INSURGENTS: the emotional side of indie publishing

How dare I write a post about indie versus traditional publishing, when I'm only on the brink of releasing my first-ever indie book? Well... over the summer I've discovered a big difference. It has to do with how emotionally invested one is in the book.

See, the publication timeline for a writer who already has a contract with a traditional publisher goes like this:

Day 1 - Send in reasonably proofread MS for Book One
Day 2 - Start Book Two
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Day 30 - Editor calls to discuss a "few little changes" to Book One
Day 31 - Sulk. Pout. Tell your best friend that evidently the only thing the editor liked about the book was the page numbers.
Day 32 - Pour a large cup of coffee and get on with the revisions, except the thing in Chapter 14 that you really really hate and have quietly decided not to do
Day 33 - Set the revised Book One aside for two weeks, because you've learned that if you scoot it right back the editor won't believe you actually did the revisions. Resume writing Book Two.
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Day 47 - Send in the revised MS of Book One with a note claiming you did all the revisions. Hope editor is too busy to check on that thing in Chapter 14. Continue writing Book Two.
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Day 200 - Finish Book Two. Put it aside for proofreading in a couple of weeks.
Days 201-203 - Go wild, dance in the streets, rot your mind with a sappy movie.
Day 204 - Start Book Three
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Day 250 - Editor sends copy of completed cover, into which you have had no input, for Book One. The cover seems to bear little or no relation to any of the characters, settings, or events in Book One, but then it's a long time since you've read it.
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Day 350 - Book One is published! (sound of rose petal wafting down into Grand Canyon)
Day 365 - Your copies of Book One arrive. By now you feel that Book One isn't the striking work of genius you once believed it to be. Stack copies of Book One in back bedroom and get on with the new love of your life, Book Three.

A few times around this cycle and you realize you will never get excited at publication time, because by then you've practically forgotten Book One and are emotionally invested in the book you're writing now.

Now, apart from the fact that I write a lot faster now that I'm not dealing with a publisher who expects one book a year, here's what my publishing schedule for indie looks like:

Day 1 - send proofread MS of Insurgents, blurb, and back cover copy to the nice man who's going to do the cover art and formatting, with some notes on your vision of the cover
Day 2 - start Awakening
Day 14 - Artist sends sketch for Insurgents cover. Bounce preliminary sketch back and forth a few times until you're both satisfied with it.
Day 20 - Receive e-formatted version of Insurgents and put it on your Kindle for proofreading.
Day 21 - Realize that your previous proofreading was not perfect. Ask for half a dozen changes.
Day 28 - Agree on final version of cover.
Day 29 - Start Pinterest board for Insurgents
Day 40 - Finish Awakening
Day 41 - Receive corrected e-book of Insurgents
Day 42 - Proofread Insurgents again.
Day 43 - Start Survivors
Day 48 - Decide to release Insurgents in ten days, because you suspect just before Labor Day isn't a good time for it
Day 49 - Read through Insurgents yet again, this time looking for good lines you can excerpt and put on your Pinterest board for Book One, or ideas for pictures you can use there.
Day 55 - Upload Createspace and Kindle versions of Insurgents to Amazon
Day 58 (maybe) Book goes live on Amazon! (sound of rose petal wafting down into Grand Canyon)

The big difference to me is that the time elapsed is much less and I am doing stuff with Book One throughout the process, so when it comes time to upload and release Book One is still one of my darling children.

Full disclosure: the indie schedule is semi-fictional, because what really happened was I wrote Awakening first, realized it should not be the first in the Harmony series, then wrote Insurgents and sent both of them off together for cover art/formatting. The above is my guess about what it would have looked like if I'd written the first book first.

Everyday it's a-gettin' closer...

Planning to release just after Labor day, and most of the ducks are in a row.

And I'm starting to get excited...

