Saturday, December 29, 2012

Surviving the Holidays

Well, I'm here. That means I survived. If you're reading this, then you too are a survivor. Congratulations!

The holidays, regardless of which ones you celebrate or why you celebrate them, are about tradition and bringing families together. Anyone who survives that dangerous mix deserves their due credit.

I didn't do it alone, my wife and children helped me through it all with a continuous flow of joy and rich foods. My wife is an artist with food and confection at a level that I strive for with words.

I'd have to say the hardest part of the whole holiday ordeal was not writing. It's not that I didn't write or revise at all, but it certainly wasn't to the schedule I've grown used to. It kept leaving me with a nagging sense that I was being lazy and leaving things undone.

I'm revising now, which means I'm learning a LOT about my bad habits and just how horrible and clunky some of my prose can be. 

I've got this fantastic thing I do, which likely comes from my personal speech patterns, where I use more complicated words when simple will do. I don't seem to let it creep into dialog, which is a good sign that I'm not overpowering my character voices.

I'm enjoying the experience so far. Granted, I've only revised 6 chapters in to a ~50 chapter manuscript,  but some of them needed serious surgery. I'm talking the "hit it repeatedly with an ax until it stops moving" kind of surgery. Messy, somewhat painful, but necessary. 

I've started to receive feedback from my Alpha Readers on some of what they have so far and it's been invaluable. It's really quite amazing how much some of them pick up on. I probably drive them batty with how I'm dropping, revising, and re-dropping the same chapters to them on Dropbox, and I'm trying to clean up that process so they'll have a frame of reference when I give them updated revisions.

I still aim to push it out to some Critique Partners over at CPSeek.com and on Twitter by end of January. The timeline from that to Agent Query Submission will have to be more flexible depending on feedback at that level.

This writing thing is a lot of work. It's a good thing I enjoy it.

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Cleanup! Aisle Seven!

Just a quick update.

I've been cleaning up a few things on my Blog this evening. Ugh! It's like housecleaning but far more repetitive.

It started innocently enough... Oh look, the Twitter widget is broken, let's see if I can fix it! Uh, no, it's well and truly broken, likely because Twitter changed their API rules.


Well that led to me shuffling around a few things on the side-bar and taking note that my tag cloud had 193 tags in it?!?! You see, when I started this whole blog thing, I didn't really get the significance of labels and tags, I just used them like I would on Twitter and that clearly got out of hand.

The madness had to stop! So I've pared it down to 43 tags, and it only took an hour and a half... hopefully everything is tagged correctly, Blogger's toolset isn't exactly the friendliest.

If you find anything missing (because I know how much you all love poking around in the archived posts) or better still, find anything that's tagged improperly, let me know and I'll fix it.

Monday, December 17, 2012

BookB - Crow's Blood

I'm on vacation!


Of course, being on vacation, that means I'm working hard on my revisions of BookB, which now has a working title: Crow's Blood.

I've revised the first 4 chapters (Chapter 3 twice!) and have thrown a progress bar on the side panel. Those are on Dropbox ready for my Alpha Readers.

I'm finding the revision process both rewarding and exhausting. There is SO MUCH to clean up with this manuscript, but as I finish each chapter and push it to my Alphas it gives me a HUGE sense of accomplishment. The feedback I've received so far has been great and it's not only helping with the chapters in question, but with the other chapters going forward as well.

I'm working in silence, which is somewhat odd for me as I usually have a sound-track when I work. Instead, I get to hear my own voice repeating and reworking sentences for hours on end, which is nowhere near as cool sounding as I'd really like you to think.

My end goal is to have this entire draft revised and edited and ready for critique by the end of January, so far I'm on track. I think the first half of my MS needs a good deal more cleaning than the second half as I was really finding my groove further into the story. With how much of a mess the first half is I'm hoping that holds true.

In other news, the wonderful @QuikChaos (AKA Mr. Fizzygrrl himself Andrew Heacock) set up a great new site at the direction of @Fizzygrrl (Summer Heacock), @WriteForApples (Dee), and a whole host of other awesome writerly types called cpseek.com. A great new resource for writers and aspiring writers to find critique partners and beta readers.

