You Do Too Have Time to Write!

"I wish I had time to write!"

Ever find yourself thinking that? Ever been on the receiving end of people saying that to you?

Lots of people think you need to sit down in front of the writing implement of your choice for hours on end to crank out the Next Awesome Bestseller, and while it helps, it isn't always necessary, and thinking that it is will just leave you spinning your wheels waiting for Enough Time.

When I started writing Heart of Steel, I had a guaranteed hour a day to work with. I work full-time, and I wrote like an absolute fiend during my fifteen-minute morning break and my 45-minute lunch break. It took a while, but I eventually ended up with a 54k-word novel. Neat, huh?

Now, this situation was not ideal, of course, because Heart of Steel was practically running out my ears at that point and I just wanted to get that sucker down, but it worked out okay in the end.

So how can you squeeze in the time to write? Here are some tips:

• Carve out a block for writing. This can be an hour that you specifically set aside for writing. During this time, you don't answer the phone, you don't check your email, and you don't browse on Facebook. You just write on whatever project offers itself up to your brain.
• Guard your writing time like it's the Holy Grail. Seriously. If you have housemates or family members you need to let them know that You Are Not To Be Bothered. Lock the door if you have to.
• Trash your excuses. The Procrastination Monster is an insidious beat. If you find yourself thinking, "I'll sit down to write after I finish the dishes", or "let me just read this next article on Facebook", or ""Let me check my email first", STOP. Close that off. put everything else aside and writing. The other stuff will be there when you finish. (Exceptions: if the house is on fire, someone dear to you is bleeding, or a Roland Emmerich movie is happening in real life.)
• Get in the habit. This one will be hard. Your brain might not always be cooperative during your writing time. Don't worry about it. If you're drawing a blank, just free-write. Get those words out. Set up a routine. Get in the habit. I had to do this during NaNoWriMo to make sure I got my word-count total down.
• Use writing tools. I found a bunch of sites that offer reinforcement programs to encourage you to write, both positive reinforcement (Written? Kitten!) and negative reinforcement (Write or Die). You may need to play around with some of these to see what works for you.
• Write whenever and wherever you can. If all else fails, bring your writing tools with you. My smartphone can access Google Docs, where all my works in progress are, so I can peck away at a story wherever I can find wi-fi. Failing that, bring a small notebook with you to capture ideas as they happen. Get creative!

If you follow these tips, soon enough you will be in the habit of writing. Guess what--that's all you need in order to crank out that story you have in your head! I won't happen all at once, but it will happen.

You just need to sit down and make it happen.

Countdown to Hungry as a Wolf: Kickstarter vs. Indiegogo

In this week's blog post I'm going to compare the two top contenders for crowdsourcing my third book, Hungry as a Wolf. It's a weird western novel and the sequel to my novella Sheep's Clothing, which seemed to be pretty popular(ish), and in any case it turned out Wolf Cowrie had another story in him.

Kickstarter and Indiegogo are the two biggest and most popular crowdsourcing sites I've been able to find, and the two best suited for a creative project like this. Since 2015 looks like it's going to be The Year That Everything Happens (between dental work and moving house) I need to save as much money as I can. Currently, I have a few hundred dollars in my business account--a tidy sum, but not quite enough to do what I need to, and I like to have a bit of a safety net just in case.

On to the comparison!

Popularity

Kickstarter

 Kickstarter is the most popular and best-known crowdfunding site out there. It curates its projects for applicability, meaning that not every project qualifies, so there's a higher chance that successful projects will be featured.

Indiegogo

Indiegogo is a distant second to Kickstarter in popularity, having only about a sixth of the fanbase. However, they have much looser guidelines, allowing you to fundraise for any kind of project or financial need. It doesn't curate projects for applicability, meaning anyone can try to raise funds for whatever.

Funding Models

Kickstarter

Kickstarter has an "all or nothing" model, which means that I only get the funds if I reach my funding goal. On the one hand, this cuts down on flexibility, but it can also spur potential backers to work harder to donate if they know that the project won't happen if they goal isn't reached.

