Hallelujah I Broke My Head - Part 2

Off the cuff, can I say how much I love google analytics?  I'm bad (real bad) at geography, but the way I see it, if it's not in Scotland, why should I care?  

So, anyway, google analytics just told me where Malaysia is.  And it told me where Petaling Jaya is.  I did a google image search and the city is lovely.  I don't know who visited my blog from there, but thank you.  Now I know something new.

I love knowing new things. 

My broken head, part 2 carries on from My Broken Head Part 1 (the post immediately beneath this one.)

I was all for adding my Tome of Infinite Greatness to the assembled crap of the slush pile, seen on the left here.  With a title like The Guns of Pleasure and Death and a kick-ass septigenarian and a rampaging evil God it was so incredibly awesome it would stand ten miles out from the crowd.  It would blow them all away.

I am nothing if not confident.  (It would only count as arrogance if I thought I was better than I am.  But despite the fact that I am number one on this list, ((I am, go, check, look right back to number one... okay you got me, I'm not, but I should be)) I'm actually modest).

But then I started to think things through.  And I realised I didn't want to do that.  And I blogged all about my recalcitrance elsewhere.  Because I know how much you love reading about me, it's here.

And then I decided to go indie.

And that's when things got interesting.  Or difficult.  Depends on your point of view, really.






I mean, the cat probably finds this interesting.  The mouse, I'd say he's more angled towards difficult.



Interesting or Difficult: problems with POV

Weirdly I discovered my head had been subliminally altered by years of consumerism.  I thought the way I had been taught to think.  I bought the things I had been told to buy.  I was a good little Mass Media consumer junkie.  I was a 21st Century Zombie (that would make an awesome title).

I thought the way I was taught to think.  I thought e-books were wrong, evil, dirty, not real books at all.  I thought books should have a minimum of 80,000 words.  I thought novellas were wrong, evil, dirty, not real books at all.  I thought success could be measured in sales and money.  I thought Neil Armstrong had landed on the moon (the flag moves in the wind, for goodness sake).


I, who consciously rebel against conformity for no reason other than the fact that I like rebellions; I, who am in mind if not in body of a punkest mindset (I be a punk, right-o, yo ma bitch); I, who - yeah, you get the point.  I'm always that guy, the one not doing what he's supposed to be doing.  The one, you know him.  


I have problems with authority.  If I was a girl, I'd get pregnant just so I could piss in a policeman's hat.  What?  Are you saying you wouldn't?


And now my head has betrayed me.  It's a conformist.  Damn it, my head is a sheep, and it isn't a cool ass sheep like this one. 

 I love that sheep.


No, it's a lame duck type of sheep.  I'm not posting a picture because my blog is already nearly overrun with wool and animals.  Y'all might start thinking I'm Jodi Meadows' secret identity or something.  Incidentally, if you have never read her blog, you should.  It's good.  Nearly as good as mine.  It is here.

My head betrayed me, and so I broke it.  And now I'm free.  Now I see what I couldn't see before.   

 Oh, this one has gotten long, too.


Well, I shall post the third and final part of My Broken Head soon. 
 

The Value of Editing

I recently received an email containing one of my beta's comments on my manuscript.  A lot of the comments I felt didn't really apply, for instance when the comment was that only one character seemed to be introduced (there is only one main character introduced in the first two chapters)  whilst other comments were essentially lost in translation (I will continue to spell artefact with an e; sorry, but I know I'm right and spell checker agrees with me.  So does the Oxford English dictionary.  :p   )

And some comments blew me away.

Really.

My novel is about an old warrior who heads out on one last battle, and discovers the only way to win is to die.  In some ways it has been vastly influenced by David Gemmell's Legend.

I love Legend, so no big surprise there.

There's a scene in Legend where Death comes to Druss and warns him that if he goes to war he won't be coming back.  If he stays in the mountains he can have another twenty years.

Druss goes to war.  He's a hero, that's what heroes do.

There's a scene in my book just like that.  It wasn't until it was pointed out to me and I thought about it that I realised it does nothing for the story.  It slipped in out of my love for Legend.  It's coming out.

This is the importance of editing.

I sent the full manuscript out to two beta readers.  They knew nothing about the manuscript before they started reading.  I told them I wasn't fussed about crits, I just wanted people to read it.  At least 1/3rd of my story is flashbacks, an entire second story within the novel.  I didn't tell them this; I needed to know if the flashbacks were confusing to people who had no idea they were coming.

I'm waiting on them coming back in.

