Mary Sisson's Blog, page 141

No-no NaNoWriMo

Yes, November is upon us again, and everyone's all "Whee! NaNoWriMo! Whee!" And they invite me to do it, and they expect me to do it. At this point NaNoWriMo has been pounded into people's heads so hard that even when I am working on a novel at some totally other time of year, folks will ask me if I am writing it for NaNoWriMo, or they will tell me that I surely must have written it for NaNoWriMo, because it's impossible to write novels except during NaNoWriMo, which is why no novels were ever written before it was invented.

With any luck, I will start writing Trials sometime this month, and I fully expect to be asked if I am doing it as part of NaNoWriMo at least a dozen times. So: NO. I do not participate in NaNoWriMo. I never thought it sounded like a good idea, and the more experience I have with the people who do it, the less I like it. If it has benefited you, that is wonderful, but to my mind something like NaNoWriMo generally leads not only to bad writing, but to bad attitudes about writing. Cranking out 2,000 words a day, day after day, is (to paraphrase Truman Capote) not writing; it's word processing. Honestly I think National Story Outlining Month would be a hell of a lot more useful.

I wrote about this earlier, and I'm going to quote myself, because I am just that egocentric: "Once you've written something, it's easy to get attached to it, especially if you made this huge push and didn't sleep or socialize for the entire month of November in order to meet your 50,000-word quota. No one wants to hear, 'Sorry, dude, back to the drawing board!' after that--it's like going on a huge diet and being very good and losing 80 pounds, and then having the doctor tell you that, no, you did it the wrong way, you need to gain back 70 pounds and then lose it again. But good job on those 10 pounds! The doctor really liked those, and he thinks you show great promise."

Giving Goodreads a spin

So, I've decided join Goodreads. I've sort of gone back and forth on it, mainly because that person who gave it a two-star review on Amazon gave it a one-star review on Goodreads, and it seemed really stupid to try to promote a book on a site that has one, one-star review of it. Even worse, there didn't seem to be an easy way to link the book to the New Podler review.

But The Passive Voice featured a good post about using Goodreads, and it mentioned that you can set it up so that your blog posts automatically post there as well. That does run into my discomfort with the whole idea of marketing yourself in order to market your writing, but on the other hand, it would be some kind of counter-propaganda to that one-star review. So I went back and looked, and hey! That awesome reviewer from Book Rooster was waaay ahead of me, and had already posted her five-star review! Thank you so much, AGAIN, awesome Book Rooster reviewer person!!!

And of course as I set up the Goodreads account and apply for their author program, I start going, hmmm...this site is beginning to appeal to me for its own sake. You know, given how much I read and how opinionated I am about it all, I probably should have joined Goodreads a long time ago....

Done! Done! Done!

Whoo-hoo! I improved the doggerel, and I am finished--with this editing pass anyway. Yay! Now it can go beta readers, and I can take a rest from it for a while.

Although I do want to work on the book description and jacket copy now, rather than waiting and doing a big push on production all at once. Doing the cover was a lot more enjoyable when I wasn't all burnt out on production, so I'm assuming the same will be true of doing the description and jacket copy.

I'm going to take a break (hopefully just a short one) and then get going on Trials!

Progress report

I input the edits through the end of the book and dealt with the notes (as suspected, most at this point were not helpful). Now it's just the poetry left--yeah, that's gonna be fun.

I actually didn't get a great amount of sleep last night (a combination of going to bed late and the cats being so excitable that one had to be sprayed with water), but I had tea instead of coffee this morning, and that seems to have made all the difference. I don't know what it is about caffeine and my ability to concentrate--maybe it makes me so irritable that I go "I'm tired--screw this!" instead of mellowly plugging along.

Oh, and I was going through Trang in order to check on something (continuity is important!), and I realized that, even though everyone is supposed to be on the metric system in that book (metric is the future! at least it is if you're Canadian), I still have Philippe make references to feet. I'll be fixing that when I get the proofreader's copy back.

Learning from things you don't like

I had a birthday recently, and a dear relative gave me a considerate gift: a memoir by a famous film critic. I was really excited about reading it, I read it, and I really didn't like it.

Whenever I don't like something, I find it useful to figure out precisely why I don't like it. In part, that's something I just do, but I also hope it helps me to not write something like that myself. (And nothing makes a criticism of my work resonate more to me than seeing someone else do the exact same thing.) Call it mindful reading--I think it's valuable to writers to not simply experience something, but to figure out why they experienced it as they did.

I think the first part of the problem with this book is that the film critic is famous. I can't really think of a truly interesting celebrity memior (with the exception of Candice Bergman's, but she wrote mostly about being the child of a celebrity--now those kinds of memoirs have some meat to them). This book even starts with the standard, "Oh, now, you--I don't think my life is worthy of a memoir! But if you insist...." No celebrity ever seems to harken to that little voice saying, This just isn't that interesting.

The lessons: 1. Listen to that little voice: If you're bored, the reader is really bored. 2. Try not to assume that the reader is automatically going to find your main character interesting just because they are the main character. 3. A striving character (even if they're just striving to be normal) is a lot more interesting than a character who has made it and now sits around, contentedly counting their money, reflecting on how swimmingly it all went and how totally excellent they are.

