Cheating on My Own Blog...

I know I haven't posted here in a while. The reason is that I've been posting for Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers on the regular, and my blog-fu has been going to them. For those who'd like to drop by and see what I've been up to, here's a list of links to the blog posts I've done so far:

Learning from Television: The Art of Predictability

Mixing It Up--You're Doing It Wrong

Wrapping It Up--Finishing a Series

Feeding the Muse

Making a Big Deal out of It

Gadgets and Spreadsheets and Apps, Oh, My!

Spicing Up Your Stories

I hope you'll drop by and take a look. And I'll try to get a big more news coming on this blog. I have some news regarding an upcoming release, and I'm looking forward to talking about it.

Why I "Failed" at the Poetry Challenge and Why it Doesn't Matter

I started the April Poem a Day challenge and shared some of my work here, but as you noticed I quit after a few poems. This tends to happen to me a lot when I try this kind of challenge. I toodle along pretty well at first, then I find other things demanding my attention and I move on to those things. It happens with NaNoWriMo too. But in the long run, it doesn't really matter.

Why doesn't it matter? I mean, I set a goal and I didn't meet that goal. So I should berate myself and feel bad, right? Yeah, I'm thinking no. Because what did I accomplish? I wrote some poems. I probably wouldn't have written them at all if I hadn't started the challenge. So I have some bits of work that wouldn't have otherwise existed. That's not a bad thing at all.

Also, who's to say I won't finish the challenge eventually? I did last year, though I didn't write the last poem until some time in May or June if I remember correctly. I like the challenges and I'll probably go ahead and tackle the rest on my own timeframe. So, in my mind, rather than failing the challenge, I've produced some new work, challenged myself, and now I have some new pieces I can market later, with more likely to come.

In fact, the thing I'm most worried about regarding this challenge isn't that I didn't write all the poems in the time allotted, but that I can't seem to find the notebook I wrote them in. Now that's a catastrophe...

NaNo Totals for 11-13-12

Well, my word count totals are kind of pitiful compared to what they're supposed to be and compared to what others are doing. But I'm kind of happy with them, and this is why.

I've only written 7,000 words, but those words were on a few different projects. (No, I didn't even follow my own rules. This surprises you why?) One of these projects, thanks to me deciding I was going to work on SOMETHING ELSE ENTIRELY is now almost done.

So my brain is lame but at least I'm finishing things. That's good, right?

Oh, Good Grief, It's November Again

In case anybody's been living under a rock for the last few years, November is NaNoWriMo month. This phenomenon seems to be getting more popular every year. (Yes, you damn kids, get the hell offa my NaNoWriMo lawn!)

I've participated in NNWM several times, and have yet to make the 50,000 word goal. I tend to hit about 30-35K, although I think I might have flirted with 40K last year. Formal participation kind of makes me sad because of this inability to "win," so I've been doing it informally the last couple of years.

I'm going to do the same this year. I have a WIP that's about 2/3 done. I think I have 25-30,000 words left on it, so my goal for this month will be to get to that place where I write "THE END" on the last page. (Actually I don't write THE END on the last page. I usually write some kind of weird squiggly thing. But you get what I mean.)

I'll start today with my initial wordcount graphic. I snarfed this over at Writertopia, and I think it's cool so I'm using it, so there. I'll update it whenever I feel like it and maybe post a short excerpt or two here and there. The book I'll be working on is represented on its own Pinterest board here. I'll probably be adding stuff there, too--I still have a lot of research to do on this book, and God forbid I should do the research before I start writing. That would be too easy.

Anyway, best of luck to everyone else who's NaNo-ing. I hope we all crank out many words, and that some of them are even good!

Friday Links for Friday--The Business of Writing

Today's batch of links is focused on the overall business of writing. Goalsetting, how to ensure quality, seeing yourself as an entrepreneur, etc. This is the hard stuff we have to do instead of sitting around scribbling in notebooks all day. (In a perfect world, I'd be scribbling in notebooks ALL THE TIME. While drinking coffee and watching hockey or ogling band boys. Alas, this is not a perfect world.)

Jane Friedman--guest post by John Warner--How “Literary” and “Entrepreneur” Are Becoming Intertwined

Chiseled in Rock (Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers)--post by Tamelah Buhrke--Is Micro-publishing the Game Changer?

Jody Hedlund--Walls on the Way to Publication: A Necessity or a Nuisance.  A little of both? I think her approach to setting up your own walls to determine your readiness for publication are not a bad idea. It's easy to rush stuff out. It's harder to be sure it's really good.

