I went into it with 3 outlines. Saturday night, well before the deadline, I finished the first draft of the third novella. Here are the stats of each of the three:

26560 – Night of the Aurora
26374 – Alien Winter
25553 – The Singing Lakes

Talk about close to each other in word count. I’m not sure I could have done that on purpose if I had tried!

Congrats to everyone else who participated, no matter how many words you wrote. 1 word more is a victory.

More information on the books will come out as “The E-Book Experiment” posts continue. Which, will be later this week!

Not for a writer!

I’m addicted to writing. I admit it. Life doesn’t feel complete without plotting, planning, writing and revising all the stories coming out of my head. Even if no one ever read them, I would still write.

Hey, there are a lot worse addictions to have!

I’m also prolific. When I’m on a roll I can write 10,000+ words on a single full day. The highest word count in a single day has been 18,000 (I’m not aiming for that last number ever again. I suffered for it for days after.).

So, it follows that I have a great deal of fun in November for National Novel Writing Month. Apparently so do a lot of other people…

Because other events have sprung up all over the place. July is one of them. “July Novel Writing Month” was inspired by November’s NaNoWriMo. The premise is similar: 50,000 words in 31 days (1613 words a day). Where the November and July event differ is that JulNoWriMo invites those with previously started projects to join in. The idea is to get 50,000 words total.

And yes, despite life being rather crazy, I’m joining in for the second time. You can find me over at the JulNoWriMo website under the user name “Dreamerscove.”

This works out well with “The E-Book Experiment” premise. I need product, as in plural. Time to create more.

Now to get a few outlines in place…

Hope to see you there!

The entire story was plotted out, the first few chapters written. Started up the webpage and started publishing it as a webcomic. At first it had a frequency of one a month. As I became more comfortable with the process it moved up to two a month.

All might have been well, but an old injury reared its ugly head. It meant I could not draw for a long period of time. The webcomic went back down to one a month. But even that wasn’t slow enough. Considering how long the story was, doing a page even once every two months, or one a quarter, would result in a story that could not be told in a lifetime.

That was too depressing for words.

I tried all sorts of things. I experimented with black and white, but I didn’t care for the look of it. I pared down the pages to an illustrated story, but by then the injury flared enough that even that was too much art.

Yet, the injury didn’t affect my ability to type!

So, there it is. I have this lovely little story that I still want to finish. It cannot come to fruition through the original vision of a webcomic. But it can be told another way.

I have taken the original story line and realized it comes out perfectly into three books. “Dreamers Cove” will still be told (perhaps under a different title, but the characters will remain the same). This year, for either the July JulNoWriMo or the big November NaNoWriMo, the first book in the trilogy will be written.

And the story lives on.

It also had some mistakes in it. Such as the number of books ‘sold’ on the first day of the iPad release. The numbers Apple released were how many were DOWNLOADED, not sold. And considering the iBookstore came stocked with about 30000 free books, that gives that figure a completely different meaning. It means that possibly a good chunk of that number were freebies with which to try out the iPad and not the overpriced ebooks from the Big 5 (thanks to the Agency Model. Random House has so far been smart enough to opt out of the Agency Model).

In fact, I haven’t seen any figures on how many books have actually SOLD in the iBookstore. Has anyone else?

The article also didn’t say much about the reader reaction to all of this, other than the token paragraph at the end. Readers are revolting against higher prices. They are leaving one-star reviews on Amazon. Penguin isn’t allowing ebooks into Amazon at all. On a Kindle mailing list I’m on, the publishers aren’t forcing people to go elsewhere for these books. They are causing readers to BOYCOTT their books.

(As an aside, with the lack of an open e-book standard that ALL the ebook readers can read, means that the publishers are preventing an entire population that own a different ebook device from buying their books. A lot of people aren’t savvy enough to know how to strip DRM’s, which is illegal, and convert the files to a different type of file. In any case, it’s a bad business move.)

