Mary Sisson's Blog, page 80

Progress report

I edited Chapter 7 of the Trang audiobook today. I think standing up worked really well--not only are there fewer chair sounds, but there are fewer flubbed lines caused by my being mush-mouthed. I think standing probably not only helps with voice projection but also just plain keeps me more alert.

I know I wanted to get back into writing, but I'm feeling a little under the weather right now (nothing serious). In addition, I'm going to be doing a lot of child care this week and (probably) next.

Progress report, General Jesus edition

I finally finished noise removal on Chapter 6 of the Trang audiobook--huzzah! God, that was a whole lot of noise removal. It wasn't just the excessive length of the chapter, but also the fact that there's a lot of dialog with the aliens, and I decided to take out all breath sounds from translated speech. I was subtle about it, so it doesn't sound as artificial as the computer's speech or the Magic Man's speech--the idea is to make it slightly nonhuman. Aesthetically, I think it works, but actually doing it is a real pain in the butt!

I find it interesting how there's this whole artistic side to the audiobook--it's not something I'd ever thought about before, but there it is. Another thing that's unique to the audiobooks is how characters pronounce "General Jesus." The diplomats all use the Spanish pronunciation of "Jesus," since presumably he was Cuban, and I think they would regard that as the correct thing to do. But the SFers all use the English pronunciation. My thinking is that that is how they would have been briefed about him--you know, using the English pronunciation to emphasize that this guy is crazy and actually thinks he's this religious figure. Their job was to kill him, so there would be no effort to show him respect by using his own pronunciation--quite the contrary, the idea would be to take him down a peg verbally. Kind of like how soldiers refer to members of the Taliban as Tabbies.

Fiction is not the easy way out

Recently I have read a spate of disappointing historical novels, and I appear to be a few chapters into yet another one (although there's still time for this one to pull it out of the fire), so I'm going to vent about unsatisfying historical fiction.

What annoys me about historical fiction? More even than preaching, or obvious anachronisms?

When the person doesn't seem to be aware that they are writing fiction!

What seems to happen with some people is that they get enthralled with a particular historical event. So they want to write a book about it. But they don't want to go to the trouble and expense of researching a nonfiction book. So they don't research it, and they call it historical fiction.

The result of this process is basically a picaresque novel: This happened and then that happened and then another thing happened and then something else happened. The End. It's not very satisfying because it's not really about anything--there's no arc of any kind. If you already know about the historical event (and oftentimes even if you don't), it's staggeringly dull.

The other problem is that this kind of writer rarely takes interesting risks with the characters. Either they slavishly follow real life, regardless of whether or not that works in a story, or they create a character...well, a character like Biftad Kennedy.

Who's Biftad Kennedy? He's the character I just created for my historical novel on the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was going to write a nonfiction book about it, but that's too much work! Instead I'll write a novel--wait a minute? Who's going to be the main character?

Oh, it can't be John F. Kennedy or anybody who had any actual responsibility for what when on then--that's too hard. I'd have to do research, and I know whatever I write about someone like John F. Kennedy is going to piss somebody off!

So, I'll invent--Biftad! He'll be a ne'er-do-well distant cousin of the real Kennedys--you know, some loutish Roger Sterling/Paris Hilton-type who never bothered to graduate from prep school because he has a trust fund and plans to just drink his life away. He'll have no influence on anything, ever, because he didn't really exist and I don't want anything in my fiction that didn't really happen. Biftad will just occasionally stagger through the White House and say things like, "Wow, cousin, that looks important. You got any gin?"

This isn't going to be like the movie Dick, where ditzy teenagers bring down a president. This isn't going to be Happy Gilmore Saves the Free World. That would be too risky and too hard. Instead, Biftad will never do anything. The reader's experience will be: I'm reading things I already know, and I'm forced to rehash them through the point-of-view of a completely useless character who just sits around drunkenly scratching his testicles, while two doors down, the world teeters on the brink of nuclear annihilation.

Wouldn't you love 600 pages of that!

The problem as I see it is that these people are writing historical fiction because they think it's easy. They think it's easier than nonfiction, because you don't have to do any research, and they think it's easier than other genres of fiction, because you don't have to be creative.

None of that is true. Good historical fiction does not come about because the writer is lazy. It takes a lot of research, and more important, it takes the exact same amount of care given to story and to character as any other kind of fiction.

