If I couldn't concentrate...

Hey, guys, go read a fancier version of this post over at H2NHePub.com, now!

I wouldn't be a writer.

I'd be some sort of "day labourer", and then where would the world be? Labouring with me, I expect.

And that would be sad.

So let's write. It all comes down to the aptly named "Three AlliterativeMs", so named because there are three of them and they all start with the letter M. I've capitalized them so you don't miss them.

MOOD

You've got to feel pretty OK to be able to write this much and so fast too! It's a matter of focus, concentration, zen harmony with the universe. No, I tell a lie. It's a matter of being crazy, in that special manic-depressive way that I do.

Up
I'm not manic right now, but when I am shucks!howdy! do I write fast. I love it, but the problem, as referred in the post title, is that when I'm manic I have to be very self-disciplined or I'll start a hundred projects, many of which linger around to This Very Day. (cf: twenty-two short stories lying around the house). One of the side benefits of mania is that I really shouldn't be around people anyways during these times, as I will talk faster and faster and faster because I can finally keep up with my thoughts but they can't understand me and then they run away and I'm all alone and eat too much and am fat oh gods—

Down
That's what I am now. No...now. Now. Yes: then. In this state, I think about a great many things, and connect them, and read carefully and clearly. I may have mentioned I'm a genius, but I'm not just saying that. I am.

(and you're not.)

Some of my best non-fiction (including blog posts) gets written at this time, and some of my more contemplative fiction. And I still write fast.

I don't know any other way.

But sometimes, sometimes...I lay in bed all day, listening to the audiobook of Lamb (Christopher Moore) while watching — on two screens simultaneously — The Princess Bride and Secretary, the screens set on both sides of the room so I can focus on whichever one I happen to roll over to look at.

If I lose the remote, it's Hell.

All Around
When I walk and walk and walk, no writing gets done. This is why I can't drive.

Downtown
everything's waiting for you

MINDSET
You're going to be rich, get excited! You're doing what you love, man! Get in the spirit of things! No...let's be more honest: Running a small business is more fun than getting a real job, right? You've got freedom and joy and nobody can take that away from you.

Nobody.

Except you.

But you're an idiot. You can easily outsmart yourself.

More important to your mindset, but only included here because DRUGS ruins the alliteration scheme I've got going, is CAFFEINE. Drink your tea, coffee, and delicate mix of tea'n'coffee, or, as I call it, TOFFEE*. I drink four caraaaaafes of coffee every day, poured gently over ice. It's sometimes caf and sometimnes decaf. I never can tell, as I'm usually too twitchy to read the side of the box by then. At the end of the day I moderate my caffeine buzz with delicious weak tea, then summon the WRITING MUSE with some absinthe on the rocks.

Which is — don't look it up — an actual drink.

MUSIC
This is the most important part, and the true secret to my success. Buy these four tracks, load them up on your phone, press shuffle'n'repeat...then Just Write:

Tron: Legacy
Derezzed
Daft Punk

The Dark Knight
Introduce A Little Anarchy
Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard

Sherlock Holmes
Discombobulate
Hans Zimmer

The Avengers
The Avengers
Alan Silvestri

all links to Amazon

This blog post was written under the influence of these four songs, just as an example of the kind of quality sh*t you can expect if you try it!

MORE?

There is nothing else. I wrote myself into a corner by calling it the "Three AllitereMs"***
Complaints?
Tough nougat,
Get back to work.

Thanks for reading!

feel free to comment

*Actual toffee is disgusting. I'm taking the word back.
**Got any more awesome tracks I should add to my playlist?
***I'm too lazy to scroll up and check what I actually called it.

I'd Go But I'm Working

Hey guys! Read a fancier version of this post over at H2NH ePub now! I'd go...but I'm working.

Have you ever said that while you're writing?

If not: You're a f*cking writer, man.

Man up.

Get back to work.

Everything henceforth is a personal attack on myself, written while drunk. But you can learn from it, if you like. But only if you are also drunk.

