A.J. Race's Blog, page 20

Blog of the Week: The Guardian

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One of my all time favorite news sources as of late, has to be the Guardian, in particular their Comment is Free section. I’ve had a long discussion with a blogger friend of mine Grace Bunting over at Wondering Grace about my love for the Comment is Free section of the Guardian. In particular, one article that forever sealed my love for the Guardian in which a journalist referred to the prime minister as a Dim-witted ballon on a stick.

To be clear, I’m always wary of any ‘comments’ section on any blog on the internet, because it always seems to be a congregation of the clinically insane, screaming nonsense at each other. So I try to avoid anyone’s comments as a matter of routine, because for reasons I will never fully understand people get very vicious on the internet. (I’ll blog more about that later).

I can’t really tell you why this amused me as much as it did, suffice it to say, I don’t believe I’ve ever laughed so uncontrollably at an article as I did there. But it isn’t just that, I’ve always rather enjoyed British news. In particular, their need for having a US edition. I mean granted CNN has a World Edition, but that’s all over, The Guardian (and actually a few others) have, local news, World News and then their own specific US News. I find this both fascinating and a little exhausting as well. We don’t have like Canada news, or UK news, it all goes into the ‘World’ heading. But I digress.

Ultimately, if I’m being honest I have a love for many political and news blogs, depressing though the news often is, I’m still fascinated by what’s going on with the world.

Oh, and One More Thing

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[image error]ecause apparently, I don’t have enough on my plate currently, I’m considering adding Racewood TV into my already over scheduled work week. I had originally intended to post a sort of sneak peak/first episode on Friday, rather than doing a Daily Racewood, and somewhere I got the idea that I could do a vlog on Fridays, the podcast on Saturdays then Sunday through Thursday I would do my normal Daily Racewood posts, which might have worked, save for the fact that I decided I wanted to do my vlog with my podcast co-host, and we filmed what could have been a semi interesting video, only to have iMovie, not actually have the video. We’re not entirely sure what happened, but all I know for sure is that the video was freezing while we were recording, and so I’m like, okay I’ll just press Done, I’m finished anyway, and then I look down, and there’s no video. Anywhere to be found in the application. We had, for a moment, the idea of re-recording it, but frankly by that time I was exhausted and annoyed and so I decided maybe it was worth it, to just try it again next week.

I haven’t entirely decided whether or not this is going to be a weekly thing like part of me wants it to or not, but if it is it’s definitely not going to be anything like what you’re used to seeing from me on here.

Racewood TV coming soon to YouTube ?

On Contests

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[image error] typically don’t talk about it here when I enter contests because a part of me worries that it might be bad luck, but considering that even when I don’t talk about it, I still don’t win anything, perhaps it wouldn’t hurt just this once.

A few months ago I scurried to enter Goddess of Carnage into the Amazon Breakthrough Novel award. I didn’t get in, and needless to say that did nothing good for my self esteem as a writer, but it got me thinking about contests and whether or not they’re ultimately worth the time and effort it takes to attempt to enter them.

Depending on which writing blog you subscribe too, or which book on writing and how to get published you’ve read (I’ve read quite a few and they all pretty much say the same thing) it’s always worth it to enter into a writing contest. Even if you don’t win, it’s a new challenge for yourself and it gives you an experience you might otherwise not have had. And I’m totally all for that, as long as it’s free.

Recently I considered entering Writer’s Digests Self Published Novel Award contest but the entry fee was something like $50-$100 per entry and that’s a lot of money for something that you have no idea whether or not you even have a chance of winning. Sure, maybe it’s good publicity (and you could argue that a few ways) but if you save up you could get your book reviewed by Kirkus or Publishers Weekly for a few hundred dollars, and of the two of them, I’d rather take a professional review over a contest any day. You may not necessarily get a great review, but hey, it’s attention you otherwise wouldn’t have had, and truthfully any press can be good press if you spin it right.