Pictures, and a kludge

I'm making a Pinterest board for Insurgents, and for the last hour I've been trying to upload some snapshots taken in Greece that show how I imagine life in the Esilian mountains where Gabrel and his guerrilla fighters operate. Uploading pictures from the computer is not working so well; the pins show up in the board preview and when clicked on, but on the board they show up as blank spaces. Everything except the picture of the donkey does this! Okay, the donkey's probably cuter than the snaps of stone houses and mountains, but I don't think this is a case of Pinterest exercising aesthetic discrimination. After staring at the pictures and picking them apart in Photoshop, I can't find anything (technical) the donkey has that the snapshot of Monemvasia doesn't have. So I'm kludging it. The pictures will be posted below, then I'll "pin" them from this blog to Pinterest.

Stealing from Bollywood

When I'm writing a book I have mental images of the characters (duh, obviously.) Now that I'm dealing directly with a cover artist it helps if I can find pictures to show the artist. In the case of Gabrel, the guerrilla leader in Insurgents (to be released next month), that was easy; I was already thinking of him as a very young Salman Khan. He was just 24 in his first starring role in Maine Pyar Kiya, in 1989. (Yep, I've been a fan of Bollywood musicals for a long time.)

Gabrel is 23 during most of Insurgents, lying about his age because he's fallen for an "older woman" of 28, and I picture him in the mountains, making trouble for the invading army and looking just about as scruffy as Salman Khan does in this picture.

If my attempt to embed the video works, here he is singing "Dil Deewana" (My Crazy Heart) from that movie. (Okay, okay, somebody else is doing the actual singing. Salman Khan is doing the leaping around and dancing part.)

Lost in a time warp

Lately all my writing time has been going to, well, actual writing. And editing. And back cover matter, which I don't count as writing exactly; more like, um, torture.

I will say there's nothing quite like discussing the cover and formatting for the first book in a series, while proofreading the second book in a series, while actually writing the third book. No wonder I'm having trouble figuring out what century it is! (The Fashionista and the Organizer would claim I still haven't got it right, that they need to drag me into the 21st century kicking and screaming. Pfui. I'm prepping books for Kindle, what's more 21st century than that?)

All this stuff going on simultaneously isn't because I have delusions of being able to multi-task. The cover designer I hired wants me to approve the final cover and write back matter for Insurgents. The cover designer wants the manuscript of Awakening. And the third book, Survivors, won't leave me alone. I am the innocent victim of a hireling and my subconscious. Mostly the latter.

Anyway, in lieu of interesting thoughts about the world or writing, here's the cover for Insurgents. I'm hoping to release it some time in early September, but that depends on getting my act together on practical matters like DBA, bank account, ISBN's, etc., etc.

Finished!

I typed the last scene of Insurgents a few days ago, proofread the draft and sent it off to my one beta reader. Now trying not to breathe down her neck just because I'm in the process of scheduling it with a cover artist and formatter. If she persuades me that major surgery is needed, I'll have to put my preferred dates back; but I'm pretty sure that won't be necessary.

Pro tip: never try to proof an entire book, on the computer, in one day. It's bad for the eyes and worse for the temper.

And, of course, it's not like I'm twiddling my thumbs while waiting. I'm proofreading the follow-on, Awakening, and plotting the third and probably final book in this series (working title Survivors), which I hope to start writing at the beginning of July. This is going to be a tricky one. I need to show a collapsing society (Venezuela is giving me plenty of inspiration here) but I don't want to write a grim, depressing dystopia. Actually, I don't think I can; the funny keeps breaking out. I'm working on a sort of comedy of manners against the background of collapse and failure. There will be some grim bits - it's never fun when a society starts consuming itself - but I hope to balance the sadder parts of the story with scenes of my characters coping with whatever I throw at them.

Jury's still out on whether I can pull this off.

The predictable demons

It usually happens when I'm about 3/4 through with a book. I wake up one morning knowing that this particular book doesn't even deserve to go on a slushpile, it's a farrago of nonsense, it's boring, nobody will ever want to read it.

This time it's happening when I have only a chapter and a half to go on INSURGENTS. Possibly because this book is shorter than my usual, the internal demons were goofing off and thinking, "Oh, we don't need to attack until she reaches 75,000 words." Unfortunately, it seems that somebody blew the alarm whistle: "She's not going to get to 75,000 words on this book! Fire when ready!"

