.

In the meantime, I guess Amazon hasn't stopped doing price matching for free books after all: Waiter, There's a Clue In My Soup! is now free again at Amazon, as well as at other vendors. (They don't usually match it for other countries, unfortunately -- but you can get it free at Smashwords.) For Mick and Casey fans, there are two of their short stories in this collection.

I'll talk about that book more when I update my "high price experiment" (which isn't going well, because Sony keeps discounting Have Gun, Will Play, and so Amazon won't raise it to full price. However it does seem to be going well at Barnes & Noble.

On Friday, I'll be posting about Stuart Kaminsky and his Toby Peters books, probably my most favoritest books of all time.

See you in the funny papers.

Making The Jump To Full-Time Writing, Part 1

Many of us start writing as a spare time hobby. And for some people it will remain a hobby -- something to do for fun when the mood strikes. That's a perfectly valid way to write, and one of the great things about both the internet and the new world of indie publishing: it gives the hobbyist an outlet for that work. (And I will probably write more about that later.)

This series of posts, though, is for those of us who see writing as something we'd like to do full time - regardless of whether it's a hobby or not.

It could be a job or small business which supports us financially, or it could be an artistic avocation (related to a religious vocation) which takes up all our time when we don't have to do something else. While an avocational writer might prefer to win the lottery and not worry about the market, most aim to make a living at writing so they don't have the distractions of a day job.

Money and Time

When we think about making the transition from working a day job, to being a full time writer, we tend to focus on The Bills. That is, we think about how much money we have to make at writing in order to afford quitting the day job.

Financial considerations are a big issue, and I'll talk more about those next week, but for this post I'll keep it simple:

Generally, in order to make the kind of money needed to quit the day job, you have to have been writing full time for a while -- which you can't do while working the day job.

Which is a conundrum -- or as I like to think of it, a chasm. You can't make the leap without the money, you can't make the money without the leap.

This gap is very wide in traditional publishing -- where you not only have to be writing at full professional level long before you make a sale, but you will also have to wait a very looooong time after that before getting paid. And that is crushing to the soul when you realize it.

It wasn't always that bad, though: In the grand old days writers could develop their skills and habits and still make some money by writing short fiction for magazines and newspapers -- and that provided a buffer to get across the chasm before you make the transition to full time writing.

And now days, indie publishing can also provide a buffer. It may not be a big one, but you can get your work out there earlier, and you get paid faster, even if it is low amounts. You can build your momentum slowly, scaling the business as you go. You don't have to leap. You can hike. (See Dean Wesley Smith's post about this. Though he tends to encourage a flat out run, you don't need to go quite as fast as he does.)

However, this post isn't about money.

There is something else you have to think about before you make that transition: you have to think about your time and habits. If the structure of your life is built on your day job, that structure will collapse when the job is gone. It happens to both freelancers and retirees all the time. It's something that you need to plan for.

Ways to Deal With The Life Structure Problem

There are two general approaches to preparing for a major life change:

One way to deal with this is to simply throw yourself at your non-writing to get it out of the way as fast as possible. The goal here is not to think about writing, but only about quitting that day job. Throw yourself into becoming financially independent, and then worry about building a new life afterwards. This is what is proposed by the self-help book Your Money Or Your Life. There is a lot to be said for this book. It's particularly useful for folks who are already in a high paying profession, and don't have time to write now. Those people make enough money to have a hope of retiring early, and the demands of their profession interfere with creative work too much anyway.

This concept has two problems: It assumes that you can stop writing, and it assumes that if you manage to stop, you can start again. You will essentially be starting from scratch when you finally get back to writing, and it may not go as well as you hoped. Life is short. You could have a heart attack doing all that work before you ever get to your dreams.

Me, I loved Your Money Or Your Life, but it was out of the question for me because I can't set aside my writing. So using a plan like theirs was a non-starter. I have, however, paused my writing for shorter periods of time to take care of issues in my life. I also put a lot of energy into finances whenever I did, so that I would have something of a buffer when I came out the other side. So at least thinking about that solution was helpful.

The second way to deal with the structural change that comes with full self-employment, is to build an alternative structure that isn't dependent on the day job. It's harder because it requires you to split your attention. The two posts I did about writing as a part time job were all about managing that split in attention. (Read it: Part 1, Part 2. )

However those posts were about surviving with that split over a long time, with no end in sight. And yes, that is important, because it make take you a very long time to make that transition. But if you are actually going to make that shift, you have to do more than survive. You have to actually shift yourself.

The key, I think, is to find the right job and overall work situation.

I like academia for several reasons, but one big one is the seasonal nature of it: whether you like it or not, you will have semester breaks, and maybe summers off. While that kind of stop-and-go schedule isn't ideal for developing your writing habits, it does do one thing: it gives you a chance to use that time to develop "day job-free" zones in your life. And not just weekends -- actual extended periods of time.

