Enough

At some point in writing a book you have to say enough’s enough. You can tinker with it, finding little things you’d like to change here and there, but at some point you have to be done. My daughter sent me a meme the other day that said, “Writing a book is like reading a book, except the book hates you.” Maybe a little strong, but there’s truth in that. I’m at this point with Assignment Day, where I need to say I’m done. I’m doing my final readthrough (out loud), but that should be it. My sister is going to copyedit it next month, and then I need to figure out when to publish it. I think it’s good enough, which sounds like faint praise, but the improvements I’ve made the past couple of months definitely made it better. Could I keep going and continue as my own worst critic? Sure. I have other projects to work on, though, and it’s about time to cut this one loose. I’m hoping to have this final round completed by the end of the year, less than a week away, and then it’s on to other projects that need my attention. Such is the life of an author.

Winding Down

The year is winding down and next week I’ll take a look at how it went compared to my goals. And then with the new year starting, I’ll set some goals for 2025. In the meantime, I have some time off work the rest of this week, which should allow me to finish editing Assignment Day. We’ll see. I still feel like I need to spice it up just a tiny bit. And then I want to read it through one more time, aloud to myself, so I can catch those pesky little errors that hang on as long as they can. I also want to start looking back into the possibility of turning First into an audio book and how that would be distributed. So yes, I have a few things to do over the holidays. Hope you enjoy yours.

Holidays

Prices slashed! Get ‘em now while you can! These deals won’t last forever! Yeah, that’s how I feel after cutting the prices on First and Next Time for the holidays, kind of like an ad for used car sales. I lowered them both to $0.99 USD and will be running some ads starting the 25th to get that sweet post-Christmas gift card money. I don’t plan on leaving them at that price level for very long, though, so these deals really won’t last forever. Sales have been pretty consistent since I raised the prices a few months ago, and even though the volume is down, I’m actually getting more in royalties. Not that I’m getting a ton of money, just more than the meager pittance I previously got. And this is still a pittance. When I raised the price of First to $2.99 USD, that meant the royalty rate increased to $2.10 USD per copy. So from that perspective, every copy sold paid the same amount as six copies sold at $0.99 USD, where the royalty rate is $0.35 USD per copy. Which might make you ask: why lower the price? Because the opportunity is ripe during the holidays to get my books into the hands of more readers. I’ve probably said it here before, but I’ll say it again. My goal is for people to read my books and enjoy them for that brief period of time, escaping into another world. Not for me to get rich, ‘cause that ain’t happening. The payoff is when someone tells me how much they liked the story, or the characters, and that they wish the book kept going. That’s what I’m looking for over the holidays.

Urgency

Now that I’ve completed my effort of revising the beginning of each chapter in Assignment Day, I’m reading through it again to see how it flows. Once again, that got me to thinking about a few things. Is the climax of the book good enough? I’ve worked on it quite a bit and I think it’s almost there. However, I also wondered if the book is missing something, namely urgency. One way to create urgency and an extra sense of danger is to make the threat timebound. Threat might be too strong a word, but think of the conflict, the force against which the protagonist is waging his effort. If that conflict is up against a ticking clock (not always a literal clock), then the reader feels the tension as well. I think that’s what’s missing from the book. A few weeks ago I added an event that means something, but it’s not clear that’s a hard and fast deadline. For a book I thought was close to being in shape to publish, this is taking a lot of work. That’s a good thing, though. Better to figure it out now than after it’s published.

Middle

One of the things I’ve been focusing on the past several weeks while editing Assignment Day is the beginning of each chapter. The book has 50 chapters and I bet I’ve changed how half of them start. What do you mean? you ask. I mean that the beginning of a chapter should draw you in, just like the end of a chapter should make you want to keep reading. I found a lot of instances where a chapter started soft. By that, I mean one or more paragraphs of prose or exposition, kind of like an introduction before getting to the meat of the chapter. I don’t remember where I heard this advice, probably from multiple places, but it went something like this: always start your chapter in the middle of the scene. It means starting with action. You can always go back and recap what the reader missed in the first part of the scene, if necessary, but throw them right into the middle. That immediately stirs up the reader’s interest and keeps them going. It’s a style that’s a lot less passive, and that’s what I want in my books. And so the editing continues.

