Godby/Barron Convo 1: Speeding

The second special guest in my ongoing series of Google DocTalks™ is my good pal Ben Godby. As you read this, remember that we came up with all the section headings beforehand and use that as a guide to our organizational abilities. Enjoy!

Ben Godby of BenGodby.com is BG

David Barron of by David Barron is daB

Lit & Pulp

Pulp Lit

Literary Pulp(?) vs. Science Fantasy Romance

David Barron: So, we’re two writers who seem to have taken two separate roads, I to the Spell-check and Submit It highway of pulp writing—if I had that classic post to write again, I’d title it “Spell Check and Forget It”—littered with the half-remembered road-killed plots of the Story Before, and you to the All My Stories Are Allegories tranquil country path of literary fiction—I’m sure you have a more salient post in there somewhere—strewn with fallen words like so many autumn leaves &c &c.

Ben Godby: If I may be so asinine as to serve you up a hot dish of allegory, I feel like I’m actually on a highway constantly fretting about which exit I’m supposed to take. I’m also worried that someone might overtake me on the left, or that I’ll smash into some jerk hiding in my blindspot. Just the other day I was musing about how everything I ever write about writing seems to be nullified simply by the act of writing about it ("The Agonies"), so that every time I think I’ve hit upon an idea, a movement, a style, a solution to the agony that is “how will I most effectively and awesomely self-express,” I prove myself wrong a moment later. Then I was reading some Hal Duncan post where he says you’re never supposed to admit to doubting yourself, and I think that’s a really nice idea but I am way too self-conscious, self-obsessed, and self-loathing to do other than doubt myself.

daB: I think you’re allowed to doubt and loathe everything you’re currently writing (or that you’re sitting on), but once you’ve published it you have to pretend it’s the best thing you’ve ever written ever. That’s in the verbal contract you’ve made with your readers. Presumably the more professional one becomes as a writer, the more one has learned about believing this lie. Considering that I’m fixing to re-read everything I wrote in 2011 for the first time (as a final copy-edit before I do the fancy editions), I hope I can keep a straight face.

I agree about writing about writing. I recently read through my “The First 200 Days”, my ‘daily blogging’ collection (because I wanted to fix the formatting), and I make a lot of amazing pronouncements (esp. about business!) which I find rather ridiculous now. But that’s the point. Writers think by babbling, then keeping the good stuff. ...anyways, I assume nobody reads my writing blog except me, so it’s OK.

BG: I read your blog. I really do. Because your funny. So many blogs totally suck. I hope my blog doesn’t suck. I’m really afraid it does, sometimes. Because, seriously, so many writers have the most terrible blogs. How can people who are so creative have ABSOLUTELY ZERO PERSONALITY? I don’t get it. But you have personality, David.

Maybe it’s the beer?

daB: ...it’s the beer.

Speeding

daB: I like your highway allegory. I’m presumably That Guy—graduate of the Grand Theft Auto motor school—who’s just speeding along, changing lanes on bridges, and generally being unconcerned with the feelings of others. I write fast, now, just translating the images that pop into my head down on the page and Never. Ever. Editing. I’m too lazy to edit, I just want to write the next thing. If you go to my blog there’s about thirty covers for as-yet-unwritten stories and books that “I’ll get to writing”. Sooner or later. In my private archives, there are about ten stories with one great opening paragraph written that I lost track of in order to jump to the next story. I’ve been working on finishing those, now, because their incompleteness mocks me and makes me feel like a twit.

This is why I find it so hard to actually sit down and write a book. Short stories are more fun, and they finish.

BG: The advantage to speeding is that it’s difficult to slow down. No, wait; it’s the opposite: it’s easy to keep moving. It’s easy enough to stop completely, but “inertia is a property of matter” and all that.

