Q&A with Josh Lanyon discussion
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Writing Questions for Josh
Jordan wrote: "There is Scrivener for Dummies. Don't know if that would help you or not..."It couldn't hurt. Maybe I'll put it on my Christmas wish list.
I'm waiting till I start a new story before I use Scrivener. I've got 3 or 4 wips at the 30K stage so it seems a bit silly to switch over that far in.
K.Z. wrote: "I blame Quark for most of my psychic scars..."I blame Sport's Day and a traumatic hurdle race when I was five years old for most of my psychic scars.
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Sorry it took so long for me to answer. Not getting alerts on this thread, apparently. Well, yes. Getting Adobe Creative Suite, which contains InDesign (and then taking a class to learn how to use it and the other programs included) is worth it if you are going to continue to self-publish. But the cost is prohibitive if you're not going to use it a lot.
Nicole wrote: "Pender wrote: "I checked the specs of InDesign on Wikipedia. I have a MacBook Pro so that's compatible. Is it worth it? *ducks quickly* "Sorry it took so long for me to answer. Not getting alerts..."
No problem. Goodreads can be funny like that. At this point in my writing I prefer working with a publisher. I'm not planning on self-publishing more than a couple of shorts so it probably wouldn't be worth the cost or effort at the moment. Next time I'll just bug, Lou. ;)
Pender wrote: "Nicole wrote: "Pender wrote: "I checked the specs of InDesign on Wikipedia. I have a MacBook Pro so that's compatible. Is it worth it? *ducks quickly* "Sorry it took so long for me to answer. Not..."
I remember an author in Silver's FB group mentioning about someone who accepts formatting ebooks for 25$ / ebook for all format for Amazon, Smashword, and other places.
Cleon wrote: ""Pender wrote: "I checked the specs of InDesign on Wikipedia. I have a MacBook Pro so that's compatible. Is it worth it?..."I remember that too.
Lou wrote: "I have CS4 with InDesign, but I have to admit I've never opened it. At least I'm familiar with MS word, and it's not too bad once you figured out all the stupid tricks. Maybe I should open a formatting business. On second thought...nah..."I'd be your first customer. LOL
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That's okay, it's up to 6 now anyway. 6 has a lot of fab new features including alternative page layouts for optimal reading on things like phones that go vertical OR horizontal or back and forth.
CS6 also has a great file conversion for layout and successfully inserting images (such as maps, which are a big deal in fantasy books) into ebook formats that previously didn't support them.
Wow, you all are getting some good networking tips here!
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No kidding! This is the place to come for all your techno tips and tricks.
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How much do you write every day? DO you write every day? Do you even pay attention to the number of chapters, pages, or word count?
I guess even if you do have a full time job and hobbies, you can answer this too.
I'm really just curious to see what the answers are.
Thanks all!
I try every day, but it's not always working out, considering I'm a publisher, full-time employed and also have a partner and a household. However, when I hit the groove Im pretty productive. Next year, I'll try for two thousand words per day. Can be done if I use my commute and or lunch break cleverly.
Like Aleksandr I try to write every day, starting with morning pages. If I can manage those then somehow the space seems to appear in the rest of the day for more writing. It does help to have something that I'm keen to get on with finishing. I work part-time and have children, husband and all those sort of domestic responsibilities.I write poetry so I don't do word counts and can spend an entire day on about ten lines of poetry but if I'm happy with it by the end then that's fine.
I binge. When I'm in the middle of a book I write during every free minute (I do have a job, but I work from home and make my own hours so that schedule works for me). After I finish the rough draft I like to take at least a week off and not write anything. That's when I catch up on work, family, friends and read for pleasure. After my break I either begin a new story or edit the one I have. And in my ideal world I would take the entire summer off but that never seems to happen.
