Laura Thomas's Blog: Self-Publishing: A Mean Old Dog (who loves to cuddle) (and might just make you rich) - Posts Tagged "writing"

I give the finger to everything. You win, mean old world.

So, the book is published, hundreds of people have read it, everyone has delightful things to say about it, yay, etc. People stay up all night reading it, can’t put it down, wish there were a sequel, blah blah. This type of feedback gives me moments of high-on-crack elation. Followed by moments where I want to run away to Costa Rica forever. Because I can’t figure out how to turn hundreds of readers into thousands. Because being creative and putting out a good product isn’t enough. In addition to creating things, you also have to have the Best Business Brain Around in order to make ANYTHING of your creations. And in a cruel twist of human nature, creative people often have the business acumen of a sandfly (myself included) – we’ve just used up all our juice making things. No juice left to figure out how to trick people into buying things.

And here’s the worst thing about being a self-published author: the media wants nothing to do with you. I can’t get ANY magazines to review my book, including my own university’s magazine! Including dinky little local papers! Including book blogs! Mainstream media wants nothing to do with self-published books, which I’m certain will change over the next few years (self-pub is the wave of the future), but unfortunately we 2011 self-pub authors are just to early on the uptake. And we’re screwed. For now, at least.

I couldn’t even get a book publicist to TAKE my money. She told me that the media is still so wary of self-pub writers that no matter how good the book is, she can’t get an author ANY press, and she wouldn’t want to take my money for nothing. Good on her for not robbing me blind, but I GIVE THE FINGER to the shortsightedness of mainstream media.

So instead I’ll just try to network my way from hundreds to thousands. If I can get some big-name endorsements, perhaps that’ll get a bigger ball rolling. I just need to meet some famous people who I can convince to read my book (because I know they’ll dig it). Or maybe I can just run into Oprah and smile so charmingly that she’ll automatically give me her book-club-gold-star. Cinchy. No problem. I’ll just start calling up famous people.

[she throws a pillow at the wall, yells “I hate everything,” sits down to write new blog]

Sometimes, this endless cycle – create something, try to figure out how to promote it, discover inadequate business acumen, accept that product will likely never bring widespread recognition – takes me so low that I don’t know how I can ever create anything ever again. But then I remember that when I’m not writing or recording or performing, I’m only a withered shell of myself, and so I do it all over again. I’ll write another motherf***** novel and record another motherf**** album. Because I have to. Because that’s who I am. Tortured and rowing ever-forward into the roiling, venomous sea of creativity.

The brilliant angry insightful Charles Bukowski understood me (and every other aspiring author), like nobody else:

so you want to be a writer?
By Charles Bukowski

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.


if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

Lotsa people ask me how I decided to write about New York’s “Mole People,” and what process I used to write “Shadow Swans.” So I’ll tell ya.

First, the genesis of the idea: A few years ago, I saw a fantastic documentary called “Dark Days” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0235327/), a documentary by Mark Singer that profiles an entire population of people living inside New York’s subway tunnels. These outsiders are called “Mole People,” and they live on the fringes of society, begging and scraping together bit jobs just to get by. At the same time, they are able to construct actual HOUSES in the tunnels, with electricity, beds, televisions, lamps, carpets… Like the “Shadow Swans” protagonist Ruby, I was transfixed by the notion of people living apart from society, but still with some of the “comforts” of modern life (not that the Mole People’s lives are at all comfortable).

After seeing “Dark Days,” I bought the book “Mole People” (http://www.amazon.com/Mole-People-Lif...) by Jennifer Toth. Toth spent a year interviewing people who lived in the tunnels. She was in constant danger, and was nearly killed at least once, but she met some extraordinary, complex, and endearing people (along with some entirely un-endearing people). She discovered that some of the Mole People align into loose communities, giving distinct roles (nurse, teacher, protector) to individuals based upon their skills.

One day, I suddenly decided that I would write a novel about the Mole People. And when I say suddenly, I do mean suddenly. Like, one day I had never thought of writing a novel, and the next I was totally obsessed with the idea. Immediately upon deciding to write a novel, I got in the shower (where I do some of my best thinking), and by the end of the shower, I had written a general story outline in my head. In the end, “Shadow Swans” actually adhered to that shower outline.

Once I knew what the general story would be, I spent a week or two writing a detailed story outline, as well as further researching the Mole People (a term that the subway population does not use, which is why it doesn’t appear in my book), and preparing to put pen to paper.

And then I signed up for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month - http://www.nanowrimo.org/). For those of you not familiar with NaNoWriMo, it’s a free online community of writers who commit to writing 50,000 words in the month of November. Each member has a personal web page, and every day, you enter the number of words you’ve written, and your “buddies” check in with you, encourage you, and vice versa. I signed up to do NaNoWriMo with a couple of friends, but by the end of Week One I was the only one still plodding forward, because it is INTENSE.

For that month, I would work at my day job (I research documentaries) from 8 – 5PM without a break, and then I would write from 5PM until midnight. No socializing, no breaks. I loved it. I felt like I was on crack every day. I don’t think anything other than recording an album has ever made me feel so high and so strong and so authentic. The characters just busted off the page – I didn’t direct them, or force them to do anything, but they leapt out of my head before I even knew what they were going to do. I know this will sound eye-rollingly cheesy, but Ruby and Den and Ben became my friends. I actually cared what happened to them, and when their lives were difficult, I cried with them. I believed that the world I created for them might actually exist. Writing “Shadow Swans” was both cathartic and magical, because my life ceased to exist for that month, and there is something really beautiful about stepping outside of your own life entirely. It was like a vacation from Me.

Anyway, by the end of November, my head had nearly exploded, but I had written 50,000 words! Of course, 50,000 words is not a full manuscript – that’s only about 200 pages.

So, the next November, I geared up for another head-blasting month, wrote 30,000 more words, and edited the full 80,000-word draft.

Woohoooo(ish)! It was done, but it was painfully mediocre. I sent it to a few agents, got some really fantastic constructive feedback, realized that my main characters were one-dimensional, and Ruby was far too morose and potty-mouthed, and the story wasn’t well-constructed. [Sad face] Then I abandoned the manuscript for a couple of years, until I broke my wrist in early 2011. Unable to rock climb, or play music, or do much of anything, I plunged my head into editing my manuscript (one-handed). And I loved the editing process as much as I had loved the writing process. After another intense month of editing, I had created a manuscript that I was actually happy to share with other peeps.

So now, as you already know, I’m slogging through the world of self-publishing, and although the book industry is giving me a permanent emotional migraine, I absolutely loved every single second of the writing process. Novel Number Two is in the works, and writing starts NEXT WEEK! DOUBLE YAY.

Thanks for reading mah blog people. I heart all of you, with all my teency little heart.