S.M. Butler's Blog, page 28

it’s been a really weird month for me. I ran about five weeks behind my own timeline for Heart and Snow (which will be available in late November). I learned a lot about making obtainable goals for myself. I tend to push myself a lot, and make demands of myself as if I weren’t entirely human. It’s really hard for me to admit that, and I’m not sure that I 100% believe that I can’t hit these unobtainable goals.

So what did I do this month?

I finished revisions and edits and proofing on a book.
I formatted said book and sent book off to the distributor.
I started a new book.
I made steps toward a new writer’s community (that will be coming soon…)

And that’s just writing. For non-writing:

I also lost 9 lbs for the month.
I got back into a workout routine.
I read books for pleasure, and not for research or because I had to.
I made pre-made covers for my newly redesigned graphic design business.
I caught up on most of my TV shows.

I think it’s important when you don’t make your goals to stop and think about what you have accomplished, in addition to what you haven’t. I didn’t finish a crit that I’m supposed to finish. I was late on a book cover for a client. I haven’t done receipts for taxes in two months. I still haven’t mailed those contest prizes…

I’m the type of person that tends to harp on what I haven’t done rather than what I have. So today, I think that everyone should sit down and make a list of all their accomplishments for the month today. For the year. We’re heading into the holiday season. Time will be getting sparse, and we’ll all start running around trying to get things done last minute. So do yourself a favor, and take the time to acknowledge what you have done, and not worry so much about what you haven’t done.

 

I never review here on the blog. It’s never been the purpose of my little space here. But I read a book recently, and no one I know has read this book, so I didn’t have anyone to squee over it with. So I thought I would squee a little here. Because this book I read is really freaking good.

It’s strange how things affect you, when you don’t think that they would. I have a very particular brand of books that I like, and recently, I stepped out of my little world and picked up Carter Reed by Tijan.

I have a hard time with some books out there right now because I’m really afraid of being burned or the subject matter might be a trigger for me. I was, after reading the blurb, intrigued, but still a little iffy on certain elements of the book. Rape is one of those triggers for me, so I read the sample, you know, so I would know before I bought it if I should read it. By habit, I don’t read the reviews. I might glance at the stars, but in general, it’s not a purchasing factor for me.

And then I one-clicked.

Because the sample was intense, and fascinating, and luckily, not triggering. I’m a binge reader, so I went through this book in a few hours. But i think even if i weren’t a binge reader, I would have binged it anyway.

It’s gorgeous. And I wanted to share that. I’m not a reviewer. Just really loved the book. Of course there were some moments when I wondered how plausible it was, but in the end, it was awesome and I loved it. And I wanted to share that, because like I said, NO ONE I know has read this book, and they really should.

I keep looking at the other books by this author, and wondering if I should read them, but I haven’t picked them up yet. I’m still having cold feet about it, afraid that they might not be as awesome as this one is. I’ll probably break down and buy more from Tijan, but i think I’m going to let this one percolate in my brain a while first.

How about you guys? Ever read a book that just blew you away that you didn’t think would?

I know. Three posts in a week’s time. This might be some kind of record for me, but I’ve had a lot to say this week, I guess.

I’ve been sitting on this post for three days now, since the big kerfluffle at WH Smith and Kobo blew up. I keep debating on whether I should post it or not, because it does have a controversial subject, and I try to refrain from those subjects. It is the equivalent of politics in the publishing world. But I’m going to post it anyway, and I would hope that anyone who decides to comment, whether in favor of what I say or against, will remember to remain civil and mature in their responses.

I’ve been doing a lot of watching of this issue, reading, and absorbing. I want to make sure I have all the facts before I give my opinion.

And now I feel like I do, and I’ve pretty much solidified how I feel about this whole thing.

Authors have a right to write whatever they want.

It’s true. We do. We have that right. This is one of the glorious things about self-publishing as well, because now we can sell what we want. And all these book stores that have opened up their doors to independent authors? That’s fantastic. But there’s something else…

Bookstores have the right to sell whatever they want to.

This is also true. They have that right. They can say, “Yes, we will sell this book over here, but we don’t want this book over there.” This is not censorship. This is not bullying. This is a business decision by a company to do what is best for their business. Much like when an author decides to write under a pen name, or decides not to write any more books in a failing series. We have a right to end that series, and bookstores have a right to not sell our books, especially if it isn’t in line with what they sell or what they think will make them money or improve their image.