I think speeding kept me writing for a really long time, and even though I no longer drink and narrativize (harr harr), when I hit a “groove” or a “swing,” what’s effectively happening is that I’m hitting a top speed, covering huge distance in short amounts of time. People never talk about how they suddenly got into their rhythm and started writing incredibly slowly, you know? We’re always trying to get to top speed and stay there as long as possible.

daB: You’ve got to drink and write, it’s your duty as a Creative. My current elixir of choice is coffee spiked liberally with the nearest available Kentucky bourbon. Keeps the brain going, and punches Mr. Editor in the face with the fist of alcohol. Once the story is done, I can edit and publish (yaknow, the Boring part) sans coffee.

BG: Indeed. A glass of wine always makes me more accepting of the first thing I write. OBVIOUSLY IT’S BECAUSE IT MAKES ME A BETTER WRITER THE FIRST TIME. (Man, I... I am just obsessed with caps sometimes.) That said, lately I’ve been writing more slowly. I actually wrote a book by hand. Now, I’m going a little too fast to type it up, so that’s a problem, but... slowing down—shifting into lower gear, if I may continue being a punhole—is what allowed me to write a complete manuscript with which there was nothing really grandly wrong. Speeding may actually be counteractive to writing books, because there’s a lot of potholes you might just fly over, and... alright, I’m sick of the analogy, but the point is: sometimes speeding leaves things to be desired in the quality of road. And readers don’t speed: they read. Problem in point.

At the moment I’m turning a leaf—at least temporarily—to get really nitty and gritty and try sentence-level editing. Hal Duncan, again, managed to really inspire me here: he’s put up a couple posts lately about sentence-level and paragraph-level editing that really drew my attention. Normally, I don’t get excited about editing—usually, when the word “editing” is tossed about, I vomit nervously and soil myself—but Hal makes it sound sort of like a swashbuckling adventure. He also made it really clear how good editing can make a good manuscript great. So, yeah: tryin’ new things. Just so long as, like you said, those things fulfill the prime directive of fun.

daB: I especially liked Hal Duncan’s “How to Write a Point of View” post, from that series. What I’ve been trying to do, recently, is to write “cleaner”. That is to say, master the English language to the point where my sentences don’t need to be rewritten. I love the story of Harlan Ellison bringing a typewriter into a bookshop and pounding out a short story, then putting it into an envelope and selling it. That’s the kind of writer I want to be...and the kind of speaker I want to be, but one step at a time.

Weird vs. Direct

daB: [your?] Weird Fiction vs. [my?] “Direct” Fiction. For instance, I can’t understand a single thing China Miéville (cf: rejectamentalist manifesto) has ever written.

BG: Come now, David. You must read the latest Miéville. Why, it’s absolutely débonair.

daB: All I’m saying is that I want an umlaut in my name. Dävid Ällen Bärron. Then I’ll be popular...er...I mean “literary”.

BG: You mentioned earlier that I seem to have taken the path of the literati. Ignoring for the moment that I am a pretentious, self-aggrandizing punhole, I would dispute this on various grounds.

I think one of the biggest things standing in the way of more people enjoying more types of literature is that word, that word right there, literature. Actually, there’s a word that’s way, way worse: it’s the worse literary fiction. Uh, excuse me, but WTF is literary fiction? It’s a non-thing. One cannot write literature. One might try, but only The Future—whether in science-fictional terms or not—can bestow that honour. I guess the problem is really that people think of it as a noun, “literature,” whereas we are better served by deeming things “literary,” i.e., “well-written.” Thus: Anything can be literary. Also, “literary fiction” is a terrible genre, because it is full of contemporary realist claptrap.

daB: True. I, agent provocateur, mostly said that just to spur the conversation. But when I say Literary, I do mean a genre. “Literature”, to my thinking, is different, as you say: being the future selecting the best bits of the past. Literary, though, is a niftier genre name for ‘realistic contemporary’. Although you’re allowed to have weird dreams in there, apparently. I myself have been boning up (oi, every word-choice of mine reveals my lack of literary spirit...) on Literary books because I’m currently committing—under the pen name David Allen Barron, sans umlauts—Literary Fiction, in the form of “Scalawag”, set in Jacksonville, FL. Writing it makes me brain hurt sometimes, but only because it’s really long. I did manage to stick a LASER in one scene. That always seems to relieve the pressure, even if it’s just a community college laser.

