Linda Maye Adams's Blog, page 13

3. Hidden Extra Work

The hidden extra work is hard to find. One of the earliest experiments I did at my day job came after I read Sam Carpenter’s book, The Systems Mindset: Managing the Machinery of Your Life.

The book’s a bit dated now. Hard to believe that. It was only published in 2016. It talks about how everything is connected, which plays into how you can’t address only work and solve time management problems. Nor can you address finding extra time to write after work without addressing what’s happening at work.

He gives an example of a process that was very painful and time-consuming. The more steps any process has, the more likely mistakes will happen.

This is particularly true if you’re getting interrupted all the time. All it takes is for you to forget where you are in the process and skip a step. If you want to see this in action, watch Air Disasters. If a pilot gets distracted during the take-off process, he can forget a crucial step. Like forgetting to set the flaps, which causes the plane to crash.

All businesses are good at bureaucracy. You will get more steps, even when you know they don’t make sense.

The bureaucracy can also influence or even spread to your fiction writing.

In Mr. Carpenter’s book, he talked about mapping out all the steps in a process and figuring out if all of them were necessary.

So I did it on a report that was painful to create each week. It took me at least four hours, more if I was interrupted.

It was, like most of the tasks were get, something I inherited from someone else. I did it the way she’d done it.

Every week, I updated a spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel. The information had to be manually pasted or typed in. It constantly changed. Then I had to create two other versions of it and remove some information because two different departments didn’t want everything.

I emailed it. Then, to store it, I went through a laborious process to format it for printing. It was too big for a standard print run, even on legal paper. Every time the information changed, I had to redo the settings to print.

One of the departments emailed me back. Why was this on their report? I’d goofed up and missed one of the rows and they were unhappy. And if you’ve had problems with the glut of emails, getting ones like this adds an incredible amount of time you don’t need.

It made the report very frustrating. So I dived in, hoping to find places to cut back on some of the time. I used a yellow legal notepad and recorded each step as I did it.

Stopped. Looked at one. Considered. Why was I printing it? The file cabinet simply stored pieces of paper that no one looked at again.

I was printing it because the person I had gotten it from had printed it.

Other steps surfaced as I worked through it. I later went back and added drop-downs to many of the columns to help cut back on my typos. I also added filters, which made building the other two reports less prone to errors.

And asked why I was creating three reports.

One day, I decided to combine everyone on one mailing list, and I only sent out one report. It was terrifying. I expected one of the other groups to squawk at me.

Not a peep.

The result was that I could produce this report in about thirty minutes and have far fewer mistakes.

Gurus will tell you to do a process check like the above on every single task. I find that’s unrealistic. I’ve seen some people say they’ve tipped and tricked themselves to death, following all the rules, and suddenly realize they’ve sucked the life out of what they’re doing.

Just pick one painful task and see what you come up with.

Because then you’ll be more aware of where some of this creeps in.

This showed up for me on the writing side:

I used to be on a different host for my website. A family member had initially recommended it and I used it for an official website for an actor until I handed it off. Then I used the host when I was co-writing. After we broke up, I switched over to my site.

At the time, technology was still developing. I used Microsoft FrontPage to update the site and publish it to the host.

No problems there.

Until my hard drive failed and I had to replace the computer. The extensions no longer worked. I wasn’t sure if it was on my end of theirs. Front Page was discontinued not long after that, though.

I had to rebuild the entire site using the host’s online templates.

The templates were terrible. Though I was a business, none of the templates fit fiction writing. They had images of business people doing business things—you know, those images where everyone’s smiling as they gather around a table.

Definitely not fiction writing!

But I found one that was tolerable because what else could I do? (Yeah, it didn’t occur to me right away that I should look for a new host).

The host used this wizard to create the site. It was simple enough, though frustrating for me because I was used to being able to do more formatting. I got the site up and published.

About then, I was starting to indie publish.

And discovered a problem when I went back to add one of my books. The host’s template assumed:

You were building a new websiteYou were only adding text, not images.You were never going to update the website.

It was not designed for frequent updates. I had to rebuild the site with the wizard every single time I added a book. Adding images was a frustrating process. It resulted in me not updating the site when I had a new short story release.

Fortunately, because I’d done an initial mapping of a process in my day job, I recognized a broken process. It also gave me information I could use when shopping around for a new host. I needed a site that could tolerate frequent updates.