The Publishers are waiting the readers out. With so many good Indi books and free books, is that a wise course of action for the big publishers? Only time will tell, but it’s not looking good for the big publishers.

Or how the authors themselves don’t mind being pursued by Amazon and others after years of piddly shrinking royalties, stifling or unfair contracts, the axe always waiting to fall thanks to ‘ordering to the net‘, and expecting the authors to do the marketing without recompense. All of it combines to make it difficulty to make a living while writing nowadays. It’s easier to squeeze the author than other areas of the business. A book fails, and despite having so little control over it (no say on title, cover, or marketing, IF any marketing is done), because apparently the Publisher knows more than the author, the author still gets blamed and dropped.

Oh, how wonderful.

The grumblings in the author underground have been building for years. Now that authors have new choices, of course the brave ones are going to take advantage of them! For too long the ‘big 6′  (and the publishers the level below) have been the only games in town.

It’s about time the authors themselves were given a little power concerning their books and livelihood. It’s way past time.

And with readers looking to follow certain authors (author branding, not publisher branding), and wanting a decent price, the way of the Indi and small press is rising fast. I say Horrah!

And I say that as both a reader and an author.

So, I’m starting again.

I’m a writer. An author. A STORYTELLER.

I started to learn to read early because I was fascinated by these wondrous marks on paper that others would read to me. Stories! These marks were always the same and could be read! Then I realized my mother was using these strange marks to write her own! Oh, wow. I had to get into that. I wanted to read them on my own and, even then, before kindergarten, I wanted to WRITE my own.

When my class started using Dick and Jane to teach reading and writing (I had a head-start on that class), while the rest of the class was working on the shapes and the sounding-out of the words, my little pea-picking head was looking with scorn at these stories, declaring, “I can write a story better than THIS!”

Sound familiar? Anyone having flashbacks of reading a book and then throwing it across the room saying the same thing? I was just a little ahead of most people on that.

And it hasn’t stopped since then.

I have always wanted to make a living telling stories that others enjoyed. As time went on, and I continued to study the industry, it became clearer that it was becoming harder and harder for the CONTENT producers in the industry to make a living.

Which has been sad. It’s made my heart sick at times. The dream I’ve had since before starting school was almost impossible from the very start as I’ve never been delusional enough to think I would be one of those special people to get one of the lucky break 5-6 figure book contracts.

But, times and the technology are changing.

I’ve been in the business world a long time now. For the past several years I’ve been approaching my writing like a business, in that I’m making actual business plans and have a writing schedule. And the schedule has been working great! I now have product to sell and share.

Now it’s time to do something about the sharing part of the dream, and with it, hopefully, the ‘making a living’ part. After all, this is MY career and no one else’s. To think someone else will help me in building that career is pie-in-the-sky idiocy.

I would like to think I’m smarter than that.

Starting now will be a series of posts titled “The E-Book Experiment.” Why it is called that will become clear as the posts go on.

The first part of series will look at business basics and applying them to the publishing world, along with a few basic conclusions. Others may disagree with the conclusions, but hey, that is THEIR career choices. We all have choices to make and live by.

Then the series will progress to the meat of it: the writing.

I’m looking forward to this, even though it may mean I need to adjust my 5 Year Writing Business Plan. But I’m hoping this will mean adjustment in a good way!

Stay tuned for the next part!

_____________________________________

“The E-Book Experiment” chronicles the business and creative side of an experiment with the business opportunities new technology and creative outlets now afford content producers. Will if fail? Will it succeed? The only way to know is to approach it with a solid plan and try. No regrets!

I hope the details of this journey will be a help to other authors. As the process proceeds to selling the final products I will also share hard data that might be useful in the decision making process of other authors who recognize that only they can take charge of their careers. For a listing of all the posts in this series, please click here.

Hop on over to “Better To Outline Or Not To Outline? Some Survey Responses” to read some of the responses from the survey.

And I’m the second one from the top! How exciting!

