Nothing but Delays

It looks like I'm going back to self-publishing my work again.  That's not because I was rejected by the publisher I had hoped would take me.  It is because she had a limited number of slots open for 2012 and I didn't make that list because I had to revise my book.  So I either wait another year and hope I make it or I move on.

I'm moving on because:

• I hate waiting.
• I feel like time is short and I can't waste another year hoping for something that might not happen.
• Some other publisher may want it.

I gave her the right of first refusal but she won't even get to it this year so it is time to pack up and move on.  If she ever gets back to me and says, yes she'll take the book then I'll can stop self-publishing.

Meanwhile, I can see how far I can move the book forward into the arms and ebook readers of the general public.

This is the worst possible outcome too, from my perspective, because it is a non-answer.  A rejection I could handle (sort of) but being in limbo is like taking a final exam and then never receiving a grade.  It is also bad news because I'm lousy at promoting my own work.

It would be one thing if everyone reading this blog would go out and get a copy of the book.  But that's not likely to happen.  I need to find people who enjoy reading fantasy novels and I need to provide both paper and electronic formats simultaneously.  So that when I spend the word, people can go to Amazon or Barnes and Noble and order a copy.

I wish there was a clearinghouse for paper books that did what Smashwords does for electronic books.  But there isn't.  The best I can do is purchase a service from Lulu.com to help infiltrate bookstores or go with CreateSpace (an Amazon company) so at least the book will be in Amazon's listings.

Worse still, because I'll be self-published, some places will not review me.  In fact, the only reason for providing a paper copy of the book is that far too many folks will not even consider reading the electronic version.

If my frustration and loathing for this whole process is coming through then I'm glad; you'll have a sense of what it is like for me.  I have half a mind to forget about promoting the work and just write my novels for my own enjoyment.  Obviously no one cares if I write them or not so why should I try to move mountains?  But then why write them at all?

And I know why I am writing them:  so I can share them and entertain others.  But that task just got a lot harder.  In fact everything I'm doing got a lot harder.  Now I have to find time to do the production work for Book 1 while finishing Book 2.  I'll probably need to remake my whole web site for the both books and the series this time.  And I can't announce or promote all the new work until all the versions of the books are ready to go.  And all this just delays Book 3.

Delays, delays, delays.  That's all I'm dealing with.  Have I mentioned how much I hate waiting...?

Did someone pummel me or am I getting older?

I'm probably getting older.  But I feel like I've gotten 15 rounds with of boxing champ and loss.  Or maybe its just the end of the week thing.  I don't know.  It seems like life these days is resembles the climate of the planet, extreme highs and lows.  Highs in my case are lots of things to do all at once and lows are just the reverse, very slow times.  I think I prefer the latter because it lets me focus on my writing.

Just now I've got to get the dogs to the vet, have the car services, complete lots of yard work, clean up various messes of my own making to reclaim desk space, and resume clearing out the basement, while holding to my writing schedule.

You and I both know that's not likely that I'll do all that.  I'll hold my writing schedule and I may get to a few of those other things but most of the work will go undone.  I will be forcing myself to take a break in a few weeks so hopefully I'll be able clean up the yard, basement, and desk.  If not, there's Labor Day weekend, I suppose.

One change I've decided to make to reduce the mess and clutter in the future is accept all those 'Go paperless' links on the websites I use to pay my bills.  My reasoning is goes like this:  I track my expenses so I know when to pay my bills.  I don't need the extra paper (it is in fact stacked on one corner of my desk with my laptop on top of it.  I should be using my laptop as a paperweight).  I don't have time to fill all the bills away, which is what I used to do.  So going paperless makes sense.

My bank just forced me to go paperless to avoid $3 surcharges.  And I've been thinking about it seriously for a while.  So I'm going to take the plunge, slowly, one bill at a time and see how it works out.

I doubt I'll be able to go back but if I have a problem, but storing all the bills isn't working so hopefully this will be better.

Okay, looks like I'm out of time.  Back to work.

Imagine

I was watching a TV show the other day on chimps in the wild and comparing them to humans.  The show was asking the questions what qualities do humans possess that make them human?  One might think it is the ability to use tools, but it's not.  Chimps use tools.  And they can learn language so that's not it either.  The answer is: humans care about each other and about their environment, which chimps, or any other animal cannot.

That surprised me because I would have said it is our imagination that makes us human.  For me, the imagination and the ability to create something from it is the most human thing, humans do.  Personally, I can't imagine (no pun here) a life without my imagination.  I used to (and still try to) daydream where I let my mind go where it will.  Sometimes I end up in odd places that I like and sometimes I don't.  But even my failures, if you can call them that, are saved because I never know what I'll need for a story in the future.

But imagination by itself is not enough to write.  It has to be tempered and honed like a muscle.  You need experience to draw from and enough command of the language you are using not to embarrass yourself.  Reading helps with this more than anything else.

