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Posts Tagged ‘Make a Move’

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Why I’m Cheating on Mark Coker

Saturday, August 7th, 2010

Background

Smashwords – Mark Coker’s open-to-all eBook publishing and distribution portal – is, in my opinion, the biggest thing to happen to books and publishing in a long time. Create an account, upload a Word document of your manuscript, and your book is converted to all eBook formats and distributed to all of the major eBook retailers. Smashwords collect revenues from the retailers and pass the money onto you minus a 15% commission. They even give you a free ISBN.

How freaking awesome is that?

Yes, Smashwords is inundated with books of questionable merit (every day you’ll see new books with word counts optimistically in the “novella” range, with misspelled blurbs, priced for $9.95) , but Mark and his team have opened the market to ALL writers. Curation is just a view – a subset – of the book list, and any and all critics can step in to fulfil that function. I’m happy with the weaker books being out there, as I know there are some real gems – original, if uncommercial works – just waiting to be found. Smashwords, in my eyes, can do no wrong.

But…

Even though my book is being distributed to Sony, Kobo Books, Apple iBooks and was on Barnes and Noble before I opted out of that distribution option, it’s not on Amazon Kindle, and that’s the biggest retailer of eBooks by a long, long way, no matter who’s publishing their optimistic, massaged sales figures this week. If I’m going to achieve anything like notable sales, that’s where I need to be.

Mark explained the Amazon position from the start – that they wanted extended formatting options, which the Meatgrinder (Smashword’s automated conversion system) didn’t support – and I was fine with that as it was his priority to rectify the situation and get the books over to Amazon. But that was the message from when I uploaded Make a Move in April, and it’s now August. When the UK release of the Kindle was announced (the real release, not the mid-Atlantic hack that’s been in place until now) I knew I had to have my book on the Kindle store, and I couldn’t wait any longer. I downloaded the Kindle formatting guidelines, and conversion and testing tools, and I started converting my Word manuscript to HTML.

OCD

I was never happy with the automated book conversion Smashwords produced; the main problem was that my first-line non-indents were ignored, and I hate how it looks. Unfortunately, I followed the formatting guide to the letter, so I don’t know how I can fix that. I left it as it was, which is fine (the words are the important part) but it still bothers me. Now, with my Kindle Preview app which replicates how the text will display on the Kindle hardware, I can test and test and test, and fix anything that isn’t working. I’m a technical writer by trade, and a Virgo, so you can imagine how satisfying this is for me. Even though I’m hand-coding the HTML, the level of control I have is worth it.

An Uncomfortable Situation

So Smashwords aren’t shipping to Kindle, and now I am, so no harm, no foul. Except that Mark announced this week that they will be shipping to Amazon soon, and that the Meatgrinder upgrades are close to finished. So now I’m in the position of bypassing the distributor – a position with which I’m not 100% comfortable. It would be easy just to select the “opt-in to Amazon distribution” option on Smashwords and sit back, and I have been tempted, but I’ve tasted the level of formatting control Amazon’s DIY tools afford me, and I’m loathe to let it go. Not to mention the week of very late nights I’ve spent working on the conversion.

I guess it comes down to timing; I’m too far along now to quit. And I know I’m denying Smashwords their 15% commission on any Amazon sales, but time is money – my time is money – and after the effort I’ve put into this conversion, I think I deserve that 15%. I’m planning to have the book on the store in the next week or so – definitely before the August 27th UK Kindle release – so if you’re buying a Kindle, you’ll be able to see if my work was worth it.

 

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Top 5 Things I Learned About Being Interviewed on Video

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

Now that the second part of my author interview video is edited and uploaded, I thought I’d share some insights I gained about the process of being interviewed on video, both from my recollections at the time, and from having watched the video(s).

  • Close, or cross, your legs (one for the guys – women seem to have this down already).
  • Leave your face alone.
  • Speak more quickly than maybe feels comfortable.
  • Encourage your interviewer to ask direct questions.
  • Give direct answers.

