Tag Archives: killer application

ePublishing, Killer Application: Dead or Alive, Novels, Writing

Nearly there!

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Finally, it’s happened. I have finished my novel, minus a few minor wording tweaks, that is. Then it’s onto designing the cover, researching publishing houses and agents, and looking at self-publishing. I couldn’t be more excited if you lit a fire-cracker under my bum. I can’t sit still, I can’t sleep, I can’t wait. I have had my first real feedback on the full book, and it’s good. Ok, so it’s no Ulysses, and I won’t be winning the Booker prize, but it’s done. I’ve written, edited, updated and nearly complete a novel, from start to finish. Polished, and ready for that final push into the limelight.

Please be patient with me, the rest of the preparation to final publication may take a month or two. It will be worth the wait! 🙂

Until next time, live long and prosper!

🙂

Em

Killer Application: Dead or Alive, Poems

brain chewing

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My brain is chewing
On the marrow of a story,
The book is written only
In first draft, the characters
Plotting to grow into their
Skins, the seven into five,
Which one will win? This is
The beginning, the middle
And the end, another novel
Nearly written, spinning down
And in again, what more is there
To do but to trust my Self, nerve
Wracking as this is, it is the most
Fun I have had on my own, truly
The focus of life on creation
Is the only life force spent well.

ePublishing, Killer Application: Dead or Alive, mE

work avoidance or dedication?

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First off, this is most likely neither and both work avoidance, and dedication.

What do I mean?

Well, this is work avoidance in that although I am only presently commuting to work I should really be studying my ITIL V3 prep coursework.

This is also dedication because it is about writing (mine and in general).

While getting ready for the (lovely) commute to work this ‘brisk’ English morning (meaning quite cold, a bit windy, but dry), I found the time to read Jeanne Veillette Bowerman’s guest blog post on the Writer’s Digest website regarding the benefits to her as a writer of becoming a twitter addict Confessions of a Tweetaholic.

While finding the post insightful and illuminating, two words in particluar jumped out at from the page (or Blackberry screen, to be precise).

What were those two words? “Two Hours”.

Now, on their own these words do not hold much sway over my life. In any other context they may have had little or no impact.

However, as an aspiring self-published author they rang the “oh my god” bell deep in my chest.

Why is that? I hear you ask.

Well, simples, really.

The maximum time I have to write in any given day is about two hours (if I am lucky, am willing to forego sleeping a full night, and don’t mind looking rough the next day).

Jean spent two hours a day on twitter alone, working her way up to several hundred followers.

This is a successful playwright with accolades and shows under her belt, writing full time, tweeting with fellow writers intelligebly and articulately about her passion (two hours a day!).

On the other end of the tweet spectrum is our dear friend 50 cent, with umpty-thousand followers, tweeting requests for groupies to plunder in the local vicinity. (This presuming we have a clue where in the world he is – I see a new Facebook game – Where in the world is 50 cent? With points for how close you can guess he may be. More on that later.)

Where was I? Oh yes, ‘two hours’.

So, although I fully appreciate the need to ‘get yourself out there’ for us aspiring writers, if all I have to give is two hours of writing a day then I am not sure I will be able to invest the ‘right’ amount of time tweeting to build up a sizable twitter following.

Fingers crossed what takes one two hours a day can be done in 15 minutes instead!

Speaking of rewriting (we were, weren’t we?) I did manage to lose a good few hours’ sleep working on rewriting killer application last night.

Whilst tempted to right-off (or is that ‘write-off’?) several of the characters, fundamentally change the story arc and basically rewrite the whole story from a third of the way in, I recognised the exhaustion levels seeping into my writing decisions and held myself to less drastic changes, forcing my typing fingers to make notes where drastic changes may be required and enforcing the existing and new world rules and regulations within the story itself to drive the narrative.

Last night I either completely chickened out of a ‘proper’ rewrite, or I saved the heart and soul of the tale. Only time (and readers!) will tell.

