C. L. Norman

When I checked my email this morning, I found a wonderful email from the Kindle people talking about a couple new features they’ve set up for their authors.

Shelfari

One is that authors are now linked into Shelfari. They get a pretty little badge that says they are an author and they can manage a lot of cool extra features for their books/stories. I immediately headed over and filled in what I could for my little tales. It is so fun coming up with a “ridiculously simplified synopsis” for each of my stories. If you’ve read them and have any ideas for a synopsis post it here or over there. I’d love to see other folks ideas.

Here is a link to my Shelfari page. I’ve also included a link to it in my Links page.

Twitter

The other item they added was a link to the author’s Twitter account. This is a cool idea but for me, right now, not much help. I’ve tried Twitter but found it was a huge time-sink for me. I’ll probably go back to it eventually but as of this writing you won’t see a link to my Twitter feed on my Amazon Author page.

In Other News

I’ve been working on some things but in my typical fashion, I am busy procrastinating finishing anything. However, I should have a new John St. George short story for you in another week or two and a new teen science fiction short story in early June. I have a novel in the works as well but as I’ve never finished a novel I can’t tell you how long it will be until I release it but I am shooting for a release date before the end of summer. I will update you more as it gets closer.

        

I have been having such a hard time lately with my writing. I sit in front of the computer and I wrestle with all my insecurities about the words I am generating that I don’t generate any. I am lucky if I get more than a sentence down. Sound familiar?

I have found that I work better to a deadline and I had a deadline yesterday; imposed on me by my writing group but a deadline just the same. Even then writing is so very hard. I cannot get the words to flow. My ideas are fragmented. In general, I always want to quit before starting.

If I can struggle and sweat and bleed out 200 words though suddenly I hit that zone wherein the story comes much easier. I don’t mean 200 words in a particular story but 200 words in a particular writing session. At 200, words come a lot easier. My inner critic’s voice becomes muffled behind the ideas that are coming fast and furious. Individual sentences blend into the background so I don’t spend all my time picking them apart—passive verb? repetitive phrases or words? clear pronouns? etc. I adore when I pass the 200 word mark.

I hate the 200 words leading up to it though. It isn’t that I throw them away. Sometimes those are the parts of the story I like the most. I just hate all the work leading up to catching the wave of the story.

I forget about that wave too. I forget to look forward to it and use it to help spur me on to more words.

Maybe I need to get a picture of an ocean wave, stencil the number 200 across it and hang it from my computer. Maybe.

        

School came easy for me. I skipped the 3rd grade after my mother found out my 1st and 2nd grade teachers had also recommended me skipping. After my 4th grade year, we changed school districts. The new district was harder academically than the one I came from and my mother offered me the choice of repeating the 4th grade or heading on to 5th. I, of course, said I want to be in the 5th grade. Duh.

She then told me that if I was going to maintain my “skipped-a-grade” status I couldn’t get any grades below a ‘C’. I had to stay above average or she would hold me back. Sounds like incentive to work hard on keeping my grades up. Right?

Wrong.

Getting B’s and A’s was easy. Oh so easy for me. I didn’t have to work at it. I could get by with minimal homework. Only two classes had me asking for help and actually *gasp* studying, chemistry and pre-calculus. Blech. I didn’t care about my grades as long as they weren’t C’s.

Even in college, these non-habits held me in good stead. As long as I attended classes, I could get good grades without cracking a book.

I am not telling you all this to brag but to bring up a point. I have awful, terrible, no-good work habits and now when I am trying to write stories and share them with others, I find I am trying to get by with the minimum needed for that pat on the back from my friends and family. People seem to enjoy my tales and it feels like they have given me a grade that is good enough to keep me going with little or no work from me.

Sigh.

These habits are hard to change twenty-five-ish years after I should have began forming them. I feel like those cartoons with the ginormous rock that they need to push up the mountain and they keep slipping back down. I want to push that rock up but it is so much easier to stay here at the bottom, back against the rock, butt on the ground.

So I say unto you: If you ever plan on working for yourself like writers do, do your homework now. Those habits will help you later. I promise.

Note: My mother told me about 12 years ago that my 5th grade teacher recommended I skip another grade and she declined. She thought it would put me too far behind socially. I sometimes wonder if I would have had to work harder in school if I had and so have those habits I so desperately wish I had now. Parallel universe time to find out.

        

Tolkien’s birthday is today and while I am not a fan of his books (which is nearly 100% due to the ending), I agree with the things Ms. Flewelling lists here that she learned from his writing. All of these things are components of my favorite stories and I hope to one day include all of them in my writing (when I get my process settled out).

