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Archive for the ‘Writing Process’ Category

Musings on Income

(Author note: if you are waiting on book 7 and couldn’t care less about nitty-gritty of the dark inner workings of being a pro writer, skip this post.  For you peeps- book 7 is over half done and still on track for release in next couple months. I apparently might have pneumonia, but I’ve wrestled that beastie and won before, so I hope it won’t slow me down too much.  Happy New Year, eh?! But no fear, Boss Fight: Samir (ie Magic to the Bone) is on its way).

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For everyone else… have some random thoughts and some numbers:

Income, especially in American culture I guess, is a touchy thing. Among writers and other creatives, I think it can be even touchier. This business is so uneven and so subjective once you hit a basic threshold of quality. Which is why I always choose to define “good book” as “book multiple people want to read enough to pay money for” and leave it there, because every other measure runs into problems of taste and opinion.

Some writers do share their income. Many choose not to. I think both are making the decision that they are comfortable with, however, I super appreciate those who share. For the same reason I watch certain books and how they do with readers, I also watch various author careers. It’s all data that I might be able to apply to my own career, to my own books, to help me better deliver great books that people want to read and to find the best avenues to get those books into reader’s hands.

I’ve noticed though that there’s an odd gap in the numbers being shared, and chatting with a few others I am not the only one who has noticed. Authors starting out, both trad and indie, seem to share more often than long-time authors. Same with authors (long in the biz or not) who are making less than six figures. Then the gap appears as you see some authors who make very high six or into seven figures sharing. Where are the betweens? I know they exist in the professional fiction writing world, because I know quite a few of them personally. But they don’t share.

Many, I assume, don’t share because they aren’t comfortable talking numbers outside private groups. After all, in the end it is nobody’s business but the tax people and yourself what you make, and that’s cool. Many of us are raised to never discuss money, though from dealing with various unfair work situations and seeing relationships dissolve over financial disputes, not discussing money can sometimes be a poor choice. But when you work for yourself? It’s a decision you have to make for yourself.

I imagine others don’t because six figure income is this funny limbo place. You are making money, good money, but you aren’t making enough to feel untouchable (especially not when the tax bills come due, weeee). Publishing is a very volatile field. You can sell thousands of copies of one book, release the next, and watch the pennies trickle in. One change at a vendor or a mix-up in a computer system somewhere, and you can lose tens of thousands in the blink of an eye. There’s no “made it” or coasting available at almost any level of publishing that I can see until you hit the upper echelons where you have more money than JK Rowling (okay, probably nobody has more than she does in publishing, but you get my point).

This is stuff I’ve been thinking about as I read blog posts by awesome people like Jim C Hines and Kameron Hurley. Posts such as theirs, posts by others like JA Konrath, Amanda Hocking, and John Scalzi, and surveys like the one Tobias Buckell did back in 2005 helped me figure out what paths to take, what careers to look at, how to navigate things and what expectations to have. I’m a firm believer in more information is more better.

For that reason, I used to share numbers. I still do pretty openly at conventions and if people ask. But when I thought about writing a post after reading Jim Hines’ summation of his year, I balked. Why? Because this year was super successful for me and I fall into that limbo place now. I worried that writing this post would cause backlash, people saying “oh she doesn’t deserve that” or “she’s just bragging” or “her books aren’t that good” or “she’s just an outlier” or whatever else people say when green-eyed monsters come to live in their brains. Professional envy is a real danger in creative endeavors, I’ve witnessed it first hand multiple times and almost fell prey to it myself once in a general way (I quit writing short fiction for a while because I felt like I’d never compare to people who seemed to work less hard than I did, but thankfully I got the fuck over that hang-up).

But you know what? Data is data. I might be in the fragile limbo where income could be zero next year (if I don’t stop getting sick, that might be my reality, sigh), but I’m going to share numbers. These are a combination of a ton of work/study finally paying off and the support of the best readers anyone could ask for, with a dollop of luck thrown in (like the whole e-book revolution happening while I’m still alive to enjoy it, for example).