Otherwise you get the exact same thing you get with weak fantasy and science fiction: A humdinger of a setting, but nothing to engage you and carry you through the book.

Progress report

I'm doing noise removal on the second half of Chapter 6 of the Trang audiobook, yay.

I haven't gotten back into writing, which is a little annoying to me, especially since noise removal is hardly the most scintillating of tasks. Part of it is just getting back into the swing of that, and part of it is that it takes some time for me to recover from a week-and-a-half of disrupted sleep. But I went ahead and did an overall word count, and I'm at 32.550 words for Trials. So yay for that, too.

Progress report

I re-recorded all the things that needed re-recording from Chapter 1 of the Trang audiobook through the first half of Chapter 6, which is now officially done. And I did a little noise removal on the second half of Chapter 6.

Spring may not be quite as horrible as I had thought

It sounds like things may actually happen on the out-of-state elderly relative front without my having to basically spend the entire spring there, doing every last thing myself. That would be wonderful, plus it would mean that I don't have to buy some kind of portable computing device in hopes of getting anything done, which is good. I may even be able to attend Norwescon!

I'm thinking about some beta tasks to do once the Trang audiobook is done. As it turns out, recording an audiobook is a good way to find typos (at one point Cheep is called Chip--funny how hard that is to catch when you're reading silently, but how glaringly obvious it is when you're reading aloud). So I've been marking those up as I find them, and I'll clean up the e-books when that's done with.

Of course, with the new computer, how should I do the e-book files? I think in the interest of efficiency I'll just use Calibre again--I'll save the learning curve for when I convert Trials.

Speaking of new software, I want to spend a little more quality time sorting out GIMP. Obviously, if I'm doing Norwescon, I'll do some flyers, but the other, more-sophisticated project I have in mind is to re-do the lettering on the cover of Trang and Trust. I think the author name should probably be a bit larger and easier to read, plus the title lettering could stand to look a little more elaborate (which I hope is something this program lets you do--my old program was pretty limited). The tweaking should also give me some practice with GIMP, which I'm going to need when I get around to doing the Trials cover. 

What else? David Gaughran had a good post about the importance of mailing lists--it's nothing that I didn't know, but I've been very lazy about creating one of those, mainly because I just don't think I have it in me to do a full-fledged newsletter. But I could just do new-book alerts and sale alerts--that sort of thing. I'll put it on the list, anyway, along with getting on Pintrest.

Why there is no Lactose Intolerant French Huguenot History Month

I periodically read WhiteWhine--it's funny, but it's also capable of completely destroying any good opinion you may have of humanity, so I try to take it in small doses. Anyway, to celebrate of Black History Month, they have the obligatory selection of "Why isn't there a White History Month?" whines.

Putting aside the fact that these people are assholes, let's rephrase that question and take it a little more seriously: Why is there only Black History Month?

Or rather: Why is that you only hear about Black History Month? Because there actually are a lot of other heritage months and days and whatnot. But they definitely don't get the same kind of press.

Why is that?

Having worked for a multicultural educational publisher, I can reveal the reason to you. As you might imagine, it's an elaborate conspiracy, masterminded by this nation's most-celebrated secret society, The Illuminati! Yup: Jay-Z, Nicky Minaj, and Black History Month--we really are a full-service secret society!

The other reason? Black people buy Black history.

Yeah, that's the real reason. It's not guilt, or political correctness, or African Americans being "superior," or what have you. It's capitalism: African Americans identify as a group with a common heritage, there's a lot of them, they have money, and they don't mind spending it to learn about or to commemorate their history. And what do you know--Black History Month is a big success! There are books and TV specials and concerts and all kinds of things, because these things attract an audience.

Hispanic Heritage Month? Not so much. Women's History Month? Oh my God, if women bought women's history the way African Americans buy African-American history, multicultural educational publishers would be rolling in dough. But they don't.

German American Heritage Month--wait, that's a joke, right? I ask only because a good chunk of my family was Not German. You know about the Not Germans, right? Their ancestors came to this country before World War I from Saxony or Bavaria or Prussia or some place that was Not Germany. Once they came to this country, they called themselves Pennsylvania Dutch or just plain old Not German. When World War I rolled around they changed their names just to make sure everyone knew that they were really, really Not German. My father the amateur genealogist found it easier to handle the revelation that his family owned slaves than he did the revelation that his family's heritage was largely German. Let's just say that I'll be surprised if German American Heritage Month ever makes the kind of splash Black History Month does.