Shift Back

I’ve decided I don’t like the chapter I added to Assignment Day last week. It creates too many problems, including the fact that it undermines one of the main premises of the story and I can’t resolve that issue to make it work. The addition seemed like a good idea, or at least worth trying. That’s the great thing about writing. I can do like I did and write the scene and see if it fits. It costs nothing but a little bit of time, unlike adding a scene to a movie or TV show where I’d have to pay lots of people to create the set and prep it for a few minutes of filming. In this case, I might keep some of the chapter but rework it a little, using it to create more questions than answers I don’t like. It does address a plot thread that was dangling, but I think I can do it in a different way. We’ll see how this goes.

Shift

I continue to make changes to Assignment Day during the editing process, including one I’m unsure about. I added a chapter yesterday that’s an interesting wrinkle to the story, but I’ll need to revise the chapter quite a bit since it’s too explanatory - one character kind of lecturing to another - and will have ripples in later chapters that I’m not sure I want. This is the part of writing that turns out to be interesting, if not exactly fun. I considered not writing that chapter at all but thought, hey, why not? Experiment and see if it turns out to be a good thing, and if it doesn’t I can delete it. I know where the idea came from in my brain since it seems like it should be a necessary component of the book, but again, I’m just not sure yet. Next step is to see if the effects on later chapters make sense, and if so, then re-work the new chapter to be palatable and not such a blatant plot device.

All that aside, I’m making one more addition to the book that I know I’ll like. It’ll add an extra layer of relatability for the reader and no, I’m not telling you what it is. At least not yet. Okay, it’s a dog. I figured the main character and his family needed an extra component to their interactions as well as something the reader can relate to. Maybe it seems a little indulgent to add something so minor this late in the game, but it’s my book and I can do what I want. Plus, I like dogs.

Frequency

Yesterday morning I sat at the laptop, staring at the screen, and decided to change the frequency of my posts here. When I first started this blog almost two years ago, I posted every day. Admittedly, that was a little excessive, but hey, I was excited. Then I moved to three times a week on a M-W-F pattern. My most recent thought is to go to twice a week, on T-Th, with extra posts as needed. It’s mildly less writing on here for me, but I think at least for the time being it’s a good idea while I work on editing several books and think about finishing another. Plus, making goals for 2025 and considering the possibility of an audiobook. I don’t know that going from 3x to 2x/week will save a ton of time, but it’s worth trying out in the short time and seeing if it works out okay. And like I said, I can put up random posts or even change the frequency back if I want.

Remains

What remains of 2024? Just a little over a month. And what do I want to do with the time that remains? Well, the first item on the agenda is to finish editing Assignment Day. I’d like to get it in final form by the end of the year so I can then determine what’s the best timing for publishing the book. I don’t know, some of the editing might bleed into the new year, especially considering some of the changes I’ve been making. It’s going well, though, and my latest work on the book involved taking a couple of pages of narrative and turning it into a character interaction and conversation. Much better than a big block of prose. Back to the remainder of 2024 - I also need to consider my year-end promotions, such as dropping prices, running more or different ads, etc. I don’t intend to go crazy, but should probably do something so people are inclined to use those Amazon gift cards on my books after Christmas. If I do finish Assignment Day, then my next task will likely be to do the edit of the first draft of First Step, which has been sitting in the virtual drawer since the end of October. Of course, the other thing I need to do this year is plan for 2025 and set goals. Lots to do next year!