Titles published in 2015: 2 (plus one three book omnibus of previously published work)
Paid Titles total under this name: 17
Free titles: 7 (one of which was paid for half of 2015 at .99)
Short stories sold to anthologies in 2015: 4

Books sold in 2015 (including audio and print): 106,661 (approximate)
Income earned from ebooks/audio/print: $257,293
Income from multi-author bundles/Misc: $4,048
Income from anthology sales/royalties: $1,690
Total earnings 2015 (paid in 2015): $263,031

Want to see what a totally uneven career looks like? I quit my job in 2009 to start pursuing being a writer full time. I made one short story sale for a flash fiction piece that year, earning 18 dollars.  2010 income is a short story sale and the tiny beginnings of my foray into ebooks. Baby steps while I learned how to write (I wrote and submitted 39 short stories in 2010 alone, plus a novel).

Here’s the graph of my career so far:

chart of earnings by year
And here’s a pie chart of how my earnings for the year divide out between indie, trad, and multi-author stuff, because who doesn’t like pie?

2015 earnings by type
So… to sum up, I had a fantastic 2015 income-wise. Health-wise and stress-wise, it was awful and I’m ringing in 2016 with another bout of pneumonia, so who knows what my writing schedule will be like but I ain’t gonna quit. I will keep on writing, and working to make every book something I am proud of and that people want to read for as long as I’m alive to do so. That’s pretty much all any career writer can ask for, I think. Maybe I’ll have crazy numbers to post again this time next year, or maybe I won’t, but if I can get more good/healthy days and more books written than in 2015, I’ll consider 2016 a win.

And as anyone I’ve ever gamed with can tell you, I’m all about winning 😉

Three Years

Tomorrow is the 3 year anniversary of my writing journey. It’s been a crazy ride so far.  When I first decided to quit my job and get serious about writing, my plan involved something like “write a novel every year for ten years” while submitting short stories and hoping for a book deal.

How things change, eh?  I discovered Heinlein’s Rules, attended a bunch of workshops including Clarion, and the self-publishing/e-book world came into being.  Now my plan is more like “write ten novels worth of new material every year”, I’m hardly writing short stories at all this year, and I have quit submitting queries for books (for the moment). In these last three years, I’ve written over a million words, sold ten short stories, and self-published over twenty novels, novellas, and short stories.

I have seven years left in my ten year plan (I made a deal with my husband that I would be making a living from my fiction in ten years or I’d go get a different day job).  I’ve learned so much, tried a lot of different things, put in a lot of work, over the last three years. I can only imagine where my skills will be in seven more years.

So I start my fourth year as a writer with a lot of optimism and a lot of hope. Also, because hey, this is still me, a lot of experiments planned.  I’ve been absent from the blog because of one of these experiments. The novellas are going well and are a ton of fun to write, but also take a lot of writing time and energy.  So the serial novel and the neo-pro interviews are on the back burner until March.  I’ll probably be pretty scarce here for another month or so.

Three years. Feels like twenty sometimes and like a couple months others.  I have a long way to go and a lot more to learn, but this is still the best job I’ve ever had.  Here’s to seven more years of awesome (and hopefully another few decades beyond that).

The Sneaky Faces of Doubt

I’ve talked before about how I suffer from depression and how it often affects my writing. It is tough to push away the many negative voices that I think most writers suffer from when you already feel like life sucks and there is no point to anything.  Part of living with chronic depression is learning coping mechanisms and how to pull yourself out of the deeper pits.

While I’m aware that some of my coping mechanisms aren’t the best, I had thought I was getting pretty good at identifying and eliminating the writing doubt voices.  I have three pieces of paper posted above my desk.  The first is a poster of Heinlein’s Rules. The second is a sheet with “It Never Ends” written on it to which I’ve added dates and magazine names for my published stories (I got this idea from Dean Wesley Smith. I’m hoping to fill that sheet front and back someday).  The third piece of paper has the five elements of a blockbuster novel according to Al Zuckerman (which I think are good things to keep in mind while writing anything).  On another wall, I have a super cool poster a friend made me of Lester Dent’s Pulp Paper Master Fiction Plot. I have yet to write a story directly from his formula, but I often glance at it and ask myself some of the questions he poses about whatever I’m working on.   I also have a bunch of smaller pieces of paper with things like “what is the bad guy up to?” and “parade the tag!” and lists of plotting tools (timebombs, crucibles, reversals, revelations etc).  All these things are here to surround me with tools to shove past the writing doubts and get the work done.

