Self-publishing your personal writing

Speaking of deadlines, one that's coming up fast is the June 1 deadline for NaNoWriMo winners to get your free bound copy of a book from CreateSpace.

I mentioned before that I wasn't keen on the idea of self-publishing my NaNoWriMo novel, because I plan to submit it for traditional publishing. But, for any writer, there is probably always some art form that was done more for personal pleasure than for publication glory, and a print-on-demand press is the ideal platform for preserving that art for future generations. Even if you're not a NaNoWriMo winner, read on, for I have good news on that front!

In the interests of scrambling, I am compiling 20 years (golly, I'm old) of my poetry into a chapbook for the purpose. I'm laying it out in Microsoft Word, having my graphic design-adept husband craft a cover, and calling it a day.

Of course, first I had to dig out boxes from storage to find some older poems that weren't still (or ever) digitally entered on my computer. I chose a little over 130 poems to be in the book (why not go whole hog, when I'm not sure I'll do this again?), most of them recent, but a sampling from my teenage years. And then I had to figure out how to organize them all.

I threw out chronologically. Do I start with the early (read "bad") poems, so that's the first thing people see when they crack it open? Or do I go reverse chronologically and have the clunkiest poems be the last thing left in people's minds?

No, no, I needed some other arrangement. I considered grouping themes (school, parenting, nature, etc.), or structures (formal vs. informal, or even subdivided such as, sonnets together, sestinas here, etc.). But it seemed like it would be too repetitious for the reader.

It finally came to me. A friend had recently crafted a beautiful self-published book of poetry and photography (see thumbnail to side). Because her photos are primarily macro nature shots, she wisely grouped her poems and pictures into a coherent seasonal progression.

I'm all about stealing what works, so I started making piles. Some poems were easy to sort: a poem with "July" in the title went in the summer stack, and a poem about the start of school went in autumn. Others were more metaphorical — poems of grief made it into winter, and hope for rebirth into spring. A few were more nebulous still. If the poem was mostly happy but not sentimental: That sounded summery to me. Did I sound pensive but not depressed? Fall, I think.

Eventually, I had four roughly equal stacks, and then it was time to make sure that the poems made a nice progression within each season, and leading from one season to the next. So, for instance, the autumn section would end with a poem suggesting colder days ahead. Again, some of this was bordering on esoteric, but it all seemed to work out.

For the week ahead, I'm editing and fine-tuning the layout. And then off my book goes to be printed! My very own proof copy of my very own poetry, on the page in black and white.

I chose to self-publish my poetry because I could submit it for publication, but I just don't want to. I write it because it begs to be written, not for a specific audience, and certainly not a commercial one. Unlike with my fiction! My novels also beg to be written, but I love having an audience in mind, and I don't at all mind revising my fiction to make it more sellable.

So, now for the good news — in perusing CreateSpace's site to determine the nitty-gritty of cost, shipping and handling, and royalty setups, I was pleasantly surprised that the prices for self-published black-and-white books are really astonishingly reasonable. And, they get you an ISBN and listed on Amazon.com automatically. And, because it's print-on-demand publishing, they print up a copy as soon as someone orders it, so there's no need to order a big print run, then store all the inventory and try to sell them all off.

I had been intending just to take my proof copy and run, but it's sorely tempting (and, yes, cleary that was CreateSpace's clever intention!) to buy several copies of my cute little chapbook to hand out to family and friends this Christmas. (Nothing says "I love you" like a vanity press offering!)

I also realized I could offer my collected poetry for sale on my personal writing blog, in case other friends wanted to pony up the bucks necessary to purchase it. If they buy it through Amazon.com, they can even qualify for free Super Saver Shipping. And I can price my paperback reasonably low, while still making a little bit in royalties!

So, even if you're not a NaNoWriMo winner, check out CreateSpace and see if it's a good fit for any of your unpublished works. Getting your own proof copy requires you to pay only the base publishing price plus shipping and handling, and the same goes for any copies you buy for yourself.

So, think about the gems you have languishing in a drawer: a stack of short stories? A fabulous how-to on creating wool diaper covers? You can also self-publish (is that the right term here?) movies and music, so if you have a CD of children's lullabies you've been dying to have professionally produced to give to your kids as a Christmas present (been there, done that), that's also an option.

