Hey everyone! It's the last Friday of the month, which means it's time for another Update Day! For those of you who are unaware of what all this is about: A group of us have set some huge/crazy/crazy important goals that we're striving towards. And on the last Friday of every month, we post updates on our progress.
If you'd like more information or to sign up, please click here.
So... last month was a bit of a downer and I didn't set many official goals. But I made some progress with Book 3, having done almost 30k words of writing and editing this month. I might see how many more words I can do over the weekend.
I also read one book, The Hunt for Red October AND I moved house. So I'm pretty happy with getting all this done despite the upheaval.
Lots is going on in my life still, though, so I'm thinking I'll continue with giving myself a breather and just seeing how much progress I can make in August.
Hey everyone! Today I'm welcoming the lovely Tyrean over as part of a blog post exchange. If you'd like to read my post, you can find it here.
Take it away, Tyrean!
Starting Over Again
Since 2007, I’ve
been working in one main fantasy world. Champion
in the Darkness took several re-writes to bring to completion in 2013, and
I followed it with Champion in Flight
(2014), and Champion’s Destiny
(beginning of 2016).
As I finished
the last book, I started thinking of other ways to expand the Aramatir world
with other trilogies. However, I had promised myself that I would do something
different this year. I even had three “new-old” projects lined up, partially
prepared to go.
Then, in the
midst of my Short Story Writing Time (I have time set aside for each kind of
writing), I stumbled upon a character and a dilemma that wasn’t going to
resolve quickly. In fact, I was 7,000 words into it before I realized that I
had written the start of a new novel, and not a short story.
So, now I’m in
“A Whole New World” (Cue Music from Aladdin).
But I feel like
Luke looking for R2D2 on the horizon, unsure of how much trouble I’m going to
be in as I chase down the new droid idea.
I thought I
would have my rough draft of this new project done by now. Cue: hysterical
laughter.
What was I
thinking?
I love entering
a new story, but getting all the layers of world-building together has been
both challenging and exciting. I’m only a quarter of the way into my rough
draft and it’s a completely horrifying mess. I changed from 1st POV
to 3rd POV and back to 1st POV in the first three
chapters as I’ve been challenging myself to write in 1st POV; it’s
distinctly weird for me to write like that for a character but I felt I needed
to get closer to her. I also changed from present to past tense in two chapters,
and I’m not sure which one I like best.
I feel like I’m
starting everything all over again – everything.
I’ve been doing
research, taking notes, asking myself questions, digging into the history of
the world as well as the history of the characters, and I feel like this
project will be better than anything else I’ve ever written. (Or . . . no, I
just won’t go there.)
However, it’s
going to take more than a month or two to write. It might take six months, or
it might take a year. (I’m trying not to think longer.)
Meanwhile, I’m
trying to keep a few non-fiction projects running and some real short fiction
moving through the submission cycles.
Just when you think you've hit the bottom, some asshole throws shows up with a shovel.
Things have gotten ugly here. So ugly, I can't even really write it out in public.
Anyway. If I'm not here tomorrow, that's why. I'll have a guest post up tomorrow at Tyrean's blog. (Sorry Tyrean! I meant to do more to generate traffic. But the best laid plans of mice and men and all that) and on Thursday, she'll be here to talk about Starting Over with a new story.
In the meantime, can anyone tell me where I can find the reset button?
Hey everyone! Before I get started, I just wanted to mention that the lovely Crystal Collier is hosting Endless on her blog. So if you'd like a chance to win an e-copy, please head over there and guess which one is the lie.
Hey everyone! Today's the first Wednesday of the month, so I thought I would stop by and give a bit of an update. For those of you wondering what The Insecure Writer's Support Group is about... We're a group of writers who come together on the first Wednesday of the month to share our insecurities. The idea is to be encouraged, but also to visit each other and find that no, being insecure as a writer really isn't all that strange. If you'd like more information or just to sign up, please feel free to visit the awesome Alex J Cavanaugh (he's the host).
So. Why am I so quiet?