In the last couple months, these tools have been failing me. I’ve been failing me.  I got most of the way through a novel through sheer determination and a lot of self-talk. But it wasn’t fun. So I told myself that hey, I have no deadlines. No one is waiting for this book. No one is going to hold me to the writing plan I set out for myself. I can write whatever I want.  Which sounds very freeing.  It should have been.

So I moped sat around and thought about which of my ideas for things would be the most kick-ass fun to write.  And I settled on a series of novellas I’d been turning over in my head for the last year or so.  They are adventure fantasy in the vein of RA Salvatore or Elizabeth Moon’s Paksenarrion books, basically following one group of adventurers as they go around and kick some monster ass, help people, and spit in the face of evil.  With fireballs. And a small pink unicorn.

Sounds fun to me. I decided on my course of action, roughly outlined 15 of these novellas, and on Tuesday got to work.

On Wednesday, I hit a huge mental block. A million negative thoughts and voices flooded my brain. Wasn’t I just writing derivative crap? Shouldn’t I be spending this time working on further books in series I already have started? No one is going to want to read books from the PoV of a mute elf with a bit of a god-complex (to be fair, she did used to be basically a god).  Don’t I know that this sort of fiction would never sell to a publisher? Will never win any awards? This is too fun to write, it must be terrible.

Voices like that.  Wow. Ouch.  As soon as I realized I was avoiding working on the project because of these voices, I paused the Starcraft 2 game I was watching and had a serious conversation with myself.  (Hey, I’m not crazy. We writers do this all the time. Right?)  Where was all this coming from?

Apparently some myths are still stuck in my head and I’m not the freewheeling, commercially-minded mercenary writing machine I like to wish I was.  Some of the senarios in the back of my mind were tied so deeply to things I never consciously think about that once I examined them I laughed.

Like the little scene in my head of being at a con and having someone ask me why I write that DnD knockoff crap. Or why I’m not writing serious novels.

The funny part is, when I stop to think about it, it is always a fellow writer in my fake scene who asks this stuff. I don’t think a reader would or a person who had no idea who I am anyway (ie most random people anywhere).  I was stuck and had stopped working on a project that was the first thing to really thrill me in months because I was worried about hypothetical writer guy in my head.  Yep. Stupid.

I know where a little of that worry comes from. I was privately slammed recently by a fellow writer and the negativity definitely didn’t help my already pretty low esteem. I don’t even know this person well and I have had one IRL conversation with them ever, yet they apparently wormed their way into my subconscious and fed doubts I had thought my mercenary, hack’n’slash-loving intellect had long since defeated.

Thankfully, these doubts are lessened by working through them. I had a serious conversation with myself, identified some of the issues I was having, and talked myself through them.  It’s amazing what looks stupid and trivial once you bring it out into the conscious light.  Especially things like “if it isn’t hard, it isn’t good” which is a dumb myth that gets reinforced a lot with idiot phrases like “no pain, no gain” and that mentality. Pain is bad. Ask anyone who suffers from chronic pain (would you like to trade shoulders with me? Or knees?) how they feel about it? Or people who suffer from emotional pain.  Not a plus. Not a gain.

So I’m adding a couple new pieces of paper to my collection here.  One says “writing should be fun”.  Another says “My path is mine”.  I know that more hidden fears and doubts will show their faces eventually, but now I have a few more little weapons against them.

Follow your writing joy. And kick out anyone who says you should do something else.

The Quest for Productivity

I’m lazy like an old cat on a blanket in the sun.  I’d far rather sit on the beanbag and read ALL the books than do anything that resembles work.  Even work I enjoy doing like writing.  I am also very insecure.  I have a lot of negative talk going in my head all the time and writing doesn’t get a pass there, either.

In fact, if ideas didn’t boil over in my head and basically frog-march me to the computer, I’d probably never get anything done.  Being poor doesn’t hurt, either, as my father loves to say “poor is a good motivator”.  Between the stories in my head writing themselves and begging me to start typing and the fact that my husband and cat like to have the heat on in winter, I manage to get work done despite my nature.

But I’d like to get more work done and I’d like to get it done more quickly so that I can get back to that whole reading thing (or playing videogames, that will do in a pinch).

Stress and depression are my biggest hurdles.  This last year has been a roller-coaster for me between my husband having a little cancer, my grandfather dying, my husband losing his job, Clarion, medical bills, etc.  I try to console myself that I’ve written over 400,000 words and still got a lot done, but it doesn’t ever seem like enough because I can’t manage to do the one thing I really want to do which is write more consistently on a schedule of some sort.  And I know that I’m capable of more than I’ve done, so that bugs me, too.