I'll try to write once I receive my proof copy with an update on quality, turnaround time, and final bill. Happy self-publishing!

Free bound copy of your novel from NaNoWriMo08

Hey, fellow NaNoWriMo08 winners!

In case you didn't get the memo, you can still get a free bound copy of your work courtesy of CreateSpace through NaNoWriMo.

The details are under "I Wrote a Novel, Now What?":

CreateSpace, an Amazon.com Inc. owned company, is generously offering every NaNoWriMo 2008 winner a "free proof copy" of their 2008 manuscript. ... They'll even cover the costs of basic shipping to you.

To redeem the offer, you'll need a special NaNoWriMo winner's promo code.

... After you receive your proof copy, you can then choose if you want to make it available to the public at large—everything from showing up for sale on Amazon.com to complete invisibility.

More questions and answers are available on the NaNoWriMo forum.

The offer expires June 1, 2009.

If you're anything like me, you relish the thought of getting a free, bound copy of a book by yourself, but ... it's not necessarily your NaNoWriMo book that you want to have self-published.

That's ok, too. You can publish any old book of yours you want, as long as it doesn't exceed 828 printed pages in your PDF proof.

One reason I don't want to publish my novel-in-process is that I'm not sure that it will be publisher-ready by June 1 (though I sincerely hope so!). But the main reason is that I intend to submit it for real, live publication, and don't want an ISBN attached to it as I shop it around.

So, instead, I'm considering printing up some of my poetry and essays, and some of my husband's essays — things that we've "published" online but that we've never submitted for actual money anywhere. It would be fun to have them in print! Having a son now, I relish the thought of passing along some of our favorite writings in bound form.

What are you going to do with your free copy? Or, if you're not eligible for one, what have you considered self-publishing?

Writing software vs. doing the hard work

I’ve been deep in the throes of editing my NaNoWriMo novel. It’s such a muddle to wade through, 50,000-plus words, and I do understand that that’s on the short end for a novel. In the end, being a cozy, it will be at least 60,000.

But whether 50,000 or 100,000, that’s a lot of words to edit!

I have three murder incidents in my book, as most mysteries do, and I realized after I’d written it in that crazy month that numbers two and three needed to be swapped. It just made more sense that way, and allowed the main character to get to know beforehand the person who’s killed last.

But, oh, dear — that means rewriting and rearranging fully two-thirds of the stupid thing. Even those wonderful, witty conversations I was so proud of will now have to fall, because the characters will all be talking about something else now.

But as someone on the NaNoWriMo boards consoled (and I can’t remember who it was now — sorry), you can’t edit nothing. At least I have a truckload of words to edit!

I thought there might be some computing help out there to make my life easier. Microsoft Word is dismal when it comes to the demands of fiction writing. There’s no easy way to outline or to rearrange whole sections.

I started researching writing software for the Mac, reading reviews and comparing demo videos, and I settled on two that sounded promising — Scrivener and Copywrite — before a review for one of those led me to a third possibility — StoryMill. I looked at other options as well, but those three sounded like the best fit for the kind of writing I do, which is to say, novel-length fiction. Some other programs seemed to have more use for non-fiction writers or technical writing.

Intriguing features of these types of fiction-writing word processors (not available in all of them) are the ability to create timelines that link to your scenes, chapter views, the ability to save multiple revisions and revert to an earlier one if necessary, character description files, virtual corkboard for rearranging index cards that contain parts of the story, multiple windows to see various drafts simultaneously, inherent outlining, etc., and everything’s theoretically linked to everything else — so if you, say, moved a section on your corkboard, it would move that section in your novel as well, no tedious searching, cutting, and pasting necessary.



I have links from Amazon just for StoryMill, so I went ahead and put up screen shots that were available to give a general idea of the sort of experience you’d have with one of these writers’ word processors.

If you want to find out more about the programs, feel free to click on the software site links above or read some reviews for them here: CopyWrite reviews, Scrivener reviews, StoryMill reviews.