Bookstores are like restaurants.

So, let’s say you’re eating at a restaurant, and suddenly, a cockroach crawls across your plate. Or a rat. Are you going to eat there again? How is the restaurant going to deal with that? You tell some people about your experience, and then one thing leads to another, and the local paper is running your story about the restaurant that has rats. And if that restaurant keeps functioning with a rat problem, who’s going to keep coming back?

That restaurant’s gotta shut down to take care of the problem.

They have to deploy traps and put poison down. It’s the same with bookstores. Right now, WH Smith and Kobo are scrambling to kill the rats. They’ve quarantined as much as they could, and they realize that not all the books are rats. But they have to grab as much as they can in one fell swoop and then they can sift through to find the rats, and release the rest of the books. Sadly, this means that many authors’ books are offline on Kobo. Some, in the last few days, have already started coming back. Patience is where it’s at now. Which is hard, when you’re losing money by your product not being there, but that’s the name of the retail game.

It’s not censorship.

Most traditional publishers have guidelines. Even the biggest digital first publishers do not allow bestiality, rape for titillation, or incest in their catalog. But with the rise of self-publishing, many are not going through gatekeepers, like publishers and editors. For some, it has been liberating. Authors who have been told historical romances are dead have found an audience. New adult writers have found themselves somewhere to fit in. Unfortunately, with the awesome comes the awful.

People write things like bestiality or rape or incest (or pseudo-incest) and make bank, because for the first time, retailers gave them an audience. But the thing is… they shouldn’t have been given that audience. These guidelines are in place at publishers because they are illegal material in many areas of the world. By writing them, porn writers have unwittingly put retailers at risk of breaking laws in certain countries. Hence the swift, overarching removal of as many books as they could. Better to err on the side of caution than to get sued by the government and risk criminal charges.

The actions of the few affect the many.

The truth is that many people who write things like this don’t actually care about rules. They don’t want guidelines and scream “censorship!” or “bullying!” whenever they don’t get their way. They get their books sent back to draft status because they violate the TOS on the retailer’s site, but they change the cover or the blurb and send that back into the world with very little changed. They play with the filters and push the envelope to see how far they can go. This is a very small group of authors, but it’s enough to cause issues.

So, the restaurant shuts down.

This, in effect, means that everyone has to pay the price of the restaurant shutting down. Not just authors. Not just the patrons of the restaurant. But the waitresses, the cooks, the managers. The retailers, the authors, the publishers, the readers… We all get hurt by this when the actions of the few affect the many.

Publishing is a business.

These businesses are entitled to sell what they want, but even they have to deal with the outcry, and yes, these businesses might have a moral code that suggests that “hey, these books don’t fit in our moral code.”

Boycotting these retailers won’t help your cause. They discovered a flaw in their system, very publicly, and are working to correct it. Give them the time to do so. Let them fix their search engines and filters. They aren’t out to destroy authors and create an age of censorship. They are trying to correct a mistake, and sometimes, things get worse before they get better.

You should see me when I’m cleaning. It gets far more messy before it finally gets better. I imagine the same thing happens to others, too.

I saw this video and just about died. It might be one of the best things I’ve seen this year.

Seriously.

Watch it. The expression on the dude’s face makes it all worth it.

 

I’ve always considered myself a pantser when it came to writing. Until this year, when I dug out some old notebooks and discovered a crap ton of old outlines and manuscripts. Apparently, when i first started writing, I was an outliner. And the books that I wrote back then, are solid, story-wise, if not a little amateurly written. I don’t mean that in a bad way. Simply in a newbie-writer sort of way.

Image from Big Stock

So I decided to try writing with a  vague road map and see if it helps with the revision process later. Because normally, I write off the top of my head, with no plan other than I know the ending that I want. And usually, I end up rewriting more than half the book and edits take three times as long as it took to write. I wanted to cut that time back, be more efficient with the time I have.

I did the roadmap with H&S and so far, with the exception of a subplot I forgot to write in, it’s been a much smoother editing process. Of course, I’m totally procrastinating the edits right now, so I’m here talking about my writing process. I’m pretty sure I’ve talked about it in the past but it’s always changing, always evolving.

