C.V. Sutherland's Blog, page 4

Roadblocks

Remember my ‘Milestones’ post? I think I have something to add to that.

You see, milestones are pretty hard to achieve when there’s roadblocks in the way. I don’t think I touched on that. And there’s traffic, too, tens or maybe hundreds of people all traveling down the same road as you. And if you want to be the one that reaches the destination, you have to be aware of these things. (And of the fact that I can’t help my philosophical, sometimes pointless thoughts and the urge to share them.)

Anyway, I am stuck at a roadblock right now. One that every single writer is quite familiar with.

Writer’s block.

I won’t go too in detail here, but I’ve been at that roadblock for a while now and I can’t seem to find a way around it. So I’m afraid that this post can’t really help you out of the situation I’m in. I just had to warn you.

New Year, New Times

It’s 2013 2014. The world is changing at a rapid pace, and along with a new year comes those resolutions – and the chance to give yourself a new outlook on the world, and give the world a new outlook on you. Everyone has different interpretations of what that means, but this is what I did.

To give the world a new look on me, I first proceeded to chop off all my hair. Yeah. And if it weren’t for my floral pants and ruffly tee shirts I now have to wear to distinguish myself as a female, I’d probably look like a boy.

The other thing I’ve done is start to write a new book, called Golden Hour. Since finishing Delicate Bones I’ve been in a little bit of a rough patch, writing little one-page scenes of fantasy, realistic fiction, and everything in between. Now I have a good plot I want to stick to, because most YA books nowadays are science fiction, futuristic, dystopian, that kind of thing, and I feel like there needs to be more exposure to things like steampunk and historical fiction. Which is exactly what I’m going to do, if you haven’t already guessed; break the stereotypes of teenage readers in today’s society. I encourage you to do the same.

As for giving myself a new outlook on the world… I don’t know yet. I guess we’ll find out. 364 days to go.

Milestones

There’s a few moments from my early childhood that I remember quite clearly. This is one of them.

We were all in the car, driving down the highway, surrounded by trees. I think it was a little foggy. I was maybe 5 or 6 or 7. I asked my mom how far a mile was, and I think she told me that it was as far as I could see. I spent the rest of the car ride trying to stare down the highway and see as far as possible, and my attempts were in vain because the fog blocked my sight.

Now that I think about it, I get why they’re called milestones. You can only see a little bit into the fog of your future, but when you get far enough it’s a milestone, every mile deeper into your successes. Milestones.

Don’t worry about the fog of life. It lifts.

Tease

I’ve been thinking.

Apps like Wanelo are kind of strange to me, just because it’s hard to tell if it’s a good or bad impact, if it makes us feel good or bad to look at pretty things on a screen and browse through collections of pretty things that we probably won’t ever have. Does it make us jealous of the absence of those pretty things, or is it satisfying enough just to see them?

It’s like window shopping, but at the same time it’s not.

I think it has a different effect on everyone. Nonetheless, though, we should be careful about what we’re doing to ourselves.

All About the Buzz

Every day, there are roughly 500 books releasing into the writing industry. Every day. Competition is fierce, no doubt. So even if you’ve got the best novel in the world out there, you won’t get anywhere without publicity – something indie authors tend to struggle with.

I’m embarrassed to say it, but in the first 10 days of December, only 1 copy was sold. 1. And the book was only released at the end of October. It’s burning pressure on my shoulders now – publicity is falling, people are forgetting about the book, and something needs to be done about that. And it’s up to me, because I’m the author and the publicist and everything in one. It’s scary, just thinking about it – if I fail to get the buzz going, my career will die away.  So today, I’m going to share with you some tips on making yourself heard when you have something you need to market.

Tip One: Start small. Get involved with the local social scene in your town. Is there a local charity or a program that does auctions? Great! Write a polite email asking if one of the items for sale could be a signed copy of your book, or whatever you’re selling, and offer to throw in a personal touch as well, like a personal handwritten dedication towards the highest bidder. It’s a great way to promote both yourself and the foundation that’s hosting the auctions – plus, you’ll be there yourself.

Tip Two: Don’t neglect social media. There’s nothing out there that gets news and publicity to millions of potential consumers faster or more effectively than social media. Twitter and Instagram hit a lot of different age groups, too, so no matter who your target audience is, you’re sure to have some readers there on those sites. Another trick is to use one social media to promote another. On a blog post you could write, Tweet me questions on Twitter, like I often tag onto the ends of my Q&A posts.

