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Man, I just don’t know about this.  Belinda Frisch linked to this post at WORST BOOK EVER, and while I think they may have a point, I just can’t agree with the conclusions they draw from it:

Write faster, no more laying around or drinking coffee to be happy with one book a year. You need to do 2-6 books a year at least. Now, if you keep up with your hungry fans you stand to make a great living. We are no longer in the time of the easy writers life. So, if you have a short story sitting around… Publish it! If you wrote a story in high school… Publish it! Content, content, content! Back list, out of print, old works… anything and everything just get it up and for sale, you never know what book will take off and lead the change for all your other works.

— THE WORST BOOK EVER!: WRITE FASTER!

Now, I certainly agree that it seems to be best for an indie writer to have as many books in “print” as possible, but . . . . I somehow just don’t think that means that every single one of your unpublished trunk stories necessarily needs to see the light of day.  I mean, come on — a story you wrote in high school? Seriously? Okay, maybe you were turning out professional-quality writing when you were a teenager, but I know I sure as hell wasn’t.

You can’t just shove everything out there regardless of quality hoping that some of it will magically find an audience.  If you’re looking to publish something that’s been languishing on your hard drive for years, take a good long look at it first, and ask yourself if this, this right here, is really the piece of fiction you’d want a new reader to associate with your name.

This is much on my mind lately, because at Norwescon last weekend, I ran into an old friend of mine who asked me when I was going to self-publish Scratcher, which was my first horror novel.  She looked at me with wide-eyed shock when I told her I probably wasn’t.  I’m glad to hear that she still thinks of it so fondly, but — I’m just not sure I feel like it’s up to my current standards.  And I think having standards to apply to your own work is important, if you want to build an audience over time.  If editors and agents aren’t the gatekeepers of quality anymore, we have to be our own gatekeepers.

I may still dust off Scratcher and take that good long look at it.  But I strongly suspect that at the end of the day, I’m going to quietly put it back where I left it, and move on to something better.

Good morning! Sorry for my silence the past few days — I was busy getting ready for, and then recovering from, Norwescon, the big annual regional science-fiction convention. Not that I really saw anything of the convention itself — I was too busy prepping for a party I was running. Totally worth it.

I used to be on panels at Norwescon, but they haven’t invited me to be a guest in years.  I think this next year I need to get in touch with them and remind them I’m still around.  I miss doing panels and readings there.  I feel like I’m only doing half my job when I’m just writing — the other half of it is getting out there and connecting with people.

Anyway, I apologize for being gone, although I have to say I may fall silent again next week.  I’m having surgery on May 3rd, and I may not be posting for a few days after that — or alternately, may start posting nonsense through a painkiller-induced haze.  I guess we’ll see.

No link for you this morning — instead, I went looking for a quote to share, and found this one that I thought was rather lovely:

“You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what’s burning inside you.  And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.” — Arthur Polotnik

Here’s an article in the Atlantic that I immediately identified with — “Working Best at Coffee Shops.” I figured out quite a while ago that when I’m writing, I get a lot more done at a coffee shop (such as the late, lamented Aurafice on Capitol Hill, and the closed-until-further-notice Wayward in Greenwood) than I ever manage sitting at home. A lot of my friends find that kind of strange — they think the environment would be too distracting. But as this article says, I find it just distracting enough:

“Put in a silent room before a blank page, it’s almost impossible to write. Neither is it be ideal to work near a television set that keeps drawing one’s attention or a room where a child keeps interrupting. In a coffeehouse, its rare for someone to intrude on the space of a patron with an open laptop and a look of concentration. Still, there is just enough conversation and foot traffic in the background that you’re forced to semi-consciously tune it out [....] Forced to focus on a single thing the mind rebels, whereas adding another element somehow focuses it. The coffeehouse somehow provides that element.”

The article goes on to provide other theories as to what’s at work here, and I agree with them, too.  If you’re having trouble sitting down at home and making yourself write, you might try getting out of the house instead.

You could, I suppose, if you really wanted to, try to find the same level of detached engagement in a tea shop, a restaurant, a library. . . but I think there is something particular about coffee at work here.  “Coffee sets the blood in motion and stimulates the muscles,” observed Honore de Balzac; “it accelerates the digestive processes, chases away sleep, and gives us the capacity to engage a little longer in the exercise of our intellects.”