My twin theories of literature are that I read everything, so long as it’s good, and stories are more important than pretty words...but I like pretty sentences.

BG: Hal Duncan again: “Style is not a fucking patina.” But, then, sometimes, it can be a game-changer. I just finished Michael Cisco’s “The Great Lover,” and it is heavily style-based, but it’s not really a normal novel. Sometimes, you’ve got to play with style, just to see what can be done. And to crap all over people’s expectations.

Re: Einstein: “Insanity is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again and Expecting a Different Result:” Re: Writing: Are We Fucking Insane Dudes Or What?!... Or Is It Just Me?!

(this a general title for the “motivational paradox” or “the art of self-immolation” whatever we call it)

daB: But...but...writing is pretty much the only relaxing thing I do.

BG: Yeah, I don’t know if writing is “relaxing” per se, but I have trouble relaxing if I don’t write. I’m pretty much addicted to writing. If I don’t get a daily fix, there’s trouble. I’ll start stories and abandon them, I’m unpredictable, I’m ornery when I haven’t written... I mean, I’m a junkie.

I never really thought writing would get like that for me, either. I have a lot of friends who are Creative-types: musicians, photographers, film-makers. They’re always telling me I have to “just let it happen” when I try to explain to them the desperation of my creative process. But it’s impossible for me to just let things happen, because things don’t happen on their own. I have to implicate myself. I have to overcome the desire to just play videogames. And that’s not so hard to overcome, because like I said, I’m a junkie: I can’t help but write. I’ve built up dependency. Writing is a demon that is invested in me, and even if I do it wrong—even if it hurts—I have to keep going.

Good talk!

BREAKING NEWS! Ben Godby's short story The Tower of the Golden Eye has just been published in the latest OG's Speculative Fiction (Issue 35). Pick it up and enjoy this "Victorian-era, Franco-Prusso-Egyptian Communard steampunk alternate-history"! (I sure did!)

I'm still too lazy to write my own blog posts, so if you’re a writer and/or small publisher and you want to have a Convo with me (or Jeff or Ben, for that matter) hit me up on Twitter where I exist as DavidalBarron, or shoot me an e-mail at DavidalBarron [at] gmail [dot] com !

Thanks for reading!

-daB

feel free to comment

Ambrose/Barron Convo 1: Wearing the Writer Hat

This is the second part of a recent Google DocTalk™ with my publishing pal Jeff Ambrose, and we had a broad conversation about this Writing thing we do. We decided to split it up into two "hats", writer and publisher. Last week? "Wearing the Publisher Hat" This week: "Wearing the Writer Hat". You'll be able to find the conversation on both of our sites.

Jeff Ambrose of The Window In The Basement is JA

David Barron of by David Barron is daB

“Wearing the Writer Hat”

David Barron: ...yaknow, Ambrose Barron would be a really fun pen name. He writes Civil War Westerns and smokes a lot.

Jeff Ambrose: Do you know a lot about the Civil War?

daB: I’ve dabbled. As a political scientist, it’s my duty to know about the birth throes of the Modern Era. (That sounds much more exciting than what it looks like in academic papers.) It wouldn’t have to be about the battlefield exclusively.

JA: This is why Ken Burns is such a blessing … though I’ve heard his documentary on the Civil War is slanted at times. But then, all histories are slanted, if they’re worth anything. Who wants just a list of dates and facts? Good historians offer opinions.

daB: All description is opinion. That’s what writers have to believe or they’re screwed.

Attitude

JA: Since we’ve been talking a lot about what “beginners” should know, I think it’s important to emphasize again where one gets ones information. One reason why I don’t talk too much, if at all, about the business side of writing is that I don’t know enough. I struggled with writing for over 10 years before I finally got into the groove, and 2012 makes my twelfth anniversary of trying to make a go at it, and my second anniversary of Getting Serious. So I have no problem talking about writing or telling beginning writers (i.e., writer with less experience than I) what they should or shouldn't be doing. Again, this isn’t in terms of business or even craft. It’s attitude. What attitude should a writer have. What kind of work ethic should they cultivate.