Not that I’m not happy with the finished product – it’s been a great way to communicate some of what I feel about writing, and about Make a Move in particular – and Chris and Julie did a great job on the audio and video editing, but I’d sum up my reservations about the video with a bonus item to my top-five list:

  • Have a practice run and get used to being interviewed, and then don’t upload the results to a universally accesible video hosting service.

 

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Author Interview: Part Two

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

Here’s the second part of the interview (part one here). One mild(ish) expletive in this one, and a weird “postmodern” ending from Chris, which I kind of like…

Credits

  • Cameras, video editing and audio mixing – Chris Collins
  • Audio recording and editing – Julie Cunningham
  • Music – Theanon Wonder

 

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Author Interview: Part One

Sunday, July 11th, 2010

Here’s the first part of the interview we filmed between myself and Theanon Wonder, filmed in the Manchester branch of Travelling Man.

It’s taken a while to finish (hence the lack of posting recently) but it was our first attempt at making a video, so we were learning along the way. In fact, we had such a good time working on this, we’re sifting through ideas for a short film to make over the summer (using better camera and equipment and mics next time, though…).

Credits

  • Cameras, video editing and audio mixing – Chris Collins
  • Audio recording and editing – Julie Cunningham
  • Music – Theanon Wonder

 

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Making a Move: Finding the Tone

Friday, June 11th, 2010

Today’s post was made possible by orange Lucozade and Sky Player.

Tone’s a difficult quality to define when talking about fiction. It’s not voice – that’s how a writer says things; it’s more about what you do and don’t say. What you’re prepared to show. Whether you go all-out, or tone it down. As it were.

The tone of Make a Move evolved as I wrote, but there were rules from the start, and they shaped the feel of the situations in the book. They set expectations. Before I started writing, I had to decide what age group I was going to pitch the book at, and what I could and couldn’t get away with based on that decision. It seems naive now, but at the time it seemed reasonable to ensure that my story of killers and strippers would be suitable for young adults to access the largest readership. I hadn’t considered the artistic implications of that decision, but it made commercial sense.

The decision to avoid any sexual expletives started off as a challenge: was it even possible writing in this genre? Turns out it is, kind of. Most people swear when they’re under stress or immediate threat of conflict – it’s a way of venting the pressure – but by avoiding that behaviour I found my characters talking in a way that was confident, casual and humorous when faced with impending violence. It wasn’t being glib, it was just a lack of fear. I liked how that style of dialogue flowed, so I stuck with it. Later in the book, as Freddy struggles to deal with his new life, a theme emerged -whether it’s possible to live in a debased situation without yourself becoming debased. I realised that my goal of avoiding sexual swearing (let’s call it “the big four”) mirrored the theme of philosophical conflict in the story. Now I had to stick with it, and I did for the most part, only resorting to potty mouth on two occasions, and learning that there’s no replacement term for “shitty”.

But language isn’t the only way to cause offence; some situations or realities are fundamentally damaging to young minds, and most parents won’t want their children exposed to those concepts until they’re old enough to understand the complexities themselves. Hell – I don’t understand the complexities of the sex industry – and how people find themselves with so few choices that prostitution looks like a valid career choice – myself, and I have a kid of my own. Wait – maybe it’s wrong to say I don’t understand it, but I’m definitely not qualified to write about it with any authority. Yet here I was, setting my story in a world of prostitutes, strippers and dirty pimps…

I could be accused of ignoring the harsh realities of the lives of some of my supporting characters, of not taking their plight seriously, but Make a Move is a positive book, and my artistic choices reflected what I wanted to write about, rather than what I didn’t. Take the character of Corentin, for example – the little boy with a prostitute mother, both of whom Jay befriends in Episode Two. His situation is less than appealing to most readers, but at his age what his mother does for a living isn’t important, not when compared to seeing his first Disney film, or being treated to ice cream, or making a new friend. And that’s where my focus, as the narrator, lies.

How a character feels is so much more important to me than the facts of the plot, and not just in Corentin’s case. It doesn’t matter how complex the world I create, or how sordid the environment, those core relationships are my primary focus, no matter how freaky things get. And that’s the basis for Make a Move’s tone – that’s what makes it different. Because it’s a thriller, with nothing too thrilling happening. Because it’s set in a world of sex for sale, but it’s not lascivious. Because when people die, the emotional implications are more important than how far the blood spatters.

