UK Amazon Kindle Forum discussion
Agony Aunt
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Today I mostly wrote ... the word count thread.
Yep. I'm with both of you on this. The key scenes always wipe me out.
Totally. Haven't done much this week. It's been v busy. But wrote a.blog post so there's that.
Finding that the second scene in LIMBO is both a key scene (I thought we were just mopping up and getting ready for the third volume in the trilogy) AND
that I have to make some very serious decisions about what to include/exclude from extensive personal knowledge.
Hint: don't put these at the beginning - they slow you down. :)
PS: I didn't have a choice.
Alicia wrote: "Finding that the second scene in LIMBO is both a key scene (I thought we were just mopping up and getting ready for the third volume in the trilogy) AND
that I have to make some very serious decis..."
Those pesky characters aren't going their own way are they? they have an annoying habit of doing that. Any progress is progress though, right?
M.T. wrote: "Those pesky characters aren't going their own way are they?..."I thought we had an arrangement: I told them what to do, they decided how they would do it, and I clean up the language a bit, and we move on.
You can probably guess that even though I have a COMPLETE purple prose rough draft which will be burned after I finish (whatever that means digitally, and the biographers will have to lump it), there were decisions left hanging in the wind...
Now they have to be made, and have to be good (my intention is to do an even better job on the last volume in the trilogy), and some of the little cheats I used to finish that abominable draft won't stand muster...
I just hadn't planned to run into them in the SECOND of around 120 scenes.
Which was disingenuous, given where the second book left the story. Not a cliffhanger, per se, but a major ending in the last chapter or two. New direction needs support, and I know it, and technically am looking forward to it...
We'll get there. :)
'I thought we had an arrangement.' 🤣🤣 love it. Glad to hear you are keeping on.
Thanks. Don't really have a choice - but I didn't realize how much stuff was in the end of the story - and that it would take longer than expected (doesn't it always?) to track some of these down.The characters have to decide how much of themselves they're letting out - the original ending was the same, but tamer. This one may have more secrets - there is an entire ethical dilemma layer to do justice to. If you've read the first two, you will have an inkling.
Alicia wrote: "Thanks. Don't really have a choice - but I didn't realize how much stuff was in the end of the story - and that it would take longer than expected (doesn't it always?) to track some of these down...."
Sounds brilliant. I haven't read them yet, I've been waiting for the last one but I bought the other two ready ... or wait a minute. Did I? ... urgh ... if I haven't I'll do it now! :-)
M.T. wrote: "Alicia wrote: "Thanks. Don't really have a choice - but I didn't realize how much stuff was in the end of the story - and that it would take longer than expected (doesn't it always?) to track some ..."If you're waiting for LIMBO, it's going to be around five years more. Unless I can get this scene perfect sooner than it seems to be happening. Frustrating because I KNOW what happens - just not the best HOW.
Or - you could just start reading when you need something, but I don't recommend doing it right before bed, unless you have a lot more discipline than I have. Thanks!
Yeh books and night are a bad mix for me too! I hear you on the knowing what happens just not how. I am in the exact same place myself right now!
We're even battling bodies which are giving us a hard time!
Alicia wrote: "We're even battling bodies which are giving us a hard time!"I think I'm a lot luckier than you are on that score though. You do amazing things.
VERY slowly. Far less amazing when they take so long. But thanks.
Alicia wrote: "VERY slowly. Far less amazing when they take so long. But thanks."Trust me, the fact you do them at all makes them amazing. :-)
Now all we both have to do is persuade several million people to read and decide if they like our wares, right?Always working on it.
Ah yeh, I wish. Reaching suitable readers is hard. Brits love it most but with bookhippo gone I have no access to them, which is a shame.
Sad when promotion opportunities disappear, just as you thought you were getting the hang of them.Just keep wearing that hat and cape, MT. You are making your brand more and more visible with each appearance.