And yet, it amazes me how many writers look to their peers for advice (I don’t look to my peers, and I don’t expect my peers to look to me!). That’s silly. I want to be a long-term professional writer … so I look to my peers how to do that? I have to say, if you’re doing that, you’re beyond crazy. You’re an idiot. Here’s the rule of thumb: If you want to be a long-term writer, look to long term writers for cues of how to think and act, of which attitudes to cultivate, of which ones to get rid of.

daB: The standard mantra If you want to learn the business, find a few successful people and do what they’re doing. Then: innovate. If you want to learn something, find somebody who knows how to do it and do that until you’ve figured it out, then make it yours. It works for writing, of course: Read a Lot, Talk a Lot, then Practice by...Just Writing. For business, it’s even easier. Learn Business, by Watching and Doing.

My “First 200 Days” was all about how I got into that Mindset of Writing (and Publishing), and the only clear lesson throughout is “Copy, then Create”. ...obviously the thing to copy here is not ‘intellectual property’ but rather ‘best practices’.

Copying To Create

JA: I agree! And you have to make it yours, too. But how? By copying first. That’s the only way. One of my 2012 writing goals is to get serious about studying the craft in different ways. One way to do this is to copy out passages you like, passages that strike you as supremely well written. Dean Wesley Smith equates this to letting their words flow through your fingers in order to learn both by analysis and intuitively. Now here’s the thing. Dean says to copy out in Standard Manuscript Format. He says it a lot, too. Why is this important? I’m not sure, but I think it has to do with seeing words in the rawest form, without the pretty font, without the bookish formatting. At any rate, I’ve decided that this year I’m writing using Standard Manuscript Format. I’m copying Dean’s method to a T, no exception. And I suspect that by doing what he does, I’ll not only learn how to write better (because of all that copying I’ll be doing) but I’ll also understand, in part, why he thinks Standard Format is the way to go. Once I understand that, I’ll be free to make it my own.

Now that I said it, I wonder if I’m just too OCD.

daB: Could be, could be... But I’ll sum it up, I think. It’s to ‘demystify’ the process, taking the formatting and spellcraft and sticking the words in Courier New, just like yours. Except written better. Writers aren’t Wizards, they just Work Harder.

Workshops

daB: I know you’re going to one of those workshops [for short stories?], and I think that’s an excellent idea, especially for ‘journeyman’ writers (digression: well. The categories are a little loose. I’ll give my hand rule: 10 books = journeyman; 100 short stories = journeyman) I haven’t done it for the simple reason that I’ve had the Pacific Ocean between me and America for 27 months, but I’ll certainly do one of these things at some point in the next two years. That’s hard-earned practice, intense story, character voice, plotting, what-have-you practice, and overseen by Experts.

JA: The workshop I’m attending is the Character Voice & Setting workshop, a pure craft workshop through and through, and from what I’ve learned from past attendees, you write around 30,000 words that week, a few short stories as well as a bunch of exercises, I think. For me, I’m going for two reasons. First, to learn the skills it teaches. I did choose that workshop, after all. And second, from what I can tell from his blog, from what others have said, and a few private email conversations, Dean and I think the same way, beginning from an analytical standpoint. That’s great for me, because I have to figure out a way to take the analysis and make it intuitive, part of the creative process. My hope, beyond learning character voice and setting, is to learn how to about learning the craft of writing. Workshops take time and money, so you have to really suck the marrow out of them when you can attend. You have to learn how to fish, so to speak, and not just eat that which is given to you. Needless to say, I’m thrilled about going to this workshop.

