Tonight I'm researching things I'd rather not have to research because I wish they didn't exist. There's a scene in Soulwoven: Exile that was very difficult to write, and that it's extremely important to me not to get wrong. So. Research. Dark Things. Frightening Things. A whole mess of unpleasantness that taps my pysche in all kinds of unsettling ways.
And it's Monday, and that's one of the days I blog now, and I don't really have anything else to talk about.
Oh! Except being rusty. Good. Let's focus on that because it's less of a bear to write about without spoiling. Also, it's a happier subject.
This morning I finished making revision notes on Soulwoven: Exile and started revising. At the end, actually. Because one of the great tricks of a good novel is the way the end wraps around to the beginning, and the end wasn't working quite right. I need to nail it down before I go back to the beginning and make sure the circle closes.
It's been a month and half since I wrote anything new, and man, am I rusty.
Returning to writing after a layoff is always a little bit terrifying. I'm never sure whether it's going to come back, or whether I'm just going to keep on sucking as much as I do for the first however-many-hours-it-takes-to-get-out-the-kinks. Inevitably, it comes back, and then I get better. Thank God.
But right now, I feel like a shadow of the writer who finished Soulwoven. And having spent most of the last month and a half staring at the pages of Soulwoven, I'm not sure how I'm ever going to achieve that level of polish again.
I will. I'm quite certain of it, because that's how this whole thing works. You just keep spitting and polishing and spitting and polishing until it shines. And the thing that is Soulwoven: Exile lying underneath the grime of I-haven't-polished-this-yet is going to be beautiful. It's better than Soulwoven. It may even be much better than Soulwoven. The final paragraph (which only became the final paragraph this morning, after I snipped off some extraneous bits) gave me shivers. I will get the rest of it to look like that too eventually.
But in the meantime, I'm scared. And that's normal. And I say that because I don't think there's anyone in my life who isn't scared about their career sometime, no matter how good they are at it. And if you're reading this, there's a reasonable chance you think I do a decent job as a writer. Maybe if I'm honest about how terrified I am of sucking sometimes you'll think of it someday when it can help you.
And that would be wonderful.
Showing posts with label fear. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fear. Show all posts
Monday, March 31, 2014
Friday, April 12, 2013
Countdown to Three Dances: Do It Now
I don't cry often.
It's not so much because I think I must be manly (although I sometimes do) as because I think I must be calm. I don't like letting my emotions get the better of me. When things get hard, I try to get rational and quiet and thoughtful.
But I cried last weekend.
Those of you who have been following the Three Dances posts will remember that I talked about a subject that made my stomach churn and my eyes tear up. This is it. And I am now three paragraphs into talking about it without having talked about it at all. That's how hard it is to write about for me.
One of my grandmothers did the art for Three Dances. She is an amazing, wonderful woman; donated her time and art to the book; and has been a mentor and a guiding light to me in ways I don't think she fully understands, because she is also a humble person.
But she's not the grandmother who has been most supportive of my writing over the course of my life.
Since I was a teenager, my other grandmother has encouraged me to be a writer. When she visited, she asked how my writing was going. When I was in college, she was thrilled to hear that I was studying writing, even though everyone knew it was never likely to be particularly remunerative. When we talked, she always, at some point, said, "Now, you're still writing, aren't you?" She was never pushy, but I always knew that she thought it was amazing that I was writing, and that she would be proud as a peach when my first book came out.
After my grandfather died, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, or something so much like it that nobody other than a doctor is likely to care about the difference.
But still, she knew I was a writer. During the times when the disease was just taking hold and she would only forget my name and not my face, she knew I was a writer. When we spoke, she still wanted to make sure that I was writing. It was very important to her. That's one of the funny things about that disease; you get to see what's important to people, because they talk about the same things over and over again.
In the last year, her disease has gotten much worse. I don't think she really knows who I am anymore. When we see each other, she gives me a huge smile and a hug and a kiss and says, "Oh, what a good-looking young man!" because, even as her brain wanders away from her, she is still just that kind of a person.
Last weekend I brought the proof copy of Three Dances to my parents' house so that I could share it with them and my grandmothers. And as I sat a table and waited for her to arrive, I realized that the grandmother who for years had encouraged me to write books would never really know that I had finished one, and that it was being published.
So I cried. And I'm crying again now, as I write this.
Because I could have done better. I could have done sooner. I could have published Three Dances, or Soulwoven, or something very much like them, while she was still capable of recognizing me and truly, deeply knowing that I had done something she had always wanted me to do.
So my advice to you is this: whatever thing you want to do with your life, do it now. Don't wait. There are people to whom your dreams are more important than you yet realize. And if you wait too long to make things happen, you may lose the chance to share wonderful moments with them.
