Category: writing

Nanowrimo 2018 – day 4

Well… so much for plotting plans. Plans to plot? Whatever

Word count: 2,421

I was making spinach lasagne and sourdough at midnight on day 3. I wanted to use up a big bunch of spinach that had been in the fridge a little too long and some milk that was close to the use-by date. I’m having issues with my sourdough.

I may have to chuck out most of my sourdough starter and well, start again. [wait… is this a metaphor for writing???]

I thought it might be the flour batch, but no. I opened a new packet of flour and this is what the finished result looks like. Check it out. That is sad. [ugh… Trump has stolen the word sad from us all…] Okay, that is a poor excuse for a loaf.

20181105 sad sourdough

I shall eat it anyway. I can toast slices, or it can be made into Tuscan bread Soup, or into breadcrumbs.

I spent the day doing chores and errands with my earbuds firmly in, and managed to get through The Shape of Water. There was a moment where a woman walked around a shelf in Kmart to see me frozen in the aisle listening. [Some days I don’t multitask well, thanks ADHD]

I am getting a better idea of 4theWords. There are quests. And you have to find and defeat the monsters that drop the right items for you to satisfy the quests.

I did drag out the Plotto book while kid 1 watched some more ‘I Claudius’. Kid 1 is not good with recognising faces but there was no way he missed Patrick Stewart’s voice. And he has hair.

‘Don’t eat the figs’, may become a new saying for Kid 1.

And then there was much research and discussion of various players in the Roman drama. I said we have the book somewhere about the house. The scene where the two lady poisoners lunch and eye each other off whilst carefully eating and comparing poison notes is amazing. I heard an interview with Sir Derek Jacobi on Audible saying he wasn’t supposed to get the role, as he was too young, but a producer saw him in a stage production where he had to age, and recommended him. You can hear the size of the sets and the makeup is not bad for such an old production. [Looks better than Henry Cavill’s Geralt wig…]

Plotto, also, is very old-fashioned but there are so many plot ideas in there that I just know I’ve read or watched. It was a favourite of Hitchcock which is how I stumbled onto it in the first place, I think. E A Deverell talks of it often, too.

And would you believe it, there’s a tag for fake dating:

#83 B pretends that she is engaged to be married in order to be free of certain annoying experiences.

Which is part of my plot. I do love a good trope.

Links:

I Claudius

EA Deverell’s website

[sign up for Museletters? Oh, that’s good.]

Nanowrimo 2018 – day 3

Word count: 1100

My worst fears have come to pass. I use electronic apps to borrow library books. They are super neat. I have also recently taken to placing a hold on books that are very popular. I do tend to read a lot of older stuff because it’s often at a reduced price. So as part of my book buying, I now check if the library has a copy before I cough up the cash.

I reserved: The shape of Water by Guillermo del Toro, Norse mythology by Neil Gaiman, Time Travel by James Gleick, Call me by your Name by André Aciman and I recently grabbed a physical copy of An absolutely Remarkable thing by Hank Green when I saw it on the ‘new releases’ shelf. [I know I’ve read the book and the screenplay for Call me by Your name but this is the audiobook. It’s different, I tell you. Different.]

The app tells you how many copies the library has, how many people are waiting for each copy, and where your place is in the queue, along with an estimated date when it will automatically ping onto your electronic shelf.

I had them all nicely spaced out. One was meant to come in 2019. But NOOOO… they all came in within the space of two days. EEK. And I’m doing Nanowrimo!

Goddammit, universe.

What happened? Did a loved one buy them all a copy? Was there a sale on audiobooks I missed? I used to take pride in returning a book early but now I worry that maybe I too, am messing up someone’s carefully spaced library borrowing schedule. Should I wait until it is electronically ‘returned’ from my account? What IS the etiquette on library holds?

Plus, today kid 1 plonked down on the couch and announced he was going to watch ‘I Claudius’. What? No… I’m trying to write here!

To expand: I saw the series decades ago when it was on TV. [it was maybe 1978? Decades… seriously.] It has always been on my ‘to buy’ list but I had trouble finding it. Then, recently, I was in my local Target and a lot of things were on sale before a store reorganisation and I saw a boxed set of British Drama DVDs. It had: I Claudius, The Scarlet Pimpernel, The first two series of Poldark (the 1970’s one), and Lady Chatterley (the Sean Bean version) and it was $5. Insane price. I already had Sean, but it was a no brainer.