My point is, while it might make seem like a good idea to have a lot of heritage months (especially if you publish multicultural educational books), the fact of the matter is some groups will rally around such products, and others won't.

This is true for the wider world of genre, too. Some people really identify as readers of a particular genre--they read voraciously within that genre, and they even socialize around these books. It's why you have to go to the trouble of putting things into categories, even if you think genre categories are arbitrary and kind of stupid.

And it's why you have to market your book to the categories that already exist, even if that's a little tough to figure out. As Jaye Manus wrote, "[F]ocus your book description on what the readers are actually looking for." You don't want to find yourself stuck marketing "German Pride!" to a bunch of Not Germans (who might, however, buy a book about the Pennsylvania Dutch).

A tiny hint that retailers are maybe starting to pay attention

So, Apple is starting to highlight self-published e-books in its store.

It's something, right? I mean, if you compare Amazon, which has been great to self-published writers, and Barnes & Noble, which has pretty much sucked for self-published writers, and you look at who is seeing more e-book growth, it might occur to you that appealing to self-published writers might be good business.

Might be!

Of course, you have to actually appeal to them, which is harder to do than saying, "We just love us some self-published writers!" To actually appeal to self-published writers, you have to make the service easy for writers to use (time is money, after all). And then you actually have to be good at attracting readers (helpful hint: hiding the free books is a bad idea), and then you have to make it easy for those readers to find and buy and read stuff, because what self-published writers really like is sales.

Apple does not have a great reputation on any of these fronts.

With Apple (and Kobo, too) it seems like they're making a lot of promising noises. And that's great--I'm glad they're thinking of moving into this sector more aggressively. I think more sales platforms are good, because then writers would have to rely less on Amazon. I think if people really gave it some thought, they could create real competition: Passive Guy has a great post on how much book discovery could be improved by making a search engine that works more like Lexis-Nexis--which is a very robust search engine, to be sure, but hardly a new technology.

But if Barnes & Noble is proving anything, it's that the devil to selling e-books is in the details. So far, I don't see a lot of retailers really nailing those details.

With a pin-pin here, and a pin-pin there

Lindsay Buroker had a recent article on using Pintrest. Once again she takes something I would never have considered doing (Pintrest? For a book?) and notes that with, oh, about 30 seconds of effort you can have a presence on yet-another social media site.

And in one of those serendipitous things, another social-media savvy person I know (who works in the nonprofit sector) linked to this graphic about Pintrest's demographics and how the people on there like to spend money (especially on food, it seems).

The focus on food and the fact that the site clearly skews toward young mothers makes me a little skeptical that it's worth doing for books like mine. (Of course, if I were writing, say, women's literature with recipes, this post would be about how I'm already on Pintrest.) On the other hand, there is Buroker's (eternal, and eternally valid) case that, "I didn’t have to work very hard for those visitors." So I think I will get on there eventually.

Ah--"I didn’t have to work very hard for those visitors." Her lodestone and mine....

Progress report

The roof was completely finished today (and there was much rejoicing). The gutters still have to happen, but I'm assuming that will be done tomorrow, when I'm looking after the kid anyway.

Other than that, it's been a lot of focus on the Trang audiobook this past week (even on days when the roofers couldn't work, I still had to get up at the crack of dawn in case they did come, so writing was just not happening). Audiobook work is a good beta project precisely because it's repetitive and not especially creative, so I can do it when I'm too sleepy or distracted to write. But the downside is that it does get pretty boring after a while, especially because events resulted in my having a whole lot of noise removal to do.

So today I was looking at that pile of files and going, NOOOOO!!!! but I set the timer and did a slog in the theory that it wasn't like I wasn't going to have to do it all later if I didn't get some of it done today. And I completed noise removal on the first half of Chapter 6, so yay for me.

I have a line to re-record there, but I assume gutter replacement is no less noisy than roof replacement, so I'll do that and the fixes on the first five chapters after that work is done.

And I'm going to be very happy to get back to writing, especially because I think I sorted out how to start the book.