Smashing Words Together: Lessons from My Decade with Smashwords

Tags

self publishing, smashwords, writing

art generated by Midjourney

Shout out to everyone who picked up free copies of my books at Smashwords during this July’s Summer Sale. Giving away hundreds of free copies of printed books can be a major marketing expense for self-publishing authors, but ebook giveaways are a low-cost alternative for those of us whose pockets are not as deep as those of the big boys at Penguin or Random House. This year, Smashwords made a deal to be acquired by another ebook provider, Draft2Digital, but many authors I talk to are not even aware Smashwords exists.

Just to be clear: I don’t work for Smashwords, and they don’t pay me to talk to about them. But I have been using them for years as an additional distribution channel for several reasons. I also want to cover some technical aspects of using Smashwords that authors should know before they dive right in and try it for themselves.

Increasing Your Distribution

First: While I like giving away free books in July and December using Smashwords, you don’t need to make them free. You can also set discount prices at a certain percentage of the list price, and you can use Smashwords to generate “coupon codes” to distribute to anyone you want. Although I don’t, it’s a handy tool for authors with an email marketing list or social media presence. I go with the “totally free” option because it gets dozens or even hundreds of books into the hands of new readers at no cost to me. Some of them write lovely four- and five-star reviews.

Second: While I am a big fan of Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), they’ve always had gaps in their distribution. Amazon would—for obvious reasons—prefer that ebook readers stay within the Kindle environment rather than spend money elsewhere. Many years ago, I started using Smashwords because my friend in Australia preferred getting ebooks in the Apple/iTunes environment, and she could not get my books there. I did a little research and discovered Smashwords distributed to the Apple bookstore, so I set about learning how to use them. At the time, getting distribution through additional global retail outlets was, to me, icing on the cake. I really just wanted my friend to find the book!

Since then, I’ve realized that while KDP gets my paperback books into the catalogs that libraries can use, they don’t appear to be doing the same with ebooks. Amazon wants sales money for every single copy, and they don’t seem to care about people who check out free ebooks from public libraries and the increasing network of partner sites libraries use. (For example, Hoopla partners with the Pima County library system for ebooks, including graphic novels and comics. It’s just an app you download for free and log into with your library card credentials.)

Smashwords, on the other hand, distributes to ebook outlets such as OverDrive where libraries can buy ebooks. The Phoenix Public Library, for example, now has several of my ebooks available to check out because they buy through OverDrive. While readers can check them out for free, the library does buy them, so I got paid for those sales.

Plus, Smashwords allows you to set a different price for libraries than the retail price. Some authors might feel they should jack up the price for libraries, since a single library purchase can reach a theoretically unlimited number of readers. I take the opposite approach and lower my price for libraries, because not only do I love libraries and want to support them, but I am also a relatively unknown author who wants to make it easy for libraries to take a chance on my books without risking an arm and a leg.

One final bonus is that Smashwords will create an EPUB file that you as the author can download for free. So, if you want an ebook you can send for free to friends, family, reviewers, or contests, you can just get that file and email it to them. Anyone can get a free EPUB reader from Adobe, called Adobe Digital Editions.

Technical Difficulties

While the sales, giveaways, and added distribution are great reasons to use Smashwords, you do need some technical knowledge to work with them. If you are still using Microsoft Word like it’s a fancy electric typewriter, then you don’t yet have the skills required to work with Smashwords—unless you hire someone like me to deal with it for you. Here are some of the major things I’ve encountered and overcome in my years of working with them.

First, Smashwords will accept two kinds of files. One is a completely and properly formatted EPUB file, and if you don’t know how to create EPUBs on your own, that will be a challenge. Programs such as Calibre can help, but most authors I work with lack the technical skills to deal with it—and good luck finding any classes on it. Adobe’s InDesign program can create EPUBs, but it is most often used by professional graphic designers and is about as challenging to master as Photoshop or Illustrator, for which most authors don’t have any training.

For those who aren’t Adobe experts, Smashwords will also accept a .doc file. That’s not the current version of MS Word files, which are .docx, but the backwards-compatible and increasingly outdated version of Word files from a simpler, bygone era. Current versions of Word can absolutely save files as .doc, and that’s how I do it. I work on all my manuscripts in the current version of Word, but when it’s time to make a Smashwords edition, I save them as .doc files. That process causes some changes; for example, if you formatted anything in Small Caps, it will become All Caps in .doc. So, this requires some formatting expertise to make sure everything looks right on the virtual page.

The process becomes more complex if you have images and illustrations in your books. I have run into so many problems with images not being displayed correctly after Smashwords crunches my .doc file through their converter. The only solution that ever reliably works the first time for me is to delete every single image, save the file, then re-insert every image from scratch and make sure all of them are formatted as being positioned “In Line With Text”.

Probably the weirdest image problem I ever encountered—and it only happened once—was when the converter robots kept renaming embedded image files in a .doc to something even they didn’t recognize, so then they couldn’t find them in the converted file. Eventually, I fixed it by downloading Smashwords’ resultant EPUB file, opening it in Calibre, and using a repair function in Calibre to fix the EPUB. Then I uploaded that version instead of my .doc file and, magically, it solved the problem. I’ve never seen that happen before or since.

But there are even more time-consuming design challenges with .doc files for Smashwords. I think they boil down to the fact that the robotic Smashwords converter has even stricter demands than Kindle, because you can get away with all kinds of things that make for perfectly readable Kindle ebooks but which are total failures at Smashwords.

A common challenge is the hyperlinked Table of Contents (TOC). If you have an intermediate skill level with MS Word, then you know how to link something in your TOC to a specific place in your document. That’s easy stuff. But what you might not realize is that MS Word has a tendency to fill your document with all kinds of bookmarks you don’t know about. These Hidden Bookmarks confuse the Smashwords robots and wreck your TOC, preventing Premium Distribution to other outlets. (Note: Smashwords will not tell you the TOC is broken, but instead say that the “NCX file” is bad. The NCX file is, in simplest terms, a separate TOC generated for EPUB files. But in all cases where my NCX was broken, my own TOC links got corrupted, too.)

I am not a noob when it comes to Word. I have been working with it at an expert level for more than twenty years, taken advanced college classes and corporate training on it, and taught other people how to use it. I have done things with Word that professional graphic designers have assured me are impossible—until I showed them how it was done. So, hidden bookmarks were not a mystery to me, and whenever I work with bookmarks, I make sure there is a checkmark in the little box that says, “Show Hidden Bookmarks”.

But what I did not initially realize is that the checkbox is useless if you don’t uncheck it first, then check it again. MS Word apparently needs to reset its brain with the uncheck/check process before it displays all the actual bookmarks so you can delete the garbage bookmarks one-by-one. My failure to realize this resulted in many of my more complex books being rejected for Premium Distribution, which is how you get into places like Apple and library platforms. After struggling, I contacted Smashwords support, and they helped me get a clue. These days, I know about the problem and how to eliminate it, and my books are all approved for Premium Distribution on the first try.

Bookmarks in Word are also crucially important if your book has footnotes. When I upload a compressed HTML file with footnotes to KDP, their robots automatically convert them to hyperlinked endnotes that appear at the end of the book. It’s super convenient. (How I make compressed HTML files for KDP would require its own tutorial.)

But the robots at Smashwords hate footnotes. If you’re pretty good with MS Word, then you already know that it only takes a couple of clicks to convert all your footnotes to endnotes using the References tool bar. But guess what? Smashwords’ robots don’t like that either.

It took me years to figure out a solution—even after reading all of Smashwords’ formatting documentation and watching multiple, useless YouTube tutorials about it. The solution to getting workable endnotes with Smashwords is—in the simplest terms I can put it—to create a bookmark at every place where you have a numbered note in the text, then create a bookmark at every specific endnote, then create individual hyperlinks from the note number in the text to the specific endnote, and finally create another link from the note itself back to the place in the text.

The bookmarks also need to be named with the prefix “ref_”. (Don’t ask me why; it just keeps the robots from getting confused.) So, my first note in the text is named “ref_001”, and the corresponding endnote is named “ref_ftn_001”. If you only have a couple of notes, this is child’s play. If you have, like I sometimes do, upwards of 100 notes, it’s a time-consuming, brain-numbing clerical task—especially since the pop-up window MS Word gives you to work in is roughly the size of a couple of postage stamps.

Anyway, this four-step process of bookmarking and hyperlinking will allow readers to click on a note in the text so they can see the endnote, then click on that to get back to the original spot in the text.

But what if your document already has linked endnotes because you made it in Word? Sorry, but it’s now full of junk that will confuse the robots. The actual first step that I discovered is to remove every single hyperlink in the document.

I started out doing that manually. But when I got to books with copious notes, I suspected there must be an easier way, and I searched for it online. The “easy” way turns out to be running a Visual Basic script to remove all hyperlinks. Even as a Word expert, I don’t find writing Visual Basic to be easy. Fortunately, I copied the script from someone else who was kind enough to post it on their blog. It was a lifesaver.

Now, you might not need to get that technical to remove a handful of links and insert a couple of bookmarks manually. As far as I’m concerned, that is simple stuff. But one of my books had more than 200 footnotes, and doing this manually just to get approved by Smashwords and have a viable ebook that readers could use reliably was a massive project that took hours of my time, research, and so much mouse-clicking that I’ll probably end up with carpal tunnel syndrome.

The things we do for art.

Conclusion

Do I love Smashwords? Absolutely. They got me into libraries, ebook outlets around the world, and the hands of many readers who would have never discovered me otherwise. But because I often publish books with massive amounts of images, footnotes, and complex Tables of Contents, I had serious technical challenges to overcome to achieve my vision.

Fortunately, I solved those problems. Now, I can help other authors get past them and distribute their ebooks on a global scale through channels that KDP alone cannot or will not handle.

Tomorrow, the world.

Meteor Mags: Permanent Crescent – now in print and ebook

Tags

books, meteor mags, permanent crescent, self publishing, writing

For sale on Amazon in ebook, paperback, and hardback editions. The ebook is also for sale on Smashwords and other major ebook retailers.

After the events of The Second Omnibus, Meteor Mags and her hard-rocking space-pirate crew confront new enemies, old rivals, and the final fate of the interspecies band, Small Flowers. Permanent Crescent and Other Tales continues Mags’ evolution from a rogue pirate to a leader with far-reaching plans, and her choices will have major consequences for the future of the solar system. This collection contains six all-new episodes totaling 57,000 words.