So here we are again, and the only way forward is through the Insecurity Demons. Arguing with them does no good; I simply have to get my head down and adopt the attitude that I don't care what they say about quality, I'm going to finish this thing. Today I've done 1600 words in that mode. It's not fun. But sometimes it's necessary.

The demons usually STFU after it becomes clear that they're not able to stop me writing. But this time I'm so close to the end that they may be able to keep it up for the rest of the book.

Full speed ahead. And damn the torpedos.

Lies of Omission

In the family we call this "R.L.Moore-ing," after the great mathematician and teacher who insisted that it wasn't a lie if everything you actually said was the literal truth. One of my characters uses this in the current book: already self-conscious about being young for his position at 23, when he meets an Older Woman of 28 and she asks his age, he says, "I'm still on the right side of thirty."

I've come across a more practical application in Andrew Mango's biography of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. In a passage about negotiating the withdrawal of foreign armies from Turkish territory at the end of the First World War,

"Pelle urged Mustafa Kemal to stop the movement of Turkish troops towards the neutral zone of the straits. Mustafa Kemal refused, saying that his government had never recognized the existence of the neutral zone, nor could he hold back his victorious troops. Unless an armistice was signed, they would march rapidly on Istanbul. But when Pelle had left, Mustafa Kemal turned to the Turkish journalist Falih Rifki and said with a smile, 'Our victorious armies... I don't even know where they are. Who knows how long it would take us to reassemble them.'"

That may come in handy during negotiations for the end of the war in INSURGENTS.

And it reminds me of a story that I consider the ultimate achievement in R.L. Moore-ing. The notebook I copied this story into has temporarily disappeared, dammit, so I may get some details wrong, but this is the gist of it:

Up-river from the British headquarters, some local warlord is making trouble. A young lieutenant is told to take a boat up river and tell the warlord to cut it out. "And what do I do if he refuses?" "It's not worth starting a war... I suppose you'll just have to turn around and come back."

Up the river we go, and in due course the lieutenant conveys the British ultimatum to the warlord. "And what if I refuse?" the warlord asks.

"In that case, I should, with regret, be obliged to carry out the second part of my instructions."

The warlord caved.

The joys of research

[Inner Cat: Waah. Do I hafta write a blog post? The new Megan Whalen Turner just came out.

Adult: And the rest of life did not conveniently go away. You also have to write the next scene, do something with the shrimp in the fridge, and pick up your books before the cleaners get here.

Inner Cat: But I haven't done anything interesting!

Adult: So? You've been reading some interesting stuff for background. Write about that. And if you're good, you may review Thick as Thieves on Friday. I know you'll have read it by then.]

What, your various identities never argue with each other? How boring.

So. Research for a science fiction book: it's not just about science. The three books in the picture are just a part of what I've been reading for INSURGENTS.

Starts off with guerrilla war in the mountains. Not exactly my area of expertise; fortunately the First Reader has half a dozen books on World War II in Greece. I started out with Ill Met by Moonlight, the story of how Patrick Leigh Fermor kidnapped a German general, and also read several other, less entertaining books. Quit when I decided I couldn't bear to read one word more about the rival resistance groups and how they undercut one another. That wasn't what I was looking for... but somehow it's worked its way into the story.

Part of the backstory of INSURGENTS is that on a world with just two continents, the green and inviting one has been settled. As its government grew more and more totalitarian, it began dumping political dissidents onto the other continent. Yes, I was thinking about the beginnings of Australia. And Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore - that's the second book in the stack, the one whose title you can't read - gave me lots of ideas about how the first deportees might have managed in that bleak environment. None of that made it directly into INSURGENTS, but I needed to know how the society developed before I could describe it. And... there's a lot of stuff currently stored in the back of my head that may recall a book of its own some day, about those early deportees. But not right away! I'm tired of backing up. It's confusing enough to have written AWAKENING first and then to realize I needed a book about events a generation earlier.

Now I'm getting to the part where the rebels, having (sort-of) won, have to create a government overnight to replace the colonial rule. Our own history is a grand source for that. But just to keep it interesting, I'm also feeding the subconscious huge dollops of the life of Ataturk (bottom book) who faced a similar problem after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. And again I'm getting more than I bargained for: in the story of the negotiations there's a beautiful example of lying by omission which I hope to steal for my own book.

