I've been busy elsewhere

Anenome Jones | Flickr

What a horrible horrible blogger I am! It's been nineteen days since my last post. I'm glad to say I've been decently productive during that time. I've been doing a little reading, a little editing, a little outlining and a whole lot of book cover making. 

Inkpop has dictated most of my time. I've met some really nice people and its fun to read the awesome projects that others have written. I do worry sometimes that I come on a little strong in my comments, since I live to line edit apparently, but all has been so far. I hope. I like to think I've been helpful to someone, at least. 

My favorite project so far is the wonderful, Margaret Loves Mr. Darcy by Brianna Elizabeth. Brianna has a way of writing scenes that makes me painfully envious. MLMD is funny and bittersweet and I enjoy reading it. Brianna has graciously allowed me to help with editing the project and I've also made a cover for it! The project now sits on the Top Five on the website, so as long as it maintains its position, it is heading for the editor's desks at HarperCollins. Good luck, Brianna!

As far as my own projects are concerned, Ghosts of Fallen Leaves has returned to my main publishing focus. I've got the whole project posted on Inkpop on a temporary basis. I'm curious to see how far it gets in the ranking system. Sooner or later, I'm going to have to start promoting it. I plan on starting the editing process again soon. Hopefully it will be ready for publication by the end of the summer. 

Some Say in Ice, the sequel to GOFL, has hit a few rough patches recently. I started writing from my outline and already I can tell it's a bit weak. I realized with a onslaught of dread that nothing actually happens in the book. Sure there are plenty of lovely scenes and the mystery is laid on just as thick, but at the end of the day, nothing is answered and there are barely any new questions. It was basically just a remashing of GOFL, which does me no good. Oh well, the middle books are always the hardest, aren't they? In order to fix its limpness, I've taken some planned parts from the third book and added them into the second. This significantly changes and enhances Nathaniel's role in the book, which is as it should be. He always seems like the most neglected character, which is silly because he's the one with the most to offer. I'm nearing completion of chapter one and I can't wait to move along with this story. 

In the meantime, I am being a bit distracted by another project. I don't want to talk about it too much just yet. The project is a planned trilogy and I'm in the process of outlining the entire thing. I've made it through the first book and find that I quite like it. The characters appeal to me and the plot, while rough at the moment, looks like it's going to be an interesting challenge. The general mood of this project should be much lighter than GOFL, and without the bittersweet fringes of Loch Raven, so we'll see if I'm able to pull it off properly. I won't begin any actual work on the story until I finish outlining the whole thing, which, at the rate I'm going, shouldn't be much longer now...

Very soon, I hope to be adding a book cover section to this blog. I would very much like to start helping authors fulfill their book cover needs. In the meantime, here is a selection of some of my work.

Construction

Laineys Repetoire on Flickr

Well, piece by piece I'm working on a new design for this blog. So far I've added a new header at the top and mixed in some CSS to make things look neater and prettier. The photo in the header was taken by me with my old camera. It's a shot of the trees at Loch Raven, so yeah. Fonts are Garamond and Scriptina, two of my favorites.

Where credit is due

The background comes from Shabby Blogs, which has a lot of cute stuff. Unfortunately most of it is too cute for this blog, but it's still a highly recommended site! I also need to give a shout out to two other sites. I recently found Blog Bulk and it helped me put the divider lines in the sidebar. It looks like I'm going to be using a lot of the tutorials there. Pugly Pixel is an awesomely cute design site and it's currently one of my new favorite blogs. I used her navbar tutorials for creating the links under the header. Thanks a bunch to both of these sites!

In other construction news...

I finished with the outline for Loch Raven. Structured outlining is somewhat new to me. I used to just 'wing it' a lot when I wrote. I'd come up with an idea, jump right into chapter one and just plow on from there. 

The thing is, this usually results in one of two things happening. The most popular result is that I write an awesome beginning, flail about the middle and eventually give up. I have so many false starts under my belt, it's amazing. I've probably written War and Peace six times over with all of the abandoned projects I have lying around. One of these days I should get around to totaling up a word count of all the stories I've 'wasted' time writing. I'm sure it's a ridiculous amount. 

The other result of the 'full steam ahead' method is that the story can end up very disjointed. That's what happened with the first draft of Ghosts of Fallen Leaves. I would start to reference or set up story elements that would later be dropped, ignored or completely reversed by the end of the book. The various drafts since then have partly been motivated by a desire to make the beginning, middle and end of that book feel more connected. 

