10 Hours a Week

My "goal", such as it is, is to write two short stories a week. This is not even close to being a full-time occupation, and shouldn't feel like it. Let's take a reasonable estimate and assume that a short story takes about five hours to write (That's the strength of short stories, they let you blast an idea out on the page and get it over with.) I should, by a reasonable standard, be writing 8 short stories every week. It's not like I don't have time.

With that preface, let's talk about GOALS. Goals, in my view, should be impossible. Plans, by their very nature, fail upon contact with the enemy, likewise should goals fail upon contact with reality. Much like plans, though, they should be so constructed that victory is possible even in failure. Simple, direct, well-sourced, and victory entirely under the control of the planners. If victory would require the other guys to be stupid, that's a bad plan. Likewise for me, Writer: If monetary success would require all other potential writers to work less hard than me, than I'm screwed. 

Fortunately, it's not too hard (or at least, it's simple). The only way forward is to work hard. I doubt I'll bust out eight stories a week first go, but I bet I could get at least four and half of the fifth. And once that's done, what's stopping me from getting five and half of the sixth? What indeed?

If I knew the answer to that question...

...well, there'd be one less question.

#

Right, yeah! Let's do this thing with the writing and the winning and the all the money! Whoo! There's nothing that can stop us now!

Wait, you want to do What? With the...ah.

Er...OK! (Whoo!)

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250 words? Yes

Book "Lived Too Long to Die"

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Reading - Authors Feel Pinch in Age of E-Books

(WSJ)

*134

In Which I Briefly Praise Literary Fiction

Before Rejecting Those Who Read It Exclusively: A Novel

I read everything, it's what I do. I'm an intellectual striving to get paid for it, so of course I read. Furthermore, how can I be sure I'm not writing The Same Old Thing if I don't read a representative sample of everything else? Fair's fair. 

I've read a reasonable proportion of the Classics, Penguin or otherwise, and the two things I can say is that they're mostly good (special shout-out to Nabokov) and that Pride & Prejudice is not improved by zombies. From time to time I pick up the latest Literary Sensation (last case being "Freedom" by Jonathan Franzen), and usually I enjoy it. I can hold my own in a hoity-toity discourse on literature, so long as I don't let on that I finished reading the book. That's not a joke, that's just good strategy. A bohemian mustn't endanger his supply of wine.

I like the idea of a genre devoted to the Craft of Writing, fiddling with language and emotion and generally working out the effects of the (in this case) English language on people, viewing each work as an experiment and taking careful notes. What is the ideal reading length? Does the reader really care about adverbs? Sentence structure, phrases good? And so forth. I call it Literature Science, and obviously that's not what's going on in MFA programs.

Maybe I just don't trust anything without at least observing a little perfunctory data collection being done, but it seems that Literature, by which I mean those in the literature genre who don't admit they're a genre, has puffed itself up without having any hard numbers for a foundation. How do they know they're Art? How do they measure the emotions their writing is supposed to be evoking? They haven't even asked those questions. 

Eh. I apparently can't get too excited about this, so all I'll say is: Look at the New York Times reviews of fiction books and you'll almost certainly discover that the so-called genre book reviews are a lot more interesting, as evidenced by how they don't have to talk about the author for the first quarter of the article.

Read everything. 

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When I'm a rich eccentric writer, I'm going to buy a printing press and give it to an inner-city school. Learn 'em a trade, it will.

As for myself, I'll have a book printer in my house.

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250 words? Yes

Book "Lived Too Long to Die"

- - - -

Reading - Emotional Complexity in Literary Fiction

*133

I'm In It For The Money

I don't know about you guys, but I intend to make a living at this thing. I like the idea of having a profession that's easy to explain. So easy in fact, that you don't have to say "I'm a writer, I write stuff." People just assume you're interesting at parties unless you give them some reason to think otherwise. And then they'll think you're some sort of heroic misanthrope, which is just as good.