Passive Voice Blog--It's the Rare Writer Who Actually has Ambitions. This post has excerpts from and links to a full post by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Long but worth a read.

The Creative Penn--Writing for Life: 5 Practical Goals for Writers. Guest post by C. S. Lakin. Great advice.

Deanna Knippling--How Much Is Your Writing Worth? Wow, that was depressing. Also--warning--white on black. I suggest using Readability. (Via The Passive Voice.)

Mystery Writing is Murder--Promoting a Pen Name. I have... way too many. *collapses in exhausted heap*

Michael R. Hicks--Adjusting to Being a Full-Time Author. Part 1 and Part 2. Really good, meaty, sensible advice I wish I had known, oh, sometime mid 2011. (Oh, and there's about 5 parts now. Go read them all. They're linked at the bottom.) Again, black on white. Don't have Readability yet? Go fetch it.

David Farland--Marketing Before You Write. Writing for a specific audience. Interesting thoughts. Pretty sure this approach would work best if you make sure you're still writing what you love.

And that's it for today. Hope you found something useful, and have a great weekend!

Friday Links

More bits and pieces that have wandered my way through Twitter or elsewhere.

Jane Friedman--How do you Know if Your Agent is Any Good? You know, if you have one...

The Write Practice--The Fool. (Via The Passive Voice.) Craft--interesting breakdown of the Fool archetype.

Stephen Pressfield--Work Over Your Head. Ways to challenge yourself.

Jody Hedlund--Making Friends Without Making Them Feel Used. How not to abuse your fanbase.

Ghostwriter Dad--10 Grammar Rules you Can (and Should!) Ignore. I could add like five more to that list. And by five I mean nine zillion. (I have a love/hate relationship with Proper Grammar.)

HuffPo--Why Some Authors Fail. Some interesting analysis of the industry. I still maintain that most authors who "fail" fail because they quit. Being stupidly stubborn is an underrated quality in the artistic soul.

Penny C. Wrede--Keeping Track. Craft. How to keep track of all your plots and subplots and sub-sub-plots and still remember what color eyes Annoying Guy to the Right of the Hero in Scene Twelve has.

The Domino Project--Rejecting the New York Times Bestseller List. I reject thee, NYT! I reject thee!

The Passive Voice--Some Things That Were True About Publishing For Decades Aren't True Anymore. Read the original article if you like--I was more interested in Passive Guy's analysis.

Grammar Girl--May vs. Might. This came up while I was editing, and I realized I differentiate solely by gut instinct. Actually I parse most grammar by gut instinct. Which might explain my love/hate relationship with Proper Grammar.

So there you have it. Hope something was helpful, and have a great weekend!

Friday Linkage--KK Gets Herself in Gear (Hopefully) Edition

So, now that the taxes are turned in and all I'm stressed over is nine million deadlines, back to Friday linkage!

Roni Loren: Fiction Groupie--Authors Interacting with Readers Online. Possible drawbacks to interacting with your readers online. Probably not what you think...

Jane Friedman--Where to Find Free Market Listings.

Barnes and Noble Book Review--Kind Reader--Despair and William James. Reasons to NOT despair if you're not wildly famous yet.

Patricia C. Wrede--Weaving Plot Threads. Structure and craft.

Passive Income Author--The Uncommon Truth About Marketing Your Books. Marketing vs. you know, yutzing around.

Dean Wesley Smith--Shifting Goals in This New World. Goalsetting in the Brave Freaky New World of Publishing.

More Intelligent Life--Writing is the Greatest Invention. Well, duh.

Sunset. Anne Lamott on Finding Time. Read it. 'Cause it's Anne Lamott, ferpetesake.

The Creative Penn--Technical Aspects of Creating a Non-traditional Ebook. Yeah, this made me want to go out and do all kinds of crazy stuff. *eyes to-do list* STOP IT, BRAIN!

The Business Rusch--Writers: Will Work for Cheap. Kind of appalling, really...

So... there's another Friday of Linky Linkage. Hope you found something useful!

Organizing Ideas—The Door

We’ve already talked about generating and capturing ideas. Now I’d like to chat a bit about organizing those ideas.

For a long time—like all the way back into my teen years—I kept my story ideas in loose-leaf notebooks. I put dividers in them and put any and all information into the appropriate section. I still have all those notebooks, and every once in a while I go digging through them for nuggets of inspiration. This isn’t a bad method of organization. It keeps things together in one spot, and you can keep adding bits and pieces to the individual sections until you get the urge to break the idea out and write it. (When you get enough collected that an idea needs its own notebook, it might be time to seriously consider writing an actual book.)

