When you should edit old stories

DID YOUR FIRST NOVEL GET YOUR HEART AND SOUL?

This is a writerly post if looked at strictly, but could apply to many other things in Life if you think of it as a metaphor for anything you have loved – and maybe lost.

It is a truism that the first novel is often unpublishable, and that IF it gets a publisher (or you publish it yourself) it is often not your best work, because, as a writer, you lack the skills to do the best possible job on the material.

[A corollary is that getting it to the publishable stage takes a huge amount of time which you lack on subsequent books, leading to the dreaded ‘sophomore slump’ when the second book doesn’t materialize or fails to meet its deadline if on contract or simply isn’t good enough and gets rejected.]

A first completed book is like a first crush

There is something in that first attempt which takes you from someone who has never written a novel – THROUGH someone who has finished at least the first draft of that novel – to whatever fate it gets: trunk novel (never to be published or even seen again); published without sequel or following books; or published with great satisfaction (in which case you are extremely lucky, or talented, and will not be reading this post – mazel tov.

In any case, DONE!

So it has value regardless of outcome, disproportionate to its size.

But it has pulled something special out of you: the first story you can see as a whole, the first to get your full commitment, the one to let you try your wings on, the first you have hopes for.

The one that makes you want to improve your writing chops.

[And the one you hope will make you famous and rich, but that is rare, and you won’t be reading here if you were that lucky one.]

For the rest of us writers

IF you didn’t go self-publish that first one (for whatever reasons – in my case self-publishing wasn’t a thing yet in the 1990s), you may have the niggling feeling that some day you really should go back to it, because it pulled so many good things from your nascent writer self.

Many things which you simply couldn’t handle yet.

I had a severe case, when I took a very brief private writing class, of looking at my own writing, KNOWING what was in my head – and UNDERSTANDING that I had not taken that story and put it on a page.

The disconnect was huge. I couldn’t see my own story in my own words.

Self-awareness is exactly the right place to start

Another truism: if you can’t see what’s wrong, you can’t fix it!

So the ability to judge your own writing is a developmental milestone.

Many people outsource this to an editor – and, if they’re lucky to find the right editor, will have their flaws pointed out to them gently, and should proceed from there to correct those flaws in future works, possibly even in the current work-in-progress.

Others choose to essentially do their own first drafts from then on out, and to outsource the editing permanently (I’ve had one such author literally tell me ‘the editor will fix everything, while I go on to the next book’; he is quite successful and very energetic, and I still don’t like his writing – possibly envy?).

I don’t judge writers, but I do choose what to read (when I have time to), so ‘whatever floats your boat’ is fine with me – for others.

By the time I started writing

my life was in tatters: I had planned to write mysteries in retirement after a long and rich career as a working mother/physicist/normal citizen. Chronic illness at 40 scrapped those plans as cleanly as a good snowplow clears the road.

I kept writing; the trunk novel grew to ‘finished story’; the sequel in the planned series was half-finished, the third in the series planned in concept and title (Acapulco Deadlymoon)…

The point here being that I did NOT plan to be hijacked by a much better story, or rather, possibly, a story I really needed to write and to up my game for (the Pride’s Children trilogy).

So the old story got literally left in the dust cloud in the rearview mirror – while I went off to become an indie mainstream novelist, and to spend the next twenty-three so far years on an obsession.

Now I’m heading into the final (?) stretch for Pride’s Children

and the inevitable question arises: what’s next?

Is the answer, ‘Go back to that first love’?

In favor of the idea:

• In the style of Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton, I had envisioned a long series of novels with a single, first-person main character – and I had poured an enormous amount of my interests and background into her, a young Mexican mechanical engineer who had emigrated to the US with her family as a teen, become thoroughly Americanized on the one side while retaining a cultural Mexican side.
• The first novel in the series had Thea taking a job (she had MP experience) as a security officer on a college campus where her American husband was doing a PhD in physics because she thought he would be finishing and moving to a permanent job, and it didn’t make sense to her to start a Master’s in Engineering and have to switch locations halfway through.
• I could make a graduate school real from personal experience.
• I grew up in Mexico and had, first-hand, the disorientation being bi-cultural can bring.
• A series can end any time you choose to write the last book in it (or are forced to).

Against the idea:

• My experience there is a LONG time in my past now.
• Just because something was satisfying way back when may not carry over.
• There is a LOT to rewrite – with the more modern skillset.
• I am not well yet – may never be – and I’m not sure that is where I want to have a legacy, after mainstream fiction.
• Keeps me from thinking of something new.
• Is in a different genre I don’t have the chops in.
• Was set a long time ago – almost historical if I wrote it in that time frame, which I’d have to because I know nothing of a modern grad school or college experience.

I can’t quite explain the pull

Maybe I feel I failed Thea, after promising her so much.

Maybe I feel I have something to contribute that is relevant to the immigrant side of my own background – first TO Mexico at seven, and then BACK to the US at nineteen.

Maybe the second book, set in Mexico has legs.

I miss Acapulco! Hate what has happened to it, though my sisters do go back from time to time to the safe parts.

Maybe I miss my own youth and health. Okay, I do – don’t we all?

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But I’ve never quite been able to consign this one to the permanent dark.

Do you have trunk novels – and have you considered resurrecting them?

We grow in many ways as we age, but we also experience much in the way of loss – is it even feasible to try to go back?

How much of yourself and your writing self did you leave behind?

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Over a year to write a chapter

I’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE AND THE WRITING AND I SURVIVED

I’m digging out some of my unfinished blog posts – to either finish or delete – and I find this one which is entirely appropriate, because I’m basically at the same place, but in LIMBO, not NETHERWORLD, and the Chapter is 41, not 26.

And, of course, the date is Mon., May 29 – 2023 – and Memorial Day.

Must add: I ended up quite pleased with Chapter 26!

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March 19, 2018 at 1:52 PM
I have been mentally putting off getting started on Chapter 26 for plenty of good reasons having to do with time, selling the house, giving stuff away, health (the Valsartan [heart drug I couldn’t tolerate] loss of ten days crippled me), worry…
And one bad reason: I’m scared of it.

Friday August 16, 2019 at 2:33 PM
Finished. Cut out a bunch of words. Left it cleaner.
Andrew is back to thinking only about himself as he heads back toward his rooms. Considered professional, and personal by implication. His way – fast easy travel at the drop of a hat implied – is contrasted with what he knows about her ability to travel. It is quite clear for the reader.

I have a bunch of time: this is the end of the chapter.
How can I best use the state of being more or less awake.
Unfortunately, I’m also hungry.

But Chapter 26 is over – down to She’ll be fine ’til I get back.
Which is my foreshadowing.

Saved time by not running scenes through AC as I finished them because, in all honesty, I didn’t think my brain capable of the fine decisions AND I was worried about the chapter as a whole still being in my ‘voice’ and the characters’ voices and my style…

Then the editing went stupendously well – I’m getting better at correcting a couple faults I have as a writer, from the very beginning – and it took less than a day to get the whole chapter – around 11,500 words, not untypical for me – edited, polished, and proofread.

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Be wary of accepting help from bots/algorithms/autocorrect

The rest of the original 2018 post is toast, because I accepted WordPress’ offer to turn the original Classic format into the current Blocks format – and it took all the statistics I quoted, from AutoCrit, and me writing Chapter 26 – and turned them into some kind of weird ‘Your Statistics’ in the block format because it recognized some patterns (such as the word ‘statistics’) and MISREAD them, and now won’t let me go back to the previous version.

Sigh.

I will have to delete all of them from here to the bottom.

Basically, the statistics from AutoCrit (which they no longer provide) said I had analyzed over 4 MILLION words up to that point in my use of AC: “On average, each scene went through Autocrit (online editing software) and my process about ten times after I finished writing it. I constantly edit and rewrite as I go, so this isn’t unusual for me either.”

So why bother quoting statistics from 2018?

Because, due to 1) publishing NETHERWORLD (which took until September 2022), and then 2) the aftereffects of two major problems, surgery and a big tax/paperwork project, I haven’t finished a Chapter in the new book, LIMBO, yet.

I HAVE written the first scene (which will not be shared for a while because I don’t have the whole of Book 3 organized the way I need to, and the scene MAY be missing a few key pieces), so I can’t move on yet.

And it was over a YEAR since writing the last scene in NETHERWORLD (March 2022?) and getting to the first scene in LIMBO, and I would rather not dwell on that year!

But the PATTERN – much time may go by between writing one scene and the next – is not unfamiliar for me, so it doesn’t alarm me, and I just get to work as soon as I have a usable brain and the ability to put that time to my preferred use, writing fiction.

To be clear: I’m not HAPPY about this way of writing, but it happens, doesn’t freak me out TOO much, and I’m like a police dog which has acquired a scent: I go right back to following it.

My style of writing, my ‘process’, copes fine with the breaks

Because I do everything in writing, using the many Journals and Scrivener files to keep track of minutiae (if I do anything remotely new or different, I start and date a new file in the appropriate Scrivener folder), EVERYTHING is there when I need to reload my brain.

I don’t even try to remember what I need (will, spontaneously, sometimes, but I don’t RELY on it), but I KNOW I wrote it down somewhere.