Permanent Crescent: The Moon is about to die, and it’s all Mags’ fault. Join a hell-raising space pirate and her indestructible calico cat as they confront a lunar death cult whose alien leader plans to take vengeance on humanity by destroying Earth’s ancient satellite.

Odonata’s Revenge: Mags faces double trouble when an alien menace and an ex-mercenary converge on Ceres to end the pirate’s life and steal her secret technology.

Infinite Spaces: Mags and her crew discover signals emanating from the depths of the subterranean ocean on Ceres and risk their lives in uncharted waters to find the source. What they find makes Mags reconsider her role in humanity’s evolution and the final fate of her universe.

Farewell Tour: A band of telepathic octopuses and their interspecies friends bring a message of liberation to the solar system one last time. Mags and Patches fight to rescue them from the forces of law and order.

One Last Night on Death World: On the last night of Gramma’s life, Mags takes her drinking at a west-coast bar to shoot pool and have fun. Between games of billiards, they discuss the future of the solar system and reminisce about their past, revealing details about Gramma’s childhood, her relationship with her piratical mother, and the development of GravGen technology.

Pieces of Eight: Mags and her friends in Small Flowers return to Earth to seek a new home for the dying octopuses, but what they find is not at all what they expected.

Might be unsuitable for children and other forms of carbon-based life.

reflections on writing: One Last Night on Death World

Tags

billiards, memoir, meteor mags, pool, reflections, self publishing, writing

art generated by Midjourney

On the last night of Gramma’s life, Mags takes her drinking at a west-coast bar to shoot pool and have fun. Between games of billiards, they discuss the future of the solar system and reminisce about their past, revealing details about Gramma’s childhood, her relationship with her piratical mother, and the development of GravGen technology.

July 2022 Update: The story is now collected in Meteor Mags: Permanent Crescent and Other Tales. For sale on Amazon in ebook, paperback, and hardback editions. The ebook is also available on Smashwords and other major retailers.

About seven years ago, I started compiling notes for a Meteor Mags story that would take place on the last night of Gramma’s life and, through flashbacks, fill in a lot of details about Gramma’s history and how they relate to the main narrative in the series. While the series is ostensibly science-fiction, this tale was more like historical fiction.

If you’ve ever written historical fiction, you know it takes an incredible amount of research into historical fact. Otherwise, you end up with unintended anachronisms, inaccuracies, and all kinds of things any expert in your chosen time period will absolutely tear apart.

This problem almost killed my story.

Since it involves the history of billiards, I got involved in the history of France and a man named Francois Mingaud. He invented the leather tip we all now take for granted on a cue stick.

The first indication that I had serious problems was that my research turned out to be contradictory about when and where Mingaud was held prisoner, and the inaccuracy of him being imprisoned at the Bastille years after it was demolished was repeated in dozens of billiards-related websites where I sought information about his life.

I solved the discrepancy by emailing Mike Shamos, author of The New Illustrated Encyclopedia of Billiards (an excellent resource rivaled only by the work of his friends Victor Stein and Paul Rubino in the massive Billiard Encyclopedia). Dr. Shamos was kind enough to provide historical documents that set the record straight about Mingaud’s imprisonment. I am such a Wikipedia nerd that I corrected the mistakes in Mingaud’s article and included a note about why the widespread inaccuracy about his imprisonment was impossible.

That’s just one of the complications of the history I was trying to construct. Eventually, it all became so overwhelming that I relegated my story to being one of those ideas I would never get around to writing.

But last month, one of the authors from my old workshop group was kind enough to listen for a few minutes to all the reasons I had never written the story I wanted to. In the days that followed, I thought about those reasons; the chief of which was that I simply did not want to invest another year of my life researching the time period to write the novella I had planned.

As I have said many times before, being able to articulate our problems often leads to them solving themselves. I’m indebted to the author who took a few minutes to listen, because thinking about my so-called “reasons” led me to trying some narrative solutions to those problems.

I played with a few ideas, cut some scenes that were too involved and slowed the pacing, engaged a few characters to summarize events that could have filled a novel, and ended up with a short, fast-paced tale that accomplished damn near everything I ever wanted from the “sweeping historical epic” I would never get around to writing.

You can judge for yourself whether it succeeds or not.

I’ve written before about my love for various games of pool, so I have only one more thing to say about the title of this story. Years ago, I saw an infographic about the most-used words in book titles. People online ripped this thing apart as an example of the most cliché and crappy book titles.

So I came up with several fun titles based on that silly infographic and decided to use “One Last Night on Death World” as the name of a pinball/videogame Mags would have distributed on the west coast of the USA in the 1990s as a cover for her smuggling operations. (It’s introduced in a flashback in the previous story, Farewell Tour, which fills in the early years of the friendship between Mags and Alonso.) The name also fit the idea of Gramma Margareta’s last night on Earth, so I ran with it.

What did I learn from all this? First, it helps to have other writers to talk to when you are having problems with a story. Second, you can get a lot of mileage from emailing an expert on a subject. Third, the problems you encounter when telling a story can often be solved by taking a different approach to narration and engaging the characters to solve your problems for you.

I’m tempted to add a fourth lesson about “Stop making excuses and write the damn thing”, but I can’t help but feel that compiling notes for all these years until I had a chance to bend a sympathetic ear was the right decision. It was like I had been dissolving minerals in a solution for seven years and then all of a sudden—Boom! All it took was one little grain for them to gather around and become a crystal.

In addition to borrowing Francois Mingaud from real life, this tale guest-stars Scott Safran, a young man history also remembers for his accomplishments in a game. Both of their lives play out a bit differently due to meeting Mags and her ancestors. The hotelier Jonathan Hathaway is a complete fabrication.

A Few Thoughts on Mortality and Legacy

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books, legacy, making books, memoir, writing

art generated by Midjourney

This week, I got the sad news that an author I worked with two years ago passed away. I helped her edit, design, and publish her memoir about how she transitioned out of a life of prostitution, domestic violence, and incarceration to create a non-profit organization that supports women in similar circumstances to make the same transition and build new lives for themselves.

At times, the memoir was absolutely heartbreaking to work on due to the severity of the abuse and trauma it described. But it was also an amazingly hopeful and positive book due to what she and her organization eventually accomplished in terms of helping other women in the community.

The author was also a joy to work with. I always enjoyed our conversations, and she had an unconquerable sense of humor. Even when we discussed the saddest topics or events, she always found a way to make us both laugh.

I am sad to hear of her passing, but I am glad I had the chance to help preserve her story in a book. I don’t know if other artists, authors, and musicians think about this as much as I do, but there is something satisfying about the idea that what we create will outlive us. Whether we have an important message to share with the world, or we are just making something entertaining to enjoy, we leave our mark on our society and culture. It isn’t necessarily immortality, but it is a kind of afterlife.

Years ago, another author I work with included a piece of advice in one of her books: “Focus on what you want to create.” That idea has carried me through many times of difficulty and doubt. Obstacles pile up, and it can be easy to lose sight of long-term goals when you get bogged down in dealing with the challenges of the day. But if you can raise your head above the floodwaters and focus on the legacy you want to leave behind, it puts today in a different perspective.

So, I intend to keep on writing, editing, and helping others make books. Those legacies will last long after we pass, and I am proud to have played a part in them.

Collector’s Guide: It’s My Story and I’m Sticking to It: From the Streets to Survival by Kathleen Mitchell is available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle. Kathleen founded DIGNITY House in Phoenix, Arizona.

Finishing Matters

Tags

self publishing, writing

One of the greatest struggles I see aspiring authors encounter is with finishing a first draft. Finishing is an important part of the craft of writing, but maybe it doesn’t get enough attention. Let’s take a closer look.

Although I will offer advice and observations, there is no big secret. The key to finishing pieces is to finish more pieces. That might sound like an obvious tautology, but it runs deeper than that. Like everything else about writing, completing a work takes practice. If you aren’t seeing your pieces through to the end, you aren’t getting enough practice to strengthen this particular muscle.

It’s a bit like going to the gym. Imagine your workout involves doing three sets of an exercise, with some number of repetitions per set. What would happen if every time you decided to work out, you got dressed in your workout clothes, went to the gym, and did a couple of repetitions—then stopped? Maybe completing the workout seemed too challenging or boring, or maybe something else distracted you. Either way, you would get a lot of practice at getting dressed, but not the practice of completing a full workout. You’d be great at getting started, but you would not build any staying power.

Writing is like that. It’s important to keep going beyond the initial excitement of getting started so you can practice completion.

My writing-intensive courses in public policy were a huge help in this area. Every week, my classes required me to do a ton of reading then crank out several thousands of words before the week was up. I put a lot of time and energy into those papers, but I did not have the luxury of pondering them for months or years, agonizing over every word, or getting halfway done then deciding to do something entirely different. Even when I felt what I sent to my professor wasn’t my best work, I got a lot of practice going from start to finish in a very short time. Dawdling was not an option.

That being said, when a paper was on something that mattered to me personally, I reviewed my professor’s comments and criticisms and did a final round of revisions for my own benefit. Integrating feedback and critique was an important part of improving.

Finishing a draft even when it is challenging and you aren’t entirely happy with the result is still an important step because it gives you raw material to revise. It is always easier to start with something rather than start from scratch with nothing. When you have nothing, it’s easy to get bogged down in considering all the possibilities, spinning your wheels and not producing anything. But when you have something on the page, you can look at it and say, “Okay, I like this part, but this other part doesn’t work. Now I can see why, so let me work on fixing that problem.” You’ve narrowed down the infinite possibilities to a manageable revision checklist.

A friend who produces articles related to his artistic endeavors takes an interesting approach. He hires a copywriter to produce a first draft, then he completely re-writes it. He says it saves him a lot of time and effort in the early conceptual phases, and even when he is unhappy with what the copywriter produced, it’s a lot easier for him to start from a draft and be critical of it. If he sees something that isn’t said the way he would say it, that makes it easier for him to decide what he does want to say.

As a freelance editor, I often work on the flip side of that process. People might come to me with an essay or story they’ve drafted, but it has conceptual, grammatical, or structural problems and doesn’t feel professionally written. It’s up to me to “get” what they are trying to communicate, then rewrite the piece with clarity and concision. If I were assigned to draft a piece on the same subject from scratch, it would take a lot longer than the relatively short time it takes me to pull apart an existing draft and fix it.