Long breaks are like a dress rehearsal for quitting the job. And you may very well find, at first, that all you succeed in doing is demonstrating that making the switch is not easy.

If you can subsist on a part time job -- or at least have the kind of job which you can wean your hours down from beyond full-time, to part-time, to consulting work -- that is ideal, because you can work on creating that writing schedule and structure more formally.

This helps not only with physically having time to do the work, but you can start thinking of your day job as the one you're moonlighting at.

And if you're young and you have energy, you could potentially push your writing up to full time before you actually have to give up that day job.

Now, One Big Warning....

One trap many writers fall into is that once you realize it's possible to make a living at writing, you start thinking of it as a way out of your troubles. Instead of being annoyed at your day job because it interferes with your writing, you start clinging to your writing as a white knight which will rescue you from your day job.

If you find yourself doing that, stop yourself right now. Don't think that way. Just don't. It will kill you.

Writing is too slow and too unpredictable to rescue you from anything. Even if you happen to achieve some wonderful success in your first year or two... that is likely to fade. Especially if you were so busy with marketing and other premature success efforts that you didn't prepare to handle the aftermath.

Instead, say this to yourself regularly:

"Writing will not rescue me. I must rescue my writing. If I want to write full time, I need to find a way to sustain myself and my writing with the resources I have now -- perhaps until retirement."

Novel Dares

A little over ten years ago, I maneuvered my work situation to about half time. The new schedule was to start in January, and as the end of the old year wound down, some Clarion folks I knew online started talking about doing a novel dare. Most Clarion novel dares were more intense than even NaNoWriMo -- often 2000-3000 words a day to finish a novel in a month. But that December, someone proposed a slower dare -- 1000 words a day for 60 days.

Hmmm, thought I, 1000 words a day is something I should be doing every day anyway. And if the whole point of reducing my hours (and taking an income hit) was to make time to write, I really need to put my (lack of) money where my mouth is. So I joined.

Though life has intervened multiple times since then, and laid me very low, that was the start of that new life structure that really worked for me. I do think that if indie publishing had been viable at that time -- the way it is now -- that would have provided the foundation I needed to move to full time writing much sooner.

Furthermore, if I'd had a steady but small income trickling in from indie writing, I could have powered through those tough times a little better. Some of those tough times were due entirely to the changes I was seeing in the publishing industry -- as I saw so many authors I liked lose their careers, or quit because they couldn't afford their "success" any more. It's discouraging to work so hard and then see your only option is something you simply don't want to be part of.

But no matter what your situation, or what you're battling, the very best way to build a structure in your life for writing, a structure which will survive any changes, is with a long term sustainable daily challenge. This will help even if the changes in your life are not voluntary.

I started this blog two years ago to have my own ongoing challenge which would not end. I needed it to build my structure and get me through. And that's why I am so pleased to find like-minded people in this A Round Of Words in 80 Days challenge.

The Most Important Element of a Writing Dare: Reporting

The reason your day job makes for such a strong structure in your life is because you have to show up. Some days, you may not do as well at the job. Some days, you may even call in sick. But you have to call in. The power is not in the doing, but in the showing up and calling in.

I notice a lot of writers in the ROW80 challenge who skip updates, or who make their goals vague and so their updates can't really say if they achieved them. Look, folks, go ahead and set low goals. Change them as your time situation changes. Heck, change them as your interest changes, but make those goals quantifiable, and whatever you do...

NEVER EVER MISS AN UPDATE REPORT.

Even if you don't achieve anything, even if you fail utterly, always always always make that report. The report is the structure you need to hang your habits on. No report, no structure, no goals, no habits, no nothing.

And if you're going to successfully make any kind of transition, it starts with that structure.

As I said at the top: the thing you're going to need when you change your life is a structure that fits that new life. Building that structure is more important at first than actually meeting goals.

You don't have to join an outside challenge or dare, or even create your own public dare. You can do it privately, in a journal. But whatever you do, you've got to show up every day, or you've got to call in.

Next week I'll talk a little about the money side of all this. But before that, I've got a challenge update (and you'll note that even though we only post updates twice a week, I actually have daily progress reports within each update. I don't go to bed any night until I have updated that post).

And Friday I want to talk about a favorite series which has just hit ebook format: Stuart Kaminsky's mystery series about Hollywood P.I., Toby Peters. The ebooks are a little overpriced, but even though I have all the books in paper, I will re-buy them for Kindle. That's how important these books are to me.

See you in the funny papers.

Monday Art - What I'm Working On

One of the sad things about ebooks is that it has to look reasonably good as a thumbnail.

And this goes against everything you get trained in if you learned to do art for print. Art for print is all about looking good in high-rez. For one thing, if you draw something too small, and then scale it up, it looks awful -- all pixelated.

And this is something you learn very strictly not to do -- not even to think about it. Except....