:waves at Zette:

And as someone who just received a big long crit with many bad points in a story pointed out, here is what I did, in hopes it helps:

First, realize this is YOUR story. You know what you wanted it to be, the story you wanted to tell. Remind yourself of that first before looking at the crits. If you happened to write down your theme or your ‘hook’, take the time to read it. (I did this, and it was a very good thing. See below)

Then go at that crit in one massive read-through, but do it with a pen and paper next to you. If you don’t agree with something, keep moving. Put it out of your mind. It doesn’t matter anymore.

However, if you find something that you think might have a little bit or a lot of merit, write it down on that piece of paper in your own words. When you write it down make a note of the area in the story to find the problem to help you track it down later.

Remember to compare the crits with the theme and story you want to write. If the suggestions take the story in a different direction, ignore them, even if the suggestions are good. Filling the work with a bunch of themes and unconnected ideas will only make it worse, not better.

Do the above until you are done with what was said in the crit. Then put the crit away. Don’t look at it for a while.

What you will have left is the piece of paper where you wrote down your notes. Because it’s in your handwriting and in your own words, your mind and heart won’t view it as if another strange person is trying to infiltrating your writing. The notes are now YOURS.

This is a little bit of a mind-game. By doing this you won’t be opening up the crit continually, and possibly getting yourself upset with too much negativity or constantly seeing things you don’t agree with. You are giving yourself distance from the crit while still moving forward with advice that could possibly make your work stronger.

But, it also has a practical purpose. You’ve now condensed out of the crit only the things that you agree (or somewhat agree) with. You can focus only on them. You don’t have the work of looking through a long crit to find the little bit you need out of all the things mentioned there. You have a condensed to-do list that you can condense down further or cross out as you finish the points or decide you don’t agree after all.

As I mentioned previously, I received a difficult crit. The above steps made it much easier to deal with, especially reviewing the theme and story hook. Going through the crit all at once made me realize the critter was giving suggestions to turn the story into a novel. The story wasn’t a novel, and I didn’t want it to be. With that realization, I was better able to sort through the advice and use details here and there to help improve the story without allowing the short story to become more than I wanted it to be.

Every critiquer comes to the story with their own slant, their own preferences, likes and dislikes, wants and needs. Those wants and needs may not coincide with you or the story you want to tell.

Be flexible while reading the critique and see it objectively. But also be strong enough to say ‘no’ if it conflicts with what you want the story to be. Just because the advice is given doesn’t mean it must be followed.

Never forget this is your work, your words. Only you know where you want it to go, what it should be when it is polished and finished.

So, I spent a little time making out a list. Wow, what an eye-opener.

As one of my short stories just made the leap from “Revising” status to “Finished” status, I thought I would put the numbers into here.

Finished
1 novel
3 short stories

Revising
1 novel
2 short stories
1 Non-fiction Article

First Draft Finished
4 novels

First Draft in Progress
None

Outlined
1 novel

Planning Stage
6 novels

Not including the “Finished” category, that makes 15 projects actively being worked on. Yeow, no wonder I couldn’t remember them all! We won’t even mention how long the ‘idea file’ is becoming. The Muse has been hyped up on sugar, throwing out ideas right and left. My head is hurting from being bonked by one too many of them!

I just realized I never said what the second book I wrote for Nano 2009 was. In my defense, November was a really hard month. The answer is: Hyperspace Encounters: (Science Fiction Romance) After her freighter crashed into a sentient ship of an unknown species, a clever widow finds herself neck-deep in the delicate balance between peace and war, and her dead husband’s fate might hold the key.

It came out to a finished rough draft of 84k and turned out better than I expected. The outline for this particular novel was rather skimpy, and some interesting things happened while writing it. As a result, it’s going to need massive revision to carry all the new ideas throughout the book. But it will be a fun revision, too. The characters really came alive, and the universe took a few interesting turns. Plus I got to write a space adventure! In spaceships! So totally cool!

I’ve put it away to rest for a bit while I work on the revision of two other novels.