Tom Ryan's Blog, page 3

Proof

I wrote a book. Here’s the proof.

The proof – also commonly referred to as proofs, or galley proofs – is the preliminary version of a publication. The proofs come after the primary editing and copy-editing stages have been completed. This is one of the final steps before the book finally goes to print.

This is my last chance to carefully read the text and make notes wherever a change is necessary. I’m talking little mini changes – as in a mistake with a character’s name, or the wrong word in the wrong place. This is not an opportunity for rewriting - I’ve been informed - That stage is past.

Okayfinethenwhatever. It’s for the best – it’s expensive to make changes at this point, and chances are I’d find a million things to fix if I let myself.

The proofs will also be used to produce a limited number of ARCs. ARCs are Advance Review Copies. These will be sent out to reviewers in the months leading up to the book’s release in April. I’ll be receiving a few ARCs that I’ll be giving away as prizes in the lead up to the launch, so keep your eyes peeled for details!

By this point, the production editor and layout team have completed their magic, and the marked up MS Word document that my editor and I have been slinging back and forth for months has been transformed into something that looks like a real book. The typeface has been chosen, the pages are numbered and the text is properly justified, and the biography and acknowledgments are neatly arranged.

Even the copyright page is in there. You know, that page inside the front cover that nobody ever reads, with dates and library numbers and all that other good bookish stuff written out in tiny text. I have an ISBN number! I have a Library of Congress Control number!

 

It looks like a real book, and it looks fantastic! F&*#ing A!

Yup. This is it, the book is almost complete. WAY TO GO is almost ready to be released into the world.

2012 is gonna be fun!

 

 

 

Cover Me : Volume Three

 

 

Another day on the countdown to the WAY TO GO cover reveal, another awesome cover tune. Johnny Cash covered Nine Inch Nails in 2002 and a year later he was gone. In the video – IMHO possibly the greatest video ever produced – his life literally flashes before our eyes.

Eep. Cheerful, hey? Tomorrow, something more upbeat

Cover Me : Volume Two

 

Sometime very soon, I'll be able to reveal my cover. Until then, I'm posting a great cover tune on my blog every day in anticipation of the big reveal!

Today, everyone's favorite gang of maniacs taking on a bonafide classic. Enjoy!

Cover Me : Volume Two

 

Sometime very soon, I'll be able to reveal my cover. Until then, I'm posting a great cover tune on my blog every day in anticipation of the big reveal!

Today, everyone's favorite gang of maniacs taking on a bonafide classic. Enjoy!

Cover Me – Volume One

 

Why am I posting this Otis Redding song, you might ask?

Well, you might not realize that good old Otis didn't actually write Try a Little Tenderness, it was originally recorded by Ray Noble and Bing Crosby. (Bing Crosby? Really? .ed)

SO that makes Otis's version a cover. Right?

See where I'm going with this?

YES!!! HEY!!! WOW!!!! I SAW MY COVER! I LOVE IT!

Seriously, it's AMAZING! The designers couldn't have done a better job of matching a book cover to my personality if they had tried. So awesome.

BUT…

…I can't reveal it yet – there are some artsy-fartsy technical tweakings that need to happen before I can throw it out into the world.

HOWEVER…

…the moment I get the go-ahead, you're gonna get sick of looking at it, because I intend to scream and holler about it from the social media mountain-tops until my voice is raw.

SO…

…until then, I'm gonna post an awesome cover song on the blog every day until I can do an official reveal. Just a little something fun to keep me busy. And to stop me from spinning excitedly from one end of my apartment to the other. The dog is terrified and I've made myself ill.

Cover Me – Volume One

 

Why am I posting this Otis Redding song, you might ask?

Well, you might not realize that good old Otis didn’t actually write Try a Little Tenderness, it was originally recorded by Ray Noble and Bing Crosby. (Bing Crosby? Really? .ed)

SO that makes Otis’s version a cover. Right?

See where I’m going with this?

YES!!! HEY!!! WOW!!!! I SAW MY COVER! I LOVE IT!

Seriously, it’s AMAZING! The designers couldn’t have done a better job of matching a book cover to my personality if they had tried. So awesome.

BUT…

…I can’t reveal it yet – there are some artsy-fartsy technical tweakings that need to happen before I can throw it out into the world.