I will never know what my grandmother's reaction to my first book would have been if it had come out five years ago. When I was younger, she was a very deep and thoughtful person. I wish I could know what she would have said and done.
Last weekend, her reaction was "That's wonderful! You wrote this? Where can I buy this? [pause, during which conversation moves on a little] I will give you two dollars for this!"
I told her her copy was on its way, and I laughed, because that reaction was so much better than what it could have been.
But still. Do it now. Whatever it is. Don't wait. We all only get so much time.
-Jeff
You can buy Three Dances here, here, or here.
It's not so much because I think I must be manly (although I sometimes do) as because I think I must be calm. I don't like letting my emotions get the better of me. When things get hard, I try to get rational and quiet and thoughtful.
But I cried last weekend.
Those of you who have been following the Three Dances posts will remember that I talked about a subject that made my stomach churn and my eyes tear up. This is it. And I am now three paragraphs into talking about it without having talked about it at all. That's how hard it is to write about for me.
One of my grandmothers did the art for Three Dances. She is an amazing, wonderful woman; donated her time and art to the book; and has been a mentor and a guiding light to me in ways I don't think she fully understands, because she is also a humble person.
But she's not the grandmother who has been most supportive of my writing over the course of my life.
Since I was a teenager, my other grandmother has encouraged me to be a writer. When she visited, she asked how my writing was going. When I was in college, she was thrilled to hear that I was studying writing, even though everyone knew it was never likely to be particularly remunerative. When we talked, she always, at some point, said, "Now, you're still writing, aren't you?" She was never pushy, but I always knew that she thought it was amazing that I was writing, and that she would be proud as a peach when my first book came out.
After my grandfather died, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, or something so much like it that nobody other than a doctor is likely to care about the difference.
But still, she knew I was a writer. During the times when the disease was just taking hold and she would only forget my name and not my face, she knew I was a writer. When we spoke, she still wanted to make sure that I was writing. It was very important to her. That's one of the funny things about that disease; you get to see what's important to people, because they talk about the same things over and over again.
In the last year, her disease has gotten much worse. I don't think she really knows who I am anymore. When we see each other, she gives me a huge smile and a hug and a kiss and says, "Oh, what a good-looking young man!" because, even as her brain wanders away from her, she is still just that kind of a person.
Last weekend I brought the proof copy of Three Dances to my parents' house so that I could share it with them and my grandmothers. And as I sat a table and waited for her to arrive, I realized that the grandmother who for years had encouraged me to write books would never really know that I had finished one, and that it was being published.
So I cried. And I'm crying again now, as I write this.
Because I could have done better. I could have done sooner. I could have published Three Dances, or Soulwoven, or something very much like them, while she was still capable of recognizing me and truly, deeply knowing that I had done something she had always wanted me to do.
So my advice to you is this: whatever thing you want to do with your life, do it now. Don't wait. There are people to whom your dreams are more important than you yet realize. And if you wait too long to make things happen, you may lose the chance to share wonderful moments with them.
I will never know what my grandmother's reaction to my first book would have been if it had come out five years ago. When I was younger, she was a very deep and thoughtful person. I wish I could know what she would have said and done.
Last weekend, her reaction was "That's wonderful! You wrote this? Where can I buy this? [pause, during which conversation moves on a little] I will give you two dollars for this!"
I told her her copy was on its way, and I laughed, because that reaction was so much better than what it could have been.
But still. Do it now. Whatever it is. Don't wait. We all only get so much time.
-Jeff
You can buy Three Dances here, here, or here.
Friday, April 5, 2013
Countdown to Three Dances: Images
Various versions of Three Dances are under final review at Amazon and B&N. The print version, actually, is live here: you can buy one (or ten, or a hundred) if you want, and I will get paid for it.
For some reason, this is terrifying to me.
So in order to stay clear of being afraid, I'm going to put up a blog post I wrote months ago with the plan of posting it in the runup to the Three Dances launch, mostly because I thought it was interesting and also because I thought it might drive some attention. Warning: It's long and gets a bit technical in places.
Anyway, here goes:
--
Today I want to talk about the art for the collection, and the interesting challenges it has presented for me-as-publisher.
I decided to include art in the collection because I wanted something to help it stand out from the crowd. There's so much being self-published right now, and it's so easy to just chuck something up on Amazon as an e-book, that I wanted to provide my readers with immediate proof that I had not just chucked the book up on the Internet. That, in fact, it had been planned and plotted and slaved and sweated over, and was going to be worth their few dollars of money and few hours of time to experience.
Including custom art seemed to be a good way to do that.
