Fuckarounditis

Fuckarounditis is a word I learned when I started seriously working out. It describes the  malaise of people who go to the gym with no system or goals, who stand around doing curls or endless hours of light cardio, and who generally see little progress because they don’t really know what they’re doing*.

Fuckarounditis is what I have been suffering with regards to learning about self-publishing. That ends now, because it appears that Trad Publishing does not agree that I am a special snowflake, or possibly they are too distracted with their own issues, or maybe my blurb just sucked.

Done:

• Researched KDP and Kindle Select. Almost decided between Kindle Select and D2D.
• Book cover designed.
• Relatively convincing-looking copyright and dedication page inserted (hey, it’s the little things).
• Pen name selected.
• Joined some author forums.
• Spent an hour being irritated by SquareSpace, but probably have it sorted out. Not sure a full website is really necessary at this point.
• Learned that I can just pay for some lightweight advertising, rather than pretending to like things I don’t like on social media.
• Blurb re-written. Man, when I was writing my query letters I was really stiff. I guess I’d read too many lists of Things You Must Do In Your Query Letter.

To Do/To Research:

• Do I Really Need An ISBN?
• Buy a domain name.
• Double-check that people in the Ack section don’t mind me using their real names.
• Grab up some obvious accounts with the pen name (gmail, twitter, and possibly, killmenow, Facebook). (Wait, does Facebook let you use a pen name?)
• Figure out if I can rename this blog to match pen name. Since I have a readership of roughly zero, probably not a serious dilemma.
• Find out exactly which promotional services are worth throwing money at.
• Convince my Mom that she CAN’T write reviews on my book. (Apparently Amazon frowns on this and has secret algorithms meant to weed out anyone who might be less than objective. Creepy.)

*Punchline: After work today I’m going to the gym to walk on the treadmill while watching iZombie.

Nemesis

This one isn’t about writing, and I don’t have a nemesis.

But a thing happened to me today: I remembered a vague snippet of a song from when I was very young. This probably happens to everyone, it’s just more embarrassing if you were very young in the 1980s. It involved a lyric where someone legit rhymes ‘big black nemesis’ with ‘parthenogenesis’, and the great thing about the Internet is that it means you never have to wonder what song you’re thinking about as long as you can grab hold of a few words. Granted, if you can grab hold of a word like ‘parthenogenesis’, it makes it a hell of a lot easier.

So this happens to me sometimes, and given the 1980s, when I load the song in Spotify I often end up giggling (unless it was one of those bands that never had an embarrassing 80s phase, like U2). The synths, the saxophones, the electronic drums … and then, even worse, you may be compelled to look for the video on YouTube. That’s basically never a good idea.

So the song in question was Nemesis by a band called Shriekback. You can find it in Spotify here:

 

This is maybe the most Eighties the eighties ever was. So after listening to it at work a few times and giggling in my office, I had to go look up the video. Watching it, I realized I vaguely remembered it, and to be fair it hasn’t aged as badly as some videos do. (Recent traumatic experience: looking up the video for Depeche Mode’s I Feel You and seeing the striped monstrosity the singer is wearing.)

But the real reason I’m posting this entry is the lead singer, who is frequently giving me Bald Spike.

 

You’re welcome.

 

Where We Are

Book One completed, polished, beta’d, feedback’d, etc. I think I am done. Done done. Cover art designed for possible self-publication.

Book Two, 65k words written, fully plotted. Four sample chapters sent to beta reader, who wants more badly.

Book Three, final chapter inexplicably written. Notes taken.

Book Four (unrelated to first three), started writing. Notes taken.

Twelve query letters on Book One sent to appropriate-seeming agents as of November-ish. Five rejection letters so far; all else is crickets.

The husband of my most enthusiastic beta reader reminded me that, about twenty years ago in the BBS space, we both knew someone who is now way up at Penguin. He convinced me to email her, based on his wife’s reaction to Book One. I haven’t heard back. I don’t expect to. I don’t think they just let you jump the line like that.

I have made no progress on the Social Media Problem. Well, I’ve discovered there’s a word now that means fear of social media, but it’s not a very interesting word. But after a year of whining about it here, and like a decade and a half of whining about it in other places, we’re fast approaching the part where I’ll have to Just Get Over It, because anonymity just isn’t going to work. On that note, I reached out over the holidays to the old Gilmore Girls fanfic community, to see if anyone there would be interested in reading my book. I got a few bites. So there’s a few potential readers.

But I still have to decide: Real Name, Totally New Pen Name, or Something with “Kieyra” That May Link Me To Old Embarrassing Fanfic.

 

What Have We Learned?

Okay, so it’s been like eleven thousand months since I posted anything on what the kids call “social media”. What have I learned in that time?