With ebooks, the most important images are the small, low-rez ones. That's what everybody's going to see all the time. It's either going to be the 100 x 150 thumbnail, or the somewhat larger image on the product page, usually around 200 x 300.

And here's the thing that makes it sad -- textures are in. And textures really don't scale. If they look good at a high resolution, they disappear completely in thumbnail. Or they become muddy and strange.

Now, when I say "texture" I don't mean it quite the way we do in out in the real world. Among ordinary humans, the word "texture" means a tactile surface -- bumpy or smooth or something you can feel. But in digital art, texture has come to an image where the surface has a pattern or color variations. It may appear to be stained or faded or discolored, or marbled like stone, or with woodgrain. It's basically just a surface.

(That's the reason we started calling it a "texture." In the early days of 3-D animation, the objects were smooth, and so to get the appearance of a texture, you would draw a picture that looked textured, and you'd apply it to the surface.)

Textures are really in vogue right now. You'll see scrapes and smudges even on "conservative" things like ads for banks and insurance companies. You'll see some really spiffy ones on modern print books. They add a lot of quick visual interest to plain, abstract designs. But like I said, they don't scale.

So I've decided to play around with creating textures which would scale. And I've decided the way to start is by going against the rules and starting out by creating the texture small -- at 200 pixels by 300 pixels, then upscaling them to 600 x 900 to do the details that matter most at a higher resolution. Because I started small, the main gist of the texture stays visible when it is then reduced back down to 100 x 150.

The two blue images here show one example. On the left is a close up of the higher rez version of the image, and on the right is the thumbnail of the whole image.

It's dark because I was experimenting with text, and it looks good with white or very light text on it. However, because I did it in layers -- with the texture itself in grayscale, and a blending layer to add the color, I can make it lighter or darker or a different color (or a number of different colors) to suit the mood. With some settings it looks icy, others it looks like stone. With the right red it can look bloody. I could also invert it so that the streaks in the foreground are dark, and the smudgy background is light.

The other cool thing about a texture is that it can be applied to something else. You may have seen it on some modern thriller covers. A scraped up grunge texture might be applied to a silhouette of a gun, for instance. Here you see a mock cover made using that design above. I dulled the texture so the text and the silhouette would stand out.

This, I think, could be a very nice technique for making memorable but quick short story covers. Once the texture is done, it's very quick to play with it, and knock out a whole bunch of covers like the one on the right. (I'm tempted, actually, to offer to do such covers in return for proofing.)

I'm thinking I may replace my cover for Harsh Climate with something like it. While that's one of my spiffier covers, it doesn't necessarily suit the book that well, and I don't want to use photos or stock on anything I use any more.

The textures I did here, I knocked out in Photoshop with some grunge brushes. Next week I think I'll play with Painter for some less "canned" effects.

See you in the funny papers.

ROW80 Update and Posting Schedule

As I mentioned earlier, I'm splitting my weeks, and doing art and layout Wednesday through Friday. Even though these are workdays at the day job, I'm thinking of them as my "weekend" when I take time off to do relaxing things at home.

And so far this is working really well for these artsy weekends. I'm very relaxed, and I'm getting some things done that I've wanted to get done. I'm going to add "blogging" as one of the tasks for Wed-Fri -- though at the moment I'm not doing it on the clock.

Blogging during this time will allow me to get the blog back on a schedule. I have three subjects I generally want to get to:

Mondays: Covers and Art. I'll talk about what I'm doing, and also about interesting covers and related topics.
Tuesdays: Writing Life and Business. I want to continue the series on writing habits, money issues, life and business stuff.
Fridays: Authors and Craft. As more and more backlists become available for Kindle, I really want to talk in depth about some of the books and authors who influenced my writing, and also about some craft issues that come up.

In the meantime, here is the Round Of Words In 80 Days Update:


Wednesday, Day 10 - 94 minutes. I watched TV on my computer and practiced drawing textures which would re-size from 100 pixels to 600 pixels. Then I did some layout for the paper version of The Man Who Did Too Much. I have completely forgotten all the little conversion hooks I did for Have Gun, Will Play -- so I reinvented the wheel for about a half hour, taking notes as I went. This time for sure!

Thursday, Day 11 - 55 minutes. Did some sketching and more work on layout. Should have done more, but didn't. (Actually, I did put some extra energy into editing yesterday's blog post.)

Tomorrow, possible snow day. (But most likely not.)

Friday, Day 12 - 85 minutes. Mainly layout. I'm definitely behind on getting the paper version of The Man Who Did Too Much done. Got it all in and formatted, but still have checking "widows and orphans" and such, and also have to decide what the "end matter" is going to be. I'll use the same author blurb as the ebook, but do I want an "other books" list? Pictures? Book covers? Excerpt?

