Hiatus

As you might have noticed I've been absent lately. There are a lot of reasons but I'm only going to share the happiest here.
Yes.... that is a baby pic. I'm somewhere between 8 and ten weeks pregnant.... leaning toward the 10 weeks right now. He/She is just over an inch long and has a very normally beating heart. The other half is endearingly overprotective (this is our first) and overjoyed.

Things will probably still be quiet here but when I am able to come back I will.

Wow!

In my last post I lamented that November really didn't go so well on the writing front. I vowed December would be different. But so far it hasn't so much. A million excuses and most of them boiling down to doubt. When I get stuck on a project I have a bad habit of starting a new one. It leaves a graveyard of half finished (or less) novels that lately have taken to rising up and trying to eat my brains during writing time. Poor un-rhinestoned Glennis has been neglected so. I've been really doubting if I can actually write something that someone who isn't related to me or friends with me would like. Then something happened: http://kierstenwrites.blogspot.com/2009/12/in-which-i-vow-to-never-hold-another.html

Earlier this week Kiersten (her debut novel Paranormalcy is coming in Sept 2010 and sounds awesome) hosted a contest to give away books. Considering I am reading my way through the local library, my friends libraries, and my four overflowing bookshelves... you can NEVER have to many books. So I entered. I read my way through the honorable mentions and thought, wow there are so many good lines here. Then I scrolled down to the end... and I'd won.

I scared the cats, such was the depth and volume of my squee. Max is still hiding under the bed. Glennis is booted up, (still bemoaning the lack of glitery goodness), the husband has been informed (with a confused, "of course you are a good writer dear why were you doubting?" Therein lies why we love him) and I've spent ten whole minutes twirling about in a resting laurelish glee. Back to making words. And thanks Kiersten, you made my day!

Ya know all that stuff about self publishing I just lectured on....

This says it better.

DeDeWriMo

I failed at writing this month. I got Glennis (my shiny blue netbook still, lamentably, with out rhinestones) and I fired up my computer.... and I got nothing. Some of that was the fault of the flu. Swine or not it laid me up for a solid week. Some of this was my roommates moving out of the house, freeing up time to clean and rearrange things. Most of it was this:
That is the dinning room of our little white house, affectionately known as Cricket house. This time last week the dinning room was plain white. There were whiteish carpets covering the floors and half the furniture was in other rooms. I fixed that with help from the ever patient husband. We hosted our parents and sibs to the tune of 8 seated for Thanksgiving. His parents brought their dog Sophie and the cats fled in panic. It's all done now, the boys even banded together to bring in our massive newish entertainment center that languished forlorn in the garage since August.

The house is less spotted then usual and the fridge is full. Dec is much less chaotic then Nov in it's planning. Therefore I am declaring December to be DeDeWriMo: Denise's December Writing Month. I have no firm plans except make word counts of my previous 1000 words a day total. If I can manage that for the month I will be happy. Wren's Song is outlined perhaps past the ending, Spandex is stuck in the place you put the novels you are editing when you think of them as not very good, and Lily remains aloof. Gemini stepped up into the empty space and has started to poke into my subconscious and make snarky comments. I suspect another 99,000 words might shut her up. So DeDeWriMo it is.

Excuse me while I lecture.

With the announcement last week that Harlequin is launching their own "self publishing" (the quotes are important) line originally called Harlequin Horizons, now Dellarte Press (Writer Beware's announcement), I'd like to take a moment to discuss the difference between Self publishing, vanity publishing and traditional publishing.

Fast forward a moment. You have a complete novel. In the traditional model you submit your novel to publishers. (Agents are helpful and I highly encourage them but in the interest of focusing on publishing I'm glossing here). You get rejected a few times but eventually you find a publisher for your debut fantasy novel A Game of Scones. The publisher buys the rights to print and distribute your book in various formats (Hardcover, Mass market paperback, Trade paperback, E book). There is a contract involved, usually an advance against your royalties. Except in the most dire cases of contract breach you do not have to pay this advance back. Eventually the book rights revert back to you and you have the option to resell them to the original publisher. Your book is edited, copy edited, a professional lays out the text and designs the cover. The number of copies printed varies but is is usually several thousand. You receive a few free copies and copies are usually sent out to various reviewers. Your publisher usually contracts with a distributer and A Game of Scones is stocked in bookstores nationwide. Books sell, usually several hundred or thousands depending on many many factors. You pay nothing for the editing, cover, printing or distribution and you receive a percentage of the cover price. This process means you have to write what someones else would consider a good book. It's harder and it's safer.