Because even though all hell is kicking off, it just comes down to three friends, trying to build a life and have some fun.

And that’s why it works.

Hey – I just started six sentences in a row with a conjunction. Told you I was ill.

 

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Making a Move: 1, 2, 3, Go

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

Too many years ago, I was at a reading by Michael Marshall Smith, and he said it takes at least three ideas to sustain a novel-length narrative. It made sense when I heard that, and I’ve yet to see it disproved. What that meant for Make a Move, was that there was never a point where I thought ”that’s it – I have the idea for a novel”. It just doesn’t work that way for me. There was, however, a point where a number of other ideas bumped into each other and became more than the sum of their parts. That too didn’t happen instantly – it took a month or two to find a way to fit the separate ideas together into something that felt like it would work – but it was a shorter process than the collection of ideas/images/questions that I eventually fused into the book.

I Know Kung Fu

I was about five films into a Jet Li jag when I saw Kiss of the Dragon – a Luc Besson-produced film featuring a lot of people getting kicked in the head on and around famous Parisian landmarks. It was cool, if forgettable, but there was something in it that stuck with me. When Li’s Chinese intelligence operative arrives in Paris, he stays with a sleeper agent – an old man who’s been living in the city for most of his adult life, running a shop that makes and sells prawn crackers to local Chinese restaurants, whose real purpose is to provide a place to stay for agents passing through on Chinese government business. Spoiler Alert! He gets killed, and Jet Li takes his body to the steps of the Sacre Coeur and lights some incense, before running off to kick more people in the head. Nice scene, but it left me wondering who this guy was? What was his story? How many agents has he helped? I thought about a book based on the life of a sleeper agent, his excitement derived from the various operatives that land on his doorstep looking for a meal and a clean bed, but it felt flat. Without his own story, the episodic nature of the other operatives’ adventures would lack a narrative core upon which to hang, and it’d be a mess. I filed the idea away.

Sex Tourists

The first time I went to Paris, I didn’t know about Pigalle, and I ended up walking down the Boulevard de Clichy by accident. Honest. My then-girlfriend (now wife) and I had visited Montmarte, and decided to walk back down the hill toward the centre of the city instead of descending the 200-odd steps into the Abbesses metro station. I figured we’d taken one turn too far when I saw the first adult video stores, but we kept on, and it wasn’t long before we were invited, by a nice lady and her three big men-friends, if we wanted to go and see a live sex show. It probably helped that it was the middle of the day, but the situation just didn’t seem threatening, even when we politely declined the offer and headed on. It’s a strange place: filthy and sordid in all of the oldest ways, but friendly, and open, and very Parisian. I filed the idea away.

Skip To The End…

Spaced was an awesome TV show – original, funny, and intermittently moving. I bought both series on DVD on a bit of a nostalgia trip and watched the whole lot practically back-to-back. When I was done, I wanted more (they only made 14 half-hour episodes) and was feeling inspired, so toyed with the idea of trying to write a sitcom. Thinking through some ideas, though, I realised that Spaced had left me a bit flat – as the format hadn’t allowed me to get to know the characters to any great depth. They were great people, but compared to the depth of character you can mine in a novel, I just didn’t know that much about them.

That was the first time I thought of writing a book in a sit-com format, or rather, writing a sit-com in a book. I played with a number of ideas, one of which was that the setting should be aspirational in some way, which lead me to Paris as a location. That triggered a memory of Kiss of the Dragon, and how I’d wanted to explore the sleeper’s story; this idea of writing a sit-com could solve the problem of the narrative for him being too episodic, as I’d be purposefully embracing the episodic nature of the format. In the film, the sleeper’s shop is in a red-light district, but it was a nasty, cruel place with no room for humour; I ditched that, but other settings I thought about felt too cosy and sterile to produce any real drama. I think the idea of disguising the safe house as an adult cinema started as a joke, but one that had some truth to it. Those memories of Pigalle and it’s cartoony brand of naughtiness were still fresh, and as I dropped my scenario into that place – trying it out – a number of background characters arrived, and they brought friends, and scenarios, and conflicts, and humour, and cake.

