I’m thinking ahead here but I’m going to be wanting some first readers in a few months (I’m pencilling in Easter) but where do they live?
For my first novel, Railroaded, I printed out ten copies of the third draft and handed it out to people; My Mum, Dad, three friends, a daughter of a work colleague who ran a small reading group, an ex-girlfriend and a local activist I found on the internet!
Yeah, that’s right, only 8. I’ve still got 2 copies sitting here because I really couldn’t find anyone else.
I haven’t blogged for a month because I’ve been busy writing and planning the remainder of the novel. I’ve started Chapter 17 and sketched out all the chapters up to the end, Chapter 23. A huge sigh of relief, and in my post-coital bliss I thought I’d post the playlists I write to.
I say ‘write’ because in my recent planning stage I needed silence so I could hold multiple chapters, storylines, arcs, characters, twists and turns in my mind without being distracted by a clever lyric, consumed by a deep bassline or led astray by a beautiful melody.
All these tunes are from the electronica, chill-out, ambient school of thought. Lyricless mainly, but there are exceptions.
Here’s the links to the playlists (here & here)but after submitting them to iTunes, only about 4 tunes from each list is available at iTunes, so if you want the rest you’ll have to go hunting.
I’m a creature of habit and routine, anything outside of my realm of obssessive organisation either has to quickly find a sub-section to house itself within or freeze itself in suspended animation until it catches my eye again.
After writing for a few years and after my recent two week writing push, I became aware of a few writing rituals I perform before hitting the keyboard. None of them are particularly Haka-like in their intensity but I don’t feel comfortable behind my laptop without them.
I’ll have to divide them into two because I write in two places; at home and at a coffee shop.
Home Routine.
Make a cup of tea, adjust cushions on my garden chair and table which are located in the lounge because interior design orientated, I am not. Turn TV off, place tea next to laptop, fire up laptop and whilst it’s slowly waking up I check Twitter. 10 minutes later I decide on what music to play, this is usually ambient or deep/trance house music, then I read through the last few pages to get myself back into it. If I’m happy with the music and I know what I’m writing then off we go, if not, then I’ll stare into space searching for that starting place.
Coffee Shop.
Order espresso to wake myself up and a Liptons Peach Ice Tea to keep me going. Go upstairs in favoured coffee shop because it has proper tables and chairs and look for a seat against a wall – I have a paranoid fear of having anyone behind me when I have my laptop open, can’t stand it even though I have sat behind people with laptops and not been the remotest bit interested in what they’re doing. Then my music selection/reading past few pages/staring into space routine comes into play.
Nothing out of the ordinary there I don’t think, maybe the fact I always write with music playing. Never music with lyrics though, my singalong-in-my-head reflex is too weak and interrupts my thought process. Writing high tempo scenes with high tempo music is great, afterwards I always look around to see who’s looking at me bobbing up and down in my seat though.
What’s your routine?
Just a quick word on backing up your work.
No, I haven’t just had that nightmare scenario where your work has been subsumed into the ether never to be seen again but I thought I would share my super anal back up practises…on second thoughts, I’ll rephrase that.
This is how I back up my writing.
I write everything on my laptop, it gets saved automatically every 5 minutes or so. After every writing session I back it up onto a flash drive/memory stick, whatever your part of the world calls it.
After I complete a chapter, I initiate my super-anal back up procedures. I save a copy on my laptop, my memory stick, my desktop computer, the external hardrive connected to my desktop…but what if my flat is destroyed by an asteroid?
So here’s my first ever publication, in the flesh. Feels good, feels like I’m actually getting somewhere. The best part was seeing my name in the copyright pages, nothing like legal mumbo-jumbo to stir the emotions!
Richard from Spike The Cat sent over a copy of ‘The Last Laugh’ anthology a few weeks ago. I thought I’d do a post after I’d read it.
It’s a collection of 12 humorous short stories, my favourites were ‘A Match Made in Heaven’ and ‘Looking Back’.
I still like my one, ‘The Lost Journeyman’, especially the fact it’s 100% dialogue – conversations on the phone.
You can buy a real life book version for £7 here or the ebook version for £1.49 here.
A bargain considering it’ll probably be worth thousands in a few years!
Read an interesting blog post by Heather Trese entitled ‘Should Writers Talk About Their Rejections?‘ after seeing it retweeted by @dirtywhitecandy on Twitter.
This caught my interest because I painstakingly detail all my rejections here.
I mainly do this for a personal record but intentionally because I’ve never seen any other writer do it.
The blog post goes on to highlight the fact that writers moaning about rejections and whoever may send them is not very productive, which I agree with 100%. I don’t do that. I just list (agents anonymously) all my rejections without prejudice or comment. No hard feelings.
To be honest, a rejection is better than being ignored completely.
Came across the site I Write Like which compares your own writing with more esteemed writers.
I uploaded the first 3 chapters of Railroaded and IWL said I write like Cory Doctorow.
I then uploaded the first 3 chapters of my WIP and IWL says I write like P.G.Wodehouse.
I’ve never read either of these writers but I know a little about each one and it seems a pretty good mix.
Naturally, I thought what would a mixture of Ben Ellis, Cory Doctorow and P.G.Wodehouse look like?
I went to MorphThing and mixed up these great writers.
What a strange looking fellow…but what a writer!
Holy crap! Hell must have frozen over, eskimo’s must be buying ice AND arabs must be buying sand plus other such impossibilities because one of my short stories is actually getting published.
Spikethecat had a competition called ‘The Last Laugh‘ so I submitted my story ‘The Lost Journeyman’. Recently I got an email saying it had been chosen to be published in ‘The Last Laugh’ anthology, along with 11 others.
In the top right of the site I’ve written ‘unpublished’, so I’ll cross that out as soon as I have a hard copy or ebook in my grubby little hands. One down, two to go.
So until then, let’s run some numbers.
All my writing has been rejected a total of 35 times, the 36th time this short story got accepted. So 1 in 36 times I’m successful, which, if my maths serves me right, means I’m batting 0.027, not major league.
It also means I’m accepted 2.7% of the time, which means I’m doing better than being rejected 99% of the time.
Thank you cold, hard maths for providing me with a warm embrace.
I’ll let you know when this anthology is available to buy.
Update 21st Sept. 2010: The anthology is now available, looky here.
MYOWS is a fairly new site (still in beta at time of writing) where you can upload your original work and manage it’s copyright protection.
How does it do that?
By uploading a piece of work you are agreeing it is yours and giving it a creation date (the date you uploaded it). You then get an online certificate proving the work is yours which can be made accessible to anyone, eg. a court or someone that has violated your own copyrights.
I suppose it’s like sending your lawyer a date-stamped, recorded envelope with your original work to remain unopened until such times that proof is needed. However, this is free and a lot easier.
There’s a wave of graphic/information geeks out there who are making seemingly boring data look attractive via the medium of flow-charts, graphs, pie-charts, etc.
Information is Beautiful is the best known site featuring loads of ‘Infographics’.
Charting The Beatles is a great one charting the lyrics and songs of The Beatles.
GraphJam contains loads of funny and inane ‘infographs’.
So it was only a matter of time before the multitudes and reems of writing books could be condensed into one simple flow-chart poster. Anna Hurley has done all the hard work over at her blog, plus the full size poster is for sale so you can stick it above your laptop and get on with things.
This isn’t a guide on how to write a novel from scratch, but how to edit it so it’s ready for publication. The future of agent rejection letters and emails may simply feature a print out of this poster.
I’m now off to add a dinosaur into my novel.