I tells ya, I like to think of Art as including a monetary component. Somebody's got to pay for my Creative leisure, and if it must be me I'm going to have to earn some money being Creative. Fortunately, I can see a path forward towards that. It's going to be exciting.

This qualifies as more of a Business-side post. I've already seen a big change with 10 short stories up instead of a mere 5 (and it's only been couple days... Sheesh.) I want to get the number up to at least 50 short stories ASAP and see what happens from there. Of course, I'll be sending forth short story manuscripts to the usual markets as well, because a broad churn propels all boats.

I have no idea if that nautical metaphor is accurate, but it's better than no metaphor at all.

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By the by, I was going to write a walkthrough post for basic Amazon DTP Publishing since I couldn't find one anywhere else, but then I ran across Simplified Guide to Building a Kindle Book. Apparently it was posted sometime after I figured out all the formatting by trial and error for the first wave. Sucks for me. Still, pretty clear. Something else that may help is HTML Tags Supported, if you want to get fancy (you probably don't).

Hard numbers, then, on how long it takes to get a short story formatted and up, assuming you start with a clean Microsoft Word document and have done it two or three times before:
Cover - 15-25 minutes. (Not counting actually going out and taking the picture)
Smashwords - 5-10 minutes (Premium Catalog inclusion took less than a day)
Amazon DTP - 10-15 minutes (DTP Publishing time about 24 hours)

So...negligible. And no special skills needed. You could do it today with Cover Art, that simplified guide, and a short story at 99 cents.

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Whatever else is going on in this image, it's too crowded.

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250 words? Yes

Book "Lived Too Long to Die"

- - - -

Reading - The Role of Literary Publishers in the Digital Age

*132

Story Good People Bad Rawr

There's no real benefit to be had in trying to convince people to like your (or anybody else's) work if they don't like it immediately. Just write something else. If you've got two million words out there, they've got to like something, assuming that isn't a two million word trilogy. That would be bad no matter how good it is...

You're running a small business, and you don't get satisfied customers by yelling at them when they don't like your products. If the reader didn't like what you're selling, sell them something else. Everything I know about small business would exhort me to give them something free for their trouble, too. Satisfied customers are worth more than Artist's Pride, which is worthless until somebody pays for it. Fortunately, you're your own supplier so the only haggling for supply you have to do is with yourself about time.

The same goes with promotion, which is something of the same idea. I feel the best promotion is having a lot of work out there, just a massive backlist. That's my weakness right now is that I don't yet have at least five unrelated books I can just point people to. And thus, of course, from.

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On that note, though, I now have 10 Short Stories available for purchase and 2 free flash fiction just for fun. All of them are on Smashwords and sooner or later these newest 4 will be on the Kindle and Barnes & Noble.

In honor of this milestone and to test the coupon feature of Smashwords, I'm making Ernie Centrifuge, Private Eye available for free until Christmas. Just follow that link and input the coupon code [expired] at checkout. We'll see how this works. If you have any troubles, tell me.

It's a fun scifi romp, I had a lot of fun writing it, and this is my favorite cover art of the new set. I like how it all came together. You can find the rest of the short stories in the convenient category tabs above.


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People good, also story good too! Rawr? I'm going to class up this post with a little classic classy.


Aww.

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History of the lower varieties always seemed to focus on a bunch of nobles and warlords who never really did anything except break stuff. That's not my skill set. What I liked about studying Science was that you got to learn about a bunch of Creative types from all of history. Some of them were wrong, but they were trying to be right, and they showed their work. It was only when some warlord got involved that all the work got hidden.

Concentration of power is Bad For Science.

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250 words? Yes

Book "Lived Too Long to Die"
Short Story "Sharia & The Gays" - in progress

- - - -

Reading - ?

*131

Pulp Writ Large

My goal is to be a pulp writer, that's just how it is. I will not be satisfied until I am writing continuously at least eight hours a day, five days a week. But what does it mean to be a pulp writer, eh?