This whole sense of detachment is the main reason why I stopped writing Loch Raven in the first place. It wasn't that I couldn't come up with an ending. I just couldn't reconcile the darkness of the paranormal elements with the light, summery beginning that I'd written. The paranormal elements in the beginning are practically nonexistent, so I was having a great deal of trouble figuring out how to drop them in without it shattering the story beyond all believability. 

To outline, or not to outline? That is the question, folks.

I've since become a believer in outlines. Of course every writer has their own method and it's not like I refuse to write anything without having an outline first. While working on the rewrites of Ghosts, I actually got in the habit of doing outlines without even realizing it. I would make notes, either on my computer or during down time at work. Sometimes I'd write little bits of dialog, but mostly it was just rambling descriptions of chapters and scenes. 

It eventually occurred to me that this was actually a form of outlining. It helped me to keep track of the things that I needed to have happen whenever I sat down to write. Before starting this final rough draft though, I did outline the entire story so I had a mapped out version of the plot. It helped me keep the separate plot elements organized as well as focus on the 'beats' of the story, the little story arcs within the overall story arc. 

When book two became a foreseeable reality, I jumped right into writing  an outline before even starting a single word of chapter one. I actually have all of book two planned out, which is very strange for me. We'll see how well I stick to it, but it's nice starting a story with some sense of the beginning, middle and end for once. 

And now it's the same situation with Loch Raven. After looking over what I'd already written and brainstorming a new ending, I hammered out an outline over the past few days and now I'm ready to start  working on the story again. I'm very excited about where it's heading and I can't wait to share it with everyone!

I feel so lost.

BookCountry.com

bookcountry.com

Let me start at the beginning. About four/five days ago, ShelfAwareness sent out another one of their awesome newsletters. This one featured an article on the launch of BookCountry.com. It's a website run by a subsidiary of Penguin Group, as in the publisher. It's main goal is to be a writer's community, where people post their writing so it can be read and commented on. The goal is to have a bunch of writers interacting with each other, reading and critiquing each other's work. It's a great idea, so of course I signed up. 

One of the catches to making your own work viewable to the public is that you must review three other user's work first. Of course I totally get the impetus behind this requirement. If everyone just dumped their stuff off so other's could read it, where would the motivation be for anyone to review anything? Since the site is new, however, I did have a problem finding content that I actually wanted to read. I think I'll keep checking back, but for now, I've put my Book Country account on hold. 

Inkpop.com

In the meantime I found a similar site for writers, called Inkpop.com. This site is run by HarperCollins, more specifically tied into its HarperTeen division, since Inkpop is decidedly for teens and teen writing. From what I've been able to tell, the majority of its users are teenagers (there's no actual age limit, so that's why a dinosaur like yours truly is trolling around) and they post everything from fiction and its myriad of subcategories, to poetry and nonfiction. Inkpop allows users to pick five books as their Top Picks. From what I understand, rankings based on a ratio of Top Picks vs. Top Pickers or Trendsetters, dictates the ranking of a book. The kicker is--and this is how Inkpop greatly differs from Book Country--the homepage keeps track of the top five ranked books and at the end of the month, editors from HarperCollins read these top five, entire MS or the first 10,000 words, whichever comes first. 

inkpop.com

What HarperCollins is doing, of course, is using the Inkpop community to separate the wheat from the chaff for them. This is a smart move. Everyday publishers receive piles of manuscripts for review, and these are mostly from agented writers. They'd be drowning in paper if they all accepted unsolicited manuscripts. With a community at Inkpop at their disposal, the teen branch of the publishing house has a whole fleet of volunteer assistants (who happen to be their cheif consumers to boot) reading manuscripts and either giving them their seal of approval or not. All with the aim of getting reviewed by an editor at the end of the month, with possible publishing contracts to follow. 

It's a great idea. One Penguin decided not to do. They expressly say they cannot guarantee anyone of any significance will ever read anything on the site. Of course, that might change, but who knows? The one thing I absolutely loved about Inkpop was the wealth of choices available. The site has been around for a year or so and it is heavily active, so there are tons of projects to choose from for your reading pleasure. I've already poked around at few things and I can't wait to dive in a bit deeper.

This is when things started to go south...

read

Four days ago, I posted the first four chapters of GHOSTS OF FALLEN LEAVES on Inkpop. Literally within minutes I received a short, positive review. A day later, another, more detailed review showed up. For not having done anything to promote it, I was pretty proud of myself. My ranking hovered somewhere around 1040, and one of the sites Top Trendsetters actually picked my book, so it even lingered on the homepage for a day or so. 