Long story. Mostly, I'm busy trying to change up the way my whole social networking strategy works. I know what I want to do and why. The issue is that right now, I just don't have as much time as I'd like.
Another long story. If you're really interested in what's going on in my life, please feel free to go check out my previous two or three posts.
So. Big deal that I don't have so much time left, right? (Pun not intended.)
Wrong.
See... I have this one thing left where, if I manage nothing else this year, I want to see book 3 in The War of Six Crowns published. We're already past half way and because of my consistent lack of time, I'm nowhere near where I want to be with it.
So. I'm cutting back for the next month or so just to get myself on some sort of track, because as it happens, I belong to the school of thought that the best marketing to do is to publish a new book.
Which won't happen if I'm more obsessed with my social networking than... you know... editing my story.
Speaking of edits... I sent book 3 to my first CP last month. Usually, I send to more people at a time, but right then, I needed someone to tell me if my sneaking suspicions about the book were wrong or not. They weren't.
Which isn't much of an issue, except that the issues I had been avoiding until now require that I basically re-do the first third of my book to get more information in.
Excellent.
Except, I'm currently somewhat stuck on the subject of exactly how I'm supposed to manage it without turning book 3 into a 200k word monster. Right now, it's at 90k because I already split it in two. Now I have to add a third to it. Which means I'm looking at a book that's twice as long as The Vanished Knight.
And I'm worried that that extra third will throw off the pacing.
I'm worried, yet again, that this series is just too... big for me. Yes, this has been a reoccurring theme from the first time I started writing the first books. But I don't always think people realize just how big this series is set to become.
Somehow, I'm supposed to manage the scope of the story while still keeping the pace to at least a reasonable pace.
Which is just... not something I'm dead sure I can do right now.
So for now, I'm rereading The Vanished Knight and The Heir's Choice, trying to see which strings I'd left untied and if I've forgotten anything that can be worked in. Or just if anything in the story shakes loose something that I might use to bridge the gap between the end of The Heir's Choice and the start of the main action of Book 3.
Long story short, I'm super insecure about finishing Book 3 for publishing this year. How are you doing?
So after all
this time, I finally managed to be way late for my own bloghop. It’s been a
long week and I got home so late that I just couldn’t focus. I decided to sit
back and sort through my goals for July in the morning (because I didn’t have
time to do it all week).
And when I
finally managed to sit down and put this post together, I realized that I’ve
got to be realistic and completely change the way I’m approaching my goals.
Why?
Let me show you…
Writing
Goals:
1) 60 000 words written, 60 hours
of edits or some combination of those.
The
equivalent of 23k words.
2) Find and submit to Critique
Partners for Wo6C3
Sent
to one CP and in short, Wo6C3 needs only a ton more work before I can send it
out to more.
3) Critique works by critique
partners.
I’m
waiting for my CP’s work.
4) Edit ES1
Didn’t
look at it.
5) Prep rewrite for BvB2.
I
managed to think of this a few times before I had to do something else.
6) Complete revisions to O1
I
revised two chapters.
7) Add 10000 words to StW1
Added
almost 8k words.
8) Work on CdW concept Nope.
9) Start Sci Fi Project. (Still
thinking about an suitable acronym.)
Nope
and Nope.
10) Work on concept for a new
story that came to me while I rested.
A
little bit of this done, but not much in the way of a concrete start.
11) Edit my Untethered Realms
anthology story.
Done.
Yay. I managed one thing.
Reading:
Read 6 books.
I
read 4.
Read some chapters of Les Trois Mousquetaires.
Nope.
Networking
and Marketing:
Rethink Social Network Strategy
This
I did and it’s huge. So much so that it’s taking a chunk of my writing time to
implement.
Regular updates to at least some
of the social networks.
This
I was spotty on because I’m basically rebuiling my entire social network from
scratch in some places.
Confirm new covers for Wo6C series.
Done.
Life:
Maintain balance between life,
writing and work.
Bahahahahahaha
*cries*
Go to dancing classes once a week.
Didn’t
go because the week before I was to go to my first lesson, I discovered that I’m
moving again, so I couldn’t sign the membership contract.
