Tag Archives: writing

I am editing. Loose Dog.

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So I’ve got this novel, you see.

I love the concept. It’s a first person novel, narrated by a woman who is an animal control officer.

And she’s got problems.

Man problems, for starters. Her ex-fiance has shown back up in her life. And here, she thought she was completely over him.

Before you know it, she also ends up with dog problems — particularly when she stumbles on evidence of a dog fighting ring that is out of her official jurisdiction but very much on her conscience.

I first drafted Loose Dog several years ago. Shopped it to exactly one agent, who requested a full, but eventually passed on it.

I should probably have kept pushing, but instead I set it aside and wrote Libby, and a bit after that Can Job.

And you know what? That was the right decision. Because what that one agent told me is that Loose Dog was well-written but needed work on pacing. So I focused on improving my plotting, and as you can see from my Amazon reviews, plotting is one of the things readers like about my novels.

So now I’m back to Loose Dog, and my first New Year’s resolution for 2012 is to tweak it until I absolutely love it.

Get ready, world :-)

UPDATE: Out now…

Does this book teaser make me look . . . fat???

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A porcupine ate this sign.

A porcupine ate this sign.

So we indie authors lob tons of marketing advice at each other.

Let me know when someone answers the most important question of all:

Why is it harder to market yourself than somebody else?

Actually, now that I think about it . . . this may be just a variation on that other perplexing paradox: in general, it’s easier to solve other peoples’ problems than your own.

Ever notice that? You can tell when someone else’s relationship is a disaster waiting to happen. You know when somebody else should quit his/her soul-crushing job. It’s easy to tell when someone else’s self-destructive habits are out of control.

Meanwhile, someone dares to offer you some extremely good and  timely advice . . .

“Maybe you should dump the jerk” or

“Why don’t you just quit?” or

“Ya know, there are other foods besides Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey”

. . . and you bristle and snarl like a porcupine with PMS.

I can’t!

But how will I pay the bills?

Are you saying . . . I’m FAT?

camel

Why would anyone want to buy my camel?

Anyway. Those of you who noticed that my Can Job book description was pretty fugly: no worries. Because if you’d mentioned it, I wouldn’t have been able to fix it anyway.

But you were right. It was too much information, and not enough tease. I see that now.

So here’s the rev. Let’s see if it helps sells books . . .

They’re launching a product that will save the company.

At the biggest trade show in the universe.

Their careers are at stake.

Heck, the future of the entire CITY is at stake.

Then they discover that the product doesn’t actually exist . . .

I disagree. Social media is a MUST for writers.

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how important is website traffic to writers?

Fiction writers face peculiar challenges when it comes to generating search engine traffic.

Sabine Reed, in a guest post on published here [UPDATE: link no longer any good], tackles a topic of perennial interest to writers: how much time should we spend on social media?

It’s a good question and her answer is a thoughtful one, but I don’t think it goes far enough.

Sabine makes the following, very valid, points:

1. Google is by far the biggest source of online traffic. She points to this study, which notes that

social media sites do not drive traffic like content sites and search engines do, and it’s not even close. That means that, while all those retweets are nice to see, apparently, few people are clicking the actual link embedded within the tweeted message.

2. Writers need to generate saleable content. The corollary being: if you’re wasting hours a day on Twitter, you’re not writing your novel. And yes, that’s a problem.

But while I agree on both of those points, I don’t think they tell the whole story.

So let’s look at the problem a bit more closely — and tell me if you think I’ve missed anything here!

Yes, Content is King

As Sabine also mentions, the not-so-secret secret about driving Google traffic is to publish good content.

But what is “good content”?

It is text that Google’s bots determine to be

  • Relevant and
  • Authoritative

Relevance = keywords. Authoritative = linked.

This is a relatively straightforward problem if you are operating in the world of non-fiction.

Say I want to promote my dog books. All I have to do is write articles and blog posts about dogs, and dog training, and adopting a companion dog. There’s my keyword-laced content that all relates to dogs.*

I also network with other people publishing articles about dogs, and over time they link to my blog, which gives me authority.

This isn’t difficult to do, especially if you’re working in subject areas that are relatively narrow and don’t have  a lot of competition. I’ve done it lots of times, both on my own blog and for other peoples’ blogs.

But when it comes to fiction, what keywords are you going to use?

If someone hasn’t read my novel Can Job, then it doesn’t matter if I write 500 articles about Borschtchester, New York, or Miles Chacuderie, or the DipTych Digital Division of DipTych Corporation.