        

A new year has arrived! (. . . and there will be much rejoicing.) And with it the almighty resolutions and goals post.

You can read my goals from last year here. Let’s find out how I did.

• Finish and polish the novel I started during this year’s NaNoWriMo : Failed—I restarted this novel during NaNo 2010 and the story is much stronger now but still unfinished.
• Submit enough short stories to various markets that I have five pieces circulating at once: Failed, mostly—I had four stories circulating at once. I’ve decided that this goal was too loose and too long term. It allowed my procrastination tendencies to kick in and take over. It left me stranded at the end of the year with very little time due to the holidays and one last story to write.
• Attend RadCon and MisCon. Put my hand out and say “Hi” to at least one author at each. : Success—I attended both of these events and chatted with authors at both. At RadCon it was a narrow success. I said Hi and blushed and stammered and I don’t even remember who I talked with. Though I did spend an hour with Dean Wesley Smith and Darragh Metzger during the writing workshop and learned a lot.  MisCon was much better. I talked with Patricia Briggs, John Dalmas, Harry Turtledove, James Glass and others at various times during those four days. It was totally worth the heated cheeks to talk with these professionals.
• Research into a third con to attend, and if money permits go: Success—I found a third con to go to, SpoCon, but money was too tight to go. However I helped organize and put on a local writing conference, Rivers of Ink, and attended. I even had dinner with Patricia Briggs afterwards. I also attended Write on the River this year, and met and chatted with Terry Brooks, one of the first authors that made me fall in love with the fantasy genre. Before him, I mostly read classics like Little Women and Anne of Green Gables.
• Keep up with this blog, including more fiction pieces and more regular posts: Failed—I actually stopped posting for a while. I didn’t post any more fiction pieces and in general, I let you all down.

Last year is over, done, finished. On to 2011! My goals for this year are as follows:

• Write 5000 words a week for January, February, and March. This goal is much more immediate and set in stone than the above goal of circulating short stories. Some of these words will be on short stories, some on novels. I set the goal for the first three months because I know I can do better than 5000. I just need to get the habits into place first. At the end of March, I’ll reevaluate the word count goal for the next three months based off of children’s activities, work schedule, and how I did in the first three months.
• Finish what I start. This one is so very hard for me. I get these cool shiny new ideas and I whip out a fresh document and start typing. Less than 1000 words in, the shine has worn off and I want to move on to something else. This year, I will not let that happen.
• ePublish what I finish or submit to a traditional publisher. I will continue to fill up my inventory of titles available by yours truly this year.  This goal was the hardest to decide on. I was so tempted to say “Publish a short story every week or every two weeks.” I decided against that though as I want to also work on longer projects and if I fail once, I tend to give up. I didn’t want to leave myself that out. If I stay on target on the first two goals, this goal will be easy. I should also still be finishing enough projects to be self-publishing regularly.
• Continue to make contacts at conventions and writing conferences. As a part of this and expanding on last year’s goal, I will also start promoting my stories at these events. I will print up something to hand out to those interested in my stories and I will suck it up and talk about myself if the opportunity arises. I will be grateful that my complexion is such that only I will know if I am blushing.
• Keep this blog and the new webpage for my publishing self, Kandake Publications, up to date. I’d like to set a regular schedule for entries on the blog but if my schedule comes down to writing on a story or writing on my blog, I want the freedom to choose the story.

Those are my writing goals/resolutions for 2011. I’ll keep you posted on how I’m doing. What are your resolutions/goals for this year?

        

As I mentioned on Friday, I published a short story as an ebook and it is now available on Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Smashwords for 99 cents. I detailed last time my decision making process and why I thought it was right for me.

Today, I will describe how I prepared to e-publish this first time.

I downloaded the free ebook from Smashwords about how to format my stories for electronic publishing. That’s right. I learned how to format the silly thing before I even chose a story to put up. I read through the entire thing and familiarized myself with the process. I didn’t know everything I needed to know about formatting it after one read through. That wasn’t going to happen until after I put what I read to practice.

Choosing The Story:

The caps and the bold and the colon above make this seem like there will be some secret here. Some sort of great revelation as to why I chose Survive to Eat to publish first. The honest answer is that there is no secret. This story was available to publish. I’ve been sending this one out to traditional markets for over a year and have been getting encouraging rejection letters back but no acceptances yet. Since I had just come out of NaNoWriMo, I didn’t have any short stories finished and unsent. With the holiday retail season upon us, writing time is at a premium (have I mentioned I work retail?). So the only short story available was this one and while I can’t say that the writing is the best, I do stand by the story. I enjoyed writing it and Aetran is an interesting hero that speaks to me (he may even have more adventures in his future) and I hoped that others would enjoy his story too.