Indiegogo

Indiegogo offers the option of flexible funding. What this means is that no matter what percentage of the goal is reached, the project gets to keep all of that. This allows for more flexibility in projects where the project can still be launched even if the whole amount is not reached. However, even if the goal is not reached, creators must still deliver all promised donation perks.

Fees

Kickstarter

Kickstarter applies a 5%  to all successful campaigns, while failed projects incur no fees.

Indiegogo

Indiegogo applies a 4% fee to successfully funded projects, making it a slightly cheaper alternative to Kickstarter. Like Kickstarter, failed Fixed Funding projects incur no fees.

Publicity

Kickstarter

Kickstarter is much more popular than Indiegogo in this regard. In the United States, where I am, Kickstarter is by far the best-known crowdfunding sites, and in many ways, it has become synonymous with crowdfunding itself.

Indiegogo

Indiegogo is better suited to smaller projects, but considering how much Kickstarter is dominating the crowdfunding market, their chances of viral marketing success drop off hard.

Conclusions

While I was thinking of doing Indiegogo due to their flexibility and their shallower learning curve, it's starting to look like I'll have a higher chance of success if I go with Kickstarter. I'll keep Indiegogo in mind in case Kickstarter isn't successful, though.

Next week: Working out my Kickstarter Campaign Pitch!

Post-NaNoWriMo Recovery

It's December. That means that those of you who were working on a novel for the National Novel Writing Month are in the clear by a significant margin. Heck, I had to postpone this article for a week just so that I could think clearly about the topic. Assuming you finished your rough draft (and if you did, good for you!), now comes the time to decide what to do next.

The main thing that you absolutely do not do if you value your reputation as a writer is send your rough out to publishers as-is. I've heard of this happening and it makes me throw up in my mouth a little bit every time. And even if you think its the finest contribution to modern literature since Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, for the love of your deity of choice do not self-publish it as-is. I've heard of this happening and my faith in humanity crumbles a bit more every time.

You take that rough draft and you put that sucker away for a while. I'm not even going to look at Necromancy Will Kill Your Dating Life until January. Stephen King recommends letting your draft hang out in solitude for six weeks. Why? Because when you do pick it up to look it over and unleash the fury of your red pen on it, you'll be able to do so with the level of detachment this process requires.

What to do in the meantime, though? Lots of things. Read. Work on another rough draft (I have a whole pile of works in progress I could pick up). Edit another manuscript. Do what you can to clear your NaNo novel from the front of your mind. Think of December as a mental palate-cleanser. Relax.

Why is this break important? Because after living and breathing your draft for a month solid, the words might start to blur together. You'll start seeing what you meant rather than what your fingers actually typed. Stepping back and clearing your head will let you do that first pass of editing properly. I generally recommend self-editing for the first pass of a manuscript, but especially here, because you'll be able to catch all the embarrassing mistakes that you will subsequently be glad nobody else saw.

It's understandable if you want to get right into editing your NaNo novel right away, but have patience. The results will be well worth it.

Designing an Alien Species for Fun and Profit

For decades, science fiction writers and scientists alike have speculated about life on other planets. The possibilities they've come up with range from funny-looking humans (Thanks, Star Trek!) to completely incomprehensible horrors from beyond the limits of sanity (Thanks, H. P. Lovecraft!). This offers modern authors a wide range of possibilities to choose from, which can be liberating and terrifying all at the same time. On the one hand, the possibilities are endless. On the other hand... okay, where do I start?

Intelligence

 If an alien species is going to be a meaningful part of diplomatic negotiations (successful or otherwise), it's going to have to be at least as smart as humans. If it's going to be the one who seeks us out, then unless we already have FTL technology by the time of whenever the story is set, they're going to default to smarter than us. Why? Because the nearest galaxy is maybe a dozen light years away, and your alien species will need to have determined that there's something worth checking out on our insignificant little planet, or else they wouldn't have bothered.

That's not to say that individual aliens within your species can't be idiots. You get those all over.