Self Publishing is when you the author produces their books themselves. You buy the ISBN, register your copyright, edit or hire an editor. The design your own cover or you pay someone to do it for them. You pay to have it printed and pay for distribution if you want it to be in physical stores. You retain all of the rights to the book and other media. When the book is sold you receive the entire profit.

Vanity Publishing is when you pay someone else to publish a book for you. You pay a fee for editing, you pay a fee to have a cover designed, you pay for it to be printed. The ISBN registration is in the name of the company you paid to print it. After paying the company to print your book each time they sell a copy they take a percentage. There are a lot of books being published this way. Someone ran the numbers for iUniverse's book sales from 2004. Out of the 18,000 books they published that year only 83 sold more then 500 copies. (Courtesy of How Publishing works).

Here is the issue, vanity publish tries to sell you that it is an alternative to traditional publishing and that by paying to have your manuscript publish you can eventually have a traditional publisher look at it and purchase it. In all fairness there are a few manuscripts that have passed this way, but look at those numbers from iUniverse again. 83 books out of 18,000 sold over 500 copies. For most traditional presses 500 copies is a poor selling. By my miserable math skills that is a .46% chance of selling over the 500 copies. I'm going to pick on DellArte since theirs is the most recent numbers. Their cheapest package for publishing is $599. I'm rounding that up to $600 for the sake of having zeroes on the end, call it a simplicity tax. They pay their authors a 50% royalty after the publishing fees, it's about $1 per book. You have about a .46% chance of breaking even at their cheapest fee. The math doesn't add up. If all you want is to see your name in print, this can work for you. But for anyone trying to play the odds and break into publishing, you are better off using your money on workshops, stamps or red pens, honing the craft and trying again, then playing the vanity odds.

I have the flu...

So today's scheduled blog post is not going to happen. Instead you get feverish ramblings.

Ten things you might not have know about D. M. Beucler:

1. I wrote my first book in first grade. I got an F. I rewrote it and got an A. Revisions for the win, even in elementary school.
2. I have two black cats named Blair and Maximilien Catten. They are often found sitting on my computer, manuscript pages, or anything else that steals my attention. Despite over a year of living with both me and my husband they remain firmly my cats and do not deign to let the dear husband pet them.
3. Speaking of the dear husband, we met at a LARP (Live Action Roleplaying) group. I don't remember him. Five or so years later we met again when we dressed up to see Serenity in the theater. I dressed as River Tam, he was Jayne Cobb. A year later we were dating, 3 years later we were married. He's a saint.
   
4. My net book is dark blue. It will soon have silver decals and rhinestone accents. Her name is either Glennis or Wrenna, it's still working out.
   
5. I occasionally write while wearing a tiara. It makes everything better.
6. I sew costumes and wedding dresses. Mine was royal blue. I do not take commissions, it's only for friends and close kin.
7. Cricket house was named because of the large black crickets that invade every year around August. Cricket house sounded nicer then the flies which also come in. New windows are being looked at.
8. One of the reasons we bought the house was because of the full sized floored attic. At somepoint we are going to turn it into a master bedroom and writing room. Also the doors which lock with the old fashioned skelaton keys.
9. I am a geek of the highest measure. I play Dungeons and Dragons in multiple editions, quote most of Joss Whedon's works, can costume a party of ten for a Renaissance festival from what's in my closet, and I've spent over a decade running around the woods hitting people with plumbing supplies.
10. I'm allergic to cold medicine. This means bribery with shiny links, funny youtube videos, and other things to amuse will be appreciated.

Now off to more Buffy, cough drops and hot tea.