So I’m sitting metres away with my headphones on but I wasn’t listening; really, I wasn’t. I kept shouting “I’m not listening” occasionally to confirm it. But omg Brian Blessed was so young (and beardless… it’s just WRONG). And Ian Ogilvy (sighs)… and was that Inspector Wexford? And gah the ladies…

But this post is about Nanowrimo, right?

Today, I battled some monsters and trundled out 1100 words, no problem. But what I realised was I was pantsing it. I have no plan, and no plot. Besides the fact that I’m still trying to work out how 4theWords works*, I don’t even know what the heck this story is about. I don’t even have names for my main characters. With the heatwave, I was watering my plants, and I suddenly shouted, “Sage!” as I watered my herbs. Is that my heroines’ name? I don’t know. Tonight I might take a couple of hours and scribble it all out on index cards.

Oooh… what if the hero’s name is Ian? [Look… they were doing the Roman body scrape thing and he was naked… and I am weak…] Or Sean? Wait… what was the name of Lady Chatterley’s game keeper? Oliver.

Ha. That’s it.

 

*it seems I signed up in May 2016 and I really have no memory of that.

 

Nanowirmo 2018 – day 2

Yes, I know I missed day 1, I didn’t sign up for it until day 2.

Okay…

Word count: 2249

That’s not bad for a day, and it’s a failure for two days… but *shrugs*

I did sign up for 4thewords and then the oddest thing happened: I already had a record. I felt like Gandalf in a meme. Intones sonorously, I have no memory of this place.

According to the website, I signed up in October 2016. What?

And I had two files posted; one full of intriguing book titles and the other some hastily scribbled bits about a magic carnival… and nope. I have ZERO memory of writing these things. I didn’t do any battles… I just signed up and then seemed to forget about it. [thanks ADHD]

I was oddly thrown back into a memory from years ago when I got on a bus and the driver knew my name and said we were at school together. I spent the whole trip scouring my brain to remember who he was. It can’t be junior high school, I went to a girl’s school. And so on.

I had NO clue who he was. And then, as I alighted, he said his name… and nope. It still didn’t ring a bell. I smiled happily and made all the right noises… but I still didn’t know who he was.

I am hopeless at life, I tell you.

Oooh, just noticed someone uses 4theWords to write their Goodreads reviews… [No, Brain.]

My electronic devices crawled through the day. Sydney is having a mini heatwave and it hit 38C in my back room – where my desk is.

But we nano-on! For the words, she cries!

Nanowrimo 2018 – signup

To nano or not to nano?

*spoiler alert* I signed up.

As per usual I left it to the last minute, or the first day. I was listening to Writing Excuses and Mary Robinette Kowal said something about how she’d written all her books in Nano and that it didn’t matter if you won or lost, you had a pile of words at the end of it.

Nano works for me. I do the words. I’m also going to sign up for 4theWords app. I hear great things about it from Mur Lafferty and Rachael Stephens.

I will try to keep a blog diary; may as well… and no, it won’t count towards my word count. Worst luck. *grins*

So it’s the second day of the month and what’s the first thing that happens? My PC crashes.

*sighs*

Ah well, I drag out the Chromebook.

Turn it on. Nothing happens. The black screen of death.

I am cursed; cursed I tell you!

 

I fixed the Chromebook after holding start button down for seven long seconds and praying to all the gods of writing. By then the PC had thought better of itself and restarted.

Hope dawns in the distance…

 

Links:

Writing excuses

Mur Lafferty – I should be Writing podcast

Rachael Stephens – youtube

It’s all in the algorithms

Last month I was listening to a Sterling & Stone audio sales pitch for their most recent author training. It was a pretty generous offer and they said they were being so generous because it was the last time they would do such a thing. Now, I know people always say that in sales stuff, but the guys gave their reasons why.

They love what they do. They love the independence it gives them and the quality of life they get from being a full time writer. They won’t do anything to jeopardise that because that would affect their income and thus their families. And in current America with no guarantee of Health care and education, money matters and none of them (even Dave) want to go back to working full time for somebody else.

They do the sums. They rely mostly on Amazon for income and over the years they have learnt how Amazon works and how to use it to sell more of their books. That’s what the course was about. The tag was ‘make $3k a month’ or they’d give you your money back.**

But… and here’s the big but… Amazon is run on algorithms. When you buy something it tries to work out what else you might be interested in. The key to success is for your works to appear as recommendations to people when they are already buying stuff. These suggestions are referred to as ‘also-boughts’ because that’s literally what the screen says: people who bought this title also bought… Amazon also uses your ranking to pick recommendations to email out to readers. This is why some people cheat and put their book in the wrong genre, one with less titles usually, to get a higher ranking.*!

Sterling & Stone have worked out that teaching other people how to write messes up their sales.

