As I continue the toiling of working on my book and other assorted writing pieces, I continue to notice a trend when it comes to my muse appearing or not appearing. I've read and seen some presentations on hypnotism, and never really believed in it until recently. In my case, my muse seems to be connected to my hypnotic state.
When I was a child I would come up with most of my ideas while either running for the cross country team at school, or being driven places on the bus or in the family car. The act of moving and not having to focus on anything specific put me, unknowingly, into a meditative and hypnotic state. I was alert, true, but I was also tapping into my subconscious, seeing images of characters in my mind and hearing snippets of their dialogue to each other. After the run or the ride in the car, I would hurry to write down what I saw and heard, and that would turn into a few chapters of the latest manuscript. (In case you're wondering, yes, they are all still in a file box, newly rescued from the unorganized filing cabinet that was overflowing. They may have some water damage from a basement flood, but they are still readable - thank-you Smith Corona!) Today, I can put myself into that state by listening to music during the drive to or from a job, and sometimes simply going for a walk.
The illusive muse. She doesn't always appear, but sometimes she can be coaxed out of the ether. It's glorious when that happens!
Friday, August 30, 2013
Fanfiction: Yay or Nay?
I've read a few different blog posts that discussed the idea of fanfiction, and with Amazon's recent Kindle Worlds unveiling, I decided I would put my own two cents in.
I am a huge supporter of fanfiction. When I was a freshman in high school I was distraught that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was taking so long (indeed, it didn't even have a release date or title at that time) and was craving something to read that was Potter related. My friend Kim introduced me to fanfiction.net, and I was in heaven. There were five or six different full-length Harry Potter Book Fives on there, and I reveled in the exploration of different themes and characters who weren't the central heroes of Rowling's work.
Needless to say, I am a writer, and quickly found myself spinning my own Potter stories. I learned a ton about writing from beginning to end, as that was how I uploaded so quickly. I started planning ahead a few chapters at a time, and found myself up to 40,000 words within a year. Better than that, I got regular feedback from a handful of fanfiction readers (I've never met any of you in person, but I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your criticisms and your encouragement! I hope you're all doing well and still writing your own stories!). I also joined fanfiction.net around the time that the "hits" data was being tested. I could see how many people were looking at my work daily, from which country, and which stories were most popular. What a revelation! Imagine the encouragement that people from across the ocean were reading something that I wrote. It was powerful.
As writers, we all want our words to reach many people around the world. Will my novel entertain someone riding a subway car in the UK? I certainly hope so! Will someone in Los Angeles be checking out my books while they wait in rush-hour traffic? That would be fantastic. These goals would have seemed unthinkable if I hadn't started out writing fanfiction. Exploring the craft within the confines of a pre-existing world was a great learning tool for me, and a lot of the terminology that the website used ended up priming me for a future in digital publishing. I encourage anyone in school to check out all the fantastic work on fanfiction.net and elsewhere around the net.
But, what do I think about Amazon's Kindle Worlds? I'm a little lukewarm on the idea. So far none of the franchises that are involved are ones that I am into. Vampire Diaries? Meh. They're all a little too CW for my taste. Now, if they were going to start allowing people to write Smallville fanfiction, I would jump all over that! It's a neat idea, but until they broaden their scope, I'd much rather write fanfiction for a website and learn about the craft of storytelling while getting some feedback on my writing style. Even if I'm not making money from writing or reading fanfiction, I am getting something else out of it creatively, and that's providing entertainment until a new season of American Horror Story or Downton Abbey comes out!
I am a huge supporter of fanfiction. When I was a freshman in high school I was distraught that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was taking so long (indeed, it didn't even have a release date or title at that time) and was craving something to read that was Potter related. My friend Kim introduced me to fanfiction.net, and I was in heaven. There were five or six different full-length Harry Potter Book Fives on there, and I reveled in the exploration of different themes and characters who weren't the central heroes of Rowling's work.
