Word Count Miss

This week has been more work on the B'vellah novella. I didn't meet my 10k per week word count. I got just under 6k done. I had a couple of minor, last second changes to make on Avatars of Espionage, which is up for pre-sale. Part of the problem was because I was tired due to a tooth infection. Or gum infection. It's hard to concentrate through pain and fatigue. Despite all that, I'm getting close to the 50% mark and am on schedule to finish the rough draft before the end of February. I'm hoping for somewhere between the 15th and the 21st. A minor roadblock this week was doing a little research in order not to be describing something I don't know specific details about. I ended up writing around it. Once I get my author YouTube channel up and running, how to write around something is a topic I already have planned.

I spent a limited amount of time looking for a cover for the Mystery/Romance. It should already have been out the door under a pen name with no pre-sale, but I haven't been letting it get in the way of the word count. When I was looking for the cover for AoE, I found a couple that might work, but they don't quite fit. I may use one of them anyway. I could always change it later.

Something else I've put some time into is trying to get AoE onto Barnes and Noble for the Nook. I uploaded it using their formats, but it doesn't look right in their viewer. Their online tools are not Amazon quality. Amazon's put a lot more into making their tools work, although they still have problems like freezing indefinitely. The B&N requirements are much more rigid. They require either a .doc file or a .pdf. However, the .doc file requirements are for MS Word, which I don't have and costs too much. I might could work around it, but I'd have to go through and reformat the manuscript and page numbering almost chapter by chapter just to see. Sadly, the .pdf upload doesn't remove page numbers the way Amazon's conversion tool does. It looks decent, but e-readers don't have page counts. If I approved it, there would be random page numbers in the middle of screens.

I thought about getting a Nook to experiment with, but the price is much higher than what it used to be. Even the refurbished ones are higher than the Nook used to cost full price. I guess I'll have to use the software version on my PC. It kind of looks like, if I want my books on Barnes and Noble, I'll have to create yet another version of the manuscript. That would be a pain. I already have four versions of AoE in different formats just for Amazon. I'm looking at putting AoE on the Apple and Kobo platforms, too. If I had to change something like a spelling or comma mistake, I'd have to change the master file. I'd have to convert it to Kindle format and .pdf. I'd have to fix the B&N version. I'd have to create an Apple version and a Kobo version. Maybe I could use the same file for more than one platform. There's got to be a better way. People do all this for money, but I can't afford that. Maybe there's a program out there that will do it for me. I downloaded Calibre which I've used in the past, but it doesn't do what I want.

Hopefully, I'll figure it out this weekend. AoE goes live Feb 3. I'd like to have it on B&N, too, and the others. We'll see.

Have a great weekend.

Avatars of Espionage Pre-Sale Active

Avatars of Espionage is up for pre-sale for 99 cents for faithful readers. It took a little longer for it to be ready than I estimated last week because Amazon's approval process is slower than it used to be. It goes live Feb 3. The price after launch goes up to the regular price of $3.99.

With that no longer taking my time, I've been working on the B'vellah War series novella. I've worked on the plot and introduced a major new character. The rough draft is now over a quarter of the way done. I'm trying to do 10,000 words a week. That would get the rough draft done in a month. Several years back one April or May, I did 50,000 words in about three and a half weeks. Afterward, I felt tired and mentally drained. Ten thousand words is still a good pace, but it gives me more time for polishing and considering plot elements and not feeling burned out. I hope. The difference between 50k and 40k is "only" 2.5k words a week. However, that number of words takes a number of hours to write. I'm putting those hours into making the rough draft as polished as I can now in order to make it faster to market later. I think it's working. I've been catching mistakes I probably would have overlooked if I was trying to grind through just to meet a word count. My plan is to get the novella and Book 2 out at the same time or nearly the same time.

During my search for a pre-made cover for AoE, I found several covers that would have worked if there had not been some bizarre element in the scene. A lot of covers have a white wolf or a pentagram or some kind of paranormal element or occult symbol that has nothing to do with the rest of the cover. Now that I've been through the process of buying and requesting changes to a pre-made cover, I realize that I could have bought one of those bizarre covers and had the wolf or whatever removed, and it would have been a great cover. I may be able to go back through some of the thousands of covers I looked at and pick out some for the B'vellah series. I'm still going to try painting one, but I have more options.