It wouldn’t work if I were writing many or shorter books; but for my complex novel trilogy about Andrew, Kary, and Bianca – characters who love and work in the movie/writer universe – this kind of compulsive tracking of details has come in handy time and again, rescuing me from having to remember any more than vague concepts, and leading me to where I can reload the pieces I currently need with relative efficiency.

I thought the organization of LIMBO was more complete

But now that I’m finally going through the spreadsheets I created in Excel and the reports from Dramatica, I find that I did NOT really finish it.

Not surprising: when I spent those three weeks at LaSalle as chaperone for our teenage homeschooling chemistry interns in 2007 (?), I was still working on PURGATORY!

Back then, I did the fully-fleshed encoded storyform for Book 1, and did a great deal with the enrobing of Book 2, somewhat less for Book 3.

When, years later, I had finished and published PURGATORY (Oct. – Dec. 2015), and plunged into writing NETHERWORLD, I found myself at the same stage I’m at now for LIMBO, where I hadn’t done as much work on NETHERWORLD as I thought I had, and it was NOT ready to ‘just write’. It took several months to get it to that state.

Well, it turns out that LIMBO is pretty skimpily encoded. I can’t write it from this state – because I don’t have each individual scene and its requirements planned.

So, after another year+ of not writing, I have to go back to planning and organizing, which means RE-READING most of the notes I wrote myself in 2016 as I put Book 2 through its paces. And finding that they help – a lot – except that the final details of the end of the whole trilogy are sketched in much less than I thought they were, so I’m having to repeat the whole process, AND the third book is actually a leveling up of a bunch of concepts, rather than a duplication of the same concepts from the previous two books.

Complicated enough yet?

All this means is that I have work to do.

With all my written notes, I can figure out what the work is, and have a scaffolding for escalating the parts of the structure that will need it.

I THINK I’ve learned enough now that this part of the process won’t take me months this time. It is OBVIOUS where I’m going with it, and I know what it needs to produce, the list of scenes with every important detail assigned to the appropriate one of them.

The auxiliary files – spreadsheets and calendar – will take a bit of time, but I know how much it helps to have them, and have models from Books 1 & 2.

YESTERDAY the pre-learning tantrum occurred

If you haven’t heard the concept, it comes from Dr. Karen Pryor’s Don’t shoot the dog, and expresses the frustration at a key point in the learning process:

The old ways don’t work, and the new ways don’t make sense. Yet.

My brain HURT, physically, as I struggled to make sense of how to apply my process for the third time, BUT to a more complicated book.

But YESTERDAY I had a brain for a while, a stubborn one, and I didn’t quit, didn’t put it off, didn’t flee at the pain, but broke it down into the tiniest of steps.

And voilà! We broke through.

I figured out what the heck I was doing (and for a bonus, WHY it was giving me such a hard time), and calmly took the first tiny step – in this case, assigning the major plot steps to the list of chapters and scenes. Starting from those fragmentary bits from 2007, I started putting up the scaffolding and bolting it into place.

So that today, when I ran into the first wall, I recognized it and started the process of getting over it. WITHOUT freaking out.

I think I’m okay now. The tantrum was painful, but it is already receding, another one conquered by method and patience.

There are plenty of missing bits, so I have plenty of WORK to do, but I also have the memory that twice before, when the blueprint was finished I could move on to the construction phase, and I am actually EAGER to tackle the project.

Then go back and revise 41.1 (LIMBO’s first chapter’s first scene if you count from the beginning of PURGATORY, 1.1 if you start numbering in LIMBO) IF necessary, and then confidently grab the next one and write IT, over and over until the words are out.

Even though there are always MORE walls.

Maybe this time it will be done in fewer years.

Is this elaborate process worth it to me?

Yes, because, with my damaged brain, I can’t write anything with any level of complexity otherwise.

And also yes, because, once the rigging is finished and I start raising sails, we fly over the water (okay, I’m slow at that, too), and I have hopes of finishing a book.

And this one IS the biggie, the third one which tests/proves the rule, the solution/end/completion to the trilogy – and I can’t wait to read it.

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To celebrate, here is the very beginning of LIMBO over at prideschildren.com, the tiny prologue/Prothalamion which is the continuation of the New Yorker article that is the frame around the trilogy, purportedly written by someone interested in ‘telling’ The Great American Love Story, years after and with all the missing pieces.

And readers of the whole will enjoy knowing a LOT more than that journalist – and knowing which pieces in that article are truth.

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Biggest disappointments for self-published authors

THE ON/OFF SWITCH – PERSONAL USE, RECOMMENDATIONS

The post below has been sitting in my DRAFTS folder for months. As usual, when something is a bit controversial, I find myself not wanting to make waves – but some of these topics need discussing, because SPAs (self-published authors) don’t have teams at their publisher to KNOW what to DO.

The topics are ones I struggle with – not ones I’ve solved.

TAKE AS SUGGESTIONS AND QUESTIONS: RANDOM MARKETING THOUGHTS

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What do you support?

I haven’t figured out yet how this works, so I’m asking myself how I would deal with some of these questions. And I have friends who are authors in different genres from what I like to read, so the question isn’t academic: Do I buy their books? Do I read them? Do I review? Do I recommend them? The answers are not obvious.

My writing support, except for my original writing partner from last century, Sandy, has always been online, but I have come to ‘know’ some of these writers rather well, mostly from long back-and-forth conversations (comment threads) about mutually interesting topics.

If a friend opened a restaurant, would you go?

If a friend opened a store, would you visit and possibly buy or commission something? Would you think of them when you needed something they sold?

If one of your children did an outstanding job in a play, would you be proud, tell people, and try to get people to go see the play?

If your child is now a mechanic, would you send customers to their workplace?

Family and friends

who don’t share or recommend, who seem more embarrassed by you than proud of what you’ve done. Would I be the same? I like to think I wouldn’t.

But we aren’t necessarily each other’s audience, just because we share DNA.

It seems to be an ON/OFF switch. I asked, for example, about a niece’s new business, only to be discouraged from trying to find something there because I am not in her target demographic. Not fancy enough, not thin enough, not rich enough…?

Asking for help and not getting it

Each ‘ask’ is making myself vulnerable – without some special reason, why would someone help you? So when I do that, open up a little bit of my diffidence, tell a stranger who seems potentially interested due to something THEY’VE written, something personal – and get the usual “Good luck!” back, instead of something more specific and more useful and more personal (such as actual help), my carapace hardens further, and it’s harder the next time.

Turning someone’s request for help down should be done gently, possibly with an actual usable suggestion as to where to get the help. So far the help rarely materializes; the help which does is small and within the obvious parameters and requires a lot of time and effort to ask for in the first place.

A lot of care, and research into what they’ve said before, goes into creating a request which MIGHT get a review, for example.

Best not to make implicit offers if you’re not open to carrying through, and just want to make yourself SOUND caring, open, and helpful.

Finding the RIGHT readers, being turned down – it happens

Many SPAs are introverts – not great at asking or marketing – but we try to do it, anyway. Sometimes we’re clumsy at it.

Not getting the readers who, by their reviews or comments, you think would really understand your work. Commenting is easy, agreeing to read and review requires a commitment of time, energy, and skills. I get that.

Replying to strangers who act as if they think they know you and your requirements – obviously difficult. Reviewers are used to getting many, and many completely unsuitable, requests for their time. But it’s still rare to find them actively seeking ‘good stuff’ among these requests. It’s more likely to run up against their fence-posts: ‘temporarily closed submissions’, ‘no longer reading…’, and my very personal favorite, ‘no self-publishing.’

Their statistics are probably accurate: most of what is offered isn’t as good as the submitter wants to imply it is. Most of the books offered are generic, and come with generic appeals.

But there often seems little room for the carefully-crafted appeal that takes into account more than just the submission guidelines, and shows a real effort by the requester to make sure this is the kind of material the reviewer likes – and earns a generic turndown. The worst? A generic turndown months later.

Those who substitute congratulations for support.

These are often people who congratulate you on publishing but never buy or read, much less review. Sort of the adult generations ‘participation trophy’ view of the world.

Instead of taking their trust in you as a person to imply that maybe, just maybe, you might have a little something special as a writer, and they are in a privileged position to participate in the launch.

And, since you know them, you might have actually taken that into account in writing – so they would find resonances and interesting bits in YOUR fiction they wouldn’t find in a random author’s fiction – because you’re, somehow, ‘one of us.’

Gedankenexperiment?

The perfect term – thought experiment – for when doing actual experiments won’t work. For the writing/publishing field, with readers as independent data points you don’t know, unless you have a big marketing firm that can find a way to understand the individual points in the context of a whole, the experiments are not independent explorations of how a group of readers might respond, but instead an attempt to put oneself INTO the point of view of those individual readers, and figure out what is going on.

The clear first step is to let a bunch of readers of your kind of fiction know you exist. This is targeted advertising – but only studies those who would see your ads. You can’t make them change where they get their information, so if you can’t access those same information sources to provide yours, you’re out of luck. Example: if they only look at Kirkus reviews, they won’t even see your information unless you BUY a Kirkus review for your book, and not even that if the readers you crave have already trained themselves to scroll/look past the Kirkus indie reviews.

