Week 16 - Public Service Announcement

 

Update – pretty slow last week. I spent most of my time on paid stuff. The big news is, a publisher I was considering for the detective book had an open call, so I put together a submission package (synopsis and first three chapters) and sent it out. I think they got it. The autoresponse email said, “Thank you for your interest” and discussed dates and general facts, but said nothing to confirm they’d received the thing. I sent a second copy just to make sure. I may be in, I may not. I won’t know until next year; that’s how long they said it’ll take to go through all the subs and make a decision. Which is fine with me, since all I have at the moment is a handwritten first draft and about a third of a typed second draft. But now I’m on a deadline. Whether I get chosen or not, whether I even made it in or not, makes no difference. By the end of the year I’d better have a finished product. Then I can decide if I want to wait for word or start querying agents and publishers. Or self-pub if I don’t hear back from anyone by the end of April 2025. I pretty much win no matter what.

My viewership still consists mostly of Hong Kong-based  bots, though the Chinese contingent is growing rapidly. So have the views from the US; who knows, some of those may even be actual people. And my viewer from Switzerland is back. Hey, buddy! (waves) I’ve had a couple hits from Germany as well, and a big block of “Other,” which I suspect includes Russia. Well, we are coming up on a Presidential election. I did my bit at the primaries by writing in “Bozo the Clown” as my choice for Prez. No matter who wins in November, I’ll have been right.

And now, on a more serious note…

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This one’s mainly for the ladies, though you guys may want to stick around. If you have a significant other, it could concern you too. Two weeks ago I had my first follow-up to my hysterectomy. I have to do two of these a year for at least the next three years, to make sure they got all the cancer. So far, so good. The doctor told me I don’t need Pap tests any more since my uterus was removed. I haven’t bothered with Pap tests in years, so no loss there.

However, there was the matter of the cyst on my left ovary—the size of a grapefruit, so I was told—which, fortunately for me, turned out to be non-cancerous. Would that have turned up on a Pap smear? The doctor said no; Pap tests are only for uterine cancer. There are no preventive tests for fallopian/ovarian cancer.

I had to let that one sink in. Some form of pelvic cancer, possibly ovarian, killed my aunt almost 30 years ago. That’s all I could think of when I was diagnosed with the Big C. Pap tests only catch incipient cancer in the uterus. I’d been walking around with an ovarian cyst for who knows how long. I could have been getting Pap tests for years and it wouldn’t have saved my life had that cyst been malignant. Those tests don’t cover the ovaries. You need an ultrasound for that, which I was only given in the pre-tests before they did the D&C to check my bleeding womb. That’s when they spotted the cyst.

You’d think a growth of grapefruit proportions would have made itself known, wouldn’t you? That’s what I thought. But here’s the thing about the female body: that part of it is designed to expand because that’s where the babies grow. You get cancerous growths in the Easy Bake Oven and the Oven stretches to accommodate them. If you’re pre-menopausal, people will assume you’re pregnant. Or, because you’re a woman of any age, they’ll decide you’re just getting fat. Because there was no pain or bulging or discomfort of any kind, and me being sedentary to start with, that’s what I assumed. The pain, etc. hits when the cancer starts spreading beyond the reproductive parts, and by then it may be too late.

I was damn lucky. My cancer was a slow-growing sort, and my uterus warned me early on by trying to expel it, which is where the blood was coming from. The cyst only got found because they needed to examine the whole Easy Bake Oven to see what else was there. My aunt was clearly not that fortunate.

Ladies, I present this tale to you as a warning. If you’re getting regular Pap tests, see if your doctor will also perform an ultrasound, maybe every couple of years or so. Especially as you start aging and gaining weight becomes a fact of life. Yeah, it’ll cost extra and insurance may not cover it without good reason, but better safe than sorry. Or having to go through a hysterectomy and follow-up radiation/chemo. Or dead.

Sorry to be such a downer, but if this post helps even one woman, in Hong Kong or elsewhere, I’ll have done my good deed for the day. Who knows, I may have just helped save the life of my reader in Switzerland. That makes it all worthwhile. See you next week.

Weeks 14 and 15 - Putting What We've Learned Into Practice

 

Update(s) – Time got away from me again. This past week I wanted to cover the beginning of April, but paid work happened and blogging didn’t, so I’m going to update the last two weeks today. That should put me back on schedule. I had myself a bit of a mini-block on the writing front, which led to a minor brush with the game addiction, but I’m back on track again for the time being. I’ll be getting a new assignment Monday, so we’ll see how long that lasts.