I don't write every day, no, but I work at writing every day. For example, yesterday, I didn't generate a single fresh manuscript page, but I:1. Added 3 shorts (Denny, You Melted Me, and Foreshock) to TRR's database, which required resizing 2 out of 3 covers,
2. Set up headline banner thingies for 2 books at TRR,
3. Wrote a blog post in which I cobbled together review quotes for I Don't,
4. Generated a coupon code (ZR24V) for I Don't, dropping the price to $2.50 at Smashwords this week before Christmas (ho ho ho),
5. Added review quotes from blog to I Don't's Amazon book pg,
6. Tweeted about the Smashwords temp price drop/coupon code,
7. Sent out a freebie prize of I Don't from a giveaway,
8. Noticed "You Melted Me" had switched over to free (YAY!) at Amazon so tweeted about it,
9. Realized my arranaged marriage story works ever so much better as a MoC story so brainstormed that premise with that change in mind,
10. Worked on edits for Half a Million Dead Cannibals, which isn't as easy as it sounds since I'm with a new editor again & so have to adapt to the new editor's process,
11. Sent query & then follow-up info to participate in a giveaway promo blitz,
12. Was in mail with another editor about another story...two stories actually...
and
13. Added a rough blurb for Half a Million Dead Cannibals to my WIP/Coming Soon page on my site.
There may have been (and probably was) more tasks to my work day that simply isn't occurring to me at the moment because there are always a million and one chores on my professional to-do list. Always. Seriously, I keep a list, LOL. And the longer you're in the business, the longer that to-do list of chores gets. At least, that's the way it's shaken out for me.
Yesterday was a chore day, but when I'm writing instead of working at the business of writing...I like to get 1500 words. That's a nice, solid day for me. I've taken enough time to write cleaner text so requires less revision, producing bedrock instead of gravel. On a really good day, I can produce up to 2500 in bedrock, but it gets rather gravel-y toward the end. Sprinting, I can produce 6-8K words/day, but it's so godawful, revision takes me longer to clean it up than writing would've taken if I'd just slowed down and done it right the first time. So I'm a fan of a slower rather than a faster pace.
Unless I get obsessed and binge-write my way through a book. LOLOL
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Cool. Thank you for sharing this (also). Another intriguing holiday story to read over the Christmas time... and it has such a lovely cover!
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But generally my schedule goes like this:
Mon, Tues--Blind Eye Books, household mgmt
Wed, Thurs--writing
Fri, Sat--line cooking, which is a night job as well as a recreational activity
Sun--sleep, writer's group meets
Since I don't have a day job... (overlooking the stay at home mum bit for a moment) I thought making a 40hr week would be easy peasy... yeah... even with teens/tweens, it's not working out like that. I've got appointments here, appointments there... and a lot of them not even for me *sigh*. So, I don't make 4h hours, not even when I'm ignoring housework, which only results in me spending a whole bloody day catching up on the laundry. Not ideal.I do try to write 2K a day... but that doesn't work out, and really depends on the story. Still, the time that I'm not writing, I'm working on stories in my head, working on blogs and guest posts, doing some writing exercises/course work.
As for writing fast... I need to get past the 'I can only do that during Nano' mind-set. Which is not exactly true, but I don't write short stories the same way I do novels, so, that might be the problem. I feel I write novels faster than I do shorts... huh.
I keep hoping I'll get some more quality writing time once the kids start moving out... which might be a while
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I've come to realize lately that I don't like fleshing out characters ahead of time lately and that it might not work for me. My current WIP, I'm just seeing where it takes me. I'm writing slow, and if I need to go back and fix things later, then I will.
I've been on vacation for awhile but haven't gotten nearly as much writing done as I'd wanted to. But there's still time to catch up, and I feel like I might be getting there this week.
This week, I'm working on one chapter a day, no editing. And so far, my chapters are roughly 5 pages each. So, really, that's not bad.
Kari, I can see where the business end of writing definitely has to have some days all to itself. Definitely important once you're published, or are about to be.