Needless to say, I am a writer, and quickly found myself spinning my own Potter stories. I learned a ton about writing from beginning to end, as that was how I uploaded so quickly. I started planning ahead a few chapters at a time, and found myself up to 40,000 words within a year. Better than that, I got regular feedback from a handful of fanfiction readers (I've never met any of you in person, but I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your criticisms and your encouragement! I hope you're all doing well and still writing your own stories!). I also joined fanfiction.net around the time that the "hits" data was being tested. I could see how many people were looking at my work daily, from which country, and which stories were most popular. What a revelation! Imagine the encouragement that people from across the ocean were reading something that I wrote. It was powerful.
As writers, we all want our words to reach many people around the world. Will my novel entertain someone riding a subway car in the UK? I certainly hope so! Will someone in Los Angeles be checking out my books while they wait in rush-hour traffic? That would be fantastic. These goals would have seemed unthinkable if I hadn't started out writing fanfiction. Exploring the craft within the confines of a pre-existing world was a great learning tool for me, and a lot of the terminology that the website used ended up priming me for a future in digital publishing. I encourage anyone in school to check out all the fantastic work on fanfiction.net and elsewhere around the net.
But, what do I think about Amazon's Kindle Worlds? I'm a little lukewarm on the idea. So far none of the franchises that are involved are ones that I am into. Vampire Diaries? Meh. They're all a little too CW for my taste. Now, if they were going to start allowing people to write Smallville fanfiction, I would jump all over that! It's a neat idea, but until they broaden their scope, I'd much rather write fanfiction for a website and learn about the craft of storytelling while getting some feedback on my writing style. Even if I'm not making money from writing or reading fanfiction, I am getting something else out of it creatively, and that's providing entertainment until a new season of American Horror Story or Downton Abbey comes out!
Thursday, August 29, 2013
Why Scrivener?
I will admit right off that I've been using Microsoft Word since I was in high school, and if you want to count, that was roughly ten years ago. I was typing away on an old Windows machine in the basement, writing Harry Potter fanfiction every night. If only I could be so productive now with my own stuff! But I digress...
The argument I'm going to make here is that it's hard to jump ship on a typing program and learn a completely new piece of software if you're looking just at the act of typing words on the screen. I heard about Scrivener last year, and the free trial has sat on my laptop since then, barely used. Originally I was trying to use it to write a few screenplays, but never really got into the nuts and bolts of the software with that usage alone.
Fast forward to a month ago.
Nearing the end of my first draft of my manuscript, I decided to try my hand at formatting for Kindle, my end goal format for self publishing. I thought it would be easy. After all, with every Kindle that I've purchased (I own a Kindle 2 - purchased in 2009, the original Kindle Fire, and now my beloved Kindle Paperwhite) Amazon has provided a free eBook that goes over the process of publishing on Amazon. This step-by-step guide insists that I use Microsoft Word, so I was thrilled that I already had my hands on the program and was doing all my typing in it.
However, when I actually got into the nitty gritty of formatting, I wasted at least three hours on trying to get my tabs to work (I had already stripped out the manual tabs like it told me to do and replaced those with the auto formatting of first-line indent x percentage). After all that time, I still had tabs that were off kilter and looked like a mess! Now, you have to understand that I worked for two years as a graphic designer for the University Of Southern Maine's music department where my entire job consisted of making sure that all the text of their music programs was lined up precisely and all the italics were where they should be. Seeing my manuscript, a 50,000+ word novel just thrown together with me being helpless to figure out what was going wrong - I was ready to cry or drink a very large glass of red wine!
I did enjoy the wine regardless, but it wasn't until I re-discovered Scrivener through the Self Publishing Podcast that I found a solution to all of my formatting woes. (If you haven't checked out that podcast on iTunes, I highly recommend it). You see, the main roadblock to my using Scrivener was simply that I didn't want to learn a new, fancy interface in order to do something that was so simple up until now: type words on a screen and print them later. But, with the advent of self-publishing as eBooks, I found that I wasn't printing my words any more, rather, I was going to be exporting them as a digital book that is not unlike a website. The table of contents is a list of links, and the image insertion is exactly like a web page. I didn't finish my only HTML course in high school with flying colors, but I knew the basics and was easily frustrated when the codes didn't do what I wanted, or I forgot how to type some random tag.
