Well, I Screwed That Up

I played around with Canva and made a new cover for No Such Thing. But when I went to upload it to Amazon, I noticed that the page number was suspiciously low.

Turns out I published the wrong file, which unfortunately is also the only version I kept. I guess, at least, it’s the version after the massive rewrite and not the original. Still, this kind of sucks Now, I get to re-revise the thing before taking it wide next month.

Because the only thing I really lost is some more in depth description and potential tie-in for future stories, I’ve decided against unpublishing. That and I’m not a big seller anyway.

On the positive side, I’m making decent progress on Lost Among Shadows. It’s a pleasant mix of passages that need massive rewrites and those that only need minor fixes. So, I’ll get stuck for ages on one page than breeze through the next ten.

Seeking Rejections Versus Seeking Sales

Now that I know, I want to both self publish and keep submitting new stories to magazines, I’m a bit torn on  my strategy for that. So far, I’ve been submitting to mostly high paying magazines, but it might make more sense to switch to those with a higher rate of personal rejection regardless of pay rate. Of course, if a, for example 3 dollars flat magazine wanted to buy the story I sent them, I’d sell. I mean it’s still exposure, and, I don’t think my conscience would allow for anything else. Still, I feel a little like I’d be using them. I haven’t made a final decision on this yet.

It’s Getting Personal

Got my first personal rejection today and I’m elated. If I’m reading it right, the story overall worked fine but the ending was lackluster. It’s still a no, but it gives me something concrete to improve on an I’ve always suspected that endings were something I still have a ways to go on.

I’ve a stack of stories, I never finished because I couldn’t think of an ending that didn’t seem contrived to me.  Hearing it from a more official source, helps me trust in my own judgment and shows me that I’m fairly aware of my skill–sometimes, anyway–despite my limited experience.

All in all, that was absolutely worth the wait. Makes me wonder, though. How many of my formal rejections were due to the endings, too? Except for the one, where I managed to delete the first page from the file send, I’ve not gotten any instant rejections.Now, I know that doesn’t mean it took the other magazines that long to decide. But more likely that there were many others before mine.

It doesn’t matter, I suppose. Most of those submission have since been rewritten or edited again,but I’m going to have a closer look at their endings now. I’ll have a look at this story later and see if I can find a way to fix it, then decide on its future.

Only thing that bummed me out a little–with myself, not them–is that I gave away the ending in the title, because I changed it to Scotophobia after deciding that the original title, which I can’t remember anymore, was lame. Go , me…I guess.

Backing Up the Backup

When I was about seven, a police officer held a speech in my class on why children shouldn’t cross streets outside of traffic lights and so. He said that up until a certain age children can’t judge distance properly. Unfortunately for me, he neglected to say when that inability fades. So to this day, though I’m sure I no longer count as a child, at times I don’t trust myself to know how far that car is from me.  Kind of problematic when I got to cross streets with no crossing no matter which direction I leave in.

Anyway, I keep reading variations on “have multiple backups.”  but no hints on what’s too much and what too little, though I guess in the case of backing up my writing, it’s the more the better. So, I came up with a system that seems to have a lot of redundancies to me, but hey. Better than using my leading edge mid flight.

• I write in LibreOffice, which saves to a Google drive folder
• then I copy various stages of tories to evernote <– different drafts get saved here too
• I edit with kingsoft, which again gets copied t o all the others
• I copy those same stages to yWriter, which again saves to Google
• Finished stories get send to both my kindles

And I’m tempted to start emailing files to both myself and my mother, since she’ll be my final typo checker anyway. At some time I had dropbox in there, too, but that folder glitched out and it took me weeks to fix, so I dropped it.

In comparison: my ebook collection is only backed up on a single thumbdrive.

Am I going way over the top here? Maybe, but you gotta see the whole picture. Computers tend to survive me for about two years and my laptop is now two and a half, so I’m getting a little paranoid. Especially since there’s a suspicious lack of things going wrong.

I’m now planning on releasing my first collection in October. That should give editors enough time to get to the stories I’ve still got out there and decide on them. If they reject them, they’ll likely go into the collection. If not, then I’ll probably invest the money into either a professional cover or editing. Either option is fine for me.  Other than that, I’m all set, I just need the final verdict on those stories.