Make a Move had found its home.

 

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Making a Move: It’s Good To Talk

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

I think I’m a fair writer – I can plot and manoeuvre a reader with some degree of skill – but what I’m really proud of is my dialogue. It’s Make a Move’s major selling point. I know that sounds vain, but I’m okay with that, as I know how hard I’ve worked to get to the point that I can say I’m proud of it. I’ve spent years watching films, TV, reading books and comics, and most importantly, listening to people talking, and I’ve filtered all of that information into a list of what I do and don’t like to hear. Then I took that list and crafted it into a style that’s all mine.

A few people have said my dialogue reads like a comic, which is cool. Comic dialogue has to be lean and efficient to fit in the speech bubbles, and I try to emulate that sparsity.

The way I found an ear for dialogue, and used it to create my own style, was to listen to people talking and break down what they say into two containers: what they want to say, and what they think they should say. Next, I threw away everything in the second container.

Sound Smarter By Talking Less!

Have you listened closely when a witness to an event is interviewed on TV?

  • “I was leaving the pub when I heard a scream and the car crashed into the actual wall”. The actual wall? As opposed to what? A virtual wall?
  • “Personally, I think it was the wrong thing to do.” Is it possible to have an impersonal thought?
  • “The man himself dived in to save the kid.” Good job he didn’t dive in as someone else.

I know these are picky things, but they illustrate my point. All language is peppered with useless, often nonesensical, words (really, kind of, you know) that people use because they think that’s how people talk. It’s a belief that the more you say, the more what you say matters. I think there’s a better way: by all means talk a lot, but say a lot too.

You can see the same thing in book dialogue. A lot of writers need the security blanket of an opening “well” or “so” before they let someone speak. It’s the written equivalent of “um”. It’s almost become an accepted standard – that that’s how people talk in books. Fair enough, but it’s not how my characters talk. My characters convey the information they need to with as many words as they need and no more. The content can be trivial, or apocalyptic; high art or low art. Regardless, it’s delivered in the same economical way. It’s one way in which I created the tone of the book – people talking about epic events in minimalist, almost dismissive dialogue. Yes, it’s stylised, but it has style.

This economy of words is the key to keeping dialogue flowing. By parsing ideas down to their core concept, you can create dialogue that is portable, and once it’s portable, you can mix it up to find beats that bring your characters’ words to life.

An Example

“Freddy stared at her for a second, frustrated. He kept his voice calm. ‘That was a question,’ he said. ‘I now have no more idea of what is going on, and you’ve annoyed me’ – her eyes narrowed, so he eased off – ‘a bit.’”

I love that construction – the strong parenthetic break hiding the end of the sentence, turning it into a punchline. I try to use that technique sparingly as any stylistic tool can become tiresome if overplayed. Identifying tags and actions can be mixed into dialogue to pace the rhythm to perfection, but the spoken content has to be lean and portable. Long, multi-clause sentences just don’t arrange well.

How Much is Too Much?

I’m not sure what percentage of Make a Move is dialogue, but I know it’s a lot – more than the third of the wordcount recommended by some how-to-write books (I learned that rule quickly, and broke it twice as fast). I’ve experimented with a variety of writing styles in working towards something I’m happy with, and dialogue-heavy prose just works for me. I’ve written extended sections of action-description, really digging into the details of a situation, but I don’t find them fun to write, so I’d be a hypocrite if I expected them to be fun to read.

But it’s not just a question of taste – that kind of writing just isn’t giving me what I want, which is something that dialogue can: relationships. All of the stories have been told, and creating an intriguing character is almost impossible, but human relationships can still provide a compelling experience within an unoriginal narrative. How do the characters feel about what is happening to them? Without lines of tired exposition, the only way to find out is when they share their thoughts with each other, and allow us to listen in. Those interactions are the life of the story, the way-in for readers, and suppressing the vitality of those relationships with tired, bloated dialogue will rot a story from the inside out.

Ironically, I’ve said enough.

