What If You Could Not Fail

Seth Harwood, One of the Indie Publishing Kings

Every time I think I’ve decided how to pursue publishing, I run into Seth Harwood.

Seth Harwood is a crime writer who came out in 2006 with his first novel, Jack Wakes Up, on podcast. He gave it away for free. Random House picked him up and published it, but Seth has remained on the edge of independent, electronic and self-publishing for the last five years. He’s tried all sorts of things, but always comes back to the podcast.

I’ve been listening to Seth’s latest book, In Broad Daylight, about a female FBI agent tracking a serial killer in Alaska.

Seth is also in the middle of a Kickstarter campaign, a way for artists to raise money to help produce their works. Through the campaign, Seth is taking pre-orders of some of his existing books, offering discounts and other items. The goal is to raise enough money to print some of his books and do some more e-publishing (WARNING:  I may have the details wrong. I’m not sure). He raised the cash he needed in 29 hours.

If you have an iPod and you commute or ride your bike a lot, or you’re just books on podcasts, listen to Seth. Look for Seth Harwood on iTunes. If you tap into Seth’s feed, you might also hear in interview with him on Interview for Your Ear-Piece at Spoken Word.

Also, look at Kickstarter, which bills itself as “the largest funding platform for creative projects in the world.”  Check out Seth’s kickstart campaign here. 

I am a Discovery Writer

I am a discovery writer. I sit down at the keyboard and ask myself, “Who am I going to meet today?” 

This is opposed to those people that write from an outline, carefully spelling out their plot and characters. Nothing wrong with that. I’ve thought about doing this a few times, but I’m not disciplined enough for it—at least yet.

I listen to a podcast called Writing Excuses that talked about this all the time. It is not uncommon. 

When I started Rules for Giving I had a general idea of the plot. A young girl’s life takes a bad turn. She flees to her mother’s hometown, hiding out with her grandfather. She finds some letters and high school yearbooks hinting of a traumatic event in her mother’s past. She tracks down a man who was her mother’s boyfriend (our protagonist) during this time, in hopes of finding out what happened. Things go to hell from there. What those things were, I had no idea until I wrote them.

In a chapter midway through the book I sensed things were leaning towards boring. I created a new character. Leona Kunkles is a 6’2” lipstick lesbian, a veteran of the U.S. Army special forces and a fifth degree black belt, known by her friends as Leo the Knuckle. She is a major character in the remainder of the book.

A few chapters later I met Steve of Lake, a schizophrenic homeless man who hangs out around Lake Avenue in Pasadena. In the final pages, Steve helps the protagonist come to a realization.

Neither of these characters were in my plans when I started writing. I discovered them during the writing process.   

There were times when I knew where the plot had to go, but I had no idea how I was going to get to that place. But I wrote, and I turned out some good chapters. I had no plan. I was just exploring. 

I have a concept for my next book. It’s going to take a little more research, and I think there is going to be some more pre-thought put into this when I write it. I’m going to have to outline this one. Maybe even do some character sketches. But I also plan on doing some discovery writing. After all, I never know who I’m going to meet. 

Why I Still Read the Dead Tree Version of the Newspaper

Hello. I am on a ten-day vacation in Yosemite National Park and then Pismo Beach. As hard as it is to believe, there will be times when I will not have an internet connection. In the meantime, please enjoy one of my favorite posts from this last year. 

A few days ago I was listening to a webinar about Google Plus, Google’s social media vehicle and rival to Facebook, which in itself is exasperating. I’m hanging on by a fingernail to this whole social media thing and now there’s something else I have to learn.

I defer to my standard answer here:  It is enough to make my head blow up.

But buried in this presentation was something that visited upon me a revelation. Google Plus has this feature that acts as an aggregator of news. You feed in the topics you want to hear about and then you get all the news and web posts pertaining to that topic, and only that topic. You get only the news you want. I’ve heard about this feature before in other web services, and it bothers me.

Now I know why.

I can see the use of this service, but if carried to its extreme, I’d never learn anything new. I’d only get the news I want to hear. That’s why I love reading the newspaper—the real one with ink on paper—referred to as “dead tree publishing.” I love sitting down with a cup of coffee and turning the pages.  It’s like a scavenger hunt. On each page I find something new. I just flipped through yesterday’s Los Angeles Times and saw no less than a half-dozen interesting stories that would not have been picked up in a news feed because they have nothing to do with anything I am normally interested in. I would even have a hard time finding these stories if I pulled the newspaper up on the Internet, because you can’t just flip through the pages.

As a writer of fiction, I get story ideas everywhere. Sitting in restaurants, talking to strangers, and doing a lot of things that take me out of my comfort zone. I’m still reading the hard copy version of the newspaper. I can’t afford to miss what might be my next story. 

 

Video for the Book

I recently attended a presentation on independent publishing. Among other things the presenter emphasized the importance of social media, and especially video.

I purchased an Ultra Flip video camera a few months back (the quality is amazing) and I've been thinking about putting a video together.  Today I was checking out Mashable.com when I saw this news about upgraded video editing capabilities on Youtube.com. Guess I have to get my butt in gear and work on a video.  Keep watching these pages.  