So the story is chosen, and it was a simple matter to then go through and format it according to the guidelines on Smashwords. The price was easy to settle upon. 99 cents seemed pretty fair for a short story.

A trip to the bank to open up an account exclusively for my internet profits and I was set.

I created accounts at all three sites and uploaded the file. Done.

But wait! What about the cover? you ask.

The cover was both the most complicated and the easiest part of my adventure. I tried a free ebook cover creator on the web but had issues when I could never create one of the free accounts (stupid, automatically generated emails that never made it into my inbox). Then I tried PowerPoint and I was pretty happy with the end result until I tried to resize it to 900 pixels tall by 600 pixels wide. The words blurred and the program kept ‘fixing’ it by flipping the numbers. I honestly don’t know what I was doing wrong and I didn’t want to spend the time to figure it out. I then tried the Paint program that came free on my laptop. I opened a photo my husband took of some interesting trees on a camping trip this summer. I then resized it and added some text and Voila! A cover is born.

The hardest part of this will be keeping this going. I want to publish a new story every couple of weeks but that will mean finished a story every week or so. We will see how that goes. Keep an eye on this page to find out.

        

Last night, I finally had all my ducks in a row (unless one wandered off and I don’t realize it is missing yet) and sent my first short story out into the world to be e-Published.

I woke up this morning and Barnes & Noble already has it for sale. I’ve been walking on air ever since. Amazon and Smashwords will have it available soon as well and when they do I will provide links to those pages.

I wanted to share with you my experience in putting this first work up for the world to see. Let me make myself very clear, despite all my excitement, I am very aware that this is just the first tiny step. I hope to keep putting up new short stories every couple of weeks and eventually have novels available. I did have to start somewhere and it was kind of like that first time I stepped onto a stage and the lights were on me and I had a line to say; it is totally unlike anything I expected.

Decision Time:

The first thing that had to happen was the decision to epublish. I’ve been toying with this idea for quite some time now. On again. Off again. Do I? Don’t I? Have I mentioned I’m a ditherer?

While I dithered I read up on the subject. I knew I couldn’t make a decision without arming myself with information first. I read blogs that were pro-ebook and some that were anti-ebook and others that were middle of the road. I talked to and listened to writers who held many differing viewpoints on ebooks. And I came to a conclusion.

Just as every story is different and every writer has a different style, the decision to epublish is a personal one. There is no right or wrong answer to this question. Which was a very freeing thought as I hate being wrong. (Just ask my co-workers)

So now the question became is my writing good enough to self publish? Frankly, I still don’t have the definitive answer to that. I have been receiving very good feedback on my stories from NYT Bestselling authors, co-workers who have worked in the book business for years, and, while I have yet to get a treasured acceptance letter, publishers are very rarely using form letters to reject my submissions. I take all this to mean that I don’t suck. Someone (or more than one) out there will be interested in reading what I write.

So now the decision is nearly made but when should I begin self-publishing? After I finish that novel I started for National Novel Writing month? After I prove I can produce short stories regularly enough to publish regular? I am a procrastinator and these kinds of questions (read excuses) can put off that first publication date indefinitely. I could feel that paralysis creeping into my being and I couldn’t just make the decision to go ahead and do it already.

That is until I read this post by J. A. Konrath.

He is extremely pro-ebooks and so I know to read what he writes with a grain of salt (in fact I try to read everything that way as I know I am extremely naïve, sometimes downright gullible) but a couple little lines in there caught my attention.

Millions of ereaders will be sold this holiday season, and next season will be even bigger.
In 2010, my January sales had a nice bump, from new Kindle owners trying out their new gadgets. 2011 will begin the same way.

I work in a bookstore and I know just how many e-readers are being bought as Christmas gifts this year (well maybe not know as in the exact numbers nationwide, but know as in how many folks are buying locally of the kind we sell). Admit it, you know someone who is getting an e-reader for Christmas, don’t you?

I wanted to take advantage of all those people who would be opening up their electronic devices on the 25th of December and looking for stories to read. That knowledge made me decide that now was the time.

Next time, I will describe how I went about choosing a short story and putting it up for sale.