M.T. wrote: "Ah yeh, I wish. Reaching suitable readers is hard. Brits love it most but with bookhippo gone I have no access to them, which is a shame."Yes, I sure do miss BookHippo. What other ones are available? I think BookAngel is UK but I don't sell many, if any through them.
M.T. wrote: "Ah yeh, I wish. Reaching suitable readers is hard. Brits love it most but with bookhippo gone I have no access to them, which is a shame."Have you checked Shepherd.com? I think it might fit in with the way that you want to connect with your readers beyond just the books. It's a membership thing, but not that expensive to join.
I'm getting my lists, thinking of titles - will get it all working when I can figure out a few things that would make readers be interested in MY lists.
Anna wrote: "M.T. wrote: "Ah yeh, I wish. Reaching suitable readers is hard. Brits love it most but with bookhippo gone I have no access to them, which is a shame."Yes, I sure do miss BookHippo. What other on..."
It's gone! I missed that :-(
For the last year I have been limping along at half speed (and hardly at all in the last 3 months) so I'm not what you'd call up-to-speed. Nothing at all has been written since mid March but now that I am recovering from the operation to get me up and running again (or at least limping faster) I managed to do some writing of the wip last week. About 800 words. Eek... Hoping for more this week.Kind folks have thought I could be writing at full speed but limping around means that everything else in life is done at half-speed.
Things can only get better :o)
Anna wrote: "For the last year I have been limping along at half speed (and hardly at all in the last 3 months) so I'm not what you'd call up-to-speed. Nothing at all has been written since mid March but now th..."It takes energy to heal, to recover, to catch up. That is energy not available for writing (which prefers having the good creative energy all to itself).
You'll catch up - but you have to rest and recuperate to be able to write. And 800 words is no small feat, especially when you've been dry for a while. I managed 76 words that I'll keep over the whole weekend. Better than the week before.
Yes, I thought of you several times recently, Alicia.
I’ve been working on the timeline this week and wrote a bit early in the week. I have discovered the timeline doesn’t work because it’s the first and second book. So it looks like I’ll have a trilogy centred around Goojan Spiced sausage. Mwahahargh!Anna wrote: "Yes, I thought of you several times recently, Alicia."
I hope the limping is soon finished. It’s difficult if you are healing to do much else. Also if you’re tired or in pain, it takes it out of you a lot more than you might think. Well done on getting anything done.
Alicia wrote: "Anna wrote: "For the last year I have been limping along at half speed (and hardly at all in the last 3 months) so I'm not what you'd call up-to-speed. Nothing at all has been written since mid Mar..."
Graham green apparently only wrote 100 words a day so you’re not far off Alicia.
Thanks for the low bar. I do much better ONCE I figure out WHY I'm stuck on this particular point, and I have done that - it opened a portal to something I should have seen before, and I've been having trouble deciding if I DARE write it.Whoa! It goes in - somehow - but I'm not passing up what might be my only opportunity EVER to use this, fear or not.
If it costs me every one of my readers, so be it.
And on that happy note, back to work. Happy Pride Month to those who celebrate.
Still plugging away at the timeline, but also tidying up scenes so they fit, I need to get this bit to work before I can move on but it’s annoyingly awkward to get right.
Amazing how the logical connections start coming in, almost on their own, and things snap into place. As if it were an alternate reality, its own universe.Thank goodness!
FWIW, I tried three times to leave a comment (which I wisely saved, having been through this nonsense many times before) on your latest post.If it didn't make it, I'll try again. Remind me it's in my temp file on Notes until I delete it. Sheesh.
Today I narrowly avoided getting taken in by a scammer.I have a need for some marketing, etc., assistance, so took a chance reaching out to someone who had an entry in the 20Booksto50k FB group (they allow promotion in a slot on Saturdays). BUT they don't VET the members who offer services.
Person sounded interesting and energetic, and I ended up making an appointment for a 'free video consult'.