These little things add up. The reality is that while I was fussing at the template, my critical voice was getting involved. If it gets too much of a foothold, it’ll land in the writing and stop monkeying around.

Look for tasks that annoy you and see if you can cut the number of steps.

After that, think in terms of “intermediate packets.”

This is a term from Tiago Forte. You can find more details in his book, Building a Second Brain. He also has it on his blog, but it’s behind a paywall.

An intermediate packet makes you less vulnerable to interruptions. Essentially, you break a task down to its smallest parts so that if you do get interrupted, you don’t lose track of where you are.

It was a very hard concept for me to understand. I’d think of a task as everything that had to do with this thing I had to do.

For the day job: With a report, I had to download it, review it, fix problem one, fix problem two, contact Joe Smith, contain Jane Doe, etc. If I got interrupted, I’d miss that I still needed to fix problem two until someone contacted me and it was now an emergency.

For indie publishing: Format the book into the template, proofread, write the blurb, come up with keywords, find the cover image, create the cover, publish to three sites, and post the cover and link on my site. If I got interrupted (in this case, because I was worn out from all the interruptions at work), I’d miss something like a typo in the blurb, which I then have to correct.

Breaking this down a little more with the report example:

Download the report (or actually reports, since I try to do multiple for batching).
Review it and identify anything that needs action. Note it on the report.
If I have an issue that needs help desk intervention, add a task on my calendar to do it the next day (since I know that will take some time to get through).
Record all the names of the people I need to contact first, then contact them via Teams. This is another batching, so I can copy the spreadsheet section impacting them and paste it into the Teams.

If I get interrupted during any stage, I can refer back to what I’ve already done and knock it out. Once I’m finished with the reports, I move them out of my downloads into my archives so I know I got it done.

Onto the indie example:

I build a keyword guide and dump all the keywords into it, adding more as I need to. This is so much better than me trying to reinvent the keywords every time I publish. I have one for my GALCOM Universe series, one for Dice Ford, Superhero, and one for fantasy. I’ll eventually add mystery and science fiction.
I built a category map and dump all the categories I want to use on one publishing site so I can reuse everything.
Find the image. This can usually be batched with finding more than one cover.
Create the cover. This sometimes has a revisit to the second task. Sometimes I download an image and it’s not right, or too complicated for a cover, or not enough contrast.
Drop the story in my first template. Quick formatting round to clean it up.
Write the blurb (it goes in the template with the story).
Run my macro. This uses FrEdit, which you can find online. In my GALCOM Universe series, it searches for the ship name, including my misspellings of it, and replaces it with an italicized version. I also have some phrases I want it to look for because I use them too much.
Run Microsoft Word’s spell check, Grammarly (free version), and ProWritingAid. I proofread and edit, then run PerfectIt.
Migrate to my source file and download the license for the image(s). A brief check through and any additional formatting clean-up.
Migrate to my eBook template.
Build my Jutoh file and create the epub.
Publish to the three sites.
Update my website.
Review the story’s folder to make sure everything is named properly and I’ve downloaded all the image licenses.

That’s a lot of individual tasks! When I tried publishing before, my critical voice informed me that it was easy and why wasn’t I doing it more? I pantsed the steps, not always in the correct order, and interrupted myself just being tired from the day job.

Intermediate packets make completing something more dummy-proof. But also, it shows you as well how much work something is.

It’s well known that we underestimate how much time something takes. Our critical voice jumps to the result and says, “This isn’t going to take much time.”

And then you find something that will be harder than you expect, you get interrupted, start on it again, get interrupted again, and by the time you surface, you’re on something. It gets forgotten.

It becomes very stressful when you do miss steps. During the bad days of the day job, I woke up in the middle of the night, dreaming about all the things I’d forgotten after getting interrupted a dozen times a day.

2 The Lie Everyone Tells (Time Management)

When I came up with the title for this chapter, the first thing I thought of was all those promises time management gurus made about their system. But then I thought about it more, and there’s a deeper lie, one we all tell ourselves.

I saw it when I first got online, during the gold rush days when everything was new and exciting. I’d posted Microsoft Word for Writers tips, hitting on several features that confused writers.

A woman emailed me with a question about how to do something in Word. I responded and told her how.