In other news, someone I know took something I've told her a couple of times and made it into a quote and put it on mugs and t-shirts that are now for sale on Zazzle.com. Ouch. On the one hand it's nice to know I can be so inspirational. On the other hand I wasn't asked if I could be sold and marketed. The silver lining is that the mugs are $19.45, and the t-shirts are $37.75. Those same items in generic versions without my quote sell for below $5 at the store. The mugs range $1 to $3. I've seen the shirts for $4.48. Maybe the justice is built right in. Who's going to pay that much extra to get an inspirational quote? Crime doesn't pay.

Have a great weekend.

Partial Cover Workaround

I have a cover for AoE. I'm waiting for final revisions. Ideally, I'd like to figure out how to translate my painting skills into something that would substitute for an illustrated cover. But that's going to take time and a certain amount of investment into materials like more paint and art pens. I need AoE and the Mystery/Romance out the door now. I have a couple of potential covers for the M/R, but neither are a great fit. I've looked at literally thousands of pre-made covers. Commissioning a custom cover is a little bit too expensive, especially for the M/R that I already have doubts about.

The person who made the AoE cover(pre-made) is offering a deal for the rest of the covers in the series. Those would be custom and cost more but not extravagantly more. Unless AoE takes off like a rocket, the B'vellah series is more important. I'm not sure when I'll write the AoE sequels. Maybe after the middle grade trilogy? However, in my email detailing the revisions for the AoE cover, I asked about covers for the B'vellah series. I kind of think it's too expensive, but if I could get the right style and discount, it would be cheaper than the other custom cover prices I've seen.

It would be super nice if I could update the cover for Book 1 and have the novella and Book 2 covers ready to go not long after. Book 2 is ready except for checking to see if a minor character I thought was dead was mentioned later in a scene.

The other good news is that I've started on the B'vellah novella. I have no idea what the title will be. So far, it's Book 1.5. I still don't have the plot entirely worked out, but the beginning is obvious. It picks up exactly where Book 1 left off on earth with the raid on Lakeside. When I went through Book 1 making a list of promises that need to be fulfilled, it told me what needs to be in 1.5. I just need to put it into story form in an interesting way. If I can get it all figured out and maintain a decent word count per day, the rough draft should be done around the end of February and probably sooner. Since it's only half the length of a full book, it should be a lot easier to move from rough draft to ready to publish. I'm taking a little extra care with polish to make it even smoother, although that's easy with the beginning since it has to be a certain way and won't be as subject to change the way later parts might.

Update:
I'm interrupting the blog for a live update. I got the revised cover back.

As a reminder, the book is about a 16-yr-old girl who is trapped in virtual reality. This was the only pre-made cover that fit the story and looks good and was affordable. I like it.
This should be up for pre-sale by Saturday night. I worked on setting it up last night, but I still need to add the cover designer to the front matter of the manuscript and resubmit it. I'll also need to set all the pricing and use Amazon's online tools to  create the e-book.

Along with the cover I heard back about the B'vellah covers. What I want is not really a fit for them. I got referrals to two other cover creators. I'll check them out. After sleeping on it, it occurred to me that I'll have at least a month while doing the rough draft to practice illustrating. I think I'll try that and hold off on buying covers I can't really afford. Unless I can get an amazing price, of course.

It feels like it's been a busy week.

Have a great weekend.

Harvesting Ideas

Where do you get your ideas? Interviewers always ask writers that. Ideas are everywhere. It's hard to explain, but a lot of what happens during the day ends up on the page at night. If I had to swerve the buggy out of the way at the grocery store, that could end up as a car or pedestrian scene or something more abstract like insects or birds maneuvering around each other. Or it could be conversational maneuvering such as a character dodging a question. A reader would never read that and think it came from a shopping cart. It's kind of like the way daytime events end up in dreams symbolically. In that sense writing is like dreaming the story. I don't make notes about day events. They appear by themselves just like dream imagery.