Saturday, Day13 - 90 Minutes. Woke up with the worst sinus headache I've ever had in my life. I've mentioned my migraines, but I seldom get pain with those -- I just get stupid and blind. This was what I imagine other people with migraines must suffer. So the headache left me with an incredibly slow start for the day. The Tylenol eventually kicked in, but my first session was little more than some brainstorming (off the clock), and the evening session was a partial read-through. I am actually pleased with the results of both sessions.

More Thoughts on Writing Schedules

Call this an addendum to the Writing as a Second Job posts.

So now I begin a four day block of writing time. No, it won't all be writing time. It never is. It does, however, approximate what writing full time would be like: Saturday is shopping day. Sunday is socializing and going to the pictures day. Monday will usually be to myself. Tuesday will have appointments.

This is how it will ever be. Get three more days into that week, you'll undoubtedly find three more varieties of kerfuffle to commit to them. Which is okay. There still should be plenty of time to write. The problem is attention management.

For instance, Saturdays. Saturdays have not changed in this new schedule. They usually go thusly:

1.) Get up, wake up (usually in that order) get self and day sorted out (make shopping list, brush hair, comb teeth, remember my name, etc.). 1-2 hours.
2.) Head to Taco Bell with full writing kit. (This includes an ancient netbook, steno pads, pencils, my iPod Touch and my Kindle. Also 5 x 7 cards for sketching, just in case.) 2 hours.
3.) Shopping and errands. 2-3 hours.
4.) Cook. 2 hours. (I'm a serious cook.)

The remainder of the evening is spent this way (times highly variable):

5.) Screw around
6.) Set to work.... Ooooooo, shiny internet!
7.) No, really, set to work.... Urgent email about video with cute cats.
8.) Detailed political conversation, or major breaking news story.
9.) Actually setting to work.
10.) Oh, shoot, it's 2am and I've got to type in my blog update.

That's how every Saturday goes... but that doesn't mean it's not productive. That exact same scenario can be very productive or not at all productive. It depends largely on what happens in items 2 and 9. (And also 6 and 7.)

The thing about this new schedule is that so much will depend on that Saturday Taco Bell session. That's the moment when I transition into my full writing week -- and my mind won't be there after having been on a break. If I can set things up to hit the ground running, I can get momentum up for the week.

(And given this morning's headache, which completely derailed the first session, you can see how it can be completely derailed.)

Headaches aside, I can think of two strategies for hitting the ground running:

1.) Do a review of what I'm writing on Friday night. That's not always going to happen. There's a reason Friday is not a writing day. And maybe, as long as I'm doing this divided schedule thing, I should respect that and not mix tasks.

2.) Use the Taco Bell session to set my head into the week's writing. Set up for a proper night session and beyond.

Today, though I couldn't get much writing done, I went to Taco Bell anyway, before shopping and errands, and wrote down some ideas about certain clues. In other words, I had the session anyway, and I did make progress, even if I didn't get where I needed to be. The evening session turned into what I planned to do at Taco Bell. But I do feel I've made a transition into the writing week, and that helps.

Monday I'll talk a little about an experiment I'm working with on the art side, in trying to come up with scalable textures -- abstract textures which look good at 100 pixels as well as at 600 or more pixels. Not sure I have good images, but I might throw in some sketches as well for visual interest.

And Tuesday I'm starting a series about the transition to full-time writing.

See you in the funny papers.

Great Post About Writing as Investment from DWS

Next week, when I talk about making the transition to full-time writing, I was going to talk about money and personal finance at the end of the week. I was going to explain the differences between wages and investment and passive income and how to plan some security into something insecure.

Dean Wesley Smith must have been thinking along the same lines. He posted about Investing In Your Own Future and compared your writing output to a 401k investment plan. He does a wonderful break down of the numbers in a way that reminds me of the Miracle of Compounding. Only in this case, instead of the interest compounding, it's your body of work.

You can never understand the economics of publishing if you can't wrap your head around the concepts he's talking about.

This is a must read.

See you in the funny papers.

Workday Writing - Writing as a Second Job, Part 2

Last time I talked about the practice of writing on weekends and holidays, what problems I've found with it, but also why I'm doing something like it for this quarterly dare anyway.

This time I'm going to talk about two concepts - Daily Writing and Workday Writing.

Daily Writing

Daily Writing is what we usually do when we get serious about writing. If writing is your calling, and your profession, then you have to do it every single dang day of your life.

The advantage of daily writing is obvious: you form good habits and you build up a good sized body of work fast. And though there is a down side, this is one of the most important things for you do start with. Never a day without a line, as the poet said.

The thing to remember is that it's more than a habit. This is the thing that makes writing a part of your identity. You write, and you keep writing. And your mind always comes back to writing. It's via this daily writing that you make the transition from a wannabe who thinks about writing all the time to the writer who does write all the time.

