Coffee heat rising

Writing

The Next Big Project: A New Writing Book

by

So I propose to a new young editor at Columbia, a pup who doesn’t know me from Adam’s Off Ox (what’s an off ox, anyway?), that we should do a new edition of The Essential Feature. He gives me a brush-off. I think, eff you, you little twit, and lay a new set of plans.

This effing of him comes easily, because in the meantime some other plans are afoot. Pretty clearly I need to get off my duff, abandon the evidently futile social media, and show up in front of living human beings to peddle my bookish wares.

And what, yea verily what do I have to sell? As Jackie wrestles with masses of content at Plain & Simple Press, we realize that of several content categories, “writing tips” is a) the largest and b) the most appealing on social media.

By extension, I conclude, the large “writing tips” category of my blog and print content probably represents a convenient shoehorn into various public speaking opportunities.

One plan is to try to offer a public-service course for one or more of the community colleges — how to self-publish your own book. Something along those lines could also be offered at the local bookstores, which tend to offer various presentations, and quite frankly I’m very sure I can find venues coming out the wazoo without much effort.

And what do we need to embellish these dog-and-pony shows?

Why…another book, of course!

Come to think of it, I realized that between the more timeless segments of the Columbia book, two yakkity blogs, and lecture material for five courses, there’s plenty of material to cobble together a book about how to write, self-edit, and self-publish your own magnum opus. Yes. You, too, boys and girls, can publish your very own Great Novel (or Great Self-Help) (or Great Memoir)  (or Great Exposé) of the Western World.

Thanks to the “filter” function in WordPress, it didn’t take long to cobble together the skeleton of this thing. A few more hours and it was fleshed out, to the tune of about 85,000 words.

By the time the chaff is trimmed out, it should come to about 60,000 or 70,000 words, a good length for a nonfiction tome like this. I’ve been pouring the candidate material into one of Friedman’s Word book templates…am about 3/4 of the way done at about 43,000 words: 267 pages (so far) in a standard trade-book trim size.

Naturally, after weeks of nothin’ doin’, a new client shows up at the door, smack in the middle of this industrious little project.

He has 26 pages of abstruse academic copy written in, by his admission, darkest Chinglish. Needs it by the 29th. Just now in China it happens to be the 26th. He’s not paying much, but that’s OK: every little bit helps.

So tomorrow &  the next day will be occupied by that project. Good. Which reminds me…my other honored Chinese client owes me a grand. Guess we’ll be importuning her before we start on this guy’s project.

🙂

How to Freak Out a Dog

by

🙂 The secret: Birds. Birds raiding a feeder are total Dog Freak-Out.

It’s a San Diego morning: cool, slightly overcast, occasionally misting a little sprinkle. Absolutely gorgeous. After a mile’s walk with the poochies, I felt inspired to refill the hummingbird and the real bird feeders.

Couple of weeks ago (or more?), I dumped the rest of some old bird seed in the two plastic feeders that lurk around here, habitually disused. With two of them filled and the cat barriers holding off the neighbor’s predator, we were rushed with flying bug-eaters of all kinds: finches and sparrows and thrashers and towhees and mockingbirds and doves of three varieties and a number of things that I have no idea what they are.

It was really quite lovely. So I decided I should do that more often. Having used up the bird food and sunk under another tsunami of work, that plan was forgotten until yesterday, when I serendipitously stumbled upon some bags of bird food at the Walmart. Hallelujah!

So the birds are now fed and I’m in the Leafy Bower enjoying a very pretty morning, and the dogs are going BATSH!T chasing the birds.

Cassie, who will eat anything (it’s a corgi trait), is trying to hoover up seeds that drop when they spook the birds into flight.

Doesn’t take much to amuse a human, does it?

Yesterday I started working on the client’s book layout at 5 a.m. Flew to a doctor’s appointment at 10, running late and carrying page proofs for the book I’m supposed to be indexing. Couldn’t find a place to park at the Mayo; parked illegally and raced up three flights of stairs, only to be told they’d moved to a new building. Ran down the way to the new building, raced up another three flights of stairs.

Got there so late that there was exactly zero wait time, putting the eefus on the plan to get at least a little mark-up done on the textual study of umpty-umpteen centuries of Semiramis narratives. Oh god.