As for twitter, I’ll do what I can and hope for a miracle. Slow burn media not-so-frenzy here we come! 😉

Back to the scintillating ITIL V3 world of study.

Til next time, this is mE

Em

ePublishing, Killer Application: Dead or Alive, Writing

the rewrite thang

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Some say that the first draft is the beginning of the story. That all we need to do is get the story down in the first draft, beginning to end. Then we can start rewriting it for the second draft. We can clean up the prose, cut down on the fluff, align the story, pull the threads closer and knit ourselves a mean novel.

From recent experience rewriting Killer Application I am not so sure that the first draft of a novel is, as I originally thought, actually a first draft. In my estimation the first draft is more like the clay a potter makes before making the pottery. Or even the dough the baker beats for hours or days before baking the bread.

The first draft, although lovely in its completeness, is just that, the lump of unmolded clay or unbaked bread. All of the ingredients for a good story are there in pretty much the right form and consistency, with all of the possibilities that a wide-open horizon can give.

Only now do I realise that the rewriting, that which defines an author (as I have been told / read many times over), is where we really begin to hone our craft, to shape the dough into something special, something unique, something extremely personal.

Here is where we get to put our own touches in. Like my grandmother baking the boiled egg smack dab in the middle of her meatloaf (oh for a slice of that meatloaf now, so succulent and crumbly all at the same time!), a good author can work in their sense of humour, personal preferences, world view, perspectives, thoughts and feelings into the story without letting it take over.

All the while this weaving is happening (apologies for the inter-changeable metaphors – rewriting really is like a cross between pottery, baking, knitting, weaving and eating egg-centred meatloaf all at the same time, seriously!) the story itself is given new life. Characters that were stretched too thin are removed or fleshed out, killed or fattened (only to be killed off later or even reborn, depending on the angle of the story and where the rewriting takes us).

In truth, I find the rewriting almost more exciting than the original writing. Okay, that is not entirely true. This is a different kind of excitement for I am watching the story mature and grow under my own hands. I get to watch the characters delve into themselves and pull out wonders of unique personality with which I can help them along, or change the story itself. Anything is possible right now.

I am excited by the process of writing. I can see why Philip K Dick used to get depressed after finishing a novel. (Not that I am comparing my writing to Philip K Dick, just the sense of accomplishment at each stage of the writing, and the subsequent emotional endorphins triggered by that feeling of ongoing success and creation.) It makes perfect sense.

I managed to keep myself away from my ebook publishing games this evening, mostly because I wanted to get some good writing time in before going to bed (not too late this time!).

That’s it from me, for now.

Til next time, enjoy life,

Em (mE)

a day in the life, Killer Application: Dead or Alive, Novels, Writing

We’ve only just begun…

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Killer Application novel update…

…from the first set of feedback I received on my novel, I realised that I had some major rewriting to do.

In other words, I was going to have to buck up and blood myself as an ‘author’ by doing a serious rewrite of my novel, pretty much from start to finish.

I think it was more difficult to accept that what I had been doing for the past few weeks up until this ‘revelation’ was mere dabbling, rather than proper rewriting.

Yet when the pieces that needed some attention were pointed out to me and the repercussions in how much work was still required before this piece of writing could be taken to the next level, i.e. professional ‘2nd draft’ editing, I had to swallow some semi-sweet pills regarding my writing style, including the banks of snow I had plowed right up across my own driveway (in some cases).

Basically, this was a wake-up call.  So I sat down on Saturday and started to put together a proper outline of what I thought the story was, where it was going, who the main characters were and all that jazz.

You’d think, after writing more than 500 pages or nearly 170,000 words, I would know all of this off the top of my head…and you’d be right – I did.  What I did not realise is how much ‘tweaking’ (read ‘major overhaul’) I had to do to bring the story back on track.

I think the major issue is that I knew in my head all of the missing gaps – I had been living with this story for so long that I presumed anyone reading it would know it as well as I.  Then in midst of my outline writing and drafting of character and plot and subplot details, I realised in a ‘Eureka’ moment, that I did not have to sacrifice what I was writing.