Ultimately (as with almost everything in life these days, at least for me) you have to do a cost-benefit analysis. Or, if it’s free, consider the cost the time and effort you have to put into it. It’s hard to see the benefit if you’re in the middle of writing a novel (that you’re already behind on), that said, since I’m not writing anything anyway, maybe taking a little side trip and entering a contest and writing something completely unrelated to my novel could be beneficial. It’s worth a shot and at any rate, being free I don’t have a whole lot to lose. Except my time and my sanity, two things which seem to be in short supply as of late. But that’s a blogpost for another day.

Sexually Active Gays, Oh My!

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This week Katrina and I discuss gay characters in literature, why I think it’s important to portray gay characters in t.v., film and books as sexually active and the reality of Y.A. fiction. Plus we ask what’s the worst thing we’ve ever had a character do? All this and more, only on Racewood Radio.

Read-spiration

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About a day or so before I ended up hand writing a good deal of a scene from book 3, what I later referred to as the epiphany, I was pushing myself to at least attempt to get further into the Casual Vacancy. Part of my reasoning was because I knew I was going to be talking about the book on the podcast, and I felt that I should at least attempt to read more of it than I previously had. To my credit, I actually ended up getting a lot further than I’d ever thought I would, and more importantly it sparked in me the desire to get writing again.

A major part of the reason that I have such a hard time actually reading a book cover to cover in less than a few months has, for a long time now, been because of the fact that within a few paragraphs or a few pages, I end up wanting to write something of my own, and drop the book for that. About the only time I attempt to pick up the book again is if I have writers block or if I randomly just decide that I want to read something.

It’s been a few weeks (at least) since my hand written epiphany and as I said in my previous post I haven’t so much as even typed all that up, let alone attempted to write something new. I’ve been trying to consider a dozen different ideas that might spark some kind of creative renaissance in my mind, but maybe reading is all that I really need. It’s worked in the past and at this point, I really have nothing to lose, except my sanity.

Artistic Burnout

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“I’m really kind of over it,” as soon as the words left my mouth, a small part of me wondered how horrible that would actually sound to anyone who was listening to the premier episode of our podcast. How could an author be so sick and tired of writing a novel? Especially the last in a trilogy… is that even a thing? Of course, a quick conversation with a fellow artist quickly proved that it wasn’t just me.

I think it has to do with creativity in general. There’s something about the creative energy that seems to make us get bored with things more easily than other people. It’s probably why teleplay writers (pretty sure that’s what you call people who write t.v. scripts isn’t it?), write multiple television shows at a time. There’s this artistic burnout that you get from doing the same thing day in and day out month after month. It isn’t to say you don’t still love it, but after a certain point it’s almost rather tedious, and at least for me, I don’t like routine. In fact I don’t think I know many artists who do. It’s not in our nature. Writers probably more than any other artists are forced to walk the fine line between multiple worlds, left and right brained, adventurous and needing routine, and of course genius and insanity. We need to balance all of these things in order to function as creative people on the whole.

I think a major part of the reason that book 3 continues to be a royal pain in my ass is because I’ve been writing the trilogy off and on for ten years now. In some form or another I’ve always managed to get at least the first book finished and I had written at least one or two other drafts of book 2 many years ago, but the third book has never actually been finished before now. If I’m going to have any hope of completing it without losing my mind I’m going to have to write some other things in the meantime. I’ve got plenty of other books in the works, so maybe that’s the answer, if Shonda Rhimes can juggle three shows at once, I think I can manage writing two books at once.

There’s No Excuse

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[image error]ver since my rather major epiphany regarding book 3 a few weeks or so ago, I really can’t say I’ve written anything particularly new, nor, to be perfectly honest, can I say that I’ve really tried. Truthfully there’s no excuse for it, but if you’d allow me to attempt to explain maybe it’ll make some kind of sense.