Karen Wiesner, in her book First Draft in 30 Days , outlines a method similar to this. She uses a file cabinet and folders instead of loose-leaf notebooks. I’ve used an expandable file folder as well, to keep track of quickie ideas or articles I find online that I print and toss in the file. (Evernote is great for this too, and I’m using it more and more instead of printing things out.)

One problem I had with this method, though, was that it doesn’t keep the story ideas right in front of my face. I’ll have a perfectly viable idea, or a sequel to something I’ve already written, worked out in the notebook, and I’ll forget all about it to go chase after some other crazy notion. (Squirrel! No, vampire squirrel!) I ended up writing lists, to-do’s, “what I’m going to write this year,” etc. But even that doesn’t seem to keep my crazy brain on point.

Then one day I was sitting in my office staring into space. It’s a relatively new office in an addition to my house that the previous owner used as a walk-in closet. (She had a lot of clothes.) Anyway. I was staring at the door and had a sudden urge to write all my WIPs, gestating ideas, bits of thoughts and wayward titles on sticky notes and stick them all over the door.

Why? my brain asked. What possible use could that be? So I didn’t do it right away.

Later that day when I was on IM with my best friend, I told her about this insane urge.

“Do it,” she said.

Thus enabled, I whipped out a pile of sticky notes and covered the entire freaking door. There’s a method to the madness—some color coding and a flow that takes ideas from germination to partial manuscript to full manuscript being actively submitted to published work. When a piece has been published, on the day it comes out I take the sticky note off the door, tear it into pieces and throw it away. (Some people might prefer to take them off the door and put them into a commemorative notebook or something, but I get a wacky tactile satisfaction out of ripping up sticky notes. 3 x 5 cards too. I’m weird. Deal with it.)

It’s fun to track the ideas around the door, watching them move from the middle of the door (idea) to the top left corner (complete) to the top right corner (accepted) and then come off the door. I try to keep that top row full—that’s stuff that’s contracted and will soon be seeing the light of day (it's much fuller now than it was when I took this picture). I also keep possible sequels grouped by publisher, or shuffle notes around as I start thinking about where to market them.

I also stick new notes on the door whenever an idea pops into my head, or when my best friend comes up with something. She’s great for generating plot ideas. We had a conversation one night that resulted in a yellow note with “Headbump Hieroglyphics” on it being slapped onto the door. Yeah, I know what it means. Other times she’ll say something like, “Evgeni Malkin, Persian Sheikh. Put it on the door.” I’ll put it on the door and let it work itself out later.

Evgeni Malkin, Persian Sheikh

This method may or may not work for you. Maybe you don’t have a convenient door. But for me, walking past all those sticky notes on a daily basis gets me fired up. I want to write them all, clear that door right off. Now if I could just stop adding so many new ones…

Links for Your Perusal

Livia Blackburne--How to Incorporate Backstory that Hooks the Reader.

A Newbie's Guide to Publishing--Konrath's Resolutions for Writers 2012. A little late, but hey, it's still January.

Jodi Hedlund--How to Drive Yourself Crazy as a Writer. Ways to make your life a LIVING HELL!! Read the article. Avoid the practices.

Write it Forward (Bob Mayer)--12 Daring Predictions from the Indie Author Trenches. Thought-provoking stuff.

Jane Friedman--Guest post by Brad King--The Design of Authorship. What does it really mean to be an author? How is technology changing that definition?

The 99 Percent--Setting the Scene for a Productive Day. Using your environment to trigger more productive work sessions.

Study Hacks--Flow is the Opiate of the Mediocre: Advice on Getting Better from an Accomplished Piano Player. Yeah, it's about piano playing, but easily adaptable to any artistic endeavor.

Justine Musk--How to Flunk Social Media.

Dean Wesley Smith--New World of Publishing: Failure is an Option. Quitting is Not. Excellent advice on goalsetting.

Writer Unboxed (Jane Friedman)--The Secret to Finding the Time to Write, Market, Promote and Still Have a Life.

New Year's Linky Links!

Talk to YoUniverse: Tightening Your Plot by Layering. A great checklist for one element of rewrites.

Palm Beach Pulse: Palm Beacher James Patterson's 10 Tips to Improve Your Writing. Good advice, regardless of your personal opinions on Patterson's writing.