Back to the Funny Farm; back to work on the book layout. At a little after 7 p.m., sent word to the client that page proofs had been ordered. Bolted down some food and then went back to work on the Semiramis index.

And that is what I should be doing right now. But I’m not. Because I’m beat. And it’s totally too nice a day to be mining salt.

How would I like to be fooling with my next novel idea? Let me count the ways.

Over at Plain & Simple Press, I posted another excerpt from a work-in-progress in the Fire-Rider series.

New Adventure Squib at Plain & Simple Press

by

Seth usable Depositphotos_45725153_l-2015What a hoot! Over at Plain and Simple Press, I’ve been posting short squibs from the draft of the next FireRider noveloid. Several love interests are developing, not the least a possibility between a fellow named Seth and a young pistol named Caddy.

Caddy Depositphotos_99552390_l-2015Actually, if you want to start following this pair, you’ll want to start with the first episode, “Seth.” Then move on to today’s episode, “Banshee.”

I’ll publish a couple of the other sub-plots over there, too. One that’s under way has to do with the wife of Jag Bova “Snow-Killer,” Mayr of Rozebek. I’d titled it “Women Warriors of the North” because the original idea was to follow several of the women elite — the kubnaths and mayreths — who actually run the place. But the whole Bova – Lieze thing is turning out to be interesting enough to take center stage. In another day or two, I’ll post a new installment in that part of the story.

Check it out!

Computer Kudzu

by

It’s taken two days to prune the computer kudzu out of this little machine. Ever notice that? Files grow like horror-movie vines, shedding endlessly reproducing directories and subdirectories. After awhile you can’t find anything, because whatever it is that you need (right this minute, dammit!) is hidden under impenetrable mounds of digital debris.

Hour after hour of hacking and shoveling left just 12 main directories.

12FilesWho’d have thunk it? Two years of nonstop work occupying seven days a week boil down to 12 little computer folders.

…And 52 subdirectories with 118 sub-subdirectories… Ugh.

That doesn’t count the ones I threw out, the ones in the “Archive” folder, the ones in “Dropbox,” the junk that’s settled on the Desktop, and all the mystery files in “Microsoft User Data,” for which I disclaim responsibility. 😀

But the depressing part surfaced in a folder containing a bunch of projects I’d started and imagined working on after quitting the damn teaching job. An elaborate sequel to Fire-Rider involving a tribe of cryptids…a crime novel I drafted in graduate school, unearthed a couple years ago, dreamed up a new plot line for, and had begun revising…a corgi book…several books on nonfiction writing technique…a personal finance book…a science fiction story with an alarmingly clunky opener (gotta write that thing over!)…a book to be titled, creatively enough, I Hate Cats…Notes for the proposed (and long-defunct) boob book, complete with a full-blown proposal including two chapters, two appendices, and an introduction….

Ohhh well.

Really. If I’m going to do this publishing gig for nothing — actually, right now I’m doing it for considerably less than nothing, since the $34 I earned last month hardly comes under the heading of “profit” — then I might as well amuse myself by writing unpublishable books and stories, instead of working my buns off formatting, publishing, and marketing the unsalable. LOL!

In fact, if I pulled down revenue from The Copyeditor’s Desk, an ordinary year’s occasional income would come to just about what adjunct teaching pays for a course load equivalent to a full-time load with honest pay and benefits at the Great Desert University. It ain’t much, but it’s better than nothing. Thirty-four bucks a month makes adjunct teaching look good. Matter of fact, it makes reading Chinese dissertations and math treatises look good.

Editorial work doesn’t exactly overtax one’s skills or time. It would leave plenty of opportunity to write whatever drivel I feel like posting.

Or even to have a life. Can you imagine?

Calling on the Muse…and all that

by

Muse_reading_Louvre_CA2220Wannabe a writer? Or an artiste? Or the 21st century’s answer to Bach? Well, all you have to do is summon the Muse, eh?

LOL! Personally, I’ve never been much of an acolyte of the Muses…inspiration lurks in the “Pay to the Order of…” line of a well-written check. But some of us revel in the emotional tug of a mystical impetus to inspiration.

The “Muse” answers to one call: hard work. Work at learning one’s art. Work at practicing it. Work at perfecting it.

