Write what you want

I’ve never been one to chase fads. I shudder when I hear the expression “out of style.” Shortly after that particular expression surfaces there is often a figure quoted, which reflects the necessary coinage required to get back “in style.” Whereupon life is good again. All too briefly.

You know the expression: lather, rinse, repeat? Chasing trends feels that way to me, like some endless shampoo cycle. Only it’s your sanity and bank account that’s getting washed out.

Okay, so we’ve established that I’m a genuine stick-in-the-mud. This is the point where I draw a quick parallel to writing and wrap up the blog post, isn’t it?

Err... sort of.

I titled this post “Write what you want.” Underline and emphasize the word ‘you’ in that title. Because that’s not only where the writing comes from, it’s who the writing really targets at the end of the day. Strip away all the readers, fans, agents, editors, critics, et al., and you’re left with the one person who really defines success.

You, the author.

Obviously this implies you actually have a definition of success for your writing. While this could amount to anything under the sun, I would strongly encourage you to focus on factors that are more in your control. Completing your novel is one example. Selling 1,000 copies a month of it is not. Writing a story in a totally different genre is good. Getting it to the top 5 ranking on Amazon is not.

Equally bad is defining your success along the lines of: “being the next X, Y or Z.” That’s sure tempting, isn’t it, comparing your appeal or your book’s acceptance to some popular name or work.

Don’t.

Whoever it is, whatever they wrote, that’s their success. Not yours. Make your own, using your terms. Stay out of the chase and run your own race.

A writer’s sanity and psyche is usually under enough pressure as it is, so figure it out and write what you want.

You just might start your own trend. You never know.

Sale: Desperate Measures - also a donation

Ever donate a story to help a cause?

I just did.

I expect you’ve heard of Cystic Fibrosis. It’s a cruel, killer disease that afflicts about 70,000 people worldwide with 1,000 new cases diagnosed each year. While advances in treatment have been made, the median age for survival of a CF sufferer is still only in the late 30s.

It’s less likely that you’ve heard of Erotic Anthology, which produces a grab-bag of themed story collections, all of which have an erotic tilt of some kind. Most of the collections are unified together under the main title of Coming Together, and each of the themes is then a subtitle within. The Coming Together anthologies are sold through the major digital outlets and in print format. All the profits from the sales are donated to various charitable causes. The motto of Erotic Anthology is: “doing good while being bad.”

Indeed.

Recently, a new science fiction theme was added to the Coming Together line called Off World. I happen to spot the call for submissions. While I can’t say I’m looking to branch out my writing generally into erotica, the mission of Coming Together appealed to me while also giving me a shot at writing outside of the box. It was something quite different.

Still, I dithered. Until a tragic, erotic, sci-fi story plot line smacked me between the eyes. Funny how that happens.

The result was a dark little tale called Desperate Measures, which is about what can happen between a woman and a man on a last-ditch, one-way mission that doesn’t quite go as planned. I’d classify the story as a sci-fi romance with an erotic thread. If you’re looking for something more gratuitous, titillating or explicit, this is not the story for you.

Here’s a teaser:

I dreamed.

Emma said I would. According to her, most people did though they didn't realize it.

She knew firsthand, having been a guinea pig for the initial suspension trials. Said she loved it, giddy and gushing like an eager teen in a clingy prom dress with grand expectations and even bigger desires. Said she couldn't wait for the real mission, the true motivation for suspension testing. The ultimate payoff.

Emma told me she'd dreamed of her first husband, Mack, and her second, Padraig, both killed in Zet raids not four months apart. Emma died too, weeks after Padraig, in another raid during our panicked retreat from Betelgeuse, our fleet hacked to one third the size of when we'd arrived.

Sorry, Emma. No mission for you. No prom. No climax in some glorious payoff that you ached for.

But I got to go. Emma had nailed it and more.

You can purchase Desperate Measures thusly (and it goes without saying that this is for adults only):

On Amazon

On Smashwords

On Omnilit

And here is the main page for Coming Together: Off World over on Erotic Anthology.