Your Sh*tty Career

What are you, a f*cking dilettante? You're just sitting around, playing around on the Internet, when stories are in your brain, waiting to be told. People want to read your writing. You know they do, because they have bought your f*cking books, even the sh*tty ones, and they've sent you e-mails asking about plot details (which you have then cheerfully stolen for the sequels). They want your sh*t. You give it to them. What else do you have to do? You want a f*cking life? You earn your life. You want to be a gentleman of leisure, be a gentleman of letters. Oh, but you've got to actually write the f*cking letters, put them into words, slap together some sentences, and cap them off into stories.

You're a Pro, Man

Even if nobody were reading what you were writing, you'd better be writing it down. You have a responsibility, to yourself. You and I both know we're a misanthrope, but we're fair: We don't even like us that much. We're awesome, but...that's different from being accomplished. How many manuscripts did you finish this week? Do you not know? And, a follow-up: Is it because you finished so many, or because you finished absolutely nothing?

F*ck You, Man

You don't have what it takes. You can't even beat yourself, much less the world. Why don't you just hang out in your house and live in your own sh*t. There are better writers than you, better because they sit down and f*cking write, instead of wasting their life on bullsh*t. Like you. Get your sh*t together. How many books do you have almost f*cking finished? Finish the f*cking books!

They're Awesome

F*ck yeah, they are. You know why? Because you wrote them. You are better than every other writer. How many times have you sat down with something you've written and enjoyed the hell out of it? Loads of times. You can read what you write. That is a skill. You never admit it, but there's some stuff you've written that's horrible. Most of it is burned, but some of it slipped through, and now too many people have bought it for you to take it back. Fine!

Write Some More

You want to know how to write more? Turn off the f*cking Internet. Turn off the TV, turn off the computer, turn off your f*cking phone. Too many things! Make a schedule: Three hours a day, seven days a week. Total sensory deprivation, except for your fingers on that keyboard, or your hand on that pen, or wherever you decide to etch word into a medium. And? Anybody who tries to distract you? F*ck those guys.

You Will Win

You'll have plenty of time to play in Hell, which, as a writer, is where you're going. Just accept it. They have libraries down there, but they'd never burn a book, not even to save a soul. So, where are you going in life?

I'm Going To Write

I'd go...but I'm working.

Thanks for reading!
daB
feel free to comment

How to Write a Book

Not pictured: Writing

Rule One: drink AFTER you write.
If this were How to Write a Short Story, I’d be all for drinking while you write. You’re trying to finish as fast as possible, so you need an outside clock to race against. In this case, that clock is drunkeness. Try it with speed chess! (On no circumstances should you drink before you write. That never helps.) With books, though, you’ve got to pace yourself. Unless you’ve hit the Next Level or are on drugs, you’re probably not going to finish the book in one day. So, put the beer aside until you’ve got at least 2000 words done that day.

Rule Two: Set a deadline!
Make it arbitrary, but realistic (you know how much you write), then generate an ‘expected wordcount per day’. Buy a wall calendar or some sort of annoying computer program that counts the days for you and yells at you. For my current series, I’m giving myself 25 days for each short book, at 1000 words a day. Obviously, some days I write 500, some days I write 2000, and one day (this is a Certainty) I write 5000 words. Whatever you set, just do it or you’re not a Writer, and stop calling yourself one. It makes the rest of us look bad.

Rule Three: Don’t think about the book too much unless you’re writing it.
Write in the morning, Play in the afternoon, Write in the evening
Sleep
Repeat
Note: It doesn’t count as ‘play’ if you’re thinking about work.

Rule Four: Race yourself!
Set a 15-minute timer and type. See how many words you can type, then try again. Mark your highest. FocusWriter has a convenient timer that’ll give you a wordcount at the end. Neat!

Rule Five: Bracket Outline
When I start a book, I usually write the first chapter without knowing what’s going to happen, then I take whatever characters and plot developed from that and come a bracket outline. Each bracket can be a scene, a chapter, a plot twist, or just a cool ‘image’, but the point is that you’re supposed to expand them and ‘explode’ words out of the bracket. Anything not in brackets can be weaved into the dialogue. (I’m sure there’s a way to make the wordcounter ignore anything between [X], but I’m too lazy to deal with it) Here’s an example of a short bracket outline after a first chapter introducing Jimmy Bats, hapless used car salesman:

