Did someone see a wagon go by?

So, um, I'm supposed to be sweating for 70 days? Uh, yeah. Ok. I don't think that's happening.

I did great through November. But the rest of my life caught up with me this month. In fact, I should get my butt off the computer and go run errands. I have a list of things to do a mile long, and writing is only one item on the list. And, it doesn't have a deadline like Christmas shopping does.

Next year, I'll know. After the giant push in November must come some down time. otherwise, I will go crazy trying to get everything done. Wait, I'm already going crazy and I have dropped writing to th bottom of my priority list. For a couple of weeks.

Myrrah and Dominic are still there. Their story is still percolating. As are a few side projects that I could tackle (not till I get a first full draft of this one).

Gift Exchange

There's a little Secret Santa action happening over at Robin Bielman's blog. It sound like fun--Robin will match up people to buy each other a new book (buyer's choice) and ship it to them. Sounds like an opportunity for expanding your reading list (or adding to the "to be read" pile, but I won't dwell on that).

I'm always up for something new. Anyone else?

E-books, royalties, and the hidden costs of nothingness

Have I mentioned this before? I don’t remember. But I’ll do it again, anyway, because the issue is on my mind, and because I'm in a mood to rant a bit.

Let me start with a few background statements.

I have a great sympathy for authors who are publishing books with e-presses, and with traditional presses that offer e-book formats. I completely understand the desire to make a greater royalty percentage. And I do believe that high e-book prices are a barrier to getting readers to buy into the format. With e-book readers costing $300 a pop, I personally would not shell out an additional $24.99 for an e-book to read on it, when I can buy the paper book and save myself the cost of the reader. They need to make the economics work out in favor of the consumer for long enough to saturate the market with e-readers.

So, in general, I support the idea of an author making a larger % of a smaller $ for each e-book sold.

Where I start to disagree is where authors and readers make comments like “E-books should be cheaper to buy, after all, you’re not paying for the paper or the printing costs.”

Listen, folks. You cannot hold the bytes of an e-book in your hand. But that does not make them free.

Was your computer free? I guarantee you that the servers used by the publishing companies and retail stores (like Amazon) to store your e-book were not free. In fact, they cost 10-20x more than an average home PC. And a company with a big online presence typically has more than one. A LOT more.

Ever call the Geek Squad (or that neighborhood computer whiz) for help? Was that free? Even the neighborhood kid probably cost you a favor. When you maintain corporate-type computer systems and networks, you hire your own Geek Squad. Sys admins aren’t cheap. Actually, they make quite nice, middle-class incomes. And you probably need more than one, since no one person can work 24/7 (and you want your e-book available to readers, even on the weekends, at Christmas, and at 3am, right?)

Is your internet service free? No? Well, its not free for big corporations either. And they don’t get any $9.99 a month specials for the amount of data that they have to provide. Plus, you need more than the average home cable-modem’s worth of downloading power in order to serve more than, say, 2 customers at a time for downloading or transferring those e-books.

And, especially for you published authors, was your fancy, graphics-intensive website free? No? What, you built it yourself? Ok, how much is your time worth? Because website layouts, content updates, maintenance, etc, cost money and time. And you definitely want your e-publisher’s website to look 2009 and not 1995, right?

Now, it is true that you do not need a single server, 2+ administrators, dedicated fiber lines, and fancy website for one lone e-book that might sell 1000 copies. The costs of all of this are shared across all books that a company maintains and offers for sale. And, because I’m not privy to any e-publishers budgetary information, I cannot say exactly how much the per-book cost of all of this is. But it’s not 0. It’s definitely not 0. And for someone to assume that it is, or to complain that it should be, or expecting a publisher not to make a profit on their work, is not productive.

The publishing industry is going through changes; probably much like the music industry did when iPods and MP3 players hit the scene a few years ago. I am not a fortune teller, or a crack business analyst, or even a published author (yet!). But I can say that the publishers and the authors will have to work together to make this new system work. Maybe publishers need to give a larger cut to authors. Maybe they need to lower prices on e-books to make them more attractive. Maybe e-published authors need to promote the e-readers, give a few away in drawings, offer up ideas on alternatives (like those new mini-laptops, fancy cell phones, print-on-demand discounts that allow a reader to buy a printed copy of an e-book…something!). But for goodness sake, stop complaining that publishers have no costs associated with producing an e-book. Because it just ain't so.

And, for my parting thought, why on earth is this considered a soapbox? Seems to me that a box made of soap would get awful slippery if you stood on it for a while….

Carnage

The carnage isn't as bad as I feared. Yet. I removed a couple of chapters from my WIP that I had written during NaNo, and later decided to toss. I wanted them to count towards my word count, so I'd left them in place :) I was afraid that I'd loose 10,000 or more words, but it only came in around 5k.

Now, I need to get moving forward again. I've had a nice week and a half long break, between NaNo recovery, critique group, and spending the weekend out of town. I also have plenty of editing to do on the sections that I read in the crit group.

Some of the comments were interesting. One was about how some of my word choices gave the piece almost a historical voice, not a contemporary one. I'm not sure that I'll be changing that. I don't think it bothers me for it to sound a little anachronistic, and depending on which POV I'm in, it is supposed to sound stiff and formal. Like the words have been translated by-the-book from another language, which in a way, for that character, they are.