• I am possibly just not capable of maintaining a social media presence.  If I’m just not feeling it, I’m not feeling it, and nothing happens. Unfortunately, I can not feel it for months and months at a time. Maybe I can parlay my lack of social media platform into some sort of mystique?
• I’m pretty happy posting messages, more or less anonymously, on lots and lots of forums. If I could translate my forum activity (on everything from makeup to television shows to meteorology to truly frightening reddit encounters) from the last fifteen years into social media activity, I would have all the followers. Unfortunately, I consciously use a different handle for every single forum I’m on.
• I am capable of writing novels. Multiple novels. Book  One is almost done with what I believe will be its final pass, and I hammered out a two-page synopsis for it recently (writing a novel is hard; distilling 100k words into two pages is painful). Meaning I will soon go from talking about getting rejected by agents to actually getting rejected by agents. Also: Book Two is at 60k words and fully plotted, and the damned thing has turned itself into a trilogy, which I already know the ending to.
• I hate my job. But it enables me to do things like buy laptops to write novels and also go on cruises.
• I love going on cruises. I’ve gone on two since my last blog post. (My two first cruises, by the way. The first was a week-long solo cruise in which I wrote about 20k words of Book Two, it was amazing.)
• Trying to find a new job while also facing getting lots of query letters rejected is probably more than my somewhat tenuous ego can deal with, so I will probably put it off till after the holidays. The job hunting, I mean. Query letters will probably begin their journeys to rejection in the next few weeks. Watch this space for my heartbreak.
• I like pollo a la brasa. 

Very Fucking Funny (Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye)

So on the heels of some of my recent blog-based introspection, in which I made a joke about how I needed to get some technical certifications in case the writing gig didn’t work out … I signed up for a fairly hardcore technical certification. And committed to a few months without writing (because I would instead be studying). This seemed like a good insurance policy that would undercut a lot of my insecurities going forward, in a way that wasn’t actually abandoning writing.

That was two weeks ago.

One week ago, the beta reader I’d been really counting on, and who I thought had abandoned me, got back to me with a lot of detail and a lot of effusive praise, and pointed out one issue with the motivation of the villain (something another beta reader had mentioned). This is novel #1. I was happy but I was already in technical-cert mode and mentally set it aside (after much gushing gratitude).

I guess last night my subconscious decided to work on the problem, because I woke up with an entire music video in my head that described/solved the villain’s motivation problem, complete with a song I forgot I ever knew from when I was about twelve, full of theming and nuance and foreshadowing and fucking writer-euphoria (which I know may be shorthand for ‘slight emotional instability’).

I took a lot of detailed notes before the feeling passed.

Back to kerberos.

(I can’t tell you the song I woke up with, because I’m superstitious about that shit, but instead here’s a random cover of Tracy Ullman’s “They Don’t Know” that I overheard in a cafe last weekend: Lydia Loveless – They Don’t Know)

Don’t Slow Down

This is one of my favorite passages from Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies, although ‘favorite’ is a misnomer because there are few passages in that book that I don’t love:

Once he had watched Liz making a silk braid. One end was pinned to the wall and on each finger of her raised hands she was spinning loops of thread, her fingers flying so fast he couldn’t see how it worked. ‘Slow down,’ he said, ‘so I can see how you do it,’ but she’d laughed and said, ‘I can’t slow down, if I stopped to think how I was doing it I couldn’t do it at all.’

This is precisely what happens to my ability to write once I get online and start trying to talk about writing, or reading what other would-be writers are going through. By which I mean to say, I was on a roll this morning with Book Two, and it came to a screeching halt when I took a break to catch up on my social media efforts. Now I’m just sitting here worrying about gamergate and how many rejection letters it’ll ultimately take to break me.

Oh well. Here’s today’s song: Pierce The Veil – (Don’t Fear) the Reaper

Option Paralysis

…is what I am experiencing right now.

I remember learning this phrase when I was in my early twenties, and it seemed very apt at the time. I believe it was being used to describe the state of many young Gen-X-ers in that era. We could, allegedly, do anything we wanted to do, but we had no idea what that was. At the time I wanted to simultaneously be a rock star and an astronaut, so there was a certain amount of wheel-spinning.

I’ve just googled it, and Wikipedia doesn’t cop to the existence of a state called option paralysis, but it does have this un-sourced article:

Analysis paralysis or paralysis of analysis is an anti-pattern, the state of over-analyzing (or over-thinking) a situation so that a decision or action is never taken, in effect paralyzing the outcome. A decision can be treated as over-complicated, with too many detailed options, so that a choice is never made, rather than try something and change if a major problem arises. A person might be seeking the optimal or “perfect” solution upfront, and fear making any decision which could lead to erroneous results, when on the way to a better solution.

Seems legit.

