Chris Fritschi's Blog: World building, Yikes!, page 2

My first sale!!!

I sold the first copy of my book! What an amazing feeling.
But wait, there's more. They left a great review.

Okay, it's only one review, but I'm doing the happy dance. People enjoying my stories is the best feeling  ever.

I'd write more but I can't keep my fingers on the keyboard.

Gandalf had it right

Having just published a book, which is by no means the same as crossing a finish line, gave me a breather and think about what's happened in my life as I wrote it.
There's been some pretty rough times and I wonder how I got to this far in mostly one piece. What's funny is how I can look at those moments with a different attitude, now, than was I was feeling at the moment it was happening. 
Charles R. Swindoll said, "I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it."
I love awesome quotes like this. I just wish it were me that thought of it first. Whenever I think about things that have happened to me I always end up looking at my reaction and it's my reaction that determined if I would be miserable, or motivated. 
Okay, lets be honest. If something really horrible happens to us we're not going to simply brush it off. No way. We have a natural reaction to things. It's who we are as human beings. But, after we recover from the initial reaction our heads are clear enough that we can make a decision. 'How do I want to go forward?'
One of my favorite moments from the Lord of the Rings is when Frodo feels the full weight of how his world has been turned upside down.  The reply that Gandalf gives has stayed with me. Frodo: I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.
Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.

I love this. In a nut shell what he says here is we are not victims. Things happen to us that we don't have control over, but we can control what we do about it. You spend months or a year writing a book and it flops. Do you get angry, or defensive? Do you blame the reviewers and give up writing? Or, do you decide to learn from the experience? Do you learn your craft better, study the market to see what people are looking for? In other words do we react, or do we make a decision and then act on it?
Being a writer is a tough road, but the road is only 10% of the journey.  What will make the other 90% either the best time of our lives, or a struggle is up to how we chose to react to it. 

At Long Last

Today marks a huge event for me and I hope you'll celebrate it with me. I have published my first book.

I've always loved writing and how my imagination and creativity comes to life when I work on a story. Yet, writing a book with subplots, back story, meaningful characters that people would care about while being entertaining is no small task. The journey of writing it all the way to 'The End' seemed a long way off. 
What saw this story though the months of work to completion is entirely due to the honest feedback of those people who were kind enough to read through the rough drafts. Threaded between their comments, questions and constructive critiques was always the same energizing enthusiasm of how much they enjoyed the story.

Lastly, I want to thank all of those people I've met through Twitter, Facebook and other places. You have been a constant source of support, motivation, and education, even though you may not have known it at the time.

It has been a thrilling, frustrating and enlightening journey and through it all my goal has been to create something people will enjoy. I hope you do.

My feet will forgive me, in time

Walking down the hall this morning my legs cut through the cushy haze of lingering sleep to remind me how much I've abused them over the weekend.
I took my wife to Disneyland Saturday and because I booked a hotel room for Saturday night we could stay at the park until closing and be fresh as daises for the drive home the following morning. Or, that was the plan.

We had a great time, all 15 hours of it. My legs and feet may have a different opinion but I'm not letting them near the keyboard, so we'll be sticking with my version.


We walked and walked and... you get the idea. By the time we dragged ourselves into our hotel room it was almost midnight. After a very hot shower to take the kink out of my back I climbed into bed and didn't know nothing from nobody for the next eight hours. It was great.

I like Disneyland and when it gets dressed up in all of it's Christmas finery with wandering carolers, Christmas music, bands, wreaths, etc., you can't help but feel like a kid in a candy store... with a maxed out credit card.

It rained a few times but that only helped clear the streets while others scurried for cover we happily strolled down the streets with plenty of elbow room. It was a very good weekend. And it wrapped up better than I could have hoped because with the helpful instructions from Jennifer over from Scrivener customer support I finally cleared out all of the double '??' that have been plaguing me this past week.

The book is going to be published this week! It would happen tonight, but I have a Christmas party. I'm very excited. I'm on the edge of my seat hoping people with really enjoy the book.

More to follow...

Adventures in Publishing

I finished reviewing my editors marks over the weekend and had come to the moment where I yell 'Geronimo!" and send my fledgling book off into the big world. Yeah. That didn't happen.

My writing software of choice is Scrivener. It can be as simple or as powerful as you want it to be when writing. The same is true when it comes to 'compiling' your written word into an ebook... mostly.

When it comes to filling in a form I'm the kind of person that will take three. Two to mess up because I didn't read the instructions and one to get right... again, mostly.


I'm publishing to sell on Amazon and they have their format for the Kindle. Scrivener will compile for their format, but you need a couple of Amazons programs on your computer, too. I thought I knew how to compile  via Scrivener, but when I started looking at all the options I felt like I had climbed inside the mind of the Cheshire Cat.
Away to the internet! Anything I need to know I can find there. That's a philosophy as tried and true as the earth being flat, but I cling to it like a chronic gambler believing the next time will be the big win.

So, I searched for a tutorial about compiling via Scrivener. Surely, someone in this world had to have been befuddled by this and once unlocking its secrets they would have posted a video, a blog, something. Nothing. Something as simple as adding cover art was nowhere to be found. After a lot of trial and error I had pieced together enough to compile to ePub format and view on the Kindle preview program.