I treat my own stories and essays the same way: Pound out a first draft, even if it’s a mess, then step back and look at it critically. If, for example, I feel daunted by the infinite possibilities of a scene in fiction, I just pick one and start banging away at the keyboard. Sometimes I get lucky and come up with something I love that simply needs tuned up and polished. Other times, I get something I don’t like at all or doesn’t quite fit, but I can articulate what about it doesn’t work. The process helps me conceptualize what would work so I can take a second crack at it.

In My Life As an Armadillo, I discussed the benefits of drafting an ending long before a story is anywhere near finished. I will just briefly reiterate here that knowing where you are headed with a story helps reduce the time you waste feeling stuck in the middle of it. When people are having trouble completing a draft, it’s often because they lack a sense of where the finish line is. It’s like trying to run a race without knowing what direction to run. You might end up running into the middle of the field, or into the stands, or into the toilets. That’s how it feels to be lost in the middle of a writing project. Do yourself a favor: Get clear on where the finish line is.

Finishing a draft, whether you love it or hate it, also positions you to get more practice in all the stages that come after: getting feedback, doing rewrites, making revisions, editing, and proofreading. You don’t get to practice those important skills if you don’t finish many drafts, and lacking practice in those areas will stunt your growth.

I have a ton of writings other people will never see, because either I feel they aren’t very good, or they ended up being something I didn’t feel was appropriate to share with the world. But finishing them gave me practice for producing the good stuff. Sometimes, people are trapped by the idea that everything they write needs to be brilliant, and they feel that if they write something unappealing, then they have failed.

That attitude is counter-productive. For comparison, consider what counts as an awesome batting average in baseball. Ty Cobb had a lifetime batting average of .366. That means he connected with the ball about a third of the time. It also means he failed to hit the ball two-thirds of the time! Do we look at that hit rate as a failure? Not at all. It’s a damn fine batting average—the highest in major-league history!

So if you write three things and two of them suck but one is a solid hit—not necessarily a home run, but something that gets you to first base—I’d say you’re doing well. Failure isn’t missing a lot of swings. Failure is not taking a swing at all.

Finally, consider that as your skills improve, nothing is stopping you from revisiting an earlier piece and improving or expanding it. I often return to something I wrote years ago and examine it in light of everything I’ve learned since I finished it. Maybe I now have a better grasp of what a failed poem was trying to say, so I rewrite it. Maybe I edit an old article to improve the quality of the prose. Some writers will even take an old novella and expand it into a novel, such as Orson Scott Card did with Ender’s Game, eight years after the short version was first published.

So, take a swing at completing a first draft. If you’re working in a longer form such as a novel, break it into smaller chunks: finish drafting a scene, then another, then a whole chapter, then the next. Keep going! The more you finish, the more practice you get with the entire process and seeing things through to completion. Over time, that practice will make you a stronger writer.

Active Versus Passive Characters

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character development, self publishing, writing

My favorite characters to read about and write about are active characters, especially when it comes to the leading protagonist and antagonist. I’m a bit more forgiving of passivity in minor supporting characters, but even they are greatly improved by giving them some active choices. The difference between active and passive characters is simple, but perhaps it doesn’t get enough attention.

With a passive character, the plot just happens to him. He’s going about his daily life when suddenly—BOOM! Plot events arrive and sweep him up in the narrative. When the main character or hero is passive, events are largely beyond his ability to affect. I often see this in stories that are plot-driven rather than character-driven, where the author has a potentially brilliant plot that needs to happen, and the characters are forced into it.

Active characters are ones whose choices drive the story. Active characters might make smart choices or foolish ones, selfish choices or altruistic ones. Those choices carry consequences that determine the events of the narrative. As I like to say about Meteor Mags, life doesn’t happen to her; she happens to life.

That isn’t to say that active characters are always in control. One of the most fun things about active characters is when they make choices that lead to their losing control. Take Dwight in Frank Miller’s Sin City story A Dame to Kill For. Every step of the way, Dwight makes choices that determine what happens next. But he is being manipulated by a femme fatale, and we as readers know that he really should know better. He is a delusional fool, but he is an active fool, and his foolish decisions lead to events spiraling out of his control and getting the ever-loving crap beat out of him several times.

Active characters can also be subjected to unexpected events. I don’t think anyone would accuse Meteor Mags of being passive, but the super-tornado that arrives in the middle of a heist gone wrong in Blind Alley Blues is an example of unexpected plot elements showing up to mess with her. Mags’ active nature leads her to see what opportunities the disaster presents, and she makes choices that bend the situation to her advantage. Plus, the reasons the heist goes wrong in the first place all relate to conscious, intentional choices made by her and other characters. They don’t sit around waiting for the plot; they are actively driving it by pressing forward with their agenda.

I’m a fan of No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy, and its protagonist Llewelyn Moss and its antagonist Anton Chigurh are great examples of highly active characters. Moss chooses to examine the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong, then he makes one of the stupidest decisions I have ever read. Later that night, he decides to take some water to the last survivor of the deal, and that foolish decision leads to all the pain and suffering which follows. I have always found this choice a bit suspect and possibly out of character for Moss, but the fact remains that he makes it and must deal with the consequences.

On the other side of things, Chigurh is a cold, calculating, homicidal maniac who makes choices every step of the way. In his famous scene with a gas station attendant, Chigurh uses a coin toss to determine whether he will kill the attendant—a conceit that appeals to blind chance as driving his actions, even though he is the one actively initiating the situation. Near the end of the story, Moss’ young wife calls out Chigurh on this bullshit, telling him “It’s just you.” And it is just him, making choices that drive the plot.

No Country is one of my favorite novels because both Chigurh and Moss make active choices while trying to achieve conflicting goals, and nearly every event in the book is the result of these two characters working at cross-purposes.

Besides being characters who can create the dramatic intensity of an irresistible force meeting an immovable object, and intensifying our emotional investment in seeing how such brutal conflict plays out, active characters earn our empathy and respect.

In comparison, passive characters seem like people who say, “Woe is me,” and blame anyone and everyone except themselves for their problems. Sure, we might feel sympathy for these downtrodden folks, but we can just as easily feel contempt for those who don’t take responsibility for the consequences of their own actions. And if they passively succumb to their fate, they lack the initiative we expect from heroes. They might as well be the beach being pounded by the ocean with no true agency of its own for us to get involved with.

But when an active character makes choices, we respect her for doing something besides lying on her back and thinking of England while life has its way with her. We can respect her for, at the very least, trying to do something about her situation. We might not agree with her choices, and we might even see them as foolish, but we can feel invested in her attempts to achieve her goals—even when she fails.

When those choices arise from deeply held conviction, we are more likely to empathize. Peter Parker’s active choice to continue trying to make the world better as Spider-man is a good example, because being Spider-man tends to have nothing but painful consequences for his personal life. Parker’s choices often lead him to more suffering than many of us would be willing to endure, but he remains committed to trying to do good things, to protecting people less powerful than he, and standing firm as a force for good in a world threatened by evil. We not only respect Parker; we empathize with his struggle. We don’t just feel sorry for him; we feel sorrow with him. When he succeeds, we feel that success, too. We become emotionally invested.

None of what I have said should be taken as advice to abandon tight, compelling plots and write by the seat of your pants. The important point is that rather than designing plots that simply happen to passive characters, construct plots that are driven by the choices the characters make.

Characters need goals, and they need to make decisions they believe will take them closer to those goals. They also need obstacles in their path—both the external obstacles of circumstance, and the internal obstacles of personal shortcomings they need to overcome. What lies do they tell themselves? What misconceptions do they have? Even the most active character can harbor beliefs that keep her distant from her goal, even as she tries to move forward.

In my years as a workshop leader, I saw some stories about passive characters who had no clear, primal, compelling goal they were so intent on reaching that they would have died for it. They were just people trotted on stage so the plot could happen to them, and I found that I simply didn’t care. But even when presented with a story in a genre or style I didn’t prefer, I could easily get swept up in the adventures of an active character whose choices—whether right or wrong—defined and drove events. Those were the characters I came to care about and whose fates I became personally invested in.

So whether you see your stories as more plot-driven or more character-driven, realize the best stories are both: where the character choices drive the plot forward, so readers become emotionally invested in the outcome.

reflections on writing: Permanent Crescent

Tags

memoir, meteor mags, Moon, Patches, permanent crescent, reflections, self publishing, writing

art generated by Midjourney.

The Moon is about to die, and it’s all Mags’ fault. Join a hell-raising space pirate and her indestructible calico cat as they confront a lunar death cult whose alien leader plans to take his revenge on humanity by destroying Earth’s ancient satellite.

July 2022 Update: The story is now collected in Meteor Mags: Permanent Crescent and Other Tales. For sale on Amazon in ebook, paperback, and hardback editions. The ebook is also available on Smashwords and other major retailers.

Permanent Crescent was the story I worked on while also putting together The Second Omnibus, so it bears the responsibility of setting the tone for what comes next. It was fun to write and took about three months based on notes I’d compiled throughout the year.

The first scene I wrote was a nice way to open the floodgates for writing, but it ended up on the cutting-room floor. You will never read it! I also drafted scenes which got heavily revised in terms of their points of view, tenses, and even which characters were involved. Hardly any scene survived in its original version.

As you probably know, I don’t believe in writer’s block. Even when I felt unsure about what direction to take for the story, I figured, “What the hell? Let’s wing it and see what happens!” Eventually, the results of that “anything goes” approach got ironed out into a single story.

After trying things a few different ways, I settled on three points of view to tell the story: the hero, her nemesis, and my standard third-person omniscient narrator for the series. I felt multiple POVs were necessary to convey the ways in which the hero and the villain are similar in their general attitudes but intractably opposed.

By letting both the protagonist and antagonist tell parts of the story from their unique perspectives, I hoped to draw parallels between the ways they perceive their world and their situation. Some hints are obvious, such as the way they both refer to “vermin”, but with each considering the other to be the vermin. Similarly identical phrases and judgments are woven into their narratives.