Tip Three: Let the buzz travel. If someone hears about something interesting, strange or fascinating, their general first instinct is to tell someone else about it. Often times, all you’ll need to do is give it a starting push and it will pull itself across the finish line, supported by other people along the way. The bottom line is not to stress too much over marketing, because at the end of the day, the most important thing is to keep coming out with content to be marketing!

I hope this has helped you, and it’s good to get some of that weight off of my shoulders by writing this. I apologize for not having posted in a while – I’m trying to find a good schedule that I can work off of on a weekly basis. I’m going to try to get up one post a week at a minimum. So, see you later!

- CVSUTHERLAND

Q&A – Revising and Editing

Hey guys! Since I’ve started revision on my novel, Delicate Bones, I thought I’d answer some questions you guys have for me about revising and editing books. So here we go!

Q: What helps get you in the mood for revising and editing?

A: I think most authors can agree that we’d rather be enveloped in a world of our creation and writing about it than revising and editing it. It’s not the most exciting thing to devote your time to, but alas, it’s necessary. A book with no revising and editing is shallow and full of mistakes. Once you’ve got the general ideas on paper, you can really go back and add more depth and details, and you can also eliminate those paragraphs that don’t make sense or edit the ones that you used the wrong tense in accidentally (that’s one of the most common mistakes for me, actually). 

So, I really do need something to get me in the mood for it. One thing I like to do is just read through my story, not searching for any mistakes or errors or things that don’t make sense, but just like a reader would, because readers aren’t generally reading a book just to stumble across those things. (And I guess that because I’m a child author, I have some sort of right to having a few errors here and there, but I don’t like that assumption that it will be flawed, so I do my best to get rid of them as thoroughly as I can.) Then, if I find something that doesn’t quite work, I can write it down and come back to it later once I understand the entire story a little bit better after rereading it. 

I also like to play music as I revise and edit – or do anything, really. Even as I write this blog post, I’m listening to music. Music is a fabulous counterpart to writing because it balances out all the stress you might be feeling. I’m a huge alternative rock person, so I like to listen to Coldplay, Two Door Cinema Club, Lorde, Florence + The Machine, Atlas Genius, and The Black Keys, just to name a few. I especially love listening to more upbeat songs because it kind of counteracts with the long, tedious, often boring editing process. It just pumps me up a little bit and gets me in a bit brighter of a mood, so I’m not incredibly frustrated and bored while I revise. Of course, listening to a song that matches with the mood of the chapter is always helpful. For example, if I’m editing a sad chapter I might want to listen to a sadder, slower song, just so I can really connect with that chapter.

Q: Do you have other people help you?

A: While I was editing Wildflower Dreams, I didn’t, which is probably why some parts are really crappy. But no matter – my writing has grown now along with me. Now I do, and there’s sort of a system to it. My mother especially loves reading my books before they come out, which she didn’t get to do with Wildflower Dreams but what she seems to really be enjoying with Delicate Bones. She’ll have a little piece of paper and a pen next to her, so when she stumbles across something that doesn’t make sense grammatically or doesn’t fit the rest of the plot, she can just write down roughly what it is and what chapter it’s in, so that once she’s done I can just grab the list and go through, chapter by chapter, what needs to be edited. My really good friend and fellow writer also sends me critique in emails when I send her a few chapters at a time, which I really, really appreciate because it’s good to get advice from another writer that understands the process behind it a little more. And plus, writers are always biased, no matter how much we try not to be. Since we wrote the book, we’re always stuck in this mindset where we think that it’s absolutely flawless and brilliant, which is not always the complete case. Having another set of eyes is something that I think every writer needs, because there’s no way you can edit it on your own and still weed out all the imperfections. 

Q: How long do you spend revising and editing a day?

A: I like to split up the work into small, small sections, because that way it’s not as overwhelming. I might take 30 minutes and just really go in to one chapter, or I might spend that time just editing the things that really stand out and coming back to the more minor mistakes later. Honestly, it doesn’t really matter how I spend the time as long as I get everything done eventually. 

 

That’s all for now! I hope this answered some questions you might have, and I will talk to you later! Don’t forget that you can Tweet me any questions or comments you have @CVSutherland 

- CVSUTHERLAND

a short post.

