Playing other games while playing the Waiting Game

I’ve read interviews where artists state they don’t pay attention to critics. Positive or negative, reviews cloud their judgment, and so they do their best to avoid them. I understand this logic. If everyone’s expressing love for your work, you could get sloppy. Your ego might inflate and you’ll lose your critical eye. And if everyone hates your work, you might doubt yourself. You’ll lose your confidence. Your style will weaken. You might try to appease those who cannot be appeased and jeopardize your creative identity. And everyone isn’t everyone. My favorite books and movies have their share of trashtalking critics, just as the stuff I’d regard as slop has its diehard fans.

Yet whether or not artists acknowledge reviews doesn’t alter the fact that those reviews legitimize their work.

I’m aware that’s a controversial statement. People who enjoy the what is art? What defines art? conversations may scoff at it. But when we look at art from a business perspective—look at the artist not solely as someone who creates, but someone who supports him/herself through the creating—reviews play a major part. Few people will invest their money and time in the unknown. Just like diners who browse Yelp comments before patronizing a restaurant, readers browse book reviews before making a purchase. Better to invest themselves in something that has been “proven” to hold merit rather than a work that may or may not be decent.

With the free promotion over, A Collection of Angels is completely off the radar. I haven’t sold a single copy. This is to be expected. Eventually I plan to pay to have it advertised on different websites, but only after it has garnered reviews.

A couple risks in this approach:

I’m assuming Collection will be well-reviewed. Given the first two ratings the novella received on Good Reads are three stars (how damning—to have one’s work neither hated nor loved, just judged mediocre), I could be setting myself up for major disappointment. There’s also no guarantee those who downloaded the book (~150 individuals) will even read it, let alone review it. I can cite myself as an example. I’ve read all sorts of books, and I haven’t once posted a review on Amazon or Good Reads. Maybe this is karma. 

In the meantime I’m concentrating on other projects.

For my longer works, I’m still querying agents in the hopes of gaining literary representation. I like the idea of having my foot in both camps: my too-short-to-have-been-represented-novellas published in the indie-world, and my full-length stories published in the traditional way.

Concerning my next self-publishing venture, cherubs & lavender needs a few more proof-reads. More  cleaning of clunky passages. Once done, I’ll send it off for copy-editing. When it’s in top-shape, I’ll be more organized in promoting its release. I threw Collection into the wild and hoped a few it’s-temporarily-free! days would be enough for it to gain momentum, but I realize now, in a world where over a thousand new titles are self-published every single day, it’s going to take a lot more than a free price-tag to get people to download my stuff. 

A post on tone and editing that I'll redo the tone of tomorrow.

Yesterday on Facebook I spent the better part of an hour phrasing how I would announce the availability of my book on Amazon. I toyed with sounding apologetic because, aw man, I don’t want to look like I’m using my friendships for purposes of solicitation, and then I considered being goofy and self-depreciating because, hey, this is a self-published work, and anyone can self-publish, and then decided against that because Jeez, if I sound wishy-washy over the quality of my book, how I can expect other people to want to read it? After this, I wondered if I should warn people it’s a pretty dark story. We’re talking borderline exploitative fiction. But I decided I shouldn’t go out of my way to deter potential readers. The fetuses on the cover do a fine enough job suggesting gruesome material.

In the end, I went with a flavorless straight-to-the-point approach. The book is on Amazon. It’s horror. I’d love for you to read it. You can get it for free on these dates.

This isn’t the first time I’ve wasted 30+ minutes trying to structure and word what amounts to a couple measly sentences. I think the best analogy for my relationship with status updates and messages is akin to me getting ready for a big date. I try on different tones and words, dress up basic information in different button-downs, examine them in the mirror and shake my head—no, this just doesn’t work—move on to something else, and then, frustrated, throw on a T-shirt.  

In this case, with something as simple as a Facebook status update, the plain T-shirt works.