Restart

This always happens to me. I start a story. I have the ending plotted, I know my characters and world. The middle usually ends up a haze for me till I've written the beginning and then started to plot my way backwards. But somewhere in the middle something happens that stops me dead. With Spandex it was finding out that Maisie would work better as Matt. I discovered that plot twist somewhere in the second third of the first draft. In that case I ignored the first part of the novel and wrote the last of it as if Maisie was male. Then I edited, and edited, and edited.

Wren's song stopped me early and although it's demanding a new beginning, the change isn't nearly as drastic. I've dumped some scenes, put a few in a file to see if they fit in later, and rewritten the first 2k to line up mostly with my middle. I've got about 8K of words to edit tomorrow and then most of it should be able to fit in. I'm hoping to unoffically Nanowrimo this story, which should put me at about 60k coming into the Dec. That should put me at about 3/4ths of the way through the text. That is a happy point to be. Since I'm not ditching everything I have to start fresh on Nov 1 I am not joining any of the official things but I'm hoping it will be fun and press my word counts to a new height.

What do you say?

I was at a convention this weekend, it wasn't a writing con but it was a place where a number of writers and aspiring writers were in the crowds. Naturally the conversations turned to writing and publishing a few times. Most of the people I spoke with were great. There were a few pros and mostly people who researched and knew about the industry. Unfortunately that left a gentleman who was clueless to an extreme. I endured a long rambling diatribe about his work and the state of publishing as a whole. I think that state might surprise people, evidently books don't get published anymore. Self publishing is the new only way! After all he'd sold ten copies of his book just last year. After the third attempt to interject sanity into the conversation I slide away and hid from him the rest of the convention. He wasn't going to listen to me. But what do you say to that kind of delusion?

A day....

That's lasting far into the night. Writing has been more sparse of late because finding time (yes I know, I very much have needed to make the time and I haven't been) and opportunity in the same moment has developed into absurd levels. I have a lap top. It's about twenty pounds of outdated Pentium three technology with a cracked case and a disturbing tendency to shed plastic bits from the hinge whenever opened. This is what I do the majority of my writing on as it is semi portable (if there is a power source) and has MS word. I haul this beast over to the children's house where I have been sitting along with a padded lap desk so that I don't burn my thighs in extended sitting sessions. I live in terror that the not quite two year old will someday grab the screen and wrench it into a pile of steaming plastic goo, leaving me to try and rewrite several years worth of novel excerpts and manuscript pages. Yesterday I changed this.

I bought a netbook. It is tiny and dark blue and marvelous. I bought the EEE 10.2 inch model (using all of my sitting money but it is wonderfully worth it.) The keyboard is very nearly full size, I can type with ease. It has wireless intertubes, an itty bitty screen and just enough memory to run MS office and save a few documents. I'm in love. It's so tiny and light! I can run with out plugging it in for at least 3 hours (nearer to four) and it's tiny enough to fit in my purse. I've already transferred my novels. They might be on hold while I start composing odes to the greatness of this miniaturized machine. Or I could just make my word counts.

Ever notice...

that the longer you wait to say something the harder it is to say it? This last month has wrung me out, for a lot of the reasons. Most of them are things that I won't put into this blog, although the babysitting has been on that list. Hopefully in November things will settle back into a routine. There has been writing happening, mostly in small spurts of story and mostly on Wren's song.

The difference in writing Wren's song and Spandex diaries is enormous. For the Spandex diaries characters were my plotting vapor. Characters shifted mid story because they weren't firmly rooted when I started writing. I had more issues moving the emotional arc then the plot arc.

Wren's song is a 180. I know Wren, I know her down to my core. This character has been in my head since I was 16. I know the characters around her. What I don't know are the solutions to the problems. It's been coming out of the chronological order. I know the end, I know some of the middle, I have a jumble of scenes that keep shifting order. And nearly all of them are the emotional story. The plot points... still working on it.

I'm sitting for another month then things change. Hopefully that will lead to more increase in the word counts. Till then bear with the changes and I will try to get back to my old commitments soon.