A lot of my problem has centered directly around working on all these website updates, I’ve really only just got everything settled this last week, and ever since I came up with this brilliant plan to change everything over it’s been rather exhausting trying to figure out how to set everything up. I’m immensely grateful that everyone has been so helpful thus far, WordPress in getting my followers transferred over, Laughing Squid in helping me set up the blog in the first place. It’s been a bit of a challenge but now I’m just trying to get back into the swing of things. I’ve also recently gotten back into school after my eleven weeks off in which I had rather hoped to do a lot more writing than I did. Can you believe it’s already week three?

I’ve also been dealing with a few more personal issues as well, including now getting everything packed up to move (which is always a thrill), so… while I’m not proud of it. I’ve written absolutely nothing as of late. I haven’t even managed to type up everything that I had hand written, though I’ve attempted several times.

I don’t really know what the deal is with this last novel, why it feels as though the universe is throwing every curve ball it possibly can at me. Is it to slow me down? Or convince me to take a break and write something else.

We’re In Trouble

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[image error] keep seeing  articles talking about how self-publishing is the ‘wave of the future’ for authors and I have to say… if self publishing is the wave of the future. We’re all in trouble. It isn’t that I didn’t enjoy self publishing and it’s certainly not that I regret making that decision, but it sort of lends itself to the perception that traditional publishing companies are either going to have to evolve with writers, or die trying. Say what you will about the traditional publishing industry itself, but I don’t buy into a lot of the catastrophic posturing everyone seems to have around it with regards to self publishing. To be sure, self publishing has put a dent in their sails, but they aren’t going anywhere any time soon. Not by a long shot. The reality is, some authors will always want a traditional publisher, they strive for it, and even most self published authors when given half the chance would opt for a traditional publisher, if for no other reason than publicity.

It’s tough work self publishing, especially in today’s market. It’s afforded authors like myself to find an audience true, but it’s also made it more difficult by making it easier for anybody to be published. It’s a trade off that may not necessarily have the pay off one would hope for.

That said, self publishing isn’t a new concept by far, so calling it the “wave of the future” is sort of laughable, and frankly shows just how little people really understand about where self publishing has come from. Sure it feel out of practice for a very long time, but it’s as old as writing itself.

A Host of Problems

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[image error]hen I discovered that through Mac OS X Server I could host my own website on my computer I was instantly excited, and for $20 it was a lot better than some of the other hosting options I had previously found. The problem was, it also had a lot of features that I didn’t need, and couldn’t possibly hope to use, and getting it to actually handle the website was next to impossible. I realized within less than a half an hour I was in way over my head and that this program was definitely not what I needed. I was going to have to find an actual hosting company that could handle WordPress

I wasn’t particularly thrilled about the idea of having to pay a hosting company to do my website for the mere fact that when I had originally used BlueHost back in early 2008, (as recommended by WordPress.org I might add) I had to pay a year upfront and it wasn’t pretty. Thankfully I decided to do a bit more research and found that LaughingSquid, also recommended by WordPress, offers a month to month payment plan that was a lot more doable.

This, by the way isn’t meant to be an ad for them. They’re great and I greatly appreciate the help they have given me in setting this all up. In all actuality however, this post is more about telling you how I found myself completely in over my head in trying to move my blog. I had thought that I knew more about computers and technology than this, but if anything, this experience has definitely taught me that I’m a writer first, and an adventurer second. And believe me, attempting to host your own website is definitely an adventure.

I definitely don’t regret any of the decisions I’ve made, it was a learning experience and it was mostly fun, but it was an important step for my brand and in the end I know it’s going to be worth it.

Racewood Radio: Episode 1–Hiyeeeeeee

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In the premier episode of Racewood Radio Katrina and I discuss the Casual Vacancy and why it probably wasn’t the best place to start for J.K.Rowling after the juggernaut that was Harry Potter. SCOTUS and the future gay marriage and I reveal the much anticipated (if only in my own head) title to the final Secrets of Witches novel.