Your purchase results in a donation to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. So you can have a guilty pleasure while helping a worthy cause.

Doing good while being bad.

I think I’m going to enjoy it.

Avoiding rejection dejection

Got my latest story rejection this morning. Consequently, I tweeted the following quip:

Rejections are like a gladiator’s scars. You need them to go on to your biggest killings.

The thing is I didn’t mean this to be just a trivial sound bite. I’ve always believed it to be true about writing, from day one.

When it comes down to it, my stack of rejection letters affirms two fundamental things about my writing. It means:

1. I am trying
2. I need to keep trying, only a little harder

Notice I didn’t say anything along the lines of: “I am failing” or “My writing stinks” or “Editors are idiots.” Instead, I view each rejection as measuring my forward progress. As long as they keep coming in, I keep moving ahead.

That means working harder, getting better, growing in my craft and improving my stories. That’s the path forward.

Oh sure, I’ve had moments of disappointment with some rejection letters, such as when I thought a story was an absolute perfect match with a particular market or editor. That, along with many factors regarding submission evaluation, is really beyond my control. I can control the fact that I keep writing stories and I keep polishing them to make them the finest I can deliver. Period.

Worry about what you can control. Don’t let the other control you. It’s the best a writer can hope for.

When I talk to people about my writing, it’s not uncommon for them to tell me they could never do it, often because of all the rejection they’ll experience. The thought really bothers them and turns them off. I usually smile at that point and talk proudly about my numerous battle scars.

With more to come, too. Ones that I plan to work hard to earn.

Of authors, the web and Facebook fan pages

My Facebook author page is now live. I admit I’ve been holding off putting one up for a while. Laziness is partly to blame for that. Another reason is... oh, I’ll call it social media overload. Allow me to explain.

Information is plentiful these days and thank the heavens for that. I love being able to obtain any fact, figure or piece of nonsensical trivia the very instant I desire it. It’s an empowering and liberating feeling to know you can suck from the straw of collective knowledge and understanding whenever and however you like. Whether we're talking data, news or entertainment, all of it is there at your command.

Therein lies the rub.

The more you use that proverbial straw, the more seems to try to flow back through it. Whether it is via cross-links or “Related Items” or “You Might Also Like...” interconnections, you can find yourself drawing from that straw many hours after that first drink. Suck, suck, suck, and there’s always more there for you to consume.

Ever notice your first few tastes of something are the most delightful? But keep at it for very long and the appeal drops off significantly, doesn’t it?

Now consider social media in this context. How many blogs, tweets, IMs and newsfeeds are pointed at your straw? How often and for how long are you really able to suck up all that information? Most of all, how much do you really get out of it?

Obviously there are some people who can’t get enough. More power to them. I’m certainly not part of that group. There just aren’t enough hours in the day to sit on the receiving end of that massive stream.

So that’s just in one direction, coming at you. Imagine trying to interact then with all those sources and in some meaningful way, not just tossing off frivolous replies or retweets. Which is an intrinsic value of social media: outreach and connecting via interaction. Build your network. Then, as a writer, you tap it.

Except, a goodly number of writers are doing that or else trying to. A goodly number of readers are probably like me, struggling with how much there is out there to drink up. It’s an overload.

A writer could try to overcome that. Use tactics and various methods to somehow rise above and stand out. I think if you had a marquee author name already or else an endless supply of minions, you might be successful at that. But there’s actually a better way.

Write.

Keep producing what people want.

That’s the way to ensure they’ll point their straws at you. OK, bad image, but you get the idea. You win by doing what you’re fundamentally supposed to do as a writer.

So I’ve been in that mindset for a while: more writing, less marketing. Which has delayed me considerably from finishing many outreach type tasks, like my Facebook author page.

But it’s live now so before you point your straw elsewhere on the web, how about popping over and giving me a Like?

Thanks and happy slurping.

How tough is it today to put your book on Smashwords?

I uploaded my second book to Smashwords recently, so I thought I’d give a report on how well that process went. Here’s the summary:

It’s about as slick as greased glass.