Then she emailed me with a second question. I got annoyed. There was enough up on the internet that she could have spent a few extra minutes searching for the answer. Instead, she asked me.

Because she wanted easy and quick.

That’s why tips and tricks are so popular. You can use them as an action list and feel like you’ve accomplished something.

Tips and tricks also means you don’t have to spend a lot of time “fixing” the problem.

Except that you haven’t fixed it. The problem’s still there, with a cheap store brand bandage slapped on a cut that continues to bleed.

Worse, they hide a bigger problem. One that’s eating every one of us and we don’t realize it.

Computers make it easier to do more work.

When I was in the Army, we were in the early years of the personal computer. The 384 had just come out, and my squad leader bought it. We used it to build a presentation called the quarterly training briefing (or QTB, since the Army loves turning everything into acronyms).

After we finished the QTB, we printed it on paper. Then I walked across the street to battalion headquarters with a box of transparencies. I put the transparencies into the copy machine and ran copies onto the plastic. This was a messy process. The copier often got too hot. The slides would jam, or sometimes just melt.

Then I delivered the slides to the commanding officer’s office. He gave the QTB to the group commander (that’s the command above the battalion). If there were any changes to the information, he talked to it while he was in the meeting.

Until computers made presentations a lot easier to create.

Everyone said, “No we can get these done faster!”

Another lie.

I did presentations in my day job for a while. Management started building the presentation a month out from the meeting. We’d do a draft. Five senior people met in a conference room and discussed it. Then I got the changes back and updated it. Emailed it to everyone.

They reviewed it, sent back more changes. Usually this sucked in more people to review the file.

I made those changes and sent it back out. Maybe there was another meeting or three of the senior people. More changes. It would easily undergo twenty drafts.

Day of presentation. I’m trying to print paper copies for the meeting. They’re still making changes. I’m substituting slides, pulling others, and keeping my fingers crossed that I don’t goof it up.

But let’s now take it to fiction writing.

In the days of the Royal manual typewriter, the physical process of typing was difficult and had a lot of steps we’d find tedious today.

Add a light pencil line to each page so you didn’t accidentally type off the page.
Insert the paper into the typewriter roller and line it up against the guide. You also had to make sure you started typing in the right place.
Hit the tab key. Start typing. Once you reach the end of the line, you cranked a handle for the carriage return and pulled the roller back to the left to start on the next line.
Cursed a lot when you made a typo. You might use a pencil eraser to fix the typo or make a pencil correction.
Once you reached the end of the page, you pulled out the page and repeated the process.
Then you proofread it and penciled in corrections.

As a result, pulp writers learned how to write in one draft. Especially since they were getting paid a penny a word. There was no profit in revision.

Today? The computer makes it easy to revise a novel. You can easily write one book for five years, putting it through twenty revisions to the point it looks nothing like the original. The steps might look like this:

Write a sloppy first draft. You leave all kinds of problems in it unfixed. Like figuring out how the heroine got caught by the bad guys at the halfway point. You put in placeholders for information to research or fix.
Now you revise it. You fix all those issues you left for the revision. Some of them break other things. You spend a lot of time fixing them. You’re probably doing three to five revisions.
You submit it to your critique group. They make comments. You zoom back and start a new revision to make those changes. You might bounce back and forth between this and add another three revisions. Or more.
Off to beta readers. They make more suggestions. Back to the revision board for more changes.
At last! Now it’s time for the developmental editor. She has more changes yet. Another round of revision.
Finally! The story is published.
Reviewers post some comments about the book. You freak out, see it as a call for action, and go back to revise again.
Republish.

“It’s easy” makes us go on autopilot. And we start adding more work and never realize it!

Mind you, I’m not complaining about having computers. I’m a rotten typist. I typed on an electric typewriter and was constantly retyping pages because I made so many typos. When I did that, I made even more, left out entire paragraphs—arrgh!

I was ecstatic to jump to a computer with an actual spellchecker. I now use a combination of four tools to help me find as many typos as possible (Microsoft Word spellcheck, Grammarly, ProWritingAid, and PerfectIt).

But the tools can easily add more work, and it’s something you have to be vigilant for. The worst part about this lie is that it looks productive while it’s wasting your time.