Using what’s special to market

Your book? Lots of ideas out there to market to various groups. Each one takes energy to develop for those different groups.

Yourself? A little tricky for fiction – and very hard to take back once you’re over-shared. And it can get you a label you can’t shake. And make you subject to being ‘inspiration porn’ – cute or interesting or laudable, but not really enough ‘good’ to succeed without being patted on the head.

ANSWERS? Go viral.

NO ONE knows how to make something become the next big thing – or how to capitalize on it if you happen to get that kick of karma.

Commercial PR firms do a lot of work, and charge a lot – and sometimes succeed at making it look effortless.

On your own, it’s very unlikely.

What you CAN do is to ask yourself, “Am I ready if it happens?” Can people find my books, can they buy them easily, is it easy to get them from the library? Is the front matter and back matter up to date wherever the books are sold? Will they know where to sign up to be informed when the next book comes out? Can they find my other books?

And the biggest: is the next book being created right now?

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That’s it, in a nutshell: be ready – hope to get lucky.

And the perennial: write a VERY GOOD BOOK. Because if you don’t, all the publicity and virality in the world won’t keep the readers you snag.

If you know THE ANSWER, please send it privately – nothing spoils a secret like sharing it on the internet. I will be eternally grateful.

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Disability Book Week started without me

MAKE AN EFFORT THIS WEEK TO READ A ‘DISABILITY’ BOOK

Disability is very common; hidden disability even more common (1 in 5 adults has a significant disability).

This week libraries and other book places may have a display which encourages you to try a book

WRITTEN by a disabled author, or

ABOUT a disabled character.

There are lots of these books

I did submit both Pride’s Children: PURGATORY and NETHERWORLD, as they are BOTH, but was not chosen this year.

Of course, YOU can read either of MINE and hit that category.

But the whole point is awareness

and I encourage you to become MORE aware, even if you are neither disabled nor have a family member or close friend who is.

Because the reality is that you are five times more likely to become disabled during your working years than you are to die, but most people have LIFE INSURANCE, and don’t even know if they have LONG TERM DISABILITY INSURANCE.

Please investigate – disability insurance, if you have to purchase it yourself, is NOT expensive – and having it kept our family middle class in those many years I was of working age – and unable to get back to the physics work I loved.

Don’t rely on Social Security Disability

You might get it when you need it, you might apply repeatedly before getting it, or you might never manage to fulfill the requirements to get it – and in ANY case it is NEVER generous. Ask anyone surviving on SSDI alone.

Private disability INSURANCE usually covers something like 60% of your salary.

Caveats: most are not really designed for ‘long term’, as they have no inflation protection in spite of their name – check your policy carefully. A few years without income can be very difficult, but a lifetime at the salary you had when you were 30 can be a disaster.

Become ‘Disability savvy’

Think about what you would do – and read some of these books – if you had to, for example, navigate Target in a wheelchair – or get to Denver for a child’s wedding.

Be kinder to disabled folk – we didn’t choose to become this way; for some of us, we didn’t choose to be BORN this way.

Do your little bit: Federal LAW requires that DISABLED PASSENGERS be allowed to board FIRST. BEFORE First Class Passengers. BEFORE passengers with children. Did you know that? Honored more in the breach than in the observance by AIRLINES.

So, use markers such as Disability Book Week to remind you that we’re all equally worthy – but some of us may need a little more time or some assistance, and it would be a much nicer world for all of us if accessibility were BUILT-IN instead of tacked on.

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Obsession is liking something way too much

A DANGEROUS WORD, A DANGEROUS CONCEPT

OBSESSION is

The foundation for Pride’s Children: PURGATORY and Pride’s Children: NETHERWORLD.

And defending the consequences of that obsession is the foundation of Pride’s Children: LIMBO, which I am sharing as I write through the final volume of the trilogy.

When does liking something, preferring it, turn into obsession? When it dominates too much of your waking hours, when it starts to interfere with your dreams.

Overdoing calm control leaves you vulnerable

The one who had no trouble learning Mathematics or Logic in school, who has a PhD (for heaven’s sake!) in NUCLEAR Engineering (fusion) was a big reader as a child, and has always had this, uh, underpinning to her temperament, a capacity for intense interest in something fantastical.

The tech subjects were easy, easier than it seemed they were for other little girls in the classes, so the decision was made to represent women, and follow that lead. It seemed a waste not to use the gift that had been given to that child.

Besides, it seemed to amuse the grownups, to make them take the little girl more seriously.

It had the wonderful side benefit it still has: understanding the why of everything from snowflake patterns to the rings of Jupiter, to make the natural world even more fascinating.

Capacity was not limited

It seemed I could do both: understand the logical stuff, and stuff my head with reading the fantastical. Switch the intense focus from one to the other, still be happy. The fact that no others seemed to enjoy the same dichotomy made it a little lonely, but the family support was warm, and the teachers had a high-performing pupil to point to and be proud of, and there was plenty to occupy the time.

If anyone had tried to focus that intensity at that age, they could probably have created either kind of monster, but most adult energy was expended elsewhere in a class with 50 students, and the mother had four younger children and needed help and had no problem demanding it. The father worked long hours building his engineering business, and the grownups were happy not to have problems to deal with.

The child was allowed to obsess without much in the way of supervision.

Or direction.

Or individual guidance. Or indeed anywhere to express it.

Call it ‘benign neglect.’

The keystone: neglect

If you’re quiet and don’t make waves, and sparkle when a flashlight is shone in your general direction, you fly under many radar beams.

Switched to an American college halfway through university because there were ‘student’ (ie, young communists with nothing better to do than disrupt) riots at the Mexican one, but because I spoke perfect American English (it was, after all, my mother tongue), no one at the new US university realized or made an effort to smooth the transition they didn’t realized had been made. Benign neglect again.

The transfer student didn’t make waves, have academic problems or do any of the things which trigger supervisory attention. The grades were good, the activities obvious, and no distress signals seemed to be being put out.

She also had no guidance about what to do or what to do next – not an uncommon situation in college – but, when graduation approached and she didn’t want to go home to Mexico, someone mentioned that she should take the Graduate Record Exam. So she signed up, with no clue that one should prepare for it, and showed up with her yellow pencils on the appointed day.

One section was hard – it had a bunch of questions on details of Optics, a subject never studied. But either it was amenable to logic (as applied), or it was the ‘experimental’ section which didn’t count, because the test results were high numbers.

And the professor who had made a pass, and was probably feeling somewhat guilty about it, read in the paper that another university had a big grant in fusion, and suggested that the girl student should apply there, and went an extra step and CALLED the director of the program. Who said, even though the deadline was past, “Send her papers.”

Graduate school – where benign neglect is not a good thing

I was the only woman student in my cohort. Was not invited to participate in the sessions where the male students did their homework and helped each other learn. The advisor I had applied to work for LEFT soon after I got there, to a big corporation – didn’t reply when I sent a request for guidance. The new advisor was a recent PhD destined for bigger things who found one male grad student in our bunch who thought like him – and groomed him only. He had no clue how to advise the lone female student allotted to him, except to tell her she should ‘read the literature.’ Full stop. No details. No guidance. Attempts to change advisors were unsuccessful.

Stumbled through. Did a project that was useful to the little empire the advisor was creating because the data supported a pet theory of his. No one told her that 90% of the students going through such a program were NOT destined to be sucked up by academia OR the national labs that were considered the next step, but would have to find a job ‘elsewhere.’ The obsession with reading, mostly SF now, continued unabated. In self defense.

Skip ahead a lot

to where all this disconnected stuff had resulted in working on submarines, marriage, a failed bid to become a NASA Mission Specialist, a leveraging miracle of some sort resulting in a job at Princeton – in fusion! – with a discovered facility for handling large computer codes on CRAYs, and two small children.

And then the disaster: contracted a virus at a physics conference where I was presenting a paper, went home with a raging infection – and never got well: ME/CFS had claimed another random victim.

Obsession went underground – there was no energy to feed it with, and a third child on the way – but the specter of a STEM PhD at home, sick, led to what I called ‘accidental homeschooling’ – the use of that education to bring up offspring who turned out to be easy to teach – rather than deal with the logistics of school buses and lunches and paperwork and parental involvement.

And then obsession struck again

Writing fiction. I could do that in tiny chunks once the kids didn’t require every second of my attention. I had always planned to do it in retirement; it happened earlier, agewise, because there wasn’t much else I could do when we had accomplished the necessary schooling: my energy was so limited even leaving the house was rare.

And then the biggie: they were going off to college around the same time a single story hit me and demanded to be written – because ONLY I would write this one. So many things went into it – including an obsession with books and science and movies and a crippling disease – causing a flash burn that showed me the story from one end to the other at once.

Now I’m in my twenty-third year of an unabated obsession, and writing the third volume of what turned out to be the single welded spot where it all stuck and – dare I say it? – fused. I marvel at its staying power, because it happened to the slowest writer on the planet.

Would it be the same?

If I had made it as an astronaut?