Then I did what I should have done first: googled their name + 'scam' - and found all kinds of red flags. Went to Writer Beware, found all manner of things I know are problematic (changing their name and website, complaints, requests for refunds due to not delivering promised work to clients' satisfaction, crazy emails...
Thank you, Writer Beware. I canceled, will lie low, hope I don't need to block on FB, etc.
I have zero energy - I can't cope with this kind of stress. So glad I bailed before making any commitments.
If you need to know, send me a PM - I'm not spreading someone's name who hasn't harmed me personally yet, no matter how much I think they might have in the future had I signed with them.
Also today, but not connected, as it started a couple of days ago: sometimes what you need to get out of a blind alley is to CHANGE the POV CHARACTER for a SCENE.And all of a sudden a whole bunch of related problems became much reduced in size and scope, and cleaner to deal with.
I write deep third pov with three randomly rotating main characters, and have usually chosen the correct character to be point for a scene - but I think this change in this spot is going to make it a lot easier and coherent to do what has to happen here.
Little things - I saved the whole development from the previous pov (in case my experiment fails, and I need to retrace my words) - and I'll be using a lot of the content of the scene, but I think this is a much better choice this time. Changing after extreme plotting is quite rare for me, but I wasn't getting anywhere, and it just clicked.
Wish me luck. I've been stymied and not quite sure WHY, as the scene will be the same EXCEPT for whose interior monologue we'll be listening to.
Who knew?
Alicia wrote: "Today I narrowly avoided getting taken in by a scammer.I have a need for some marketing, etc., assistance, so took a chance reaching out to someone who had an entry in the 20Booksto50k FB group (..."
Phew! Glad you escaped, Alicia.
Alicia wrote: "Today I narrowly avoided getting taken in by a scammer.I have a need for some marketing, etc., assistance, so took a chance reaching out to someone who had an entry in the 20Booksto50k FB group (..."
Glad you dodged them
Alicia wrote: "Today I narrowly avoided getting taken in by a scammer.I have a need for some marketing, etc., assistance, so took a chance reaching out to someone who had an entry in the 20Booksto50k FB group (..."
Wow! Glad you realised in time. And thanks for the warning about services on that group.......
Scammers everywhere. I got an email from a Princeton University (former employer) account telling me they were considering closing my account, and if I wanted to keep it, I needed to verify it.And provided a LINK.
Something was off, so I didn't do what the link wanted me to, and got out of there quickly.
Next day I CALLED the number I have for Princeton's HR, talked to a human, sent them the email... Long story short, it came from a REAL princeton.edu email account - that belonged to an undergraduate! No, not authorized to check into accounts...
They said they'd let me know, but I may never find out the real details. Except that I'm glad I check everything now - and let them know their name was being taken in vain, so to speak.
I hope that link I clicked on momentarily doesn't come back to bite me! Inexperience on the part of the scammer may save me. Not filling in their form was definitely the right thing to do. But I felt some kind of cold wind on the back of my neck.
It's relentless.
Alicia wrote: "Scammers everywhere. I got an email from a Princeton University (former employer) account telling me they were considering closing my account, and if I wanted to keep it, I needed to verify it.An..."
That's spooky - someone at the University up to no good. If concerned, you could run an anti-virus scan and maybe something like Malwarebytes who provide a free version. But hopefully the real payload would have been if you'd filled out and submitted the form.
Yes it's got to the stage where we no longer deal with BT on line because we get so much plishing email claiming to be from them. Given they are the ones who deliver the plishing emails I pointed out that they're the ones who ought to do something about it
We don't answer our phones, either. If you want to talk to us, and you're not on the phone's contacts list, leave a message (they don't seem to be able to screw those up, yet), and we'll call you back.
What we're going to do when BOTH parties to a call insist on that protocol, I don't know.
And never answer 'yes' or 'no' to a telemarketer's questions - that's designed to record your own voice saying those words, to get into your bank account through voice identification.