The Lie Everyone Tells (Time Management for Fiction Writers 2)

When I came up with the title for this chapter, the first thing I thought of was all those promises time management gurus made about their system. But then I thought about it more, and there’s a deeper lie, one we all tell ourselves.

I saw it when I first got online, during the gold rush days when everything was new and exciting. I’d posted Microsoft Word for Writers tips, hitting on several features that confused writers.

A woman emailed me with a question about how to do something in Word. I responded and told her how.

Then she emailed me with a second question. I got annoyed. There was enough up on the internet that she could have spent a few extra minutes searching for the answer. Instead, she asked me.

Because she wanted easy and quick.

That’s why tips and tricks are so popular. You can use them as an action list and feel like you’ve accomplished something.

Tips and tricks also means you don’t have to spend a lot of time “fixing” the problem.

Except that you haven’t fixed it. The problem’s still there, with a cheap store brand bandage slapped on a cut that continues to bleed.

Worse, they hide a bigger problem. One that’s eating every one of us and we don’t realize it.

Computers make it easier to do more work.

When I was in the Army, we were in the early years of the personal computer. The 384 had just come out, and my squad leader bought it. We used it to build a presentation called the quarterly training briefing (or QTB, since the Army loves turning everything into acronyms).

After we finished the QTB, we printed it on paper. Then I walked across the street to battalion headquarters with a box of transparencies. I put the transparencies into the copy machine and ran copies onto the plastic. This was a messy process. The copier often got too hot. The slides would jam, or sometimes just melt.

Then I delivered the slides to the commanding officer’s office. He gave the QTB to the group commander (that’s the command above the battalion). If there were any changes to the information, he talked to it while he was in the meeting.

Until computers made presentations a lot easier to create.

Everyone said, “No we can get these done faster!”

Another lie.

I did presentations in my day job for a while. Management started building the presentation a month out from the meeting. We’d do a draft. Five senior people met in a conference room and discussed it. Then I got the changes back and updated it. Emailed it to everyone.

They reviewed it, sent back more changes. Usually this sucked in more people to review the file.

I made those changes and sent it back out. Maybe there was another meeting or three of the senior people. More changes. It would easily undergo twenty drafts.

Day of presentation. I’m trying to print paper copies for the meeting. They’re still making changes. I’m substituting slides, pulling others, and keeping my fingers crossed that I don’t goof it up.

But let’s now take it to fiction writing.

In the days of the Royal manual typewriter, the physical process of typing was difficult and had a lot of steps we’d find tedious today.

Add a light pencil line to each page so you didn’t accidentally type off the page.
Insert the paper into the typewriter roller and line it up against the guide. You also had to make sure you started typing in the right place.
Hit the tab key. Start typing. Once you reach the end of the line, you cranked a handle for the carriage return and pulled the roller back to the left to start on the next line.
Cursed a lot when you made a typo. You might use a pencil eraser to fix the typo or make a pencil correction.
Once you reached the end of the page, you pulled out the page and repeated the process.
Then you proofread it and penciled in corrections.

As a result, pulp writers learned how to write in one draft. Especially since they were getting paid a penny a word. There was no profit in revision.

Today? The computer makes it easy to revise a novel. You can easily write one book for five years, putting it through twenty revisions to the point it looks nothing like the original. The steps might look like this:

Write a sloppy first draft. You leave all kinds of problems in it unfixed. Like figuring out how the heroine got caught by the bad guys at the halfway point. You put in placeholders for information to research or fix.
Now you revise it. You fix all those issues you left for the revision. Some of them break other things. You spend a lot of time fixing them. You’re probably doing three to five revisions.
You submit it to your critique group. They make comments. You zoom back and start a new revision to make those changes. You might bounce back and forth between this and add another three revisions. Or more.
Off to beta readers. They make more suggestions. Back to the revision board for more changes.
At last! Now it’s time for the developmental editor. She has more changes yet. Another round of revision.
Finally! The story is published.
Reviewers post some comments about the book. You freak out, see it as a call for action, and go back to revise again.
Republish.

“It’s easy” makes us go on autopilot. And we start adding more work and never realize it!

Mind you, I’m not complaining about having computers. I’m a rotten typist. I typed on an electric typewriter and was constantly retyping pages because I made so many typos. When I did that, I made even more, left out entire paragraphs—arrgh!