In fact, I had to admit to myself that I had ‘chickened out’ of the original underlying subplot I had thought of writing in the original storyline.  I had ‘chickened out’ by justifying that it was too much to put into one story – it would meander and get lost in details.  It would take too long to play out.  It would not be interesting enough to everyone.

In rejigging my original idea to fit what I thought would be a broader audience I had sufficiently transferred what (I think) is a good idea into something that had to be padded to make sense (and even then was trying ‘too hard’ at times, and ‘not hard enough’ at other times).

In other words, in 500 pages I had written the skeleton of the story with some padding that I thought made sense.  Going back to it now, I have to strip almost all of the fat (tasty bits) away and get to the gristle, muscle, tendon, ligaments, bone…the gruesome guts of the story and build out from there.

Maybe this is the experience that all writers have, I would not know.  In the blogs, books and articles I have read writers talk about how they ‘got there’ (made it into a deal with an agent or publisher) or how they ‘got their idea’ (the basis for their story) or ‘the journey’ (the whole or any part of the start-to-end journey of their publishing life).

All of these are extremely useful, but I guess trying to explain the ‘Doh!’ realisation of what ‘rewriting’ truly means (the ‘blooding’ of an author) is like trying to explain what it is like being a parent…to someone who does not have any kids.

This is not something that is easy to explain, aside from picturing the growth and maturity of a writer into an author.

  • Imagine that writing the full novel is an author’s childhood, full of wide-open vistas and bright-eyed wonderment.
  • Then editing the novel is puberty, where I know what I am doing, I know I what I want out of the story.  I just need to massage it out.  The form is there, I just need to kneed the shape of the loaf, chip the remainder of the sculpture, colour in the rest of the painting, before I get to the final finished 2nd draft product.
  • Finally the birth of adulthood comes when I realise that the novel is not actually ready for ‘editing’.  The novel is awaiting the ‘breath of real life’, the rewrite.

Now, this probably all seems a bit coy or simplistic, and of course it is.  Trying to describe the growth of the writer to author-hood (child to adult-hood) is like trying to explain the psychological alteration of going from individual to parent.  There is no way to describe it aside from ‘it is’.

I also have to admit that I am in the middle of the transformation.  I believe I am on the cusp of the writer-to-author teenage-hood, where I have realised there is more to rewriting than editing, that first I must rewrite my story to make it stronger, to make it worth reading, to make it the best it could possibly be.

Yet even being here is not disheartening in the slightest.  I am excited by the journey as much as by the end result.  I am as intrigued and interested by my own development as an author as by the novel I am writing (or any of the poetry or prose that I may work on now or in the near future).

I say, “Bring it on!”

So what if it takes another six months to get to first draft status (again).

So what if it takes a further six months to get to second draft status (for the first time).

What matters is the journey, the experience, the growth and the end result.  It all matters.

Now I just have to stay focused.

I know in my heart of hearts that it will definitely be worth the trip.

What a great experience to have, to grow up a second time doing what I love to do.

In the meantime I will continue to self-publish more free ebooks of poetry, short stories, essays, quotes, rants and other bits en route – watch this space!

“In there always pitchin’ and sometime’s bitchin'” as my Gamp used to say.

Life’s gonna throw curveballs – you have two choices, swing or get out of the way.

What happens after you decide how to react is down to dumb luck.

Taking the outcome personally is not only grossly egocentric, it is also fundamentally shortsighted.

How do we know what is coming around the corner?

We only know what we want or what we think is the best for us and others. We never really know what’s right or wrong until it’s already been and gone.

I just hope my hindsight plays out true, that this is the right journey and not too presumptive on my part, seeing as I am only just beginning (cue “We’ve only just begun“).

Let’s see what the next step in this journey brings.

Hopefully the end result is not total pants! 🙂

Until next time – a river dare-chi,

Em (mE)