More about that tomorrow. Gotta go talk to the shrimp now.

How to write a blurb

Who, me? Uh-uh. Not my talent. Baen once invited me to write my own back cover blurb. The result was so awful that I understand there was an in-house memo saying, "Never let this woman near anything to do with publicity or marketing."

But the thing about doing that for which you have no natural talent is, you have to learn. So I've been scarfing down posts from Madgeniusclub with helpful suggestions for blurb writing.

Refining the draft

This is probably the single most useful article I've read. Dorothy Grant shares the process by which she and her husband work from a long blurb with too much information down to a short, punchy blurb with a good hook.

But what is it about?

Sarah Hoyt shares a collection of blurbs for the Cinderella story, aimed at different genres.

The agony of writing that cover blurb

Rowena Daniells discusses the agony of trying to fit a 100,000 word book into the Procrustean back-cover bed of 150 words or less.

Blurbs: Short and Sweet

Think getting down to 150 words is hard? Dorothy Grant challenges you to get it down to 50 words. And if you say "That's impossible," well, she has lots of examples.

I'm not at Dorothy's level of expertise yet, but at least I've got the blurbs for both books well under 150 words.

INSURGENTS

For generations Harmony’s totalitarian government has used the bleak continent of Esilia as a dumping ground for political dissidents. Now they’re surprised that the dissidents want to secede.

Gavrel is totally devoted to his colony’s battle for freedom. Isvel, daughter of the enemy’s invading general, knows exactly why Harmony should rule. When she is taken hostage by his guerrilla group, he has to draw a line between his personal inclinations and his duty to the insurgency, while Isvel has to remember her duty to escape. There can be no future for two people on opposing sides of this war – so Gavrel will just have to win the war.

AWAKENING

Orphaned and taunted as an Unlicensed child, Devra grew up determined to expiate her parents’ crime by being the perfect citizen – which means never, ever questioning or defying the rules of Harmony’s totalitarian government. But when one of her students is threatened with “medical rehabilitation,” she finds that her personal values are incompatible with good citizenship. One instinctive act of defiance sends her on a downward spiral towards homelessness and unemployment. But at the very bottom, sometimes you meet someone who shows you a new way up….

What do you think? They're terrible blurbs, aren't they? I know they're terrible. But you should have seen the first drafts!

High velocity

At least for me, it is. INSURGENTS has started coming into my head in significantly larger chunks - 2,000 to 3,000 words a day. It's exhilarating to feel the story taking off like this, and I'm grateful for it - much better than being stuck and unable to see the way forward - but these intense writing sessions do leave me feeling like the village idiot for the rest of the day. I may not have anything much to say until this pace slows down or I finish the book. Writing fiction has this in common with raising children: I'm nowhere near in control to the extent I expected.

Using what you don't know you know

A while ago this video was all over the Internet: 3D Printed House.

OK, it's a very small house. And it's the Russians, so it could be a Potemkin house, or they could be cheating in some other ways: maybe the printer only ran for 24 hours but they're not mentioning that it stopped every fifteen minutes for teams of plumbers and electricians. But it's also... the future.

And I wasn't ready for it. Here I've got one book in a series finished (AWAKENING) and I'm a quarter into the book that happens before that one (INSURGENTS) and I was only giving my 24th-century colonists the ability to print slabs of wall-like stuff that had to be hinged together. That's what you get for not keeping up with technology! Ok, not a vital part of either story, quick revision, now they've got building printers.

Now reading a tad more diligently, I came across a story about a 3D printed RPG. My son-in-law commented that that required them to print steel...

Mental headslap. Of course they can print steel. Even I, with nothing but a jewelry kiln and some basic modeling tools, can make steel shapes! The technology's been there for years. All you need is a base of tiny steel particles in a moldable binder and some way to heat the shape at the right time/temperatures to (a) burn off the binder and (b) sinter the steel. OK, there are a few other issues, but that's the basic idea.