In addition to that, slow steady progress can help you build momentum. Trying to write in powerful bursts can wear you out, and kill momentum (unless you're just creating short term momentum to help power through something specific -- like the last chapters of a book).

The disadvantages are easy to see:

1.) It's hard to do. Even if you love writing and can't wait to get to it every day, it can be far beyond frustrating when you're exhausted and life gets in your way. It can be heart-breaking to push and push and be prevented and prevented. And with daily writing, you will come face-to-face with your goals every day. More chances to feel defeated.

However, most of the time you can deal with that. It's just a matter of moderating your expectations. (That is, lowering them.) And, of course, learning to not waste time cursing the horse every time it bucks you off. Just get back on and get back on and get back on again. Life is one ornery bronco, and it's going to buck you off. No getting around it.

2.) You can burn out. If you are successful in training yourself to always go right back to writing after every disruption, you can wear yourself out. You can also push your life out of your life. This can be great for getting up some momentum, but it's bad for your life and sanity. (There is a reason it goes back at least as far as the Bible that you should take a day off once in a while.)

An issue closely related to burn out is losing the fun. If you push yourself hard enough, you can turn anything into a chore. While at some point you will have to learn to put the fun back into it, it can be helpful to learn how to keep working, even when it isn't fun. This is a skill and a hurtle you must cross sometime. But once you've got that under control, you need to go back to learning how to keep writing fun.

3.) It can interfere with your performance of your day job and life functions. As with item two, if you succeed in focusing your life energy on writing every day, you may have a hard time changing gears and concentrating on anything else. This is cool for you as a writer, but it also could make you a driving hazard on the road, and cause your boss to lose faith in you as a worker, and your family to leave you. (Also, don't forget to shower.)

Workday Writing

One solution to the problem of writing yourself right off the rails with a daily habit is to make writing a part of your ordinary work days, like a second job, or taking night classes. Do the work as a part of a routine, so it becomes a daily habit, but keep it within limits. Do something different on weekend or vacation days. Make those days for reading or blogging or doing publishing errands...or just living the rest of your life.

Workday writing has a lesser version of many of the problems with daily writing, but as long as this routine has you writing during the majority of your days, it will still have the advantages. You'll still create a habit, and still create steady progress.

The big disadvantage is that you may be writing on the days where you have the least time, and you are the most tired. Your only solution may be to keep the fun in it. You may have to forget lessons and duties. And you may have to play with your schedule to find the best time for you. Some people find it's easiest if they get up early, when the world is asleep. Or stay up late. Others find that lunch hour writing sprints can be very productive.

Every Day, But Not Every Moment

One compromise between daily writing and workday writing is to write every day... but don't try to do more on weekends or vacations. Do exactly the same as you would do on a work day. Then, when you're done with it, get on with life and vacation.

That compromise has been the method that works best for me, overall. Yes, I still struggle with doing too much or too little on certain days, as conditions change.

As you find the right schedule for yourself, there are always two things to remember: everybody is different, and even more important, everybody changes. As you develop as a writer, your needs will change. And your goals will too.

The goal I keep in mind is the transition to being a full time writer. Aside from financial considerations, one big issue is working around the Day Job.

The Day Job (and the time and energy it takes) is kind of an elephant in the room. It's this big thing that tends to suck up all the time, energy and resources, and we tend to build our lives around it. And we keep building until it becomes the structure everything -- including or writing habits -- is dependent on. So when its gone, very often it takes all your carefully constructed habits with it. You need to consider more than finances when it comes to quitting your day job for a life of writing.

Next week I'll talk about that. In the meantime....

See you in the funny papers.

ROW80 Update - Rearranged Goals

A Round of Words in 80 Days round up:

Sunday, Day 7 - 76 minutes. Beginning to decompress. That was the problem with the previous book, it was in a state which really required a lot of close attention. And this book seemed similar, because it started life as a tightly plotted novella -- but it's beginning to let out the corset and feel like a novel. Mick and Casey stories have a natural flow to them anyway. I think the Starling and Marquette stories will too, next time.

It really helps reading Rex Stout and other really well established mystery series, though (even modern ones like Archer Mayor) to feel the relaxed pace, and how a mystery is often about the parts you skip in other kinds of books.

Monday, Day 8 - 122 minutes. In keeping with my new goal set, I worked on art and design work today, since this turned out to be more of a day at the day job than it was supposed to be. (It's the first day of the semester, so I "stopped in" to put out fires. Turned out to take a whole lot longer than I expected.)

Tuesday, Day 9 - 71 minutes. I had too much other kerfuffle today and didn't get to writing until late. I did more outlining than writing, partly because there are a couple of directions I could go, and I don't want to burn my steps on some of the clues. But I am finding the relaxed rhythm of Mick's voice allows me to slow down easily and still have fun.