Several of the sections that got repeatedly mentioned just felt funny when I read them out loud. So, overall, I concur with a lot of the feedback. Don't know when I'll get around to changing it though. Soon, maybe.

I still have no working title for my book.

Lessons in Word: Italics vs Underlines

The question of Italics versus Underlines keeps coming up lately. In recent blog posts, and discussions of “standard” manuscript formatting. And last night, at my critique group, I was told that I should always underline and not italicize. I guess its some holdover to the days of typewriters and typesetters that had to manually copy a manuscript, and could easily miss italicized words.

I use italics. They’re easy to read, and underlines just look funny to me. Like a character is shouting, not quietly thinking. I’m a rebel, I know.

But even I don’t flaunt rules without a fall back plan. You see, if you use Word, you can change all your italics to underlines in about 30 seconds. Seriously. Well, if your MS is 120,000 words, and your charcters do a lot of thinking, give yourself a minute or two.

Here’s how:

• From the Edit menu, select Replace.


• In the Find and Replace dialog, click the More button at the bottom. The dialog should grow a little taller and have more options.


• Click on the empty text box next to “Find What”. Don’t type, just make sure your cursor is blinking in the box.


• Now click the Format button at the very bottom of the dialog. From the popup menu, select Font.


• A Find Font dialog should appear, with lots of options. Under Font Style, highlight Italic. Leave all other options untouched. Click OK.


• Back in the Find and Replace dialog, under the Find What, you should see a note that says “Format: Font: Italic”


• Now click into the text box next to “Replace With:” Again, don’t type, just make sure your cursor is blinking there.


• Select that Format button again, and select Font again. Under Font Style, select “Regular”. Then under Underline Style lower down, choose the solid line (or the underline style of your choice). Click OK.


• Now under “Replace With”, it should say something like “Font: Not Bold, Not Italic, Underline”


• Click Replace All


• When it’s done, skim through the manuscript. All those pesky italics that will surely lose you a publishing contract are gone.


• Don’t forget to save your work!

The last word on NaNo (for now)

I almost forgot: I (somehow) did NaNo without a single visit to Starbucks. Not my intention at all, really.

I did have one cup of Starbucks coffee before the November MORWA meeting, but it was Starbucks from a Barnes and Noble, and I spent my meager 20 minutes of "writing time" ordering a new battery for my laptop (as the old one was dead dead dead). And I know I had one peppermint mocha, but it wasn't related to writing.

I don't know if this is a good trend or bad. A little sugar buzz would probably have helped some nights, but I relied on Halloween candy for that (the kids are now out of all cinnamon-flavored hard candies). What it did mean is that I didn't manage to flex any time at work to leave early and write in the afternoon. I missed that.

And now, a peppermint mocha sounds really good.

In Summary

NaNoWriMo kicked my butt. It was harder this year. Much harder.

Last year, I had an idea, and just started writing. I hadn’t thought much about POV, or conflict, or anything else. I just felt my way through the process. I picked up a couple of books on writing during that month, and I know that they helped. Instinctively, I started keeping to one POV at a time, and the scenese definitely improved as I went. I did a lot of cutting and editing later on. A LOT.

Last year, I had more time. With a breastfeeding baby under 1, plus a 3 year old and a 3-day-a-week job, you’d think I wouldn’t. But I had naptimes, and after bedtime. And I was already used to sleep deprivation.

This year, I have RWA, which ate 2 of my writing days (Saturday meeting and a Wednesday crit group). I had an extra day of work every week, plus encouraged overtime at work. I was used to crashing by 10, and my 1.5 year old and 4 year old keep pushing their bedtimes back. And, because I knew what I was doing, I was more fearful about how it would turn out.

I probably only wrote on about 20 of the 30 days in November. I was able to crank out lots of words per session, luckily, averaging over 1000 words an hour. I wrote myself into a corner once and stalled out for a day (a day off work no less, which should have been super-productive!). When I restarted, it began with “Starting over. The last two chapters never happened.” So, probably 7-10,000 words will hit the chopping block soon (maybe even tonight). Several nights, I typed until I was nodding off at the keyboard (literally)…it should be fun to see whether I ended those scenes with complete sentences or not.

By Sunday night, I had 46,500 words. I didn’t get to my laptop until almost 9pm. Thank heaven for high school typing class, because I cranked out 3500 in 2.5 hours! And then NaNo’s website tried to tell me I was 100 words short. So I typed another 100 words. And then it told me I was out of time. Except my clock said 11:40. Guess I was in the wrong time zone.

The end result is, I have maybe 1/3-2/5 of a first draft of a novel. I’m still “Sweating” for another 40 days or so, and hopefully I’ll have 80-90000 words in a first draft by then. Like my first novel, don’t know if this one could ever sell. But it’s fun to write so far. And I have a bit more critique group support for my edits on this one.

Would I do this again next year? Maybe. November is hard. I like the idea of the June SocWriMo (or whatever it is called). We’ll see.

Giveaways

Ok, I'm a sucker for sweepstakes. I'd probably be a gambler if I weren't so nervous about spending money. But free entries...I'm all over that! I've scored a handful of free books this year, just by reading and posting comments to author and editor blogs.

Over at Nice Mommy Evil Editor, there are a bunch of cool prizes up for grabs. I'd love to snag a Kindle. But you know, a gift certificate I could use for a free book would be almost as much fun. Check it out!