Career

JA: Regarding “journeyman” status, for me it’s a million words. That was John D. MacDonald’s mark, and Ray Bradbury said you have to write a million words before you hit the “foothills of good writing.” I have no idea how much I wrote between 2000 and May 2010, which was when I Got Serious About Writing, but I estimated about 500,000 words over those ten years. If that’s true, then I’m at 1,230,000 words overall. If I don’t count those first ten years, I have 270,000 words to go to hit the million word mark. That’ll come sometime this year.

daB: Both good, of course, I just prefer to measure by ‘titles’. 1 book/10 stories; beginner , 10 books / 100 stories ; journeyman , 100 books, 1000 stories ; Expert. It’s metric! Considering how few people write even 1 book (or, for that matter, one story) the pecking order of competence isn’t that hard to figure out. Before I started my blog, I had 1,000,000 trunked words, masses of plot holes and spelling errors (the stories of some of which I have salvaged, of course, which is fine.) I don’t really track my word count, except on a ‘work’ basis, billable hours (Have I written X,000 words today? 800 words this hour?) Not really on a yearly basis. I want “at least 4 books a year (i.e. 1 a quarter) and at least 52 stories (i.e. 1 a week)”

JA: Tracking word count on a yearly basis is just the outgrowth of tracking word count on a daily basis. I have a spreadsheet in Numbers (Mac’s version of Excel), and the tracking keeps me honest. I can see which days I wrote, how much, and I also have a track record of how I’m doing month-by-month. Which is nice, in case I want to set up a goal, such as, Break my monthly record, or what not.

Word Count vs. Projects

JA: Recently, however, I’ve become wary of my obsession with word counts. The most recent story I wrote took a big turn I didn’t expect, and once I realized the ending, I had to go back through the story and add/change what needed to be added/changed in order to make the ending work. I cycled through the story twice -- once to make the changes, and a second time to make sure it all worked like I should -- before I wrote the ending. Took me two days. Didn’t get too many words written. I freaked a little, then thought, What the hell? The goal is to write stories, not put words on paper. So I decided to back off a little on word count this year. I cut my yearly word count down to something more reasonable. Even though I’m still tracking daily and month words (I do want to know just how much I write this year), my real focus is on projects: at least 4 novels, 20 short stories, and 2 nonfiction works (and that may change, cutting out short fiction altogether, focusing only on novels). And that’s conservative, and based largely in part that I have no idea how long my novels will be, or how long they’ll take to write. 2012 is the Year of the Novel for me. I’m set on learning how to write a fricking novel. Short fiction, for me, will happen between novels and when I have a house full of kids this summer.

daB: I agree on needing to learn how to write a novel. Most of my books thus far have been ‘long short stories’, but when I read, say, a John Grisham or, for that matter, a Stephen King...they don’t feel like that. So, I just need to let it roll, let myself be free, and let the characters do their thing, until they stop doing their thing.

Oh, and I just did the math on 4 novels and 52 stories, and it says 500,000 words. (60,000*4)+(5,000*52) This should teach me not to do math. (I’m going to now ignore that number forever and just write)

Writing Novels

JA: I must have started anywhere between 10 and 15 novels over the years, but have finished only 2. I haven’t published any. It hit me today that my problem has been trying to write a long novel in the beginning. I mean, we learn by writing short fiction, right? Why not learn to write novels by writing short novels, around 40,000 to 50,000 words? Why set out to write 100,000 words novels, especially in this New World of Publishing, when you don’t have to write that long? So even though my goal is 4 novels, I hope to write 5 or 6 -- maybe even 7 -- short novels. We’ll see.

daB: My very favorite story length is 20,000 words, almost exactly. I call it a Davidku. It’s long enough for about five characters, but it only takes 2-3 hours to read. Which is the length of time I usually have for reading, unless I’m on a bus.

But, I think the secret of writing a 100,000 word novel is to not write a 100,000 word novel. That is...make some characters, decide a setting and let them roam and see how far they get. Then kill them off one by one, with bathos. I assume one of my novels this year will explode in this sense, and others will be stitched together ‘mini-series’ of three connected 20k stories. They’ll all be priced at $4.99, so who cares?