I won’t go into the details of each one, because ultimately I decided to hold off. It was when I was reading StoryMill reviews and one reviewer’s words really spoke to me:

May 15 2008 MSWWSM —

I can’t give this product any kind of fair review as I can’t quite figure out what it’s for. If I had to guess, I’d say this — and the similar Scrivener — are for writers who may indeed have the prose chops to get the job done but can’t get a handle on how to organize longer manuscripts in their heads …

Foremost, StoryMill and Scrivener are not models for how novelists I know actually work. We have various loose “processes”, we keep notes, we do research — not too little research on-the-fly, so to speak — and we may rough out in a notebook, on an index card, or on the back of the power bill, overarching plot lines, concepts, perhaps brief character sketches, snippets of especially pithy dialogue or metaphor we just have to use, that sort of thing. But everyone I know merely takes something that’s been stewing, sits down one morning, or evening, or dead in the middle of night, and begins writing; then we go back and eradicate, illuminate and, well, prevaricate, as required to make the story whole. …

As for aspiring novelists, screenwriters, playwrights, etc., I can’t help but advise you’d be far better off just sitting down and writing, ignoring the confusing disorganized mess you may create — because you CAN — and WILL, if you stick at it — develop a process for sorting things out, making sense of disparate parts and gluing them together into a coherent story. The bottom line is, called upon to take 60,000 - 120,000 words or more, vet this draft for grammar, style, continuity errors, etc., it’s never going to just wrap up nicely, and it’s always going to degrade into a brutal grind at times, whether you write on legal pads with a blunt pencil or with these sorts of computerized writers toolkits. It’s never easy, no matter what.

Emphasis mine, because man, oh, man.

Here’s a portion of the response from someone who liked the above review as much as I did:

although i am trying to write a novel with various timelines and therefore became interested in any computerized help i could get, i now am convinced that a dry erase board or a yellow pad with lots of revisions/erasures, as mswwsm notes, will work better.

a writer i admire once told an audience that when she teaches creative writing, she emphasizes B.I.C = butt in chair! there is no substitute and most of these apps are probably - at least for me - more of a distraction and an ill-fitted crutch than the solution and will probably never accomplish what mswwsm suggests. — rich ratzan

So, butt in chair, I have been doing the hard work.

I figured that spending any more energy than I already have on these software apps would just distract me from the task at hand. I would spend so much time copying my scenes into each demo version, then editing in each one to see how it works. I would type in character descriptions and obsess about details. It’s probably best just to use what I have and try to figure out a process for myself.

I think next time I write a novel, I will start off in one of these software options, to see if it helps. Ideally, I’ll start three novels simultaneously, so I can see which of the three options makes things easiest!

But for now — I have an outline of my original draft in OmniOutliner. I’ve rearranged it in the same app, checking my timeline by sketching it out with purple pen (hey, it was around) on the back of an envelope and drawing arrows to show which parts I wanted to change around or add.

I have another file in OmniOutliner for notes and revisions, which includes my character descriptions, painstakingly copied every time a character came up. Then I can make sure haircolor and age and the like don’t change throughout the story by referring back to my notes. I have listed things I want to add and things I want to change. I have ideas for place names and poisons. (Hey, it’s a murder mystery!) I chose OmniOutliner for this file, because I can indent subtopics to show that they relate to an above main topic, but also primarily because OmniOutliner offers little checkboxes all down the side. Whenever I’ve completed a revision task, I can check it off and stop worrying about it. Most of the boxes remain unchecked, but at least I know that they will get done, and I don’t have to keep it all in my head.

I’ve saved multiple drafts now in Word, and I’m going to start the annoyance of cutting and pasting according to my outline, and then … it’s rewrite time. I’ll just have to go in, read it through, and change what doesn’t make sense anymore. Which I’m assuming will be most of it. Sigh.

Butt in chair. I’ll get there.

I'm a novelist!

I have officially finished one full novel and won NaNoWriMo08!

It's only a first draft, but I've planned out my edits and will get to work revising. I know, for instance, that I need to add scenes and descriptions, red herrings and clues, to get my novel up to the ~70,000 words expected of a cozy.