There it was. My book on a virtual Kindle. The hours of frustration melted away as giddy excitement flooded through me. I paged through the chapters grinning like an idiot. I was rounding the final corner and about to download it to Amazon when something funny caught my eye. Several of the pages had double question marks bracketing the dialogue. What the... ?

The ?? weren't in the original text, but they kept showing up in the Kindle version. Within a few minutes giddiness was kicked out the door as frustration pushed its way back in and settled down for a nice long visit. I spent the next hour trying everything I could think of, but no matter what I did the ?? kept showing up.

I turned to my mentor, my holographic Jor-EL in my internet fortress of solitude, i.e., online forums. I posted my dilemma on the Amazon writers forum and Scriveners forum. Lots of people were interested in reading my post, but nobody responded.

I can't believe this. I'm this close to publishing, this close (holding fingers a hairs breath apart), and I'm dead in the water. At this point my only hope is that someone smarter than me, just about everyone, will have the answer. The saga continues, my friends.

I feel like Harold Camping

Last week I prophesied that on the coming Saturday, 12-3-11, I'd be published.
You'll never guess what happened. Maybe you did.

If you've been a reader of this blog it'll come as no surprise that, once again, I didn't publish. Holy flying @#$@$% Batman! This makes the third, no fourth time I had a date set to publish and missed it.

I have to cut myself a little slack, I suppose. After all it's the first time I've gone through this process and the time I estimate for things to be done are nothing more than WAGs.

Alright, so admitting my inability to judge how long this writing stuff takes and before I'm labeled the Harold Camping of the writing world, I will refrain from any further predictions of when this will be wrapped up and published.

... the 10th. Definitely the 10th.

Do Not Pass Go

I used to work with a very interesting guy. He was a computer program and very clever. We were working on a project and had hit some major set backs which kept pushing back the delivery for the finished program. 
I remember our manager coming into our office and asking, for the millionth time when the project would be done. Our manager wasn't a computer person. He had no concept of what was involved in programming, or just about anything computer related. Because of this he'd ask questions that no self respecting 'computer' manager should ask the end result was he didn't get much regard among his department. So, he comes in and asks about the delay of the project, and it was clear he'd rehearsed this because he was very specific about programming terms all of us knew he didn't understand. The programmer admitted the manager was right except he hadn't taken into account the Constant Date Retreating Factor. 
The CDRF states that the distance to the project goal date will increase in direct relation to the amount of effort you expend on reaching that goal by a factor of 1.5 to 1. The manager wasn't sure if the programmer was serious or not, but to not lose face he went along with it. I thought it was one of the funniest things I'd ever seen until I discovered that it really exists. 
Working on this book has confirmed the Constant Date Retreating Factor it real. As of the date of this post there has been three times when I was certain I was just days of publishing my book. Certain! This time I know the book will be published and it's just days from happening. Not weeks, mind you. Days. 
For those of you aspiring writers beware of the CDRF. For those published writers you know what I'm talking about. If not, then thank your lucky stars and throw a dash of salt over your shoulder that it doesn't happen to you.

The Last Hurdle

I grimace when I think back, low those months ago, when I was convinced that I was a week away from publishing my book. I took a week off from work to wrap it up believing that by the weekend I'd be looking at the web site showing the cover of my new book.

Then reality did a ninja move on me and everything fell apart. Wow, it really hurts when I think of all that time slipping by with nothing to show for it. That was then. This is now.

One of the problems was getting the cover art done. I had to make some hard decisions but in the end it worked out nicely. I found an artist who was helpful and responsive. Concept drafts went back and forth but the artist was on the ball. So now, cover done.

This weekend I give the book a final check, just to be sure I haven't messed anything up with the epub formatting and then it goes out.

I'm both excited and nervous. I've had a number of people read it and have gotten back very positive feedback, so I think readers will really enjoy it, but there's always that nagging doubt. Well, I won't know until it's out there.

It's the home stretch!

I'm taking off this coming week for nothing but heads down writing. I know it won't take me all week to finish, but I'll also be working with the cover artist to wrap up the cover and chapter art. There's also all of the little loose ends that need to be tied up but my goal is to have a finished product ready to publish by the end of the week.

Oh my gosh, finally! I can't wait to see it listed on Amazon. I have no idea if it'll sell. I don't know if people will like it. I've given copies out to be read through to be sure I have everything in the right place, etc.,  and they came back with very positive reviews. That's encouraging, but there's no telling what the general public will think of it, or if they'll ever see it in the sea of other great books out there.

I can't begin to express how much I enjoy writing. If others can find enjoyment in reading what I've created then that makes me feel really good because it's like I'm somehow able to share my love of writing with readers. If that makes sense.

I'm cracking up because I'm absolutly beat from going out with my wife as she shops for cars, and working up the umph! to write is a bit hard but I'm powered on as my daughter and her friend blast away at Guitar Hero behind me.

Oh, dinner is on and I have to go or I'll be getting, yup, there it is, the dark looks from my wife that say, 'It's getting cold.' i.e., Move your butt!.

Gotta go. Thanks for stopping by.