Michael Montoure's Blog, page 21

"Insidious"

I was up way too late last night, but I think it was worth it. I've been pushing myself pretty hard lately, and decided I needed a night to relax, and what better way to relax than to go spend a couple of hours being terrified with strangers in a dark room?

I'd been wanting to see Insidious, a low-budget horror movie that's been getting a lot of buzz, and those are always kind of hit-and-miss for me. F'rinstance, I loved The Blair Witch Project — it's one of my Top 50, in fact — but I thought that Paranormal Activity was just okay. My tastes aren't always in tune with the mainstream.  (And if that's not an understatement, I'm not sure what is.)

This time, I think the buzz was justified. I really enjoyed it, and there were definitely a couple of moments that scared the hell out of me. In a lot of ways, this movie starts out covering some of the same ground as Paranormal Activity — not too surprising, since the same producers were involved in both – but then it veers off that course into different territories. It shifts mood a couple of times so hard that it practically changes genre, and by the end of it you may find your suspension of disbelief a bit tested.

But that's actually what I liked about it — it was willing to take risks and keep you guessing, not only about the plot but about what kind of movie you're watching. That alone took me out of my comfort zone in a way I'm not used to.

One other thing I really appreciated about it — you know how in a haunted house movie, you've always got that question in the back of your head, "why don't they just leave?" This deals with that problem in a satisfying way.

Definitely worth checking out. You might find it even scarier than I did if you have children. Or want children. Or, you know, like children.

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words

. . . or in this case, it's worth about 60,000 words:

Yes, it's live — you can click on the image above and it'll take you to its page on Amazon right now. (I'm a little excited. Can you tell?)

This might be somehow even more exciting to me than receiving the first print versions from CreateSpace was. This feels like the future.

We Are All Savages Inside

THE INTERN linked to a really great piece of advice column writing, in answer to a question from a writer about how to get over the bitter jealousy they feel towards the success of other writers, and it makes a point that I think is crucial to remember:

"[ . . . ] my gut sense of your letter is that you've conflated the book with the book deal. They are two separate things. The one you are in charge of is the book. The one that happens based on forces that are mostly outside of your control is the book deal. You could write the world's most devastatingly gorgeous book of poems and nobody would give you $200,000 to publish it. You could write the world's most devastatingly gorgeous novel and maybe get that. Or not.

My point is, the first thing you need to do is get over yourself, Awful Jealous Person. If you are a writer, it's the writing that matters and no amount of battery acid in your stomach over who got what for what book they wrote is going to help you in your cause. Your cause is to write a great book and then to write another great book and to keep writing them for as long as you can.

— DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #69: We Are All Savages Inside

Or as THE INTERN puts it, "Agents, editors, publishers, and the world at large can Reject your wish for a book deal. But NOBODY, read NOBODY can Reject your ability to write a great book."  What a great reminder to other people's opinions of your work separate from your own.  Even the opinions of people you might consider all-important arbiters of quality, editors and agents, are still just that — opinions. Concentrate on where your powers and responsibility lie.

Quote of the night:

From Jim Steinman:

"There's so many things that have beautiful gods in them – y'know, amplifiers, guitars, motorcycles, girls' eyes, screams in the middle of New York City some nights, moons, there's millions of them."

— The Dark Knight Returns.

Conversion Aversion

Okay, I'm going to do my absolute best not to be snarky here.  I'm a fairly technical person — I'm a web programmer when I'm out there in Day Job Land — and I understand that not everyone is as comfortable or conversant with computers.  I do get that.

But I kind of boggled over this post over at The Book Designer, and it really underlines what I was talking about yesterday, about how much of a pain converting my book to Kindle format was.  It's called "Conversion Journey: My Word-to-E-book Workflow." This guest poster has been asked to talk about his process for conversion, and he begins by talking about how he starts out in Word, since Smashwords needs a Word file. Fair enough — but then he says:

Word produces (so far) the cleanest HTML file.

That sound you just heard was any other web developers reading this spewing their morning coffee all over their keyboards.

