Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!?

It's been more than two weeks since I last killed a man posted to my journal. I just don't feel the urge to post that much these days, but I do mostly so my lovely and talented wife can keep up with my thoughts and feelings. (I communicate much better in writing than verbally.)

So...just got back from another trip to the mall right across the street. Twoson and I are pounding the pavement (or the tiles) looking for work. I've been instructing him in the fine art of making cold calls on mall stores. He's getting better at it, and finding it easier to do. The first time I providing an incentive--when we finished our quota of calls I'd buy us lunch in the food court. This time we didn't do that, but we still did our quota of calls, and a couple more for good measure.

I've got an interview next week with one of the big anchor stores for a "sales associate, part-time" position (I'm looking for part-time work so I still have time to write) which would be a stocking position. That suits me fine. Stocking and restocking is more my speed than sales anyhow. I'm hoping to get it. It would be almost perfect: part-time, across the street from the apartment, and nothing too mentally or socially taxing.

Today we got a very encouraging response at a jewelers. The lady behind the counter urged us to go their website and fill out the application online ASAP as they're hiring. So that's first on our agenda, ahead of all the other online applications. Virtually all the stores simply give us a website address to apply to. We can haz the future.

Later today I have a therapy session. Snippy asked me to consider therapy a few weeks back. She was under the impression (and, I think, correctly) that I was depressed. What with all the change in our lives in the last year (selling our house, moving to the apartment, my father being in hospice care, Snippy and I being deathly ill in May and June, my hospitalization, etc.) I've definitely been off my game. And she needs me functioning so I can take care of her; that's a big part of my raison d'etre around here--and I wouldn't have it any other way.

So I agreed. I've had three or four sessions now. I think they're helpful. The first couple of sessions I talked about my writing, or the lack thereof lately, and my resistance to sitting down and writing, though I enjoy it when I finally do it (and really enjoy the feeling of accomplishment when I am productive). That's just old-fashioned anxiety, and something I'll probably always have to battle. Most writers (most people, for that matter) do.

Last week we went into an argument Snippy and I had, and why it happened. That was more difficult. It required more self-analysis, which is...not my forte, shall we say? I expect we'll talk more about it today.

My writing is going better, though not as well as I'd like. I'd like to be producing more words (and more finished stories), but I'm definitely trending upward, so that's good. I'm even seeing some money from my writing now. Nowhere near enough to constitute even a part-time job's worth (if that were the case, I wouldn't need an outside job), but that too is trending upward as I publish more material, and that should continue.

I started self-publishing in January of this year. Dean has written repeatedly that you won't REALLY know how you're selling for months. Smashwords, for instance, publishes your work to a bunch of other retailers (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, Diesel, Apple, and others) both domestically and abroad. Some of those sites report monthly, others quarterly. Then Smashwords has to report to you. If one or more sites are slow to report, it could be near the end of the SECOND quarter (or even the one after that) before you find out how well you sold in JANUARY.

I've made money in three digits (excluding cents) so far this year. Not a lot, but it's a start--and I'm only just starting to see results from downstream sites (as explained above). Plus, in January I only had a couple of stories up. Now I'm up to over a dozen; given months and months to wait before all the sales on all of those are reported and...there's no telling. In the mean time, I need to write, write, write and publish, publish, publish.

I'll be attending a workshop on self-publishing in October. I got my first assignment for that class by email today. I was to read Dean's "How To Think Like A Publisher blog posts (done); choose a publisher name (Gelastic press--long since done), and establish accounts on Smashwords (ditto), PubIt (ditto), Amazon (ditto), and Createspace (done), register my Publisher name with the state as a DBA (done today), and establish a bank account I can use with all the above publishing account (also done).

I've started running again. The Couch Potato to 5K program. I downloaded an app to my phone that tells me when to run and when to walk, and keep track of mileage and pace. I'm going to have to get an audio & music-streaming bluetooth headset, though. Carrying the phone is a pain in the ass when I'm running, and when it's in its belt pouch I CAN'T HEAR IT. Still, it's a useful app; I don't have to carry a stopwatch and try to remember which intervals I'm doing on a given day. My legs are very sore; after being bedridden for a while, and very low energy for so long afterward, I have no stamina and no strength.

But that's why I started running again, so I can get that back.

Time for lunch now. I didn't eat breakfast.

