Today is our regularly scheduled Open Mic, during which people can make announcements, wish belated holiday greetings, whinge about how their writing is going (or celebrate how well it is), complain about being stuck at home, or pretty much what you want.
My announcement is that yesterday, January 5, the audiobook of The Grand Tour went on sale.
I am self-publishing a local history book and want to ask some of the local businesses to carry it. Does anybody know the protocol for that? Do I sell the books to them wholesale? Give them a cut of the proceeds? Ask them nicely?
The only “fact” I know about this is one bookstore in my city that will take books on consignment. I don’t know if they share the proceeds or not.
You should also try to get your book into the local library system. You might try to find a book group that would be interested and give it word of mouth too.
Well, I have been struggling for months with a chapter that somehow got fragmented into five or six different files, all having bits that had to go into the chapter somewhere, and all having other bits that were duplicated in other files.
I’ve finally gotten all the duplicate bits cut out and the necessary bits arranged in some kind of logical order. It’s mostly about the protagonist having to examine, debug, and install software for twenty battlebots in preparation for an attack somewhere over the horizon.*
I am not a programmer; but I’m married to one. I ran the chapter by him, and he said, “Yes, that’s moving along nicely,” which is what he always says, so I asked him if it made sense as a rough description of a software package, and he said yes, he didn’t see anything wrong with it.
I now have to get into the next chapter, which is also rather fragmented, but not so much so; I feel as if I’ve finally got over one mountain and can start in on the next.
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*Since this is all taking place on the minor planet 4 Vesta, with a mean diameter of 525 kilometers, the horizon is not all that far off.
Congratulations on getting over a mountain.
Thank you. Maybe tomorrow I’ll start climbing; the rest of the day has been … kind of busy.
Happy New Year!
My New Year’s Resolution that I started early (mid December) is to “Visit the Page” every day.
I’ve just created a file to list the days when I *didn’t* visit the page. January 6 is the second day, with the first being in back in December.
Happy New Year! I love reading this blog! I am not a professional writer (maybe someday!), but I find this blog inspirational.
I recently came across a thing called the principle of equal and opposite advice. The idea is that, for most good advice, the opposite may also be good advice. For example, You need to stop being so hard on yourself, remember you are your own worst critic” versus “Stop making excuses for yourself, you will never be able to change until you admit you’ve hit bottom.”
I figure this is true for writing as well as life. Try “You need to spend some time developing some details about your world, readers will think it’s more realistic” vs “Avoid worldbuilding disease, you can waste years building your world and never write your book.”
The point of the article was that the people who need to hear the advice often self-select into the wrong group. Like if you’re worried your world won’t be realistic enough and you read lots of advice on world building and did classes on it and spent ages trying to fit in every last detail, because all the people who you’ve chosen to listen to are the ones who are reinforcing the importance of building a realistic world. When actually, what you really need is for someone to sit you down and give you the lecture on worldbuilders disease.
Anyway, this was helpful for me, so I thought I’d post it and hope it helps other people too.
Longer version here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/24/should-you-reverse-any-advice-you-hear/
Right now I want to write fluffy escapist stories that have nothing to do with current events.
And I run into my usual problem: It’s not too hard to devise a story-start idea or three. But I’m blocked as usual when it comes to turning them into complete story-skeletons with middles and (especially) endings along with those beginnings.
“Right now I want to write fluffy escapist stories that have nothing to do with current events.”
Absolutely understandable.
I’m writing a space opera set fifteen hundred years into the future, either more or less or exactly, and I’ve just realized that one of its themes is the problem of colonialism–or more accurately, government by absentee landlords. Hard to escape reality, these days, not even in a Solar System with canals on Mars and swamps on Venus.
That’s why Star Empires and Planetary Kingdoms (feudal or just aristocratic) are so common. It’s a way of signaling “The political systems here are mere scenery. Please don’t take them seriously as a statement about how things are or ought to be in reality.”
I tried to subscribe to the blog but it just gives me a page full of code. Does the link work for anyone else?
Something is definitely amiss with the RSS feed. Thanks for mentioning it and thanks for your patience!
— Caroline
I have two suggestions for the suggestion box of future posts.
1. Doing rolling-rewrites. Stopping in the middle of the draft and either going back and patching a previously written bit, or going back and doing a full revision pass of everything up to the current point.
2. Choreography, both of events within a scene and of multiple scenes.