Nobody’s going to Google those terms, because they are all made up.

Now if you write genre, you may be able to get around this. It’s arguable that there are sets of keywords specific to certain genres that you could use as Google bait. Publish 500 articles about dragons and wizards and fairies, and you could find your blog generating traffic from people who want to read about dragons and wizards and fairies.

Lucky you.

Me, I’m not so lucky. Even my book about fairies isn’t really a paranormal so much as a romantic comedy with a paranormal twist.

So what about links?

It’s a funny thing, but links without focused content aren’t really useful from a search engine perspective.

Example. The New York Times has published articles about dogs. (“Asymmetric tail-wagging responses by dogs to different emotive stimuli,” anyone?) And The New York Times gets linked by bloggers, at the rate of probably a zillion links per nanosecond.

But type “dogs” into Google and The New York Times does not get top ranking.

Links without focused content aren’t an effective way to generate high visibility via search engine rank.

So although Sabine makes valid points, I think we need to re-frame the issue.

Social media is not about generating website traffic.

For writers . . .

Social Media is About Long-Term Word-Of-Mouth, Not Short-Term Traffic

That statement would give the heebie jeebies to your average SEO professional.

Your average SEO professional focuses on driving website traffic. He/she has to. When your goal is to get people to spend  money, website traffic is critical. It’s a critical link in the process of online lead generation and/or sales.

your readers are waiting

Your audience is out there — and chances are they’ll find you by word-of-mouth.

But as a novelist, I don’t care as much about traffic as about something more nebulous.

I’ve actually been wrestling with what to call it. It has aspects of “visibility” and “brand” and “platform.”

But ultimately what I need to do is generate word-of-mouth referrals.

And the way to do that is to be available when people want to connect — specifically, people who love books.

In fact, this relates to another point Sabine makes in her post:

Writers should write. The more books you have out there, the greater the number of people who will find out about you.

She notes that JA Konrath, among others, reiterate this point all the time.

But why does it work?

Word of mouth.

Write a great novel, and people talk about it. They recommend it. They publish positive reviews about it. And when they do, other people buy copies. And those people recommend it. And so on.

Which is where social media comes in.

Social Media Augments This Process

Social media can act as an amplifier.

Savvy writers know this. Watch them. They’re not tweeting to get people to go to their websites. They’re tweeting to start conversations about their books.

Yes, you need to strike a balance. You have to be conscious that time you spend on social media is time you aren’t spending on generating saleable content — novels or short stories.

But IMO it’s not accurate to say that Amanda Hocking’s success is based on the fact that she wrote a lot of books instead of doing any promotion. To quote Hocking herself: “The amount of time and energy I put into marketing is exhausting.”

So not only has Hocking invested her time in marketing, her success  can be directly attributed to social media — specifically, to word-of-mouth about her writing, which was spread and amplified via social media.

My advice, then?

Writers need blogs. They need Twitter accounts. The need to be on Facebook and probably a bunch of other sites like GoodReads.

And they need to invest time in connecting with people on all of those platforms.

What do you think?

a NaNoWriMo debrief

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So I “finished” my NaNoWriMo project — working title, Dr. Forst — on Sunday. That’s three days early, for anybody who’s paying attention.

Notice I’m not calling it a novel — I’m calling it a project.

Because what I have now on my hard drive is not a novel by any stretch.

I’m very glad I participated. There are a lot of things about writing a novel that are pretty intimidating, of course, but one of the biggies is the sheer volume of words required. Starting a novel feels a bit like standing at the foot of an impossibly high, impossibly steep mountain, and wondering how the hell you’re ever going to get to the top. And of course, the answer is “one step at a time,” but you also know that a lot can go wrong on the way, including spectacular falls from precipitous heights ;-)

Participating in NaNoWriMo forces you to push through that anxiety. And then, 30 or so days later, you’re at the top of the mountain and you realize: hey. It really wasn’t that hard.

That’s the kind of experience that you internalize even if you don’t do anything else.

And I’ve got proof. As I neared the last few thousand words of Dr. Forst, I found myself suddenly thinking of another novel I’ve drafted, Loose Dog. I like the book, but it needs a major edit. And I’ve been putting that off because the job seemed so enormous.

Hey, that doesn’t look too bad from here . . .

Now, all at once, the job doesn’t look so huge. I’m excited. I’m going to start working on it as soon as I catch up on a few other non-NaNo responsibilities.