JA: True enough. Getting my mind around the freedom of length has been a difficult adjustment for me. For so long, a short story was 7,500 words, about 30 pages. So when I’m writing a short story, as I near the 7000-word mark, I can feel myself tighten a little, thinking I need to end it. Short fiction length in this New World is far more fluid than before. Likewise with novels. I have to stop thinking a novel is a 400-page beast. It’s not. And you’re right, the best way to write a 100k-word novel is to not try to write something that long. Just gotta learn to let the story go where it will.

Good talk! 

I don't want this to be the last Convo I do, because I'm too lazy to write my own blog posts now. If you want to have a Convo with me (or Jeff) and have indie published some stuff, hit me up on Twitter where I exist as DavidalBarron, or shoot me an e-mail at DavidalBarron [at] gmail [dot] com !

-daB
feel free to comment

Ambrose/Barron Convo 1: Wearing The Publisher Hat

I recently settled into a Google Doc with my publishing pal Jeff Ambrose, and we had a broad conversation about this Writer thing. We decided to split it up into two "hats", writer and publisher. This week? "Wearing the Publisher Hat". You'll be able to find the conversation on both of our sites.

Introductions!

Jeff Ambrose of The Window In The Basement is JA

David Barron of by David Barron is daB

 present

“Wearing the Publisher Hat”

David Barron: We’re both successful businessmen, I of H2NH ePub, you of Dark Elms Press.

Jeff Ambrose: Yep, that’s right. Dark Elms Press. But after a major overhaul of things, I’m now blogging at a place I call “The Window In The Basement,” which is just about writing.

daB: Which is a good example of two different approaches. I’m just hanging out on my Blogger blog, because I’m too lazy to maintain a bunch of places.

Starting Up

JA: Yeah, but here’s the thing -- you started your blog as a writer’s site, and it still is a writer’s site. When I started Dark Elms Press, I made a major mistake: I tried to combine my author sites with my publisher’s site with a writing blog. That doesn’t work. Then, back in March or April of 2010, I started the “Jeff Ambrose” site. All was fine until I started using pen names. The more I wrote under different names, the more I realized I needed other sites … or, that how I organized in the first place it was fundamentally screwed up. So really, the last few weeks I’ve been trying to correct mistakes, multiplying web sites like loaves and fishes.

The lesson in all of this for anyone setting out to be an indie writer: Keep your publishing site, author(s) site(s), and writing blog (if you have one) separate from the beginning … or at least as much as you can.

daB: Yeah. There’s one Dean Wesley Smith article that lays it out, “Think Like a  Publisher: The Early Decisions”, and it’s perfect. I made a Do This post “Indie Ploy” as well, and it boils down to, start simple, but efficient. Obviously, my first 50 stories/titles were a melange...no, that’s a weasel word...were ‘terrible’. In the sense of being muddled-through, but they were Educational. I just finished my first short story for 2012, and I sat down at my computer and formatted it in 10 minutes, and it looks better than anything I published in the first two quarters. And, production costs? Well, I pay myself $100/hr, so...$10.

Speaking of which, I think the most important thing an indie writer can do, ever is pay himself. That would have reduced our ‘publisher vs writer’ problems right there, starting with a clear vision of exactly how much money we’ll need to at least break even. And, it’ll help us understand why we should behave like a publishing professional.

Learn in Public

JA: Wow, you just said a hell of a lot of good things, but I think the most important point you made you left unsaid -- and that’s that one has to be willing to learn in public. I mean, as a new indie writer, there’s only so much you can do at the beginning, when you don’t really know what the heck you’re doing … or how it’ll turn out. But maybe that’s not true for every writer. Me, I’m an intuitive creative type. I hardly know where a story is going, much less what my next project is. I’m not really sure how much I could’ve planned the publishing side of things too far in advance … and yet, as I say that, I remember thinking very early on that I wanted to write under two pen names. But there’s little point in rehashing all of that here. The real point is that the entire process is one of learning, and if one isn’t willing to learn in public, one can’t engage in this business. That’s the nature of it.