I was pleasantly surprised by the content of Anne R. Allen’s post, “3 Questions to Ask Before You Jump on the Indie Publishing Bandwagon.” For one thing, with a title like that and the use of the word “bandwagon,” I really thought this was going to be another post from someone who’s just trying to dismiss self-publishing as an all-around bad idea.

It’s really not, though — she’s not trying to dissuade anyone, she’s just presenting literally that: three questions to ask first.

The main kind of preparedness she’s talking about is something I don’t see a lot of people mentioning: emotional preparedness. Namely, are you sure you’re ready to deal with snarky comments and bad reviews?

“There are some unspoken benefits to the old query-fail-query-fail-submission-fail-editorial meeting-fail, fail, fail system. It not only gives us numerous readers to help hone that book to perfection—it also teaches us to deal with rejection, failure and bad reviews.

If you choose to self-publish because you can’t handle the rejection of the query process, you’re setting yourself up for worse pain later on. If those form rejections in your email sting, think of how you’ll feel when very personal rejection is broadcast all over the blogosphere.

So there’s a lesson here: don’t publish until you’re psychologically prepared to take the heat. Always keep in mind this is a business, and business can be nasty.”

Emphasis above is mine, not hers. That was the sentence that leaped out at me — it’s an excellent point, and very well put.

Me, I’ve got a pretty damn thick skin, earned in the constant flame wars of my youth. (I know the media likes to call this current generation the “Digital Natives,” but I’ve been kicking around on the Internet since 1987. This is home to me, and I’m entirely used to the way people talk to, and about, each other.)

I was up way too late last night, but I think it was worth it. I’ve been pushing myself pretty hard lately, and decided I needed a night to relax, and what better way to relax than to go spend a couple of hours being terrified with strangers in a dark room?

I’d been wanting to see Insidious, a low-budget horror movie that’s been getting a lot of buzz, and those are always kind of hit-and-miss for me. F’rinstance, I loved The Blair Witch Project — it’s one of my Top 50, in fact — but I thought that Paranormal Activity was just okay. My tastes aren’t always in tune with the mainstream.  (And if that’s not an understatement, I’m not sure what is.)

This time, I think the buzz was justified. I really enjoyed it, and there were definitely a couple of moments that scared the hell out of me. In a lot of ways, this movie starts out covering some of the same ground as Paranormal Activity — not too surprising, since the same producers were involved in both – but then it veers off that course into different territories. It shifts mood a couple of times so hard that it practically changes genre, and by the end of it you may find your suspension of disbelief a bit tested.

But that’s actually what I liked about it — it was willing to take risks and keep you guessing, not only about the plot but about what kind of movie you’re watching. That alone took me out of my comfort zone in a way I’m not used to.

One other thing I really appreciated about it — you know how in a haunted house movie, you’ve always got that question in the back of your head, “why don’t they just leave?” This deals with that problem in a satisfying way.

Definitely worth checking out. You might find it even scarier than I did if you have children. Or want children. Or, you know, like children.

. . . or in this case, it’s worth about 60,000 words:

Yes, it’s live — you can click on the image above and it’ll take you to its page on Amazon right now. (I’m a little excited. Can you tell?)

This might be somehow even more exciting to me than receiving the first print versions from CreateSpace was. This feels like the future.

THE INTERN linked to a really great piece of advice column writing, in answer to a question from a writer about how to get over the bitter jealousy they feel towards the success of other writers, and it makes a point that I think is crucial to remember:

“[ . . . ] my gut sense of your letter is that you’ve conflated the book with the book deal. They are two separate things. The one you are in charge of is the book. The one that happens based on forces that are mostly outside of your control is the book deal. You could write the world’s most devastatingly gorgeous book of poems and nobody would give you $200,000 to publish it. You could write the world’s most devastatingly gorgeous novel and maybe get that. Or not.

My point is, the first thing you need to do is get over yourself, Awful Jealous Person. If you are a writer, it’s the writing that matters and no amount of battery acid in your stomach over who got what for what book they wrote is going to help you in your cause. Your cause is to write a great book and then to write another great book and to keep writing them for as long as you can.

— DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #69: We Are All Savages Inside

Or as THE INTERN puts it, “Agents, editors, publishers, and the world at large can Reject your wish for a book deal. But NOBODY, read NOBODY can Reject your ability to write a great book.”  What a great reminder to other people’s opinions of your work separate from your own.  Even the opinions of people you might consider all-important arbiters of quality, editors and agents, are still just that — opinions. Concentrate on where your powers and responsibility lie.