HOWEVER…

…the moment I get the go-ahead, you’re gonna get sick of looking at it, because I intend to scream and holler about it from the social media mountain-tops until my voice is raw.

SO…

…until then, I’m gonna post an awesome cover song on the blog every day until I can do an official reveal. Just a little something fun to keep me busy. And to stop me from spinning excitedly from one end of my apartment to the other. The dog is terrified and I’ve made myself ill.

Movies In December

This is totally my favourite time of year to see movies – lots of great stuff is hitting the theatres and I really love anything geared towards kids. I saw HUGO on the weekend. It was beautiful. I am a sucker for production design, and it was really one of the most visually appealing movies I've watched recently. 1930s Paris, need I say more?

BUT

It was slow as hell. It just dragged on and on and on. Long drawn out scenes that didn't contribute anything to the story, which, in my humble opinion, was kind of flimsy and – dare I say it – kind of boring. Well, maybe boring isn't the right word, but for a movie that promised so much (I was stoked to see it) it really didn't follow through for me in the story department.

NOT TO MENTION

It was in 3D which I DO NOT understand. I hate this new 3D trend. Not only does it do nothing for me, I find it really aggravating. A thoughtfully composed, well photographed scene or shot in a film, when projected on a screen, can be one of the most beautiful things in the arts. 3D totally  messes with that, and it was especially noticeable in HUGO. For some reason, Martin Scorcese took these beautiful images, and all their potential, and blurred them up with 3D. I'll never understand the appeal.

ANYWAY

I must be out of touch or something, because HUGO has a 94% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and the National Board of Review just named it the best film of 2011. Maybe all these film buffs and critics are responding so positively to the fact that the story, at heart, is an homage to the early days of film. Maybe. Who knows? Not me. Anyway, I have a hard time believing that anyone but the most serious of kids will sit through the whole thing without fidgeting.

Whatevs. I still totally want to live in Paris someday.

Overwhelmed

I'm not gonna lie. I sometimes feel like my platform is gonna kill me.

I am trying really hard to get a writing career off the ground. I was given a wonderful once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take a crack at writing full-time, which is what I want to do with my life, more than anything, and so I spend the majority of my time writing. Makes sense, right? I deliberately have at least two projects on the go at all times. This involves a lot of leap-frogging and juggling of balls and mixing of metaphors and that kind of thing. I don't want to screw this opportunity up, so I work as hard as I can to make it happen. There's a very good chance that it won't happen – but if it doesn't happen, I don't want it to be because I didn't work hard enough.

But here's the thing – ask anyone in publishing today and they will tell you that if you want to be successful as a writer, then it is more or less essential to have a platform. What's a platform? In this context, the platform is kind of a vague concept that boils down to an individual's presence both online and in the media world at large. It can involve a website/blog, social media accounts, participation in online communities, and representation in the more traditional world of media – newspaper interviews, public readings, etc… If you're lucky (or not) you have a reality TV show. Or a sponsorship deal with a sportswear company (gimme a call, Adidas – ed.) Anything that promotes you and your message/product is your platform.

The publishing world is full of chitter chatter about platform.

I really enjoy building a platform – creating and evolving my website is fun! Meeting people on twitter is fun! Talking about books with people on Goodreads is fun! The problem is, it comes with a lot of pressure. Keeping the blog updated involves a lot of thinking and writing that I sometimes wish I could just channel into the "day job." Tweeting and meeting and reading and promoting – it can get exhausting. Sometimes I don't have anything to say. More often, I just don't feel like I have time to say it. I'm trying to actually get some writing done here for chrissake!

It can really start to feel overwhelm. And when it overwhelms, it stops being fun. And when it stops being fun, I stop doing it. And when I stop doing it, I feel even more pressure and anxiety. Worse – I spend valuable time sitting around thinking about all the platform things I should be doing, and then nothing gets done.

The good news is that I have been accomplishing a lot on the flip side. I have been writing and writing and writing and learning and editing and writing. I feel pretty good about the work I'm doing – I still have so much to learn, but nobody can say I'm not working hard enough. The bad news is that the blog has been suffering.