Basically: I have written a novel and I don’t know what to do next. The options currently paralyzing me:

• Begin traditional publishing process. Network, query, synopsize, receive rejections, bounce back from that or something, triumph of human spirit, profit? I discussed my fears regarding this path in my previous blog post.
• Self-publish online. Problem: How to make people aware that the book exists when I am a natural introvert. Something tells me that there is a certain amount of behind-the-scenes fuckery in regards to the fact that the same ten or twenty self-published ebooks are the ones that show up over and over again on Amazon, no matter how sneaky you try to get with the searches. Something tells me that if I don’t know anyone, my book won’t be one of them.
• Expand online ‘platform’ before self-publishing. Problem: I’m impatient. Also, once I start digging into writer-y social media, it seems overwhelming. My interest in attending conferences, entering short-story contests, pretending to like stuff I’m not sure I really like, and ‘selling myself’ is all very low. I realize, in fact, that this entire blog post is kind of doing the opposite of selling myself. A lot of this social/networking/introversion stuff I’ve been whining about literally for years now just goes back to my basic difficulty in pretending to be something I’m not. To wit: a gregarious person.
• Shelve this book for now (and I’m still waiting on some beta reader feedback) and start working on the next book. I have, in fact, started working on the next book. Problem: the next book is a spinoff of the first book. Well, that’s not really a problem, but it does mean that the first book can’t be ‘shelved’ indefinitely.
• Set aside the original fiction and pump out some more fanfic. I’ve always felt that fanfic is great practice for writing, sort of like training wheels, and it’s a good source of feedback, especially if you write for a popular fandom. This might also allow me to become more active online and meet more people in a way that feels more organic and less forced. Problem: Will feel like a cop-out. I’ve proven to myself that I can plot, edit and polish an original novel, why futz around with fanfic? 
• Say fuck it to all of this and work on technical certifications instead so I don’t accidentally age out of my IT day job.

I’ve been kind of stuck between these various options for the last month or so. I declared the novel finished in November, and since then I’ve been talking with beta readers and doing a small amount of polishing, but mostly spinning in circles in my head. I am definitely in the depths of analysis paralysis and it sucks. For one thing, it means I can’t get in the right mindset to actually write.

And of course there is always the voice in my head: Statistically, what are the chances your novel doesn’t suck?  What are the chances you have any talent at all? But from what I understand most writers have this voice in their heads, so that part doesn’t bother me as much.

Anyway. Here’s hoping that writing this shit down will help me break through the paralysis.

If you actually read this far, allow me to reward you with this cute little Smiths-esque song I accidentally discovered in spotify:

The Crookes – Backstreet Lovers

Welcome to my blog.

I’m a writer. I’m a chick. I work in IT and have done for a long time.

I’ve written fanfic for about 12 years, in a sporadic kind of way. Here’s some of it. 

I should tell you that I detest social media. I have reasons that go back a very long time; not just the current online weirdness. You know. All the online weirdness. I’m also a private person, although rationally I know that no one really cares all that much about my secrets. I ‘blogged’ for a while, a long time ago, by which I mean the 90s, and when you’re in your early twenties, getting online and saying every damned thing that comes into your head feels great, and seems like a good idea. But the older I get, and the more I am faced with how little I really know, the less convinced I am that we all need a global platform from which to scream our opinion on every damned thing.

I do have a footprint when it comes to things like message boards, on quite a few topics, but generally hobby stuff: cooking, video games, television shows. Usually nothing too heated. But no Facebook, no tumblr, no instagram, no YouTube. I do have an old LJ because it was the place to be for fanfic for a while. Maybe it still is. I even posted some personal stuff in it in the early aughts, but I quickly freaked myself out with it and deleted a lot of it. Or made it private. I don’t remember now. Social media messes with my head and my ego pretty badly.

So why am I here now?

I love writing.

Writing fanfic was pretty easy: write anonymously, post anonymously, the readers come to you. And then you can go away again.

But now I have written a novel. It’s an original novel, so I can’t just dump it in the Arrow category on fanfic sites and know that it will get eyes with no further effort on my part. I’m researching the traditional publishing industry, and if you would ever like to have your soul crushed to death, I would recommend researching the traditional publishing industry. Jesus. They might as well print “Give Up Now” on the cover. I have a certain amount of drive and persistence. (I finished a novel.) The state of my ego … fluctuates. I love writing and I am afraid that once I begin the traditional querying process, the inevitable rejection letters will crush my spirit and I will no longer want to write.

But I love writing. I don’t want to lose it. I have, in fact, begun working on a second novel.

If my spirit is crushed–and unfortunately, I must admit that my spirit is not very resilient when it comes to setbacks–then I’m just a chick who fixes computers for a living. I like my day job fine. As day jobs go, it’s pretty great. But when I discovered writing fiction, around age 30, I felt for the first time in my life that I’d found the thing I was ‘supposed’ to do. Nothing feels as good as being in the groove while writing.

I have a few options:

• Go through with the traditional publishing attempt anyway, and attempt to grow a thicker skin. Risk ego crushing. In this event, the books and articles all tell me that no matter what else happens, I will need an online ‘platform’.
• Self-publish instead. Drop the fucker under my fanfic penname on Amazon or iBooks or whatever. But then how to make anyone aware the book exists? I will need an online ‘platform’.

See what these two things have in common?

And thus: Welcome to my blog.

I begin this project with profound misgivings, in case that’s not apparent. But keeping everything bottled up inside–the writing, the wanting to talk about the writing, all the the other stuff in my head–is not working for me either.