Johanna wrote: "Kari wrote: "8. Noticed "You Melted Me" had switched over to free (YAY!) at Amazon so tweeted about it,"Cool. Thank you for sharing this (also). Another intriguing holiday story to read over the ..."
Isn't that cover gorgeous? The first cover Lou (our Lou Harper) did for me. That cover was too sweet not to be on The Mighty Zon. Hope you like the story!
I work full time and have an exercise class three times a week. I have a spouse and two teens so I'm always dropping someone off or picking them up. I intend to write every day, but some days I just run out of time. It took me five months to write my upcoming release and another six weeks to do rewrites.
It's frustrating, especially when a story wants to get out, but I've learned tricks to cope. I always carry paper and a pen and I write scenes longhand on my coffee break or jot down ideas whenever they strike. I've been trying to outline a sequel, but I haven't found the time to organize the order of events. I must have about twenty pieces of paper, sticky notes and even a cardboard coffee cup sleeve with key scenes scribbled on them. Since I never know who might be looking over my shoulder as I scribble away in the grocery store checkout line I write cryptic notes to myself. Sometimes I can't understand what I meant when I read them later. LOL
Lou wrote: "Jordan wrote: "I'm always ignoring house work in favor of writing. :-) Though it sucks when I have to catch up on that house work. I've come to realize lately that I don't like fleshing out characters ahead of ..."
I ignore housework even when I'm not writing."
Me too. Until someone is due to come over and then it's all hands on deck to make the place look half-decent :p
Hambel wrote: "Lou wrote: "I ignore housework even when I'm not writing."Me too. Until someone is due to come over and then it's all hands on deck to make the place look half-decent :p "
Glad to know I'm not the only one. I find that a lot of it is not strictly necessary. Just keep the food areas clean!
Hambel wrote: "Me too. Until someone is due to come over and then it's all hands on deck to make the place look half-decent :p "*nods* sounds very familiar :)
Our biggest cleaning operations are often the days before we're celebrating our Bdays LOL
Hj wrote: "Glad to know I'm not the only one. I find that a lot of it is not strictly necessary. Just keep the food areas clean! "And the laundry under control. Anything else can wait.
Blaine wrote: "Our biggest cleaning operations are often the days before we're celebrating our Bdays LOL"
When I'm shoving dusters in my boys' hands and hoovering like there's no tomorrow, they ask if it's Christmas already!
And to get back OT, I'm fascinated by all these writing processes. It's interesting to see how much time is put into promoting as well (thanks, Kari). My last piece of writing was around 1100 words and took me three weeks to write. I have no discipline. Good job I don't write for money!
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How much do you..."
I used to write a minimum of 12 hours and/or 4K a day.
The new plan is to only work Mon - Friday and aim for 1 - 2K a day. I think I can preserve my brain and my wrists with that schedule.
That's the plan. Whether I can stick to it or not...remains to be seen.
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1. Added 3 shorts (Denny, You Melted Me, and Foreshoc..."
God. Yes. And there's all this stuff that gets worked in around the writing time.
Which is why I basically had no life for six years.
:-) And why I have no intention of spending the next six years that way.
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But generally my schedule goes like this:
Mon, Tues--Blind Eye Books,..."
I think this kind of breaking it up works well and keeps everythign focused and fresh. I'd like to try breaking my schedule up more along these lines.
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Yeah. Unfortunately all that stuff doesn't go away, does it? And you can only put it off for so long. Not having kids or even a pet gave me a lot of room to delay and postpone tasks that you just can't get out of when another living being is dependent on you.
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..."
I don't know that it's necessarily vital to work it all out ahead of time -- although great ideas come to you through that process.
What I do know is that if you plan on visiting those characters, you do absolutely need to keep detailed notes on everything from college to childhood illnesses.