Several scenes are written in first-person present tense, which I rarely use. In Permanent Crescent, my intent was to use that POV to create a sense of immediacy, to put the reader in a moment where anything might come next. In Mags’ first-person scenes, she mostly abandons her conventions from the first two omnibuses where she wrote in a journal or a letter. This time around, she speaks more directly to the reader, and her only epistolary contribution is a journal entry from 1966 where she gives relevant background about developing artificial gravity.

Getting all that sorted was a world of fun, but writing the story took me to dark places involving crime, cults, and the human (and feline) condition in general. At some point, I realized I wanted Mags to narrate a few scenes in a pulpy crime/detective style. So, I re-read the entire Criminal series to get that flavor and tone in my mind.

Permanent Crescent also reflects my feelings about the kind of urban decay I’ve lived in or visited many times in my life. The descriptive scenes about lunar cities are basically me writing about neighborhoods I’ve had the misfortune to experience. If I had to pick one song that sums up everything about that, it would be Spinal Tap’s Hell Hole.

I was a bit disheartened to discover an anime series has already blasted the Moon into a permanent crescent. It’s getting so that you can’t even blow up the Moon without someone else having done it first!

I don’t know what “Assassination Classroom” was about, but they trashed the Moon.

Finally, I should mention how hard I tried to do the actual math for launching Patches out of a space cannon. I read a ridiculous amount of articles and papers about the problem, most of which were beyond my grasp. I tried multiple times to get scientists to help me, to no avail. I even created a spreadsheet full of formulas to do the math. At last, I needed to admit I had no idea what the hell I was doing.

But one way or another, we were launching Patches from a space cannon, and we damn well did it. If anyone wants to email the solution to me, I’d be thrilled.

Meteor Mags: The Second Omnibus. Now in Paperback and Kindle!

Tags

books, meteor mags, Patches, science fiction, second omnibus, space pirates, writing

Thanks to Vamkire Trannel for the cover illustration!

The Second Omnibus collects and updates volumes 7-10, plus two all-new stories, previously unpublished interviews, scenes, drawings, a mini-comic, and more!

In the aftermath of the disaster that nearly wiped out civilization on Ceres, a hell-raising space pirate and her indestructible calico cat get set to throw the greatest birthday party of a lifetime—until alien death rains down from the sky!

Join Meteor Mags and her criminal crew, including the hard-rocking Psycho 78s and the teenage Dumpster Kittens, as they rage against the forces of law and order, struggle to control the future of the Asteroid Belt, and confront the total destruction of their beloved home on Vesta 4. Some will live, many more will die, and nothing in the Belt will ever be the same!

In fifteen episodes of relentless anarchy, sci-fi madness, and violent revolution, the pirate crew comes face-to-face with betrayal, annihilation, telepathic octopuses, evil space lizards, cybernetic murder wasps, game-changing technologies, objects of unlimited power, and much, much more! Strap on your battle armor and get ready to rock, because the asteroid-mining frontier is no place for the faint-hearted.

What readers are saying about the series:

“A violent, feel-good space romp. An irreverent, rocking series.”

“A lot of guns and bloody battles. Fast-paced and full of action.”

“Anarchy, asteroids, and rock music abound. A great read.”

“The swashbuckling spirit and generous—but murderous!—hearts of Mags and her cohort are endearing and engaging.”

“So insane.”

578-page paperback edition or Kindle ebook

(154,000 words plus illustrations).

BUY IT ON AMAZON.

KDP: Hardcover Beta Review

Tags

hardcover, KDP, meteor mags, self publishing, singing spell, writing

In case you missed my post from last month, I was invited by Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) to participate in the beta version of their new program for producing print-on-demand hardcover books. I promised you an update when the first, physical proof arrived. Guess what came in the mail today!

All I can say is that the book looks and feels amazing. It’s sturdy and way more substantial than I expected for a smallish 150-page book. The print options I chose were for white paper and a gloss finish on the cover.

Some folks believe you should use cream paper for fiction, but I have produced books in both cream and white, and the white paper looks and feels better to me. I also find the high contrast with black text makes white paper easier to read. I’ve produced books with both matte and glossy covers, and I tend to prefer the shiny gloss that really makes the colors vibrant. But matte finish is also nice, and I’ve gone with that several times when it felt right.

The binding is beautiful inside and out, and I love the way that about a quarter-inch of the cover color and design is visible inside the book when opened, where the cover wraps around the edges.

I think authors will be pleased when this hardcover option is available to everyone. I already feel the urge to make hardcover editions of about half a dozen of my books. I’d love to release the first Meteor Mags Omnibus in hardcover, but at more than 580 pages, it exceeds the maximum page count of 550 for a KDP hardcover.

Besides page count, authors will want to consider price points and profit margins. My paperback edition of The Singing Spell has a wholesale printing cost to me of less than USD $3. But the printing cost for the hardcover is $7.28. (Again, this is for a 150-page book. Longer books will cost more.) To sell the hardcover and make a reasonable per-unit profit on Amazon, I needed to price it at $14.95, as opposed to the $6.95 price for the paperback and the $2.99 bargain price for the Kindle ebook edition.

This doesn’t make much of a financial difference to me, since I design my own books, but authors who need to pay a designer to format the cover for a hardcover edition will want to consider whether they can recoup the additional expense with hardcover sales at a higher price than the other editions. Will their target market be willing to spend the extra bucks for a hardcover? It’s a question I can’t really answer for anyone without market research.

Either way, I expect my fellow authors and readers will be impressed with the quality of these hardcover editions, and I’m looking forward to the day when this program is no longer in beta testing but available to all self-publishers using the KDP platform.

Update: The hardcover edition of The Singing Spell is now available on Amazon.

Reflections on Writing The Martian Revolution

Tags

martian revolution, memoir, meteor mags, reflections, writing

art generated by Midjourney.

An updated version of this essay appears in the second edition of Virtually Yours: A Meteor Mags Memoir. The story appears in Meteor Mags: The Second Omnibus.

My recent story about the Martian revolution in 2030 is a fairly quick read at only 16,000 words, but it took six months to finish. I’ll tell you a bit about what happened along the way—both the challenges and successes—but let’s start with the two main lessons I learned.

First: The more moving parts you have, the longer it takes to assemble the machine. When plotting a story with two or three characters in a limited setting, you have fewer things to keep track of. Seven years ago, I used to crank out first drafts over a weekend, from 5,000 to 15,000 words long. They took a lot longer than that to revise, but most of the first drafts went quickly.

Those were simpler times in The Adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches. Episodes had only three to six main characters in only one or two settings. Plus, I was free to make up things as I went along, because so much of the “universe” was unexplored, and I could invent unresolved plot threads on the fly to set up stories I wanted to tell in the future.

As the series progressed, it encompassed many more characters and settings, and those dangling plot threads needed woven into the fabric of everything we already knew about Mags’ life and her solar system. When writing about any event or character, I needed to bring my internal continuity editor on board to make sure I hadn’t contradicted any previous facts in the more than 300,000 words of established history.

Plus, I chose more ambitious settings as I went along. I started with what you might call “stock footage” for the early stories: things I’d seen in movies and comics that I basically stole or used as blueprints. But after boiling those stolen bits in my own kettle of ideas for a few years, they became a stew with a flavor all its own.

As a result, I sometimes needed to step back from writing the story and return to planning—which leads me to the next lesson. The suggestions I’ve given other writers for years once again proved their usefulness. Finding renewed success with so many of my basic methods reinforced my confidence in publishing them for a wider audience.

In My Life as an Armadillo, my recent book about writing and workshopping, I assert that writer’s block is a myth, because you can always write something—and I give suggestions about the fundamental, foundational pieces of writing you can do behind the scenes to overcome any feeling of being stuck.

I needed to take my own advice a bunch of times for The Martian Revolution. I reached points in the narrative where I realized I had not fully developed my own understanding of a setting or character. I needed to step back and write about those things “off the record”, behind the scenes. That empowered me to come back to the main narrative and write through several scenes and character-driven moments from a deeper understanding and keep moving forward.

Not that I wrote it all in order, from start to finish. Instead, I started from a series of scene synopses built from several thousand words of notes I’d compiled while writing earlier stories that led up to these events. From the scene summaries, I picked whichever I felt most emotionally drawn to when it was time to write.

The challenge of that approach is that you end up whittling down the unwritten scenes to the ones you feel the least emotionally involved with. But that helped me discover, as it has in the past, what it would take to get me emotionally involved in those scenes. After all, if I am not captivated by a scene as the writer, what hope is there of involving any readers?

To get to the emotional core of some things, I did a ton of exploratory writing and description of characters—not just physical descriptions, but about their true motivations, their likes, dislikes, strengths, flaws, histories, relationships with and feelings toward each other, even things that remain unspoken in the narrative but formed a subtext for my own understanding of these characters.

All of that takes time, and no one really gives you credit for doing it as a writer, just like no one gives you credit for studying an instrument for years and practicing for untold hours after giving a great concert performance.

But it wasn’t like I spent every day of six months working on one story. I published the previous collection (The Singing Spell) in October 2020, but then I needed to move at the end of January and didn’t have a place lined up. So, I packed all the stuff that would fit into a rented 10×10 U-Haul truck, threw out everything else, and drove to another city a couple hours away. I hoped for the best, but total disaster was also a possibility.

The resultant upheaval of my life made it difficult to focus on my story, so I decided not to worry about it. I found solace in writing about something every day. During my week in a hotel, I used my mini-tablet and wireless keyboard to type thousands of words of ideas for the next couple of episodes. During the subsequent saga of three weeks with no Internet in my new place, I revised and edited the collection of essays about writing and workshopping that became the book I published in March 2021. Sometimes I just wrote letters to friends to gather my thoughts.

Plus, my neglected blog needed a shot in the arm, and I had a million things to do to get my new life started and reconnect with my clients. In the meantime, I let The Martian Revolution simmer on the back burner of my mind, and every now and then I felt inspired to make more notes about it or write a scene. Those notes and the extra time proved helpful when I got around to finishing the first draft in mid-March 2021.

I never saw this as being “blocked” as a writer. It was more of a question about where to direct my writing and editing energies on any particular day during a series of life challenges that disrupted my groove. It helped that I had multiple ongoing projects to choose from, some of which were more analytical, some of which were more creative and free-flowing, and all of which were in various stages of development from brainstorming to hammering out a final draft.

