Tag: Writing Advice

Daughter of Madness: logistics edition

Hey everyone! It’s been a while since I’ve posted directly here. For those keeping track, we’re a little over halfway through the blog tour. I’ll be officially back here with your weekly Friday post in July. July 27th to be exact. But since I had some thoughts to share, I thought I’d check in to do a quick rundown of the publishing process for Daughter of Madness.

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So first, let’s outline the normal process in a traditional publishing house.

  1. Finish a first draft.
  2. Finishing rewrites.
  3. Sell the book to a house.*
  4. Cover design.
  5. Final edits.
  6. Formatting.
  7. Proofing.
  8. Printing/Publication.

*For a sequel, you typically sell the series first so this would be step #1.

This is not exactly how things flowed for this book, but this is the process you’re most likely to see for a book through a publishing house, with some wiggling. I also have to note there’s a huge marketing piece of publishing a book as well that is very difficult to juggle and deserves some examination, but for now we’re just going to focus on publication, not marketing. This is only what it takes to make the book, not to get people to buy it.

The process for Daughter of Madness was a little out of order from the above. It looked something like this:

  1. Cover design.
  2. Finish a first draft.
  3. Finish rewrites.
  4. Final edits.
  5. Proofing.
  6. Formatting.
  7. Ebook publication.
  8. Cover revisions (print version).
  9. Print publication.

First, let’s talk about the things that went great. This was my first time doing Kindle Preorders. That was excellent. It gave me a hard release date to work towards and market around. I sold some books before I had even finished polishing, though not as many as I would have liked. The downside of the preorder was that I set it up before I was done with step #3 up there, so I was really scrambling at the end and lost a lot of sleep, as one might imagine. That said, overall the ebook launch went off without a hitch.

The print book launch had some glitches.

First, I did my print book launch through CreateSpace, not through Amazon. I made this choice because, for me, it is better to maintain distribution flexibility by using CreateSpace. Many bookstores, libraries, etc, will not buy direct from Amazon. There are other POD services that can be used that I will be investigating for the next book, because CreateSpace is really not competitive in terms of its functionality. It really feels a bit like it’s being intentionally lampooned, actually. I

With the print book, I could not set a preorder date. That means that I couldn’t go through the review process and then be sure my book would show up for order on Amazon at a set time. I could and did publish to CreateSpace pretty quickly, but the rollout to other distribution channels can take up to 8 weeks for some markets, which is insane. Combine that with other glitches that were totally on my end, and I just received personal copies of the print book this Tuesday and just saw it listed on Amazon this Wednesday.

As far as the formatting process, I really enjoyed formatting with Scrivener this time through. My last two releases were formatted in Word. I had planned to do the same this time because it is what I was more familiar with, but my license for Microsoft Office expired about a month ago and I was too cheap to renew. Instead, I used Scrivener, which I have had for a couple of years now but have had a mixed relationship with. I’m now a full cheerleader for this product. It allowed me to easily produce .epub files for giveaways and to make changes to my formatting within minutes. I now have my own free files I can use for promotion, which I didn’t have for my last two books, and I love the interior of Daughter of Madness. The new formatting maintains some of the aesthetic of Mother of Creation but is far more reader-friendly. I will probably see how much I can fiddle with the formatting of Mother of Creation in the next few weeks, but we’ll see.

Each publication has left me learning more and more about publishing, and that’s a good thing. By the time I have a complete series to promote, I’m going to be an expert! There is one more book in the series, and there are relatively few things I would do differently next time around. My cover artist continues to be a joy to work with and overall I’m very pleased about the look and feel of this book.

If there’s something in particular you’d like to see a future post about, please drop me an email or leave a comment below. I’m happy to share what bits of knowledge I’ve gleaned over the years.

See you here again in July, and until then please do check into the blog tour for giveaway links!

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Maximizing your writing time

I received a comment a few weeks back about how to best maximize your writing time. If you only have a half hour to an hour a day to work on things, this can be a real challenge for making any headway on your manuscript. Here are some things that work for me. As always with writing advice, your miles may vary.