And I think I might have found a way to do more.  I met another writer at Orycon who insisted that I come hang out at a coffee shop and write-in for NaNoWriMo.  I almost didn’t go.  I don’t like writing in busy spaces, I don’t really enjoy being around strangers and find socializing draining, and I wasn’t sure it would be a useful experience.

I went anyway because, on the other hand, it sounded fun.

Boy am I glad I did.

I wrote 4500 words, the first chapter of a brand new novel.  In 3 hours of actual writing time. Around people.  And thus I discovered an amazing new way to work.

The structure of the write-in was this: 45 minutes of quiet where we all wrote, followed by 15 minutes of break time where we chatted, got more coffee, etc.  Rinse, repeat.

It worked so well for me that I came home and decided to try it here.  I didn’t have an hourglass (I do now!) so I used an online egg timer for my 45 minutes.  Apparently being timed helps me focus, because I write as much in 45 minutes as I used to in an hour to an hour and a half.   That’s right, 1000 to 1500 words in 45 minutes.  Something about knowing that I have to work now but I get a break soon lets me put off the little things I used to let creep into writing time. Want to check my email? It can wait 20 minutes until my time is up.  Want more tea? It can wait until my timer is up. 45 minutes is such a short time, just about anything can wait while I get the work done.  Plus I can use the timer to mentally trick myself into doing more in the same way I use the timer on the treadmill at the gym to get myself moving longer.  Want to finish this chapter? Well, okay, I’ll just set another45 minutes.  It’s less than an hour, I can manage one more session.

And I’m starting to work in little bits of extra writing time.  Before, if I didn’t have a large chunk of time free, I didn’t even bother to start.  Now? All I need is 45 minutes.

It seems so simple, but without the NaNo write-in, I’d never have thought to try this. I probably would have shoved it off as “I can’t get enough done in 45 minutes” or something.

So that’s my new method for getting things done. 45 minute chunks.  It’s almost 7:15pm now, so I’d better go flip the hourglass over and get a little work done.  After all, what’s 45 more minutes?

New Collection and Also Music for Writing

First, the business stuffs or whatever.

I have a new fantasy short story collection out.  Here are the shiny details:

A pregnant witch must decide between protecting her heritage and protecting her unborn child… A man looking for a better life learns there is a permanent price attached to change… Grieving for his lost brother, a man faces the mother of all tornadoes with a little magical assistance… When a social worker threatens to break apart her family, a single mother of two must use all her imagination and courage to escape to a better world.

This is a collection of four fantasy short stories from Annie Bellet.  Included are: River Daughter, La Última Esperanza, Roping the Mother, The Scent of Sunlight.

*Bonus Material*
The first five chapters of “A Heart in Sun and Shadow”, a fantasy novel set in a re-imagined ancient Wales.

You can buy it for Kindle here: http://www.amazon.com/River-Daughter-Other-Stories-ebook/dp/B005SM8372/

And in all other formats via Smashwords here: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/93998

Now, on to what I want to talk about in this post.

Music. Specifically, the music I use when writing.  I’m always curious about what other people listen to while writing (or don’t listen to) but I am not sure I’ve shared some of my favorites.

It often depends on what I’m writing, but generally, I can’t write without music.  I gotta have it.  I prefer music without English or Spanish words (or at least pretty incomprehensible lyrics if they are in a language I understand).  But instead of just waxing on forever about this band or that song or whatever, I figured I’d just post some links so you can listen to things yourself.

For writing SF, lately I’ve been totally hooked on the Halo 3: ODST soundtrack.  Listen to this and tell me it doesn’t make you want to go write something full of spaceships and brave people and guns and stuff:

I’ve also been listening to the Bastion game soundtrack a ton.  You can get the soundtrack (or listen to it) here: http://supergiantgames.bandcamp.com/

For writing fantasy, especially epic-feeling fantasy, Two Steps from Hell is pretty much the winner.  Listen to this and then go write a giant sword fight or sweeping reunion among long-lost companions: 

In general, I’ve been enamored of the Red Sparowes lately:

And for writing romances or fantasy or pretty much anything highly emotional scenes, you can’t go wrong with anime soundtracks.  I really love the work of Yoko Kanno:

So that’s the story with me and writing music.  The right song while writing a scene can help me tap into the emotional core I’m looking for or help me visualize the story I’m telling.  I don’t know how people write without music.  It works for some. Just not for me.

