What am I Doing Wrong?

With this blog a little over a year old now, I thought I'd evaluate if it is being effective and achieving the goals I set out when I started the thing.  For those who may not have read the early posts, I started this blog to help promote myself, gather an audience, and ultimately help sell the books I am writing.

In reviewing the last year, I think it is clear that I have gathered an audience.  It is bigger than the people who have subscribed because I hear from people about various posts who are not on the subscription lists.  To this people I would ask to take a few minutes to formally subscribe.  It will help gauge the size of my audience.

And since I now seem to have an audience, I have achieved the goal of promoting myself.  The blog goes out to Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, Goodreads, and some other sites I don't recall.  I've also posted links in Delicious, Digg, and Stumbleupon, I believe.  All in the effort to get the blog and myself noticed.

The part that seems to have fallen flat is the selling of books.  I'll be the first to admit that I am not actively promoting my novel at the moment because I am waiting to hear back from the publisher I sent it to.  So let's put that part aside for the moment.

The part I want to focus on is that blogging equal sales.  That seems not to be true, unless I'm doing something wrong.  And that may be.  If anyone sees the error, please let me know.  But I think one reason for the disconnect is the audience for the blog is not the audience for the novel.

To correct that, it occurred to me that I might want to start a second blog (God help me!) to attract the audience of the novel.  This blog would focus on the characters from my novels, relate the history of my fantasy world, and describe different places and magic items. A Facebook friend of mine does something similar to this by writing mini-stories with the characters from her novels.

I figure it is worth a try.  However, I would like the opinions of others.  Let me know what you think.  Thanks.

Summer is Here

I know summer is here when...

• my air conditioners run all day and my electronic bill is over $100

• a tick from my tree lands on me and I have to flush it down the toilet.

• all the flowers in my garden are done blooming and now all I have is weeds.

• I can film the sunset going down over Boston from the boat that goes to the airport.

• I eat too much over the weekend and regret the next day.

• I start pulling up weeds from the cracked in the pavement.

And yet even as I write this, thinking about summer, an electrician is hooking up heating cables in the gutters of my house as I prepare for winter.

But I really don't have many good things to say about summer.  The heat and the humidity are things I can live without.  There's more hours of daylight, I suppose that's good, unless you like to stargaze.

I think what I dislike most about summer, though, is it gives false hope.  It tricks you into thinking that everyday will be warm and bright and nice.  If you live in the northern half of the country, you know that's not true.  The cold is round the corner.  At least in the spring and the fall, days are balanced and varied, which is more like life.  Sometimes it's a good day and sometimes not.  There's light and darkness.  Warmth and cold.  With summer you get none of that, particularly during a heat wave.  The days just stretch on in unvaried, unending order.   I need more variety than that.  Maybe that's why I like to see thunder and hail, it breaks up the monotony.

And of course there's yard work.  Lots and lots of yard work.  Grass to mow; bushes and tree to trim.  Weeds to pull.  Seems like I've got more weeds than anything these days.

But I'm managing.  The second novel progresses slowly because of interruptions from other sources.  Perhaps I should weed out the interruptions next.  Now there's an idea...

Editing with an iPad

As I mentioned in my last post, I tried to work a new revision process, one that let me edit away from my computer.  I wanted this because I find I edit better when reading in a more relaxed venue.  For example, I've lots of errors in text when reading from my Kindle.  I wanted to replicate that for myself during the writing/revision process.

I could have converted my draft to the Kindle, of course, but I'd have no way to edit the text directly.  The Kindle only lets you leave notes so that's like adding comments to a Word or PDF file.  That was not what I was looking for.

I decided I needed a tablet with an app that let me edit my text and the iPad seemed like the logical choice since I work on a Macintosh computer regularly.  The trouble I had was find an app to do the job.  Ultimately, after discarding the notion I would save my story in RTF format, I settled on QuickOffice.

I chose that app because I had used it before on my old PDA and had experience with it.  I also chose it because it could save text in Word format and after discard RTF as my preferred format to work in, Word is the next logical format to use.

Using QuickOffice is easy and editing the text is straightforward but clunky.  This is not because of the app.  This is because of the iPad.  I am so used to having fine control for cursor placement with my mouse, that on the iPad, I really don't.  This is why I think all touch interfaces should use a pen or stylus like my old PDA.