Originally, I was going to have a friend of mine who does amazing things with spraypaint and stencils and letters make the art, but his schedule got too crazy, and he had to back out. I then approached my grandmother, who has been making art for the better part of a century, about helping out.
Luckily for me, she was excited about the project, too.
Working with her has been a fantastic, once-in-a-lifetime experience worthy of its own blog post, but one of the upshots of it has been that I'm left doing the digitization of her artwork completely on my own. Computers are not her thing.
I'm using a free program called GIMP, which was introduced to me by the folks at Wattpad, to do it. Process breakdown below:
First, I receive the finished art from my grandmother. It's not exactly in ready-to-display shape, but we're on deadline here, and she's working for free, and I'm happy just to have it at all.
Next, I wait for good, natural light in my apartment, take a digital photo of the artwork, and shovel it onto my computer. It looks something like this:
Next, I crop and rotate the photo in GIMP.
At this point, it's still far from ready for production. The whites aren't white, and there are a lot of extraneous lines left to be cleaned up. My first thought was to attempt to go through and clean everything by hand, but that very quickly proved to be an untenable amount of work.
Luckily, GIMP has a tool called "Color Select" that selects everything in an image that's the same or a similar color. The tool has been a godsend for me. So next I create a new image with the same dimensions as the original, select everything that's black in the source image, and copy it over onto the new image. It gives me something like this:
Pretty big improvement, right? But we're not done yet. It looks a little washed out, like it's been copied poorly on a machine. So next I go after the gray tones.
It takes several steps, but eventually, I get this:
Still not perfect, but it's getting closer, and we're now at the point where manual touch-up becomes feasible. So I go in with my GIMP paintbrush/pencil tool (they work kind of the same) and eraser, and I blacken in lines that I think are meant to be blacked and get rid of lines that I think were not meant to appear in the final product. It takes some fiddling and a little artistic interpretation on my part, but eventually, I end up with an image that looks more like this:
Finally, I print off a test page, which includes the image and the text roughly as I think they'll appear in the finished version. I then put it under a good light and circle areas of the image that I think need further retouching, like so:
Then, after I go back through and do some more image correction, I come out with what's approaching a final version:
Now I still have to get it laid out for real and wait for proofs, and there's a chance that the image will need some tweaking at that stage, but for now, it's done! And in much less time than one might think, as well. This one probably only took me three or four hours of work, and I was figuring everything out as I went. Future images should take even less time than that.
--
The image I used as an example here is one of the black-and-white ones that appears in the print and basic digital (for black-and-white ereaders like the basic Kindle and Nook) editions of the book. Creating the Digital Deluxe Edition's colorized images was a bit more fun. I'll pop back on the blog to talk about that sometime next week.
I also have a Three Dances-related blog post in the back of my head that churns my stomach and brings tears to my eyes to think of. I will write it when I think I have the mental space to do it justice, and I will share it with you before the book's official launch on the 13th.
I promise.
For some reason, this is terrifying to me.
So in order to stay clear of being afraid, I'm going to put up a blog post I wrote months ago with the plan of posting it in the runup to the Three Dances launch, mostly because I thought it was interesting and also because I thought it might drive some attention. Warning: It's long and gets a bit technical in places.
Anyway, here goes:
--
Today I want to talk about the art for the collection, and the interesting challenges it has presented for me-as-publisher.
I decided to include art in the collection because I wanted something to help it stand out from the crowd. There's so much being self-published right now, and it's so easy to just chuck something up on Amazon as an e-book, that I wanted to provide my readers with immediate proof that I had not just chucked the book up on the Internet. That, in fact, it had been planned and plotted and slaved and sweated over, and was going to be worth their few dollars of money and few hours of time to experience.
Including custom art seemed to be a good way to do that.
Originally, I was going to have a friend of mine who does amazing things with spraypaint and stencils and letters make the art, but his schedule got too crazy, and he had to back out. I then approached my grandmother, who has been making art for the better part of a century, about helping out.
Luckily for me, she was excited about the project, too.
Working with her has been a fantastic, once-in-a-lifetime experience worthy of its own blog post, but one of the upshots of it has been that I'm left doing the digitization of her artwork completely on my own. Computers are not her thing.
I'm using a free program called GIMP, which was introduced to me by the folks at Wattpad, to do it. Process breakdown below:
First, I receive the finished art from my grandmother. It's not exactly in ready-to-display shape, but we're on deadline here, and she's working for free, and I'm happy just to have it at all.
Next, I wait for good, natural light in my apartment, take a digital photo of the artwork, and shovel it onto my computer. It looks something like this:
Next, I crop and rotate the photo in GIMP.
At this point, it's still far from ready for production. The whites aren't white, and there are a lot of extraneous lines left to be cleaned up. My first thought was to attempt to go through and clean everything by hand, but that very quickly proved to be an untenable amount of work.