Maybe that is the third lesson. I often meet writers who are struggling with a single work, and they feel disheartened when they run into obstacles in their life or with the story itself that prevent them from making progress. But if you have a few irons in the fire at the same time, you can usually find one that strikes your fancy on any given day. Not everything in the universe depends on your finishing your current novel or short story when you have a few of them to tinker with at once. Having options gives you freedom, and having options you truly care about means you can always find something to write.

Three Changes at Kindle Direct Publishing and Amazon for Self-Publishers

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amazon, books, case laminate, casewrap, CD, compact disc, hardcover, KDP, print on demand, self publishing, writing

Three changes are taking place this month at Amazon’s platforms for self-publishing. Two involve Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), and one is happening at the Media On Demand platform that replaced the old CreateSpace function of selling compact disc albums.

Media On Demand is terminating compact disc sales, apparently due to a lack of demand and the increasing market preference for digital streaming and downloads. I’m sad but not surprised. Although my wholesale cost for each of the two music albums I made available on CD was only $4.99, I felt the retail price where I could make a decent per-unit profit was too expensive at $17.95. CDs are nice, but that price always seemed unrealistic to me. On June 4, CDs will no longer be available from Media On Demand, including wholesale copies to the creators, so creators will need to stock up if they want copies before then.

Next, KDP has begun offering print-on-demand paperbacks in Australia. This requires authors to adjust the pricing of each of their POD books for that market. That’s an easy process inside your KDP account, but since I have around thirty books in print, it took me about an hour to make all the adjustments. Still, I’m excited about this development.

Finally, KDP is currently running a beta version of the ability to make print-on-demand books available in hardcover! (Note: The linked pages for this program might only be currently available to KDP authors who have been invited to the beta program and are signed in to their account.) While not available in all international markets, they will be available in the USA and a few other countries. Many of my fellow authors will be excited if this works out, because my self-publishing customers often ask about hardcover editions.

The new hardcovers won’t be the kind with dust jackets. Instead, they will be “case laminate” hardcovers. Casewrapping is common for specialty books and textbooks, where the image is printed on a material that is wrapped onto the hard binding and glued in place, not a removable paper sleeve.

From a technical perspective, this new format will require some graphic design software skill, because formatting a cover for the casewrap is more complex than just clicking a button! Compared to a paperback cover, the casewrap cover must be created at dimensions both wider and taller so the printed image can be wrapped around the hard binding. It also means there is extra width to account for the “folded” area on each side of the spine. To help cover designers implement these changes, KDP provides a cover dimensions calculator which will also generate a PDF or PNG template to use as a guideline, and the templates are created specifically for your book’s trim size and page count. That is handy!

I spent a couple hours tonight re-doing the cover to Meteor Mags: The Singing Spell and Other Tales, getting a new ISBN and barcode for the hardcover edition, uploading and reviewing the files, and ordering a physical proof copy. I will update you on how it turns out, once the proof arrives.

So, goodbye compact discs and hello hardcovers! And hello to Australia! Feel free to share your experiences with these changes in the comments on this post.

Anyone Can Self-Publish a Book—Right? Not Necessarily.

Tags

self publishing, writing

A few times a month, aspiring authors contact me for advice on projects they have already begun, and they usually want me to help them self-publish their first book through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program (KDP). Most of the time, these authors face challenges that can be summed up in one sentence: They do not know nor understand the technical requirements for KDP, nor how to meet those requirements. In all cases, these authors have been lured by the oft-repeated idea that now “anyone” can self-publish. This idea is both true and false, depending on how you look at it, so I want to give you some insight about why it can be false, and how it can be true.

Saying that “anyone” can do something is part of the problem. Consider these statements: Anyone can play a Rachmaninoff piano concerto. Anyone can play basketball like Shaquille O’Neal. Anyone can be an astronaut. Anyone can be a university professor who lectures about quantum mechanics.

See the problem? All these professions require years of study, training, and practice. They require technical skills and long-term dedication to the craft. While I enjoy reading the works of Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, and other noted physicists, I will never be on their level of understanding the subject. I don’t even want to spend the time learning the math required to have an intelligent conversation with them. And if you put me on a basketball court with NBA players, I would get my ass handed to me. Heck, a bunch of random high schoolers could defeat me on the court.

But I’m pretty good—though not great—at making music with a guitar. People who are lured into self-publishing by the “anyone can do it” mentality remind me of all the times I was asked by someone during my twenty-plus years of performing, “Show me how to play that.” People assume that if you make something look easy, then it must be easy, so surely you can show them how to do what you do in a couple of minutes. But they don’t realize how much they don’t understand about rhythm, harmony, scales, and the language of music, and they definitely don’t realize how long you need to train your hands, muscles, and brain to play an instrument.

My experience in the world of self-publishing is no different. Someone might say, “Show me how to make a Kindle ebook,” but they don’t have the most basic software skills that take anywhere from hours to years to learn. Someone might say, “Help me set up my book on KDP,” but they have files that are completely unworkable for technical reasons they do not understand. They often do not know the language or terminology needed to even explain the problems. They have no idea what “image resolution” means, or what “Styles” are in MS Word, or the basic conventions for a properly formatted manuscript.

One author asked me on the phone about an “Izbin”, and I didn’t know what he was talking about. He was trying to pronounce “ISBN” like an acronym. That was somewhat less frustrating than the people who ask about “ISBN Numbers” without realizing the “N” in “ISBN” stands for “number”. I often wonder if they use their “PIN Numbers” to operate “ATM Machines” in a universe where the usefulness of initialisms has been destroyed by redundancy.

When it comes to printing paperback books, the problems compound. Have you ever tried explaining a “bleed” to someone who has no background in graphic design? I’ve encountered freelance “designers” who still don’t understand how to set up their files to meet bleed or resolution requirements, and “designers” charging way more than I do per hour but don’t have the first clue about the technical requirements for paperback covers. They might be talented artists whose creativity surpasses mine, but they don’t understand making books.

It isn’t like I was born with this knowledge or learned it all in a day. My first print-on-demand paperback in 2013 left a lot to be desired in terms of design and editing, and I’ve since taken it out of print to save myself the embarrassment. My first full-color art book was rejected by the printer for technical problems, and I couldn’t fix it for the life of me, no matter how many hours I spent. It wasn’t until I had another year or two of experience that I was able to re-open the old files, realize what the problem was, and fix it in about five minutes. That five-minute fix took me years to build up to.

Then we have the problem of quality. The biggest complaint about self-published books is that the writing isn’t very good and has never been professionally edited. One author contacted me because she was upset that her ebook wasn’t selling on Kindle, and she asked if I had any marketing advice. I looked her up on Amazon, found her book, and used the “Look Inside” feature to see what she was trying to sell. The text had a ton of obvious spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors on the very first page. Plus, the cover was unappealing, and the description in the Amazon listing was even worse.

As is so often the case in my line of work, it fell to me to be the bearer of bad news and explain to the author all the ways in which her design, description, and the text itself were sending huge red flags to potential buyers. Everything about the book screamed, “Don’t buy me!” Fortunately, I was able to help that author with copyediting, formatting, and a cover re-design. Now she has a book she can be proud of.

I understand authors with a do-it-yourself mentality. If I didn’t have the same mentality, I wouldn’t be where I am today. But I came to the world of self-publishing with a few decades of experience in writing as a professional, making art as a hobbyist, and using relevant software in both capacities. And you know what? My first book still sucked. Despite all I had learned, I had miles to go before I could competently make a book, even farther before I could communicate all the requirements to others, and farther still before I could lead an entire project team in a logical, organized way where things went smoothly.

In the years since, I’ve focused on helping other authors. I’ve looked for ways to share what I’ve learned or put my knowledge and experience to good use so other authors can experience the profound joy of holding in their hands a book they made and can be proud of—and confidently sell. Even so, that rarely happened without a team.

While it might be true that “anyone” can self-publish, few people can successfully do it on their own. A team might include an editor, a graphic designer or illustrator, a marketing consultant, and even a ghost writer or co-writer. Since all those people tend to speak their own language, the team usually needs a project manager, too—not the author, who probably does not speak any of those languages fluently, but someone who can help everyone involved stay on target because he knows the entire process from start to finish.

Can anyone do what I do? Sure. It is far from impossible. I encourage my fellow authors to get into it all the time. But people getting into self-publishing for the first time rarely realize just how much there is to know, and they become easily frustrated when they encounter obstacles during the production, or if nobody wants to buy their book.

Maybe anyone can play amazing guitar like Joe Satriani, but it isn’t necessarily easy or quick to get there. Believe me. I tried to learn a few of his songs and still can’t do them justice even after months of practice. Even if I could compose and shred like Satriani, he never goes on stage without a team to support his performance, from his fellow musicians to the stage crew and his management team.

Maybe anyone can do what Satriani does, but only if they are willing to invest the years of study and practice, take the time to find a team to help them succeed, and persevere in an insanely competitive marketplace. They should also be willing to accept that their first album might not be their greatest album, but it can be a learning experience and a steppingstone to truly great things.

For more insights into writing and becoming a better writer by workshopping with others, check out my recent book My Life as an Armadillo. For a quick orientation to the world of self-publishing that will save you from a lot of headaches and wasted money, see A Passion for Planning. Good luck on your writing journey!

a note about solving writing problems

Tags

self publishing, writing

A piece of advice in my new book about writing needs qualification. In My Life as an Armadillo, I state my belief that writer’s block is a myth, and the solutions to most writing problems involve more writing, usually freewriting about that problem or your emotional relation to it, until you get to the heart of it and work out a potential solution.

But I base this advice on an assumption about my audience of writers; namely, that they write because the written language is their primary way of processing information and expressing their creativity. That is not true about every person on Earth, and it might not even be true about every author. It certainly is not true of everyone working temporarily on a writing assignment such as a school paper, a business letter, or a memoir.

While my advice about writing through the problem can still help those people, it is not the only method nor even the best for everyone. Different people prefer different modes of communication, learning, and information processing. As an editor, I find the best way to help my authors work through a problem is to ask a few questions and encourage them to talk through it with me. Like many people, they feel more comfortable speaking than writing or typing, especially in a dialogue with an attentive and thoughtful listener. These conversations can lead to dynamic brainstorming sessions and bouncing ideas back and forth until we find a solution.