I fell in love with the 7 Point Story Structure that Dan Wells yanked from a Star Trek RPG manual. For a novel, it’s ridiculously broad and overarching, and it’s perfect for me. Detailed outlines give me the heebie-jeebies. It’s essentially a road map for the whole book.

Now something I started doing after I read 2k to 10k by Rachel Aaron is writing a quick and dirty synopsis of what I want to happen in what I write that day.  It’s only about a paragraph or two for each scene, and it might have dialogue, action, maybe some points where I need to have some important feeling.  But it’s basically a bare bones outline of that day’s writing. And having that map was invaluable.

So, new process is working. I think I’ll keep it for now. Here’s a quick overview.

Now I start with a blurb, like back cover copy, and the two main characters’ names and conflicts, if it’s a romance. If it’s not, then it’s the MC and the antagonist of the story and how they fit together and conflict with each other. I refer to that a lot during the writing, because it reminds me of why I was excited about the story.
Next, I figure out my ending, and then the beginning, and my midpoint. I usually do this on my dry erase board so I can draw circles and arrows and make a big mess that I can eventually erase. Once I know those, the other four points tend to fall into place on their own.
By the time I’ve filled out all these things, I’m pretty sure of myself, and can probably start writing right then. Now if a timeline is going to play into this heavily, like it did for Heart and Snow, then I’ll have to figure out how the plot happens by day/week/month, however it needs to happen.

That’s pretty much all I do. Sometimes, I will do more. But always, there’s at least this much. Once I start writing, I do the daily synopsis before I start writing for the day. Sometimes it’s a freewrite of what I want to happen. Sometimes, it’s a bullet list. But that extra step has helped me work through all kinds of problems that I might not have caught if I didn’t do it.

Sometimes the roap map changes too. I’ll find an alternate route. But I’ve found that my stories have been stronger since i started. So I suppose that I’m kind of a hybrid. I still consider myself a panster, or discovery writer, but now I have this plan laid out that gives me at least an idea of where I’m driving to.

So that’s me. What is your process like?

 

 

You know what’s really bad? When you have a week’s worth of posts in draft, but none of them are finished or published on the blog. That’s where I’m at. I have a ton of posts I started writing, and then I got distracted or wandered off. Some of them I should just delete, I guess.

Anyway, so how’s everyone doing?

I’ve been in the Writer Bat Cave for the last couple weeks, trying to get Heart and Snow done. I’m on to edits now, and hopefully should have that done within the week. Then it’ll go on to the proofreading stage. But while it’s at the proofreading stage, I’m going to be sending out ARCs to bloggers. If any of my blogger friends are interested in reviewing Heart and Snow, please put your name down on the list here.

Oh, and I’ve been showing it off on Facebook and Twitter, and discreetly put up pages on the site here, but here’s the cover for Heart and Snow.

Iz pretty, yes?

For ROW80

For those that don’t know, ROW80 is an 80 day challenge to get stuff done while tackling real life things. It’s for people with a life that can’t be put on hold. I’ve slacked off updating for a couple weeks, but that was mainly because I was busy writing.

So the goals for this week’s ROW80?

Finish H&S Edits
Format H&S
Send out ARCs for H&S
Work on NaNoWriMo project.

That last one. NaNoWriMo is coming in November. I have two sets of ideas I want to write. I’m not sure which will happen. They’re both novella series. But I’m in the planning stages for both, and will be working on getting those fleshed out before Go Time on NaNo.

Lastly, I’m starting work on a redesign of the site. It’s running pretty slow right now, and there’s a lot of stuff on this site that can probably be pared away. So that’s the plan. There may be some down time here and there while I’m working on the back end of things here. Not much, and hopefully not at all, but I feel I should say that, since I tend to break things before I fix them.

And that’s all for me.

How’s everyone else’s ROW80 going? And who loves my cover pretty as much as I do???

It’s been a rough few weeks. Seems like I’m always starting the blog posts that way. Well, this is probably the last time for a while. The rough waters seem to be passing for now.

This week I got back into the swing of writing. We all have those moments in our lives where we just have to stop and breathe. This has been my week to stop and breathe. I rededicated my time to  writing that was previously allocated to school. I took my old writing time, and decided to read… for fun.