Appearance

As indicated above, this can range from really really human to really really not. Many early aliens in visual media looked human simply because there was no such thing as ILM. In the Star Trek universe, most of the sympathetic aliens resemble humans with accessories because the Progenitor seeded a butt-ton of world with genetic material, and let evolution do the rest. Star Wars, being set in a space opera universe with a bigger budget, has a wide variety of aliens, made even more diverse with the addition of motion-capture and fully CGI sharacters. In written media, of course, you have a lot more freedom to make your aliens look like whatever the heck you want, but be cautious with aliens that are obviously not humans with weird makeup.

Non-humanlike aliens can even resemble familiar Earth species, like cat people (a favorite, for some reason), lizard people, or even insects. In general, the less mammalian they look, the harder it is for we humans to relate to them. Give them weird senses and a corresponding lack of familiar anatomy, and the average first contact team is going to be cautious, if not initially afraid of them. Once you start getting into the more mind-bending aliens like sapient colors (I have seen this played for laughs and for horror), it gets harder and harder to comprehend them, until you get the sort of things that should not logically follow the same laws pf physics, let alone biology, that we do.

Culture

Admit it. Coming up with a completely alien culture is hard as hell. Most fictional cultures will have some aspect of a familiar human culture, even if it isn't practiced openly, locally, or currently. This can be a good thing, if you want to use this fictionalized culture to make a social statement, but you will need to tread carefully and change things up. Transplanting an earth culture into your story wholesale can smack of lazy writing (no matter how awesome lion-folk Spartans would be). In general, your fictional species' culture needs to be an organic extension of the sort of environment they developed in, what they find important, and what they're naturally skilled at. That means you will need to build the heck out of their home-world and come up with a history for them, even if your human characters never find out much about it.

Mentality

Aliens are weird. They're supposed to be. Even familiar-looking behaviors and rituals can be performed for reasons that come completely out of left field, and understanding why can be a major part of the story (see Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card for one example). Then you have the critters whose sense of morality is so completely divorced from ours that we have a hard time predicting what they will do any why, and they might have no concept of why what they did was wrong. Trying to weed out malicious behavior from attempts to help can be fun and horrifying by turns, depending on how you swing it. Try taking a quality and turning its importance3 up until the knob breaks, and see what that does to your creation's mindset.

In Conclusion

Creating a completely new alien species can be either piles of fun or an exercise in hair-tearing frustration. There's a lot of thought and world-building that can go into it if you want to have a meaningful first-contact scenario, but if you really get into it you can have almost as much fun working out the details of your species as you do writing a story featuring it. If you have fun writing about it, chances are your audience will have fun reading about it.

Things I learned at Archon 38

Last weekend, I attended Archon 38, the latest iteration of a cozy (but ever-growing) sci-fi/fantasy convention held in Collinsville, IL. I'd been to Archon before, but not in several years, and it was refreshing ot get back into the swing of things. More to the point, this was my first time with a dealer table at any convention EVER, so this was a prime opportunity to get a feel for the whole process. I had a lot of fun in the end, and I also learned a bunch of stuff in the process.