Josh wrote: "Which is why I basically had no life for six years.:-) And why I have no intention of spending the next six years that way. "
Yeah, but you've been far & away vastly more productive than moi. I generally do 3 or 4 novels/novellas per year with a short story/novelette thrown in. Your easier back-from-sabbatical year has twice that in the works, yes?
One thing I do to maintain my sanity & prevent burn-out is duck off the radar when I'm in an especially creative uptick of my writing cycle. No social media, no blog hoppiness. It's just me and the work. It's very...freeing.
I agree with that 'having no dependents'. No kids, no pets. A part time job is enough to keep me afloat and is unchallenging enough for me to go through plans and ideas in my head while I'm there ;) I try to go for around 80k a month which is some days when there's just editing and some 5-6k writing days :)
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..."
I don't know that it's necessarily vital to work ..."
Oh yes. As things come up while I'm writing I'm making note of them off on the side. Last night... or was it the night before? One of my characters got cheeky for the first time. Turns out he does that when he's nervous and on unfamiliar ground. So, I made note of that so I can make sure to use it again in the future.
But I'm feeling like these characters are more realistic than the past few that I've tried to map out ahead of time. Plus, it's more enjoyable to write them this way. I'm getting little surprises along the way to keep me interested.
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But, something else that's helped me clean in the past is to listen to very upbeat music I can sing to. Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons is my favorite for cleaning, actually. It helps to make it a little more fun.
Otherwise, like the bumper sticker I once saw said "I'd rather be writing".
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That's the ideal I'm looking for someday. Unfortunately, rent is not cheep here, so me finding a part-time job that would sustain me will be hard. And I'm super cheep on everything else. I don't have cable, my television is free over the airwaves, I don't drink Starbucks every day. (uh, hate coffee anyway) Thankfully, I'm not paying for my heat anymore (having electric heat in my basement apartment was one of the reasons I moved! And I try not to spend too much on other things. Heck, I even wait for movies to come out on DVD before I watch them (Though there are a few this season that I'm going to go see, first time in a year I've been to the theater!) But, still, it's that damned rent that makes things hard in my area.
Anyway, someday a part time job is what I want so I can focus on writing more. That'll be sooo nice.
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That's the nice thi..."
I'm still using Word Perfect since I couldn't get Scrivener to download for me last October. But I've got everything organized so it works for me. I've got separate files for the characters, places, one file for each chapter, and a file for the plot. All of that goes in one folder marked for the story which is inside another folder marked for MM Romance Novels.
And yeah, funny thing happened last night. I wrote about 2 1/2 pages, a little over 1K when the rest of the plot bloomed in front of me and I spent the rest of the night making plot notes and figuring out exactly what was going to happen. I was unsure if that would happen, or if I'd continue to write blind. But there you have it. Now I have a better idea of what's going to happen. I like surprises like that.
Jordan, yeah, I live in the UK, it's not easy, but it's doable - as you said, cutting down on other things, to have more time. I only rent a room too ;D I thought about renting a small one bed flat, but that would mean working more just to support having more room.
Living the dream! haha (not.)
Re: Scrivener...I recently finished a manuscript that came out to just over 20k on Scrivener. When I converted to Word, it came out to about 18k in Word.
Has anyone else noticed that Scrivener's word count of a manuscript is greater than Word's word count of the same manuscript?
I'm just a little worried that a category romance I'm writing in Scrivener, which is already skimming just below the required word count for the publisher, will REALLY be below the minimum once I convert to Word. *groan*
On that note...I just want to say...I hate word count requirements. Seriously. By trying to write well, I find myself chipping unnecessary words and such from my story, and thus taking a story that just about hit the word minimum (shy of a couple thousand words) and paring it down to something that has the same plot but fewer unnecessary words. In the process, I'm dropping myself below the publisher's word count. I mean, it'd be easy to pad my descriptions and make all of my dialogue scenes last for pages and pages (like some romance authors do), but really, what would that accomplish? And it is an ebook publisher, which really makes less sense, because they don't have to worry about the size of the printed product.