If I had stayed a researcher in fusion physics?

If I hadn’t become chronically ill?

If I hadn’t had children or spouse?

If I had succeeded in getting the mystery series accepted by a traditional publisher?

If, in other words, I hadn’t been thwarted a lot in how to apply the capacity for obsession?

I doubt it. Becoming what the bruising travel over the rapids made me, has been trigger and sustenance.

OBSESSION = WRITER’S FRIEND

You get what your writer IS.

**********

Prequel SHORT story (1500 words): Pride’s Children prequel: Too Late

and if you liked it (and followed the PC site):

Pride’s Children: PURGATORY

Pride’s Children: NETHERWORLD

Pride’s Children: LIMBO (coming ASAP)

Apologies for US links here only – a universal link is on the To Do list.

**********

You’re never too old for writing FEAR

From my FEAR and RESISTANCE JOURNAL today:

It got me again.

I, who have published 352K words of Pride’s Children, am terrified. Again.

It’s been a year since the writing of NETHERWORLD ended and the publishing part began, and my body and I have been through a lot.

And I’m getting started back into the final volume, with a strong path ahead of me through plotting that’s been necessary since the very beginning.

I wrote the first scene and the new Prothalamion, thought I was on a roll.

I decided to not mess with a good thing, and to go back to the detailed process that gets me through each scene.

So I started updating the auxiliary files and spreadsheets and graphics and Dramatica files – finding all the pieces one by one in my detailed Scrivener projects.

Getting ready to write as quickly as I can (I HAVE gotten faster at following my own system), I readied all the surrounding bits for the second scene, 41.2 if you number from 1.1 in PURGATORY and 21.1 in NETHERWORLD.

And I froze.

Have gotten NOTHING more written in two full days – only partly brain-fogged days – when I was so sure I’d just plunge right back in.

It’s the same old FEAR: you think you’ve conquered it – until it comes back again and waylays you.

It takes you into a dark alley and tells you you’ll never do it again: this one, the denouement, has to be higher and trickier and more explosive than the previous two, AND you have to bring everything to a logical, complete, and unforeseen but perfect CONCLUSION, and just because you wrestled the lower level bosses to a standstill doesn’t mean you have it for the Big Boss.

Aargh!

I remember reading about a Broadway megastar who still throws up before every performance. 

41.1 can’t go out until I’m sure I haven’t left something important out by free-writing it.

41.2 can’t get written until I make the deep cuts in all the contributing files to get the gold – or write new gold.

It’s not going to get easier.

It’s going to get harder.

And I’m older.

And scared.

Tough. DO IT ANYWAY.

Pretending it was going to get easier is simply the mind’s way of keeping you together until you get to the starting gate.

It’s a lie, a helpful lie, but still.

I have to DO THE WORK.

I have to GO THROUGH.

There is NO AROUND.

NO ONE is going to come rescue me – there isn’t anyone who can, anyway.

It’s my baby. It was vouchsafed to me WHOLE in 2000.

ONLY I can write it.

And I don’t quit.

Just remember I’m terrified when you ask me how it’s going.

***********

I just paid to upgrade my ‘FREE’ wordpress blog to a paid PERSONAL blog – why didn’t anyone tell me my blog posts were larded with ads for garbage?

They said ads would appear at the bottom maybe – but today I got a taste of the horror of my post INTERSPERSED with gruesome ADS.

MY APOLOGIES if you’ve been subjected to this – LET ME KNOW if it happens again.

Now we’ve really gotten to Armageddon: you have to pay NOT to have ADS.

***********

Learn to teach yourself to edit yourself

SELF-EDITING IS A LEARNED SKILL

We’ll assume for the sake of principle that there are people who want to edit others, and people who want to be edited by others, and that they WILL FIND EACH OTHER, make commercial or other arrangements, and live happily ever after.

This post is not for them.

Good luck to those who use editors – but MAKE SURE you learn how to do every single thing they point out is ‘wrong,’ so you wean yourself off external advice as early as possible.

———-

NO ONE is born knowing how to edit OR self-edit

It’s regular CLICKBAIT, and I’ll get in trouble with the Writing Police for pointing it out: if you’re going to be a writer, especially one who writes fiction, an editor is inimical to your process of discovering YOUR writing VOICE.

Someone else can’t sound like you. They can only drag your words closer to some idealized medium value that everyone thinks is ‘best.’

Editing and self-editing are LEARNED SKILLS. Writing is much harder, but if you’ve read this far, it’s because you, for your own writing ONLY, think that using someone else, at great expense and time commitment, to clean up your own work because it doesn’t yet meet YOUR standards seems somehow economically and morally wrong.

Don’t argue with me – and this may apply only to me: don’t pay anyone to trample around in your word garden.

When I see manuscripts Editors have marked-up in red, my stomach does very unpleasant things.

Self-editing is a learned skill. If you learn to edit yourself, you will only need to learn to edit ONE person – editing for fun or profit requires that you be flexible enough to, and interested enough to change someone else’s words, into “better” words; I have no objection to that – for those who want it and can afford it and don’t mind what it does to their words.

———-

LEARN to do all the individual editing tasks yourself

Become a mature writer. DO the WORK of learning. You’re a professional now; this is your job.

You’ll thank me in the long run. Editors have to learn – they are not born.

Never trust software – always use it with extreme caution, and only for counting things (my pet peeve – Business English). Software, even that which claims to be ‘trained’ on fiction, is a regression to the mean. Think about it: who is their target audience? The small percentage of people who write fiction – or the masses of office workers who produce ‘content’ daily in huge amounts?

LEARN to plot. Lay your story out in steps from beginning to end. With or without detail.

LEARN to spell, and to recognize when you’re iffy about a word – meaning or spelling – and go look it up.

Be aware of the first time you write any kind of scene – and go read a couple of books with advice about that kind of scene, and then find your own path.

Read books which teach YOU. If you’re a pantser, don’t read books about plotting and outlining. If you’re an extreme plotter (like me), don’t follow pantsers for advice. LEARN to tell the difference, and figure out where you are on the spectrum between the two. It is the biggest contribution I can make to happiness in the newbie writing world.

It will all save you time, money, and angst in the long run.

If you’re me, of course.

Also, never let anything out until at least one trusted pair of eyes and a brain have read it carefully for you.

———-

LEARN to sound like your models, the writers you admire

Your own sense of right and wrong and written should have been previously developed in fine detail from extensive READING, the books YOU like to read, for PLEASURE.

For writers like me, who want to write complex novels, it helps to read a lot of them, especially the classics.

And you can get the robot software on your devices to read things out loud to you, including your own writing: close your eyes and listen to the cadences, the awkward phrasings, the confusing bits – and the good stuff.

I don’t know if audiobooks would help – they are professional performances, and don’t show the mistakes in getting there. But a robot voice on my Mac, getting something absurdly wrong, has been quite helpful (after I stop laughing).

———-

GO DO your own thing

Only you can write your books. Only you can make them sound like you. Only you can care enough to put in the effort.

———-

POST SCRIPT:

Don’t bother trying to use this post of mine to tell people (and me) we need editors. Instead, kindly go write your own posts about why you think everyone always needs an editor, and supply your rates.

———-

Nailing pet peeves for the final trilogy volume

CAN READERS CHANGE WHAT THEY READ?

I’m a big fan of ‘canon’ – what the author of a book or series of books has written IN the book(s), what the true fans consider immutable and the final word.

I don’t read books or sequels written by someone else, mostly because every time I’ve tried that in the past, the results just made me mad.

Case in point: the sequel to Gone With the Wind, the book Scarlett, written by Alexandra Ripley – I know I would agree with many of the 1* reviews if I had read it, simply by seeing a plot summary.

Case in point: The 7% Solution, an attempt to write a Sherlock Holmes story in the ‘style’ of Conan Doyle – I did NOT like it, felt Holmes had been stretched and distorted in ways apparent in NONE of the canon stories from Sir Arthur.

I love writers precisely for their style, their unique way of writing a sentence, plotting a story, evincing the themes. And for THEIR unique creations: their characters.

Not very flexible – am I? – and either you are the way I am, or not, and I don’t aim to convert anyone!

This is your chance to argue for me to ALTER canon as I write LIMBO

Just as a writerly experiment, and because I’m at the stage (I have an awkward horrible rough draft written many years ago to scope out all the ideas, and written in a lot of haste before I learned better how to manipulate words) where I CAN possibly alter the text of the rest of the story a bit, I’m floating another one of my odd ideas:

If you were me, and could eliminate pet peeves in the final volume of my mainstream trilogy, Pride’s Children: LIMBO, what would YOU choose to emphasize?

Think like a famous author, with a ghostwriter who will do the actual writing, retaining all control over both content and style.

What would you have me do slightly differently from the previous PURGATORY and NETHERWORLD (preferably based on your having read them, but I won’t insist, and probably can’t prove it anyway)?

What would you like me to make sure does NOT appear in LIMBO?

What would you do if you were writing LIMBO?

What bothers YOU?

It would be kind if you mentioned why, or just generally what other kind of books you like to read, as the basis for your personal peeve, but I also won’t insist on a reason.