It’s much like your point about your first 50 stories. You only got to where you are now, with the most recent story, by formatting the first 50, figuring out by trial and error what works, and what doesn’t. And yet, I read your first Alan collection long before you learned “good” formatting, and I didn’t find it distracting the least bit. But that’s me.

I suppose the point is that, for the one setting out in this business, one must accept three truths. First, you must realize that you can’t know everything from the get-go. Second, you must be willing to make something of a fool of yourself in front of others, because that will happen. And third, you mush have the energy to keep learning from wherever you can.

daB: Taking off from the third point, it’s also important to figure out who is a responsible source of business information. I will now make a sweeping statement, drawn from a disastrous month, nobody on KindleBoards (et al) is a responsible source of business information. I will in fact make a less sweeping, but equally harsh statement: Nobody with fewer than 10 published books is a responsible source of business of writing information, and same goes for eBusiness of writing. Now: a caveat: You should follow loads of muddle-through folk, (like, say, myself...) because they provide commentary and best practices (i.e. Don’t Do This!) on the responsible business advice of professionals.

Changing gears, you mentioned that the First Edition formatting (you can read that as “done in Word”, instead of by html) of the Alan stories collection wasn’t distracting for you, the reader. I’m sure that was true for most of my readers, but the fact is that it took me at least 10 times as long to format that thing in Word for Smashwords, Amazon, et cetera as it did when I’d paid my dues with the next fifty titles. Even formatting one of those stories took forever (and often Mr. Meatgrinder would eat it and spit it out.) Now, though, I can maintain a good ‘publishing to writing’ ratio.

Knowing “Enough”

daB: That is to say. I work 20 hours a week, I’m a part-time Indie. I write 18 hours, and I ‘publish’ for 2 hours. Before those ‘first 50’, I wrote 10 hours, and ‘publish’ 10 hours (and that includes research!). Do I think it was worth it? Heck yeah! ...but there comes a point where it’s diminishing returns. On that third point...there’s a time when you Know Enough. You don’t Know Everything, but it’s time to stop researching and Just Write.

JA: I don’t know if I’d say it quite like that, David, in terms of “knowing enough.” The problem, as I see it, is that when you think you “know enough” you can be tempted to sit back, put your feet up, and say, “I’m done.”

I do, however, understand your point, and it’s this: You can’t let your lack of knowledge get in the way of actually working. There’s a point when you know enough to get started. There’s a point when you know enough to know it’s time to researching other options for publishing (switching from Word to Scrivener for publishing needs, in my case). Long time ago, I used to listen to the self-help guru Anthony Robbins on a regular basis, and he said a few things that have always stuck with me. One of this was this: No one needs to understand how electricity works in order to use a light switch. We can’t let our lack of knowledge hold us back.

daB: Agreed, of course. I should add “For Now”, I Know Enough For Now, not forever. I’ll use formatting as the easy example because it has the most logical progression. Sure, I didn’t know at the start how to create an EPUB file from scratch (I’m still not esp. confident, but let it ride), but I found the Word ‘export to HTML’ button and then stuck the results into the Kindle Previewer until it worked for the “First Electronic Edition”, then for the “Second Electronic Edition” I boned up on xml, with the help of people like Guido Henkel and, then, Paul Salvette, until I had my own workflow. Finally, not quite satisfied, I picked up Paul Salvette’s excellent guide, learned a lot of crunchy XML things, and now I can say that I’m on the “2.5th Electronic Edition”.(ordinal fail) And? That’s Enough For Now. Once I have about 10 books, I’ll learn some more, go back and reformat them all at once, and call it the 3rd Electronic Edition, it’ll be beautiful. For now? I can format a book in 20 minutes and it looks great (albeit a little minimal)