By the way, I’m always on the lookout for more writing music.  So if anyone has suggestions of things I might not have heard of, don’t be afraid to post some links in the comments.

Brainz Fried

First order of business, I finally have paper copies of A Heart in Sun & Shadow.  They are up in the Createspace store and available directly through Amazon.com as well.  I will probably be offering signed copies of this directly as well, so if anyone wants a signed trade paperback, let me know.

I have been basically MIA online this last week since I spent the last eight days out at the beach working my ass off in a Character Voice workshop taught by Dean Wesley Smith with some help from Kristine Rusch.  I am still processing all I learned this week. I am not even sure where to begin.   The entire focus of the workshop was on how to build characters that have dimension and feel like whole people who leap off the page and suck readers into books.  You know, basically the most important thing a writer can learn.

Each day looked basically like this:

9am, meet for breakfast.  Noon- meet for first session, turn in our coloring assignments (basically a few pages by a best-selling author that highlights what we were focusing on that we had to go in and mark up) and sometimes we turned in big assignments in the mornings as well (especially as the week went on).  We’d break generally by 1:30 or 2 and then have to be back at 7pm with our big assignments. We’d generally break again for the night between 8:30 and 9pm.  Rinse, repeat for 7 days.

The big assignments were 3-4 story starts, 2 pages each, working specifically on whatever character voice technique we focused on each day.  (So 6-8 pages of writing each day).  Then we also had two short story assigments, 3-6k words each, one was due Tues evening (we got that assignment on the first Sat) and one was due Friday evening (we got that one on Tues night).  We also had to all read everyone else’s assignments so we could see what others were doing that might work and or not and learn from that as well (there were 10 of us in the class, so about 50-70 pages of reading a night plus whatever our coloring assignment was, plus all the short stories once those were turned in).  In the middle of the week the class as a whole basically flubbed an entire assignment and had to re-do all the exercises with whole new story starts and characters, so that added even more work on.  But we did better on the re-do and I, for one, feel that I have a better grasp on what we were supposed to be learning in that exercise.

The things we focused on were: Accents, Attitude, Content through dialogue, Opinion, Actions, and Structure (look & flow of manuscript as it relates to characterization).  We also covered some more advanced tips and tricks at the end of the workshop, but those were the biggies.

Let me say this: One week was NOT enough.  It was a good, intensive start, but I know I’m going to be working hard on this stuff for probably the rest of my writing life.  So much of it can really only be put into practice through subconscious feel, but I’m glad that we did the exercises we did.  They are ones I can do at home if I feel I’m struggling with something.  There were also six major things, and there are six weeks of Clarion.  I know what I’m going to be working on while at Clarion.  Getting characters to look, feel, and sound like breathing, interesting, full-dimensional people is a HUGE part of writing well.  Ideas are neat and all, but people won’t keep reading books with flat characters.  I’ve got a great opportunity for focused practice while I’m at Clarion, and I’m going to make use of it.  I have new tools in my tool box now, and I’m certainly not going to let them get rusty.

I am exhausted, still.  I hit the wall on Saturday morning, on the final assignment.  I opened up the blank page and my brain just said “no”.  Guess what? I wrote the three assignments anyway and made two out of the three really work.  That was me brain-dead.  It’s good to push and push sometimes because I really learned what I was capable of even when it felt like my creative muscle had finally stopped moving.  I literally had no ideas. None. I needed three story starts on Sat morning and my brain just said “no”.  And I, writer me, said “yes”.  Out of all the story starts we did that week? One of mine on Sat morning is probably the only story I’ll actually go back to and finish.  A story start that came out of the dregs of my exhausted brain but the character when she started speaking was there, ready to go and I just let the two pages happen.

So I’m really glad I went. Despite the problems that cropped up in my life right before, despite the frustration and exhaustion, despite it all, I think I’ve grown as a writer in just one week and I think I’ll be able to use these skills going forward.  And again, if you are serious about being a professional writer and don’t mind being made to work, the workshops on the Oregon Coast put on by Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Katherine Rusch are worth every penny, every tear, every moment (as any of my fellow writers who have come through that crucible can tell you as well).  I’ve learned amazing things from them and met some amazing writers who have, I hope, become amazing friends.