No promises, except that I will consider carefully and thoroughly any suggestions, and at least let you know privately that I did if I accept your suggestion. Fair enough?

**********

I’m about to get serious.

I have started the process of bringing the new MacBook Air up to speed in my environment – just ordered an external SSD for backups which will be delivered tomorrow.

The thinking part, given that the Migration Assistant supplied by Apple has failed (it did last time I upgraded – must be me), will take a bit of time, but I’ve decided I can ALSO trust the beginning plot/plan for LIMBO, since it is so clear in my mind and starts only a few hours after the end of NETHERWORLD – and give in to the writing itch.

Plus the paperwork problem is supposedly almost finished (ask me Sunday night), and dumping it on the accountants should go smoothly (ha?!?), and I can get out from under something that has been in my way for over 1.5 years.

So tomorrow I install the SSD, download and authenticate my copy of Scrivener3 (paid for long ago) and watch a video or two about the new features, and WRITE again, with the intent of seeing if I can speed up the process to make up for lost time.

Oh, and install Pixelmator3, also long paid for, now that I have a LOT of internal storage space on the Air (one of the reasons for upgrading): LIMBO’s cover is clear in my mind, also to be executed in downtime (graphics are easy compared to words), so I have the cover ready by the time the text is finished and edited and proofed. Graphics take a lot of space if you want to keep layers separate for future ease of change.

TOO LATE, the prequel short

It’s been submitted to a literary magazine which would be a lovely addition to my credentials if they decide to publish it.

ONE of the reasons for doing so is that I forced myself to make the necessary final pass to edit the style as close as possible to match the style of the novels. It was as much work as I expected since TOO LATE was written before the final version of PURGATORY had settled into what you might call my voice.

If not, the cover is started, the crucial photo approved, and the whole plan for the ‘look,’ so it is obviously part of the trilogy’s story, is in place. I’ll throw it up on Amazon for a buck, and/or use it as a reader magnet, but a final ebook version is required, and it’s now much closer than it was before.

That’s the plan, in any case.

Hoping to hear your pet peeves.

**********

2023 Update on B1 megadoses, CFS, and writing

MISSING FROM POSTING IS ENDING!

I never intended to stop writing blog posts here, and at the books’ site – it just sort of happened, for the usual reason these things happen to me: there is only so much energy left to someone with ME/CFS after dealing with it during a day, and only so much of it doesn’t have active brain fog, and stress makes it worse, never better (I don’t have the equivalent of being able to supercharge with caffeine, adrenaline, or, well, anything).

So ‘things happening’ and climbing to the top of the priorities lists (as they always do) means other things get neglected.

I’ve posted some when I had a little energy, but I have about twelve STARTED posts, six per blog, because when I have an idea I quickly create a new one, think up a temporary title, possibly even create a graphic (thanks, Stencil, for 10 free ones a month), sketch in a few quick notes… And usually follow up. Which I haven’t been up to doing lately.

Erratic is the result. Sometimes people even forget you exist.

And they certainly don’t have time in their lives to track another blogger down.

COMMENTING keeps my hand in

and serves a second purpose: getting the brain cells trained toward thought and typing.

If I find an interesting post, I will leave a comment if I have anything to contribute to the conversation. Bloggers don’t get enough engagement, and they put a lot of thought into the posts, and seem to like even my digressions (ON their topic) enough not to block me. Online I’m more of an opinionated extrovert than I manage in person. I still try to keep it civil and not sound as if I’m the ultimate authority on the subject – my rule for myself is, “If you wouldn’t say it to someone’s face, don’t say it at all.” True internet anonymity is not my style.

If I get it wrong, I apologize. Text exchanges inherently lack nuance, and more than once I’ve interpreted something my way and found out from a reply that it was meant some other way. Even with knowing the blog or FB stream, it happens. Twice in the last year the best response was to delete what I said. Not too bad, considering I flap my fingers thousands of times. And have strong opinions of my own.

But commenting doesn’t mean I’m capable of organizing and finishing a post of my own; often it means the opposite.

THE BIG ONE is almost finished

I wish it had been another piece of fiction, but it wasn’t. It was a tax problem which affected me, has taken a lot of time to resolve, and is ALMOST finished, which is why I can START thinking about how to use my time for my writing again.

I like to contribute as much as I can to problems which are partly mine. And this one was big enough that I needed to maintain as much of my usable ‘good time’ for it every day – and ONLY for it – because I have such a small amount of it that it really can’t be split and still get anything accomplished. It also took almost all of my assistant’s time in the two 2-hour sessions I had with her over months, so I got no other benefit from her time most sessions.

But the problem slowly got pinned down and then solved, piece by piece, because I CAN do that, still, if I HAVE to.

I fear for when this is no longer true.

And worry that other things aren’t getting done.

But I refuse to be a parasite just because I am disabled, and I COULD help with this one, so I did.

And I still managed to get Pride’s Children: NETHERWORLD published – by spending the money, and having my good friend Bill Peschel do the cover and formatting work. Yes, he was great. No, he’s not making a career of that part of it – he has enough work of his and his wife’s to keep him quite busy, thankyouverymuch.

Otherwise I would be sending everything I could his way. Our loss.

The PHYSICAL parts I will gloss over:

The first was necessary and long postponed surgery (due to the pandemic) last September (which is why I had someone else help get NETHERWORLD out – you never know for sure if you’ll come out of surgery). And a totally unexpected VERY painful recovery and meds mess; mostly over now.

The second, this year, for the fun of it, was a trip to the ER because of chest pain. Did you know that half of the time you have chest pain AND elevated troponin (a cardiac enzyme) levels, it is NOT a heart attack, but you’ve probably done something and deprived your hear muscle of adequate oxygen for a while? But they can’t tell without dragging you to a hospital WITH a cardiac unit, and performing an angiogram to see if any of your stents have plugged up OR you need a new one OR, I assume, something else is wrong. Big fuss. Hospitals (2). Days (3). Recovery (a good week). All of this very difficult when you already have ME/CFS. I will not be doing carpet scrubbing bent over any more. The good new was that I don’t need more stents; the bad part was that I already knew that from the angiogram required prior to surgery last September. And the final word was from the cardiologist who released me who said, “Well, that should be good for another 2 – 5 years,” and who probably wasn’t thinking that I’d had one four months before which should have meant I was okay now. I’m grateful they don’t take chances, but the effect on my tiny life was astronomical.

That’s me ‘glossing over’ anything. For Heaven’s sake, the woman likes to talk! Maybe the second paragraph will help someone else in the future…

Now that I’m supposed to be getting MY life back…

all I want to do is finish LIMBO, and see if I can shorten the 3-5 year expected time to write and publish it.

The other tasks (some of which I’ve been kicking along in little bits of time) include:

Getting readers and reviews for NETHERWORLD. Seven 5* reviews/ratings is a lovely start. Selling one copy in February 2023 is not. ARCs are slowly going out to the reviewers who said they were waiting for it, but it is a long time commitment (about 12 hours to read, plus the time it takes to review), and each ask takes me a couple of days of my tiny bits of leftover ‘second best time.’

Submitting to awards. NETHERWORLD was a Finalist for the 2022 Indies Today Awards, a decent showing for the second novel in a trilogy (PURGATORY won 2021 Best Contemporary novel from Indies Today last year). I’ve submitted to one other award – will know in May – but investigating awards which are good to have has taken a lot of time, and applying to them is getting expensive. I have more to say about help on that front, but won’t, for now.

Marketing. Two attempts to get help from ‘professionals’ have resulted in nothing yet; one of the companies has ghosted me twice (hmmm).

Mainstream literary fiction – the best way to categorize what I write – is a difficult sell if you’re a self-published author; even my Facebook group admin for marketing it has stated they ONLY take their recommendations from regular media (in their case, broadsheets (newspapers) of significant repute which still have review sections). Discouraging.

My somewhat tongue-in-cheek post about how to go viral with literary fiction left me with finding the right influencer as the main method, and I’m trying, but it’s even harder than finding reviewers!

I had at one time the thought of looking at the reviews of popular traditionally-published literary novels – and targeting the readers who DIDN’T like those – until I realized what a huge effort that might be (there were thousands), and decided it would be better to spend the energy writing LIMBO, as having a COMPLETE trilogy is considered far better than having only one or two volumes finished. I’m not sure I believe that – there was a lot of publicity (much of it expensive PAID publicity) for Elena Ferrante’s quartet before the last two came out – but my record for marketing up until now is unprepossessing. At best.

THE REST OF MY SO-CALLED LIFE

The pandemic – and waiting for surgery – did a number on the fun things here at our retirement community.

I’m now able to go out (when it’s warm enough) and ride around on Maggie (my Airwheel S8, a bicycle seat on a hoverboard) on and off our campus. I’ll have to build up to doing that more – and possibly find new people to do it with.

I will be going back to using our pools, including the nice warm therapy pool I love to bob in for a half-hour or less, followed by the huge but necessary time-wasting of a shower with hair-washing.

I hope to regenerate our folk-singing group, on hiatus because singing in an enclosed space turned out to be a really good way to spread the virus, but will have to find a safe way to do that (a bigger, better-ventilated room would help). It has been so many years since we sang together that it will be practically a new venture.