Another issue is that the book lacks any kind of meaningful organization or theme. There is no main story, and stories even get repeated because the book is basically a wad of stand-alone pieces. This guy writes short pieces well, but this is long, and he's hopeless. You see this a lot with writers: Most have one length that they write well. I would argue that Flannery O'Connor should have stuck with short stories, Carolyn Hax should stick with mini-essays, Neil Gaiman should stick with novels, and Gloria Naylor should do the same thing as Gaiman. In some cases, a writer might not write badly at another length, but they don't write as well as they do at their prime length. In other cases (such as this memoir), they're not just out of their length--they're out of their depth as well.

The lesson: Stay with the length you're good at. I should warn you that from a commercial perspective, this is terrible, terrible advice: No one will publish novellas, and one standard way to get a novel published is to first publish a bunch of short stories in periodicals. Contemporary self-publishing has led to novellas suddenly being much more commercially viable, so maybe it will allow more writers to do what they do best. Fingers crossed!

The final issue was a low signal-to-noise ratio: Not much interesting was going on with the story, so he threw in a bunch of crap to make it interesting! Never works--never ever. When he was a 20-something, he had sex! And then had it some more! And he drank a lot! (Wow, that's original.) He knew a lot of crazy people! People who smoked pot! He traveled places! And he met movie stars! Who generally weren't that interesting, and he mostly didn't know them very well! But they're in there!

The sad thing is, he's got the makings of an interesting story with the drinking--he eventually went into AA. But despite the fact that he mentions the drinking a lot, he doesn't develop it: He doesn't really examine why he drank, he doesn't get much into how the drinking affected his life, and he doesn't tell you why he decided to stop.

The lesson: Pick a story. Tell that story. Everything else goes in the trash.

Interwebs

Yesterday while the kid was napping I read through more of the Passive Voice, which eventually got me to the Business Rusch. That's an interesting read if only because she started it a year ago, and things have shifted even in that amount of time. But I felt heartened because it turns out that she and her husband, Dean Wesley Smith, don't really market either. I mean, granted, they also have frickin' 200 titles available, which I don't. (But I'm OK with that!)

But it made me happy to read that other indie authors do weird things, too. For example, this author has decided against doing her books in paper, not because (as some other decide) paper takes a long time to lay out and doesn't sell as much as cheaper e-books, but rather to save trees. My own particular quixotic endeavor is doing a large-print edition: No one has bought it (yet!), but I'm still going to do large-print editions because (cue pretentious music) ACCESSIBILITY! IS!! IMPORTANT!!! Also, it really doesn't take long to lay out.

Although I do feel a need to object when people prattle on about publishing houses having "fancy Manhattan offices." Oh, my. Clearly, they have never, ever been inside those offices. Yes, the rent is more expensive than other places, but people in Manhattan pay five times the rent you do to live in a tiny shithole with the tub in the kitchen--the fact that a space is expensive doesn't mean that it is fancy. Publishing houses don't locate in Manhattan to be fancy; they locate there because the industry and therefore the skilled workers are there.

Progress report

Not too much progress to report, I'm afraid--I started inputting edits, but I didn't get quite enough sleep last night and drank too much coffee to compensate. Plus the kid was sick yesterday, and when you spend all the day wiping their nose, you spend all the next day wiping yours. The result is a mix of fatigue and distractability that just kills my writing. It wouldn't matter if the edits were just along the lines of remove this comma, insert that semi-colon; unfortunately there are some parts where I want to really smooth it or rework it, and I'm just not able to do that right now.

And the cats keep trying to eat my papers. God.

Progress report

OK, I've written down edits for the whole book--huzzah! I have child-care tomorrow, and then I'll input these edits, and then I need to fix the poetry and ponder the random notes I made for myself. When I'm not getting much done, I tend to make lots of random notes about what should be in the book--sometimes they're really useful and resolve serious problems, but I think most of these fall into the category of extraneous things that would just get cut out again on the next read. We'll see...

Progress report

OK, I am back in the saddle! I input the edits through Chapter 23, so at this rate I should have it all done by [REDACTED BY THE DEPARTMENT OF JINX PREVENTION]. I'm feeling so [REDACTED] by how [REDACTED] things are going--I'm really looking forward to [REDACTED], [REDACTED], and finally getting to [REDACTED]!

Some of these edits were interesting, because I basically screwed up on voice. Ideally, each character has their own distinct voice, and I guess I'm getting there with Trust, because in one section I had taken dialog that originally belonged to three characters and compressed it into one. And reading it this time around, I was like, Huh? That doesn't sound like Character A, that sounds like A, B, and C! So I split it back out again (I didn't think the gain from compressing it was significant, or I would have tried to make it all sound like Character A). In another section, I just voiced it wrong--it's told from the point of view of one character, and it sounds like it's from someone else's. In that case, reassigning the material wouldn't work, so that section took a lot of tweaking.

Never underestimate the power of a jinx

Yeah, I shouldn't have said anything. Last night some large and extremely noisy rodent decided to try moving into the crawl space under the house. (Why? The only things down there are spiders and rat poison.) So I spent the night banging on the walls like some crazy person, and then lying awake in bed wondering if the creature was going to give us all fleas or was going to crawl up into the house through the toilet.

As a result, I got no sleep. Today I sprayed animal repellent and bought some shirts. Whoo-hoo.