It just means you write a lot, and that you write professionally. Presumably you have some sort of university education, but you almost certainly don't have a MFA. I can't afford that, and don't like to sit in a classroom in any case, but I could afford proven workshops from other more advanced pulp writers. The main point is that you just write, then you get paid, then you write. The cycle of pulp is never complete, which is good, because the Internet demands a sacrifice and is willing to pay for it.

Here's when I feel the most like a pulp writer: I have an image flash, I open up q10 and just type until the story is over. As of this writing, the longest complete story I've writ all at one sitting has been a 12,500 word Hard SF "novelette" called Mike and the Beanstalk. It's part of the Moon Base cycle I'm working on, and the way I did it was I crammed a load of research into my brain over the course of two hours of speed-reading, then spilled it all over the page while I was telling the interwoven story of the characters. It just happened, and that's the point.

Once I can do that regularly, I'll buy the pulp writer hat and wear it constantly, even at parties. The hat I have now is a professional foreigner hat and not near so classy. If you can even imagine that.

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It's not real, none of it is. It's just a passing fancy of a scale model enthusiast who plays with us as figures in his train set. We aren't even the most important parts of the train set, we're just background noise so that the train has a populated town to stop at in its endless pointless circles. Nobody even notices us. They just notice the tunnel. 

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250 words? Yes

Book "Lived Too Long to Die"

- - - -

Reading - ?

*130

Don't Write In The Past

Don't look back unless you're looking forward to your next piece. It's my contention that the more I just plow forward, the easier it'll get. It builds the thinking muscle (the brain) and the natural instinct to move on (the feet). This has three parts, one mysteriously longer than the other two:

It's Been Done Before
and I've got nothing new to add.

It's Not a New Challenge 
and I won't learn anything from it except how to finish a piece more quickly. I always have a learning goal at the start of a piece. Note, though, that if somebody paid me specifically to write "something like that other piece", I'd say Sure. Getting paid for doing what you're apparently good at is always Good Stuff.

Continuity Is For Suckers
When I read the "series" I like, they're pretty rough and ready with continuity. The writer just writes the next book, then she incorporates the interesting characters and events into a mostly stand-alone plot such that any new reader can pick up and start reading. Perhaps, to be slightly less offensive, Continuity is a bonus feature for my dedicated fans. And if I don't have dedicated fans, I'm a sucker to worry about continuity instead of better writing.

Now, to write them there books.

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I think a major point of disillusionment in my childhood was the realization that these dishes didn't fire lasers.

Then we got hunter-killer drones and doom satellites and I was reillusioned. Hurrah!

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250 words? Yes

Book "Lived Too Long to Die"

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Reading - MFA vs. NYC
(Slate)

*129

Do Mess With a Good Thing

If you mess with a good thing enough, it'll get gooder.

The loose series of Alan stories I write are essentially trilingual since they're set in SE Asia. I've been slowly upping the amount of foreign language I incorporate into it so I can experiment with techniques for doing so.

Bad Idea

What I'd really like to do is put the foreign language that the viewpoint character is unable to understand in non-English script. That's moving into comic strip/graphic novel territory. It'd make me feel better though, for two reasons. One, there's not really a clear transliteration scheme for a lot of these languages, so native speakers would find it hard to read. Two, the trilingual nature would be illustrated more clearly for the reader, because of the different scripts.

/Bad Idea

The main point is that if everything gets translated into English, the reader doesn't quite get most of the character's issues, because they understand everything. Joke subtitles only work in cheap comedies, not in magical realism.

What I'd really like to end up with is something like this, where you don't need to understand the second language to get the idea/joke:


Good stuff.

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I always assume that these Olde Tyme Magazines were just really genteel pornography.

This is just the only position they were allowed back then.

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250 words? Yes
Book "Lived Too Long to Die"
- - - -
Reading - The Put-Ons of Personal Essayists
(The Chronicle Review)

*128