I was ecstatic to jump to a computer with an actual spellchecker. I now use a combination of four tools to help me find as many typos as possible (Microsoft Word spellcheck, Grammarly, ProWritingAid, and PerfectIt).

But the tools can easily add more work, and it’s something you have to be vigilant for. The worst part about this lie is that it looks productive while it’s wasting your time.

1. Time Management for Fiction Writers

This is something I’ve thought about writing, though I didn’t want to cover the well-trod paths that don’t help much. After reading fellow Superstars Writer Carolyn Stein’s blog I realized there was a need for something like this.

Because no one talks about any of these things. At least, not all in one place, and not for fiction writers.

And especially not for pantsers.

I’m going to publish this as a book, but you can read it here first.

1 Introduction

This is not going to be a typical time management book. If you’re like me, you’ve probably read all of them. Gurus cheerfully tell you to use A, B, and C to prioritize, hand off work to other people, and follow their system.

If you follow their system, all the pieces will fall into place.

We all know what a lie that actually is.

Fiction writing presents its own challenges because most of us are doing it on the side. We have to navigate around the job, maybe family, and even just taking the time to do something fun to refresh the batteries.

Being a pantser, a writer who doesn’t outline, has additional challenges. Certain pantser traits can create all kinds of headaches. Yeah, I’ve had a lot of practice with that one.

In one of my past jobs, I was fairly well known for being flexible. If you gave me something, I could pivot on a dime and jump right in. If you said “I’m giving this presentation in two hours,” I could get it done.

Then I changed jobs. We had a major reorganization, where we rearranged everyone. My workload instantly quadrupled.

My “flexibility” worked against me now. Everyone expected me to react as soon as their email dropped in my box.

All I could do was put out fires. But like a brush fire in California, new hot spots formed around me.

So what does this have to do with fiction writing?

I naively thought I could still write fiction and indie publish.  I even did two challenges. One was 10 Stories in 10 Weeks—all flash fiction around one thousand words. The other was Writing in Public. I did a handful of stories and a novella.

Then the workload fell on me. I was drowning and in danger of burning out. Still, being former army, I tried to accomplish the mission and finish stories. Realistically, I was still putting out fires. I’d tried to barrel through publishing or refreshes of existing books, get fried, and have to stop.

Some relief came from work. I got some help. The other person was astounded and said, “I don’t know how you kept up.”

Still, I struggled with managing everything. Indie publishing is about getting things out there. It was hard writing because I didn’t always have the energy. I wanted to get books in paper, but I didn’t have the mental energy to learn the complicated process of learning the tools. In 2019, I broke down and paid for two covers just to get books into paper.

Then COVID-19 hit. Overnight, the nature of my job shifted. It allowed me to step back and do something I hadn’t been able to do before: reassess how I was doing everything.

One of the key things I discovered was that everything filters into the writing and can knock it off balance.

The changes also enabled me to do a writing challenge where I wrote a story a week for an entire year. Then I finished a novel and a novella, both in the same year, another major accomplishment.

Then Draft to Digital and Smashwords announced they were merging. I have stories on both vendors. But I know from my day job that when you bring data from one system into another, there are big headaches.

I wanted to pick my battles rather than be a victim of them, so I decided to do an inventory refresh.

And I saw plainly how the work chaos had impacted my publishing. I could see where I didn’t have the mental energy to do basic things right like make sure I had all the files in one place. In one case, I published a story twice, and in another, had different covers on different platforms.

We don’t think how everything is connected, but they are. So, read on for all the lessons learned.

Onward!

Weekend with Superheroes available for preorder

When I started writing this story, I had a different one in mind. But the creative voice knows what it knows.

I took a course on novellas from Dean Wesley Smith during the writing of this. Suddenly I realized that my creative voice wanted to explore a different direction. What was the impact of the kidnapping of Dice’s mother on the family? Or her being a superhero?

Barely a month as a superhero and Dice Ford struggles with the attention—and lack of it.

Metro City lavishes fannish praise on their hero. But Dice’s mother?

She sees her daughter as a failure in life.

Then the arrival of a second female superhero throws her family life into chaos. Dice must make a stand for herself. Can her family survive?

A page-turning superhero novella.

Pick up a copy from your favorite booksellers!