While it’s exciting to be done with the manuscript, I’m disappointed in myself for believing the story was “finished” over a year ago. And then a few edits later, thinking it finished again. And again. And done again. It’s why even though the book is up and live on Amazon, I still experience a frequent heart-flutter and think, good God, what if you’re mistaken like those other times?! What if you were overlooking some detail or plot point that was so silly, everyone's going to think you're an idiot?

It’s such a difficult thing, determining when you can end your project with finality and say, “Alright world. Enjoy it. Hate it. Here it is.”

It doesn’t help that I believe in the artsy-fartsy argument that there is no such thing as done. Five years from now you'll look back on something you swore was polished to the utmost sheen, and you’ll find ways you could mold and shine it further (although who knows, you may accidentally break it). We’re always changing. Those changes affect our perception. They influence our choices.

But we’ve also got to be realistic.

At a certain point it’s time to move on. Barring sequels, an actor shouldn’t revisit and perfect a performance from a decade-old film. It’s over. Sure he might come up with better choices after having had ten additional years in life to gain experience and wisdom, but he’s better off dedicating his energies to creating brand new characters as opposed to tinkering with past ones.

What I’ve learned with myself, however, is that I need to take repeated hiatuses from a work to whittle it into a form that pleases me. This isn’t me desiring time to grow as a person so I can look upon my story with enlightened eyes. No. It’s that I get too easily sucked into my books. This may sound like a good thing, but it’s like getting trapped in a single room of the building you need to reassemble. You can’t see the big picture. Sure you might consider repainting the walls—that’s what your editing will become—but if you were looking at the house from afar—thinking outside the box—you’d realize the walls don’t need painting, they need demolishing.

Readers/editors help in this department. They comment on things you never saw, force you out of the room because they’re now leading you to a cracked roof. They get you thinking in ways you weren’t before. But when I reflect back on all the times I mistakenly thought A Collection of Angels was done, I attribute it to my proneness to literary tunnel vision. 

~~Novella update + BLURB~~

My initial estimate that A Collection of Angels was only a month from release was mistaken. However, the book should make it out this month, and what better time for a horror story than October?  

The cover is almost finished. My Aunt Goddess Claire, the coolest aunt a guy could have (I’ll write a post in her honor soon—ever since I was young she’s been a supportive influence when it comes to my writing), sketched a wonderful picture that captures the story’s essence, and another artist is now tweaking and coloring and bookifying it, and I’m stoked. Although you’re not supposed to judge a book by the cover, a good cover can make or break an e-book, and what my aunt has drawn is spectacularly creepy.

In the meantime I’ve been tweaking my blurb. A book-jacket-esque description to entice a reader to purchase the story. I’m not proud of the amount of hours I’ve sunk into drafting something less than two hundred words. Trying to describe a work in an engaging yet concise way is tough. Too vague and no one wants to read it. Too detailed and there’s no point in reading. It feels good to finally—knock on wood—have the blurb where I want it:

  

In the bowels of the boat there is a secret collection.

It reeks and it rots and had Galen known about it, he would never have gone aboard. Forget the cute girl at the docks: he would have run home and locked the doors and prayed.

But of course he didn’t know.

He mistook hell for heaven, and now he is trapped in a broken reality, held captive by creatures who aren’t just interested in him. They want his little brother too.

To survive, Galen will need to shed wings he never knew existed.

Otherwise he and his brother join the collection.

This is why I date myself.

I once wrote a scene in which high-schoolers were excited for The Simpsons Movie, and someone asked, “Shouldn’t you just write that they’ll be going to the movies? Aren’t you worried mentioning the Simpsons Movie will date your story?”

I wasn’t.

I believe it’s important to know in what year your characters exist. That story I set in 2007. It began in the summer. The Simpsons was released July 27^th, 2007. It made sense the characters would watch it, and mentioning it by name better cemented the characters in the story's reality.