 

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Posted in Character, Dialogue, Story, Writing | 2 Comments »

Making a Move: Names and Faces

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

Make a Move is all about the people. Plot’s important, but everybody’s just reusing the same plots – it’s how my characters react to those plot developments that gives Make a Move it’s unique tone. Originally there were going to be four main players: Freddy, Jay, Holly and “French Guy”, but I new there wasn’t enough room for four, and I didn’t have enough material to sustain the Gallic addition, so he was kicked out, only to return as Jean-Baptiste in Episode Four. Waste not, want not…

Once I had my three leads, and knew how they related to each other, Make a Move was born.

Freddy Mossman

“Not one part of me caring about you right now.”

I honestly can’t remember where the idea for Freddy’s character came from. I know where Jay came from – he was the foil for the potential mundanity that sat around Freddy’s Parisian exile, but Freddy’s origin is a mystery to me. Obviously, his background dictates his type to a large extent – MI6 recruit men and women with no distinguishing features that can be used to identify them, and his subsequent training provided his physique and demeanour. I knew I needed to break that type to an extent though, as this isn’t a military book, and I needed to inject more humanity into him. Once I had the idea for how to do that (big plot reveal from Episode Six – I’ll say no more) Freddy was… ready. Thing is, I didn’t want to detail him too much, as the more readers learn about a character (specifically, the more they learn that differs from their personality), the harder it is for them to project themselves into the story. He’s a cypher for the reader’s reaction to the situations the story presents, and I want people 100% along for the ride. I’m not a big fan of first-person perspectives right now, so Freddy, even as the star, had to take a back seat and let the reader use him as a gateway into the story. There’s a reason he’s just a silhouette on the book cover…

Jay McFarlane

“Take your mind off things with some random acts of social disorder.”

As I said before, Jay’s the opposite of Freddy. He also the person we all want to be: free, fearless, creative, vibrant, and living by his own rules. Jay walks a fine line between being an adventurer/agitator and just being an idiot, but I was careful to keep him safely within his moral framework – no matter how loose that might be. One strange occurrence I hadn’t expected when designing my characters is that all the girls love some Jay. I never tried to paint him as handsome, or even cute, but something about his personality struck a chord with my female readers. I should be put out; if anything, I’d say that Freddy is closest to my personality. Jay’s my other side though – the person I want to be, and I occasionally find when I’m at my most confidently creative. It’s no wonder that I found the interplay between Freddy and Jay so easy to write – they’re both major parts of my psyche. And, no, that’s not cheating; “write what you know.”

I’m still surprised no one noticed that my two male leads are named after the two biggest horror icons of the eighties, but it wasn’t planned that way; it really was a coincidence. Once I spotted it, I thought about it, decided it was cool, and ran with it.

Names

Speaking of which, I think I have an original way of coming up with names for characters. Most character names in books are determined by the genre of the fiction, hence the number of action adventures peopled with characters named Jack. Even if you try to steer clear of the obvious types, it’s hard to break a pattern; people just aren’t wired that way, and truly random thinking is almost impossible. I gave up trying to think of names a long time ago, so when I introduce a new character, I step from my desk to my CD collection and leaf through the credits of a random album. You’d be surprised at the variety of interesting names you can find involved in music production. A first name from one album, a surname from another, and you have a new character. Easy.

French names aren’t so easy, though. Aside from the fact that I have only two French-language albums in my collection, I don’t know enough about French naming conventions and etymology to be confident in using one at random. Luckily, there are a number of websites listing French names and detailing their origin, so I can be confident I haven’t used a name that is either archaic or regionally improbable. It’s not as random, but I’m happy with the balance.

Holly Henderson

“I’m not sure what’s worse – that you’d be comfortable asking me to do that, or that you’d think I had the contacts to arrange it.”

I left Holly until last as, out of the three, she’s the one who represents my biggest success as a writer. Freddy and Jay are two sides of my personality, so writing them is easy; I just think, “if I was in a Freddy mood, what would I do?”. Holly’s different though – guys writing about girls is hard. At thirty-five, I’d hope I’ve learned a lot about women, but I know there’s infinitely more to discover, and that gender – both your own programming and that bestowed upon you by society – is at the core of every decision you make. I was worried from the beginning that Holly just wouldn’t be believable for my female readers – something would give it away, not matter how small.

