Kristin Jacques's Blog, page 7

2018 Writing Plans: How we gonna torture ourselves this year?

The Year is Ending

2017 is rapidly winding down. (Good riddance. Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.)

In the spirit of the approaching New Year, it is time to set impossibly lofty writing goals for myself that I can weep over when next December rolls around.

This year, I totally set myself up for failure. I started with a simple goal of finishing 2 Works in Progress. I did finish Ragnarok Unwound in early March and then the year went to hell in a handbasket. That is not to say the year was a total wash. I may very well meet that goal or come damn close to it as I pound my way through Edgewise. But I also wrote over 30 short stories this year, ranging from from 2k to 10k in word length, and four published anthology stories. That’s a lot of writing. I whack myself upside the head with that in my next existential funk. *Pats self on back*

I also did a massive overhaul of my social media and website. I learned how to do things with minimal whining. I’m still learning and growing in my knowledge base on how to do a thing. With the new year coming on in less than two weeks, it’s time to plan what I shall be tackling in 2018.

Plans!!!

These are the must happens, and I hope (hahahahahah) to reach this goals early in the year.

Priority #1

Edgewise

It’s write or die time! If I don’t make that end of the year goal, I am going to continue plowing on until I can type ‘The End’.

Priority #2

Happy Little Accidents

In 2016 I published Zombies vs Aliens with a small press. That imploded a month later. It happens. I then self published the book with absolutely no know how or plan. Now comes the reckoning. My anthology publishing taught me A LOT about promotion. I plan to continue on with book 2 and 3 in the new year.

Priority #3

Marrow Charm -The Rewrite

I am halfway through penning Blood Magic and seeing what I need to fix in book one is messing me up. I want to finish book 2 to stand back and make sense of the picture as a whole and then tear into it like a box of zebra cakes.

Theses three have pretty much consumed my existence for the past two years and it looks like a third year is in their future. But for the first time I can see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.

Passion Projects:

This is what I want to tackle in the new year. Putting these on the back burner has been necessary to my sanity but hoo boy are they tempting.

 

 

Miss Elderberry’s Academy of Etiquette and Monster Slaying

 

This was my Nanowrimo 2017 project, and I am still really excited for it, but other projects come first. I still can’t wait to tackle my first YA Historical Fantasy with brave girls in petticoats, not so imaginary monsters, and turn of the century science.

 

Underdeep

 

This story has been marinating in my head for nearly five years. It is a YA contemporary fantasy I’ve been itching to tell. A dripping city under the Hudson river, dark aquatic creatures, all centered on a tale of two sisters. It’s happening baby. It’s happening. 

 

And that is all I dare entertain. Maybe. If I can shut off my brain. Do you have goals for the coming new year? Tell meh!

Support an Author!

I can’t support this tweet enough.

 

The holiday season can be tight for many reasons. Unexpected expenses pop up, you always seem to spend more than you mean to, and something in the house always seems to sputter out. The spirit of generosity is a beautiful thing, but generosity does not have to mean money. Being generous with your time, your words, your passion, there is no monetary value on that.

 

For authors who make their livelihood off their writing, support like this is pure gold, especially during the holiday season. In an ideal deal world, I would buy twenty copies of all my favorite books and just give them out as presents but Adulting. There are many methods, as this above post highlights, beyond monetary, that can help support your favorite writers, popular and indie alike.

 

Let’s break it down shall we?

 

Review the book on Amazon: Amazon currently has the widest reach and greatest audience. There are also millions, MILLIONS, of books to be found. It can be a bit of a black hole without the buoyancy of reviews.  The more reviews a book has the more likely it is to end up in recommendation algorithms. While a high number is ideal, twenty reviews can go a long way. Potential buyers read reviews. It doesn’t matter if the book is 5.99 or .99. Reviews, honest reviews, help sell a book and if you love it, flaunt it.
And you can flaunt it all over the place. Goodreads, booklikes, Librarything, your own book blog, book love abounds.
Following them on social media→ Most authors, indie and big wig, use some form of social media. Some use several, specially indie authors because it helps them connect to a wider audience. Being an author is now a social profession. This is especially true for the indie set, who must use every tool at their disposal to improve their exposure and sales. I would take it one step further, Follow and Interact. Like their posts, retweet them, share news of their upcoming releases. Your audience adds to their audience. Every person who likes, tweets, and shares off you adds to the chain. Think of it like the Thunderclap build, each follow adds their connected social network to the pot. Someone in your social network could be their next fan.
Post about the book online. So you’ve reviewed the book, but you are dying to talk to someone about your favorite ship. This book contained one of your favorite world builds. Their words were like spun sugar on the page and make beautiful quote art babies. Talk about it. Open a conversation. Make fancy calligraphy. Fangirl the frack out of it. Passion carries. Enthusiasm attracts curiosity.

Beautiful quote art babies!!