Shifting My Schedule - New Goals

As I mentioned in previous posts: my work schedule has changed, and I'm kind of excited about it. In the past, this sort of shift hasn't helped, but I think this is a very good time to try it this way again. As I mentioned in the "Weekend Writing" post, my day job work week is all shoved together at the end of the week now. Which leaves my writing week in a four day block.

For the sake of my sanity, I am going to split my week, so that I don't write on Wednesday through Friday. I will, however, do other things. Particularly art and layout work. Maybe some editing or other formatting work. Normally that work is off the clock to keep it from crowding out the writing work -- however, since there is a separation by calendar going on, I'm going to put this work on the clock. An hour a day Wed-Thur-Fri.

So here are the new goals:

• Saturday to Tuesday: 120 minutes a day, writing.
• Wednesday to Friday: 60 minutes as day, art and layout.

That comes to 11 hours a week, which is actually a slightly higher goal than I was going for. So for the total, let's round it off to: 7000 minutes!

This is going to be a bear this week, though (and perhaps other weeks ) because Wednesday is my looong day, and I really would like to get to the stuff I only just started tonight -- but I doubt I will be able to. It's frustrating.

Last time I posted about the disadvantages (and advantages) of what I'm doing now -- Weekend Writing -- and Friday I'll post about the opposite method of managing your writing time: Workday Writing (with a nod to Every Day Writing). Then next week I'll talk about the bigger issue -- making the transition to full time writing, and why habits matter as much as money.

See you in the funny papers.

Weekend Writing - Writing as a Second Job, Part 1

There's an old union song, sung to the tune of "Free Americay" (a Revolutionary War song that was sung to the tune of the British Grenadiers -- link here to recognize which tune I'm talking about). The chorus goes something like this:

Eight hours we'd have for working
Eight hours we'd have for play
Eight hours we'd have for sleeping
In free Americay

(Some more revolutionary folks weren't very pleased with the "for play" part, and had a version with "for what you will.") The point was that everybody needs sleep, and you can't just work for the rest of your time. Aside from the basics of cleaning and feeding yourself, and taking care of family, you also need some time for yourself.

Writers who work a day job have to figure out how to manage that "spare time," and one of the eternal questions is:

Is it better to spread your work out in small amounts every day -- especially work days -- or to work on weekends and other days off?

Most of us end up by not choosing at all, which either leaves us burned out from never stopping, or with no writing at all, because we don't have a set time for it.

When you stand back though, you realize that you need some time off. You need to do some things other than write with your "eight hours for play" and weekends. And you need rest and recreation. And to read.

So for the sake of sanity and argument and giving myself good worker representation here, I'm going to change the question as asked above:

If we give ourselves working hours for writing -- treat it as a job -- is it better to write on workdays or on weekends and vacation days?

Today I'll take a look at Weekend Writing

The advantages of writing on the weekend and during vacations is that you theoretically have longer blocks of time to throw yourself into the work. Theoretically, you are more rested and relaxed.

The reality is usually that you forgot that your weekends aren't actually clear. They are, in fact, filled with all the social obligations you put off during the week, and also with what the Scots so beautifully label "kerfuffle." Grocery shopping, housework, yard work, bill paying, making lists of things you forgot to do during the week that you can only do during the week but have no time to remember them (like making dental appointments).

Trying to add major writing efforts to all that can be frustrating, and worse yet, you end up with never having a "vacation" at all, ever. You can burn out that way.

But the biggest issue with Weekend Writing is that it doesn't become a habit. This is especially true when you work full time. You spend five days a week on doing things by habit and rote, and then you need a day to decompress and switch gears. It can take a long time to fall into The Zone if you put it off completely all week. And then once you're in The Zone, suddenly it's Sunday, and you realize you'll have to go back to work the next day... Your mind starts re-compressing to prep itself for the work week.

Transitions can be a bear.

I have discovered over the years, that I'm better off when writing is a part of my daily routine. I'm always disappointed when I leave it to do when on a break, or a special occasion. I'm better off when, mentally, it's something I take a break from.

And yet here I go, changing my habits for this dare from Workday Writing to Weekend Writing.

The main reason for this is that my day job schedule changed. It's now all smooshed together at the end of the week. And since I'm a part-time worker, that puts me in an odd position: My day job week is shorter than my "weekend." That creates a whole different mental dynamic. The day job becomes like a second, moonlighting job. And I can treat my writing like a main job.

This is one of those critical transitions you make in moving toward full time writing.

Sure, this long weekend will still be full of kerfuffle, but it's less compressed, and you don't have as many transition problems from one mindset to another. Furthermore, when you work as a writer full time, you will still be battling kerfuffle -- so get used to it.

Wednesday is update day, and I will spell out my new writing schedule with a new goals post. Then on Thursday or Friday I will post about the positives and negatives of Workday Writing -- which is actually the more commonly useful method. And next week, I will get to a discussion of that transition to full-time writing.