Let’s say I buy one of their books on writing. My ‘also-boughts’ will be an erratic mix of romance, historical romance, erotica and non-fiction writing. Another person’s ‘also-boughts’ might be hard core sci-fi, military fiction, non-fiction war history and non-fiction writing.

With those kinds of stats Amazon does not offer Sterling & Stone’s works to other people browsing the site because it can’t guess what people would like it. Everyone’s mixed up buying history confuses it.

Sterling & Stone know this because they have literally written a book and marketed it to a select email list of people who like that exact genre. It did better than their other works because it had clean ‘also-boughts’.

So, as a result, they will no longer write books on how to help other authors.

And that is obviously something that other people are going to realise as well. Not many of them will invest this much time and money into a solution.

Although I did hear Rachael Herron say her ‘also-boughts’ were pretty clean, so maybe Amazon is neatening the process up? %%

I hope so because a lot of peoples’ livelihoods depend on it. $$

Links:

**the proviso was that you had a series in mind. That you completed the first book in six months and they would give you a $500 cover. Also no erotica. Amazon sends all erotica writers to an algorithm ‘dungeon’. Sighs…

*! Please report people who do this or who stuff multiple works in until the actual book is a tiny percentage of the whole. Samples are fine, I love samples.

sterling & stone

%% she was talking to J Thorn on the Petal to the Metal podcast

$$ not mine obvs… dammit AM, finish your shit.

It took me 18 months to read a 35 page 10k word story

No, it didn’t truthfully.

But I had a theory: if I mark something as ‘currently reading’ on Goodreads then I will be reminded it’s there and eventually read it… yeah… nah.

It didn’t work.

Stupid ADHD brain. You really think I’d know how to live with it by now.

Here’s another example: I made a jar to put a stone in for each 500 words I wrote that day. It’s cute and arty. I made labels with hand-drawn fonts and tied it all up in shiny bronze ribbon. The idea was that each day I’d add pebbles and that they’d make a satisfying sound and be a physical reminder (as the jar filled) of the words and the work I had already done.

20180327_230410

And then I broke the Scrivener word counter. I reset my daily word count on my Scrivener doc and it helpfully said my word count was NEGATIVE 3,825. No, I hadn’t deleted anything and I can’t work out why it’s done this.

Kid Extra is my tech kid. He shakes his head at me probably once a week because I have managed to kill or break something techy in an unexpected way. It’s my gift.

But this threw me out of my writing habit. Why? I don’t know.

Logically I just need to write 3,825 words and it’ll go to zero.

So I do that. I paste in some parts more than once until I get it into positive and then reset the daily count.

Nope.

Still NEGATIVE 3,825

Bugger.

Annoyed, I delete the words and NOW it resets to negative 7,650. What? No!

*headdesk*

Why me?

I know! I’ll turn it off and turn it on again… ha! It worked. Why didn’t you think of that earlier? Dammit brain.

Inner critic

I follow story coach and writer Jennifer Louden. She’s one of those people who always comes across as enthusiastic and energetic. She’s so positive, you know?

One of her emails this month said she had decided, after four years of effort, to scrap her current memoir.

Four years.

One hundred and twenty thousand words.

She confessed that it was not salvageable.

And I hurt for her. I know how that feels.

Today she had a soundcloud link to her talk about hiding. If I was her, after making that announcement, I’d be hiding. I probably wouldn’t have got out of bed, but here she is still working, still talking, still being positive and still trying to help others.

She asked listeners to write down their responses to their inner critic. She calls it the itty bitty shitty committee. The voice in your head that tells you you’re going to fail. You know the one.

Write down what you should say about yourself in response. So I write: I’m smart, I have three degrees, I’ve done amazing things, I’ve turned unplanned jobs into successes, I made more money for ANZA charity in Jakarta than anyone ever had before, I made speeches, I met ambassadors and world leaders. I’m the #8 reviewer on Goodreads. I have written and posted 78 stories on fanfiction. I have published seven short works that have been downloaded a few times. *runs off to look up stats on Smashwords – 9,130 times. [cool!]*

I write stories that people tell me they like. I have… *runs off to look up ffn stats*

Wait…

WHAT?

I have a total of 12,001,668 hits on ffn.

*jaw drops*

Twelve million?

I should be proud of myself. I AM proud of myself. So why does my inner voice tell me I can’t do this? I already am.

Dammit brain.

 

Links:

Home

https://www.fanfiction.net/u/2154210/Mrstrentreznor

 

Blanking myself

I grabbed a new notebook to throw in my bag as the current two were down to the last couple of pages. Once I got on the train, I opened the blank notebook only to find a story snippet – two pages or so.