The Importance of Being Genre

As part of my inventory review, I took down a handful of stories that were genreless. I thought they were literary when I wrote them.

They weren’t.

It was hard with publishing them, too. Without a solid genre anchor, it was hard to find covers and write a blurb.

So when I opened the first one to do the review, I asked why and took them down.

Genre is a surprisingly hard concept to understand. It can get muddled with our personal opinions.

One writer I see rallies against formula, thinking that’s why she’s seeing bad books. More likely, it’s that writers are writing the first idea that comes to mind—and that’s what everyone else is doing.

Genre is one aspect of marketing. It gives the reader what they are expecting to find.

If you want to read science fiction, the world is required.

If you want to read a mystery, a crime is required.

If you want to read a romance, happily ever after is required.

But it’s also easy to overbalance the writing with our personal preferences. I started writing fantasy and not doing enough of the world. I liked many aspects of speculative fiction. But when writers started talking about building the entire world before I started the story, it left me cold.

You know, the three-ring binders with the tabs. A zillion questions.

I’m a pantser. That’d ruin the discovery of the story for me.

So I had to learn how to pants it into the story.

I recently picked up a book billed as a “Sci-Fi Mystery like J.D. Robb.” I like J.D. Robb, so I picked up the first book in the series.

And quickly was disappointed. The first was that it wasn’t even close to J.D. Robb. Granted, Nora Roberts is a best-selling writer with 200 books and mad skills. The other author might have done well still…if she’d understood genre.

I read mystery and speculative fiction.  As a reader, I felt frustrated by the story and stopped reading halfway.

The balance of the genres was wrong. I couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be a mystery, science fiction, or a romance.

There wasn’t enough world in the story for science fiction.There wasn’t enough mystery and too much world for it to be a mystery.There was too much romance. It took over the story at the halfway point and forced the mystery into the background. This was where I stopped reading.

The result? I didn’t get a mystery story I wanted, and it wasn’t anything like J.D. Robb. I admit even J.D. Robb confused me the first time I read it. I was looking for more world. But it’s solidly a mystery, set in the near future and with some romance.

Genre is always about giving readers what they want.

Animals in Fiction

We’ve had a few days of really nice, seventy-degree weather. None of the usual drenching Washington, DC humidity that’s common this time of the year.

The weather’s also perfect for me to do dog watching. Everyone’s out in the comfortable sunshine, walking their dogs. Sometimes the dogs stop, wanting me to pet them. I’ve even petted a pig that a woman brought to the farmer’s market.

And it’s influenced me to put animals in the Dice Ford, Superhero series. Moreover, it makes the story fun for me to write. I’m thinking of adding some to my GALCOM Universe stories. Dogs and cats on spaceships?

Sure! Star Trek The Next Generation did it with Data and his cat Spot, and then again with Archer and his beagle Porthos on Enterprise (in case you wanted a fix of the very cute).

But as I read, I don’t always trust writers to do right by animals. At the first ThrillerFest, James Rollins told his writer audience: Don’t put animals in your books.

You see, the veterinarian turned author put a dog in the book. He didn’t harm the dog at all, but it made readers put down the book.

If I see an animal in a thriller, I’m very likely to put the book down, too.

Thrillers are notorious for using animals as a plot device to show how evil a serial killer can be. With one book I read, I stopped reading immediately. It was very obvious when the cat made its appearance that the author didn’t like cats. It just came through in the writing.

I’ve also run into some thrillers where it was pretty obvious the writer was fictionally killing off the family pet they had been forced into getting.

No, just no.

Speculative fiction has its own problems. It often seems like horses are treated as cars. The character gets on one, turns the key (so to speak), and goes. So much missed opportunity for characterization!

Books I like with good animal characterization:

Anything by Nora Roberts/J.D. Robb

The Green Rider series

Anything by Tamora Pierce

Anything by James Rollins (he later reversed his comments on animals)

Summer Fun

I’ve often had trouble doing fun things. That’s also pretty important. It escapes from the day job and feeds my creativity.

My challenge has been taking the time to think about what I would find fun, rather than zooming off to the Smithsonian because it’s Saturday and I’m supposed to have fun. We called that “mandatory fun” in the military.

Mandatory fun happened when we were required to attend an event on Saturday, our day off, so we could have fun.

