Saturday, June 23, 2012

Overheard in the Office:

Ken at Popehat, fellow prolific blogger and author-in-his-daydreams, has a post up about wrestling with his dreams of actually writing a, you know, regular book-type-book.

Me: "Wow, I feel his pain. Some of what he writes there is just creepily familiar. I mean, you've heard me utter some of those same excuses almost verbatim."

RX: "And I maintain that writing a coherent narrative is only a matter of putting down one word after another until blood comes out of your eyes. Which really isn't a problem, unless you mind..."

Me: "...the whole part about blood coming out of your eyes, yeah."

16 comments:

Frank W. James said...

Writing a book, any kind of a book, is like a torrid, illicit love affair.

In the beginning you can't get enough and it consumes your life, every stinking minute of your 24 hour day, but by the end of it you can't stand the thought or the sight of the damn thing...

All The Best,
Frank W. James

Stranger said...

Well, it's not so bad when at least half the pages consist of equations.

Half the readers will not understand the equations, and the other half will never try to use them, so all you have to worry about is the parts between.

But joking aside, other than scientific and technical subjects Mr. Frank James has it about right.

Stranger

Ed Rasimus said...

But, when you've finished and a publisher has contracted you and paid an advance and you finally see the work in hard-cover in a book store and you get that first royalty check, you will realize that you could have made much more money at the local McWendyKingCarl's asking "you want fries wit dat?"

Old NFO said...

But it will have YOUR name on it as the author... :-)

RabidAlien said...

Heh. I love the rejection letters, myself. My personal favorite, so far, has been the guy who replied and said that my style of writing wouldn't be popular until after I was dead. Thanks. 'Preciate that.

Marja said...

When it comes to publishing I'd suggest Kindle Direct or something similar - it's sure to come out and you'll keep the rights, and the book will have infinite time or so to find its readers. From what I have been reading by such people as Joe Konrath, Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Rusch and Sarah Hoyt traditional publishers don't necessarily treat the writers they take on particularly well these days. Unless you are already a bestseller, or very well known aka marketable in some other ways there may be no publicity for your book, the editing may well be done badly if at all, the book will have only a few months to prove itself on the markets before it will be withdrawn but you may never get the rights back anyway and if it does sell well any profits beyond the advance might not get accurately reported to you, much less paid in full.

Well, covers in traditionally published novels are usually still better than the ones in indies or self published ones. But if you have the money you can still hire somebody to make you a good cover, that, and paying for editing, again if you have the money for it, being the only money you lose when going that route.

Yep, I got a few stories which I intend to put on Amazon sometime this summer, after about year worth of reading through all I could find about the current situation in publishing.

Marja said...

And the writing itself wasn't all that hard, if you take the 'one scene at a time' approach. Just sit down and write something. Then do the same next day, or if possible, later the same day. It adds up.

Editing your own stuff, however, sucks, it's a pain trying to keep all things straight. First problem is that I'm a pantser - I can't write to a preplanned plot map if it kills me, things always go off at some point, and that means I have to make sure the story stays logical and has that plot at the editing stage. And then there is the fact that I know the damn world, and the people in it, intimately, but there is no space to put everything down or the story ends up an unreadable mess. Which leads to stuff like sometimes missing things which are obvious to me but which I have not necessarily remembered to hint at on paper (well, figuratively speaking), and noticing that I haven't can be surprisingly hard at times.

I guess that would also be one of the good point with traditional publishing, they may not always do all that good a job with the editing, but at least then the responsibility is theirs. When you do it all yourself you have to own all the parts which suck, and that does make the self publishing route scary. If I ever start getting money from it the first thing I'm going to do will be to hire a professional editor. The champagne dinner at that expensive restaurant will just have to wait.:)

Tam said...

The job of editing sucks. Those men an women are saints -- I loathe editing my own work, which it needs a lot of.

Lulu (my vanity publisher) eats most of the miniscule profit, but Amazon has fairly dire policies anent copyright (like, "prove you wrote it," which means you should'a done the traditional copyright process).

So I do it like I blog: to amuse me. If it amuses other people, hey, bonus.

This is RX, NOT Tam. I borrowed her computer.

Marja said...

Right about that, RX, not much point to do this if your main goal is something like money. You may get it, you may not, and if you do that's of course nice, but the important part is that you enjoy telling the stories. Anything beyond that is just bonus.

Justthisguy said...

I'll try and reconstruct the comment I just tried to leave here, before google inserted their virtual icepick all the way into my notional figurative internet eye socket and waved it around in there. My google-brain seems to have grown back now (according to google), so here goes.

The Jews have a word for it: Sitzfleisch. It means having the gumption to just stay there in the chair until you "get 'er done!"

I do not have that. The most I can usually manage is a two-or-three- paragraph comment on someone else's blog, and that's with the subject already served up to me.

Firehand said...

There are reasons Robert Ruark referred to his typewriter as the Iron Maiden

Justthisguy said...

Tam, why do you continue to link to Shithat, or Popehead, or Ken, or whatever he calls himself? That creature seems to have no class and no honesty, which figures, seeing that he is both a californian and a lawyer.

I recall making a thoughtful, honest, polite comment on his blog, and seeing him delete what I wrote, replacing what I wrote with the words, "I eat paste."

I believe my comment was about the in-advisability of non-kin adoptions, in general. I do wish his non-kin adopted kids well, and hope that he will refrain from abusing them, seeing that stepfathers and adoptive fathers are statistically more likely to abuse their kids than are natural fathers.

Tam said...

Did it taste good?

Goober said...

It is startling to me, really, Justthisguy, that Ken would have been so rude to you after you ever so politely suggested that he is likely sexually abusing his children, or so eloquently insinuated that he wouldn't love his children as much because there was no biological link.

The absolute gall of that man. I mean, what has this country come to when you can't insult a man and a man's love for his own children without that man becoming defensive about that? It's just unfair.

Anonymous said...

In justthisguy's defense, perhaps he was not the recipient of a "virtual icepick" inserted into his "figurative ... eye socket" but is the recipient of an actual lobotomy. - Jason

Collin said...

Polite? Thoughtful? Hahahahahahahahaha...