I’m back to using B1 (150mg of benfotiamine + 500mg of Vitamin B1, 2-3 times daily) plus B12 (liquid B12, dropperful sublingually up to 8 times daily) because they or the combination seems a LITTLE bit better than nothing for getting me to have a usable brain.

And I continue to write better when blocking the internet with FREEDOM or ANTI-SOCIAL for a given chunk of time, so I don’t get sidetracked (I’m easily distractible – shiny!).

THE REST OF MY WRITING LIFE

All the obvious:

blog posts

sales for the books

publishing Too Late, the prequel short story

marketing

finding MY readers out of the vast sea of not-my-readers

maybe some short stories about Kary, Andrew, Bianca – and offspring

the next big writing project/book

publicity of some kind – possibly including me if there is enough interest

the as-read-by-author audiobooks

the easier hardcover and large print books

applying for relevant awards

and always, finding ways to persuade reviewers whose reviews I like that they will enjoy reading MY story, and will possibly encourage me by giving the books one of their lovely reviews.

———-

I think that’s about it. Y’all are sort of up-to-date about my MIA status.

I no longer have a BookSprout account (it didn’t produce a single download or review of either PURGATORY or NETHERWORLD in a year), so contact me (comments or About for the email address) if you would like an ARC and would CONSIDER writing a review; I don’t nag.

If you like my fiction, there’s a lot of short stuff here

I am always honored when a reader recommends Pride’s Children to friends or family. Or BOOK CLUB!

Visit the Pride’s Children blog for more about the books (including questions for book clubs!) and to read the prequel. If you FOLLOW there, you’ll find out more about LIMBO and timing and sales when I send out the occasional email/newsletter.

Pray for stability to my life – it helps the writing.

———-

How to go viral with literary fiction

IS IT DESIRABLE TO MAKE LITERARY FICTION GO VIRAL IN THE FIRST PLACE?

Big question. Big risk. Big reward?

Before talking about HOW, the question is WHY?

‘Going viral’ is a short way of saying ‘become wildly popular so everyone wants one.’

Potentially lucrative.

Also, potentially lethal.

It is one thing to have a product/idea be popular with the masses, but it is another to have the masses laugh at it.

A hula hoop going viral at the right time becomes a toy that almost anyone can buy – AND almost anyone can learn to use – at least sort of. Right before Christmas, at the right price (enough for a hefty markup but not expensive enough to break anyone’s bank), and balanced with the manufacturing ability to produce more in a hurry, hula hoops were very popular and sold millions. (Disclosure: I had one as a kid in Mexico, and was pretty good at it.)

But a book?

It almost seems contradictory to the concept of literary fiction to try to make it go viral.

Except that it has been done.

Something like two MILLION copies of The Goldfinch were printed.

Something like half of those copies were eventually pulped.

Unknown numbers of the ones purchased were READ.

Unknown numbers decorated coffee tables as the ‘book to have.’ Not to have read, necessarily, but to seem to have read. It being literary fiction and wildly popular, if you had a copy you wouldn’t necessarily tell your friends whether you had read the whole thing or not.

Full disclosure: I read the reviews, lots of them, and decided it was probably not my kind of book: too many of the complaints were pet peeves. Some day I will find out for myself, but the day hasn’t come when I can divert MY focus without derailing my own writing. Yet.

How did it go viral?

The most expensive way, the way of the BIG traditional publisher, with a campaign that put the publisher’s entire resources behind a gamble: that they could push a literary novel into being THE literary novel of the season, make it a ‘must have’ and sell enough copies to justify the advance, the push, AND enhance the publisher’s reputation.

Not just reputation, but selling a reasonable number of paper bricks at a hardcover price is lucrative – one well-publicized ‘winner’ can carry the publishing house’s season.

The economics get all fuzzy if the numbers don’t work out, or they would use this system for all their books every season. But the economics MUST work out, or the big publishers wouldn’t keep trying to find (make) the breakout novel of the season.

In sum, it costs a lot of money, but can pay off with a lot MORE money.

How to take advantage of the possibility if you’re an SPA?

Well, if you’re already a popular SPA like Brandon Sanderson, with a loyal fan base, you can kick it to the next level with a huge Kickstarter calculated to both satisfy those fans and create a beautiful buzz for your books. [Hint: He wrote four books in secret – and then releases them to his Kickstarter fans before anyone else is allowed to buy them.]

What if you’re an unknown SPA?

Then you have to hope like crazy that you catch the public imagination – or, possibly better still, the attention of a significant influencer, and get the push from someone else’s fame.

Because the product is not an easy one to sell. For one thing, they consume, each, almost a whole waking day. And there isn’t yet an audiobook so you can do other things while listening – plus it needs closer attention than many, to pick up and follow its varied threads. It’s a pretty intense experience to live a story with three main characters by sitting inside their heads, right behind the eyeballs, thinking their thoughts and registering the external world through their senses.

Not a short commitment from a potential reader, as a popular five-minute song might be.

Add to the mix an author with no energy due to a boring chronic illness – no energy to do the vaunted indie marketing, which requires dedication and verve, spending hours creating material and doing what a whole lot of professionals at a traditional publisher will do for a favored author: designer cover, a book tour, appearances on media from internet to live TV, promotions at Walmart, movie tie-ins for the fortunate… arranging, arranging, arranging – by someone(s).

The right mix of promoting the book and promoting the writer is crucial – time-critical and planned and managed. And still subject to luck. Not just the cost – but the contacts – are crucial to try to control the presentation and roll-out for maximum exposure.

So what do I OFFER such an influencer?

Few things can be left to random kindness any more.

The best value from an influencer is one who discovers your book – and promotes it on their channel of influence (think BookTok) – without any work from the author. Because they like it.

But no one can COUNT on that LUCK. Even when a book such as the lovely The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, written by a very ill woman who paid attention to the snail in a terrarium, happens, there are friends and pushers, people who did the work of finding a publisher for her, who made it their job to promote her memoir and her writing. Another book which didn’t count on luck, but was awarded the Pulitzer for fiction, A Confederacy of Dunces, was pushed, after he couldn’t get it published and committed suicide, by John Kennedy Toole’s mother, to writer Walker Percy. Again, not something to count on.

What I can offer is the brownie points (does anyone still remember those?) from discovering something unique: a chronically ill and disabled writer who takes forever, but writes mainstream fiction – and writes it well, or the influencer wouldn’t even be considering using up their points for someone else. It could be pushed as ‘discovering the indie/self-published X’, where X is the influencer’s favorite important mainstream writer. I’m far too modest to suggest a comparison author, but my reviewers (at least two) have compared me to Jane Austen. It’s worth a thought.

And if you don’t go viral, how about getting banned?

Another path to notoriety! Otherwise known as ‘publicity.’ Anything to make a good story, right? Not mine – the influencer’s.

It’s a little harder for me – I’ve been looking to the future use of teaching Pride’s Children in schools, and have deliberately kept the actual words and events to the PG-13 level – but someone is quite welcome to take my third main character Bianca Doyle’s unorthodox way of getting a father for her children as scandalous and upsetting drivel to which innocent teenagers (!?!) should not be exposed. Go ahead – it takes little to get the righteous flustered and judgy.

Those are the potential arrows in my literary-publicity quiver

I am quite happy to discover and entertain more, if you have suggestions – I want to be widely read. I would like a few more reviewers, please rhapsodizing about my prose. You needn’t be fulsome – understated works, too.

I would like a huge contingent of breathless fans waiting for me to finally complete work on LIMBO (or LIMBO & PARADISE), to the extent of making preorders possible.

I would love a ready market for any prequel or sequel short stories about our merry band and their quarrelsome ways, and I will continue to work at my deliberate pace (or until cured) to add to the canon.

Wishes make good goals for 2023, if a tad unrealistic. One can dream.

**********

Merry Christmas, Season’s Greetings, and HAPPIER NEW YEAR to all – may the holidays you love and celebrate bring you joy.

**********

Success for literary fiction defined

WHY DO I WANT TO BE WIDELY READ?

Success? I don’t know if others are in the enviable position of not writing for a living, but I am. Which is good, because I’m what we used to call glacially slow, until the glaciers started calving and melting with climate change. A friend called it ‘at the speed of continental drift,’ which still works.

My concern is that after I’ve put twenty-two years so far into the first two books of a mainstream literary trilogy, I want READERS. Legacy would be nice, but that isn’t exactly an aim, and if you’re not known during your lifetime, you will have to be unbelievably lucky in today’s world to be known because someone championed your work after you left us.

Disability – and now – retirement make writing my personal choice. I always meant to do it when I retired from computational plasma physics at Princeton; disability just made that happen at 40 instead of 66.

I spend my energy parsimoniously – there isn’t much of it, and I want it spent on writing when it is discretionary. I’m sure that if I had managed to persuade a traditional publisher to take me on, the marketing would have still been a problem – most traditionally-published works get six weeks on a bookstore shelf before they disappear.