It’s my handwriting but I don’t remember writing it.

I don’t remember where I wanted it to go, or where I thought it was heading.

I suppose I could treat it like a writing prompt; and start from what I have.

The protagonist is an accurate fortune teller. Nobody wants the truth of their own future, do they? Not really.

I did have an idea about a person knowing the hour of a person’s death. I think it’d be a good thing to curse someone with but I feel Chuck Wendig’s Miriam Black series has done that idea too well.

An accurate prophecy also reminds me of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch.

So what was I thinking of? I don’t know…

This month my challenge was to write something short to give away to my website mailing list.

I failed.

But, in failing, I got a lot of other steps done along the way to that final step.

And the idea I have is good, I think. But it wants to be longer than a quick 5-10k words.

One of my signature traits in fanfiction was writing a one shot of say, less than 5k words. I’d post it and then everyone would ask for more. After thinking it over I would extend it until it was a 200k word epic spanning a decade; with lives lost, worlds-changed, the whole shebang. Tsunamis… there were tsunamis!

So it’s not unexpected that I’d itch to extend this freebie.

I could post it as a ‘teaser’ but fanfic readers would be okay with that whereas original fic readers probably wouldn’t like it.

So, I went back into my Word document files and tried to find all my flash fiction and short stories. I loaded them all into a Scrivener file.

What was most obvious was that I haven’t written many lately. *frowns at self*

Also that some of them are pretty good. *pats self on back*

And a lot could be extended, exactly like my old fanfic one-shots. *rolls eyes at self*

So, maybe that’s what I’ll do… pick one, edit it, run it through Scrivener to make a file, make a cover in Canva, work out how to use Bookfunnel or one of the other delivery devices, and THEN I’ll give it away.

Sheesh… maybe that’ll be next month’s challenge?

Or next week’s; I can get that done in a week. *laughs at self again*

3 million hits

 

Back in May 2015 Best Friends Share Everything passed 2 million hits.

http://amgray.blogspot.com.au/2015/05/2-million-hits.html

Now it’s trundled past 3 million.

3m bfse

Well… I am amazed. It just keeps going. An odd pairing (okay triangle), a long story (over 200k), and for relatively minor characters like Embry and Quil. I certainly never expected it to be popular but almost every day I get a review from someone and it says something like: they’ve read it 20 times, or so many times they can’t count it; that the characters were their friends and they miss them.

I know people don’t often comment on older fics and I still respond to all the reviews that allow me to reply. I’m still just astounded.

I adore my three and I’m still struggling with trying to work out what I got right with that story because if I could somehow replicate it in an original work, I’d be golden.

And my total hits are: 11,898,571

And as always, Apologies is right behind it.

The banner was made by GoldenGirl and she even made a receipt with an employee discount as Quil’s mother owns the store.

the lighthouse and my creative brain

Today after I finished my headspace meditation I wandered off to look around the site. There was a creative writing prompt. Ooh… the guide suggested you feel a flame of creativity inside you but I imagined that flame as a lighthouse.

Why? No idea.

And then – instead of meditating- I started thinking about lighthouses and imagery in fiction. A quick scan of dream dictionaries suggests that dreaming of a lighthouse means: a spiritual development; to overcome trials and rough seas; guidance in difficult times; warnings about wrong directions; truth and thanks to Freud, penises. [Seriously, that man saw them everywhere.]

But it seemed kind of apt to me. The lighthouse light passes across a space regularly but it isn’t stationary; it’s off or on and constantly moving. Maybe it’s a better image of my ADHD mind. [Mind helpfully supplies an image of a cartoon lighthouse darting all over the place rather than sweeping around in a cycle. Thanks, brain.]

I can’t be creative all the time. It does come in a cycle, and on dark days, the light goes out.

And then I started to think about lighthouses in fiction. The first that came to mind was Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse’. Wikipedia quotes the theme as ‘attempting to understand people in the act of looking’. Helen Garner mentioned it in Monkeygrip. It was in Susanna Moore’s ‘In the Cut’. When I go searching in my kindle, I have a copy of Woolf’s book so I add it to my ‘currently reading’ tag along with 39 others. Scattered mind, indeed.

My therapist suggested I get a figurine to represent my creative mind as a trigger thing; see it and write. I adore Funko dolls but they are disappointingly bereft of creative reps. Bob Ross does NOT work for me. I tweeted funko and suggested they make a Jane Austen one. But for the moment, after some rifling around in drawers, I have a small figurine of a lighthouse.