Other people are kinesthetic—not verbal—learners and communicators. They work through problems not by writing or talking but by walking or dancing, by doing yoga or lifting weights. Once they engage their bodies in motion, activity, or touch, the solutions come to them. Those are great options even for writers and other people in primarily non-kinetic modes. As much as I believe in writing through my problems, the process often involves stepping away from the keyboard to take a walk or a dip in the pool, or by cranking up the tunes and having a wiggle in the living room. Sometimes I even burn a calorie or two!

When you work through problems you encounter as you write, consider your mode of learning, communication, and information processing. Before you get back to writing, you might need to talk to someone, exercise, frolic, or do some tactile, hands-on work or craft. If you aren’t in a rush, you can even sleep on it. I often awake from a nap or a night’s sleep with a simple, direct solution to a problem that seemed impossibly complex before.

As I say in my book, any rules I propose are merely guidelines. Modify them to suit your personal style. What works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for another—not in writing nor anywhere else in life.

New Season, New Book!

Tags

armadillo authors workshop, books, essays, self publishing, style, workshop, writing

Spring is in the air! And with the new season comes a new book. You might know that I recently moved to Tucson, and I experienced an ungodly delay of several weeks in getting connected to the Internet in the new Martian headquarters. I used that time to edit a collection of essays about what I learned as the leader of a writers’ workshop—a workshop I founded in February 2017 and which succeeded beyond my imagination. Before I left Phoenix, I passed the leadership torch to someone I knew would take excellent care of my baby, and I am happy to say that the group remains alive and well.

Over the years, I wrote about workshopping with other authors and the journey of improving as a writer. The result is the Kindle ebook My Life as an Armadillo: Essays on Workshopping and Writing.

My Life as an Armadillo collects my thoughts from 2016 to 2021 about writing and becoming a better writer by workshopping with others. It is not a complete guide to style nor a manifesto on how to run your own critique group, but I share it in hopes that you can learn from my experience and apply the ideas you find most helpful.

Essays are grouped into four main sections: Group Participation and Leadership, Starting a Major Work, Basic Revisions for Style, and Style and Substance. You will find guidance for leading a workshop group and getting the most out of participating in one, refining your prose based on style tips commonly given in workshops, and overcoming the fundamental challenges many writers struggle with.

Now available for only 99 cents at https://amzn.to/3c2Poga

Free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers!

Reflections on Writing The Crystal Core

Tags

crystal core, memoir, meteor mags, reflections, writing

An updated version of this essay appears in the second edition of Virtually Yours: A Meteor Mags Memoir.

Some of Mags’ adventures began as basic plot ideas, some grew out of an idea for a scene or a piece of dialogue, and some started as a concept about an object or situation I thought it would be fun to write about. The Crystal Core is an example of all three of these possibilities combined.

The plot inspiration goes back to The Battle of Vesta 4, where I realized I had given my pirate crew a too-powerful object: the multidimensional “triglyph”. If I had included the triglyph in that story, the conflict would have been far too easy for the crew to overcome. Rather than address the situation, I decided to ignore it for a while and come back to it later—hopefully with a plausible explanation. Along the way, I wrote 1,000 words of notes on possible narrative paths to take with the triglyph.

While writing Small Flowers, I planted the seeds for the triglyph’s return. Plutonian questioned Mags about why she didn’t use it, and she revealed she had forgotten about it. The epilogue ended on a minor cliffhanger. Mags discovered the triglyph was missing from her armory where she placed it at the end of The Lost Crew of the Volya IX. By then, I’d reworked my original notes into an idea to use the triglyph to terraform Titan.

But as I mentioned in my reflections about Small Flowers, I watched a ton of documentaries that influenced that story and the shorter pieces published with it. I’ve been reading about space, stars, and black holes since I was in third or fourth grade, but I don’t recall learning about the diamond cores of white dwarf stars until early 2020. My mind was blown by the idea that these huge diamonds are burning in outer space, but I didn’t know what to do with that concept. So, I asked a friend what she would do with a huge crystal from space.

She said, “Build a radio.”

That was the moment my plot ideas and my “high concept” intersected, and I knew I needed to write that story. I started cranking out more notes and scenes around the concept, but I was confused by some aspects of crystal radios.

Fortunately, a member of my writers’ workshop (the illustrious Jeff Duntemann) is a ham-radio enthusiast, so I called him. He cleared up my misconceptions, enlightened me about a few missing pieces of the puzzle, and showed me where I needed to patch up the science to achieve some minimum standard of plausibility.

This is one of the best things about having writers, artists, and musicians as friends. I can call them unexpectedly and, without much preamble or small talk, say crazy things such as, “Can you help me build a giant crystal radio from a star core?” That’s how I end up having intriguing and educational conversations for an hour or more about things most people never think about.

The Crystal Core became a unique episode in Mags’ adventures. It has long passages of narration about terraforming Titan and building the giant space radio, scenes where I flexed my prose muscles to see if I could write about science but keep it poetic, beautiful, and interesting. Those scenes alternate with discussions that focus on dialogue and character interaction.

But I wanted to do something even weirder with the story: use multiple narrators. I wanted to get inside the characters’ streams of consciousness when they encountered the new rulers of Titan and got their minds messed with, telepathically.

I’ve read a ton of science-fiction prose and comic books that did similar things, but I sometimes find them difficult to follow. I like challenging narrative techniques in prose and film and comics, but I don’t like it when I feel the author is wanking instead of clearly telling a story in the most effective way possible. As I’ve written before in essays on narrators and points of view, the choice to get creative with narrators or structure needs to be more than a demonstration of how clever the author is. I’m not impressed by being incomprehensible. I’m impressed when the choice of a narrator or structure is perfect because any other choice would not tell the story as effectively.

You can judge for yourself how well I lived up to my own standard. Sometimes my reach exceeds my grasp, and that’s a normal part of growing and improving as a writer. Much of my writing in Mags’ adventures is a journey toward being able to live up to my own expectations about what makes a good story, or what makes beautiful prose, or what is entertaining to read. I feel I get closer to my ideals as the series progresses and, like most writers, I’m sometimes frustrated that I didn’t quite have the “chops” to do justice to some of my earliest stories. But with each story, I work on improving everything from descriptive language to comedic timing, from plotting to character development, and the myriad other things that make up a great story.

The Crystal Core continues a trend that began in the opening scene of Blind Alley Blues, which is a diary entry from Mags. In Small Flowers, I incorporated the idea that Mags writes letters to her somewhat-deceased great-gramma, which gives Mags more opportunities to narrate events in her unique voice. These letters have often been “behind the scenes” projects that never saw print. I wrote a good letter for Voyage of the Calico Tigress, but it didn’t quite fit the overall structure, so I cut it from the final version. With Small Flowers, I tried to weave the letters into the story in integral ways, and The Last Patches Story completely hands over the narrative reins to Mags so she can tell an imaginary bedtime tale about Patches. (One of my original ideas for that story involved using Patches as a first-person narrator, but I didn’t care for how that played out.)

With The Crystal Core, I wanted to extend the boundaries of what was possible with using other members of the pirate crew as narrators, too. Other than Hang My Body on the Pier, which featured excerpts from Great-Gramma’s memoirs, Crystal Core is the first story where anyone but Mags gets a shot at narrating. Dr. Plutonian narrates a scene and, like the scene of Mags’ narration that follows it, it takes place while the telepathic octopuses are disassembling his mind. I set myself the challenge of showing this confusing state of mind while making it absolutely clear to the reader who was talking, what was happening, and why.

I feel like it worked, and initial feedback told me it worked, so I considered why it worked. The text contains details that help, such as Mags’ straight-up telling the readers exactly what she thinks is happening to her mind. But in terms of remaining true to a character’s unique voice when slipping into first-person internal monologue, I think the key to success was the amount of time I have spent living in these characters’ heads for more than half a decade now.

They might have started out as comic-book caricatures, but over the years these characters have become more complex and real people to me. I suspect any writer who spends a serious amount of time on long-form stories will tell you the same thing. When you, as an author, share and invest so much of your life and your thoughts and your feelings with your characters, they undergo what I think of as the Pinocchio Effect. At some magical point or phase in the journey, the characters stop being puppets on your strings and become real to you. They take on a life of their own. They place demands on you. They help you understand yourself in relation to them. You know they are mere fictions, but like the golem of Jewish mythology or the monster of Dr. Frankenstein, they become imbued with their own lifeforce, their own desires, their own path in this world.

I’m lucky, compared to some novelists. Many novelists go through the pain of creating and bringing to life a set of characters that will never be seen again after the novel’s final page. But because I am writing an open-ended, ongoing series with roots that stretch for hundreds of millions of years into the past, and branches that extend beyond the end of our universe, I don’t feel any need to finish working with my characters or close the final page on them. I have all the time in the world to get to know them—or at least, all the time I have remaining on this planet.

By the time I got around to giving Plutonian a scene to narrate, I had spent so many years with him that I felt confident I could write in his voice. He delivered an extended monologue in The Lost Crew of the Volya IX where he told Mags about an event in his past. That was the first scene I ever workshopped, about four years ago now. I love a good monologue, but that’s different from being inside the character’s head, which is what happens in The Crystal Core.

I didn’t know for sure how The Crystal Core would end when I started drafting scenes, but my workshoppers will attest to the fact that I am a big believer in writing the ending before the story is finished. As a writer, I’m not interested in taking a mysterious journey into the unknown by simply starting with the first page of a story and writing until it feels finished. The mysterious journey is the reader’s experience, not the writer’s.

People who write by the seat of their pants often encounter the same problems over and over again: not knowing where they are headed when they are in the middle of the story, and therefore not knowing what scenes or moments of character development matter, or how to advance their plot. They often arrive at unsatisfactory endings, assuming they don’t give up in frustration halfway through—something that’s happened to many writers I know.

My advice? Once you are clear on the characters and their motivations and central conflicts, write an ending! Know where you are going! Writing without knowing how your story ends is like trying to play a game of darts while wearing a blindfold. You might hit the bullseye out of pure chance or luck, but it’s doubtful. If, instead, you draft the ending earlier in the process, then you know what you are aiming for, and you can construct a story that inevitably leads to that conclusion. Yes, the ending might need to be revised by the time you finish the rest of the story, so don’t sweat too many of the little details. A draft of the ending is only there to give yourself the gift of direction and purpose.