Scrivener takes all the headache out of this export process with some very cool presets for Kindle (.mobi) and other major eBooks (.epub). I found some excellent blogs about formatting my document for the best possible .mobi output and went to town. There are way too many things to type right here, but if I get a chance, I will try to document some specific revelations that I found while formatting with custom fonts and cover images. In a matter of three hours in Scrivener, I had a beautiful Kindle book that I loaded onto my Paperwhite and enjoyed like a kid in a candy store. Why would you ever try the headache of Microsoft Word when you can get better results with complete customization options in Scrivener? I don't know.
What I do know is that I can't imagine using any other writing software moving forward. With all the different things you can do, from drafting to completed Kindle export, Scrivener is a dream. Definitely check out the free trial if you are struggling to get your work out to eBook stores like I was. There's a great peace of mind that settles over me once the technical aspect of constructing the eBook product is finished and I can focus completely on what really matters to my creative brain: my story.
The argument I'm going to make here is that it's hard to jump ship on a typing program and learn a completely new piece of software if you're looking just at the act of typing words on the screen. I heard about Scrivener last year, and the free trial has sat on my laptop since then, barely used. Originally I was trying to use it to write a few screenplays, but never really got into the nuts and bolts of the software with that usage alone.
Fast forward to a month ago.
Nearing the end of my first draft of my manuscript, I decided to try my hand at formatting for Kindle, my end goal format for self publishing. I thought it would be easy. After all, with every Kindle that I've purchased (I own a Kindle 2 - purchased in 2009, the original Kindle Fire, and now my beloved Kindle Paperwhite) Amazon has provided a free eBook that goes over the process of publishing on Amazon. This step-by-step guide insists that I use Microsoft Word, so I was thrilled that I already had my hands on the program and was doing all my typing in it.
However, when I actually got into the nitty gritty of formatting, I wasted at least three hours on trying to get my tabs to work (I had already stripped out the manual tabs like it told me to do and replaced those with the auto formatting of first-line indent x percentage). After all that time, I still had tabs that were off kilter and looked like a mess! Now, you have to understand that I worked for two years as a graphic designer for the University Of Southern Maine's music department where my entire job consisted of making sure that all the text of their music programs was lined up precisely and all the italics were where they should be. Seeing my manuscript, a 50,000+ word novel just thrown together with me being helpless to figure out what was going wrong - I was ready to cry or drink a very large glass of red wine!
I did enjoy the wine regardless, but it wasn't until I re-discovered Scrivener through the Self Publishing Podcast that I found a solution to all of my formatting woes. (If you haven't checked out that podcast on iTunes, I highly recommend it). You see, the main roadblock to my using Scrivener was simply that I didn't want to learn a new, fancy interface in order to do something that was so simple up until now: type words on a screen and print them later. But, with the advent of self-publishing as eBooks, I found that I wasn't printing my words any more, rather, I was going to be exporting them as a digital book that is not unlike a website. The table of contents is a list of links, and the image insertion is exactly like a web page. I didn't finish my only HTML course in high school with flying colors, but I knew the basics and was easily frustrated when the codes didn't do what I wanted, or I forgot how to type some random tag.
Scrivener takes all the headache out of this export process with some very cool presets for Kindle (.mobi) and other major eBooks (.epub). I found some excellent blogs about formatting my document for the best possible .mobi output and went to town. There are way too many things to type right here, but if I get a chance, I will try to document some specific revelations that I found while formatting with custom fonts and cover images. In a matter of three hours in Scrivener, I had a beautiful Kindle book that I loaded onto my Paperwhite and enjoyed like a kid in a candy store. Why would you ever try the headache of Microsoft Word when you can get better results with complete customization options in Scrivener? I don't know.
What I do know is that I can't imagine using any other writing software moving forward. With all the different things you can do, from drafting to completed Kindle export, Scrivener is a dream. Definitely check out the free trial if you are struggling to get your work out to eBook stores like I was. There's a great peace of mind that settles over me once the technical aspect of constructing the eBook product is finished and I can focus completely on what really matters to my creative brain: my story.
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