I've already put books on querying agents on hold at the library and will let you know how the process goes. I've been reading agent blogs to dip my toe in the water, and for once I don't feel like I'm just procrastinating from writing by doing that!

Right now I'm too excited to do much other than celebrate, but soon it will be time to work, work, work, and start writing the next in the series! For genre fiction like mysteries and romance, it's common to think in terms of series, and I am definitely on that train.

I highly recommend that you try out NaNoWriMo next year if you haven't done it already. Write 2,000 words a day, in little chunks if needed, and you'll have a whole fricking novel by the end of the month! What could be better?

Getting your characters in trouble

NaNoWriMo very kindly and wisely provides emailed pep talks each week, some from regional liaisons, and some from published authors. Here's an excerpt from Week Three's pep talk from Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander and Paint It Black:

When in doubt, make trouble for your character. Don't let her stand on the edge of the pool, dipping her toe. Come up behind her and give her a good hard shove. ... In life we try to avoid trouble. We chew on our choices endlessly. We go to shrinks, we talk to our friends. In fiction, this is deadly. Protagonists need to screw up, act impulsively, have enemies, get into TROUBLE.

The difficulty is that we create protagonists we love. And we love them like our children. We want to protect them from harm, keep them safe, make sure they won't get hurt, or not so bad. Maybe a skinned knee. Certainly not a car wreck. But the essence of fiction writing is creating a character you love and, frankly, torturing him. You are both sadist and savior. Find the thing he loves most and take it away from him. Find the thing he fears and shove him shoulder deep into it. Find the person who is absolutely worst for him and have him delivered into that character's hands. Have him make a choice which is absolutely wrong.

When I started writing my romance novel, I knew I wanted my hero to suspect the heroine was lying, to manufacture plot trouble for them. But I was cheating the system. I wanted my heroine not to be a liar. I wanted her to remain pure and blameless.

And then I came to my senses. A perfect protagonist is boring (look at Fanny in Mansfield Park -- sorry, Jane!).

I had to throw my characters into trouble. I had to make them flawed so they had somewhere to progress to during the course of the novel. It's frustrating when the novel starts out with an ideal relationship and situation that has problems thrown at it. It's less frustrating and more suspenseful when there's just a vision of an ideal relationship and situation that the characters need to move toward.

In my current novel, I made sure to place my heroine in danger. She needs to have the possibility of failing and even dying to create tension, to create a story. Along the same lines, she has to take steps and try things out that I would never have the gumption to, because it would be really boring to read about me!

It's similar to being afraid to kill off characters, as in my other post. Sometimes being a writer feels like too much power, but we have to learn not to be afraid to use it.

How have you hesitated in creating trouble for your characters? How have you convinced yourself to throw them into danger and face the consequences?

Scary dinosaur courtesy of Rodolfo Clix from stock.xchng

Pushing through to the finish line

It's coming down to the wire for NaNoWriMo08, and I'm on track with 41,561 words so far. If I write up to 42,000 before bed tonight, I can keep writing 2,000 a day and, assuming I get them in by midnight the last day, finish at exactly 50,000 on Nov. 30. I was feeling really discouraged a couple days ago, but I'm energized now and have a vision of the plot going forward to the end. Now it's just putting it on paper (or screen, in this case).

My husband, Sam, has been making remarks like, "It's ok if you go over by a few days. What's the difference?"

"No, because then you don't win," I told him.

"What do you win?" he asked, rightfully skeptical.

"A PDF certificate," I said sheepishly, "and a widget. And the satisfaction of knowing you're a winner."

Sam laughed at me. "So it doesn't matter," he said.

No! It does matter. Finishing a novel in a month, a specific month, is the whole point of NaNoWriMo. If you could write in anytime, you would. If you can go over by a few days, why not a few months, a few years?

Like all the other times. Like with all the other half-manuscripts in drawers and hastily typed ideas in forgotten files, languishing. Like all the other projects and passions and ambitions you've set aside till the perfect moment, only you never quite find it.

Back during the first season of Survivor, there was an endurance test toward the end where the remaining contestants had to keep their hand on a pole. That was the only rule. One of the contestants, good old Rudy, absentmindedly removed his hand from the pole to scracth his nose or something, and then tried to play it off, but was deservedly disqualified.