  1. Leaving myself notes. For our first trick, let’s look at the easiest one. I often find myself with only a short chunk of time for writing, and a lot that I want to get on the page. One of the easiest ways to make sure I know exactly where to pick up is to leave myself a note, especially if I am working in a notebook. You’ll often see odd bits of marginalia in my notebooks. They could be thoughts that I’m working out about later in the book, but just as often they are notes about what a scene is supposed to be or do according to where I am where inspiration strikes. Then I can go back and fill that in at my leisure.
  2. Using smaller chunks of time for editing. Another tactic that I find useful is to use the smaller chunks of time that I have for writing-related activities for editing. This may seem a little counterintuitive if your focus is to get words on the page, but there are a couple of advantages here. If you reserve the larger chunks of writing time for the harder work of coming up with new words, then you make more progress on your manuscript or other project more quickly. And editing (at least line editing) something that is pretty far along is really a more rote exercise. It’s a lot easier to do if you are not actually in the flow of reading – in other words, shorter blocks of editing time for line edits and proofing actually help you find errors, in my experience.
  3. Stopping in the middle of things. One of the most common pieces of writing advice out there is to stop in the middle of things. In other words, don’t finish a writing session at the end of a chapter. Finish it while you still have momentum. That momentum will carry you through the beginning of your next writing session more quickly. You’ll spend less time trying to figure out what happens next in the story and more time writing – helpful if you only have a short chunk of time to begin with.
  4. Outlining larger projects. One of the things that I most often tell beginning writers is that it’s important to outline. I don’t do full outlines like a lot of folks – that is to say, my outlines actually look like outlines, usually, with very general information and scenes sort of grouped together, at least until I get further along in a project. But for long projects, and even for short stories, it’s important to have an idea of where the story is going before you sit down at the keyboard. This piece of advice is a lot like number 1 on this list, but involves a little more time and planning in advance.
  5. Putting myself in the headspace with music. There are a lot of pieces that go into writing that aren’t actually writing. One of those is daydreaming. I find that there are a lot of times during the day when I can safely daydream about a bit of world-building or a character motivation without having to stop another task I am working on. One of the things that helps me with that is to listen to a playlist inspired by whatever I am working on. This is also a great way to get yourself in the right headspace as you go into a writing session, since it helps bring up the same thoughts and emotions you were having when you were brainstorming before.
  6. Keeping things in the cloud. One of my best tips for the person who has a tight schedule is to keep all of your writing in a cloud server. This is something I’ve only recently started doing, and I’m so glad that I have. It serves two functions – first, I don’t have to worry about my computer crashing and me losing everything I’ve ever worked on, because it’s backed up in the cloud. Second, I can literally work on something anywhere, even if I get slammed with an idea when I have no pen or paper. I even got a portable keyboard for when I’m on lunch. I still love writing in notebooks, but it definitely saves time not to have to type everything up and gives me more flexibility with note taking, etc.
  7. Eating while writing/editing. One of the big things that I do is use my lunch to write or edit. I’ve been a bit bad about this the past few weeks, but typically I use my eating time for writing. This is the one block of time that I know I will get – everyone has to eat – so if I make sure to make time for reading, writing, or editing during this stretch then it helps balance all of the rest of my needs for time later in the day. It’s not ideal, but if you’re pressed it’s better than nothing. And food helps me think.

That’s all the advice I have for you today! I hope it helps in your quest!

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The best thing I learned at MystiCon

I go to conventions to spread the word about my existence, sure, but I also go to conventions to learn. (And to meet awesome people, but that is a side benefit to the utility, even if it is a very important one.) This year, I had a number of great experiences – being on an all woman panel was one, I enjoyed that immensely – but the most meaningful learning I did was as moderator on the very last panel of my time there, Epic Scale Fiction.

As might be imagined, I focused most of my questions on the “scale” piece of this topic – that is, how to expand a story. And the most obvious method of expanding a story that’s already out there is to write a new story (or a continuation of a story) in the same world. I’ll admit my bias – writing a sequel has been a totally different affair for me than writing an original story, with a whole new set of skills that I needed to acquire. Check on any of my posts which contain progress updates on Daughter of Madness and you will see what I’m talking about. But I didn’t have the language to articulate what, exactly, I’d done wrong with my second book in the Creation Saga the first time around, and what, exactly, I was doing right with the rewrites.

(As an aside, I have gotten deep into edits and heard back from beta readers and guys, I am very confident that you are going to love Daughter of Madness. I’m also very hopeful to have an official release date soon.)