For The Crystal Core, I had about half of it drafted before I tackled the ending, but I knew I needed a firm finish to guide me through the middle. I asked myself, “What would be the most logical and consistent ending for a quasi-intelligent and supremely powerful object, especially after it encountered my octopuses?”

The ending is influenced by my love of science-fiction comic books where the fate of the entire universe (or even the multi-verse) is at stake on a daily basis, and it’s a logical development of my push to constantly expand the scope of possibilities within Mags’ adventures. The Crystal Core, like The Last Patches Story, is an attempt to connect the lives of the pirate crew to huge, cosmic-level events.

It was a fun story to write. I enjoyed expanding the boundaries of what I could do with these characters and their universe, connecting the cosmic experience to the personal stories, and seeing how big I could go in fewer than 8,000 words.

My only question is, “What’s next?”

stories – a brief reflection

Tags

fiction, meaning, story, storytelling, writing

An updated version of this essay appears in the second edition of Virtually Yours: A Meteor Mags Memoir.

Fiction can convey a psychological or emotional truth which is lost in a mere recitation of facts. By taking the senselessness of life and shaping it into a narrative which makes sense, which has internal order and cohesion life’s random events do not, stories do more than present facts. Stories tell us what those facts mean—to the author, to the reader, to each other, and our societies.

Stories bring us comfort beyond simple entertainment or fantasy fulfillment. Stories take us to a place where humans control the timing and sequence of events, determine who populates the world where those events take place, and decide what is the point of everything. Stories are a place where life does not happen to us, but where we happen to life.

The power to shape action, character, the environment, and history itself does more than relieve the suffering life inflicts upon us in careless, random fashion. This power also inspires us. It suggests we can impose our will upon the realities we confront. It makes us wonder if we are not so powerless as we often feel. Stories fan a spark of belief that we have power over our destinies, that we might shape our lives like heroes and conquer seemingly insurmountable challenges.

Storytelling is not limited to fiction. We make stories of our own lives, and the lives of others. We take observations, perceptions, and perspectives, and we turn them into tales we believe to be true or real. But these tales are as subjective as fiction, open to multiple interpretations, and completely dependent on who tells the story. Two different observers can disagree on the facts of an event or character, and what meaning we draw from interpreting those facts tells as much about ourselves as it does about anything objective.

We could propose that all stories are fictions—whether based on actual events or fantasies—for every story is a creation of the storyteller. Every story has a bias, an agenda with roots in the storyteller’s culture, time, environment, and uniquely personal experience. Understanding stories in this way reveals that humans do not have one truth, but many truths—and perhaps as many lies, for not all agendas are honest.

As storytellers, we should consider our subjectivity. What is the truth we want readers to perceive, and why do we want that? What ends do our stories serve? If we are to be honest with our readers and listeners, we must first be honest with ourselves and understand our own intent. We make our stories most compelling when we use them to present multiple perspectives or arguments and let readers draw their own conclusions— even when we want them to draw a specific one.

Is the power to create stories what makes us uniquely human? Even that proposition serves an agenda: a belief that humans are different from other animals and set apart. Does the honeybee tell a story about finding nectar when she dances for the hive? Does the lioness tell a story when she teaches her cubs to hunt? Do chimpanzees have a story when they bury their dead? Does the crow know a story when she stays behind the flock to be at the side of a sick or wounded crow? Maybe we are wrong to label all animal behaviors as instinct, to dismiss the transmission of information within a community or from generation to generation as merely the result of some internal pre-programming.

Maybe if we look deeper and with more compassion, we will find stories everywhere, even in our inhuman companions who share this world with us. Maybe we will discover we simply don’t speak the language of those stories, or they are told in ways so alien to our way of thinking that we fail to recognize them for what they are.

Maybe stories are everywhere, surrounding us with truths we have yet to consider, and we only need to learn how to listen.

Inner Planets: a poetry audiobook

Tags

audiobook, free verse, inner planets, planets, poems, poetry, self publishing, writing

An hour-long reading of fifty original poems selected from Anything Sounds Like a Symphony, Animal Inside You, and Never See the Night, along with two previously uncollected poems, all narrated by the author. This audiobook is now available on Audible, Amazon, and iTunes. The text comes in a Kindle edition and a Smashwords edition so you can read along! Also available at many other major retailers.

Nine Things Workshops Taught Me to Improve in My Writing

Tags

critique, feedback, self publishing, style, workshop, writing

2021 Update: A revised version of this article now appears in My Life as an Armadillo: Essays on Workshopping and Writing.

Do you want the good news or the bad news first? The bad news: I’ve made every single amateur writing mistake that can be made. The good news? Thanks to local workshops and critique groups, I’ve improved. Now that I know to check for my shortcomings in the revision stage, I hardly ever hear about them when workshopping new material. But invariably, when I’m having problems with a scene and take it to workshop, a few things I constantly struggle with pop up.

Why is it so hard to see flaws in our own writing? As writers, we feel about our words on the page as we would feel about our babies. We love them, we work hard for them, and they come from within us. We’re emotionally attached to our creations, even the flawed ones. Being objectively critical about them is tough, even though that’s exactly what we need to do if we want to take our writing to a higher level.

If you’ve ever attended one of my workshops, you know I mark up pages maybe more than anyone else in the city of Phoenix, and I have strong opinions on what works and what doesn’t. But you may not realize I am harder on my own material than I am on anyone else’s. My own markups of my first, second, third, and fourth drafts are absolutely ruthless. Even brutal. Two years of workshopping have made me look at my drafts and anticipate what my fellow authors would say about them, and mark them accordingly.

I take every bit of feedback about my work completely seriously. I will go back and revise something I wrote five years ago if I realize it suffers from problems uncovered in a workshop on a current piece. I write down every snippet of verbal feedback people give me. I learn from it, work to clarify and perfect my prose, and apply it to future works. In workshops, I’m not on a mission to have my ego stroked about how nice my writing is. I’m on a mission to root out everything keeping it from being awesome, and relentlessly exterminate all those things.

Maybe people in my groups wish I wasn’t so hard on their manuscripts. But I’m only doing what I wish someone had done for me twenty-seven years ago when I started out. It would have eliminated years of struggle. Then again, maybe seventeen-year-old me would have thought current me was an overbearing, hypercritical jerk, and struggled anyway.

It’s hard to say. When I was twenty-three, an editor of a local music magazine asked me to rewrite a band review I submitted. I responded with a scathing letter about how he didn’t understand music, art, writing, or anything else. See? I told you I’ve made every amateur mistake, didn’t I? Never do this to an editor. I realize now he was right, and the piece I submitted would have been greatly improved had I taken his advice.

While my academic writing is consistently graded at 95–100% by my professors, poetry and fiction are areas of perpetual growth for me. Hell, before I publish my academic works, I still go back and edit them for things my professors and I missed. Yes, I am that intense.

Fiction has been especially difficult, because I have long been the worst storyteller on the planet. Having only started fiction in July 2014, I have had more struggles than you would believe, and I still go back to my earlier works to revise them maybe once or twice a month. I mentioned I was intense about this, right?

Maybe it’s because I see perfection not as a noun, but a verb. No perfect state of being exists, but we constantly work to perfect our art. Perfection is a process, not a final state. I think of it like sharpening a blade: a continual effort to achieve the perfect cutting edge. The process is how we learn, grow, and improve.

I promised you a list of mistakes I’ve made which have been uncovered and vastly improved by workshopping, so here it is.

1. I turned action scenes into bullet lists. In my earliest fiction, I used short, declarative sentences to communicate the immediacy of action scenes. While this is essentially correct, I screwed it up by using the same subject for sentence after sentence. “She did this. She did that. She did something else. She did more stuff.” I learned I needed to vary my subjects and be more descriptive so action would not read like a soul-crushingly dull bullet list.

2. I overused the word “then” to the point where it was dull and amateurish. “Then this happened, then this, then some other stuff.” I learned most sequential action doesn’t need this word to be clear.

3. My “then” problem is symptomatic of a larger problem: overusing transitional words, mostly conjunctions such as “and” and “but”. It most likely results from a common author problem of thinking aloud about what comes next in the first draft, and failing to fully exterminate that mental chatter during revision. Once the story is on the page, the reader doesn’t need all these cues that events transpire.

4. No matter how much research I’ve done on weapons and space technology, it doesn’t prevent me from getting factual and scientific details wrong. Unlike deleting “then”, this one is tougher. Fixing this requires researching stuff I don’t realize I need to research! Fortunately, I have people in workshops who helpfully point out obviously wrong facts.

5. I often summarize or explain events that previously happened, whether prior to the story or just prior to the action described in a sentence. When I do this, I add “had” to my verbs so often it pulls readers out of the flow. Usually, using a simpler verb form communicates just as much information; for example, “destroyed” as opposed to “had destroyed” usually works. (Yes, other verb tenses have meaningful uses. But simpler is usually better and more exciting to read.)

6. My earliest fiction over-relied on verbal shortcuts for things I had not clearly visualized. Usually, they manifested in vague descriptions of action I didn’t have a clue how to show the reader. Feedback made me look for these in the revision stage, to decide if I took a shortcut because the narrator did not have a clue, as opposed to summarizing because the details were mundane or unnecessary. I internalized the feedback question, “What does that look like?” I also experimented with non-specific descriptions. For example, “His IQ was 27” conveys specific information, but “He was dumber than a box of rocks” conveys the meaning more entertainingly. The former is good for academic writing, but I prefer the latter in fiction.

7. Seeing my repetitive phrases or words is remarkably difficult, even when I read and revise my drafts half a dozen times. All writers have pet words they overuse without realizing it, and I’m no exception.

8. In fiction, my current mission is to exterminate useless words to achieve maximally crisp language. Some people love stories so much they don’t mind if the prose style kind of sucks, so long as they like the plot and characters. But I can’t get into a story at all if the prose is dull, amateurish, overly verbose, or lost in a fog of passive verbs. So, even when I’m writing about ridiculous characters, I’m on a mission to make the prose style absolutely ripping. But no matter how tight I think I’ve made the prose on a scene I take to workshop, people always find words, phrases, and whole sentences I could cut. Sometimes entire paragraphs.