See you in the funny papers.

Quick Note on Non-Amazon Income

While not all of Smashwords' figures have trickled through for 2011, and Amazon requires a little digging and math....

I think I can say with some assurance that about 40 percent of my writing income comes from Smashwords and associates right now. (Most of that is Barnes & Noble, with an assist from Apple.) About 60 percent of my income comes from Amazon's KDP.

Since I hear a lot of authors sneering at non-Amazon markets, I thought I would post this bit of information. I would also point out that it isn't because of anything special I do for the other vendors. If you'll notice, nearly all my book links on this blog are to Amazon, for instance. Or Amazon and Smashwords itself, since it's much easier. It takes a while for a book to propagate to Barnes & Noble, and Apple doesn't do direct link to their store, so I very seldom get around to posting the links to them, even though they account for a nice chunk of my sales.

Amazon has all sorts of advantages over other vendors in terms of marketing and sales. They have their lovely algorithm, and a wonderful shopping experience, for instance. But the one thing Smashwords and its vendors have that Amazon does not is the ability of the author to more fully control free books.

I'll admit that most authors are not great business people and don't know how to use sales and special offers and free books to help their income. And I know very well that Amazon has its eyes on a distant horizon that no one else can see. They don't think in the short term and they have different priorities.

But given the stats I mentioned in an earlier post about free books and pricing, I do think that my ability to control the offering of free books is what allows my sales at other vendors to catch up, no matter how bad those other vendors are at marketing.

Tomorrow I'll get on with the posts about writing schedules.

See you in the funny papers.

RWO80 Update - Writing Schedules and Productivity (upcoming)

It is horrible when you end a "vacation" and start a writing dare utterly exhausted. I really think writing will refresh me, but I need to start slower. Plus it's the beginning of the semester and things are always wild.

So I'll be slacking a bit until the 14th, at which point I hope to dive fully into the new schedule. (Maybe build up some steam.) I'm going to start by just getting some minutes done every day. That's the goal for a while yet. I am determined, though, that the Year Of The Dragon will be something special!

A quick update on my A Round Of Words In 80 Days dare:

Wednesday, Day 3 - 30 minutes. The scene I was working on yesterday still needs one more layer. I thought up what it needs, but mostly just moved on to the next transition, which sets up the, er, well I guess it could be called an actual pie fight scene.

Thursday, Day 4 - 45 minutes. Right on past the pie fight, an don to the murder.

Friday, Day 5 - 98 minutes. Today was a good day. I paused to do a little off the clock idea generation for short story writing. I realized I have two train stories, and maybe that could make for a nice thematic collection. In the meantime, I got to a section I had to write new for Devil In A Blue Bustle. It feels nice getting into the voice of the story.

Speaking of voice, I am reading Black Orchids -- an early Nero Wolfe -- and it suddenly struck me how similar Mick's style is to Archie. Oh, not as sarcastic and sassy, and his personality is not the same, but they have that hard-boiled poetic dryness in common. I think this is also helping to get back into the voice and flavor of the series. I'll probably read another Nero Wolfe after this one.

Saturday, Day 6 - 0 minutes. Muther Effin' Migraine. I don't get 'em like other people do, but I do get them whenever my hormones fluctuate. And given that I am a woman of a certain age, those fluctuations are unpredictable.

Schedule Change

My schedule will shift this semester, in such a way as to change the way I look at my writing time. I'll be posting about it this coming week in a series of posts about Weekend Writing vs. Workday Writing for those of us who have to work a day job. And, of course, the related subject of prepping to work full time at writing.

I was going to post these as a part of the update posts -- because I figure ROW80 participants would be most interested. However, even though I have a good first post hand written up, I am drooling on myself right now, so I'm going to post them separately. I'll post links to them in the update posts.

See you in the fuzzy papers... Wait. Strike that.

See you in the funny papers.

Counting Your Chickens Before They Hatch - Wiser Than You Think

Kris Rusch just posted a great post about the short-sightedness of writers who work for cheap or free, because they can't seem to do the math to see that patience will be better for them and for their work. She runs the numbers, in her usual very well researched way, and shakes her head at the foolishness of both traditionally published writers (who sign awful contracts) and indie writers (who go after marketing gimmicks like publishing is a lottery).

The most striking part of her post is the beginning, where she points out that during the depression, writers were paid much better than writers are now. And that the average beginner and midlist advance has barely changed in over a decade, and where it has changed, it's shrinking.

That post caused some strange flashbacks in me. I remembered running those numbers myself as a young writer and being horrified and disappointed when I realized that I couldn't afford to succeed at a professional writing career. I ran the numbers a million times, and you just had to do more work than there was time for if you worked a day job... but if you quit the day job, it would be years before you got any money.

I was always shocked at how few writers actually did do the math like this until they were in the middle of a horrible situation.