Now, I’m going to go read a book, drink some tea, and let my brain rest.  But not for too long *grin*

Learning and Spring Plans

I’ve been reading some really good stuff on story, plotting, and outlines lately.  I have always felt, personally, that plotting is where I run into issues.  I can handle simple plots (straightforward quests, zomg must run or die now sorts of things) but don’t really have a handle on how to write something super epic or how to keep things so tight the reader can’t breathe for fear something will happen in the book and they’ll miss it on the exhale.

But I’m learning.  I don’t like not knowing things so I’ve set out to fill in some of my writer knowledge gaps.  As always, I have a plan. (Am I the only one who hears Black Adder in my head whenever I say that or hear someone say that? No?)  Book 1 in my Law & Order with swordfights series is almost done.  After that, I’m going to try to get the other three done and to the editor before Clarion.  Hopefully I can manage to get the second book in the Chwedl duology finished by Clarion also, because I’d like to focus solely on short fiction while there.

So here’s my modified schedule for this spring:

Avarice – finished by April 10th
Wrath- finished by April 30th
Hunger- finished by May14th
Vainglory- finished by May 28th
The Raven King- Finished by the time I leave for Clarion (around June 25th)

As for plotting, here are some of the books I’ve been reading:

Save the Cat and Save the Cat Goes to the Movies by Blake Snyder

The Fiction Editor, the Novel, and the Novelist by Thomas McCormack

Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee

How to Write Killer Fiction: The Funhouse of Mystery & the Roller Coaster of Suspense by Carolyn Wheat

I got Donald Maass’s Writing the Breakout Novel and the Breakout Novel Workbook out of the library as well.  I also picked up The Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction by R. A. Salvatore and Philip Athans because I heart Salvatore and wanted to see what he said about writing the fantastic.  So far the book is very basic, but interesting.

I mention all this because I know that when I do bother to blog, I tend to talk about goals and numbers more than the actual work itself and what my daily job entails.  But, personally, I find the details of what I do pretty boring.  I mean, I get up, I read some stuff, I write some stuff, I read more stuff, I might make notes about things I want to work on or some such, etc.  It’s… well, a job.  Writing is fun, but the creation part is the fun part and it’s hard to talk about that in any real way because it’s easier to just point at the created work and be like “yeah, I did that”.  But I think just posting goals and such leads to it looking like I’m sitting in the dark beating up a keyboard.  There’s a whole lot more that goes into me writing and improving my craft besides the practice part.

Now, mind you, all the study in the world won’t improve my writing if I’m not doing the practice and putting in the writing itself as well.  It’s like what I pointed out with Starcraft 2 a while back.  I watch tons of SC2 games and can talk the theory with the best of the best (you know, same as any dedicated sport fan *grin*) but I can’t PLAY SC2 worth a damn because I haven’t put in the practice.  Writing is the same way.  Read books, soak up knowledge, and then GO USE IT.

That’s why I’m trying to get four books written before the end of June.  I want to take these things I’m studying and put them to use.  These books are a good way to do that since they all will require tight plotting, are set in worlds I already have mapped out and researched (so I don’t need to lose any writing time on world creation) and I’ve got the basic stories in my head already with characters and structure, so they should be fairly quick to outline once I get my new methods worked out.  The books are for study, the novels I’m writing are for the practical part.  I think of it as Class Time (reading about writing and studying other novels that have worked) and Lab Time (putting what I have learned into practice through practical, hands-on application).

So that’s the plan and I’m (maybe) sticking to it! 😉

Gotta Know When to Fold’em

To date this month, I’ve written just under 60,000 words.  Most of that was on my SF novel project.  However, nothing seemed to be coming together with the novel and I kept throwing out whole scenes and chapters and starting again and again trying to make the plot gel.  I kept doing this until the fun was gone and all I could do is sit and write and then delete and try again and hate every second of it.

So I’m sort of quitting that novel for now.  Not forever.  Just for now.  It’s a complex plot, more involved with more POVs and more threads than I’ve ever tried to write before.  Which is a good thing, since I think it’s healthy to stretch my writing muscles and make myself deal with something I’m weaker on like complicated plotting.  But beating myself up about it not coming together wasn’t helping anything.