As The Daily Show mocked when replaying the clip, "What's the first rule of Keep Your Hand on the Pole Game?"

What's the first rule of NaNoWriMo? Write a novel in a month.

Anything else isn't NaNoWriMo.

Keep your hand on the pole.

See you at the finish line in just a few days!

 

Dashing off a draft

I've learned a lot from NaNoWriMo. The main thing I've learned is to be quick and dirty.

Anything to get that first draft in.

I think what's held me up in the past is an obsession with perfecting as I write. For a short story or poem, this can sometimes work. For a novel, it was bogging me down and hurting my brain.

I would decided to change one thing, say, the year the story takes place, or the color of my main character's eyes (no, really! I did this), and I would feel compelled to go back through what I'd written so far, making all those changes before I could move on.

Now I've come to realize that it's more important just to tell the story.

Get it out there, and then go back and polish. I've been using the "Comments" function in Microsoft Word to help me out there. A text-file list or a sticky note on your desk would work just as well.

Whenever I decide that I screwed something up that happened earlier, or that I should shoehorn another event into the narrative, I make a comment to myself, such as: "Change character's name to sound less like main character's."

Voila! No time wasted pondering names. I can continue to use my rough-draft name throughout this first go, and after I'm done with the important part -- the story -- I can start flipping through phone books and baby-name books and getting bogged down in the editing side of things. If I do all that now, it will derail my train of thought, and the story will never get told.

This works for small things like characters' names and eye colors, and for big things like "Make Ann be a blackmailer" or "Add tension between Joe and Betty" or (true story) "Change it to first person." In that last case, I just kept going with the first person from there on out, resolving to edit my first pages to match at the end.

I also, when stuck at a particular word or phrase, instead of wasting time haring off through the thesaurus, just bracket it and, if necesary, add descriptors that make it into one long word indicating "Fix this later." For instance, I have brackets around such things as [LastNameHere] and [DifferentWordForSaid] and [SomethingLikeSmelly] and [HospitalName]. (I didn't want to unfairly inflate my word count by making those into separate words.)

It doesn't matter if it's messy and ugly. This is not my final draft. No one has to see this draft. It is not going out for immediate publishing. I have time to edit...but later!

I'm not promising to continue to write at the breakneck pace of 50,000 words a month, but I will take this little tidbit of oh-duh advice with me when I return to my first novel.

I will write, I will tell the story, and I will finish a first draft! Be it purely awful or pure gold (or purest green, which is maybe somewhere in between), I will finally have a complete story arc, and something to edit.

P.S. I think I need to think of first drafts of novels more like blog posts... Sorry to all my blog readers who now know what quality I put into my blog posts!

Perfect illustration of speed-typing hands courtesy of Kriss Szkurlatowski from stock.xchng

New love vs. true love

I hope no one thinks I'm being disloyal for writing a murder mystery for NaNoWriMo08. I'm working on a romance novel in non-NaNoWriMo life, and those are my two favorite genres.

As a palliative to those of you who prefer romance over murder, let me tell you that I've included a married couple as my protagonist detecting team. The main character is Christine, a church praise team leader in her late 20s. She narrates the story. Her husband is Rob, a graphic designer by day and newborn sleuthing partner at night.

I love love. I love marriage. That's why I love romance novels so much. I adore the giddiness of finding true love, that first spark of interest, the rapturous wondering of "is s/he interested back?", the relief of finding out "yes!". and, of course, in novels, all the interesting barriers in between and/or after those steps.

But, having been married ten years now myself (sooo long, I know!), I will play the old wise woman and say that a committed marriage is just as fascinating, just as satisfying. It's a different emotional kick, but it appeals to me just as much. Obviously, or I wouldn't believe so strongly in marriage!

What I think is missing from most novels, movies, TV shows, and so on is portrayals of real, positive marriages. There's plenty of cat-and-mouse flirtatious bickering of an odd pairing, plenty of tingly first-kiss experiences, and, sadly, more than enough of sour and negative relationships, whether continuing or ending. Many popular sitcoms have made their married couple characters barely tolerant of each other, constantly sniping and undermining, rather than true partners on the same team.