I'm up to 73,000 words on the novel. I've added almost 8,000 words this week, and it's only Wednesday. On the other hand, I didn't write word one yesterday, and if I had it would be more. I had 60,000 words done as of the end of April, so this month my pace is almost exactly half of what it was last month. Boo! On the gripping hand, despite having a bad day yesterday and a slow start today, I'm still 8,000 words closer to the finish line at the moment, and that's something to be happy about.

Of course, I also moved the finish line. Regular readers may note that I've upped the word count for the novel from 90K to 100K. Mostly that's because I suspect I'm going to have to cut some of what I've written, so a higher goal means that when I've pared it down to something closer to the right words, it'll still be plenty long enough.

This week I've received two rejections, one on my first novel (Strange Attractors), and one on the short story, "In Adversity". I'll get them both back out soon, but I haven't done so yet.

I'm experimenting with a new mindset when I write. I'm trying to find the zone I wrote in when I was participating in some online games. I wrote many, many tens of thousands of words over the years in those games (which were closer to collaborative writing than gaming per se). And most of that I wrote on the fly. I wrote fast, I wrote without editing for the most part, and I didn't worry overmuch about anything but whether what I was writing was fun to write (and, I hoped, to read). I didn't think overmuch about the nuts and bolts of writing, I just trusted my process.

And I still like to go back and look at a lot of that stuff. I find a lot of stuff that's really fun to re-read. Could it be improved upon? Of course. But that attitude--writing the story I want to read without paying too much conscious attention to technique or salability or "what my mother will think"...that's something it's too easy to lose, and which I think is valuable.

I'm still using the 60-minute timer approach too. Start the timer. Write til it chirps. Take a few minutes away from the keyboard. Lather, rinse, repeat. It helps--especially on days like today, when I had a hard time starting. Start the timer and just WRITE. It helps to drown out the critical voice, 'cause I've got a goal to meet. Words to accumulate and only an hour to do it.

And I still find that nothing promotes creativity like wanting to abandon a project. My mind lights up with ideas for OTHER things I could be writing. So I take note of those ideas...and then I work on the current project. Those ideas will still be there later, when I'm ready to actually start something new. Take THAT, treacherous subconscious!

Stories in Circulation: 12
Rejections: 37
Stories Accepted: SEVEN
Stories to Resubmit: 0

Novel Queries: 1 Novel, 4 queries out
Novel Rejections: 6

Project 1: Starship Repo Man (Title TBD)
Words Written: 73,238

My inner critic won today. I dithered and procrastinated today, and accomplished bupkis on the writing. I realize there are gonna be days like that sometimes, but I hate it. On the other hand, my writing directories and files are better organized! Meh.

Tomorrow I'll do better. Tonight, we're taking Twoson out for a birthday dinner.

Stories in Circulation: 11
Rejections: 36
Stories Accepted: SEVEN
Stories to Resubmit: 0

Novel Queries: 1 Novel, 5 queries out
Novel Rejections: 5

Project 1: Space Opera (Title TBD)
Words Written: 50,788




Project 2: Urban Fantasy (Title TBD)
Words Written: 0

So I've heard this commercial on the radio several times lately. Kindly doctor voice says that the kid may have a fever and he'll need to take his temperature. Kid complains that he "hates that pointy thing in his ear!" Kindly Doctor says that he need only swipe this newfangled device across the kid's forehead to take his temperature. Mom is dutifully impressed and wishes that she had one for home use. Cue the VoiceOver Guy, who informs the listener that it IS now available for home use.

That commercial makes me feel old. I always think, "Geez, kid! Get a grip. In MY day, if your parents or the doctor wanted to take your temperature, they used a glass thermometer--and they stuck in your mouth. If you were LUCKY."

In other news, I got 3300 words written on one of the novels Friday. Go me! As per usual based on my experience in November, my Inner Critic (aka my Ego) will require constant throttling. I look at what I've written and think, "There's no way I'm going to produce a coherent novel out of that!"

Yeah, well, it's only 3 percent of the total wordage I'm shooting for. AND I can always clean it up later. AND if necessary I can completely scrap what I've written while editing the manuscript. So shut up back there, or I'll tie you up and pitch you into an empty lecture hall in my mind where you can yammer (in a Mickey Mouse voice) to an audience of zero. It doesn't have to be good; good or bad is irrelevant at this stage. Right now I just have to pile on the words so as to have something to improve later.

In still other news, "Man-Ape" came back to me in less than twenty-four hours. It was a nice rejection email, though. The editor told me what she thought worked and didn't work, and had some suggestions for me. And she ended by saying that she looked forward me sending her something else. So that's a pretty good rejection, as rejections go.