Tell a friend. You know their tastes. You can tell they are gonna love this story if you put it in front of them. And then you can fangirl it together.
Say Hi. So simple but authors like to interact. We aren’t some oddball ogres shut up in our writing lair…mostly. Look, authors across the spectrum love their readers. Everyone from King to Rowling, to the newbiest newb newb debuting their first self pubbed book, respond to fans. Now response times may vary, but in general, authors are pretty willing to answer questions, share anecdotes and stories, and interact like hoomans. And that interaction can be a big deal for a new author. And it doesn’t have to be a long fan letter. You can interact through tweets, comments on their social media, or for serial authors, their chapter posts. Just knowing someone is out there, enjoying your work, is like a shot of sunshine in their day.
Ask your local library to add the book to their collection. Now I fully support this but I must add a footnote. Depending on the town, the library might have a strict budget or space constraints. Most are open to putting an indie book on their shelves (my local library put my book on the shelf) but they might not be able to pay for it. I donated my own book. I considered it a worthwhile investment. And if someone reached out to me and said ‘Hey, I would love to see your book in my local library but they don’t have the budget for it’, I would donate a copy to their library too. I think most indie authors would share the same mindset if a library can’t foot the bill and that brings us back to the previous point. Open a conversation! An indie author will probably be thrilled to send a copy of their book to your library.

How I Found My Tribe Through Serial Writing

Why serials?

 

It’s not the advent of the internet invented serial fiction. On the contrary, it was pretty common to serialize a novel throughout the 1800’s. Dickens made a career from serializing his work. Somewhere along the way, with the rise of publishing houses, releasing a work all in one go with bare minimum feedback, this image of the solitary writer emerged.

I hate that image. Making art is lonely freaking work. Artists as a group spend an awful lot of time living in their head, and it’s usually a pretty whack place. I spent most of my 20’s trying to hack it as the traditionalist solitary novelist and I was miserable.

 

Artists, musicians, and writers, despite how vital they are to a thriving culture, are probably the least supported group of individuals in the world. People scoff when you tell them you create for a living, they question your value as a contributor. Unless you are already ‘established’ you are written off. It creates a very wobbly sense of self worth.

 

I had a fairly supportive albeit wary and pragmatic family support system. When it was clear I was going pursue writing with both barrels blazing, they tried to give me the space to create. But art takes time, a lot of time. Writing takes ages. Plotting, planning, drafting, editing, editing, editing, and then querying, synopsis, blurb writing, selling your story, branding, promotion.

 

And the majority, you do yourself.

 

We aren’t gonna talk about the soul crushing cycle of querying and rejection. Let’s save that for a masochist day.

 

So where do serials come into this equation?

 

In my late twenties, I needed something different. I was struggling to create anything. I was a young mother in debt. I worked full time. It was a challenge to get a full sentence on the page. It was through casual fiddling on the internet I discovered serialized fiction blogs. It was such a new concept to me. I came from a background where sharing over the internet was drilled into me as a BAD THING *sirens sounding* but after much back and forth, I decided to throw it all in and force myself to post a chapter once a week.

 

New Earth Six was born. (ta da!)

The space opera was an entirely new experience  for me. I enjoyed writing with a large ensemble cast and the setting was something I could use to slowly weave their story lines together. This was a hit or miss challenge. I had no idea if people were reading and enjoying it. I mean I inserted visitor counter just to see if it actually got traffic. Some weeks were terribly hard to update. If I stumbled two weeks in a row with posting, I sometimes slipped into a bad funk. I went several months without updating around the time my son received his autism diagnosis.

Coming back to the story was difficult after such a break but something magical happened.

A reader left a comment welcoming me back. They told me how much they loved my story and were so happy to see I was updating again. This was a revelation for me. It was a validation I had never experienced before, and honestly it kept me going in many ways.

Do readers know how much power they have over us? It’s not state secrets I’m revealing here. That commented did something to me. I wanted more. New Earth Six lived on its own site, back when blogger was big, but there was still a disconnect. I wanted a writing space where I could connect to other readers and writers.

Finding the Tribe

For me, that space was Wattpad. I stumbled onto the scene when the site was already well established in 2013. I had no illusions going in. I didn’t go in to make my career there or ‘be discovered’. I began to post on Wattpad to interact. It didn’t happen magically overnight. Establishing that initial connection was hard work, but putting in the effort to connect paid off in spades. The platform also thrives on serialized fiction, delivering chapters every week or few days.

Three years later, it is still a formula I write to, with mixed success. Having that expectation has helped me finish several novels in the past few years. This is coming out of my twenties where I think I finished maybe two drafts in ten years.

From 2015 to now, I’ve written three complete novels, over 50 short stories, which includes about 10 novella length pieces and have several others in progress. That’s not meant to be bragging. (Hell I know some writers who produce three times that, I suspect through elves.)

But it is a testament to what a support network can do for a struggling writer. On Wattpad I found a network of readers and writers. (More on them later.) It’s not about what platform you choose so much as finding a group that supports you. If you are looking for a platform to try this on, there are now tons out there, everything from Radish, Tapas, Channillo, Jukepop, and more are coming out as we speak. Choose the platform you are most comfortable with experimenting on and give it a go. Interact and be patient. 

The friendships I’ve formed, the support network I’ve created, is priceless. My writing goals are still in flux, but I do know writing serial fiction will be something I continue to do. Wattpad is my sounding board, my laboratory. The reader interaction makes me story better and gives me clues about what works and what doesn’t. The same cues I bet Dickens listened two when he heard people talking about his fiction on the street. It’s a network of beta readers and they hold you accountable if you leave a story hanging. There is a perfect sort of alchemy in creating serial fiction, a freedom and motivation worth exploring for any writer. 

Welcome to the Show!

Introducing: The Blog

 

For reals though, let’s see how this goes shall we?