1. Don't panic. When I got there with my two boxes of books and all the promotional materials I judged I would need, I was in a bit of a panic. I didn't know where to go, who to talk to, where my table was, or what would be expected of me. Fortunately, the convention staff were super helpful and made sure I got where I needed to go, especially when it came to pallet carts to schlep my stuff to the site.
2. You will forget things anyway. I spent half the day Friday kicking myself because I left my phone charger and the envelope of cash I'd brought to make change in my hotel room. Bleh.
3. You may accidentally meet famous people. As it turned out, my table was set up next to Tony Todd. I knew him as a horror actor in films like the Candyman series and all but one of the Final Destination movies. My roommate knew him as an occasional actor on various Star Trek series. Fortunately, he fell neatly into my mental category of Nicest Guys on the Planet and he helped me settle in.
4. Make friends with Klingons. Boxes of books are astonishingly heavy, and I occasionally had trouble getting them in and out of my sales space. The Klingon cosplayers were super helpful in moving boxes for me.
5. Don't expect a lot on day one. I discovered that Saturday is the busiest day of Archon, which may have something to do with the Grand Masquerade on Saturday night. On Friday and Sunday I sold two books each. On Saturday I sold about a dozen.
6. There will always be people with more publicity stuff than you. This is especially true for indie authors who are just starting out and thus have to squeeze every microgram of usefulness out of every dollar they have. Your more experienced booksellers will often have some very useful advice for you if you ask.
1. People love free bookmarks. Seriously, have a box of bookmarks printed up and give those things away like candy.
7. People watching is fun. The hall costumes this year were awesome (as usual). I must have taken fifty pictures of people passing by on Saturday alone, including several that were later entered in the Grand Masquerade.
1. Chocobos are adorable. One of the costumes that I saw all throughout the convention was an awesome chocobo with a noise-maker in the head to make the requisite "wark" noises. I think she won best in Novice Class at the Masquerade.
2.  Steampunk will never die. I saw a lot of steampunk costumes this year, including Steampunk Green Lantern, Steampunk Wolverine, and Steampunk Batman.
8. Cosplay is fun but hard. I dressed as Twilight Sparkle on Saturday. Because I'm thirty-five years old and I can dress like My Little Pony if I want, dammit. I had a wig (half hour of detangling Saturday morning), unicorn horn and ears (on elastic bands requiring a bunch of hairpins to hold in place) and a t-shirt with appropriate cutie mark (after searching the internet fruitlessly for a suitable one, I had it custom vinyl printed at Threads). I didn't use nearly enough hairpins, so my ears and wig kept trying to escape down the back of my head, and the elastic gave me a bit of a headache after a few hours, but I persisted all day. In the future I need to learn how to better manage my cranium accessories.
9. Bronies are everywhere. Throughout Saturday five people under the age of ten and three people above the age of twenty ran up to my table yelling, "Twilight!" I think I got verbally glomped by one girl who simply ran up to my table, arms extended, and bellowed, "YES!" before running off. During the Grand Masquerade, one of the sound guys sent me a bro hoof via messenger.
10. The final day will be hard. Seriously, it's the last day of the convention, and everyone's been geeking their asses off all weekend. In the end, though, I came in, complete with cosplay hangover from the previous day, and set my stuff up for one final day of "PLEASE BUY MY CRAP!" And you know what? People did. A bunch more took bookmarks and business cards for later reference, and I imagine I will have a fair number of digital sales coming down the pipe in the next few weeks (hope hope). Finally, I packed my things up, said my farewells to my neighbors on Bookseller's Row, and got ready for the drive home, satisfied with a modestly-successful first dealer-table experience.

As you can see, I learned a lot during Archon, and I feel more confident about the prospects of my next dealer table experience. I have ideas on how to improve my table presence. I hope that I'll do a lot better at my next convention (though I'll have to decide when that will be), but until then, I still have my local sales I can focus on.

And now for something completely different...

Here comes the expected update on book sale progress! I also have a book signing scheduled at Panera Bread this coming Saturday, so hopefully I'll sell a bunch more then.

3.8%

A Modest Request: August Summary

I hope that everyone had a fantastic Labor Day! I did (got a bunch of writing done and watched Maleficent at the dollar show), and now I'm ready to barrel into September!

In August, I discovered a possible regular venue to selling my books, and one that I wouldn't have considered when I first started with self-publishing: Panera Bread. Yes, the sandwich shop that in the St. Louis area is still known as the St. Louis Bread Company. I set up a table there a couple Sundays ago and sold four books, two to walk-ins. I think this coming month I'll do this again, especially since I'm coming up on Archon 38 and Bookseller's Row, to get me used to selling books face to face.

Aside from the book signing sales, I sold one copy over Amazon and three audiobook copies on Audible. I'm going to rearrange the page for Sheep's Clothing on my website sometime this week to allow my readers to more easily find my stuff, and starting this month I've knocked a dollar off the price of the paperback.

I will be making a big advertising push through Facebook and such, not only to tell people about all the myriad ways they can get Sheep's Clothing, but also to tell them about my author page on Facebook so I can get more "Like"s. I've found a website called Tweet My Books which has a big list of free review sites, so I will be working my way through that as well.