Have you ever read Kate Wilhelm's Constance and Charlie series? There's a wonderful example for me to live up to: a middle-aged married couple who like and respect each other. The tension is in catching the murderer, not in whether or not they'll stay together. Their commitment to each other is a given.

Or look at the delightful Nick and Nora!

I like to think I'm doing my part to promote the naturalness -- the unostentatious joy -- of a good marriage, both in real life and now in fiction.

ETA: I forgot, and we're even watching them on DVD right now! There's also Hetty Wainthropp! I think my characters are a young, newlywed version of Hetty and her husband -- very grounded and very committed.

Photograph of beautiful hands courtesy of Julia Freeman-Woolpert from stock.xchng

Writing exhaustion

Is it just me, or is it hard to keep writing all day long?

I'm a little behind in my NaNoWriMo word count. I've been trying to write 2,000 words a day, and I ended up skipping a day to catch up on sleep, so today's assignment was to write 4,000. Well, I've gotten 2,500 done so far, but that still leaves a normal-amount 1,500 to finish up tonight.

And I'm feeling spent.

I took a year off a few years ago just to work on my first novel. I wrote every day, but I could never manage to write all day every day. Does anyone do that? Can anyone write for eight hours straight?

Maybe in the throes of a passionate Muse, but on a daily basis, I find it fatiguing to write even four hours in a row, at least in one medium and on one topic. Even switching to, say, a blog post, affords me and my poor brain a little break.

Just wondering if I'm alone in that.

I'll take a rest now and come back to finish up my words tonight. Carry on, all you NaNoWriMos and other fellow novelists!

The uneasiness of killing off characters

I'm halfway through the timeframe of NaNoWriMo, though not halfway through my word count since I started late. I have daily writing goals of 2,000 words that if followed (or caught up on...) will get me to 50,000 words on exactly the last day.

Now it's just down to two things: 1. that I have the story told by 50,000 words, and 2. that I remember to verify my word count by midnight! (I tend to fudge my "days" a little.)

As for #1, I'm trying to be bare bones about this writing assignment and make sure I get the plot told. I figure I can fill in all that fancifying description and character development later!

Here's something I didn't expect, though. As a huge fan of reading murder mystery novels and watching American and British versions of same, I thought of myself as hardened and jaded in terms of committing fictional murder. But in my first chapter, I had to kill off a character (otherwise it's not, you know, a murder mystery), and I felt guilty! She seemed kind of nice, and I'd barely gotten to know her before she was dead. In a horribly agonizing way, although not overly gory. (This is a cozy, so I'm going with things like poison and booby traps.)

I accept with no qualms the deaths of characters in mystery fiction I read or view, but somehow being the perpetrator of the death made me feel bad. I could see it being even more wrenching if I'd really "known" the character and become attached.

How have you experienced the death of a character? Has it felt necessary and acceptable, or has it upset you as much as it did the other characters?

Photograph courtesy of Mateusz Stachowski from stock.xchng

NaNoWriMo time!

November is National Novel Writing Month. You can visit the NaNoWriMo site to learn more about it.

The crazy goal is to write 50,000 words of continuous fiction in 30 days. Words and speed count; quality doesn't.

As you can see, I'm a little slow off the blocks. I had heard about it back in April when I was doing the Poem-a-Day challenge, and I resolved to file it away in my memory bank for November.

Apparently, I didn't too so well with retrieving the file, because I forgot about it this month until happening upon a fellow writer friend's Facebook page.

But I am not discouraged. Words per day aren't the requirement, as long as I get to the 175-page target by the end of the month. And I'm a pretty fast typist!

So...what to write? I was thinking a mystery novel, specifically a cozy, because that would be the kind of light-hearted thing that would fit a flurry of writing and a short novel length. I had thought about one set in Northwest Indiana, where I used to live, so I could dust off that idea.

Another path would be a romance novella, because it seems like publishers enjoy putting collections of those together, and I could see it as a good way to get some exposure and new readers. Hmmm...I'd better decide tonight. Maybe I'll just start typing and see where it leads me!

Want to join me? Let me know what you're writing, and post your word count at the NaNoWriMo site.