        

1. Have a lot of healthy snacks on hand. Procrastination by food can add the pounds on fast.
2. Have chocolate in the house. Hours can be wasted dreaming “if I only had chocolate, I could write so many more words.”
3. A steady pace is key to finishing on time.
4. I can write so much more than 1667 words a day if I put my mind to it.
5. Even pantsers can benefit from a little prep work. A little more worldbuilding would have made for less fuzzy spots in the process.
6. Having people rooting you on is an enormous help. Getting an “atta girl’ everyday I made my word goals kept me going.
7. The faster I write the easier it is to stay in the story. Plot point after plot point are revealed if I don’t spend a lot of time overthinking it.
8. Word count graphs are incredibly motivating tools. How high can I make the next bar in the bar graph became an obsession.
9. If I get stuck on a detail, it is perfectly ok to make a note and move ahead.
10. There are so many more words out there to put down on paper. Fifty thousands words is only the beginning.

        

The first thing I want to say is that I am a pantser. I start with a situation, no idea how the story will end, and I write. I’ve tried (and tried, and tried) to outline or even throw a few notes down on paper before I start so that I have the all mighty “Plan” to fall back on when I get lost or bored with the story.

So far that hasn’t worked for me. I can only get about three to five scenes out and then I am blocked.

The second thing I want to say is that I’ve never finished* a novel length project yet. I’ve been writing off and on since I was eleven but I’ve never finished a novel. It has been less than two years since I’ve finished a short story (of course, it has been less than two years since I tried to write a short story).

I have no idea if these two traits have any correlation to each other. They are just facts.

That said. I am determined to finish NaNoWriMo this year AND keep going until I finish the novel. Until I get a finished one under my belt, I can’t learn how to write one. And believe me, I can tell that I don’t know how to put one together and it is painful.

So how am I keeping myself writing this time you ask? Two things I try to keep in mind.

One: I have no idea how many times I’ve read it, or who wrote it in such a way that it finally stuck with me, but I think of writing as a marathon or a journey. Each word is like a step towards the finish line.  When I look at the word goal for the day and think “I can’t write another 1k words!” <groan and thud> I try to trim it down. I can write another 200 words, or 20 words, or just write one more sentence, one more word. And that keeps me going.

Two: A couple months ago, Patricia Briggs came into the bookstore and we had a chat about this and that, and as always eventually the conversation came around to writing. She gave me a simple piece of advice and I’ve been using it a lot this week. The initial rush of words had passed and now the work is kicking in; traditionally the point I give up and switch to a new project. She told me “Have fun with it.”

Such simple advice and yet, so very helpful. When I find the story is boring me, or bogging down in details that I haven’t completely worked out yet and my attention is wandering, I remember to have fun. Suddenly, something new comes into the scene and bits and pieces of my favorite stories make an appearance. More humor and lightness infect my writing. The pacing picks up. And a romance subplot is allowed to be written (something I love to read, but have always been too self-conscious to write).

Step-by-step, having fun, I have progressed through this story further than I ever have before. Do I know yet that I’ll reach the finish line? Not really. But with these tools, I believe I can.

*I have trouble finishing a lot of things. Not just stories. Check my closet for half made afghans, cross-stitched designs, and way in the back, scrapbooks. It is a chronic thing.

        

And I’m not talking about 80’s hairstyles here.

I’m talking about layering in images and clues in your stories. Or to be more precise, MY stories.

I finished a short story last week and began the tortuous submission process yesterday. Before sending it out, I gave it one more read through, just to make sure I couldn’t make it sparkle just a little bit more. And what I discovered amazed me.

Let me be straight with you. I am a by-the-seat-of-my-pants kind of writer. I started off with an image in my head and I went with it. More slowly than usual as soon after I started putting words down on paper, the idea of loneliness reared its head as the “theme” of the story and loneliness is hard.

And I wrote.

At about 3000 words, I reached the end and sent it out to my first readers. Then I waited five days before looking at it again myself. I had layers! and foreshadowing. Wow. The very first sentence has an image that echoes clear to the end of the story and I didn’t even try for that. Other images echo backstory.

I don’t know if anyone else will notice these things except me, but I think it ties the story together very nicely.

In my English classes, every story we studied had layers and foreshadowing and symbolism and every author deliberately put those elements in. At least according to the teachers. I always hated over-analyzing stories for those things. They did make those stories richer but I always had my doubts that it was ‘planned’. I thought most of those authors were just trying to write a darn good story. Mine doesn’t compare with theirs but that is all I tried to do and yet I ended up with some of those elements English teachers assign papers for and I’m happy.

How about you? Do you even notice symbolism, foreshadowing, or layers? Do you care?