Self-Publishing Blog: Karen Woodward

Self-Publishing Blog: Karen Woodward:

Woodward offers a thought-out and detail-rich blog on writing, particularly writing short stories. In recent posts she’s commented on the James Bond story arc, fear of failure and developing good story structure.

The summer's most unread book is…

The Wall Street Journal takes an amusing look at how Kindle's highlighting feature can be used as a metric indicating which popular books are being purchased vs. actually read to the end.

Self-Publishing Blog: The WorldBuilding School

Self-Publishing Blog: The WorldBuilding School:

Like the name says, this blog focuses on creating believable story worlds, a skill relevant to both fiction writing and fantasy game development. Recent posts have focused on otherworldly weapons, languages and maps.

Resurrection

Tying back into my earlier heartrending story about learning to walk again after a motorcycle crash—with which I kicked off this batch of blog entries—I find myself in the completely unsurprising position of having to learn to write again. Not how to put words on the page, per se, but to get back into the routine of writing, and being effective about it. The last time I did this, at the very beginning of this blog, the key factors in forming that habit were as follows:

1. Clearing the way: Breaking the mental block against writing fiction that I’d built up over two decades of putting it off


2. Leaving [me] wanting more: making myself stop before I wanted to on each given day for the first couple of months, in order to make myself look forward to each session.
3. Nurturing the obsession: Once the routine was in place, I had to, on an ongoing basis, foster sense of urgency required to get a project of this magnitude moving and keep up the momentum while maintaining the highest standard of quality I could achieve.

Thus, after months adrift, in a different place, and in many ways a different person, I am now in the process of doing exactly the same things once again.

It will take some time to get the old engine fired up, but the lazy and shiftless aspect of me that insists upon making this difficult is fast running out of excuses.

In fairness to, uh, me, I guess, I haven’t gotten absolutely nothing done. Over the last few months, I’ve implemented hundreds of tedious small-to-mid-sized edits that the book’s alpha readers indicated were needed. I made notes pertaining to numerous key character and plot issues plus many new ideas that came to me over time in conversation, in the shower, in bed (including dreams), while driving, and in other random contexts. I’ve organized my long lists and stacks of notes pretty well, and even implemented some of the ideas contained within as changes in the book.

Perhaps most importantly of all, I’ve come up with what I feel is an interesting and fairly unique solution to the major dilemma I’ve known about for over a year, an issue similar to the “story question” in the (great) movie Stranger than Fiction.

So in summary, I won’t be restarting things from scratch here. It’s not a clusterfuck. It’s just work. A lot of work. With most of the easy fixes done. Meaning, most of what’s coming up is the hard stuff.

On a positive note, I’ve had conversations with various “alpha stage” readers corroborating the idea that the project is worth seeing to completion. In other words, most of them like it. In fact, the ones who like it, seem to like it rather a lot. Given that that’s how genre fiction operates, I couldn’t really ask for much more.

All right, that’s enough of an update for now. What it boils down to is this: over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be enmeshed in the process of flogging myself back up to speed.

Self-Publishing Blog: Author U

Self-Publishing Blog: Author U:

The brief, pithy posts at the Author University blog offer quick hits of writing advice. Delving into its frequent roundups of writing-related tweets is a more time-intensive process but can turn up some gems.

Picking Up the Pace

As I mentioned earlier, before I could have any hope of resuming the productive routine I’d gotten myself, I had to weather a veritable storm of life changes.

To kick the whole thing off, I had to sell the house I’d lived in for 14 years, which was at least 4x longer than I’d ever lived in one place before. When it sold more quickly than I expected, I had to move out abruptly, cramming an unbelievable collection of stuff (and collectibles) into storage. Then, not knowing where to move to, I bailed to Europe for six weeks, leaving the famed Bernadette in the care of friends. I spent that time walking miles a day, trading fat for muscle with the help of some push-ups and sit-ups, and curing my back pain almost totally. In the process I lost about 12 more lbs., putting me a good 30+ under my peak of grotesquery a couple of years ago.

After various wacky adventures, meeting new and old friends and burning a couple of bridges along the way, I returned to find that the problem of where to move to had not gone away. (For the record, America’s Nuclear Landfill—Nevada—is still home, but I needed another place to spend some time.) Stabbing in the dark, I found Portland to be a suitable venue in which to finish my book. Then the real moving hassle began. Three different accommodations in quick succession, endless furniture and housewares shopping, and multiple trips back and forth culminating in an interminable drive involving an RV and a frightened, morose runt of a Burmese cat.

And then there were the dental problems: two root canals, several crown replacements. Joy by the boatload. And my old career is refusing to leave me alone as completely as I’d envisioned.

Most of that is settled now, except for the parts that aren’t, and I’m writing this from a Starbucks across from Powell’s famed bookstore (which I haven’t been in because I only read on a Kindle now). This is one of a handful of suitable coffee shops I’ve located in the area, and the only one thus far that’s in walking distance.

Unfortunately, the deliberate breaking of my writing habit went a little too far, and I’m finding it quite hard to get things started again.

More on that to come…

A Long, Boring and Tedious-to-Live-Through Story

A few years ago, I was, uh, “involved” in a major motorcycle crash that, incidentally, destroyed my favorite Harley ever. It also broke my arm nastily (think “extra joint”); nearly put out an eye (saved by Oakley), scarring my otherwise flawlessly complected (it’s a word) brow in the process; and fractured the sides of my knees, as well as my sacrum. I couldn’t walk for a while, mainly because of the sacrum, which is the most painful thing you can break, at least in my experience, because while the hip bone may indeed be connected to the thigh bone, every damn bone is connected to the tailbone. Five months of physical therapy later found me largely returned to functional, having accumulated a bunch of new scars to add to my prodigious collection. (The one on my knee looks like an autopsy scar, which naturally makes it my favorite.)

There is sort of a point to that story, in that I liken my current situation to the physical therapy stage. I have done very little on the project for the last few months, for…reasons, and…

Fine; here’s the reasons. To make a long, largely dull, and tedious-to-live-through story fairly short: a few months ago I realized that my carefully formed habit of writing every day, as documented in the early entries in this blog, had become a rut. Not so surprising, really, given that the habit had lasted me a good 18 months and seen a thousand-plus solid pages written: a complete first draft, with a good 2/3 of the manuscript brought up to a 2nd-3rd+ draft level. But a rut is a rut, and my productivity was in the toilet. I’ve always been a proponent of productive obsession, but sometimes you just have to pop your head up or something will grab your hair and do it for you. I, of course, waited till something did it for me: specifically, the obvious fact that it was time for me to make some major lifestyle changes.

To be continued…