OK, if you are as anal as I am, you sweat the small stuff. In my case, I took between 3 to 4 hours to get the book content ’just so,’ which is not to say that the process calls for grueling, painstaking steps that you must grind through that whole time. Not at all.

You see, I’m a bit of a perfectionist (the nice way to refer to someone who’s anal). I want my product to be spiffy and top notch. I don’t want errors or inconsistencies, no matter how slight. I want it to shine. Which takes time. It takes checking and rechecking. It takes grumbling over how a paragraph looks or how a story intro meshes with the opening sentence. It takes tweaking the layout and adjusting the overall flow. It takes imagining yourself as a reader holding a Kobo, Kindle or Nook.

This is the responsibility and work of a publisher. In the case of Smashwords, that’s you. You make the decisions on how it should look and feel. Once you’re happy, you push it to market. But it doesn’t end there. You can go back anytime and make changes, add content, improve the product. You are the publisher. You decide how it will be. The power rests in your hands.

So that’s all fine and good, but... getting back to the Smashwords process... just how tough it is these days?

If you have your document polished, your cover art image ready, and you can follow some step-by-step editing guidelines, you can do it in 2 – 3 hours. No sweat. Smashwords provides aspiring authors a decent instruction set that takes you through the process, including what gotchas to beware of and what to do when things don’t go as well as they should. In short, this is a process that demands attention to detail, but don’t let that scare you. This is not rocket science or black art. You can do it. Honestly, if you just don’t want to be bothered with the effort, you can even hire someone to tackle this, possibly for as little as $50. Bottom-line: if you’ve got a book ready to go, you should press on and do it.

Just a couple of brief observations:

1. Be sure you have your book cover ready to go. Smashwords just upped their requirements on the image dimensions. It now should be no less than 1,400 pixels wide, ideally a bit larger. The height should end up being a multiple of the width by like 1.3 or 1.4. This is considerably larger than the old requirements they’ve used.
2. Before diving into the Smashwords Style Guide process steps, take the time to refine your manuscript file to make it as polished as you can. Once you start the publishing process steps, you won’t want to be detouring to deal with beefing up your manuscript format, not if you can avoid it.
3. Check out the Smashwords publish web page and especially review the meta data you’ll need to provide at the time you upload and publish your book. I recommend you think about each of the inputs and prepare your information in advance, ready to cut-and-paste into the fields on the Smashwords web page. That approach is a lot better than waiting until the moment you publish your book’s file and rushing through entering the meta data. It matters. Think like a publisher would, because that’s you.

If you’re sitting on the fence about publishing via Smashwords, I hoped I’ve convinced you to take the plunge. With a little effort on your part, you can be selling your book in just a few hours.

Good luck!

Slow Blogging Writer

I'm a slow blogger.

Duh, you say. A quick peek at my blog post calendar reveals that big secret.

I suppose I should have said that I've made a conscious decision as a writer not to spew forth volumes of word-spray across the various social media streams one is supposed to use to reach one's audience and fans. It's all summed up nicely by Anne R. Allen in this blog post.

Which flies in the face of plenty of tribal advice urging authors to post more, not less. After all, more content pushed by an author equals more chances to make impressions, more prospective readers to touch with at least one post / one thread, more of your noise drowning out the surrounding din. Hopefully.

It's folly though.

Think about it. In a connected world chock full of endless streams of infotainment of all stripes, do you find yourself craving even more variety, more ways to fritter away one of the most precious commodities you have: your time? I don't. I have too many already.

So I heartily agree with Anne R. Allen's points regarding slow blogging. She's spot-on and makes a strong case.

I'm going to add my own spin though, invoking something that's the bane of every entertainer. Most in the business try hard to connect with their audience, drawing an emotional reaction from them, informing them, challenging them, amusing them, or generally touching them in some tangible way. An entertainer tries to never, ever bore the audience though. That's the kiss of death.

This, then, is what worries me regarding pounding my thoughts out through social media channels. The harder and more frequently I do so, the faster my decent into the pit of boredom and irrelevance.

Brrrr. What a terrible thought.

I'll stick with slow blogging.