However, Kris' post reminded me of one more thing, and maybe it's part of the explanation of why our culture breeds people who can't plan ahead. It's a folktale, and I remember this particular version very very vividly -- though there may very well be other versions which are not so idiotic.

There was this milk maid who was carrying a bucket of milk to market. It was her own milk and she could keep the money she got for it. As she walked, she thought about what she was going to do with the money.

She figured she'd get some chicken feed and some eggs to raise in an incubator. When they hatched, she could raise those chickens, and they'd lay eggs for her, which she could sell at the market. But she wouldn't sell all the eggs. She'd let the hens hatch some, and then she'd have more chickens to lay eggs.

And with the money from the eggs, she might buy her own cow, and then she could sell milk and eggs, and maybe hire a milk maid to do the work. She could pay her in buckets of milk, after all. And if she kept growing the business, she would eventually become a leading lady of the town, and be able to afford a find dress and some horses and carriage....

Ah, but as she was dreaming about this, she tripped and spilled the milk and had nothing to sell at the market.

Which only goes to show that you shouldn't count your chickens before they hatch.

And even as a child I wanted to scream NOOOOOOOOOOOOO! You MORONS! That is not the lesson here!

That milk maid did exactly what she needs to do if she wants to achieve her dreams -- she actually bothered to THINK IT THROUGH. So she had a setback. As far as I know, cows need to be milked twice a day. So there's going to be more opportunities, you know? ( Unless she was an utter idiot who never learned from her mistakes, she'd be more careful next time.)

Let's face it, folktales like these often have their roots in a time when people were supposed to know their place and accept what they were given. (Especially girls -- they shouldn't be dreaming about earning the money for fancy dresses, because their husbands are supposed to supply that.)

And it seems to me that writers are treated like Victorian damsels -- told not to think ahead or run the numbers, but just accept their lot and hope a lovely man can come and rescue them. (And this is true of male writers as well as female.)

And that's why I never fit in and never could accept the terms and conditions of publishing. Because I preferred to think ahead and count my own eggs, thank you very much. For the amount of work I did, I didn't want some shiny dime. I wanted some compound interest, dang it.

See you in the funny papers.

What Triggers the Pie Fight? An ROW80 Update post

Going back to work is not fun. I am, indeed rather tired. However, in this first leg of the dare I sat and thought about about how I was going to make use of the prep work. I want to find what works well for me -- and I find that partly depends on how tired I am. (Check out the goals for this writing dare.)

To whit: Sometimes all I need to do is stop and make those "blank page" decisions (i.e. what scene am I working on, what do I want to get done in this session, how does the pie fight actually start?). Then it's off to the races. It really works great....

But when my brain is dull, I write dull at first. "The pie fight starts with, um, um, with um, well somebody throws a pie, right?" Sometimes I have to go at it for a while -- letting the characters move around the stage like not-very-good actors, blocking things out -- before something finally clicks and I can then start over and just let the scene play out.

So I'm still working out the efficiency of the prep work. For now the rule is that I don't start (and the clock doesn't start) until I know what my goal is for the next writing session. However, I'm thinking that I need to change that to knowing what the trigger is for the fun stuff in the scene.

So from here on in, the question I need to answer before each session is: What Triggers The Pie Fight?

So here's the progress for the first couple of days:

Sunday, Day 0 - I did some prep work, mainly gathering up what I've done and listing the scenes and turns. I discovered that a lot of it -- as with any mystery -- is discussing and speculating on the turns of plot. Since that will change, a lot of the text I have now really is useless. However, there are a lot of jokes and "turns" which I'll keep around for reference.

Monday, Day 1 - 105 minutes. I think. I had a phone call while I was working and I forgot to stop the clock.

I started today thinking up the rules, and then I got on to the first chapter. Although I have a bunch of stuff written, I decided to type it in from scratch, only taking what I like, and moving on from there. This is a great way to begin with an old story -- it gets you back into the voice of the story.

Tuesday, Day 2 - 65 minutes. Today I was as dull as dishwater. (Old used dishwater -- not freshly drawn dishwater with spiffy sparkling detergent in it. I was definitely not lemon scented today.) Had to get up a little earlier for work, and also the cat is going through an acute boredom phase, and therefore has been tap-dancing on my head all night.

Interestingly, out of those sixty-five minutes, it took me forty to scratch out the dull stuff, until I finally got the scene trigger, and then I drove right through about 600 words in 20 minutes. So I ended up getting 1000 words done in that time.

And in honor of my epiphany, I give you a highly edited version of what is probably the greatest pie fight in movie history. It isn't just pies flying, of course. It's Laurel and Hardy, who are very clever and deliberate about these things. (The clip comes from is The Battle Of The Century, from 1927). Note how helpful Stan Laurel is throughout the sequence, and also the cute little tribute to Charlie Chaplin at the end.

See you in the funny papers.