Gracias

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day in the U.S. and it seems appropriate to take a few pixels to convey some gratitude. What do I have to be thankful for this year? First of all, I’m thankful for the thousands of readers who enjoyed First and Next Time, and even those who didn’t. I’m thankful I got to publish Next Time earlier this year, and I’m thankful for the awards and recognition both books won. It’s been quite a ride. I’m thankful to have a job that pays the bills and leaves me enough left over to self-publish and indulge my writing addiction. I’m thankful for the support of my awesome wife and family and for cheering me on. I’m thankful that I live in 2024, where the publishing industry isn’t ruled any longer by a cabal of agents and publishers, and I can have complete ownership of my work and how it’s produced and marketed. And finally, I’m thankful to God for giving me the inspiration and ability to write stories that people have enjoyed from here to Canada to the UK to Europe to India to Australia, and all places in between. Muchas gracias, indeed.

Vacay

I’m taking a staycation this week from work, which hopefully means more time to work on Assignment Day and other assorted activities. I spent a good amount of time on Saturday doing some editing, and that’s my plan for today as well. And sounds good for tomorrow? And so on. I like how the changes are working, but I’m still looking for the thing that puts it over the top. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a very good book. I just feel there’s that one little thing I need to change to bump it up to the next level. That might be refining some of the key scenes to ratchet up the drama, or it could be a plot element I need to add. Not sure yet, but even though I can’t define it, I’ve learned to trust that nagging little feeling of unease. Maybe a few days off work will help.

New

I’m pretty sure what I’m doing with my Assignment Day editing is not something they teach you to do in Creative Writing, especially when you have a book that’s almost ready to publish. And I took Creative Writing back in my college days, so I should know better. What is it, you ask? I added a new character. A minor one, but definitely not in the previous versions of the book. And now for the follow-up question: why? Remember a couple of posts ago where I said I felt the book relied too much on exposition? Sometimes that’s fine, because the reader wants to know what the narrator is thinking. Plus, as a writer I need to build a believable world, and explaining how that world works is essential. However, I found in this book that there are plenty of moments where the exposition could be changed to a conversation. The problem was that the main character was by himself in those times. Too often, in fact. And I didn’t want him talking to himself since that’d just be weird. Hence, a new character. That’s the easy part. Making those expositions into conversation without making it seem like I took expositions and made them into conversations is the hard part. We don’t make expositions to our friends about the evolution of AI, for example. I feel like I’m reverting back toward a first draft of the book with these changes, but that’s okay. The end product should turn out a lot better for it.

Site

It strikes me that it might be time to update the bloggy part of this site. I have almost two years’ of posts at this point, all in a list that isn’t the most accessible. I’m taking off next week from work, so maybe that’s a project I will work on then. I don’t know what it takes to archive everything so that future readers can scroll through the posts easily, but I have a feeling it’s not going to be a half-hour project. It’d also be nice to figure out a new format for these and also make them easier to scroll through without periodically archiving. That might not be possible, but at least I’ll have the time to figure it out. After all, that’s what vacations are for, right?

Pending

My book plans for the holidays are still pending. I figured at some point I’d lower the prices on the eBooks, probably a week or two before Christmas. That way everybody who gets an Amazon gift card will be more inclined to give one of them a try. Other than that, I don’t really have any promotional ideas. Guess I should research that a little more. I suppose I could do the signed book thing again - that went all right last year but didn’t generate a ton of sales, just enough to make it worthwhile. Last year when I did my usual bit of minimal research, I found that to get into catalogs or other promotions, you have to start early. That’s not really my strong suit when it comes to book promotion. Regardless, I’ll figure out something, whether social media ads or otherwise.

Exposition

As I’m editing Assignment Day I’m trying to get rid of passages where there’s a lot of exposition. It’s difficult to build a future world without a little bit of explanation, but I also don’t want to bore the reader with lots of prose. I’ve already changed one scene to have the characters talk about things rather than me explaining them. I think there’ll be more of that as I go along. Speaking of exposition, I started reading the first book of The Wheel of Time series, and oh my stars and garters, there’s a lot. I don’t know if I’ll read the whole series, but it’s something that’s mildly intrigued me for years. I might get a little bit deeper into the book and decide it’s not for me, which is what happened with Game of Thrones. I read the first book in the series about fifteen years ago and made the decision to stop there. Kind of glad I did, since I’d be pretty upset with George Martin for not finishing the story. Anyway, that’s what’s going on with me. How about you?