9. I skimped on setting. Real estate workers have a saying: “location, location, location.” In my earliest fiction, I focused on action at the expense of describing location. My scenes were like comic book panels with figures but no backgrounds. By observing how my fellow authors approached scene construction, I learned the importance of what filmmakers call the “establishing shot”. This made me think more deeply about how locations influence action, and the resulting rewrites more effectively brought characters to life by showing how they interacted with their environments. I also realized the value of drawing a map of a location to fix in my mind the space where events happen. It doesn’t need to be brilliant cartography; even a simple sketch will do.

Before I started workshopping locally and built a new workshop from the ashes of another group which died off, I thought I was pretty awesome at writing. But two years of workshopping revealed to me just how far I had to go, and instructed me on how to improve. I understand how critique can be disheartening to novice writers who don’t realize how much room they have to grow, because I was one of them. In many ways, I still am. We must always consider that criticism without encouragement amounts to tearing people down instead of building them up.

Fortunately, my workshop group consists of people who genuinely care about each other’s progress. Our core members share a vision of helping each other produce the best works we possibly can. I’ve learned a lot from them, and their feedback has been inexpressibly valuable to my growth as a writer.

Two years ago, I felt something was holding me back from achieving the artistic level I wanted to as a writer. By connecting with other authors and being completely open to everything they told me, I grew at a pace that would have been impossible on my own. My only regret is that I did not start sooner. But to paraphrase an old proverb, “When the student is ready, the master will appear.”

A huge thank you goes to the local workshop groups without whom I would have never achieved the quality of writing I aimed at for many years. Your support, encouragement, and honest critique has made a world of difference.

Why Minimalism? A Personal Reflection.

Tags

free verse, Jupiter, memoir, minmalism, poems, poetry, reflections, writing

A year and a half ago, while workshopping poems for my collection Anything Sounds Like A Symphony, I received game-changing advice. For reasons I can’t remember, I had been capitalizing the first letter of every line. But two folks told me that since my free verse closely resembles prose, I should punctuate and capitalize it as such.

I take workshop feedback very seriously, so I reformatted all my poems. It also made me realize much of my poetry from 2012–2016 read like bullet lists. Maybe it was my training in technical writing that led to that. I don’t know. But the feedback helped me rewrite and improve a body of work I was mostly happy with, but which had problems I couldn’t quite resolve. Symphony was a better work because of it.

When I was done, and Symphony was published, I had this inescapable feeling I could go even further. The experience made me wonder just how much punctuation and capitalization was necessary to convey meaning.

As an editor and a writer who produces essays on public policy, I need to be the master of grammar, punctuation, and all the formal mechanics of writing. The things I work on professionally and academically need to be technically perfect, and that is no small task.

But just how much technicality is required to convey meaning, emotion, and imagery? This question made me reevaluate my approach to poetry. What if I could get rid of all the mechanics and focus only on words? Is that even possible?

I gave it a shot to see how much of the mechanics could be removed during the Poetry of the Planets group project earlier this year. Using nothing but line breaks and spaces between stanzas, could I make meaning absolutely clear? Could I toss out capitalization and punctuation altogether?

It turns out: I could. But it wasn’t instantaneous, and my first few efforts required a period or two for clarity. Also, I granted an exemption to apostrophes to show possessive words and contractions.

As possibilities became realities, I worked to construct lines which never needed periods. It became a poetic mission, the kind of artistically satisfying personal obsession that makes you terribly boring at social gatherings. “I’m working on exterminating punctuation to reveal the beauty of words. Let me show you.” Right. Good luck with that line at the next office or holiday party.

Oddly enough, it worked. I put the new poems in front of workshop groups which included amateurs and academics and everything in between, and they drew the exact interpretation I wanted. They unequivocally got the meaning. The only exceptions were when I had made narrative errors, not mechanical omissions. Those exceptions forced me to rewrite poems until people drew my desired interpretations.

I also discovered a weird thing about line breaks. Without a period to stop a sentence, I could create double meanings depending on where people assumed the sentence began or ended. The first confirmation of this effect happened when author Judy Cullen sent me a beautiful reading of my poem, Jupiter.

The poem has two ambiguities in it. The first happens at the line, “love me for an hour then leave / traces of your orbit…”. Judy read this without a pause between “leave” and “traces”. Read with a pause, it says, “Love me for an hour and then leave,” as in, “Let’s get it on and then you go away.” It’s a cold line, read that way.

But if you extend it without a pause, as Judy did, it’s a line encouraging your lover to love you then leave traces of themselves, which is an intimacy the former reading stops cold. I wrote it that way to set up multiple possibilities between coldness and intimacy—something standard punctuation never accomplished.

The poem’s second ambiguity happens in the line, “until all they know is mystery like a fool / i would keep you to myself”. When Judy read it, you can tell by her pacing that she chose the first meaning: they know only mystery, like fools. But a second possible interpretation exists. You could end the sentence after “mystery”, and read the next part as “Like a fool, I would keep you to myself…”

Which interpretation is correct?

Like the first ambiguity, both ways of looking at it are right. As the author, I can tell you the correct interpretation is to simultaneously hold both interpretations in your mind, despite the contradictions. In the first case, both the coldness and intimacy are intended; in the second case, both the foolishness of others and the foolishness of the narrator are intended.

Those simultaneous but contradictory meanings were never available to me in more conventional forms. Stripping out punctuation between sentences made it possible to mean two things at once.

In most poems, I want the reader to reach a definitive meaning. But having the option to reach two possibilities, either of which is correct, and both of which are more correct when taken together—that was simply impossible in my previous style.

I respect poets who work in forms with guidelines about meter, rhyme, structure, and other formalities. In nearly three decades of composing poems, I’ve dabbled in countless formalisms. But my current minimalist approach to free verse has unlocked a freedom of expression I felt was inaccessible before.

This is not a minimalist manifesto, nor an insistence that my current approach is right or wrong. All wordsmiths need to find solutions to their own unique concerns about language. I would not produce fiction, essays, or technical manuals using this philosophy.

But when I need to unleash myself from the mechanical constraints governing my non-poetic work, and delve into the potential beauty of the spoken word, throwing convention to the wind and relying only on line and stanza breaks opens a whole new world of possibilities.

Ten Things I Learned from Making My First Audiobook

Tags

acx, amazon, audible, audiobook, audiobook production, baby and the crystal cube, books, making books, self publishing, writing

My short story The Baby and the Crystal Cube is now available as an audiobook on Audible and Amazon. I published it in ebook and paperback formats earlier this year, but other authors keep asking me about audiobooks. So, I made one and got hands-on experience working with the Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX) platform that distributes to Audible and Amazon.

So, what did I learn?

First, you don’t need a million bucks to do this, or even a thousand. I do know some professional audiobook talents who built soundproof studios in their homes, stocked with expensive microphones and Pro Tools audio software. If you’re making a career of being voice talent, that’s the right thing to do. But if you are an author with a DIY philosophy and a limited budget, you can get a decent headset mic for $30, download Audacity software for free, and get started.

Second, Audacity has a noise-reduction tool I never used before. With a little trial and error, it helped me eliminate background hum. ACX has strict limits on the decibel level of background noise (“room tone”). I learned I live in a sea of electrical hum! Plus, my first recording efforts took place during rush hour—a terrible time to do this on a busy street like mine. I had much better results recording super late at night when all is quiet.

Third, keep a pen and paper handy while recording. Jot down all the times when you mess up or clear your throat, or when a noise interrupts you. When you edit the recording, start at the last time you marked, and work backwards. If you start at the beginning and snip out mistakes, then the subsequent times are no longer at the place you marked them, but earlier, because you’ve shortened the recording.

Fourth, listen to the whole thing after editing. I was over-confident in my editing the first time I submitted files. I sent one where I missed a major mistake involving cursing loudly and re-reading a botched paragraph. Don’t count on ACX’s quality review team to catch mistakes. They do not listen to every second of your recording. Fortunately, you can upload corrected files, but it’s slightly inconvenient. Do yourself a favor and listen to the whole thing before you submit files!

Fifth, if you have multiple email addresses, set up your ACX account with the same one you will use to email the ACX support team. They absolutely will not lift a finger to help you if you contact them from a different email address. I learned this the hard way. ACX is linked to my Amazon shopping login, which is also my Kindle Direct login, so I needed to change my email address at Amazon. Not a huge deal, but a little inconvenient.

Sixth, the ACX platform and ACX staff really are friendly and easy to work with. I don’t blame them for my failure to use the right email or upload the right files. Once I got my act together, everything with ACX went smooth as silk.

Seventh, the ACX book cover requirements are unique to them. If you already have a Kindle cover, or Smashwords cover, or paperback cover—guess what? You need to make yet another cover! I admit I was a little annoyed by this. As a result, I probably didn’t put enough effort into modifying my existing book cover to fit the ACX size requirement of 2400 pixels by 2400 pixels. Now that I know, I can plan ahead when I design my print and ebook covers.

Eighth, for as much effort and brain surgery as it takes to produce a decent hour of voice recording that meets quality standards, the process is fun and exciting. I may not have the perfect voice, but I do know how I want my own work to sound: the emotional tone, the inflection, and the pacing. Besides the total creative control, reading your own work aloud gives you a more intimate connection with it and understanding of it. You also gain the satisfaction of having your work in a format with even more of your personality in it than the printed page.

Ninth, what works on the printed page doesn’t always work in a reading. I discovered that although my written dialogue makes it absolutely clear who is speaking without excessive speech tags, I needed to throw in a few extra “he said” and “she said” tags in the audio version. Maybe if I had tried to work out different voices for characters, then it wouldn’t be a problem. But I haven’t got that far yet. And how silly would I sound if I did a fake female voice for female characters?

Tenth, I had no say in the audiobook’s price. This isn’t a deal breaker, but with Kindle, Smashwords, and Createspace, I control the price and can even change it after publishing, so long as it meets minimum pricing requirements. With my first audiobook, I wondered, “Where do I set the price?” Answer: I don’t! See the ACX pricing page about how your book’s length determines its price. What do you get paid? The ACX royalties page explains how giving them exclusive audio distribution rights earns you 40%, and a non-exclusive deal earns you 25%. “Non-exclusive” means you could sell the audiobook through other channels of your choosing.

To sum it up, you can make your own audiobooks at a low production cost if you learn the ACX requirements, and if you know or can learn basic audio recording and editing. It’s a bit of work, but creatively satisfying.

Would I do it again? Absolutely! In fact, my second audiobook should be available in the next week or two. I will keep you posted!