It started with precious metal clay, you see, which gave jewelers fine silver or gold in just such a binder. That's been around for what, 20 years? And after that came copper clay and bronze clay and steel clay. Any of those "clay" bases can be thinned to make "ink" just by diluting them.

So... my guerillas in INSURGENTS have just stolen a printer that makes solar-chargeable blasters. And the steel "ink" to put in it. They may have melted their first couple of attempts (Hey: I know a LOT about failures with this material) but they are now figuring it out with the help of an antique jewelry-making book. I feel it's a happy combination of using what I know combined with what I just found out about.

Reaching a tipping point

I have to write a certain number of words before a book really 'comes alive,' for me. Part of it is getting to know my main characters better; part of it may simply be that it takes a while to persuade my brain that it really does have to turn itself on and generate a certain number of words every day.

It seems that I reached that point on INSURGENTS yesterday, at 9000 words. Today's 1,000 words were effortless; I could see and hear what was going on in the chapter, and all I had to do was type at top speed trying to get it all down. I love it when this starts to happen, not only because writing is no longer hard work, but also because writing in this mode seems to smooth out something in my brain. I become a nicer person, kind to children and small animals and actually willing to cook for the First Reader. I shouldn't be surprised if this actually alters something in my brain chemistry, generating endorphins like exercise or playing chamber music.

This shift is also why I had to have a sitter when the children were small. I'm really not safe to watch over small children in this mode, because I stop hearing and seeing what's going on in the outside world.

There's a temptation to go on and shoot for 2,000 or 3,000 or more words. I've done that in the past, when faced with deadlines, and it really doesn't work out very well for me. I can push it for maybe a week, but then I pay the price with several days of staring at the air and feeling like a total idiot whose brains have just been scooped out with a spoon. It seems my personal story-generating mechanism works at a rate of 1,000 words/day and that's that; if I speed up one week, I stop altogether the next week, so I'm not really that far ahead. And before anybody says, "But look at John Ringo," I would like to point out that I don't have the use of John Ringo's brain and his inexhaustible, high-speed story generator.

In any case - Hallelujah! Good Friday has been very good to me.

Washing garbage

I hate it when I have to throw written words away. Hate, hate, hate it. I try to get it generally right the first time, and if that doesn't happen, I'd rather delete a passage when revising the complete first draft, by which time I have forgotten just how much work it was to write that scene the first time.

Sometimes, though, there's no reasonable alternative. I've been struggling with the first three chapters of INSURGENTS (working title). At first I thought it was just the pain of starting to write again after several weeks off; when I start a new book I always mope around the house for the first few days complaining that I've forgotten how hard it is to write. So I didn't immediately recognize the Second Law of Writing, which is that if you are agonizing and struggling to write a scene there is probably something wrong with it. After all, these opening chapters did everything I wanted them to: show a rebel raid on an outpost, bring my two main characters together, set up that they're going to have to stay together for some time whether they like it or not, and create a new problem for the rebels arising from the raid.

The only problem was that it wasn't believable. The outpost was seriously undermanned for no reason, my secondary character had no good reason for being there, the ruse that made the raid possible wouldn't work, even if it did the raid would only succeed if the invaders did a whole slew of stupid things... Well, I fixed this and explained that; asked my First Reader to take a look at it; he pointed out some new problems; while he was reading I noticed some other problems.

Then I realized that I was putting patches on top of patches to save a structure that was unsound in the beginning.

That's when you're "washing garbage." When, no matter how much you change words and dialog and insert explanatory background, you're still working with a fundamentally flawed idea. And it's still going to smell like dead fish and coffee grounds no matter how often you wash it.

So, this weekend, eleven thousand words went into the recycling bin and I spent most of my time reading books on guerrilla warfare and IED's in the hope of shaking a new idea loose. (If anyone's interested, the book I found most useful was The Other Side of the Mountain: Mujahideen Tactics in the Soviet-Afghan War and the least useful was Mao's Guerrilla Warfare.

Now, I hope, I've got an entirely new surface plot with the same deep plot (those things I wanted to accomplish in the opening chapters) underlying it.

Let's see how hard it is to write this version.