Jimmy Bats was a man disappointed with his car lot in life. [&c]
[Jimmy Bats loses his keys]
[A global key theft ring?]
[Meet Cute: Darlene, the key detective]
[A Comic Interlude; polka dot dress]
[Murder by Car]
[Jimmy Bats Finds A Clue amidst the wreckage, leads to the Smithsonian’s Janitor Closet]
[The Declaration of Keydepence?]
[Darlene kidnapped!]
[Jimmy kicks Ass. (...keyster?)]
[A Wedding and a brand new car]
“Oh, Jimmy! You DID have the keys to my heart!”
THE END
###

Now just write it, rolling through the brackets and expanding them as far as they’ll go, adding new brackets as you see the need so you always know what you’ll be writing tomorrow. I usually come up with about ten brackets before I start, not worrying too much how to tie them all together. They’ll all come together somehow, if you just force yourself to write about it. (The title of the book is “Christmas and Keyster”. And if you write it, you can keep it.)

Rule Six: Don’t read the book until you finish the book.
It can’t be judged as a book until it’s done. It probably doesn’t suck as much as you think it does.

Rule Seven: [Redacted]
[It was about sex.]

Rule Eight: Buy My Book, I guess?

Amazon

May you live forever...

Ernie Centrifuge just wants to relax with his girlfriend (a police inspector) and play with his survey drones, but when a Senator is assassinated by laser, Ernie decides that the floating city isn’t as relaxing as he would have hoped. When his sister (a psion) brings in an orphan girl who found a tantalizing map, Ernie decides to descend to the surface of a forgotten Earth. But what has he left behind on Megalopolis?

A technological thriller with a double shot of humor and romance: To roll anyway, a science fiction short novel by David Barron.

Like Unto a Rubber Tree is the Business of Writing

Folk hereabouts have rubber tree farms. Now the interesting thing about these trees is that before you can get any rubber out of them worth anything, you’ve got to plant the trees and grow them for five years until they’re ripe, then you can harvest the rubber and sell it steady for the next thirty years, and then you cut down the trees and make some really nice furniture. Some owners just hire people to harvest and sell the rubber in exchange for forty percent of the profit while they sit in the house counting their sixty percent. Or they plant some more rubber trees. It’s a good life.

So, what’s my point? Calm down, writer guy. It’s too hot. Work in the shade, stop looking at your sales numbers. You’re getting all anxious over something that ain’t ripe yet. Add to it, it’s lonely. Don’t even think about quitting for at least five years, and don’t huff the fertilizer you should be using to tend it and make it grow.

BAM! Spreadsheet --


Here’s a real basic spreadsheet. You can make it too, so long as you know where to find the SUM function in Excel. I’d make it interactive, but I’m super lazy. It’s all monthly, and I’ve set it up to do all the royalty math (using Amazon’s setup). At the top I input my basic minimum income, and included an hourly wage based on that. All that done, I just input how many of each product H2NH has at the moment and see what happens. This leads to two basic conclusions:

I don’t have enough rubber trees.
I need more titles to get to my basic minimum income, unless the lightning strike of sudden popularity hits me in the business (read: Magic! Fairy Dust! Bubble!). I can play with the numbers and see exactly how much more I’d have to write to get to my basic minimum income, but the inescapable conclusion is “I should write more.” Getting this result is a good test of any Writer’s Business Plan. Five hundred rubber trees will earn you one thousand baht a night...

My rubber trees ain’t ripe.
For the average monthly sales, I input the “scraping-the-bottom” benchmarks culled from Dean Wesley Smith’s various series. Right now I only have actual data for my short stories, and it’s a number that’s a little less than 2. Then again, the reason I only have actual data for short stories is that I’ve only been doing this for six months. That’s kinda the point. Nobody cares about a field of six-month rubber trees except some random people who happen to notice it while they’re walking down the highway. You can’t even sit under a six-month rubber tree to get shade from the sun. But, you spot a mature five-year rubber tree farm and you’ll wander in, say hello to the rest of the people sitting around. What else’ve you got to do? It’s hot.

So, here’s my plan: I’m going to Write for five years, give Amazon et al thirty percent to sell my writing, and then sit in my house counting the seventy percent. Or write more.

It’s a good life.