No. Wrong. Nuh-uh. Anti-yes. Word doesn't produce anything like a "clean" HTML file. Word riddles your HTML with horrible proprietary tags that are absolutely meaningless to anything but itself, and produces output that's literally about three or four times the size it needs to be, riddled with useless markup like inoperable cancer.  Word is a perfectly decent little word processor, as far as that goes, and it has its uses, but using it to create "clean HTML" is like using nuclear weaponry to go trout fishing.

But, okay, fair enough, moving on:

There is something about the process of closing the text file and reopening it that prevents Word from assigning any extraneous styles.

[....] For some reason, Smashwords does a lousy job of converting the linkable table of contents when those links are created solely in Word.

There's something about the process. For some reason. Look at the language he's using here — he's approaching the tools he's using in, well, kind of a cargo-cult like fashion — he doesn't know why they do the things they do, or what exactly they're doing to his files — he has just figured out, through trial and error, what steps seem to just magically work, no matter how Rube Goldberg-like the process ends up being. (And it really is that convoluted. Go read the linked article and you'll see what I mean.)  And what fascinates and horrifies me is that he sounds perfectly happy and accepting of the idea that this is the way it should be, this is the way it has to be.

At this point you might be thinking, man, Montoure, go easy on the guy.  He's just a poor struggling writer like the rest of us, he can't be expected to know his way around this stuff, can he?  Well, see, no. That's what kills me. He's a professional editor and e-book designer. He does this for a living, and he's happy with a workflow process that ends up like this:

The third workflow stream is to export the Word file as an HTML file. I open that HTML file in BBEdit and spend the next couple of hours cleaning the code and adding additional code where appropriate.

A couple of hours?  To go over "the cleanest HTML file?"

Okay, look, my point here is not to eviscerate this poor guy.  He does conclude, "The process is still far too complicated, however, and I'm excited for the day when we have one or two superior tools for creating e-books."  My point here is to agree with him on that. The tools out there for making an e-book are in their infancy, and right now, a lot of people are relying on them. They're out there gamely trying to carve Michelangelo's David using a flint ax and a butter knife. Something's gotta change.

 

From Print to Pixels

Okay, I've finally finished something I've been putting off for a while. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I've been polishing up Slices — re-working the intro, clearing up a few typos, completely redesigning the cover.

Stayed up late Saturday night doing the last of the editing and re-formatting, sanity-checked everything today, and re-uploaded it to CreateSpace, and ordered another proof copy.  The book will be briefly unavailable while I go through this process again, but I think it'll be worth it.  I can't wait to show you the new cover.

I also uploaded the book to Amazon's Kindle store.  I've really been wanting to do this — all of the indie authors whose experiences I've been avidly following online say that that's where most of their sales come from.  I had read that the process was pretty simple, too — you could just format your book in Word and upload the .doc file and it would be automatically converted for you.

Ummm, yeah . . . didn't really end up being that easy.  My first attempt looked horrible. Turns out I would have been better off just coding the HTML for it by hand in the first place.  Man, what a headache.  I can see why a lot of people prefer to just pay someone else to do it.

But the important thing is — it's done!  Which is awesome.  I'll let you know as soon as it's available.

I also managed to answer all my e-mail, design and order some promo postcards for the book and for Causality, and finish designing the pledge reward T-shirts for the party I'm running at Norwescon.  Busy weekend.  Now that the day-job work week has begun, maybe I can relax . . . .

Written in Stone

Fiction Groupie currently has a great post up, modestly titled "The Ten Commandments of the Successful Author." They are blunt, funny, and right on the nose — most of it you already know, but it never hurts to hear it again. I'm just gonna share one of them with you here:

"6. Covet your neighbor's success.

A dose of envy does a writer good.There are all these posts out there about writer envy and jealousy telling you how you shouldn't waste time being envious of other writers and what they have, their level of success, etc.  Yes, that's true. If you spend all your time burning green, you won't get anything else done. BUT, a little bit of this can be helpful. So and so got an agent and you haven't yet? Your crit partner hit the bestseller list but you can't seem to? Feel that envy and USE it. Use it as kindling under your butt and light a fire to keep going, to get what you want, to grab that success too. Envy with motivation can be very productive. Envy with whining and no action is what you need to avoid."