Seriously. I looked at my Goodreads shelves the other day. I have read a dismal 6 books this year. Three years ago, I read over 300. It’s weird to see that number dwindle over the last few years. And I think that my writing has suffered for it. I probably will still try to keep those books to something that isn’t similar to the book I’m writing, but I really feel like I need to read more and get my writing fuel tank topped back up. And I was looking for my writing fuel post I did years ago just now, so I could link to that, and I think that was on my old blog. I need to dig that up again. I have all the posts somewhere, even though the blog is no more.

Anyway… So today’s the ROW80 update and I have no idea where I was when last we updated. And I’m too lazy to go look up the last post. So, new goals.

I’m really close to being done with Heart and Snow, which will give me about 6 weeks to get it edited, critiqued, edited some more, beta read, and then edited again. I’m cutting the wire close. Sigh. But I finally have a groove on this story. I figured out why I had an issue with it, and how to fix it, and I no longer want to punch the book in the junk.

I also have been working on my new design site, since I completely rebranded my design company, and I already have a few clients I need to take care of in that arena too. So that’s most of today and tomorrow that I’m doing that, and getting that out of the way.

The plan for the week:

Finish Heart and Snow (or get pretty darn close to it)
Finish two book covers for clients and three pre-mades for the new design site.

And that’s me. Nice and easy. How’s everyone else’s ROW80 going?

This has been a really difficult month, as far as stress and time go. But this past THursday, I had my last class. I turned in the files for my portfolio, and I’m done. Graduated. Hello, graphic design degree.

It’s been a crazy ride, and in the middle of it, I’ve been trying to get the Christmas book written and edited and ready to go to alpha readers.

Yeah, I failed miserably on that.

So, after classes and stuff all week, I took Friday and Saturday off from any obligations and just rested. Sunday, I tackled the new design website, and got that mostly presentable. Today, I got back to work on Heart and Snow. I redrafted the plot points, and I went back through what I wrote and figured out what needed to stay and what needed to go for the new plot. Thankfully, I’m keeping most of it, and reworking small parts of it.

I think I finally figured out what was killing me about this book. The words have been flowing nicely today and I’m suddenly excited about writing it again.

I check in on my goals once a month, reevaluate, and tweak if needed. I have a theme song for the year, and I realize that it’s still very much an accurate theme song for me. So I’m sharing it above, because P!nk is awesome.

Recently, I read this post about accomplishment amnesia and I realized that this is me. This year has been a bit of a rough patch for me, and I noticed that as I’ve been starting to pull myself out of the hole I dug, as I started to feel better, I have been berating myself for not having more done. I was feeling constantly behind and wondering how things got like this.

So what is accomplishment amnesia?

We get so busy meeting our obligations and moving on that we forget a lot of the time that what we’ve done in the past has value. Writers, I think, are particularly afflicted by this. We’re so full of self-doubt and anxiety that we cannot even remember what we’ve done in the past. We get behind on goals and suddenly we’re useless. The thing that sucks about this is that we can stress ourselves out so much that we creatively block ourselves, or we devalue the work we’ve done already.

Remembering our accomplishments

Now, we’ve all been through that point where we start feeling better after a rough time and we realize how far behind on everything we are. We berate ourselves for not doing our job, even though that is exactly what we’ve been doing. I’m particularly afflicted by this. I set lofty, practically unattainable goals for myself. And when they don’t work out or the deadline I set for myself passes by, I freak out and start kicking myself for not getting anything done.

But the thing I have to remember, and I’m sure many others have this problem too, is that I am actually getting things done. It might not be at the incredible pace I want, but it’s there. These last couple months, I’ve had to deal with a lot. I had military training to deal with, kids going back to school, my graduation portfolio to tweak and assemble, normal monthly budgets and lots and lots of crazy work piling on in my design business that I hadn’t expected. I had to pull back. I stopped blogging here. I was writing until the graduation deadlines hit, and then I had to stop that for a couple weeks too. You can bet that not writing thing screwed with my head.

What was I doing with my time if I wasn’t writing?