To that end, here is the expected raft of links:

To Buy Sheep's Clothing
Amazon Paperback: http://www.amazon.com/Sheeps-Clothing-Elizabeth-Einspanier/dp/1495358372/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1402671109&sr=1-2
Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/Sheeps-Clothing-Elizabeth-Einspanier-ebook/dp/B00IWY0Z6A/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=1-2&qid=1402671109
Barnes and Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/sheeps-clothing-elizabeth-einspanier/1118630507?ean=9781495358371
Audible: http://www.audible.com/pd/Fiction/Sheeps-Clothing-Audiobook/B00MJ3LWZI/ref=a_search_c4_1_6_srTtl?qid=1407942119&sr=1-6#publisher-summary

Find Me Online
Website: http://elizabetheinspanier.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/elizabeth.einspanier.author
Twitter: https://twitter.com/GeekGirlWriter
Google +: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+ElizabethEinspanier/about
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/GeekGirlWriter
Library Thing: http://www.librarything.com/profile/eeinspanier
Shelfari: http://www.shelfari.com/authors/a1002742061/Elizabeth-Einspanier/
Amazon Author Page: amazon.com/author/elizabetheinspanier

Is there anything you've like me to write an article about on my blog? Let me know!

Things I Wish I Knew About Self-Publishing Before I Started

As I get ready to self-publish my next book, I find myself looking back on the lessons that I have learned from publishing my first--things I wish I'd known the first time around. In hindsight they seem like fairly simple things, but they can mean everything in terms of success.

Let's dive right in, shall we?

Self-Publishing is Hard

It's not hard in the same way traditional publishing is hard--goodness, no. With traditional publishing they hard part is getting past the gatekeeper--usually the lead editor--but once you do, everything is gravy.  They take care of formatting cover art, promotion, and distribution. They have complete control over how much exposure your book gets.

The good news is that a self-pubbed author has complete control over all of this.

This is also the bad news.

Print-on-demand companies like Createspace do ease the pain quite a lot, but you, the author, are still in charge of getting all the different components together. If you don't plan this stuff out ahead of time (see below), you will likely be left scrambling.

Self-Publishing Can Be Expensive

Note that I said "can be" rather than "is". You will find sites all over the internet that offer "author services" that range from copy editing to cover art to formatting, for anywhere from a few hundred dollars to something equivalent to your first-born child. If you're not careful, you might drop a whole load of money into one of these places and get something in return that looks like crap.

Thus, it is imperative that you take the time to shop around. If you're self-publishing, you're not on anyone's schedule but your own. You will have plenty of time to get all your ducks in a row within whatever budget you happen to have.

Pursuant to that...

Plan Ahead

I will be the first to admit that I didn't plan out how I wanted to get Sheep's Clothing out there and in the public eye. I was just so excited by the prospect of getting my book published that I completely forgot about this step. This left me scrambling to get my marketing stuff all set up and to find reviewers that wouldn't cost me hundreds of dollars, and to contact bookstores for events and all that jazz.

It was way more stress than I needed.

Your best best is to plan your marketing about four months before you release your book. This will give you time to create buzz on the various book blogs and in your social media (you do have that, right?) and tell whomever you want to know about your Really Awesome Book Coming Out. It will also allow you time to line up venues for a book release party and for signings after release day. Trying to do all this after release really, really sucks.

In Conclusion

I was young and naive (...this past February) and I've learned some hard lessons since then. I hope to do better with my next self-pubbed book, but I'm sure this will be its own brand of a learning experience as well. The publishing world is always changing and evolving, and as more and more authors start taking the self-pub route, more people will find out additional quirks in the process.

Hopefully, if you decide to self-publish, you won't make the same mistakes I did.

Happy writing!

And now, for something completely different...

I've been making decent progress with selling my books this month, though not as much as I'd like. At the beginning of August I'll provide a complete breakdown of what I did in July.

12 / 1000 (1.20%)

Enjoy what you read? Follow my blog for regular updates!

Plotters vs. Pantsers

This week's article will be on the two major types of fiction writers I keep hearing about: plotters and pantsers. The difference in approach between the two seems to define how the first draft of anything is done, and there have been heated arguments over the merits of their respective style. Which one is right for you? Have a look.

Simply put, plotters are writers who plan the heck out of anything before they begin writing. They have complete character profiles on absolutely everyone in their book, they have a detailed outline of every chapter, scene, interaction, and implication, and can weave the whole thing together into a complex whole when they start writing. Pantsers write by the seat of their pants. They get an idea and start writing to see where it leads them, discovering new characters as they go and generally letting the characters and plot do what feels natural.