I would like to see all the hoopla be about the quality and especially accessibility of the writing itself: as I have always found books such as Rebecca and Jane Eyre eminently accessible STORY- and CHARACTER-wise, that is what I’ve aimed to write. Maybe my view of ‘literary’ is flawed or limited (personally, I’m not a fan of ambiguity – others love it, or of speculative fiction – ditto, or of creatively formatted fiction): I want better, more intense, more compelling fiction with care for all the factors that make a ‘good book’. Which is why I appreciate the genre fiction with a literary quality – ‘Dune’ isn’t just SF: it is at least literary-quality SF, at best literary storytelling.

The problem is that ‘literary’ now covers anything that doesn’t fit elsewhere, a common contamination.

Instead of being the fiction that subtly raises literacy – and pleasure. As it was for me as an American child growing up in Mexico, with limited access to books in English and no libraries.

I want READERS. Readers who find what I write better than their usual fare. That’s how I define ‘success.’ It requires that I do a much better marketing job somehow.

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To see what I mean by ‘accessible’ and ‘pleasurable’, try the short story prequel to Pride’s Children.

If you like that, consider tackling the longer novels:

Pride’s Children: PURGATORY

Pride’s Children: NETHERWORLD

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Who and what a writer is matters

WHEN YOU ARE YOUNG, YOU TRY OUT FEELINGS

And the books which become favorites, the ones you remember, are the ones that make you feel good somehow.

Because that’s what you get objectively and subjectively when you read/buy a writer’s book: their particular take on a life, love, and the universal.

It isn’t accidental that some books become classics: they appeal to something in the reader that makes the reader buy the book as an adult, and read it to their children, because it’s an easy way to say that: this is what I want you to grow up loving – and feeling – because it was important to me, and I want you to have it.

As you go through life, and get battered, you choose

But you have to read widely first, so you find out what you need.

Is it The Velveteen Rabbit?

Is is Pooh, original or Disney (or both)?

Is it mysteries or gory serial killer thrillers? Do you like fantasies and are you satisfied when someone else – the protagonist – is The One? Or do you prefer stories in which, due to the writer’s skill, YOU are the center, the quester, the One.

There’s a whole MATRIX of other relevant bits

• Historical time
• Gender
• Location on this planet or an alternate universe
• Ending
• Language
• Complexity of ideas
• Style and tone and vocabulary
• Originality

But the most important one is always: how does it make you FEEL?

Because that’s what you’re looking for in the next story, the next favorite, the next book.

And that’s what will determine a basic satisfaction with what you read, and what you look for when you take a chance on something new.

I’m a sucker for well-written books

And I get annoyed when that leads me astray: well-written – but with a basic nastiness to the ending; well-written – but with an underlying misogyny or racism; well-written – but with characters you’d never want to meet in real life.

I still remember one book which was recommended by a literary blog I no longer recall and which the reviewer said it was a shame more people hadn’t read, since it was so well-written. I bought it! I read it! I was indeed very well written. And the recommendation made me miss the early red flags, because the story, about a murdered young girl, and how it affected her family and friends, turned into a story which blamed the victim for her own murder – because of the way she ‘responded’ to the sick adults who perverted her innocence. And the final conclusion to the story was that it wasn’t important to identify and stigmatize the killer!

I deleted the book from my Amazon account, something I rarely do, but haven’t been able to scrub how it made me feel from my mind.

Because first the writer described how wonderful she was and how everyone loved her – and then destroyed her by saying she deserved what happened to her! As if anyone, especially a child, a teen, deserved to be murdered.

It makes me wonder WHY someone would write such a book. And realize there’s a whole subculture of writers who do – and readers who love those books.

When I write I make conscious choices

I leave the characters those turnoffs that the big trucks use on a mountain road when their brakes fail – but I can’t make the characters use them.

I adopt the slow burn: things happen with enough time to think about why, to consider consequences, to justify actions. There are plenty of stories – and real life events – where something pivots on a tiny accidental point. They don’t interest me because there is nothing a character can do to avert the coming disaster – they will cope with the change, and the coping will show who they are, but it’s a cop-out, and, under dire circumstances, even good people make mistakes. And have to live with the consequences of a split second.

Not much in the way of subtlety with the turn-your-life-on-a-twisted-dime stories, especially if the reader can see it coming at the previous mile marker. Plus, those books don’t reward re-reading, and that’s a waste: depending on a trick ending is a fool-me-once.

I WANT to write something re-readable.

I want it to take several readings to see many of the connections.

I want most readers to have to go back and read the previous volume before the new one – or to have internalized what came before so they wouldn’t have to (I’ve had both kinds of readers comment about this).

I offer the usual bargain:

I do the work – you tell me how it made you feel.

Then tell me how it worked for you.

Try it out on the prequel 1500 word short story Too Late.

Then remember there’s plenty more where that came from.

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Phoning in a bad editorial review

PAYING FOR AN EDITORIAL REVIEW GUARANTEES NOTHING

I’m going to be very careful with this post, as getting a bad editorial review is one of the hazards of paying for reviews: your book could be crap, and a proper reviewer is entitled to say exactly what they think of it.

This reviewer sends you the review as a courtesy, so you can tweak any problems before it gets published.

Sometimes you have the recourse of requesting that the review be dumped, and I have exercised that right.

So any quotes I list from the to-not-be-published review are my only product for my money – as only the reviewer and I should have access to the content, and therefore no one should be able to search for the quotes on the internet, and identify the person I’m complaining about here.

Got it?

I will leave off any identifying information

and write only about the substance of the review, which is the subject of my complaint in a general way (I can already see readers wondering how bad Pride’s Children: NETHERWORLD was, and whether I simply can’t take criticism).

Indies like me need a few impartial honest editorial reviews and we need to pay for them. They – in full, or quotes from them – go in the Editorial Reviews section of the book’s Amazon page.

Having a decent editorial review legitimizes you as an author, gives you some credibility.

We need to choose our source, as it can get into real money (for example, a Kirkus review is almost $500), and it will take a lot of sales to make that review worth the expenditure.

There are many other reputable review services available to self-published authors (SPAs), less expensive ones, but the field is, like literary agentry, completely unregulated, even taking into account that the ultimate result, the review, is published for anyone to see.

One would hope for some self-regulation, but the standard thing for an author to do if you don’t like a review is to let it sink like the millstone it is and hope no one sees it.

FIGHTING a review is not done, and will get you branded a ‘difficult author.’

Again, got it?

So why am I taking the risk?

Because I had expectations (silly woman?) that a professional reviewer would at least read the book.

Or enough of the book to be able to say something real and thoughtful about what I spent 7 years of my small supply of good energy producing.

When I was offered the draft review to tweak

my heart sank.

I wrote back, after a bit of reflection at the complete mismatch between my understanding of my book, and the review:

…I have been looking forward to your review for a long time.

And now I have to ask you to completely cancel publication.

If you have any interest, let me know, and I can provide you with a list of all the points your review did not mention that are critical to the story continued in NETHERWORLD.

I don’t know what to think, but the review below in the email you just sent me is not something I would want published if I have any choice in the matter. It does not represent the continuing story nor the characters.

Email, 11/5/22

I did NOT expect a response other than cancellation; what I received was:

Oh my! The review can of course be put on hold.

Please let me know what was wrong or missing. I will go over my notes and re-read, and re-do the review to get it right.

Sometimes I leave out some points in a story in favor of trying to preserve some elements of surprise for the reader; but in this case it sounds like I missed too many and was too general.

Please let me know specifics, and I’ll work at identifying where in my notes I went awry, and will redo the reading and notes as needed.

Lovely offer, so what’s the problem?

I’ll go into specifics of a few things below, but ‘missing a few points’ was not my interpretation.

In fact, when I started to make a mental list of the ‘few points,’ I quickly realized that the entire book had been left out, and a completely generic Romance review was what had been supplied.

If anyone knows Pride’s Children, they know that it is NOT a Romance, was never intended to be one, and misses every trope that a Romance reader expects from a satisfying Romance. Romance is a perfectly viable category with dedicated writers and MANY more readers than literary fiction – and enviably lucrative – but I don’t write Romance.

I’ll let a reviewer for PURGATORY comment:

…And the development of the central attraction isn’t a “romance,” except in the sense that a Jane Austen novel could be called one (and allowing for differences in setting and literary conventions between the early 19th and early 21st centuries, a comparison to Austen isn’t entirely inapt!), nor is it predictable or syrupy…

https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R37NLDE4OZP2AG/

In fact, as much as I respect Romance writers and readers for knowing and getting what they like to read, I have been fighting Pride’s Children being categorized as a Romance everywhere that crops up, including Goodreads, where the librarians refused to do anything because some READERS had chosen to include PC on a shelf with ‘romance’ somewhere in its title.

Pride’s Children is a LOVE STORY embedded in a mainstream trilogy set in the intersection between Hollywood and writers

From the same reviewer:

…This is solid general fiction of a very high order, in the best Realist tradition, exploring human interactions and relationships between enormously well-drawn characters who come fully alive, as real, intensely human people. These relationships do include romantic attraction and love (and even have it as a central focus), but it’s not the sole focus; family relationships, friendships, working relationships, etc. -some healthy and some not– come under the lens as well…

Op. cit.