I have some other thoughts on the benefits of NaNoWriMo which I’ll share at some point (about 4,500 words’ worth! A longish essay :-))

But part of what I also learned is that NaNoing isn’t 100 percent compatible with the way I, personally, need to write fiction.

As a result, the output I’ve generated this month is a bit of a mess.

Now granted, I haven’t gone back and read it over, and yes, I know there is probably some decent writing in there, and probably plenty of salvageable bits.

But pushing to get to 50K in 30 days just didn’t give me the gestation time I needed to solve certain problems that came up as I wrote.

And these are structural problems. This may be the height of folly, but with Dr. Forst I am trying to combine a golf novel (whatever that is) with a loose retelling of Faust (as you may have guessed from the title) (hey, I know lots of golfers who would do a little deal, wink wink nudge nudge, in exchange for a single digit handicap!) with a lightly satirical whodunnit.

I have no idea if I can pull together such a hodgepodge into a cohesive story.

But I do know that I can’t pull it together in a month.

There just wasn’t enough time for the bits of my mind that connect things together to discover and bridge the connections.

So instead of a novel, I have a . . . a kind of jackalope.

Or, say: a jackalope so poorly stitched together that it’s not going to fool anybody.

I also suspect that the voice/tone of the novel changes in the course of the book — which is partly a symptom of the same issue, but is also a result of the NaNo process. Usually, when I am writing a novel, I go back through what I’ve already written from time to time. This helps keep the voice consistent. I couldn’t afford that luxury with Dr. Forst, and I suspect the book suffers for it.

So will I ever do NaNo again?

Maybe.

But what I really hope I do is to retain the feel of constant production that the NaNoWriMo process instills.

I have my eye on a certain other mountain.

I don’t necessarily need to climb it in 30 days.

But I’ve noticed it looks a lot less steep than it did before . . .

Advice to writers who want to do humorous fiction. 1975 interview with P.G. Wodehouse

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1975 interview with P.G. Wodehouse

I adore Wodehouse.

I appreciate serious novels, of course. I love novels that tackle Big Questions, and when they’re well-written I find them transporting.

But I also adore humorous fiction, and Wodehouse is by far my favorite humorous fiction author. It’s partly the language — I’m a total Anglophile — and perhaps it’s also that we’ve got those Butterfields and Lydiards in the family tree but I so appreciate the English sense of humor as well.

No surprise, then, that I view him as a writer to emulate — so much so that when I was starting my novel Can Job, I spent some time studying the Wodehouse novel Leave It to Psmith to understand how he put novels together.

I did thing like count how many characters he uses, and created an outline of his plot to see how he handled pacing.

Learn from the best, right?

Now I discover this gem: an article online where Wodehouse passes along some tips for writers!

They are fantastic tips as well. Here’s a taste:

[A]lways get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a great slab of prose at the start. I think the success of every novel – if it’s a novel of action – depends on the high spots. The thing to do is to say to yourself, “What are my big scenes?” and then get every drop of juice out of them.

He also says this, in answer to a question about what makes a story funny:

I don’t think a man can deliberately sit down to write a funny story unless he has got a sort of slant on life that leads to funny stories. If you take life fairly easily, then you take a humorous view of things.

All in all a delightful little read. Many thanks to Abe Books for putting it online!

NaNoWriMo is here!!!

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Set my alarm for 5 a.m. cuz if I don’t make extra time for this in the morning no way am I going to keep up :-)

Here’s my opening sentence. YES it’s rough — it’s supposed to be! But I don’t care, I’m so excited :-)

Most suppose golf is about life, not death—it is, after all, supremely difficult to manage a golf shot while dead—but death had been very much on the minds of the members of Crumbling Bluffs County Club the past few weeks, ever since Sly Burbank’s body had been found off to the side of the 4th fairway. And it was on their minds that night in particular, because they’d learned, that night, the results from the coroner’s inquest.

NaNo on, dudes!!!!!!!!!!

NaNoWriMo, or: Just because it’s stupid doesn’t mean I’m not going to try it

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National Novel Writing Month!

Fifty thousand words in 30 days. Because what could possibly go wrong?

Just because it’s stupid doesn’t mean I’m not going to try it

If you’re a writer . . .

Or have even thought about being a writer . . .

And have spent any time at all kicking around the Interwebs over the past several years . . .

You’ve probably stumbled across this: the phenom known affectionately as NoWriMo.

National Novel Writing Month!

It’s a movement. It’s a website. It’s a community.