I overcame this hurdle by first accepting that I wasn’t qualified to write a female character. I’m not being proud – that’s just a fact. That done, I fell back on the adage of “fake it ‘til you make it”. I lifted stories and scenarios from the women I know well – my wife, sister and female friends – and riffed on those situations. That was working well until about midway through the book, where Holly is becoming closer with Freddy and Jay and adopting more of their mindset, at which point I did feel confident enough to write her; she was playing by my rules now, and I felt I knew her well enough to make some suggestions. There’s no feeling like having a female reader tell you they identified with Holly, and enjoyed her journey, especially as I purposefully placed obstacles and decisions before her that aren’t the normal fare of mainstream women’s fiction. Holly took a different path, and people were happy to join her for the ride.

The Best of the Rest

The episodic structure of Make a Move gave me the opportunity to introduce and remove characters exactly how and when I wanted, and that freedom gave me room to have fun. Monsieur Vasseur – the aggressively self-aware clichéd French baker. The Beautiful Spy – the adolescents’ wet dream with a bitter streak that makes your eyes water. Inspector Guischard – the Parisian policeman who would rather Freddy and his friends keep their crimes off his radar. Hector, Dunnes and Abbott – the trio of British agents delivering bad attitude, disease and high-velocity rifles to the party.

The accepted wisdom states that you shouldn’t introduce a character to a story unless they’re going to advance the plot in some way. That belief assumes that dialogue, character and tone are irrelevant, and that plot is king.

As I’ll discuss in a post covering dialogue, I honestly believe that to be the best way to write a boring book.

 

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Making a Move: The Basics

Monday, June 7th, 2010

The Old Way

I wrote the first draft of Make a Move in Microsoft Word for Mac. It wasn’t the best way to work, but it did the job and got the first draft done. I’m a big fan of not messing about when something’s working for me, so I had no reason to look elsewhere, but when I delivered the draft of Episode Six to my first readers, knowing something was wrong with it (an issue they confirmed) I was tempted to look around for a better way to write, or specifically to edit. I hate scrolling through page after page of text; I prefer to deal with individual scenes – really focus on the details and how the scene fits together – and only at the end assess the completed work. So I looked around for some writing software that would let me work the way I wanted, and I found Scrivener, and I never looked back.

Research

Thank God for the internet.

Seriously – why spend days in libraries, or researching locations, when you can look up facts and figures as you write? It’s amazing. I still like to visit locations, but thats more for inspiration and high-res photography for book jacket designs; why jump on a plane to find the ideal location for a scene when you can walk the streets of almost any major city using Google Maps Streetview, and then check out interiors via a business’ website? It’s so much easier. More importantly, it’s quicker, which frees up more time for writing. And if you care about carbon footprints, you’ll be happier.

My research method is to gather bookmarks into my “Research” folder of whatever browser I’m using (currently Google Chrome) or, if it’s an image, text/Word/PDF file or whole webpage I want to read offline, I drag it into Scrivener.

The Plan

Make a Move was easy to plan; six episodes, each requiring three main ideas. Originally it was all planned in Word files, but now I can just create 6 folders in Scriv, one for each episode, and add files for key scenes, as I’m doing now for the sequel. I try not to restrict myself by planning in too much detail as I get bored writing the story; I need to find out what happens as much as the reader, so I only put down key plot points, such as “In this scene, Freddy needs to discover this, and get from here to there”. I have files of ideas for scenes, gags, action beats, and I lift those into the scene as I go. It’s not jazz (shudder) but it’s as freeform as I can keep it while still being structured enough to get me to the end.

The Execution

I’m not a born writer; it’s hard for me to keep grinding out wordcount, but I’m getting more productive. I guess 1000 words is a good session, 2000 an amazing one. I won’t be mad at myself for only doing a couple of hundred though – that’s how it goes sometimes.