I now have that language, thanks to the panelists. A sequel still involves changing the status quo. You sequel starts in that shift, just as your original novel did. It’s not just a continuation of the prior story. Something must change for each of your characters. So:

  • Change the status quo
  • Your sequel is not a continuation of the old story, it’s something new
  • Each book should be a story unto itself

When I started writing Daughter of Madness, I was trying to continue the story that I was telling in Mother of Creation. This is where I went wrong, and this is why two thirds of the book got chopped and rewritten. I had a solid thread on Liana’s story, with drastic changes to her new normal in the offing, but I just expected the other characters to keep doing what they had been doing and honestly? I was bored. I was bored writing it, and it showed, and it didn’t make any sense at all. Everything was bad.

Then I listened to Kameron Hurley talking about the need to throw out part of her book on her Twitter. I realized I could do that. And I started over. I started telling a new kind of story for each of my characters. One where the setting was more or less the same, often, but the stakes had changed, either internally or externally. I muddled towards the answer that the panelists so concisely gave me.

Everyone approaches sequels differently. The level of backstory required, the way that you orient the reader to the characters, changes from person to person. I very much want people to read the first book before they read the second. They are installments in the same broad arc. But they still should be able to stand on their own enough that if I as a reader came back to this series after a long time, I would be able to orient myself and still be engaged. And the only way that can happen is if the story in the second book is just as gripping and engaging, in its own way, as the story in the first. It can’t be a repetition of what has gone before, though some of the same themes and conflicts may be present.

In a way, I’m glad I had to learn things the hard way. Even if I had heard someone say those very words before, I don’t know that I would have recognized it in application to my own work. Even if I had, I don’t know that the book I would have written would have been as truthful as this one, because if I had finished Daughter of Madness sooner I would have lacked the experiences I needed to make it sing. But I am glad I know the lesson now, and I wanted to pass it on to you, in case you ever find yourself in the same boat.

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Impostor syndrome

Recently I listened to an episode of Writing Excuses entitled Impostor Syndrome, with Alyssa Wong. I love Writing Excuses, and I listened to this particular episode at a time in my life when I was feeling that impostor syndrome very strongly. We all have days like that, when we come face to face with our inadequacies and can’t see anything else, when we make those flaws larger than life. I was incredibly grateful to this podcast, and I encourage you to listen to it. But there was definitely something missing for me.

Writing Excuses is made up of a bunch of excellent and famous writers. There’s Brandon Sanderson, perhaps best known for finishing The Wheel of Time series. Mary Robinette Kowal is a phenomenal writer who has won multiple awards and been published in many collections. I strongly recommend her short stories especially, but she is also an excellent novelist. I may have mentioned Ghost Talkers a few posts back. That was her. Howard Tayler has been on the Hugo ballot, and Dan Wells has a multi-book series in the John Cleaver books. They are all well beyond where I am as a writer. This podcast was in fact about that. They were discussing having “made it” but never quite feeling that you have any legitimacy.

I have not made it. This is not an example of impostor syndrome, actually. This is a bare fact. I am making it. I am in the process of climbing. That is something I can be comfortable with. There are no awards that recognize me, there are no even mediocre book deals. There has been no moment of relief on this mountain, and so there can be no sense that I do not deserve that relief. That is what the podcast was referring to: the sense that you do not deserve the relief of recognition of your effort. That you do not deserve the praise, the acclaim. This requires having praise and acclaim.

However, the feeling comes from the same place. The feeling of being an impostor flares up when I think that I will never make it. That my work will never find its audience and that this hard grind, this endless, impossible climb, will never have a moment of relief. It is the same feeling, but different.

My S.O. told me recently that it was utterly irrational to feel bad about not being successful in a field which requires so much input from other people. You cannot control readers. You cannot control agents or editors or advertisers or the people they advertise to. Each little thing you throw out is lost in a sea of media. We are inundated every day with such a massive amount of information. When you become a creator of content, you add to that sea. The additions never cease, and each year they pile on one another. All of which is to say that your voice will be lost. It takes years and years for an author to break through to the top of that pile, and many of them sink down again. You should not be embarrassed or think yourself less than for not welling immediately to the top. That is just silly.

That is what I wanted to hear from the podcast, and happily I had him to tell me that instead. Sounds grim? It is. But for me, it is a comforting bit of grim.

One of the important points that was made in the podcast was the importance of knowing why you continue to create. If you create for acclaim, you will fail. That is something that I have been wrestling with and something that I have had stated to me multiple times recently. If your focus is on selling books, you are doomed to failure. You will never sell enough books to assuage that hunger. But if your focus is on telling a story, and telling a good one – telling a story for a story’s sake – that will never leave you.

So, in light of that, I leave you with this inspiring video. I can only find the link on Facebook, so you’ll have to click through. Enjoy.