Editing and Me

This week, I learned something, I wish I’d figured ut months ago. Editing is far easier for me when I do it in the morning. Before noon I have next to no creative energy and writing is a chore–a 100 word an hour chore. Editing on the other hand goes easy because of the same fact. If I edit in the afternoon, or worse yet, the evening, I start adding and rewriting and can’t stop myself from it. Thus I’ll end up with out of control stories, which need just as much editing as they did before…

I’m also putting together a set of stories, who’ve reached their minimum rejections, to selfpublish. One of them is still out and I’m unlikely to hear back on it for a few months yet.  Not sure what I’m going to call the collection yet.  I’ve got it saved under Fantastical Tidbits for now, but I’m not particularly fond of that title.

I still stand by my decision to let the other story die. I’ve send out two since and am close to finishing another five. So, yeah, that story was just evil. But now I’m only one submission behind because of it and catching up rather than falling further back.Learned my lesson on that matter: If a story doesn’t want to work, leave it behind.

When Stories Die

I’ve spent the last two or so weeks trying to fix a story that just isn’t working for me and it completely stalled me out on everything else. So, I’m now behind schedule (Shame on me). This week, I made the choice to let it go and it worked. After another day or two spent grieving for it, I finished another two stories and started the next batch.

I’ve also made a final decision on self publishing. I’ll send every story to three to six markets and if it doesn’t sell by then, it goes into the selfpub pile. I’ve several stories out right now that fit that bill and some of them have good chances of getting personalized rejections ( according to  the Grinder), if they get rejected.  Just for that reason, I’m kind off hoping for rejections on those. Call me weird, but I think personalized rejections might do me more good in the long run than an acceptance. After all, “Your characters are flat” for example tells me more than  knowing I did something right but not what or how.

I tried my hand on making a cover for my camp project. It’s nothing great, because I’m so not a graphic artist. Don’t enjoy it much either, but it came out better than my previous attempts, which amounted to little more than brush effects and barely legible text…

I Think I’m Doing it Wrong

or at least saying it wrong because whenever I state my desire/plan to make money off writing, people think I mean just until I find something better. So, they try to fill my time with other ‘great’ things to entertain me. Oh, and that book I’ve open in front of me? That just means I’m bored…

I’ve also been given a great piece of advice recently that I can’t quite wrap my head around:

The quality of once writing doesn’t matter because  only marketing dictates how well a book sells. While, I do believe that marketing plays an important role in a books success. Who’s gonna market all these badly written and (likely) unedited books, which no publisher would ever touch? Fairies? And who gets them in front of people?

Is it weird of me to find comments and behavior like that more bothersome than the expected rejections I’ve been getting?Which, for the record, still make me more excited than disappointed. I’ve gotten five out of the ten piece, I sent out, so far. Still hoping to get an acceptance sometime soon, but for now I’m happy just being part of the game.

I think the comment was either meant to be encouraging, or to get me to spent less time writing and more time socializing with people I share no interests with. I’m an introvert. Socializing isn’t on my agenda, though world domination might be (one day) ;p Besides I got called arrogant more than once for using long words. Anyway, I’m also stubborn to no end, so it makes me want to produce quality writing even more.

I’d rather not be published at all, than be published only because I sold out and wrote some trash…

Trade- vs Self-Publishing

That’s a question I’ve been asking myself since 2004 when I first learned of self-publishing. Although, what I’d been introduced to then turned out to be vanity- not self-.

And I’m not ashamed to admit that my inability to finish things was the only thing that kept me from taking a running leap at PA. In my defense, I was a teen and had no money, and they were the only ones, that came up in a quick google search, not asking for cash up front.

Nowadays I know better than to pay some outfit to stroke my ego and vanity publishing is of the table but self and trade are not. Both have their pros and cons, I know.  The big problem is figuring out which one fits my needs best. I want to be able to make a living with writing while at the same time avoiding fame as much as possible. I’m not a people person, so signing and interviews are things I dread.  In that regard, self-publishing might be the better option, but there’s marketing. I don’t think I’d be very good at that either.

And thanks to the aftereffects of a stroke when I was 21, I still don’t have anymore money than I did in’ 04, so with self-publishing my books would have to bring in enough profit to not only support me, but also themselves. There’s also the fact that I refuse to sell trash, so I don’t really want to put anything out there until I’ve made at least one sale to a magazine as proof to myself that my writing is worth money.

It’s a hard decision. that I’m currently postponing until December, when many magazine take a sort of Christmas break anyway.  Until then, I’ll keep subbing.