Stories in Circulation: 10
Rejections: 34
Stories Accepted: SEVEN
Stories to Resubmit: 1

Novel Queries: 1 Novel, 5 queries out
Novel Rejections: 4

Project 1: Space Opera (Title TBD)
Words Written: 3,323




Project 2: Urban Fantasy (Title TBD)
Words Written: 0

In November of last year, I gritted my teeth and jumped into National Novel Writing Month with both feet. It was my first attempt at a novel, and I wrote it in eighteen days. All fifty thousand words of it, which is the goal of NaNoWriMo. It was an interesting, informative, sometimes frightening experience.

I worked without a net. I've never been able to plot out a story beforehand, though God knows I've tried .It just doesn't work for me. So I worked out a very general idea for the story, then on November 1st I sat down and started writing. Within a day or two I'd changed the names of my characters (and thereby their personalities) because what I'd started with wasn't working. Fortunately, that was a quick and easy search-and-replace task. I also changed the setting of the first scene, but only in the sense that I made a note to myself to change it upon revision and thereafter wrote as if I'd written it that way all along.*

Some days I thought I doing pretty well. Some days I thought I was writing crap. But I kept plugging along because, after all, it doesn't have to be good. It just has to be 50,000 words long. I placated my Ego (which wanted to spare me itself the pain of failure and rejection by giving up ahead of time) with that mantra. Some days were a struggle, but I did it. I wrote a 50,000 word novel and I finished it in eighteen days.

Then I promptly saved it and swore that it would never see the light of day again. I was convinced that it was awful. It was my first attempt at anything longer than a short story. How could it be anything but awful?

But my writing gurus, Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Katherine Rusch, have repeatedly told me (and anyone else who'll listen) that a writer is not the best judge of his own work, and especially while he's writing it. They have over a hundred novels and hundreds of short stories published between them, and they still wrestle with that tiny voice that says "this is crap." It's such a common and predictable reaction, usually coming about a third of the way into the novel, that when one of them tells the other that the latest novel isn't working and they may have to start over, the other asks, "How far into it are you?" At which point, the other turns and goes back into his or her office to continue writing.

So I thought, I really ought to listen to them. Plus, my spouse (and trusted first reader) gently nudged me to reconsider. So I grudgingly pulled it up on the monitor and started reading it again in January. And it wasn't half bad. In fact, some of it I liked a lot. So I let my spouse read it, and got a rave review.

Okay, Spouse also had a few criticisms. I couldn't argue with them, either. So I decided, what the hell, I'll polish it up and send it out. Let some actual editors tell me if they thought it was worth buying or not.**

There was a problem, though. The minimum length for a publishable novel (with rare exceptions) is 70,000 words, but my novel was only 50,000 words long. So I had to revise and extend it, as Congressmen so often do their speeches in the Congressional Record. I've spent the last month or so doing just that.

It was slow, tedious work. In part, that was because my Ego gibbered and capered and jumped up and down, screeching and flinging poo, in a Herculean attempt to make me give up. Change is scary and difficult, even when it might be a good change. Writing and revising (and ultimately trying to sell) a novel meant changing my self-image. It meant thinking of myself as a novelist. It meant risking rejection (almost certainly repeated rejection, even if the novel eventually sells). My Ego hates that, so it tried hard to stop me, clinging to my ankle and crying piteously as I dragged myself (and my Ego) toward the finish line.

Some days, I confess, it succeeded. On other days, forcing myself to ignore that voice was difficult. On rare days, I successfully throttled it and managed to write several thousand words. But I'd set a goal of getting the novel finished and out the door by the end of February.

And today I finished the revisions. The novel weighs in at about 72,000 words. Shorter than I'd have liked, but as long as it's gonna get. This evening I scoured Publishers Marketplace for editors and publishers to whom I could send it, looking for editors who'd bought books in the same genre. I have a list of five I intend to start with.

Tomorrow...I'm taking the day off to celebrate finishing the novel. Friday, I'll write the cover letters and the synopsis, and get everything ready to mail. Saturday, the queries will go into the mail. I'm going to meet my deadline, and I'm very pleased by that. In March, I'm planning to work on some short stories, but in the not too distant future, I'll be starting another novel. My goal for this year is to have at least three novels written and circulating. More would be better, but three is the absolute minimum.

Look at me. I'm a novelist!


*A technique I learned from the Book In A Month workbook, and one I highly recommend.

**Robert Heinlein's fourth and fifth rules for writers:
4. You must mail your story to someone who will buy it.
5. You must keep it in the mail until someone buys it.