Some writers refrain from referencing popular culture out of fear of dating their work. They want their stories to forever take place in the present, in the here and now. This is impossible. In writing there is no such thing as a permanent present. Be as nondescript as you want, as vague about jobs and entertainment and world issues as you can, and it won’t matter: eventually (or quickly) your story will become dated.

It can’t be helped.

Language and society and the world change in unforeseeable ways.

Back in the eighties, you could have done your damndest to write a middle-class coming-of-age novel that would always read like it was occurring in modern day, but by not mentioning smart phones or social media, by a total lack of texting or tweets or snapchats, a 2014 reader would sense your story was written in a different era.

Does that mean the 80’s story has lost its relevancy?

Maybe a smidgen, but for the most part, no.

Novels aren’t like pieces of hardware. As newer stories emerge, older narratives don’t turn obsolete. Books aren’t timeless because they avoid details a modern mind would find antiquated. They’re timeless because they immerse a reader in the world of the pages. Readers can empathize with the characters on account of the story’s given circumstances. It doesn’t matter if those circumstances occur during ancient times or the Elizabethan era or the eighties or now.

So accept the inevitable. Any modern story is bound to become a period piece. Date yourself. Now, I’m not advocating writing unnecessary pop culture references. Don’t be superfluous. Don’t obsess with trivial details, where your writing is like a camera focused on background scenery while the main characters walk around blurred and out-of-focus. Just recognize your characters inhabit a world that has its own technology and cultural consciousness and, depending on the story you’ve chosen to create, know that to gloss over this might rob the work of its verisimilitude.

Giving credit where credit isn't due.

Here’s an empty calorie for the blog: the idea of “congratulations” in the self-publishing world.

I’m not aiming to demean myself, but when I tell people I’m close to putting an indie novella online and they congratulate me, I get a guilt complex.

Self-publishing is not praiseworthy.

I could copy-and paste this sentence for one hundred pages and upload it to Amazon and charge you $2.99 for the pleasure of reading it. People write the roughest of drafts and throw these stories up for public consumption.

For better and worse, there is no quality control on Amazon.

“Well sure,” you might say, “but come on… you’ve written a book! That’s something in and of itself!”

The reality is that anyone, with very little effort, can write a book.

Writing is not the difficult part.

It’s writing well that’s the challenge.

And unless you’re a wunderkind, which you likely aren’t,

(amateur mistake: assuming you are)  

(younger me: guilty)

your initial writing won’t be good. This is nothing new. Almost every author stresses how rough drafts cannot be trusted. You must revise. You must distance yourself from the work to be able to read it with fresh, critical eyes and then revise some more. And the cycle repeats. This is a major time commitment in the writing process: performing corrective surgery on what is guaranteed to be a flawed creation. Trimming fat. Stitching up scenes. Hiding those stitches. Remodeling characters. Reconstructing dialogue. Figuring out the most engaging way to form a sentence/paragraph/action sequence.

Many self-published authors do not take these steps. They’re too enamored with their writing to realize this thing they birthed needs to go to the hospital. The idea of editing (if it exists) is a quick proof-read. And online the story goes. Available for all to download.

End point being, anyone can create and upload content.

It’s the quality of the content that matters.

Actually, yes, I can imagine what you're going through...

When you work in a restaurant, you wind up an eavesdropper. I could try and paint this as a writing perk, claim that listening in on people gives me a better feel for dialogue (and it does), but mostly I enjoy catching snippets of conversations because I'm nosey.

It just so happens that this particular snippet pertains to writing:

“Of course everyone loves the book,” one twenty-something-year-old guy says to his friend. “It’s about a woman who’s lost her child. How can you not feel bad for her? You’re an asshole if you don’t.”

“I hate when authors do that.”

“What?”

“Male author writes from the perspective of a woman.”

“He’s not even married.”

“I’m pretty sure he doesn’t even have a kid.”

“Yet he’s writing about child loss.”

“As a woman.”

“That’s so insincere.”

“Unless you’ve suffered through something like that, you’ve got no business talking about it.”