Short Fiction

JA: I still remember when I started indie publishing a year ago. I had no idea what the heck I was doing. Just learning as I went. Like you, I spent a long time on formatting, cover art, blurbbing, uploading -- what have you. But over time, the more I did it, the faster I got. Now, I have a basic work flow, and keeping this work flow “well oiled” is one of the reasons I continue writing short fiction. I don’t want to lose the skills. This is one reason why I think for the new indie writer, a year of short fiction is the way to go. You just learn a hell of a lot writing and publishing short fiction. Not to mention the thick skin you develop.

daB: I agree. I would say to anybody who wants to start this that you should really focus on short fiction. There’s three very simple reasons: 1.) It’s quick! You finish a lot of titles, and you put them up. One a week. 2.) Multi-skills Practice, it’s a full exercise routine, blurbs, covers, formatting...oh, right, and writing. 3.) Making collections teaches you more about formatting than making a book, and about introductions, blurbs...and it’s fun, too.  Solid practice.

JA: Also, if you’re writing/publishing a story a week, you can’t get hung up on anything. You just have to write, finish, publish. You just have to say, it’s done, I’m moving on, it’ll live or die, and I’m not looking back. I’ve seen, in my limited experience, writers nitpicking words in a blurb -- as if a word or two is going to make or break their book!

Blurbs

daB: With blurbs, that sort of mindset can be helpful at the start. But it shouldn’t take more time to write the blurb than it took to write the First Line of the story.

JA: My own take on blurbs, especially for short fiction, is that the should be about 30 words long. I skim long blurbs, and if they’re too long, I just skip them. What I try to do in a blurb is write a sentence that shows a character with a problem and the twist a story will take. Sometimes, that’s not possible -- especially with short fiction, which can lack a conventional plot -- but that’s my goal when I sit down. Don’t know if I always hit it, but I try.

daB: Really, at this point, esp. with Amazon’s easy preview, the first line of the story often serves as a sufficient hook. (I mean, it’s what you do for editors, right?) I often just end up with a blurb appearing as I’m about to format the book and need to enter the metadata. It’s not so difficult. Read a lot of movie taglines, and do that. (It’ll be better than a lot of the eBook blurbs I see from monied publishers.) The story will out. I mean, the blurb for “Swift Invasion” is The aliens were completely unprepared for one completely prepared human. So was Humanity. A science fiction short story. ...but it’s still one of my best-selling stories, because (I suspect) it’s enough to draw the reader to the preview, which is tight.

JA: Movie taglines are a great way to learn how to write blurbs. Get on Netflix and spend an hour analyzing them. Also, if I’m really stuck on a blurb (which is often the case), I’ll hop on over to Smashwords and read all of Dean Wesley Smith’s and Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s blurbs, just for inspiration. But I try not to spend too long on them.

Paying Yourself

JA: Going back to something we said earlier -- about when to know you know enough -- there’s another danger we indie writers have to watch our for, and that’s perfectionism. You can’t get caught up in that! Just recently, I spent four hours trying to come up with a title and cover for a story. Four hours! That’s a huge waste of time. And when I look at it in terms of what my time is wroth -- $50 an hour, say -- I’ll have to sell 500 copies of that story in order to earn back that time.

daB: Agree, agree. Which goes back to ‘paying yourself’. You have to ask: “Would I pay somebody else $250 to do this?” The answer, in this case, ...no. Titles can be changed. That’s the joy of Electronic. It’s pretty easy to make a new edition. (Don’t use that as a crutch, but embrace the convenience!)

JA: So, what happened on the Kindleboards? Never been on myself.

daB: Well, if you’re a regular reader of Dean Wesley Smith’s blog, you can probably imagine. Mostly useless comments, Wild Mass Guessing, and bull - boasting about sales numbers and dramatic business proclamations (‘publishers will go bankrupt’, ‘Amazon will eat our young!’) Waste of time, mindset break. You don’t need to be doing that.

Abrupt? Just wait until Next Week: “Wearing the Writer’s Hat”!

If you want to have a Convo with me (or Jeff) and have indie published some stuff, hit me up on Twitter where I exist as DavidalBarron, or shoot me an e-mail at DavidalBarron [at] gmail [dot] com !

-daB
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