Specifically, you want to read in the genre you plan to write and you want to read the stories in that genre so you know what the masters of the genre have done already.  You want to read philosophy for ideas and debate of questions humans have tried to solve for centuries.  I also find well-written books on science (physics mostly) help to so you know how the world works and what new discoveries science is unlocking.  Lastly, books on history are great because you can learn how people lived in by-gone age.

If I could add one more category of book to read it would be books on writing.  I love to read the advice of John Gardner or Ray Bradbury or Stephen King on writing.  I review it now and again to keep me fresh.

But you have to write too.  And in the early stages it does not matter what you write about.  Write about what you have been reading, write about the bad day you've had, write about this one person who pisses you off because she sends unrealizable request by email and you don't have the heart to say no.

Then when you are sick of writing whatever pops into your head, do a little planning.  Think of a story line and a few characters.  Develop them.  Then repeat the process.  Share them with others, get feedback, revise, rewrite, and try again.

If you are brave and have no ego, try to have one published.  And keep writing and reading.

And above daydream and imagine.

In Requiem: Borders Bookstore

I'm not a big fan of many things, although some things touch me deeply and got to the very core of who I am.  I do, however, love book stores.  I love to browse and to find new things.  I love the smell of a new book.  I love to lose myself in a good story.

I suppose these all reasons I decided to pursue fiction writing one day.  I was hoping to talk a place on the bookshelf with well-known, lesser-known, and mostly unknown writers (put me in that last category, thank you).

But as you probably all know the book store, Borders, is no more, at least as a physical place to go.  Their website is still there and you order books from them, but it is not the same.  Worse still, as a CNET article noted, the loss of Borders means that it is will be harder for new writers (like me) to be discovered.

I read that and sighed.  This is not something I want to hear.  It may be true; but don't tell me.

Borders is the victim of changing trends in the publishing world and too much debt (that seems to be a trend these days).  They were going to file for Chapter 11, but they couldn't find a buyer so they decided to fold instead.

What a shame.  This leaves only Barnes and Noble left standing and some independent small stores.  If I take a very selfish view here that probably means my books will never be on the bookshelf of any store because I suspect CNET is right.  If I take a broader view, as to the value bookstores bring to society as a whole, I see we are diminished because bookstore serves as a social gathering place.  For Borders this was true.  It was a place to get coffee, read a little, and browse book, movies, and music.  We need such places to learn, socialize, and enjoy ourselves.

You might argue there are other places like this, and that's true, but most libraries are most like museums than places for social gatherings and the bookstores that are left will find it harder to keep going I think.  They may even take fewer risks, offer less variety.  None of that is good.

So let us mourn the loss of Borders and try to support remaining bookstores we have.

A Road Not Taken

I'm sitting here at my desk, where I do a lot of writing and letting my mind wander.  I suppose this is one reason I'm a writer.  I've been letting my mind drift since I was a boy.  Maybe someday it will drift back to me...

And as I sit here, I think about roads not taken.  I don't why I do this.  It is pointless really.  I can't change the past, I can only learn from it to change the future.

But here's a simple thought experiment: what if I had started writing seriously sooner than I did?  Would I be farther along toward my goal of being published?  I don't think so because delay, my procrastination, was necessary for me to have the ideas that lead to the initial plot of my novel in the first place.

Let's step back in time for a moment so I can explain this.  As a high school, I was big into thinking up ideas for stories but not big on execution.  I think the reasons for this are many:  most of the ideas were not very good; I had no writing tools (like word processing software) to assist me; I did not very the focus and discipline to do the writing.

All of these things resolved themselves in college.  My ideas got better, I got my first computer and word processing software, I learned how to stay focused on a piece of writing and ultimately learned how to compose at the keyboard.

But even after college, while I wanted to pursue a life of creative writing, I did not have a really good idea for a story.  There were bits and pieces of my fantasy world, random thoughts, sketches of some maps, but no plot, no characters, nothing that would let me take the reader from point A to point B.

What I lacked, as I discovered later, was life experience.  I needed to go out into the world and have some experiences traveling and working in other jobs to understand myself and people.  Oh sure, I studied psychology and different cultures in school.  But there is a fundamental difference between theory and application.  And so I needed to stop reading about people and places, and start experiencing them.

From these few years I learned much and so when I finally had the idea for my novel, I was ready to receive it and recognize it for what it was.  That's sent me off on the writing path I wanted.

William Wordsworth, the English Romantic poet, believed that art comes from experiences recollected when one is calm and passive.  I think I agree with that.  That seems to be what works for me.  So if I had taken a different road, I might not be blogging now or hammering out my second novel.  I might still be groping for a way to put words on the page.

This is a scary thought and a humbling one too.  And it sustains me when words will not come.