Of course, this all happens after I get started, and that can take a while…

I tend to write in my study (read: third bedroom with computer desk, bookcases and a variety of musical instruments), but it’s never been an inspiring place to write. Nowhere really works for me. My average writing session is two hours: one hour of getting ready to write followed by one hour of writing. I always sit down with the intent to write immediately, but I have to stare at the screen, re-read the previous section, think, walk about, play some guitar … it takes time to start flowing. Luckily, once I’m writing, I’m fast, so I claw the time back.

Make a Move took about two years to write, which isn’t great, but remember I said it was six episodes with three main ideas each? Most novels have three main ideas TOTAL; Make a Move really took a lot of inspiration and time to come up with coherent, entertaining, original ideas, and they didn’t all hit first time. Okay, so I’m exaggerating a bit, as episodes five and six are a two-parter sharing three ideas, but that’s still fifteen. You try thinking of fifteen narrative hooks using the same characters.

The End of the Beginning

So that was the first draft done. Two years. Okay, maybe two and a half, but who’s counting? I was pleased with how the first draft came out (apart from that issue with Episode Six) and was ready, after a short hiatus, to start editing. I’m not great at editing, but that’s okay, as I’m not great at “just getting it down” to finish the first draft. My writing tends to hit the page in a near-finished form, which also goes some way to explain why it takes me so long. I’m obsessed with the form and pacing of dialogue and action beats, and I can’t put anything down unless I know it’s my best work. In the edit, I’ll polish it further, but by then I’ll have learned more and feel I can do better than my raw effort.

I said before about the issues with Episode Six. Not wanting to reveal plot points, it involved a misjudged sub-plot, told as backstory, that just killed the pacing of the finale. Killed it dead. As I approached the edit, I knew I had to break the episode apart to fix it, which was when I turned to Scrivener as a writing tool. With all of the scenes separated, I began to delicately extricate the details that were causing problems. Translation: I deleted all of it. Like I said, I’m not great at editing, so I just delete what isn’t working and rewrite it. It’s just what works for me.

With that major flaw fixed, I just read and reread the book, over and over, until every sentence felt as polished as I could make it. I’m not talking about major rewrites – just pacing dialogue better and making sure my prose is as interesting to read as possible. With all of the episodes the same length – give or take a couple of hundred words, I knew I was there.

 

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Posted in Editing, Photography, Software, Story, Writing | 4 Comments »

Making a Move: Prologue

Friday, June 4th, 2010

I think I’ve lost sight of why I’m writing this blog, and why I decided to put Make a Move out myself. I wanted the blog to help people out – provide good information and suggestions/warnings for other writers looking to self publish – in the hope I’d be able to connect with people who shared my interests and goals. Thing is, I’m not that happy talking about myself – I’m not doing this to get famous – but that seems to be what I’m doing; I’m promoting myself as a product. That was never the plan. It’s also not much fun, and that was the whole point of starting this.

I love Make a Move; it’s an awesome book, and writing it pushed me to new levels of creativity and inspiration. It made me happy. I’m trying to sell copies of Make a Move, but I’m not marketing it, I’m marketing me. That probably explains why I’m not enjoying it as much as I thought I might; printing and typesetting and retailing aren’t fun; ideas and creativity and kick-ass dialogue are fun.

I need to dig words out of the book and get them into the wild. I need to find new ways to market the book using Freddy, Jay and Holly as my spokespersons. I need to play to my strengths and let my writing do the talking for me. I’ve already got some cool ideas…

I’m not giving up blogging about the process of self publishing; I’m getting some good traffic and I still feel I have a lot to offer those just starting out. I am, however, going to be looking into my writing more; I’m going to tone down the technology and focus on the ideas. After all – I want readers to enjoy the site as well as writers.

When I told my friends about this refocus, it confirmed my decision, as they immediately returned with topics they wanted me to discuss. I had three friends with me throughout the writing and editing, but more arrived after the book was done, and they want to learn more about the process that brought the book into being. I’m going to write five posts covering the subjects they asked about, and publish one a day next week (7th-11th June).

There. I’ve said it now, so I have to do it. It’s going to be a busy week.

 

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