– Fiction Groupie : The Ten Commandments of the Successful Author.

The whole list is definitely worth reading — maybe worth printing out and hanging up over your desk.  Go check them out.

The Great Kindle Swindle

…. Holy yikes.  Just saw this posted at Making Light:

"S.K.S. Perry is a Canadian writer. He had a hard time getting an agent interested in his novel, Darkside, so he posted it on his web page.

A couple of weeks ago someone suggested that he put it on Kindle as an e-book. He thought that was an excellent idea. Someone else agreed: To his surprise he found that person already had. He posted about this on his LiveJournal on March 30 (two days ago), and since then has found that Amazon doesn't care."

— Making Light: Fence Your Stolen Content at Amazon.com.

The situation has gotten both better and worse since Making Light posted about it — Perry writes:

"First the good news: I received offical notice from Amazon's Copyright Agent today that they were taking down the stolen version of Darkside.

Now the bad new: they took all the reviews you nice folks wrote about how that copy was stolen, and applied them to the legitimate copy!"

Good Lord, what a nightmare. These are clearly the early days of self-publishing, and there are definitely some growing pains and kinks to be worked out.  I hope Amazon can figure out how to get some better copyright safeguards in place pretty quickly, and I really hope they get Perry's specific situation sorted out even sooner.  My heart really goes out to him.

Why Don't Authors Switch Genre?

Graham Edwards brings up a point I've wondered myself many, many times:

Movie directors – if they so desire – are allowed to tackle a range of genres. In the course of his career, Steven Spielberg's bounces from The Sugarland Express to ET to Schindler's List to Saving Private Ryan and beyond. Danny Boyle's practically made a career of picking a different genre for every film he makes.

But what about writers?

Okay, let's pick a few big names. Terry Pratchett? Oh yes, he writes fantasy – the funny kind to be precise. James Patterson goes for crime thrillers. And that nice Philippa Gregory does historical. Their names might just as well be genre tags. The fact that they've all have had work published outside their respective pigeonholes has no effect [.... ]

So what's the problem here? Is it the authors who get stuck in a rut or the readers who put them there? Is it the publishers needing handy and reliable blurb, or the merchants needing books that fit under their equally handy and reliable categories? Is it all, god forbid, driven by focus groups?

— Why don't authors switch genre? | Graham Edwards Online.

He does mention several authors who manage to write one type of book under one name, and another type under a pseudonym; he doesn't mention any of the rare few who, like John Shirley, have managed to build a name for themselves in one genre and then switch gears and successfully build a new reputation in another.

I wonder about this phenomenon myself, quite a lot.  I've definitely tried to position myself as "a horror writer," and will probably continue to do so — but I do come up with ideas for stories and novels (and webseries) that are definitely science fiction, and not horror at all.  Should I adopt a pseudonym for those?  Would readers who enjoy my horror work be confused or turned off by finding work from me outside of the genre?

I also wonder if the current self-publishing revolution will change this at all.  Surely without publishers and agents telling them they have to stick to a consistent brand identity, more writers will start to choose to play in other sandboxes whenever the feel like it.  The question is whether or not readers will follow them there.

April Fooling Around

Ahhh, April Fool's Day — it's not just a really bad horror movie, it's also my favorite holiday. Like all writers, I am, of course, an excellent liar, and this is the one day every year I have the excuse to indulge that ability

I didn't post anything here for it — I ended up deciding that, since this blog is still a new and fledgling venture, and I'm still building up a relationship of trust with you, Dear Reader, you were safe from any such shenanigans.  This time.

Besides, I was busy pranking Doctor Who fandom with this fake news report: "No Neil Gaiman Episode for Season Six," custom-designed to provoke cries of nerd-outrage everywhere.  My most elaborate preparations for an April Fool's joke yet — I created an entire fake news site from scratch just to give that one article credibility.

Some of my other favorite pranks I saw last Friday were John Scalzi's "Unveiling My Secret Fantasy Project," and Smashwords' announcement that they were acquiring Amazon. Did you see any good ones?