There's even a large number of mentors on the site and a "SecretAgent" account (that I'll be stalking) run by a gaggle of Agents who may pop in and give advice from time to time.

It's fairly new and was launched just last week, but it's already a thriving and growing community and I'm very excited to see where it goes. I know I'll be a frequent visitor and an active member of the community. I hope to find some CPs there to augment my already awesome Alpha Readers.

- Grimm

Friday, December 7, 2012

Acknowledgement Problems

I read a blog post recently stating that Authors should keep their acknowledgements in their books short and concise. It got me thinking (not that I'm in a position to start thinking about an Acknowledgements Page yet but bear with me). I don't know about every other aspiring writer but I have a strong need for good information, external validation, and support. How on earth would I pare down the massive list of everyone who's given me a little (or big) push, or some really key piece of information that inspired or helped me limp through this process called writing?

Let me give you an example of what I mean.

Offline, my main support comes from my lovely wife. She allows me the time to write, which is a pretty big consideration, we have a 3 year old that keeps us busy and a 13 year old in Rep Hockey, so she's sacrificing her alone-time with me. She also props me up when I have my little personal crises and think that I suck and shouldn't bother. All in, it probably helps that my writing keeps me out of her hair and makes me far less grumpy on the whole.

We just passed our 16th anniversary together, as I'm only 33 you can do the math and figure out that we're Highschool sweethearts. I wouldn't have it any other way. She's a light in my life and a strong foundation I can always turn to.

For information, like most, I tend to go online and I devour anything I can find on the subject of writing. I'm like a writing zombie constantly in search of other people's brains. There's a lot of great stuff out there if you look, books, blogs, podcasts, and Twitter people (Tweeple?).

You know what I've found along the way? An awful lot of contradiction with a strong core of consistency. Most of that seems to come from the fact that there are really very few keys to becoming a successful and accomplished writer. The rest of it is a matter of personal style and what works for the individual.

It appears the key points to being a halfway decent and possibly successful writer are as follows (in no particular order after the first):
  • Write every day.
  • Finish what you start.
  • Allow yourself to suck (on the first draft at least).
  • Read often (and in the genre you write for).
  • Have a story to tell.
  • Revise (and revise, and revise, and revise, and revise)!
  • Persevere
Other elements such as outlining/architecting vs. pantsing/discovery writing, character vs plot, etc. are all up for debate (on the whole). I myself strongly believe in a combination in both cases. 

I outline my plot and story arcs heavily while allowing both to change drastically if "discovery" strikes or something feels flat. 

When it comes to scenes and characters I have to "write myself" into them, which is most definitely a "discovery writer" thing to do.

Prose, grammar, and spelling are all things to be cleaned and touched up in revision as far as I'm concerned. Yes, I have some inspired moments while writing the first draft, and some of them may even make it into the final manuscript, but I won't know that until I get there.

That's what I've got so far, and it's by no means clean or polished and certainly up for debate. Like everything to do with writing, I'm learning as I go. Without the people that I meet online, or the podcasts and blogs that I follow with their myriad of tips and helpful information I wouldn't be nearly as far along as I am.

It will likely take several more books to streamline and work it out for myself, and that's a good thing, because it lends to my whole solution to the "Acknowledgements" problem: Write and publish enough books to cover everyone. It's going to take at least 20-30 books.

- Grimm

P.S. I was originally going to list and link some of the blogs and Twitter folks that I follow but I've decided against it in this particular post, as many of the tips and information comes from multiple sources and it would just be a mess. Instead I'm looking to add a people/links bar to the already overcrowded right hand bar once I clean some stuff up.

Scrivener, NaNoWriMo, and Twitter Trolls.

This is going to be a bit of a departure from my regular blog post direction. Instead of talking about writing itself and my daily life around it, I want to talk about some of the organizations and people that I've encountered in my journey so far.