Get into the habit of eating more
frequent, smaller meals. (Stress and an ulcer don’t mix, so I have to help
where I can.)
This
I did and also cut way back on carbs and sugars to help even further.
In short: I managed to do precious
little that I set out to do.
There are a variety of reasons for
this:
1) I’m having to rebuild my
day-job business from scratch yet again. Which means I have to put in more
hours.
2) I’m having to restructure my
social networking (see here if you’re curious as to why and what I’m doing.)
3) I’m a bit of an emotional mess
due to reason number 1
4) While being an emotional mess,
I default to working on The War of Six
Crowns, which means that I broke my own rule of not working on a sequel
before the earlier book is ready for publishing, so that I could work on Book 4
while waiting for CP feed back on Book 3. And now Book 3 needs more work.
5) People, I feel like crying this
morning.
In short, it’s taken just about
two years of unrelenting pressure, but I’ve buckled under. This month was the
most unproductive I’ve ever been and it’s been a downward trend from January.
Yesterday, I spoke to my mother
about how I’m feeling right now and… It’s not good. I’m exhausted. Completely
and utterly. I’ve expended every ounce of my energy to keep going earlier this
year and in return I got my suppliers and clients stolen by someone I trusted
and nothing to show for it because all the money I’d earned went into
surviving.
So.
The situation is this.
I’m not catching a break.
My hard work does not result in anything. Because in this
life, it seems, the only thing that matters is being rich or being lucky. I’m
neither.
And yet, I can’t just give up, so
I have to keep going.
I have to keep working in the
hopes that this time I strike it lucky. And heaven knows I’ll keep writing
because the day I stop that I might as well stop living.
But I can’t keep trying to do so
much because I have readers waiting for Book 3. I probably have one or two
people hoping I get the sequel to Endless
out too. Since The War of Six Crowns is
my happy place, that’s my priority, but other than that, my only priority right
now is to survive rebuilding, moving house, and doing everything else I need to
do in order to have a shot at making it as a writer.
Sorry if this is way too much of a
downer, but this is where I am right now. Hopefully tomorrow is a better day.
Hey everyone! I'm a bit quiet at the moment, mainly because wrangling the monster that is my social networking process into some semblance of order is taking A LOT of time.
So. What am I doing, you might ask?
Right now, I'm busy with sorting out my Twitter. The one most of you follow (@MishaMFB). To say the least, I have been awfully silent on there lately for one simple reason.
Ahem.
Buy my book.
Buy my book.
Buy my book.
BUY MY BOOK!
BUY MY BOOK!
BUY MY BOOOOOOOOOOOOKK!!!!!1!!!!!
Oh and while you're at it, click this link please.
Don't get me wrong. I'm all for promotion.
I'm just not all for promotion when it's spamming my Twitter feed so much that all the promotion take all of the "social" out of social networking.
SO.
If you have a twitter profile that you've automated. If you have a twitter profile where you're mainly posting links...
Know that I love you to bits, but I don't love your twitter profile, so I'm just going to stop following it.
Because honestly, all the clamoring for attention and links instead of real interaction is driving me nuts. So much so that until now, I've actively been avoiding my twitter. And worse still, I only posted links there myself because I didn't want to trawl through my feed looking for people to talk to.
But no more. I'm trying to become the solution for myself by clearing out my feed.
It's taking long, though. I followed almost 3000 tweeps in my time on twitter and now I have to manually go through all of them to see who's only posting promos.
So that's where I was (and where I will probably be over the next couple of weeks.)
And then.
I'm moving again.
Yes, I know. Again. But the house I'm moving to will be super awesome and actually big enough for all of us. I can't wait.
But it does mean that I have limited time in which to get everything done, and since my twitter feed sort out is part of a larger reorientation of my social networking time, I have to get that done first.
Which means that I'll only really get around to full-steam blogging in July. The obvious exception being my bloghop post on Friday.
If you missed my whole post on what's making me reorganize, you can find it here.