The other odd thing is the auto complete feature is very strange.  Sometimes it works and sometimes it is a place in the ass, introducing errors.  I introduce enough errors of my own when I type, I don't need the machine adding to it when I get it right the first time.

Typing at the keyboard is different too.  A hard press on the keys isn't needed creating more typos than normal.  I also find I can't always type with two hands because certain keystrokes are being missed.  That has everything to do with how I hold my hands and pressure I use.

So it is a different model and the shift it like the one we went through when mice and GUIs were introduced to the computing world in the 1980s.  Still, I think tables may replace laptops because content creation apps are available and more will be coming.  And since tablets are smaller and easier to carry, why use a laptop?  All the tablets need is a port so I can plug in a real keyboard.  Of course if they do that, I can probably go back to using a mouse since most keyboards provide a port for a mouse.

Regardless, I think tablets are another tool in the writer's arsenal and should be used to their fullest advantage.

Revision Process

I've completed a second pass on my second novel.  As soon as I did this, I realized I needed to read through it and start revising for a finished product.

The thought of printing the whole thing and marking it up seemed too daunting.  I didn't want to use all that paper or ink that would be required so I decided to look for another solution.

I have been wanting a way to revise stories away from my keyboard.  A tablet seemed like a good way to go.  That's when I decided to get an iPad and find an app to edit my stories.

Finding the app was the hard part.  My authoring program, Scrivener, syncs with mobile devices but only supports two flavors of text:  plain text and RTF.  I need RTF to preserve the formatting of the stories.  But there is no app that I can find to that edits RTF without showing all the RTF codes.

So I was forced to rely on exporting to Word format and editing my chapters that way.  This is less than ideal because when I bring the files back into Scrivener they are converted back to RTF so I have to check the format and apply styles as appropriate.

This is not the workflow I wanted, but it is what I've got to live with for now.  The technology just isn't there for RTF files. 

But here's the ironic part:  once I did all this for the first ten chapters of the novel, I decided I needed to print them out and copy edit them anyway.  I even got out my red pencil, which I've not used since I was 10.

So much for the hi-tech solution.  I should have known better.  Very often low-tech beats hi-tech and that is certain true here.  Sort of making me feel like the silly rabbit in the Trix commercials.

The Writer's Curse

The curse of most writers (and certainly all writers when they first start practicing their craft) is that they write without knowing how their work is received.  Once a story or poem or even a blog post goes out into the world, it has its own life separate from the person who wrote it.  This is much like what happens when a child leaves home to make his or her way in the world.

For me, this is very true because I almost never get feedback so I never know if my writing is achieving the effect I am seeking.  This is very unfortunate because more than anything else, I crave that feedback.  If you've read the early posts in this blog, you'll know that I believe writing is for sharing.  It is only when the words are read and have an effect that the circuit is complete and the mission accomplished.  The effect might not be the one I want -- the reader may hate my work -- but any effect means I'm done.  If I'm lucky, the reader likes my story and if I'm really lucky I get feedback.  And that is the moment I want, not frame or riches or anything else; I just want to connect to my readers and share my ideas.

And I'm not looking for validation either.  If someone doesn't like my story, fine; that's their opinion.  But if the reader does enjoy it, so much the better.  Then I've happy because I am trying to entertain with my stories so I want people to enjoy them.

I say all this because I discovered two mentions on Twitter the other day.  One person liked the blog which made me quite happy to hear.  I don't think this person is subscribed to my blog directly, I think he picks it up through the automatic Twitter repost I set up, which reinenforces my point.  The blog is out there and anyone can find it and read it and enjoy it.  The lesson for me is to check Twitter more often.

The other mention was someone checking out my novel.  I wish I had seen that back in Decemeber when the tweet was posted.  But again the book is having a life separate from mine, so no harm done.

In both cases I tweeted back to these folks expressing thanks and my hope that they enjoyed the work.  In both cases I got no reply back (not that I was expecting one).

And so life continues.  Work on Book 2 progresses.  I wait patiently for word about the revised novel from the publisher.  And I look for feedback on my work, hoping to hear something.  The silence is definitely deafening.