Publishing Options, Lack of Decision Making

Good news is: chapter eight is coming along well.  Bad news is: I have no idea what to do with this novel when it's done.  It's driving me crazy.  There is no shortage of articles telling writers to either self publish (it's great, you'll get tons of money, everyone is doing it) or to forgo that route and get published traditionally (you get a fat advance, you don't have to pay for anything, it's more meaningful because it's a pain in the ass).  I'm thinking about hitting some fiction writing forums and picking the brains of some other people.  Of course I'm sure I'll get the same mix of responses.

So, Bad for Business (my epublished novella) has been up on a review request board on Good Reads for some time.  The other day someone signed up!  Yeah, they could still not like the book, but I'm really not worried about that.  I'm just excited that someone is reading it.  It's been free on Smashwords for a while, and I see plenty of downloads, but I haven't seen any feedback.  It's a little frustrating.

I had been thinking about traditional publishing for the merit that I wouldn't have to do this obnoxious marketing stuff.  However, I've read a few articles that said even if you're book is published this way, the publisher makes no effort to promote it.  That part is still up to you.  The main advantage would be that I'd have an agent who would manage some of the book bidding and so on.  Of course I'd need an agent to get a publishing contract and I'd need a publishing contract to get an agent.  So there's that.

Writer's Group is Back

Now that I have something to read we'll be having writer's group again.  It's a good feeling.  Work is starting up again and I'm looking forward to getting back to it--the routine really helps me think.  It was that way when I attended school too; I always got my best ideas when I was supposed to be listening or taking notes.

We had quite the ciesta of a weekend.  Now that I'm part of Kristie's family there are a ton of parties to go to.  This weekend was a birthday party for a friend of the family, needless to say I didn't stick to my diet and exercise routine.  But I'm back at it today.  Took the dog for a walk, been counting my calories, it's all quite a pain in the ass.  I know it'll feel good when I start seeing results.

I'm going to try to plug a few more words on my eighth chapter today.  I have a feeling that it'll get easier to write when I let the group see the seventh chapter, but I'm going to get to it anyway.  It'll be nice to be ahead, even by a small margin.  I had originally hoped that I would be finished with this novel before the end of the year, of course now that I didn't write for most of the summer, I'm a little off track.  If I managed to finish a chapter every week, it could still be finished in December.  Of course there's still all the editing and revising and so on, but it's nice to see a deadline on my calendar.

Proverbial Corners

I read books.  The cat is out the bag.  What I own a lot of are these "How to write awesome fiction that will make you famous and get you a million dollars" books.  Seriously, I own like twenty books about fiction writing.  Many of them are awful.  I read one once that had an ongoing metaphor of building a house that was compared to writing a manuscript.  This metaphor was so detailed and thorough you could have probably cut the writing stuff and turned it into a DIY house-building book.  Needless to say, it didn't help that much.

I bring this up because I've been reading an actually good book of this kind.  Really.  They exist.  It's called Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft.  No one asked me to recommend this book.  No one paid me.  This is truly a helpful book.  It's actually a college textbook and the newest edition costs about fifty big ones.  If you're interested in this book--DO NOT get the newest edition.  The one I purchased was a used seventh edition and it set me back all of seven bucks.

Today I'm continuing to write on my eighth chapter of Lost Lamb, my urban fantasy novel.  Although it has been hard getting to this point, I'm beginning to feel that the work is paying off and that maybe a breakthrough is around the proverbial corner.

I've found lately that a good bit of exercise actually helps me work through the scenes in my head.  Makes it easier to imagine what is happening and what should be happening.  Moreover, it seems that having another project going makes it easier for me to bring fresh ideas to this project.  I've been doing some unrelated free writing lately and have decided to start writing it here.  I guess a fiction blog should probably contain some fiction.

Moving On...Finally

I feel like I should throw a party.  I finally finished that seventh chapter and have started number eight of my new novel.  For a little while I really wondered if I was ever going to get through it.  School is starting again soon and I'm actually looking forward to going back to work.  I feel like the routine and the predictability really help me write.  It could also be that I have less idle time while school is in session and it forces me to make better use of it.

Writer's group has kind of fallen off the map, which blows, but now that I have something to read, maybe we can get a meeting together this week.  I feel like the energy of my readers is something that really helps me find the words.  The other day it occurred to me that there are 180 school days in the year and, if I write for a few hours each of those days, I can produce about 1,000 words a day.  At the end of a year I could have 180,000 words.  That's two full-length novels.  I thought it was pretty damn cool.  Now that I think about it, with the novella I wrote last school year and the chapters that I wrote on the new novel, I wrote over 40,000 words in a few months.  That's pretty awesome.