NaNoWriMo and the Office of Letters and Light are highly responsible for me being where I am on my journey today. I'd heard from many podcasts and professional writers guides that the key to being a successful writer is to "write every day" and to "finish something". NaNoWrimo 2011 was instrumental in helping me believe I could actually write a full length novel to completion (or at least a really awful first draft).

Until I hit that 50K mark on my first NaNo I had only written short stories to completion and had started several novels that never got past about 30K. Not only did I Win my first NaNo, I went on to complete the draft I was working on. It's been torn apart and rebuilt from the ground up into the work it is now solely because I found the hunger to follow my dream of being a writer re-ignited.

They are a non-profit organization that subsists entirely on donations, their store and supporter funding.

Scrivener is a sponsor of NaNoWriMo and one of the big prizes for participating or winning NaNo is a 20% or 50% off code for their product. I grabbed the Scrivener demo near the end of October to see if I'd like it. It had an incredibly easy learning curve, helped along by an awesome tutorial, and an intuitive interface. I don't see myself using anything else to write on for the foreseeable future.

There was a surprise at the end of NaNo. Their winner code redemption on their site had a little bug that took not 50% off the purchase price, but 100%. I didn't even notice until I'd finished checking out and it hadn't asked for my credit card. In a panic I sent them a Tweet telling them of the issue without spelling it out for all of Twitter-dom. I also fired off an email in hopes that they'd be able to correct the problem before they lost too much potential revenue.

You see, I'm not one to balk at free software, I'm too cheap. Their offer wasn't meant to be free though, and the last thing I wanted was the folks at Scrivener, or the folks at OLL/NaNoWriMo to end up unhappy with how their relationship was working. On top of that, Scrivener was a great product that actually improved my writing experience and made my life so much easier that I figured they deserved my money. It's not like they were asking for much.

I received several responses. I was very impressed and awed at the speed and graciousness of the responses from David at Scrivener. I received a few personal responses thanking me for my honesty and quick action at reporting the issue. When I asked if there was any way I could give them the money owed I was told they'd be sending out a form response later in the day. I've copied that below (bold is my emphasis).

Hello Scrivener User,
As you finally got united with your much deserved NaNoWriMo winner coupon code for 2012, you may have noticed a slight glitch in our web-store when you secured your Scrivener licence. Our clumsy fingers meant you acquired Scrivener for absolutely nothing, rather than the 50% discount we promised. Many of you have already been kind enough to approach us, bringing our attention to the matter and indicating a willingness to pay for Scrivener. You're under no obligation to do this, nothing underhand will happen to the registration details you received, but we'd naturally appreciate your support!
We're trying to make this as painless as possible, so going via PayPal is probably the cleanest solution. If you have an account, please sign in and make your $20.00 (Windows) or $22.50 (Mac) payment to sales@literatureandlatte.com. If there is going to be any cost associated with you making this transaction, please deduct this from what we'll receive. Under no circumstances should you have to be paying more than 50% of your Scrivener licence rate. PayPal have provided this fairly helpful link https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/send.
Once again, this was a mistake on our part so you are under no obligation to pay now for the 50% of the licence fee that our systems failed to ask for. Our sincere thanks to all those who have contacted us to inform us of this issue and to offer to pay the balance.
Many congratulations on completing 50,000 plus words during November! We hope you'll be able to complete many more as you continue to use Scrivener.
All the best, David

Um, wow. Talk about stepping up. Kudos to David and the folks at Scrivener and thanks for yet another reason to love the product and the company.  Needless to say, they received my payment shortly after receiving that email.

There was a darker side to this story though. For pointing the problem out to them on Twitter someone clearly took offense.
The tweet was removed before I could respond, and they had several other tweets (also removed) directed @ScrivenerApp complaining about how they were being ripped off by not getting the software "free" like everyone else because they were "late to the game".  Clearly whoever is "responsible" for this Troll account needs a bit of a reality check.

I'll have another blog post later today covering some of the other organizations and people who had given me so much needed support and help along the way. This one is getting a bit long and I have to get back to doing the job that pays me for now.

-Grimm