Etexts from University of Virginia Library: Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses, by Mark Twain. I started to read The Last of the Mohicans, and I have to say my opinion of the writing was much like Twain's. I recommend watching the movie instead. It has a better plot and 100% more Daniel Day Lewis in buckskins.

Marketing Tips for Authors: 15 Commandments for Getting FREE Publicity by Carolyn Howard-Johnson. Some ideas to expand your list of promo ideas.

Writer's Digest: How to Use an Outline to Write a First Draft.

Writer's Digest: 50 Simple Ways to Build Your Platform in Five Minutes a Day. A long list with a lot of ideas.

Jody Hudlund: How Much Time Should Writers Devote to Social Media? Useful guidelines based on where you are in your writing career.

SFWA: Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions. A comprehensive guide to worldbuilding for fantasy authors. Probably good for other sorts of authors as well.

Ebpublishing a Book: Promotion Stages. There are several parts to this series. It's worth a click-through.

More Links for your Linky Perusal

Writer Unboxed: The Number 1 Overlooked Skill for Any Author. It's not what you think. Well, unless it IS what you think, in which case it's not not what you think.

StoryFix.com: Make December Your NaNoWriMo Revision Month. Tips on revising your novel, whether you wrote it in November or not.

Publetariat: About Writing (Introduction).

Jody Hedlund: 6 Tips to Make the Learning of Fiction Techniques Less Painful.

Copyblogger: Are Internet Idiots Annihilating Your Productivity?

The Creative Penn: The 12-Step Cure for Writer's Block.

Glimmertrain: Steal This List. Suggestions to help jumpstart a stalled story or improve your storylines overall.

Savvy Authors: The 7 Secrets of the Prolific. By Hillary Rettig.

The Writing Spirit (Julie Isaac): Louisa May Alcott Didn't Need a Computer. Complete with 19th century writing magazine in .pdf.

Justine Musk: Cool Quotes by Badass Women.

And for Today's Linkage....

Study Hacks: The Steve Martin Method: A Master Comedian's Advice for Becoming Famous. Not directly from Steve Martin, but still an interesting look into his career.

Seth Godin: Drip, Drip, Drip Goes the Twit. Marketing advice. Sort of a slow and steady wins the race kind of thing.

Copyblogger: How to Blog Like Bond. James Bond.
and a companion piece, Dr. Evil's 7 Tips for Achieving Worldwide Marketing Domination.

Wired: Need to Create? Get a Constraint.

Wired: 9 Equations True Geeks Should (at least pretend to) Know. Something makes me want to use these as writing prompts.

Nova Ren Suma: On Inspiration. Guest post by Alexander Chee.

Write it Forward (Bob Mayer): Kernel Idea Examples. Followup to last week's link on kernel ideas.

Editorrent: Paragraph Power...At the End. Interesting, quick post about rearranging a paragraph of dialogue for best impact.

Jody Hedlund: How to Keep Writing When the Honeymoon is Over.

Friday Linky Lingage

A cool mix of links this week, imo. Enjoy!

Patricia C. Wrede: To Sell Out... Thoughts on writers who think they have to "sell out" to land a best-seller or a contract. (To the commenter--no, that shouldn't be a comma. If it were, it'd be a comma splice, and comma splices are the work of Satan.)

Blue Rose Girls: How I Edit. An interesting breakdown of a professional editor's process. Mine's a little different, often because my deadlines are tighter than a bass player's leather pants.

Gigaom: On the Death of Book Publishers and Other Middlemen. Interesting discussion of self-publishing as well as the new models represented by Amazon and Kobo's direct contracts with authors.

Justine Musk: One Reason you Should Give Yourself Permission to Work on Your Badass Creative Project. Sing it, sister. Starting to realize I really, really like this blog.

paidContent.org: Kindle Free Book Lending Holy Sh*t! I'm seeing a lot of mixed feelings about this development. Me? I think it's awesome. Still some kinks to work out, of course, but yeah. Awesome.

Write for Your Life: Open Your Writing Mind with the Morning Papers. A discussion of the benefits of writing morning pages, a la Julia Cameron and The Artist's Way. I've tried these before with mixed results. Any insight from those who've had success with this practice?

Justine Musk: Are Fiction Writers Screwed, Part 2. This is about building platform, except it's not. Excellent post.

Jane Friedman: Self-Published Authors Have Great Power, But Are They Taking Responsibility? Didja really think we were going to make it through the week without a Jane Friedman link? If you did, you were sadly mistaken.