So I’ve been thinking about what I want to do and not being a pantser for it (i.e. deciding the day of). I roamed about the Virginia is For Lovers site and stumbled on a carriage ride. With horses!

It was a 45-minute tour in Fredericksburg, VA in blistering heat. The horse is named Raven and was an Amish plow horse. Oddball piece of information I learned: The Amish carriage horses get so burned out they can’t be used for carriages after the Amish sell them.

It was a little scary standing this close to the horse. It doesn’t show up as well in the picture, but she was huge!

I did get mandatory horse petting in.

You can see how huge the horse is from this angle.

Writing Updates:

Weekend With Superheroes: This is done! Whoop! Whoop! I just have to make a cycling pass over the ending, and probably run all four editing checkers before I send it off to the continuity editor.

One of the things I’ve discovered on the refresh is that even the copy editor had a hard time spotting missing articles. Running a combination of Grammarly and ProWritingAid catches a lot of these.

Pantser Rebellion: New book! This one is coming out of the work I’m doing with the inventory review for the Smashwords merger. Admin is tough for me to get to and can get overwhelming fast. So this consists of lessons learned on admin for fiction writers. It’s a shockingly big topic.

GALCOM 5: I’m returning for a fifth entry into the series. Part of the process is to refresh all the existing books and short stories to make sure the continuity’s straight. I’m finding I changed some things along the way…yeah.

I’m making a glossary of names of places on the ship and adding corrections to a list in a macro. A basic example is the macro searches for the ship’s name (and where I’ve misspelled it), then replaces it with italics.

I also just did my first podcast. More on that when I get it.

Coming Smashwords Merger

If you’ve seen changes here, it’s because the Smashwords merger pushed me into making the changes. In my day job, I was part of a massive project now more than 20 years ago that involved migrating an aging COBOL system into modern technology.

Converting data like this is a messy process, rife with errors. People are inconsistent in how they type in the data.

I started out indie publishing with Smashwords as the aggregator, then switched to Draft to Digital. Smashwords user interface has always been not easy to use. Also, at the time, the only tools to build ebooks were for Mac (that’s no longer true). I had to do it via Word and that was time-consuming. Even With templates, I still got it wrong!

The merger is making me do a review of my inventory and make some changes to simplify things for me.

Flash fiction: I pulled down all these stories and retired them. Not all vendors take flash fiction. I discovered this when I switched to D2D and the story was rejected by all the vendors. These weren’t going to convert at all.
Genreless fiction: I also took down genreless fiction. I think every writer lands here, thinking they’re writing a literary story. Instead, the story is actually missing a genre. Very challenging doing blurbs, since some of the marketing words come from the genre. Covers? Even worse.
Weak genre fiction: I took down weak genre stories. These were right around the same time as the genreless. They were hard to write blurbs for, come up with keywords, and even find cover images.
Collections: I dropped the early collections of stories. I took a class on building a collection and learned a lot from it. So much so that fixing the collections to that standard would have taken more time than building new ones.

A surprising result is that I felt a weight lift off me that I hadn’t known was there. Those handful of stories were the first ones I always tackled in a refresh because I couldn’t nail down the marketing. Suddenly the review felt a lot more manageable with those four changes.

Meanwhile, here’s the cover for Dice Ford Book 2 (not the final, since I realized I don’t have Book 2 on it). Might play around a little more with the branding banner. No date on when this is going to come out. My editor is not available until mid-June, though it could be earlier.

New Pantser Rebellion Book for May (Link Added)

I’ll be releasing a new Pantser Rebellion book later this month. I did this book because I was frustrated with resources that treated what we do as fiction writers (and pantsers) as if we were still in school. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to take notes like I’m being tested on them. I want them to benefit my creativity. Look for this on May 24.

Do you have trouble figuring out how to take research notes for writing fiction?

In this writer’s guide, Linda M. Adams reveals how she takes notes for her stories, using pantser writing techniques

The secrets of how are easier to learn than you think.

•     The difference between what we learned about note taking in school and what we need to write fiction

•     Traps to avoid when note-taking

•     How to take notes for book research and writing workshops!

This book shows you how to write smarter and be the writer you’ve always wanted to be. Join the Pantser Rebellion!

Here’s the link to preorder: https://books2read.com/u/3G55Vn