Part of that has to do with the fact that a lot of my early posts were longish. Like 200o words or so. That's a lot to write, and I always edit and re-edit every post, which takes a lot of time, and while it was easy and fun to write those first few months of posts, it now ends up looking more like a chore than I care to admit. The other reason the blog has been put on the back burner is that I started off thinking I'd write about being a newbie getting published. That'd be fresh and unique and interesting, right? Not really. There are a million blogs talking about that stuff, and while I might occasionally throw an interesting insight into the mix, writing endlessly about writing ends up feeling forced…

So here's the deal. New approach. I am giving myself an hour a day to work on the platform. Instead of having it hang over my head like a piano on a thread, I'm going to work it into my day, just like making coffee. Tweets are going to be off the cuff, whenever I feel the need. Blog posts are going to be quicker and snappier, unless I have something substantial to say. I'll still write about writing, but only when it comes naturally. In the coming weeks and months, I'll start to get some great news about WAY TO GO to share - cover design, ARCS, contests, stuff like that. But I'm going to start mixing in some other more random stuff. Let's see how natural I can make this sucker.

In the meantime, I am going to continue focusing on the most important part of being a writer. Writing. What's the point of a platform if there's nothing to put on it?

Goodbye October! Hello NaNoWriMo!

Artwork by Daniel Danger whose work - which is gothically creepy and poignant - I absolutely love. One of his prints sits directly over my desk. I would love to have him design a book cover for me someday. Click image for his website.

Happy Halloween! I was sick this year, so for the second year in a row, no costume. Bummer. Next year I intend to make up for it big-time – I don't care where I'm living, I'm going to find a Halloween party and rock out!

October is my favourite month, so I'm always a little sad when it draws to a close. Happily, in recent years, the beginning of November has come with its own reason to get excited – NaNoWriMo! National Novel Writing Month has been around for over ten years now, and I've participated since 2006. The idea is pretty straightforward – participants sign up online, join some forums (usually a regional one and some others based on anything from writing genre to age) and attempt to write a novel of 50,000 words or more in the month of November. That works out to about 1700 words a day and a relatively short novel.

In recent years, NaNoWriMo has seen a steady annual increase in the number of participants, and as its popularity has grown, so too have opportunities to participate in person. In Halifax, I went to weekly write-ins at a downtown coffeeshop, which were always pretty fun. I'm going to try to go to some of the Victoria events this year. In my opinion, the best thing of all is the opportunity to participate in online forums. In the NaNoWriMo message boards you can find people willing to chat about virtually any writing-related topic. It's a great way to spend a dedicated chunk of virtual time with other writers around the world as they channel their creative juices.

I definitely don't look at NaNo as an opportunity to complete a fantastic, polished manuscript. It can, however, be a great motivator. If you start off the month with a plot and a game-plan (which I always do – I need an idea and a detailed road map before I can start putting words on paper) then the push you get from participating can really help keep your eyes on the prize. I'm a big believer in spitting out the first draft – not spending too much time thinking through every page, just getting it out onto paper and working from there. For a very long time I didn't look approach writing that way – I worried that if every sentence wasn't perfect, it wasn't worth moving on to the next one – but NaNoWriMo helped me realize that for me that approach is creatively crippling. Completing a rough draft first and worrying about the details afterwards works really well for me, and NaNoWriMo lends itself very well to that approach.

NaNoWriMo isn't for everyone – there's a lot of attention on word-count over quality, which can turn off some people. For me, though, it's a fun exercise and a great way to spend an otherwise gloomy month.

I wrote a lot of Way to Go during NaNoWriMo last year. This year, instead of starting a new project from scratch, my goal is to complete a full edit of another manuscript that I wrote earlier this year. I've been working really hard to get all my ducks in a row so that I can really focus my energies on giving that project a good solid polish. Today I finished cleaning up my most recent manuscript, which I'll be handing over to a friend for some feedback, and hopefully submitting* before the middle of November. I'm pretty stoked to have it off my plate right now, because I am very excited to get working on my NaNo project. I'm kind of superstitious when it comes to talking about "works in progress" but I will say that November is the perfect time of year to be working on this one.

I am also chomping at the bit to blurt out some really exciting news that I got recently, but I am under strict orders to keep it under wraps for the time being. I'm hoping to be able to reveal all within the next few weeks!

Till then, happy NaNo month!

* Submission is what the publishing world refers to sending manuscripts to publishers or agents for consideration. When I do submit my newest book, I'll blog about the process – how to know when you're ready to send it out, how to decide who to send it to, and how to write a query letter. 

Well Said, Rick.