Sometimes a short post is all it takes to get your point across.

Which is the point of this post.

Finished

I recently finished writing a novel called Delicate Bones. It’s 154 pages long, and has 28,273 words – roughly 8,000 more than Wildflower Dreams. Even better, DB is the first installment in a trilogy! Obviously I’m stoked about having completed this project that has taken me forever – but at what stage do we really get to say that we’re done?

I might have finished writing the book, but I still need to revise, edit, proofread, write a query letter, and hopefully score a real book deal. So even though I’m done for the moment, I really won’t be finished until probably March or April. That’s a scary thought, isn’t it? 

That’s the kind of thing that discourages people from chasing what they want – the time and patience that is required in order to achieve your goal. Most people don’t have an abundance of time to spend on this – they have lives that involve doing other things, too. If I were a working adult trying to support a family AND get Delicate Bones published, it would probably not even be published a year from now. And that’s a terrifying reality.

Something that you don’t often hear authors talk about but what is the cold, hard truth is that all good authors have become experts at time management. Brittany Geragotelis faced rejection for 10 years, but that didn’t stop her and she’s now a published author. (Read her interview with Miss Literati here.) A lot of writers aren’t full-time authors until their novels are on the bestselling shelves, so most of use our spare time to write. Sure, it takes longer than if we could write all day, every day, but when you’re really enjoying writing the time will fly by because you’ll be so wrapped up in your character’s world that you won’t notice the days ticking away. That’s what happened to me – I’d be taking math notes in class and all of a sudden a great plot twist idea will hit me and I’ll jot it down in the margins of my notebook and then I’ll start coming up with details and write those down too and eventually I’ll completely forget about taking notes, which is okay to me, because if that wasted time is going to help me finish and release a book, then I’m all for it. (Not the best philosophy, I’m sure.)

My point is, don’t let your brain wander that far ahead. You should definitely think about it a little bit, yeah, but until you’ve got your content written, revised, edited, and ready for publication, you shouldn’t be worrying about which publishing company you’ll send a query letter to. Writing is supposed to be fun, not stressful – place a limit on how much you want to look ahead, and just let your imagination soar, because writing is not about the deadlines. It’s about the writing. And until you’re finished, you shouldn’t be worrying about anything else. 

- CVSUTHERLAND

Seatbelt

We all have our own opinions on seatbelts. I think that they’re annoying to have to put on, but I also know that if something were to happen, it would be the difference between life and death. It’s the same with writing – the seatbelt is a necessary step to safe success, and holds you back from failure, but can also prevent your success if you allow it to control you.

It makes no sense, I know. But think about it like this: the writing industry, and any industry, is a car. It rolls along and is always moving and never stops. Sometimes it needs a pump of gas (eg. a new, exciting novel or author) to refresh it, but it never really stops going.

We all sit inside this car, as writers both published and non-published.

Some of us wear seatbelts as a safety precaution, to protect us from failing. These seatbelts can take many different forms – support from family or friends or literary agents, maybe – and the people that wear them know that. They stay on a steady road, never failing but never making it big either.

The daredevils, however, the ones that haven’t put on their seatbelts, are the ones that will either fail miserably or become such huge stars that it’s almost unfathomable, as fellow authors and writers. So we must decide for ourselves whether we’re going to confine ourselves with the seatbelt and play it safe, or risk it all and refuse its protection.

Are you wearing a seatbelt today?

Just Keep Going.

People have so many different definitions of what being a writer really means. But really there’s just two elements to it – the basics, and then your twist on it.

You don’t need to be working on a bestselling, award-winning novel in order to be able to classify yourself as a writer. You just have to have that drive inside of you to want to keep going, no matter how many people tell you that you aren’t a writer.

Look at the wall in the room, and describe its color or the pictures on it. Go people-watching and devise a short story for someone, a stranger that you don’t even know. Smell a whiff of your favorite perfume and describe its scent. It doesn’t matter what you write about – just keep going.

The more you write, the more you notice and discover about your writing and the more you’ll start to build a story around that one scene that you write.

So once you’ve got that first scene, write another. Write a steamy love scene between two characters or a dialogue completely between another two characters or just write a regular day in their life. They don’t have to go together, just write, and eventually you’ll have written enough scenes to fill the gaps in between.

Before you know it, you’ve got yourself a story.

- CVSUTHERLAND