Worse than Writer's Block? Self-Editor's Block

The first draft of anything is shit—Ernest Hemingway

For the last month or so I have been editing my novel, Rules for Giving. It has been tough going. I was in a writing fury when I pounded out the first five chapters. It shows. Run-on sentences, digressions into meaningless detail, stilted prose. Some of it made me groan as I re-read it. Added to this, I have been reading some good authors as of late, which is always humbling.  

Then someone in my literary critique group complimented me. He said that in the last chapters of my novel read very well, with some interesting turn of phrase and word choice.

Great, I thought, now I need to go back and bring that out in the rest of the draft.

I got self-editor’s block. I slipped into despair. What’s the use?

There were two ways I was able to bring myself out of this. One of them was purely by accident. Will Bryant Smith, a former member of our critique group who moved back to Pennsylvania, recommended a book—Self-Editing for Fiction Writers. I highly recommend this title for anyone who is editing their work. It serves as a primer of all the things you need to look for—problems with dialogue, showing versus telling, character development—all kinds of things. And I’m just a quarter of the way through.

It crystallized everything I need to look for as I edit my novel.

The other thing that helped me snap out of this funk was a realization. Hey, it’s only a first draft, but I’ve written a novel. I’ve created 458 pages and 120,000 words, and some of it is not bad. I have stuck with this project for almost three years. Not that may people get as far as I have, and I did it while I was earning a living, being a husband, and also being a father and grandfather.

True, there is still a long ways to go. I have to finish editing this book. I have to find an agent, then a publisher. But I have overcome a major roadblock. I have a completed draft. Some of it is not bad, and the stuff that is, I can make it better.

Small-town Newspapers Still Cranking

As an avid newspaper fan, I'm glad to see some newspapers are getting it right. Check out this op-ed piece in the L.A. Times.  

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-muller-weeklies-20110913,0,2063966.story

Rules for Giving

Welcome to my blog.  Follow up as I talk about my adventures in writing.  Right now I am working on editing the draft for my novel--Rules for Giving:

RULES FOR GIVING is the story of happily married Gavin Oliver, celebrating his first day of business ownership by sneaking in an early morning golf game when he encounters Rose, the daughter of an old girlfriend. Her world has caved in—a philandering fiancé, a vengeful date rapist, and a recent abortion—and she asks Gavin for help. 

At the thought of again seeing the first woman he ever loved, Gavin consents. He has other problems, though. A former partner at the advertising agency he now owns is plotting against him, promising to take the firm’s cash cow client. Gavin also discovers Rose’s real goal: unraveling her mother’s demons—the same demons that haunt him.

In one week, from one Friday golf game to another, Gavin uncovers crimes, secrets and betrayals that threaten his business, his marriage and his life. 

The personalities in RULES FOR GIVING include the mercurial Rose, searching for the secret her mother is trying so hard to conceal. There’s Marjorie, the indomitable retired high school counselor who advocates castration for date rapists. Finally, meet Leona Kunckles, a 6-foot-2-inch lipstick lesbian, an Army Special Forces veteran and 5th degree black belt turned private detective, known affectionately as “Leo the Knuckle.”

The Dreaded Writer's Block

Several times during the development of my novel I was afflicted with writer’s block.  It happens to many writers--a condition where you are unable to write. 

It comes in different variations. I find the most difficult is the mere inability to sit down in front of the keyboard.  I look for reasons to procrastinate—the patio needs to be cleaned, the dog needs to be walked, it’s a nice day to go golfing, I need to stick bamboos slivers under my fingernails—blah, blah, blah. This can go on for days and even weeks. During the writing of Rules for Giving, after I’d created what I thought was a pivotal chapter with the introduction of a new character, I couldn’t bear to sit down and write again.   It took me weeks. How am I going to do better than what I just finished?

Other times I can sit down at the keyboard, but I ‘m not happy with anything that comes up on the screen.  The words don’t make any sense.  They read as stilted and contrived.  They don’t flow. 

When I took writing classes in college, one of the exercises we did at the beginning of each class was to write for five minutes on whatever we wanted to write about—the weather, our mood, what was troubling us that day.  It was a way of warming up.  Trying to get past writer’s block.  I went to a writing class recently where the instructor had us do the same thing.  As a class we never looked at this stuff.  It got thrown away.  But it broke the ice.

I am not disciplined enough to remember to do this every time I sit down to write.  Part of this lies in that the effort is so taxing that I don’t want to expend energy putting down words that don’t have purpose, that will never see the light of day.

My solution to writer’s block is a version of the writer’s exercise.  I write.  I write for whatever project I am writing on at that time, but I write.  The goal is to write through the writer’s block.  It’s mentally and emotionally exhausting.  I curse a lot and I hit the delete key quite a bit, but it works.  What I come up with is often very good.  During the writing of the rough draft of Rules for Giving I needed a chapter that had to get me from Point A to Point B in the action so that I could move to the next chapter, which was much clearer in my mind.  I had no idea how I was going to get there. 

But I wrote through it.  In the end, I had a good chapter, with some action and direction that carried me through for a couple of chapters. 

Now that the rough draft is finished, I have found something worse than writer’s block—editor’s block.  How did I cure that one?  Keep checking this blog and I will tell you.