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