Another way to get ideas is to pull them from movies or books but in a different form. This is something I haven't really done, but one evening this week I read a short book specifically to look at what caught my attention and why the book worked. I started out not looking for ideas. I was looking to analyze plot points and plot elements. I wanted to see how the author crafted secondary characters and used subplot and added quirkiness to the story.

One of the first things that happened was the main character was told her job wold be gone in four weeks. Instead of "loses job", I wrote down "unexpected life upheaval". Instead of copying it, I abstracted the concept of what losing a job is. In a story I'll need an unexpected life upheaval. The character probably won't lose a job. She might fail a pregnancy test. It could be a car accident. The manager at work could be promoted and the character's nemesis becomes the new boss. What if the mayor died or retired and someone with rumored ties to crime were running for the office? The upheaval could be anything that directly or indirectly affects the character's life.

After putting the book down a few minutes to do something else, I thought more about it. The main character is kind of a freelancer, and her husband has a great job. The upheaval isn't the end of the world. It isn't necessarily financial. She had other job opportunities already in place. The job was something she found truly meaningful. So, the real upheaval is a threat to happiness. It's a threat to the character's meaning and purpose in life. The job loss isn't just a plot point. It serves multiple purposes in the story. It has deeper resonance that the superficial. Without fulfilling a purpose in life, the character becomes adrift.

As I try to figure out a plotting style that feels right for me, it's things like this that I'm starting to think about. Maybe I need to watch movies and read books with an eye to abstracting certain elements.

This is also the kind of thing I want to make YouTube videos about. At some point I'll need to let the Messengers web site lapse and create a new one branded around my name instead. A YouTube channel is a natural fit for that. I'm still working on making a small area of a room dedicated to that.

Have a great weekend.

Plotting Along

This week was a bit of an education week. I looked at plotting and other writing things. The other day I was expressing dissatisfaction with the three-act formula. I was saying that there's too much space between the beginning and plot point one at the 25% mark. At the end of November, I ordered this book after seeing it mentioned in a YouTube video. Since I'm not reading it in one sitting, I'm only a few chapters into it. One of the interesting things it mentions is that for books the first plot point should come around the 20% mark rather than the 25% mark. It also says that the third plot point should come later than in a movie. I think it said the 90% point instead of the 75% point. Obviously, that makes the middle absolutely huge. Even using 25% and 75% to mark off the middle, the middle is already huge and gives a lot of writers fits.

Instead of going with a pure try/fail cycle, I might try moving my plot points and keeping the three-act formula ending and beginning while using a try/fail cycle for the bulky middle. I'm not going to experiment on the novella that way. My plan is to use the three-act formula since the other books in the B'vellah War series all do. The middle grade trilogy is where I would tinker around.

This morning after I was awake but not out of bed I had an idea for a high-level-concept science fiction novel. It would be about a man who is trying to prevent a series of deaths that he knows are going to occur but doesn't know how his brain received the information. It ties very neatly to an experiment I read about several years back. Unfortunately, I can't remember the scientist's name, so I'll have to find him again. The novel would be stand-alone and not a series.

And that leads me to Scrivener, an organizational tool for writers. I downloaded a trial version several years back, but it wasn't a word processor. The good news about the trial version is that it only counts days that you use. I used it three days. I should still have 27 days left on my trial. What it would let me do is organize book ideas. Instead of putting my ideas into legal pads the way I do now, I could put them into Scrivener and develop a plot outline. It has a notecard feature I could use for pure ideas and still have an outline uncontaminated with clutter.

I have more book ideas than I have time to work on. What I want to do with Scrivener is input the ideas, perhaps using plot points, and add additional ideas later. Slowly over time, I would develop a book idea into something I could start writing immediately instead of having to work on it all at once the way I'm having to do with the novella, which still has not completely gelled. I have various book ideas I'd like to develop. I hope with Scrivener I'd be able to get all of them organized here and there without interrupting what I'm currently working on. Sometimes, I have an idea for something but no time for the book it's for. Maybe this tool will help. I'm going to experiment with it and see how it goes.

Scrivener would also let me work on screenplays more easily. I have an idea for a movie I'd like to work on.

Have a great weekend.