Seriously. With all the things that were going on, I felt the most guilty for not writing. And there is a lot more that I’ve been doing in my personal life in the last month that I haven’t even mentioned. But I got things done. The only thing was that I didn’t blog and I didn’t write. So in my head, I hadn’t accomplished anything.

Everyone deals with this at one time or another.

People focus so hard on what they hadn’t gotten done, that they haven’t celebrated what they have done.

So let’s talk about what to do to break out of this.

The post I linked above has some great tips. I’m simply going to expound on how I deal with my accomplishment amnesia.

Celebrate what you have done.

It’s hard to do this. I have a lot of problems with remembering to do this. But today, I just turned in my last final. I have a paper to turn in after the person who gets it gets out of her meeting. And then you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to go home, and have ice cream. Because I deserve it for accomplishing my task.

Rest when you can.

I know. It’s hard to sleep when you’re working hard. But your brain needs REM sleep. There are three different types of REM sleep. But if you don’t sleep enough, you can start hullicinating, or you can even die from lack of sleep. Your body needs that sleep. So, sometimes, when you’re busy, and behind on All The Things, the best thing you can do for yourself is stop and take a good night’s sleep.

Set small milestones.

If you’re like me, you tend to set lofty goals and then get pissed off when you don’t accomplish them. But in the process of not hitting that 90k word deadline, you wrote 50k. That’s an accomplishment many don’t ever see. So, instead of saying “90k or bust,” maybe we might be better off saying “20k or bust” on our way to that 90k.

Okay, that’s all I got. So, your turn. How do YOU deal with accomplishment amnesia? 

Today’s kind of both my ROW80 post and me ranting a little. I know, but try to remain a little surprised, okay?

One of the things about being your own publisher is that you often get lost in all the minutiae of all the things you need to do that a publisher would do for you. For me, I was translating that as part of my writing time. Googling vendors, updating the epubs of my books, contacting places for signings and such… It all got lumped in with writing.

It’s not writing.

Writing used to be this uncrackable habit for me. If I wasn’t writing, I would get antsy. I would scribble scenes down in the middle of meetings. I’d talk to myself in the car, and work out plot issues while I was in the shower. It was consuming.

But I’ve lost that.

There have been a lot of changes since I started publishing. Life came up, and I thought, hey, I can slide a little here, if I make it up there. And if I’m working on business things, then it counts for writing time. But I was wrong.

Writing time is for writing.

Seems pretty basic, right? You’d think so. But it’s easy to lose oneself. And I did. I’ve lost the writing habit.

Now it’s all work.

So, I’m working on building a new habit of writing. Just writing. I roped a few of my friends into doing the Magic Spreadsheet that Mur Lafferty talks about on the I Should Be Writing podcast. The one she does is an open, Google Docs spreadsheet that anyone can join. And there’s a whole community there. But i didn’t want to do that. So I created my own spreadsheet that does the same thing (with the exception of the live leader board because I looked at the coding on that and my eyes bulged out) and my CPs and I are going to do it within our group.

Each day, I will commit myself to writing 250 words. That’s all. I know I can do so much more, but the point is that I need to understand that writing time is writing. That is what I need to be doing. Not writing interviews or blogging or tweeting, or doing anything else that takes away from the writing.

There will be words.

In my WIP. Everyday. 250 of them. Or more. But that’s the minimum.

This is timely, because the kids started school this week. This means, I have plenty of time to get things done and still get writing in for the day. Sure, life will happen, things will go wrong. But the consistent thing that will happen is 250 words a day on my WIP until it is finished. And then it will be 250 words on the next WIP. Everyday.

Our official start date isn’t until September 1, because I didn’t want to code a partial sheet for August. But I’ve already started, as practice, as a warmup for what’s to come. It also takes into effect that for one member of our group, her kids don’t start back for another week.

My goal is to create a new, consistent writerly habit. One that I used to have at one point. And I’m challenging you to do something similar.

Take back your writing time. Don’t let life interfere. Give yourself a simple 250 words a day.

Quick ROW80 update.

Heart and Snow is coming along nicely. If I keep up by 2500 word days this week, I should be done by this weekend. And then I can do that resting thing, right? Not really. I’m pushing to make this deadline, but really, I can’t wait until Sept 1 when I push myself for consistency rather than quantity. I think that will be what’s best for my writing then.