Luckily, GIMP has a tool called "Color Select" that selects everything in an image that's the same or a similar color. The tool has been a godsend for me. So next I create a new image with the same dimensions as the original, select everything that's black in the source image, and copy it over onto the new image. It gives me something like this:
Pretty big improvement, right? But we're not done yet. It looks a little washed out, like it's been copied poorly on a machine. So next I go after the gray tones.
It takes several steps, but eventually, I get this:
Still not perfect, but it's getting closer, and we're now at the point where manual touch-up becomes feasible. So I go in with my GIMP paintbrush/pencil tool (they work kind of the same) and eraser, and I blacken in lines that I think are meant to be blacked and get rid of lines that I think were not meant to appear in the final product. It takes some fiddling and a little artistic interpretation on my part, but eventually, I end up with an image that looks more like this:
Finally, I print off a test page, which includes the image and the text roughly as I think they'll appear in the finished version. I then put it under a good light and circle areas of the image that I think need further retouching, like so:
Then, after I go back through and do some more image correction, I come out with what's approaching a final version:
--
The image I used as an example here is one of the black-and-white ones that appears in the print and basic digital (for black-and-white ereaders like the basic Kindle and Nook) editions of the book. Creating the Digital Deluxe Edition's colorized images was a bit more fun. I'll pop back on the blog to talk about that sometime next week.
I also have a Three Dances-related blog post in the back of my head that churns my stomach and brings tears to my eyes to think of. I will write it when I think I have the mental space to do it justice, and I will share it with you before the book's official launch on the 13th.
I promise.
Saturday, February 23, 2013
Some Thoughts on Publishing and Rejection
Today as I was doing first page critiques on Wattpad, I ran across a message from a follower of mine asking how I deal with the constant threat and reality of rejection as a writer. My response to her got a bit longer than the standard e-mail, and I think it's got some points that other people will find interesting as well, so I'm going to share it here.
My response below. Thanks to @fairyfree on Wattpad for the question. :-)
For me, that's harder to deal with than rejection. Rejection can happen for so, so many more reasons than bad writing. It can be because a publisher already has too many books like the one you're submitting, or because the editor dislikes something about your writing that another editor might love, or simply because they were tired and grumpy and not in a mood to cut you any slack when they were reading your submission.
Publishing is an incredibly subjective business. Every piece of writing has an audience, and just because something isn't likely to be commercially successful (Soulwoven, for instance), doesn't mean it's not good. But publishers are businesses, and they can't afford to acquire things they don't think will be commercially successful, so not everything gets acquired.
So don't despair over rejection. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're a bad writer or that you're doing anything wrong (though I certainly had bad novels of mine rightfully rejected early in my career). In the end, if you're writing books that you're proud of, you're winning, period. Readers are a remarkably varied and forgiving group of people, and if you love your work, someone else out there will too, even if it's not a publisher.
Happy Saturday, folks. Everyone is out of town today, so I'm working through the weekend. Wish me luck. :-)
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
News for the Week of 2.6.13: Copy edits, EXTREME months, and Strange-but-Common Fears
Greetings, Friends and Readers!
Welcome to February! I hope it’s treating you well, and that
it is neither excessively hot and sunny nor excessively cold and dark in your
part of the world (February is a month of extremes, I think). It’s been another
fairly quiet week for me and my writing.
The first chapter of Nadya met with middling success on Wattpad,
catapulting briefly into the top #100 in its categories and then
disappearing from them entirely. This neither surprises nor dismays me; it
simply reinforces to me that I do not understand how Wattpad’s rankings systems
work, and that I am rubbish at capitalizing on them.
Soulwoven, meanwhile, has crossed the 150,000 reads mark,
and I have at long last put up the Aleani Language Primer. For those of you who
are interested, it can be found at the very end of the book, and it will allow
you to translate every Aleani phrase in the book into English if you so choose.
More exciting news is afoot with Three Dances. I spoke with
my copy editor, and the book will be returned in edited form to me this week.
This. Is. Exciting. Because once it’s come back to me, I’m literally only about
two snafus in page design away from having it ready for publication. And once it’s
ready for publication all kinds of exciting things can happen, the most
exciting of which is that it will be published and available for human
consumption by whichever humans choose to consume it.
I hope some of you will be among them.
That’s about all, for now. I am going to begin work on
overhauling Soulwoven: Exile tonight. It frightens me, because it matters to
me, and because I am afraid of somehow hurting it when I go back in to fix it
up and make it better. This fear, so far as I can tell, is a good and normal
thing.
But I still hope that at some point, it goes away.
All best as always, friends and readers, and happy month of
extremes.
-Jeff
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