I've entered the Wattys
Continuing my hunt for exposure, I've entered both The Heir's Choice and Endless into The Wattys, which is Wattpad's way of awarding good writing posted on the site. If a book wins, they put a bit more extra marketing effort into it, which is exactly the sort of thing I want at the moment. So if you're on Wattpad and you've been waiting for an excuse to read my books, please do check them out here.
Before I go, I just want to give a shout-out to some awesome blogging friends of mine...
“There was a time when a girl’s wedding day was the happiest day of her life.”
In Falside, girls are a rare commodity; protected, controlled, and tracked by the administration. They spend their days idly waiting to be married off to the highest bidder.
When the marriage announcements include Tale’s lover, Freda, the women will do anything to stop the match from happening.
Their relationship is forbidden, and as members of the resistance, they’re already risking everything.
But as their attempts to stop the wedding fail, both women have to decide what they’re willing to sacrifice for love.
Angeline Trevena is a British dystopian horror author. She was born and bred in a rural corner of Devon, but now lives among the breweries and canals of central England.
In 2003 she graduated from Edge Hill University, Lancashire, with a BA Hons degree in Drama and Writing. During this time she decided that her future lay in writing words rather than performing them.
Some years ago Angeline worked at an antique auction house and religiously checked every wardrobe that came in to see if Narnia was in the back of it. She's still not given up looking for it.
Maysa Mazari is alarmed by her mother’s talk about arranged marriage. As a hijab-wearing Pakistani-American, she wants to find love on her own. Her judgmental Muslim clique has protected her from racist taunts, although the leader is turning on her as Maysa strays from the group because of her attraction to Haydee.
Haydee Gomez is a former gang member and juvenile detention student. Now living with a clean-cut aunt, she wants to turn her life around, even though one person will never let her forget her roots—Rafe, her abusive pimp. Haydee attempts to pull away from a life of prostitution when she develops feelings for Maysa, although Rafe isn’t willing to give her up too easily.
Finding themselves in danger from Maysa’s friends and Haydee’s pimp, it’s apparent their love disturbs everyone around them as they fight to stay together.
Yeah. I haven't been able to write much, so it's given me plenty of time to consider where my writing career needs to go and what I need to do in order to get there.
The main thing for me is my approach to social networking.
But then something happened that made me re-evaluate EVERYTHING. And I warn you, this is going to be a downer if you're a self-publisher.
So... What happened?
It started with The Vanished Knight getting over 175k reads.
The pictures I used for its cover and for the one on The Heir's Choice are creative commons pictures. I'm not really worried that I'll get sued or anything like that but, you know... The more people read the story, the more nervous the free image idea makes me.
Besides that, the fact that I used two swords on the covers kind of limited the direction in which I can go for book 3, which I'm planning to publish later this year.
So. I started designing new ones. While doing that, I did my usual thing of going to Amazon and searching my genre (Epic Fantasy) to see how my covers compare.
And I noticed something very, very worrying.
Amazon now cuts off search results at 20k books. No matter what I did, I never got more than 25k books out of my search.
Maybe there's a way, but I'm only a run-of-the-mill user type. You know, the exact type of person who'd be looking for a new book to read.
You're seeing the problem, I assume.
Even if I enter the specific key-phrases into the search, I still couldn't find my books, presumably because I'm not ranking high enough.
Which, as a person only barely starting out in the publishing game, is a nightmare scenario.
Because in my world, all this means that if you're going to self publish or going to go the indie route, you better go in with a huge following of your own.
Yeah.
Major.
Major.
Major Downer.
So what's a girl like me to do?
She puts all her chips on the table.
I'm doing really well on Wattpad. (175k reads for Fantasy is nothing to sniff at.) The Vanished Knight has its own built-in fan-base. But it hasn't reached critical mass.
But it'll get there. But to get there, I have to re-think my strategy.
So.
I'm taking a leap of faith and posting The Heir's Choice on there as well. And I'm going to keep posting books on there for the foreseeable future. Because for me, Wattpad has something that Amazon doesn't:
Discoverability
But, of course, this brings me to my big concern:
I want to make a living as a writer.