---

While I appreciate the maxim Write what you know, the conversation’s implication is that a writer can’t possibly describe something without experiencing it. There’s a pseudo-validity to this thought process. How can someone write about heartbreak if they’ve never been in a relationship? How can someone write about camaraderie if they’ve never had a best friend? About losing a loved one if all their relatives+friends are still around? About parenting if they’re childless? About drug-addiction if they’ve never touched a hard substance?

The answer is research and imagination.

Otherwise this line of questioning can become: how could someone write about the horrors of the Holocaust without having been in the Holocaust? About killing despite never having murdered someone? About medieval wars when they were born in the twentieth century? About a disgruntled demon without ever having ventured into the underworld?

Imagination grants the ability to empathize. Just because you’ve never walked in someone’s shoes doesn’t mean you can’t imagine what’d it be like to wear them. Certainly it’s helpful to have to a large collection of experiences to draw from—that goes for any artist—but to believe someone should only write about events they’ve personally undergone is bonkers.  Entire genres would disappear. Hell, the fun of writing would disappear.

Writing is an exploration. Sometimes it’s an exploration of self—an autobiographic examination, the kind of writing the two guys I overheard would approve—but other times it’s an outward adventure. An exploration of people and places and situations that may never have been encountered in the author’s day-to-day life. A game of what-if's and how's.

What if someone grew up under these circumstances? How would they react if this happened? If they met someone like this while in the middle of that?

And sure, should an author explore a situation in an unbelievable fashion, if the author has incorrectly answered the what-if's, the writing will seem insincere. Just as we spot bad acting because the actor never took the time to believably flesh out his/her character, we will spot bad stories. They won’t ring true. But to dismiss an author’s work because he isn’t Y is as bad as dismissing an actor’s performance because he never truly experienced X.

Let's judge the quality of what is being presented as opposed to what is behind the scenes.

Into the Blogosphere we go!

Like much of modern social networking—tweeting/video diaries/FB status updates—blogging strikes me as a vain enterprise. No matter how you cut it, at some point every blogger decides they’re important enough to warrant an outside reader’s investment of time. These writers assume they possess the power to entertain or educate. When we stumble across a blogger’s sexual escapades or struggle with cancer or baking tips, if these writers are successful, we forgive them their vanity. Their ego played to our desire for knowledge or catharsis or voyeurism, and now it’s a mutual exchange: our patronage for their posts. A win-win.

But sometimes it’s a lose-lose. I’ll read entries comparable to those painful videos on youtube, the figurative and literal equivalent of people entertaining themselves by making faces in the mirror. We’re obsessed with our individual selves. That can’t be helped. You define your reality: you have every right to be interested in you. But to believe complete strangers will share in your self-infatuation is a mistake. There needs to be more on the table than zany facial expressions.

Writers are encouraged to start blogs. It's how they connect with current (and in my case: potential) readers. Despite knowing this, for years I avoided blogging out of fear of seeming conceited. What did I have to offer beyond unsolicited pontifications? What would separate me from the the guy who films his crummy lip-synching because he's convinced he's cute/hilarious? The answer: not much.

I should have gotten over myself. 

Wanting to write fiction for a career is narcissistic. I can’t dance around it. I’m assuming what I like to do is not only worthy of other people’s time, but their money (time x 2?). I hate to come across as arrogant, but blog or no blog, I’m delusional if I believe my ego has no stake in this. 

So here it is: a self-promotional blog centered around my stories and thoughts.

And here's the lowdown: I'm horror-obsessed. I've been that way since I was four. I'm approximately a month away from self-publishing a horror novella. I don’t chase trends or write what I think will make it “big.”  I write for myself. I write what I want to read, and I hope that somewhere out there exists an audience with tastes similar to mine. As I begin my foray into the self-publishing world, I imagine this will resemble cooking a favorite meal for a potluck and watching to see if the contribution is well received. Although given the overcrowded market, I know I’ll need to occasionally point to where I set my dish on the table.