It’s really hard for me to admit I need to take a step back from this project.  I follow Heinlein’s Rules, after all.  Rule 2 is “finish what you write”.  When stepping away from this, I had to ask myself honestly if I wanted to put it down for now because that’s the healthy thing to do? Or am I just walking away because this is difficult?  It’s one thing to set something down and let it percolate a little more.  It’s another to start forming a habit of dropping a project the moment it gets rocky.  I don’t want to form a habit of not finishing things, because nothing will kill a writing career faster than not finishing, except maybe not starting.  (If I don’t start, I can’t finish, if I don’t finish, I can’t submit, if I don’t submit, I can’t sell…see?)

So I’m making a compromise with myself.  I’m stepping back from this novel.  I’m still going to keep up my writing streak and go for my necessary 3,000 words a day and a short story on weekends (the numbers I need to hit my annual goals).  And I’m designating Mondays as the day to work on this novel (minimum one page/250 words).  If I have to just write it scene by scene and take 40 weeks to finish, I’ll finish.  Meanwhile, the rest of the days will be devoted to other projects that I feel more comfortable with.  I figure that this is a good compromise.  I’m not quitting this novel entirely, but I’m giving myself breathing room on it while hopefully continuing to develop my skills enough that the sort of complicated plot I want to construct here will become an easier thing for me.  I’m tired of second guessing myself and deleting words and basically letting my critical voice eat away at me.  I’m a better writer than that and I should know better.

So that’s what’s up with me right now.  I’m turning to short stories while I get a couple of novels formatted for e-publishing and then I’ll be back to novel writing in March (working on a fantasy novel with a nice straightforward quest/romance plot and only one or two POVs, thank god).

I’ve fallen behind on the Write 1/Sub 1 challenge by 3 short stories, so I intend to catch up this week and next.  Also next week I have two workshops back to back, so I think that will help recharge my batteries and be really interesting and amazing as always (but especially with the changes in the industry right now… being around multiple professional writers for an entire week is going to be very, very educational).

New Plan, Same as Old Plan

Well, mostly the same as the old plan.  I’ve noticed that one of my issues with writing is that I have too many ideas.  I don’t get the traditional form of writer’s block (ie not knowing/having anything to write about), but I get the reverse of that.  And it does slow me down and sometimes stop me entirely.

What I’ve noticed the last couple months is that I write in shifts.  I’ll write for an hour or two and then take a break (breaks often lasting a couple of hours) and then go work again.  Starting today, I’ve decided to try to use that to my advantage.  I have so many stories in my head right now that I feel like I’ll never get them all out.  I have a novel almost done and one started that literally needs to be done by Feb 1st in order to make a workshop deadline.  If I write in shifts, I should be able to finish both.  So for the rest of this month, I’m going to try that method out.  Work on one in the morning and one in the afternoon/late at night or whenever the second “shift” happens.  I know I can keep the stories straight in my head because my head is juggling about 20 different novels and short stories at the moment including these two.  Hopefully doing things this way will prevent the “but I want to work on this instead” block, because I’ll just go work on that instead.

And hey, if this works, then I’m going to keep assigning shifts to projects and see how writing multiple things concurrently pans out.  I’m still adapting my process and finding ways that work for me.  I fully intend to try different ways of outlining novels as well at some point this year (that Snowflake method looks interesting, for example).

So that’s the new plan, which is pretty much the same as always.  I’ve got a lot of writing to get done (about 90k words) in a short amount of time.  But if I finish it or even get close, I’ll have finally gotten my 100k words in a single month.  Which is pretty cool (I’ve written about 30k this month already).

My Idea System

In the comments on the last post (about 2011 goals), one of the comments asked about my system for keeping track of ideas.  I do, in fact, have a system, though like most systems that have organically grown over the course of time, it doesn’t necessarily make a ton of sense.  I figured I could do a post on it, but I’ll add some visual aids just for fun and try to describe how the parts I couldn’t figure out how to get visuals for work.

So let’s follow an idea from inception to finished product/submission through my recording system.  The first thing that usually happens is a character or bit of story or a line or two pops into my head.  From there I let it sit.  If, after a couple days (or when the idea is super insistent), I still have it in my head, then I write it down in a notebook.  Yes, a good old paper notebook.  I use Moleskine Cahier notebooks because I love the way they feel and how well they hold up.  This is probably a hold-over from when I used to write every story by hand (something I did up until a few years ago when I tried to write a novel by hand and pretty much said fuck that).