Which means that making my work available for free kind of defeats the object. (Except if you totally correctly point out that there's no chance at making a living if readers can't find me.)
Basically, it works on a similar concept as Gofundme or Kickstarter except for one major difference. With Patreon, the point is for patrons to pledge small monthly amounts (that they can pick) that will be paid over to the artist every month instead of one big fund that is aimed at something specific.
Here's a bit of a better explanation (but the video is about per-artwork pledges. I'm too prolific for that.)
If you'd like to help me out, you're awesome-sauce. All you have to do is click here and pick your poison. (There are rewards available if you want them.)
Maybe you'd like to check out Patreon for yourself? Click here. (it's an affiliate link. I get paid for people who join.)
But what does all this mean?
For one thing, I'm changing my focus. To me, it makes sense to direct traffic to Patreon, so it also makes sense to use that as a hub and branching all of my social-media out of it.
For one thing, Video gets better responses on Patreon, so starting next month, I'm moving over into Vlogging. I'll still update this blog, but I think this is going to be the next step. I'll still be writing posts here and there, though, but it makes sense to make sure that my time is spent on content that I can use everywhere.
As part of my Patreon rewards, I'm going to start hosting a weekly online hang-out, but you're all invited anyway. I'm thinking that as my fanbase grows, it might be a great way to give my favorite writer buddies (I.E. you) some extra exposure.
There is also an All Posts page on Patreon where patrons can interact with each other and me, and I think this has vast potential as a different kind of social network.
So come on! It's only $1 to get in where all the cool kids will be. Please do consider helping a girl out. Or just go check out the page and tell me what you think of it so far. :-)
Any questions? What about my new covers?
Well.
I'll share the first two here now. The others will be revealed later in the year...
Hey everyone! I'm back again! Lots of news coming up this month, since I've decided to totally over-haul the way I'm going about my social media. But more on that later.
First things first, I'm welcoming Annalisa Crawford to The Five Year Project as part of the blog tour for her new book You. I. Us. Take it away, Annalisa!
Do you like listening to music while working on your stories?
Hi Misha, thanks for inviting me onto your blog today!
I go through phases, when it comes to music. During my first drafts, I watch a lot of TV—repeats of Castle and Murdoch Mysteries mostly—I’ve seen every season of each of those programmes multiple times! It’s nice to have a distraction in those moments when the next scene just isn’t quite right, and on occasion, they’ve provided a little inspiration too.
Music comes later, either an old-favourite CD that I play on a loop, or a fantastic 80s radio station that has a no-repeat guarantee. Recently, I discovered a YouTube playlist of all the songs from How I Met Your Mother (another series I’ve watched repeatedly), which is brilliant, because some of those songs evoke immense emotion.
For my current WIP, I’m listening to Try Whistling This by Neil Finn (from Crowded House, and fantastic as a solo artist!) This track is Last One Standinghttps://youtu.be/1BZFrYcgeGsIf my WIP ever got made into a film, this would be the title track.
What music do you like listening to?
You. I. Us.
Publication
date: June 10, 2016 Genre: Short Stories (Single Author)
In
You. I. Us., Annalisa Crawford captures everyday people during
poignant defining moments in their lives: An artist puts his heart into
his latest sketch, an elderly couple endures scrutiny by a fellow diner, an
ex-student attempts to make amends with a girl she bullied at school, a
teenager holds vigil at his friend’s hospital bedside, long distance lovers
promise complete devotion, a broken-hearted widow stares into the sea from the
edge of a cliff where her husband died, a grieving son contacts the only person
he can rely on in a moment of crisis, a group of middle-aged friends inspire
each other to live remarkable lives.
Day
after day, we make the same choices. But after reading You. I. Us.,
you’ll ask yourself, “What if we didn’t?”
About the author
Annalisa Crawford lives in Cornwall UK, with a good
supply of moorland and beaches to keep her inspired. She lives with her
husband, two sons, a dog and a cat. Annalisa writes dark contemporary,
character-driven stories. She has been winning competitions and publishing
short stories in small press journals for many years, and is the author of Cat
& The Dreamer and Our Beautiful Child.