Fame is, of course, fleeting, or in this case, non-existent, so I didn't really expect much to come out of this without promotion. In the past four days, the book's ranking has risen to 914, which is awesome. It's currently on seven watch lists and ten waiting lists. No new reviews, but oh well. I feel pretty good about it, since I didn't actively try to promote it or anything. My goal wasn't to make it to the top five and have my MS read by an editor. If that happened, YAY! but that wasn't my goal. I still felt good about preparing this book for publishing later next month.

read

The issue began, however, when I decided to submit another bit of writing. A few years ago, after working on the first draft of GHOSTS, I started a story called LOCH RAVEN. The setting was loosely based on a reservoir lake near my home with the same name. After writing something dark like GHOSTS, I decided to embark on something light, though still paranormal. LOCH RAVEN turned out to be a summery story with lovely characters I loved writing about. It was so unlike GHOSTS, which is why I think I like working on it so much. It got some fond reviews from my friends, but I never finished it because, firstly, I had to pick a project and it lost, and secondly, I had written myself into a hole. By the time I got around to working on a rough draft, I realized it would require some decent amount of re-writing and so I dropped the project. 

I'd always envisioned LOCH RAVEN as the next project I'd go back to, once I'd gotten GHOSTS firmly off the ground. And so I submitted it to Inkpop, since I figured someone might read it and enjoy it. The problem is...

People are enjoying it.

In less than 24 hours, LOCH RAVEN has done better and gotten more attention than GHOSTS has done in four days. 26 pick lists, 5 individual comments, 4 related messages and an overall ranking of 628. IN LESS THAN A DAY. 

*insert barrage of expletives here*

EPIC FAIL.

My problem, and ultimately my question for you...

Am I concentrating on the wrong project for my debut?

  

Book Update

I've spent the past two days trying to improve my author presence on the internet. It's all a part of 'marketing' and 'author platform building'. Erg. Just saying those things make me sick.

As with most people, I'm terrified of putting myself out there and asking, "Hey, could you look at me, please?" People who know me know that I don't really have a problem talking about my book in real life. I've wrangled practically everyone I know into reading it. (If I haven't asked you and you're interested, just let me know!) I actually feel bad about how much I talk about it, so I've tried to cut back.

On the net, however, I don't feel comfortable seeking out readers. It's not that I have a problem talking. I doubt very many people will actually read this post, but I'm writing it anyway. I just don't know how to sell my book. I've only just figured out an acceptable jacket copy--the little blurb that usually goes on the back of the book or the inside flap. Though funnily enough I have no intention of putting it on the actual book jacket. A lack of jacket copy had made setting up professional pages for my book a little difficult, since all I was able to post was the cover and title. This problem has been fixed and information on my book can now be found in a few places:

• Under the My Fiction tap at the top of this blog
• On Goodreads.com, where I finally managed to get my Goodreads Author status working properly.
• On Inkpop.com, where I've also uploaded the first four chapters of the book for previewing/reviewing purposes. The first chapter is on Goodreads, as well, but it's so much easier to view on Inkpop. 

Tied into my presence on these sites, I've also set up an author fan page on Facebook. The little 'like' button on the right there lets you add me to your feed. I use Facebook regularly and have always posted my blog updates for my friends. I will also use my author page as a way to share information and make announcements. I know everyone is flocking to Twitter these days, but I have to admit that I don't get it. I can barely wrap my head around Tumblr (got one of those, too, but it's fairly useless). I know that makes me sound like an octogenarian, but I don't care. If I get super (or even mildly) popular and there is a request for a Twitter feed, then I guess I'll get one, but in the meantime... 

One big thing I've been avoiding on the whole book launch front is diving into the world of Kindle. I just need to get over this stigma I feel against Amazon. Their policies just irk me. They're my Wal-Mart. But this is no place for a soap box lecture. I've made my Kindle Direct Publishing account and I'll get used to using it. The next step after that would be chatting people up on Kindleboards and Nookboards. Let me tell you, I'm totally looking forward to that. Ug. 

All right, that's enough ranting for the day. I've worked myself into a bit of a depression, so I need to stop. I need to find a new book to read. Something light and happy. Any suggestions?

Breaking News!

Found on Flickr, but I'm too excited to remember where...

Happy times are here!

I've completed the biggest step toward getting my book published. That's right, I ACTUALLY FINISHED WRITING THE DAMN THING!