And now for a few review details, so you can judge for yourself

The whole mention given to Bianca, arguably the most important character in NETHERWORLD, is “And then there’s Andrew’s film co-star Bianca, whose debut film is starting to make its mark on the world,” followed by a single reference to ‘the dance between these three’ and one to ‘a triangle of connections, ambition, and obsessions that embraces scheming, film industry politics, and love and friendship alike.’

The rest of the review tries, generically, to make a two-character Romance out of the friendship between Andrew and Kary: “… recommended pick for prior enthusiasts of the tale, who will find the ongoing growth and connections between Irish megastar Andrew O’Connell [sic] recluse author Dr. Kary Ashe continues to introduce challenge and revised their visions of life…” and “…As each makes their way through dates, other life connections, and events that test their talents and perspectives, readers receive an intriguing contrast in personalities and love that will especially delight prior followers of Andrew and Kary’s worlds.”

The ending tells libraries that NETHERWORLD has “… thought-provoking escapades and interpersonal conundrums where all the characters are both villain and hero will welcome the nicely-developed tension and psychological insights…”

All the characters are both villain and hero?

Excuse me while I gag. The whole point of Pride’s Children is that integrity and morality are NOT relative, not subjective, not ‘opinions,’ but fraught choices with consequences even for those who don’t get to choose.

What do authors do with bad editorial reviews?

Distinguish here first between the REVIEW being bad and the BOOK being so bad the review which says that is good, but this can be irrelevant unless the book is so hyped people go to the original source to see what was actually written, which could lead to a firestorm of sorts until the internet finds the next flaming pile.

The most obvious and most common response is to find some chunk of words in the review that can be used as a pull quote – words to put on the cover or in an ad – that are TECHNICALLY not a lie, because those words, in that order, appear in the review, even if the review context clearly negates the pull quote. Easy? “…one of the best thrillers…” from an original “Nowhere NEAR one of the best thrillers…” Usually a bit more subtle, but you get the idea.

Or if lucky or money is available, a bad review can be buried by several good ones. With the additional fillip of implying the unwanted review is somehow sour grapes.

Dropping the review completely means the loss of whatever was paid for it, which is sometimes the only option.

Arguing about the review in public, WITH names, is best left to well-paid PR pros, because of all the positive and negative ramifications. ‘Going to war’ is expensive, with pitfalls.

Another option, mine, is to use the review carefully as a cautionary example of what can happen, for the newbies to learn from and more experience writers to commiserate about. And then to put it behind you. And, of course, never use that reviewer or editorial review service again.

I briefly considered one OTHER final option

Complaining to the service managers or owners about the review and the reviewer.

Not probably the best option – the reviewer may have been bringing in cash for the service for a while.

Possibly an excuse for the review service to dump the reviewer (usually added to other examples of the reviewer cutting corners or losing their touch).

But extremely dangerous to the individual unarmored AUTHOR, because people won’t necessarily remember that there was some justification for a complaint, only that a certain AUTHOR (those horrible people) had the nerve to complain about a PROFESSIONAL REVIEWER, followed by closing of the ranks of the pros and more complaints about, in this case, entitled indie AUTHORs.

So I’ll stop at ‘cautionary tale,’ hope I get some feedback and not too many people trolling (if you are not a regular, that behavior will get you banned before leading to any posting of your comment; regulars are welcome because I know they will be civil).

I can’t be the only one unhappy with a paid-for review that seems entirely unrelated to the book.

Am I?

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Oh, and don’t forget to BUY the book (or going to Booksprout to request an ARC if you are even considering writing a review), so you can make your own decision if my happiness with NETHERWORLD, and especially its ending, is a crock.

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Surviving an extraordinary month in one piece

So many places you can be!

WHERE HAVE I BEEN AND WHAT HAVE I BEEN DOING?

I am just coming out of a period that started, really, far before Sep. 26 when I went to Stanford U. hospitals for a badly needed surgical repair.

It involved taking care of myself in ways I had to learn, going through all kinds of medical tests to make sure that someone with ME/CFS (me) would be a suitable candidate for surgery at all, and then getting there at the right time without the coronavirus putting a stop to the whole parade: I literally had a covid PCR test on Sunday Sep. 25 in a parking lot in Redwood City – all ready for the hospital the next morning – and being fairly sure I was not sick, but knowing that the juggernaut would come to a shuddering halt if I happened to be and be asymptomatic.

And it would take months to get another surgical date, months I did not want to have to face.

Husband and I had isolated in our apartment in the retirement community for over two weeks, going out for doctor’s appointments, and husband going down to dining to retrieve takeout every night for dinner so we wouldn’t be exposed to the cases that seem to randomly infect this place now that people are being so less careful with masks and gatherings.

I had literally been waiting 2.5 years for this surgery date, since I needed it just as the pandemic was getting going in 2020, and anyone who could avoid going to a hospital did so.

Before going to my medical destiny, I published NETHERWORLD:

The Pride and Joy – NETHERWORLD

It was finished in March, but the complications of the health stuff kept me from focusing on cover and formatting, and I finally got help from friends, Bill and Teresa Peschel of Peschel Press in Hershey, PA. Bill kindly and accurately produced the cover from my notes and comments (patient man!), and responded to many rounds of requests for corrections to the interior formatting of the paperback – and I did the final touches to the ebook cover and interior produced by Scrivener on Sep. 18 and 19 and uploaded the files, which Amazon accepted with relative alacrity, making me no longer a one-book author.

And then came the surgery and its aftermath – the HORROR

The operation went fine, and the results have been stellar and relatively painless, and most everything now works properly, and all of it as well as possible.

But pain management went flooey – starting with side effects of medication changes the week before, and then continuing for the most pain I’ve ever had, for weeks, accompanied by side effects from other new medications designed to help, to finally me getting off EVERY NEW MED, and back to my long-time stable pain medications from before – and them slowly being enough.

I tried to tell them I’m a non-standard patient; I thought they had listened.

Nope.

Don’t know what I’ll do if I ever need to do something like this again, but there will be some very interesting and thorough conversations somewhere along the line: ME/CFS patients are NOT normal patients.

It’s over, I will be released from restrictions in a week

and I will be able to use our warm therapy pool, and then work up to riding my tricycle, and longer trips that the bare minimum rides on Maggie, my Airwheel S8 (a bicycle seat on a hoverboard).

And after getting my brain back these last few days, and catching up enough on sleep to be coherent (pain makes it IMPOSSIBLE to get rest), I have a big paperwork task to finish and send to the accountants.

And I will then be able to start up my new Macbook (I got the midnight blue one), and plug away at organizing the upgraded software I bought it for, and get going to finish the trilogy by writing volume 3, working title LIMBO.

I will be back to whatever passes for normal in this body and this household.

Nothing has yet changed on the research horizons

Rather, it seems that every day some scientist group has a new theory about what may be going wrong in the aftermath of viral infections such as Covid-19 and ME/CFS, and they want research money to find out if they’re right.

One of them will figure it out – the economic impact of millions of people coming down with Long Covid cannot be tolerated.

Except for the diehard holdouts, most doctors are starting to believe that post-viral illnesses are real and not psychological, or hysterical. They have no clue how to help us that gets down to basics and CURES us yet, but they are starting to treat the symptoms and minimize some of the miseries.

There is where HOPE lies: enough scientists committed to figuring it out, supported by research funds. Whether it is too late for people like me who’ve been ill for decades won’t be known for a while, and indeed the research horizon, my husband cautions, is more likely to be five to ten years than anything much faster: the coronavirus does an incredible amount of damage.

Some of it may not be fixable. I may not be fixable. Which would be a bitter conclusion I’m not ready to face yet.

All us post-viral illness folk still have to make it through the days

If you have it, my sympathies. If you have managed to avoid long covid, please be careful – if you get covid, your chances are estimated at 10-30% to not get better.

Have sympathy if you are not ill or have not lost someone dear – the tragedies are endless.

And send good vibes, pray, or cross your fingers – because I can’t wait to get back to spending my daily tiny allotment of energy FINISHING Pride’s Children.

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If you read mainstream fiction, or psychological literary fiction, and haven’t read NETHERWORLD, it’s on Amazon in ebook and print. And in KU.

I would love to hear what you think – especially about whether it ends suitably.

And you can sign up to be informed about matters connected with the books at prideschildren.com.

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Applying for writing awards is hard

BECAUSE LIEBJABBERINGS IS MY WRITING BLOG, TOO

When I post something on my other blog, the one for the Pride’s Children books and stories, that might be of interest to the people who follow my writing posts here, I’ll usually provide a link.

The latest post there talks about the psychology of putting yourself forward for awards, something which still feels somehow odd, if not wrong.

Self-promotion is weird. Filling in things like ‘Author Bio’ and talking about yourself in third person, because that’s what the traditional publishers do, is weird.

The simple act of submitting your work for an award, which wasn’t successful for me for a long time (and it is only recent that my work received one), is still weird.

But if I don’t, no one will. And that’s a sobering thought.

Pop over to the post – and if you ever think you might read my fiction, Follow – so you’ll find out about sales and samples in a timely manner. And the sales before they’re over.

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