From Jim Steinman:

“There’s so many things that have beautiful gods in them – y’know, amplifiers, guitars, motorcycles, girls’ eyes, screams in the middle of New York City some nights, moons, there’s millions of them.”

— The Dark Knight Returns.

Okay, I’m going to do my absolute best not to be snarky here.  I’m a fairly technical person — I’m a web programmer when I’m out there in Day Job Land — and I understand that not everyone is as comfortable or conversant with computers.  I do get that.

But I kind of boggled over this post over at The Book Designer, and it really underlines what I was talking about yesterday, about how much of a pain converting my book to Kindle format was.  It’s called “Conversion Journey: My Word-to-E-book Workflow.” This guest poster has been asked to talk about his process for conversion, and he begins by talking about how he starts out in Word, since Smashwords needs a Word file. Fair enough — but then he says:

Word produces (so far) the cleanest HTML file.

That sound you just heard was any other web developers reading this spewing their morning coffee all over their keyboards.

No. Wrong. Nuh-uh. Anti-yes. Word doesn’t produce anything like a “clean” HTML file. Word riddles your HTML with horrible proprietary tags that are absolutely meaningless to anything but itself, and produces output that’s literally about three or four times the size it needs to be, riddled with useless markup like inoperable cancer.  Word is a perfectly decent little word processor, as far as that goes, and it has its uses, but using it to create “clean HTML” is like using nuclear weaponry to go trout fishing.

But, okay, fair enough, moving on:

There is something about the process of closing the text file and reopening it that prevents Word from assigning any extraneous styles.

[....] For some reason, Smashwords does a lousy job of converting the linkable table of contents when those links are created solely in Word.

There’s something about the process. For some reason. Look at the language he’s using here — he’s approaching the tools he’s using in, well, kind of a cargo-cult like fashion — he doesn’t know why they do the things they do, or what exactly they’re doing to his files — he has just figured out, through trial and error, what steps seem to just magically work, no matter how Rube Goldberg-like the process ends up being. (And it really is that convoluted. Go read the linked article and you’ll see what I mean.)  And what fascinates and horrifies me is that he sounds perfectly happy and accepting of the idea that this is the way it should be, this is the way it has to be.

At this point you might be thinking, man, Montoure, go easy on the guy.  He’s just a poor struggling writer like the rest of us, he can’t be expected to know his way around this stuff, can he?  Well, see, no. That’s what kills me. He’s a professional editor and e-book designer. He does this for a living, and he’s happy with a workflow process that ends up like this:

The third workflow stream is to export the Word file as an HTML file. I open that HTML file in BBEdit and spend the next couple of hours cleaning the code and adding additional code where appropriate.

A couple of hours?  To go over “the cleanest HTML file?”

Okay, look, my point here is not to eviscerate this poor guy.  He does conclude, “The process is still far too complicated, however, and I’m excited for the day when we have one or two superior tools for creating e-books.”  My point here is to agree with him on that. The tools out there for making an e-book are in their infancy, and right now, a lot of people are relying on them. They’re out there gamely trying to carve Michelangelo’s David using a flint ax and a butter knife. Something’s gotta change.

 

Okay, I’ve finally finished something I’ve been putting off for a while. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been polishing up Slices — re-working the intro, clearing up a few typos, completely redesigning the cover.

Stayed up late Saturday night doing the last of the editing and re-formatting, sanity-checked everything today, and re-uploaded it to CreateSpace, and ordered another proof copy.  The book will be briefly unavailable while I go through this process again, but I think it’ll be worth it.  I can’t wait to show you the new cover.

I also uploaded the book to Amazon’s Kindle store.  I’ve really been wanting to do this — all of the indie authors whose experiences I’ve been avidly following online say that that’s where most of their sales come from.  I had read that the process was pretty simple, too — you could just format your book in Word and upload the .doc file and it would be automatically converted for you.

Ummm, yeah . . . didn’t really end up being that easy.  My first attempt looked horrible. Turns out I would have been better off just coding the HTML for it by hand in the first place.  Man, what a headache.  I can see why a lot of people prefer to just pay someone else to do it.

But the important thing is — it’s done!  Which is awesome.  I’ll let you know as soon as it’s available.

I also managed to answer all my e-mail, design and order some promo postcards for the book and for Causality, and finish designing the pledge reward T-shirts for the party I’m running at Norwescon.  Busy weekend.  Now that the day-job work week has begun, maybe I can relax . . . .

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