When they do I will do a full, intensive revision.  I'll do the fact-checking edit myself.  It's something I feel I can do myself; with every fact I'll check in 3 sources to make sure I have it right.  I'll edit my grammar and spelling again.  This is something else I feel I can do on my own.

At school I was sitting Higher level past papers at standerd grade, and at Higher I never did a single piece of work except assessments and exams, yet I consistently had the highest grades in English in the entire school.  So I know I have talent in that area.

I've managed to get someone to agree to do me a free grammar and editing pass.  She is studying editing and needs the experience, apparently.  So despite the fact that I'm confident in my own abilities, I'm still having someone else look at it.

I'm considering having someone edit the whole thing for story.  I know it will be cost prohibitive (seriously, I have a budget of £0)  but there's no underestimating the importance of a good first impression.  I don't want to turn readers off future books because the first one is a mess.

And I need to make enough money off of this one that the next will be paid for (cover + editing).

When did writing become about the money?

When did it become about the Monet?  Sorry, that was awful but I couldn't resist.  Over at Pimp My Novel there's been a self-publishing debate going on, and someone pointed out that as I had a grammatical error I was deluding myself if I thought I'd get fame or fortune from self-publishing.


Okay, ignoring the fact that my blog style is conversational, and as a result I favour clarity and ease of communication over grammar, and this is not the style in which I write but rather the style in which I talk, I've got to ask, when did it become about the money?

Let's be honest.  It's statistically far more likely that you will win the lottery than become the next J K Rowling.








People don't seem to understand this, though.  Writing is seen as an easy thing anyone can do.  It is seen as something you can throw together, and send off, and the publishing world will instantly fall in love with your genius.


Well, sorry, but that's crap.


Nathan Bransford has pointed out there is a growing number of people sending in queries, and for every 1 that is readable there are 2 that stink.  My words, there.


Writing is an artform, but more than any other form of artistic expression, it is becoming about the money.  Incidentally, I don't class Hollywood movies as art; you get artsy movies, but they tend to be made by the Indies.


Painters don't paint with a market in mind.  Poets don't rhyme to industry conventions.  More and more, publisher's don't publish what is good.  Publishing is a business, as we are constantly told.  They publish good writing, we are constantly told.  No, they publish marketable writing.


Writers shouldn't have to mould themselves to a publisher's shape.  The story is the most important thing.  Some readers might read my novel and absolutely hate the fact that my heroine dies at the end.  Some people might question why I constantly point out she's going to die in my blog.  Matilda's death isn't the point of the story, it's the epilogue. 


I don't agree that winning equates surviving.  Sometimes the only way to win is to go down with your ship, so to speak.  Sometimes escaping fate reeks of deus ex machina, and pisses your readers off.  Surviving is necessary in NY styled books because if the book does well the publisher will want a sequel.


I'm sick and tired of buying Lord of the Ring clones and Wheel of Time clones and pissy fantasy books about bland heroes and heroines.  There are only so many singing forest elves and surly dwarves I can keep down, before I start regurgitating bad fantasies over my kitchen floor. 


There are better books out there.  I've found so many online.  I've read stories that rocked my world and changed the way I thought about things.  My favourite author doesn't write books (maybe I should call him a storyteller) mostly because he doesn't edit.


WHAT!!!!!!!?


That's right, he thinks every aspect of his story through, and writes it down.  Then it gets betad for grammar or spelling or clarity, but there are almost never any mistakes.  After that, he might change a word or two.


He writes the best fiction I have ever read, and I read about 200 novels a year, so I've read a lot by this point in my life. 

People assume that self-publishing authors and Indie authors couldn't get "real" publishers, so our work must suck.  Well, no.  Some of us don't want "real" publishers.  Especially not when the former CEO of Random House has pointed out that publishers don't have a clue about how to treat the e-book phenomenon. 

Some of us aren't just writers, some of us are business savvy.  We look at NY publishing, and we see a creaking, groaning buckling industry ready to collapse.  We are not lemmings throwing ourselves off cliffs.  More like climbers finding our own way down.  And some of us might turn into birds and soar to the skies.  And some of us might fall. 

And that's fine.   It will separate the weaker writers from the better ones.  It will make it easier for readers to find writers who are good.  Because ultimately readers don't care who publishes books, they just want well-written interesting stories.  And 80% of the time that's not what comes out of NY. 

I'm not writing for the money.  I know my works not "commercial," but having read the clone-fiction that so often is commercial, I wouldn't want it to be.  And I'm not saying all NY work is clone work, so if you're aiming for that, good luck.