Surfing The Blur

Let us begin with a digression: I have to report that my daily writing streak is pretty much in tatters, but for a good cause. Travel is hard on writing, but easy on fun and great for thinking. I’ve spent the last two weeks on impromptu travel ‘round these parts, mostly in Bangkok, meeting lots of old friends and making lots of new ones as I circulated amongst the bars and sights. As for writing? I made a conscious decsion to focus on people and let writing rest for a moment. Quoth I: There’ll be plenty of boring stretches of time that can be filled with glorious writing when I get back. Lo! I was correct, for here I am. Here’s the takeaway: Isolation is Bad for the writer, but trying to write with a lot of people around isn’t very helpful. Telling stories with a lot of people around, though?

Yeah, there’s the benefit right there. Each of those impromptu stories will almost certainly get a showing in writing as well. Because that’s all there is to it, this thing Writing: Tell a lie, then make it True. Blur the edges of reality, define the blur as a better reality--’better’ in this case to be read as ‘more interesting’--and then surf that blur with your audience until they’re having too much fun hanging on to notice when you’ve wandered them into unreality. The blur between unknowable fact and blatant fiction is called Truth, and all I need to do is construct a good enough lie to get people to believe in that Truth. 

That sexy, sexy Truth.

Productivity

I came back and read Dean Wesley Smith’s article where he discoursed on Production Schedules. I thought to myself: Why haven’t I thought to do that yet? Well, that’s what I’m going to do, in any case, because it’s so blindingly obvious. I’ve been organically developing a writing and publishing process, so this will be a good way to tie it all together. So far I’ve been writing “by series”, that is, I write such that I’ll fill out a 5-story series for ease of publishing. I think some actual calendar planning would help that out, and it’ll keep me professional to actually set a deadline for something besides these articles. And I’ll be able to brag more easily with hard data, so’s I can point at the wall calendar and say: “QUALE, MORTALS! Productivity is Afoot!” Of course, it might be spelled Quail, in which case mortals will have a jolly chuckle at my expense. Rude.

Writing Schedule

So really it comes down to coming up with a reasonable schedule that won’t get screwed up by overreaching. I had to sit down and think up what a normal day of writing should look like, mere desultory tapping away at the keys, no major effort of will involved. What I’m looking at is about 2500 words. Obviously, there’ve been days when I’ve written more, there’ve been days when I’ve written less, but on any given day that I’ve had to myself and haven’t lazed around like a loser, that’s a fair estimate of output. 

What writing do I want to schedule, then? I have two types of product, the short story and the serial. I want to write and publish at least one serial every month, for obvious reasons. That’s 12,500 words, or 5 days. Looking at the writing numbers, I should be able to write a series (five short stories) every 10 days, so we can put that down for two a month, or 20 days.

Publishing Schedule

Ten short stories and one serial every month, 25 solid writing days, which leaves 3-6 days for Publishing. I’m including these articles (about 800 words each) in Publishing, so that’s a couple hours of one day. Formatting 13 (10 stories, 2 series, 1 serial) titles and making 13 covers will eat up a solid day, but I’d schedule two because I usually try something new with each cover for my education and don’t like being rushed. Writing blurbs and putting everything up on Amazon and Smashwords is not actually that time-consuming if you’re in the zone and properly organized, so that’d be a half day. Any extra covers and formatting (such as a completed serial book or a 10 or 20 story pack) would be done sometime in there as well. 

All the Publishing stuff would happen at the end of the month, and the titles published the previous month would be announced during the publishing phase of the next month. They’d be sure to be up on most of the sites by then. I’d probably just make a big ole’ “Monthly Releases” announcement post on this site with all the covers and blurbs, and maybe schedule some individual title Twitter announcements throughout the month.

Strategy

If this seems a trifle quixotic, it might could be. But it seems like it should work, if I’m not lazy, if I’m, if you will, a Professional . As always, it really depends on my writing output, just sitting in a chair and typing the ideas down instead of sitting around doing nothing. I’m certain that actually having a schedule of some sort will at least motivate me to stick to it, if only to avoid that depressing whir and whistle of deadlines rushing by, like a falcon without a nest, et cetera.

If it works, it’ll work great. And hey? If it’s actually impossible, it’ll still be just the right lie I’ll need to tell myself to surf the blur to possible.

This version of Professional Edition will last until April 6, 2012, updating every Friday. Site design subject to change as I learn by doing. Like what you see? Spot something unprofessional? Feel free to comment!