Over at Writers Plain & Simple, a student’s tyro article inspired (heh!) a squib on the subject, you might enjoy.

Meanwhile, not an awful lot of Musing got done around here today. Book 14 of Fire-Rider went up (to the right). Tweets got twittered. Correspondence got sent to authors. A couple of authors got paid (one belatedly!). A meeting got met. The e-book builder got discussed with. The mess that is my computer filing system got a start on a cleanup. None of it what you’d call “inspired.”

Oh well.

Another Fine Day in Social Media Marketing

by

So I set up a Goodreads Authors page today. Now as activities go, THAT one defines frustration.

Yea, verily, it would suffice to define any number of English words:

aggravation
confusion
mess
crazy-making
incomprehensible
pointlessness
arrogance
annoyance
time-suck

Well, I’m hoping that Twitter and Facebook (where I should have been setting up a new page instead) will generate buyers. I kind of doubt it, but…damn, this stuff is frustrating.

It sucked up my entire afternoon, and I didn’t get anything else done. And since I very much doubt that a Goodreads Authors page that no one reads is going to go far by way of marketing, as far as I’m concerned I didn’t get anything done, period.

LOL! What I did just now — try to create one of their Goodreads widgets — is a case in point, and typical of what happened every. step. along. the. way. It asks you to enter the ISBN of your book. In response, I copied and pasted the ISBN that I copied into my spreadsheet direct from Bowker. Click enter. And what excuse do I get for the FAIL?

“Enter a valid isbn to see a example and widget code.”

Folks, it can’t get much more valid than electronically copying and pasting it from the electronic horse’s mouth.

Should’ve used my afternoon to build a new Twitter page for Fire-Rider. What a waste of energy.

Think I’ll do a) a Twitter page for Fire-Rider and then b) a Facebook page for P&S press, which can then comprise the porn, I suppose, after all the FR bookoids are online. So that will produce three sites:

Twitter for Camptown Races (Racy Books for Racy Readers)
Twitter for Fire-Rider (not a racy book, by any means)
Facebook for both FR and the racy books.

So once again, another day went by in which I did exactly NO writing. That would be OK (marginally) if my time had been spent productively. But when the whole goddamn day is wasted…jeez.

Interestingly, most of the Internet chatter about GoodReads is overwhelmingly positive. One suspects the Power That Is Amazon behind the page after page of cheery burbling that comes up in a Google search for user reviews of the platform, but maybe it really is the be-all and end-all of indie author marketing. We have this interesting post questioning the Received Wisdom about Amazon give-aways, though it seems to be of most concern for people who have to ship off hard copies to customers who “win” one of these give-away contests. It’s as verbose and complex as the Goodreads Author site itself. Possibly those characteristics are contagious. Overall, though, the gist seems to be do it but tweak it. But then, deep in the comments section, the blogger responds to a reader with this: “You can’t give away e-books on Goodreads, so you must produce something in print to run a giveaway.”

This was the case in 2014. Whether it’s still so, I don’t know. When I looked at the form for the giveaway, NARY A WORD to that effect appeared. However, given the program’s consistently cryptic nature, I wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised but what she’s dead right.

Not a problem for any of mine, because I used a template that converts nicely to PoD page layout, and I have a PoD printer who does an excellent, quick job. If I were forced to do a giveaway through Amazon, then I easily could have two or three copies printed and shipped directly from the printer…assuming I could get Amazon to send me the winners’ names and addresses. A big assumption, I’ll bet.

We have this grutch, about some issue SO arcane that I can’t even follow what the guy’s talking about. A commenter here remarks, in March 2015, that Amazon/GoodReads (six of one, half-a-dozen of the ‘tother) was “considering” including e-books in the give-away scheme. Possibly by September 2, that has come to pass.

Apparently by late 2013, trolling and harassment had become so extreme at GoodReads the situation was becoming disruptive and truly nasty. Unclear whether this situation has been resolved. By September 2013 Amazon had taken steps to deal with it — possibly in a Draconian manner — but evidently the bullying was ongoing at the start of 2014,. In April 2015 people were still bellyaching about trolling at the site, though in June a more temperate observer that Amazon/Goodreads is earnestly trying to get a grip on the problem.

Doesn’t bode well, IMHO.