Uggghhh...
(I am hugely thankful for publishers like Carina and Riptide who don't have strict word count mins and maxes. <3 <3 )
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Re: Scrivener...
..."
It's easy to get caught up in word count. It's partly driven by readers, I suppose. Getting hung up on a specific number versus maybe complexity or type of story? I went through this last I Spy and cut something like 20 "stills" out of it. I cut a lot of verbiage like that, and it often amounts to a couple of hundred words. But the story is better for them.
Christine - Same here. I hate word count limits. Some of my best work is "short" (I still hold it that Skybound is the best I've ever done and that's clocking in at 13k), and it wouldn't have hit the 15 or 20k requirement of most publishers (never mind there's basically no sex). I'd rather have a 10k story where every word counts and resonates - because that's real skill - than a 100k story that's flabby, repetitive and saggy and pumped up with 90k of meaningless sex.Hence Riptide does short, though they HAVE to blow our socks off.
Bloated/padded wordcounts are a HUGE pet-peeve for me. I like to write tight. Why spend several sentences (...or paragraphs...or pages) writing a description when one or two carefully chosen key details will engage the reader and paint that picture? And pointless, monotonous repetition just pisses me off.I could write longer. My m/f book is 86K and my m/m/f book is 70K. When you write tight, the longer works are a massive undertaking that (literally) demand months & months of my time and focus, but I am capable. What I'm not capable of is padding a story within an inch of its life just to boost my wordcount to a higher price point or to woo readers who mistake diarrhea of the keyboard for more complex storytelling. I refuse to pad. Not. one. word. If a pub has a wordcount threshold for pricing, advances, or for sweet little perks like print? I wave a sad adieu to those thresholds. Don't care. The story is exactly as long as it needs to be and not one extraneous word more.
Kari wrote: "Bloated/padded wordcounts are a HUGE pet-peeve for me. I like to write tight... ...What I'm not capable of is padding a story within an inch of its life just to boost my wordcount to a higher price point or to woo readers who mistake diarrhea of the keyboard for more complex storytelling."Thanks for the description and the laugh. How accurate! :0D
Speaking as a reader, I have to agree that tighter writing more often than not means a better, more enjoyable, read. There are books where more description is important to building the scene or feel of the story (in SF/F especially) but if done poorly can really ruin a book for me.
Lori wrote: "Thanks for the description and the laugh. How accurate! :0D"Props to Josh then, because I'm pretty sure I heinously stole that from him. ;-)
Ugh. Diarrhea is right. And sometimes loads of constipation. And sometimes outright impaction. And now I'm having flashbacks when I worked bedside nursing...uurrghh... "Can someone get this novel a bottle of mag citrate?"
Kari wrote: "Bloated/padded wordcounts are a HUGE pet-peeve for me."Oh God, yes. I'd rather remain the Novella Queen than become rambling and discursive for the sake of a bigger advance or print edition.
Interesting what you said about verbal diarrhea. I've noticed a lot of it in my recent reading. But sometimes, it doesn't have to do with padding so much as a writer's desire to wax eloquent or sound erudite. Writers who try too hard to "elevate" their prose don't seem to realize all they're doing is raising speed-bumps.
Repetitions suffer from the rule of diminishing returns. If authors trot out every point, the whole book turns to unseasoned porridge in my mind. It's also a reason to DNF.
Aleksandr wrote: "Repetitions suffer from the rule of diminishing returns. If authors trot out every point, the whole book turns to unseasoned porridge in my mind. It's also a reason to DNF."DNF??
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Q&A with Josh Lanyon
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Quark is the Devil. I worked for a publisher who used it, after I'd just begun to master WordPerfect on my PC. Then, when I signed with Ellora's Cave, I was told I MUST compose in MS Word. Hopping from one program to the other to the other was freakin' traumatic for a tech dummy like me, but I blame Quark for most of my psychic scars.