If the idea has a title, I use the title to list it (each idea gets a fresh page).  If it doesn’t yet I just pick out a couple key words.  This is the beginning for both short stories and novels.  If I know that the idea is probably going to be a novel idea, I make a note of that on the page.  I have multiple notebooks for ideas.  In the past I was just sort of filling them up as I had the ideas, but for next year I’ve actually gone and separated out a notebook for novellas, one for short fiction, and one for novel ideas.  I’m not sure how long that level of organization will last since sometimes I don’t know if an idea is a novel or just a short one at the start (they tend to seem like they’ll be short, but then grow and get more complex).

From there the ideas sit until I’m ready to start on them.  At that point they have different fates.  Novel ideas get their own sections of a different notebook.  I give you exhibit A:

These are a few of my novel project notebooks.  Some of these novels have been written or are in various stages of writing (There’s actually a notebook without tabs in there, but it’s dedicated to a trilogy, so I didn’t tab it yet since I know which one it is, so this picture represents 11 novels and 4 short novels).  Inside these notebooks I outline, keep track of character descriptions and place names, and do all the little nitty note taking that I feel is necessary to keep track of the world for each of my novels.  I imagine that when I start actually writing multiple series books that I’ll gravitate toward having a single notebook for each series with my handy tabs dividing by book, but for now this system allows me to easily flip to whichever project I want to work on and to see which notebooks hold which novel at a glance.  I find this simpler than trying to use electronic notes, though I appreciate that if anything ever happened to my home (fire, flood, really bored thieves), that this system could fall apart.  At least I back up all the actual writing electronically in multiple places.

So that’s what the novel notebooks look like.  For short stories I just find the title/tag line of the story I want to work on (if I’m in a short story writing mood I generally flip through until I find something I want to write), and then I just continue with story notes and character descriptions and all the things I need to keep track there.  Which, once a story is done, generally leaves me with a couple of pages that look like this:

If you can read my handwriting at the top of the right page there, you’ll see that this story was originally tagged as “Race to Pluto” but then got its actual title “The Light of the Earth, as Seen from Tartarus” once I’d started working on it more.  (This story has already been through Writers of the Future, so I’m using it since I don’t have to worry about anonymity anymore).  I generally write short stories over the course of a single day, sometimes two (this one took two, but it’s 13,300 words long).  I don’t often outline short stories, but as you can see from the left page above, I did a rough time line because the timing in this story was important (And yes, I do have the crazy handwriting of a serial killer, but *I* can read it, usually).  Sometimes though I’ll be adding notes and ideas to a page for weeks before I get working on a story.  It all depends how long the story needs to percolate in my brain.

The next step is once I’ve decided to work on a story or novel.  I go into my writing folder and then into the relevant folder (Short Stories or Novels or Novellas).  Then I make a folder with the title of the story or novel.  Then I open a word document and label it as a rough draft (usually titleRD.doc) and go to work.    Recently I’ve expanded this system a little.  I don’t normally start short stories and then not finish them, but back in October I was working on hooks and beginnings, so I picked out a bunch of short story ideas from my notebooks and went to the next step without finishing.  So in my short stories folder I have a folder called AAAbeginnings (the three a’s are so it will sit at the top of my alphabetized sorted list).  In there I keep the folders of stories that aren’t done (I have quite a few at the moment thanks to that exercise). Once I finish a story out of that folder, it gets moved to the regular section.

I also have a few pages in one of my notebooks that is all titles.  Pages and pages of titles that don’t have an idea attached.  Last year I decided I was pretty terrible with titles and wanted to practice coming up with them.  So I tried a few different methods (ranging from putting random words together to using random title generators on the internet) and wrote down all the ones I liked.  So sometimes if I have a story idea I’ll scan those pages of titles and see if any fit or can be altered to fit.

Anyway, that’s how my system, such as it is, works.  I have tons and tons of ideas, more than I will ever likely be able to complete.   And more come in each day (I think I have about 15 notebooks in various stages of full at this point).  It’s one of the main reasons I’d like to be faster and more consistent, because then I’d get a lot more of these ideas developed and out to markets.  So hopefully this post helps show how the hell I keep track of all this.  I imagine my system will keep evolving to suit my needs and career, but for now it works for me.

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