Struggling with the Ego today. I read through the remainder of the novel. There's some good stuff there. There's also plenty I see that I don't like. I need to remember that that's my ego talking. I need to remember that snippy liked it very much. I need to remember that I am not the best judge of my own work when I'm in the middle of it, as I am with this novel.

It's not easy.

I managed about 1,344 new words on Strange Attractors today. I'm averaging around a thousand words, maybe a little more, each day I work on it. Around a third of what I'd hoped I'd achieve. Pretty puny word count. (On the other hand, Robert B. Parker made quite a career for himself writing 1250 words a day, six days a week. So it's nothing to sneeze at. But I want to do better.)

On the gripping hand, I think I've done about as much as I can with extending existing scenes. Adding to the novel is going to require adding additional scenes. I have a couple of ideas for that, though nothing solid yet. But since I want to punch up the ending, that's one of the obvious places to do it. So it's not like I'm not making progress, or not working on it.

It's just going a lot slower than I'd hoped it would. Perhaps I should decide on a smaller side project to work on sometimes for a change of pace, and to feel like I'm not just spinning my wheels. Yeah. I think so.

Project: Strange Attractors
Words Written Since Last Report: 4,769 (it's still going fairly slowly)



Stories in Circulation: 11 (two stories returned and not resubmitted yet)
Rejections: 27 (ditto)
Stories Accepted: SEVEN (sold another erotica to Cobblestone the other day)

So, yeah. It's been 11 days since I posted my goals for the years. I'm changing them. The goals are originally presented:

So, it's 2010 and I've rededicated myself to writing. Among my goals for this year:
Write, finish and mail a story a week.
Write, finish and mail 3 novels by December 31, 2010.
Learn as much as I can about writing; mostly via the Carnegie Hall route (practice, practice, practice), in part by reading writers I admire as well as books on how to pick up my game.

What am I changing? I'm dropping the weekly short story goal and I'm going to concentrate on writing and submitting novels. Which is not to say that I won't be writing any short stories. I just won't be thinking of them as a goal. Recently I learned that in the last six months, of 80 new SFWA members, 14 achieved that status via short story sales (and it requires three professional story sales to qualify) and 66 (SIXTY-SIX!) managed it with a first novel sale.

There is simply a vastly larger market for novels than for short story sales. And since novel sales are more lucrative (even at first-novel advance rates), it seems like I'd be better advised to pursue that avenue since it's where I want to end up eventually.

To that end, I've started a second novel. I'm only three days into it at this point. I have doubts about it, of course, which is only natural. I'll continue to work on it, but I'm also doing a lot of thinking about why I have doubts. It's not just ego defense--I think I'm missing something, but I don't know what exactly. I'll figure it out, and then I can fix it.

In the mean time, I have to work on binding and gagging my inner critic while I continue to write. I can edit later. It's an uncomfortable feeling, wondering if I can do this...while knowing that I can. I've already done it once, for the NaNoWriMo project in November. I can do it again.

In the worst case scenario, I finish this novel, clean it up, and send it out and it never sells. It's still practice. I'll learn from the experience, just as I learned from the first one. And the next one will be better. Carnegie Hall, baby, Carnegie Hall. How do I get there? Practice, practice, practice.

In other news, today was both a good day and a bad day. I got a rejection--SnipLits bounced "Home Invasion". I haven't sent it back out yet, but I will. On the other hand, my fifth Cobblestone Press story, Three On A Rooftop went live and now available for purchase here.

Stories in Circulation: 11
Rejections: 25
Stories Accepted: FIVE

I haven't posted the stats in a while, so I thought I'd do it now. I took my lovely and talented wife (snippy/snippy) to a dental appointment this morning, then dropped her off at work. After that I went out to buy her Hannukah gift at the mall and get some lunch. Now I'm back and will start writing shortly.

But first I had to respond to another rejection. *le sigh*

Ah well. I found another market and sent the story right back out again. Now, I should say up front that I'm not going to let my feelings interfere with my actions, but--I've sold five stories to Cobblestone Press and none elsewhere. Makes me feel like a one-note wonder. Makes me wonder when/if I'll be able to fool convince anyone else to buy my stuff.

But that's one those Voices they talk about, the ones that will stop you if you listen to them. Which is why, as I said, I won't let it deter me from continuing to write and circulate stories. But occasionally it does wear on me. It helps to wander through the vast, VAST selection of books in the science fiction/fantasy and romance sections of the bookstore at the mall. The sheer volume of fiction being published week after week after month after year is staggering. I gotta get me a piece of that action, and I think I can eventually.