Plotters take a while to actually get to the writing. They invest a lot into the front-end stuff, from outlining to researching, and generally collect a healthy file on their book before they actually start writing. Pantsers don't do a lot of front-end stuff, but launch into the story right away. Any research or notes they need to address happens either during the writing, or during the back-end stuff like revisions.

One a plotter gets to the writing, their preparation level tends to allow them to blast straight through the rough draft, with only minimal pausing due to unrelated writing issues like writer's block or even a bad case of Can't-Be-Arsed. A pantser may start quickly, only to have to stop and go back to fix a research error or look something up or work out how this that or the other detail would work within their setting. Occasionally their characters will simply stop cooperating, forcing the hapless pantser to figure out what's going wrong with the story or where it needs to go next.

Plotters may plan out a lot of books at once (see: James Patterson) or even had the entire course of a series mapped out (see: J.K. Rowling), but it seems logical that with the amount of prep they have, they would actually write one book at a time. When you know exactly where your book is going to do, there is nothing to stop you from focusing on that project until it's done (at least the rough draft) before moving on to the next thing in line. Pantsers... frequently have to improvise. They might have a whole pile of works in progress lying around because of some combination of writer's block, attention deficit creator disorder, or because they just got stuck in a plot hole and couldn't figure out how to dig their way out. This is not to say that they don't finish anything, of course--they just are more likely to have multiple irons in the fire.

This is, of course, not intended to be an indictment on the quality of writing produced by either pantsers or plotters, as both are equally capable of producing quite wonderful works of fiction. Pansters are not universally disorganized, and plotters are not universally anal-retentive neat freaks. With sufficient editing, both can produce perfectly enjoyable stories. They just go about it in different ways.

What style suits you? Let me know in the comments!

Progress Update:

8 / 1000 (0.80%)

Attention Deficit Creative Disorder and How to Make it Work for You

What is Attention Deficit Creative Disorder?

This is what happens when a writer or writer-analogue has lots and lots of great ideas brewing in their head at once, and their brain wants to develop all of them into Great Stories. This can result in either a lot of Great Stories, given enough time, but more often it results in a lot of Awesome Notes and Awesome Beginnings that never quite pan out into completed stories and just sit on your hard drive, mocking you. It can also mean that when you sit down to work on your current Great Story, your brain is off in the universe of another Great Story, hacking away at that and gumming up the works. This can be maddening, even if you're not on any kind of a deadline.

However, that little over-caffeinated gerbil of inspiration can be made to work for you, given proper planning. For example, I'm currently working on my sci-fi romance novel Heart of Steel, and while the main, chronological storyline might be at Scene 6, my mind has often been at Scene 12, screaming, "I wanna work on this!" Sometimes you can't force your brain to go where you want it to, and trying to do so will only result in frustration and no progress. So what if I have two chapters written that I won't get to for a while? At least I got the ideas down while they were still fresh in my head, and I can always tweak them during my rewrite.

Then there's the benefit to keeping Awesome Notes and Awesome Beginnings around. Right now I have three incomplete stories on my thumb drive, another dozen or so on my hard drive, and three on my Google Drive (yes, yes, I know...). Why? Because when Writer's Block hits me, it typically stays around until it's damn good and ready to go away, and there's no way to hammer my way through. So, instead of beating my head against the imaginary brick wall until I just shut down out of frustration, I just let the Writer's Block sit there and think about what it did, and move to another one of my Awesome Beginnings and hack away at that for a while. Eventually, the block on my original project will slink away in shame and go sulk in a corner somewhere, leaving me free to work on it.

Of course, this strategy won't work out quite the same if you have a project with a deadline, but that's where Awesome Notes come in. Jot down all the ideas you have swirling around in your mind until your head clears, and if you're lucky you might wind up with more potential Awesome Beginnings. The trick to this, of course, is not to mind that not all of them will become Great Stories. Just let go. If any of them want to be developed, they will let you know.

That's how I make ADCD work for me, anyway. What are your strategies?