To Edit

I completed my most recent pass through Assignment Day yesterday, and as I said previously, it’s going to take a lot more editing than I anticipated. I noted several nagging thoughts I had about the story and its progression, but also found several instances where I consider particular chapters as weak. What does “weak” mean in this sense? Among other things, it could be one or all of the following: a bland beginning, a scene that’s too long, it doesn’t drive the story forward in a meaningful way, or it has an ending that doesn’t compel you to immediately read the next chapter. How do I fix these problems? I’m going to first determine what story changes need to be made and then I’m going to go chapter-by-chapter, dissecting and making each one as tight as it can be. Wait, does this mean Assignment Day is a bad book? No, I actually like it and one of my sisters thought I should publish it before Next Time. I think it can be better, though. If I’m going to tell a story and let other people read it, then that story deserves my best effort. I didn’t slack off during the original writing and editing, but I’d say the perspective of viewing the book after not reading it for 20 months allows me to use the experience gained during that gap to make Assignment Day worthy.

Reading

What am I reading right now? Glad you asked. I have a couple of books going, one real book and one on Kindle. Last week I finished reading A Gentleman in Moscow, a wonderful read. Amor Towles is such an incredible writer, one whose mastery of language shines in every sentence. The story was also first-rate, taking the confined world of a Russian hotel and making it into its own universe. I liked it so much that I bought his first novel, Rules of Civility, and started that this past weekend. He breaks convention in the storytelling like they tell you not to do in a first novel, but who cares what “they” say? It works. I’m not that far into it, but it’s just as engaging as A Gentleman in Moscow. The other book I’m reading is quite interesting in a different way. It’s called Just Stay Away by Tony Wirt. I’d read another of his books as one of my free monthly Kindle books, and figured I’d try this one, too. It’s an effectively creepy read, probably made more so because the main character is a writer trying to finish a book, but a 9-year old psycho neighbor wrecks his life. It’s a tough read and makes my skin crawl, which means the author did his job very well. There you have it, two totally different types of books.

More Work

I’ve discovered that Assignment Day is going to take a bit more work than I’d planned. I thought I could go through the book once as a refresher and then one more time to tighten up scenes. Instead, I think I’m going to have to do more than that. One of the notes I made myself yesterday was to have more dialogue and character interaction than narration. As they say in Creative Writing 101, show, don’t tell. I’ve found several places where I can change the setting and add a character or two to have a discussion rather than a bunch of exposition. Mind you, it’s not that way everywhere in the book, but I’ve already identified scenes that need to be reworked. It’ll be worth it, though, since I want to put out the best book possible. I only get one crack at debuting Assignment Day to the world, and I prefer to take the time to make it better.

Thank You

I was sitting on the back patio last night, watching election returns come in, and realized there’s a certain group of people I need to thank. Those people are the ones who take a few minutes to write reviews of my books, whether on Amazon, Goodreads, Apple Books, or wherever. It takes time and extra effort to do that and I want to convey how much I appreciate it. Seriously. I’m terrible at following through and I don’t do it for every book I read, so I know how rare it is to receive written feedback. And I don’t discriminate: whether someone gives me five stars and a glowing review or they give me one star and tell me what they didn’t like, I appreciate it. To those who’ve gone that extra mile and left your commentary, I thank you.

It Begins

Yeah, I know I said I’d start editing Assignment Day this week. I decided on Saturday to go ahead and get started. Let’s just say I didn’t have much else to do that day and ended up going through the first ten chapters or so. I’m back to getting a sense of the storyline and feel for the characters, meaning this is going to be a readthrough where I don’t make any substantial changes. Once I’ve read through it all, I’ll take the time to assess what I feel are the weak points and nail down the nagging thoughts about it that are harder to put into words. Then I’ll fill in the missing parts, change some of the existing story, and take out what doesn’t need to be there. That all means I’ll probably have at least two more readthroughs in this process, followed by a final one for proofing. These books don’t write themselves, you know.