Have a great weekend!

Information Overload Part II

Last week, I talked about organizing all the articles and blog posts I read throughout the week and turning them into mini-courses in Professional Development in order to develop myself professionally. However, there’s also a ton of material on these topics that’s only available in video or audio form. So how do you handle that?

Basically the same way.

Here’s what I do:

1. Follow the link. Watch maybe a minute of the video to see if it appeals (unless it’s really short—then watch the whole thing and see if it’s something you want to keep)
2. Download it to a folder. Organize these folders by topic and/or presenter
3. Collect numerous themed videos
4. Watch later, like a lecture series
5. …
6. Profit

Do podcasts the same way.

The only tricky part of this is the downloading bit. Some places really don’t want you downloading their video. I figure if they don’t want me downloading their video, then they’re not that committed to getting me to watch it. So I download it myself. (Please note—FOR MY OWN PERSONAL USE.)

There are several tools available to download video from YouTube and other places. Many of these work for almost any embedded video. If you’re on Firefox I recommend Download Helper or DownThemAll. If you’re not on Firefox, I apologize but you’ll have to Google your own tools. I never did find anything for Chrome that I was happy with, and if you’re on Explorer you have more problems than I can deal with here.

Anyway. There are also conversion tools you can use to convert video so you can play it on your iPod. (Some video is immediately playable on the iPod without conversion, and most podcasts are.) Going to the gym? Load up the iPod with video or podcasts on blogging success or how to turn your freakish obsession with vampires into profit and fame and plug it into the TV on the elliptical and have at it. We call that multitasking. It’s supposed to be bad for you, so I do it as often as possible. Or listen to podcasts in the car while you’re driving to the store for your vital medication (I don’t recommend watching video in the car unless someone else is driving).

I hope this helps you utilize some of the information you’re undoubtedly collecting, to make it easier to access and more relevant. Hopefully it’ll help us all get to step 6 more efficiently.

Information Overload, Part I

Too much information~ Runnin’ through my brain~ Too much information~ Drivin’ me insane~
--The Police, Too Much Information

The best thing about the Information Age is that there is SO MUCH STUFF!! If you’re like me and you love STUFF, it’s a veritable gold mine.

The worst thing about the Information Age? SO MUCH STUFF!!

As evidenced by my Friday link posts, I spend a lot of time following links from Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc., looking for nuggets of Useful Information. Some of the stuff I find is great—it jumpstarts ideas, clarifies problems, helps me get my procrastinating rear end on a better path. But a lot of it is just crap.

For a while, I was sifting through blog posts and printing out everything that looked marginally interesting, then putting it in a pile. I’d read it later, I figured, and find all the wonderful nuggets of wonderfulness contained therein.

Well. That produced a really big pile of paper. So I tried a different approach.

ORGANIZATION

I like Staples. I got there a lot, and I come out with notebooks, pens, folders, binders, sticky notes…it’s a sickness. But I was looking at my pile of papers, then at the bag full of folders I’d just come home with from Staples, and I had a thought.

I sorted the papers into piles according to subject: Blogging, Social Media, Writing Tips, etc. Then I punched holes in them and put them into folders. (These are the 3-hole punch folders with the metal tabs in the middle, so when you’re done you have a sort of compilation rather than a bunch of loose papers in a folder.) Sometimes I download free .pdfs of material that seems useful. The larger of these I put into separate folders.

So. That produced a large pile of folders. Next step?

IMPLEMENTATION

Implementation is a good word here, because it sounds really important. I mean, if you’re implementing, you’re really Getting Shit Done, right?

Let’s hope. Anyway, I looked through each folder and decided what looked extra useful and what didn’t. I tossed stuff that didn’t hold up. Then I picked up one folder and started working through all the articles and blog posts there and taking notes. Everything that sparked my brain is now in a notebook, where it can foment and percolate and grow Important Intellectual Bacteria, or whatever it is that ideas do to turn themselves into Action Items. In this case, I ended up with a list of information and ideas on brand definition and development and how that ties in with platform.

I also followed a lot of links that brought me to more interesting material, which I then organized into its own folders, both on my computer and in hard copy. I’m kind of looking at each folder as a mini-course in the relevant subject. I take a “course” every few days by sorting through these themed collections.

So here’s the process, in a nutshell:

• Collect anything that looks interesting
• Cull anything that proves not interesting
• Sort by topic
• Compile notes
• Form action items and plans to implement what you’ve learned

Next time: Information Overload Part II—applying this process to video and podcasts.