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Posts Tagged ‘writing novels’

Refined Cunning Plan

Okay.  After thinking about it a lot and discussing things with some other people, I think I need to refine my plan.  Because of what I already have out, and my writing schedule for the rest of the year, there’s really no way to pull off my dueling genres experiment in anything resembling scientific fashion.

So I’m morphing the plan.  One of the things people constantly try to bring up as a point against putting up ebooks is that there will soon be too many on the market and no one but people with huge marketing dollars behind them will be read.  I have a few things to say about this.

One: Soon? Really? There are hundreds of thousands of ebooks available for Kindle.  There are millions of paperback books available as well through Amazon and other retailers.  Soon has happened. I think it happened a while ago (maybe before I was born in the paperback world).

Two:  How do readers find books now? Word of mouth. Reviews. Search terms and product tags. Etc.  Advertisements aren’t very high on the lists I’ve seen about how readers find things to read.  Putting up a shit load of good books will probably also help, since each one becomes a gateway, a chance for a reader to find you and like your stuff enough to go looking for more.

I tested the waters in ebooks with a few short stories in a genre I don’t write much in (literary) under a name that I don’t use except on legal documents (and now that I’m married, not even those).  No promotion, no history, nothing.  Those stories still outsell my SF/F stories every single freaking month.  Seriously.

But still, anyone following this blog will know that my numbers aren’t exactly buying me more than groceries.  They aren’t covering the rent yet.  SF/F isn’t a popular genre (especially not science fiction, sorry guys. We’ve got like what, 7% of the fiction market?).

So I’m morphing my experiment.  I’m going to try to test two things with one stone, so to speak.  I’m going to write three pulp-era length novels (60-70k words each) and put them up under a pen name that I’m not going to tell anyone about (well, other than my editor and my cover guy- for obvious reasons).  I will let them sit until Jan. 2013 and then report the results.  The reason I’m waiting until 2013 to report is that I don’t think I’ll have time to write the three books until Jan or Feb 2012, so I’d like to give them at least 6-8 months on the market.  So the experiment is put off a little, sorry.

But the good? news is that I’ll still be writing and releasing novellas in the SF/F genres and in Romance, just on a slightly different timetable than my previous experiment.

In other news- one week until Clarion.  Maybe I should think about packing?

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! 😉

Novel Writing Overdrive!

I’ve just been reminded that I need to have my novel for the Novel Workshop in October done by September 10th.  Glancing at the calendar, that’s really not very far away at all. Meep.

This wouldn’t be nearly as much of an issue as it seems like if I’d finished the novel I am currently working on (which is very nearly done, I’m over the middle hump but desperately trying to figure out how to make it long enough).  See, I don’t want to workshop *this* novel in October.  I want to workshop the one I intend to write after the current novel.

You know, that novel that I haven’t even started yet.  Oh, I have characters outlined, and a rough idea of what happens. And sort of the setting.  And I did some research, if you can call reading a few westerns and watching Deadwood and Silverado again “research”.  But hey! Who doesn’t love a challenge, right?

So it is time to go into novel writing OVERDRIVE!  You know, that magical “extra” gear that really tough people are supposed to have. Or race cars, or something.  Counting prior social obligations and leaving Saturdays free for “hi, still married” time, I have exactly twenty one writing days until September 10th.  21. Days. That’s like three weeks. Awesome.

Not a problem. Right?  So my goal will be five thousand 6250 words a day on each of those twenty one days.  This pace should give me two finished novels.  At least if I totally fail it I have the first finished novel as my back-up for the workshop.  But I’m not going to fail.  Even with a pinched nerve in my shoulder, I can probably find 4-5 6-7 hours a day for twenty one days to you know, do my job.  (I was almost at this pace before Starcraft 2 pwned my life).

And the plus side is that will leave me with the 10th through the 30th to actually write something for WotF fourth quarter.

Well, time to put the writing into overdrive.  Just think of it as my writer-fu leveling up. A lot.