It’s a way to invite public shame if you fail to crank out 50,000 words in 30 days.

I tried NaNoWriMo once before — in 2006. I lasted five days. Posted my progress each day on this blog ’til my effort met its early and ignoble end.

I have a new strategy, this year.

You’re allowed to lay some groundwork — an outline, for example — before you get started.

As it happens, I don’t find outlines helpful for writing fiction. Either the outline has to be so complete that it is basically the entire novel, or it has big gaps — and big gaps are the enemy of NaNoWriMo success, at least for me, because that’s what slows me down: I hit a gap and don’t know how to fill it and freeze.

So I’m going to try something different.

I’m going to pre-create a bunch of characters. (Already started, little buggers are wandering around in my head like they own the place.)

I’m going to create a handful of predestined events. (Got some of those already in place, too. I know there’s going to be a guy dead on a golf course — maybe it was an accident, maybe not. I know there’s going to be a member-guest golf tournament. I know there’s going to be people who fall in love ;-). And I know there’s going to be a winning lottery ticket. At least, there will be someone who think it’s a winning ticket — only he can’t remember where he put it. Think “where the heck did I put my car keys?” only a tad more urgent.)

And then, on November 1, I’m going to turn the characters loose and report what happens to them as they knock into those events and each other.

So we’ll see. Perhaps I’ll last only five days again . . .

But maybe I’ll be a bit more successful this time.

So how about you? Have you ever tried NaNoWriMo? If not, why not? And if yes, how did it go?

#Fridayflash. I Tripped . . .

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I tripped over the broomstick — YES I knew it was there. Quit interrupting, please.

It always falls out of the broom closet. The broom closet is too damned jammed full. Everything in my life is too damned jammed full. Especially my closets. Would you like an inventory of my broom closet? The vacuum cleaner, the mop, the bucket, the steamer, the rag bag. All expected. But wait! There’s more! Bag of sidewalk salt. Old school backpack. Plastic jug of distilled water. The ex’s shortwave radio (!!!!)

Nothing fits. Things spill out all the time, do you think I don’t know what’s going on? This is Chaos herself — Khaos! Respect her! She can’t be stuffed in a closet you know!

So the broom spilled out, I don’t know when, maybe the kids needed something from the closet this morning — the handle spilt across the doorway to the mud room, I was hurrying back from the bus stop, late for work, tripped, coffee all over.

I was flying for a moment, floating.

It seemed like a very long moment.

But that’s an illusion, a trick the mind plays — and why? To divert your attention? You’re about to get the bruising of your life, your floating is about to meets its bruising end on the hard, hard floor.

Don’t think about it yet don’t think about it yet . . .

I called Derrick afterwards, of course, and he could tell I was crying — I shouldn’t have called — one of those girlie things we do and shouldn’t because what was there to fix?

Nothing. Nothing. The fixing maybe could have happened yesterday, by cleaning out the closet, I suppose.

But he came over anyway, and drove me to work . . .

So I take it back, actually, now that I think it over again. Because I realized after he kissed me and I got out of the car and ran up to the glass doors and through and flashed my ID at the security guard:

“He drove me to work . . . he’ll pick me up after work.”

So maybe the little breaks our mind gives us are not the breaks but the thing itself. Like those optical illusions.

Is it a picture of two ladies’ profiles or a vase?

He’ll pick me up after work. Maybe we’ll grab a bite to eat. Maybe I’ll ask him about his day.

Maybe tripping over a broom handle isn’t the accident so much as the start of the floating . . .

Is that even possible, I wonder?

I wonder . . .

Teaser Tuesdays . . . and omg I’m a such a lit nerd

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So the idea is you turn to a random page in the book you’re reading, and pick out two sentences, and post them.

I thought I’d play along, only I just started reading Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal. So my teaser sentences are . . .  135 words long. And has a loooot of commas. LOL

I’m such a lit dork :-)

The beautiful idea of dying near the object of one’s love, expressed in a hundred different forms, was followed by a sonnet, which set forth that the soul, parted after hideous torments from the weak body which it had inhabited for the past three-and-twenty years, and impelled by that instinctive desire for happiness natural to everything which has had life, would not, even if the great Judge granted pardon for all its sins, betake itself to heaven, to join the angelic choir, the moment it obtained its freedom; but that, more happy after death than it had been in life, it would join itself to its earthly love, within a few paces of the prison in which it groaned so long. “Thus,” ran the last line of the sonnet, “I shall have found my paradise on earth.”