Now to be clear, I've finished writing it about three times now, but this is it. This is the final rough draft. Next step is red pen editing, workshopping with my Betas and possible editor-hiring. After that, it's smooth sailing with formating and actual publishing. I even also signed up for my ISBN through Createspace for the print copy today. Squee!!

After all that is marketing and hardcore platform building. *dies*



Final Stats:

Word count: 63,200
Page count: 250
Years in the making: Um, three?

Progress? A Writer's Rant

Look at that mess...

I've been staring down the final chapters of my book for quite a while now. I've got it all outlined (for the most part) and I know exactly what I need to write. 

But I can't bring myself to write anything. 

I think I'm worrying about the fact that the denouement is somewhat long, which can be a complete turn-off for some readers. I love that word, by the way. Denouement. I took French for six years, so I tend to like saying the French loan words with my crappy French accent. It makes me laugh. 

All in all, I've taken way too long to edit this book. I wrote the first (horrible) draft over the span of six months, and that was with easily two months' worth of breaks thrown in the mix. Since then, I've been editing it for two years. TWO YEARS. Granted, during those two years I've completely rewritten the darn thing, so I guess that counts as much as writing a whole new book. 

This final rewrite has been difficult and miraculously easy all at the same time. About a month or two ago I had an eureka moment. By adding a new character and a certain background story, I had somehow managed to make all of those awkward edges smooth out and work perfectly. It was as if that little plot point had existed in the story all along, but I had just forgotten to write it in. Once I worked it into the existing manuscript, everything started flowing very nicely. It made me grin from ear to ear, it truly did. 

I've also done the very naughty thing of taking time out to outline the next book in the series. So there it is now, sitting on my hard drive and in my brain, trying to distract me from finishing the first book. I need to start thinking of it as the carrot on the end of the stick. "Now, now, half-witted author. You can start writing book two once you've finished book one."

I'm starting to feel myself drowning in doubt again, which does me no good. Every time I write a new draft, I start off thinking it's a billion times better than the last one, but then I slowly grow numb to its wonders and I begin to doubt the quality all over again. Will it catch the reader's interest? Is this scene thrilling? Are my characters likable? Blah blah blah. 

Oh, and another little seemingly insignificant thing that is bothering me? It's so short. Like, holy cow that might just be a novella short. This bothers me to no end because no one could ever accuse me of brevity when it comes to my writing. The reason why it is short is because I've made the decision to break the original novel up into three parts because the original was too long. Like, 200,000 words worth of too long. But here I have part one probably clocking in under 70k. What the heck...?

cover design © h.m.resch

I know I just need pick myself up by my bootstraps and soldier on and whatnot. If I plow through and just finish the darn thing, then I can make it pretty during the final editing stage. 

Either way, come hell or high water, this book will be published sometime in June. In the mean time I've pretty much figured out the cover. This is still a work in progress, but I don't expect it to change too much before the release. 

Sorry for the ranting. I don't have very many people I can talk to about my writing so sometimes it just spews out and I can't stop it. I hope to have a chapter or two up for perusal sometime soon. Keep checking back and thanks if you actually read this far! <3

Just a Drive



flickr



       It was a rusty tank. It rattled slightly as it veered onto the beltway exit and I worried if it would be able to speed up fast enough to merge with traffic.

Not for the first time I wondered, What the hell was I doing in Nathaniel Strange’s car?

“You look like I’ve kidnapped you,” he laughed, glancing at me from the driver’s seat.

“Keep your eyes on the road,” I ordered. “Do the brakes in this thing even work?”

His smile faded. “The brakes work just fine, Becca. The car’s in pretty good condition for being twenty-five years old.”

I gripped the dashboard in fear. “Twenty-five?!”

He smiled proudly and pet the steering wheel as if it were a prize-winning barnyard animal. “Yep. Nineteen Eighty-three Buick Century. I bought it from an old woman who only drove it to the shops and back for twenty years.”

I sat back in the seat, transferring my iron grip to my seatbelt. “Twenty-five years…” I glanced around the car with eyes wide in horror, just waiting for it to fall to pieces. My money was on the rearview mirror. Those always fall off first.

“Relax, Becca. Rusty is made of solid steel. Even if we did crash, I’d be more afraid for the other car. Modern cars are made of aluminium. It’d be like hitting a row boat with an aircraft carrier.”

“Rusty?”

“That’s his name.”

“It’s a he?”

-------------------


Here we have some dead text from my book. The scene became completely irrelevant a few drafts back, but it's still one of my favorites. I'm going to miss this scene the most.

text © me, of course.