According to the Killzone blog, Nov. 1 is supposed to be Author Day:“November 1 is Author’s Day, a day to honor all your favorite authors and to encourage any writers in your life to keep working on their magnum opus.
Who will you encourage?
Writing is hard and writing a short story or a book is even harder. So thank your favorite authors for writing your favorite books and help budding writers and authors around you in any way you can so that they can achieve their dreams.”
Must admit I hadn't heard of author dayI think my favourite author is dead but I always try and support those independent writers I know
It has been my eternal regret that I didn't really realize authors were real people, and might still be alive, and never thought to send a note of thanks for the books I've loved.I grew up in Mexico City, as you know, and books in English were mystical magical things that just appeared. You know - without an author, or certainly without a LIVING author.
Maybe it was all those classics: I was pretty sure Dickens wasn't around any more, nor Charlotte Brontë.
I'm not even sure when in my adult life, after I transferred to Seattle U., then grad school, marriage, and kids, I realized that some might still be around, when I was looking through the card catalogue at the Princeton Public Library and came across one's name - with a born date on the card, but no death date.
The power of whatever you learned as a child. Never had the schools arrange an author visit, never had a library until the States (and a tiny one at school), didn't really think like that of books - just consumed everything I could get my hands on in English, on my own time, no dictionary, no adult support or explanations, just me and my 'nose in a book.' Daddy might have been surprised at some of his James Bond paperbacks landing in my 'read overnight and return' pile.
I even think - yep, just checked it! - that Tolkien was still alive when I read The Lord of the Rings in college.
I was totally clueless.
Local authors were unknown round here as well :-)
I hope the ones I loved got support from more enlightened readers. I certainly didn't do what I would do now.
I snagged a couple of new readers by chatting with a man on a FB group on a sort-of-writing topic.He surprised me by buying Pride's Children: PURGATORY in paperback, and we were having a nice chat.
Then he left it where his wife thought it was a book he bought for her, and I was salivating at the thought of two new paying readers, at least one of which was promising to review. He said she was up to Chapter 5, and was an English lit major, too.
Next thing I know, he said the book was stolen - along with their car - and taken when their car was gutted (this was his story) - and I have no new readers (unless you can count the thief, but that's rather unlikely).
I offered to replace the book - we'll see if they take me up on it (finding new readers, especially ones who say they review everything they read, is HARD).
Did this ever happen to other writers here?
I probably don't have enough to spontaneously run into like that :-(
There are two huge reader sins which I will rant against here, and then hold my peace about, as READERS OWE ME NOTHING!I know how the deal goes: readers don't owe authors anything (except paying for the book if they buy it).
BUT:
When someone SAYS, unprompted, they are going to BUY the book, and then no buy shows up where I sell, I get irritated (I know, I know - unreasonably).
AND:
When someone is all excited and promises a review, and no review shows up - seemingly ever - I do get a mite miffed.
I'd rather they not promise - there are plenty of ways to do that politely, which I assume people/adults are adept at.
It's the promise followed by the fail that makes me even more depressed about sales, and not having the energy to market.
Rant over - people here understand.
I have arranged for a PR firm - but only because I'm not doing anything, and thus have no sales - and won't be doing much of anything organized until I finish at least a few chapters of LIMBO.I check them out occasionally - they tend to be pricey - but worse, I explain who I am and what I write, and I am NOT their preferred customer, and they drop me, or worse, they ghost me. I keep detailed notes, so I have all the emails, etc.
Anyhoo, through a highly improbable chain of recommendations, I came across what might be the perfect firm for me, and she lives a mile away and came for lunch last week! It's not often I get a bolt from the blue, but she also gardens at a local nature preserve WITH a friend from my same floor at the retirement community, who was startled to find her in the line for lunch on the terrace with me last Wed.
Small world? I prefer Divine Providence, but am NOT used to having it apply to me personally.
We'll see.
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I know most people write faster. I feel I'm carving in Carrara marble.