I have two more stories in the works, partially completed. I hope to get them both done in the next few days. I have another idea fermenting, but not quite ready to start writing. And a couple of ideas I'm poking and prodding while I try to figure out what story I can spin out to novel length for my next stab at a novel.

In the mean time, my occasional, not-on-a-regular-schedule list of works in circulation or sold:

IN CIRCULATION
"Clean Up Detail"
"Hotel Party"
"Man-Ape"
"Watching Jennifer"
"Home Invasion"
"Making Friends"
"Surprise Party"
"Ink"
"Drowned"
"Reunion"

SOLD
"Flying High" available from Cobblestone Press
"Bound by Convention" available from Cobblestone Press
"Queen Bee" will be published December 16, 2009 (Cobblestone)
"Three On A Rooftop" sold, being edited (Cobblestone)
"One Knight Stand" just sold (Cobblestone)

RESTING
"Unconventional" (pulled from circulation temporarily to rework for different markets)

UNDER CONSTRUCTION (Working Titles)
"Fast Friends"
"The Wild One"

Stories in Circulation: 10
Rejections: 24
Stories Accepted: FIVE

I've written 1,907 words today. It's possible I'll write more, but at a minimum I've done my first day's quota.

And I think it sucks. This can't possibly be any good. I can't possible write a novel based on this! Or says my ego.

And to my ego, I say, "Nuts to you!" The absolute worst thing that can happen is that when I'm done, I'll have 50,000 words of crappy novel--which will include at least some good bits. Good bits I can steal to use in other stories. So I'll just have to deal with these feelings of inadequacy and soldier on. Harder in practice than in theory, but still do-able.

I gotta say, though, that I'm discovering depths of self-doubt and fear in my attempt to write this novel that I haven't had to deal with on short stories. Or maybe I got past that and blotted it from my memory. It's an interesting experience. A "learning experience", as they say. But it's good for me.

In other news, I received rejection on "Ink" from Strange Horizons on Saturday. I immediately sent it out to Shock Totem. Never say die!




Stories in Circulation: 13
Rejections: 19
Stories Accepted: TWO!

It has been a week since my last confess--uh, post. The overview is that I've let stress and worry get inside my head and muck up my thinking. Specifically, in that time I have:

1. Forgotten something that I had known earlier. Specifically, that I will often think my current work in progress sucks. I must continue on nonetheless, finishing it. I haven't written a lot this past couple of weeks because I've been struggling to find a way to write the story that Doesn't Suck (tm). I'm hunting a snipe. So I've gotten back on the horse today.

2. Succumbed to the fear that I don't know what I'm doing. Which is, in some ways, true enough. If I for sure knew what I need to know, I'd be selling stories by now. I'm still learning. Which means, pretty much by definition, that I don't know everything I need to know. That doesn't mean I don't know something, or that I can't learn more. And I learn more by studying, yes, but mostly by the Carnegie Hall route. Practice, practice, practice.

3. Paid too much attention to "how to" instruction. I was writing, completing and mailing stories for the last couple of months. In the last two weeks I've completed and mailed bupkis. Nada. Zip. Zilch. So I need to get back to what works. And, again, I've done that today.

4. Doing the editors' jobs for them. The current story, "Bound by Convention" is a sequel of sorts to another story I've written. It stands on its own; you needn't have read the first story to follow this one. Nonetheless, given that the first story hasn't sold, my inner editor keeps nagging at me that I can't write this one, or shouldn't; or, having written it, can't sell it, or shouldn't. That's not my decision. That's an editor's decision. I forgot that. Time to bind and gag my inner editor and bury him in a deep, dark hole in a corner of my psyche.

5. Have not been specific enough about my goals. Not on a weekly, monthly, or annual basis.

My words written total for today is undoubtedly low. I've been stitching together "Bound by Convention" like Frankenstein's monster, from bits and pieces of scenes. Nothing wrong with that--and it IS coming together nicely. But it means that I'm deleting at least as much as I'm adding as I carve away all the parts that don't look like a story.

In good news, however, my word total is rapidly approaching 90,000--the minimum for a novel. That's a novel's worth of words in about two and a half months. Nothing like a novel has emerged, true, but the sheer production of text is clearly well within my capabilities.

Words Written Today: 1,149
Words Written YTD (since May 1): 82,526
Stores in Circulation: 8
Rejections: 4
Stories Accepted: TBD