In more positive news, I’m back on the detective story again. Remember that recent blog about letting your work sit instead of just rushing it off to market? Here’s a case in point. I’m typing the longhand first draft onto the laptop, making changes as I go. In the current scene the PI’s just met an important character. She creeps up on him in a cemetery. This time around, though, she’s carrying a machete. She stole it from the bastard who executed her sister. All this was news to me. First time around I knew about the sister and that she was killed, but not how it was done. Or that this other character would wind up with the murder weapon. But now I’ve got some nifty symmetry: later on in the first draft version, another character decapitates a zombie with a machete. Now I know where it came from. Even better, it’s the zombie version of the murderer, so justice is served.

But that’s not all. As I was hashing out this scene, I realized I had a major plothole looming later on. In a couple of chapters the PI’s going to question the nephew of a writer who worked with the writer the PI’s looking for. The kid knows the writer’s real name and what he looks like. He should be suspicious of the PI from the moment they meet, for reasons I can’t disclose. In the current version, he wasn’t. If I leave the scene as is, by the end of the book people will be going, “Wait a minute. The kid knew A. Why didn’t he question X?” It’s the kind of mistake that makes readers throw a book across the room, editors reject manuscripts, and forces writers to start over with yet another pen name. Fortunately I’ve already figured out a way to overhaul the scene without giving too much away. It’s been two years since I wrote that scene and only this week that I realized its fatal flaw. This is why you should let your stories sit before you start revising, or submitting. We will sell no book before its time.

I was going to do a regular post at this point, but the update has run into overtime, so I’ll let it stand as is. I’ll save the other post for next week. Instead, here’s a good laugh: I’m now over a hundred days into this personal challenge and I still don’t have any followers. However, my daily views have been climbing. I was feeling good about that until I checked the stats and discovered over 90% of those views are coming from Hong Kong, with a recent spurt from mainland China. Great. My biggest audience is Asian bots. Then there’s a handful from the US of A, and occasionally some guy in Switzerland. Hey, I’ve hit the big time. Break out the champagne. Bots don’t even buy books, do they? No, that’s right, they just pirate them. Well, maybe the Swiss guy likes my writing. This one’s for you, Liam. See you all next week.

Week 13 - Should It Stay Or Let It Go?

 

Update – Ran into another case of time managementitis, and had to spend the bulk of Easter Weekend wrapping up paid work before the Monday deadline. Before that, though, I did get back into the detective story. I came up with a reason why the love interest definitely needs to have a showdown with her dad. Hint: he was a church elder before he became a zombie hunter, and lately he’s been talking about the Biblical story of Lot and his daughters. Look it up; it’s a doozy. The woman should have no trouble at all now turning against her father, and with the readers’ blessing. That’s one problem solved. I also came up with a much better action for the writer’s revenge. I hinted at it in the first draft, but only recently decided on switching things up. It eliminates filler and makes more sense. I’ll be getting back to that later this morning. I’ve been thrown off track already this week by the discovery of a puddle of water on the floor of my laundry room, and the secondary discovery that my plumber won’t poke around under a mobile home. You have to hire specialists now. The other plumber I called won’t go under trailers either, but they’re willing to send a guy out to check it over. It may be an inside leak in the washing machine, or rainwater seeping in from somewhere. I won’t know until Friday, which is the soonest he can get here. In the meantime, I mop periodically. It’s always something.

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The above illustrates why I don’t have more books out, and why it takes me so long to finish something. It’s not just writer’s blocks, depression and life shit happening. I can, eventually, get a draft done. But then what?

Back in the days of yore, when I read how-to-write books and magazines, one repeated bit of advice was, “Finish the draft, then let it sit for (a week, a month, however long you feel comfortable with).” It’s to let that first hot thrill of creation die down so on the next pass you can view your work with a bit of distance and catch all the fubars and logic errors you missed while you were typing. Like Maggie having green eyes and a husband on page 27 and then being blue-eyed and single six chapters later. Or—one of my personal favorites, delivered by Stephen King himself in The Tommyknockers—a character who lost all her teeth several chapters in, but towards the end bares those now-missing teeth at the protag. She must have slipped off to the dentist between chapters.

I imagine this is where plotters have the advantage over pantsers. Plotters know their story from start to finish before they even start typing. Pantsers make it up as they go. Hence the bright idea that initially kicked off the story may no longer even be relevant by the time you get to the end. Characters may need to be added, or cut, or given their own separate story if they’re not important to the one you’re writing but still try to take over anyway. (All of this has happened to me.)

Here’s where my slow writing habits actually pay off. By the time I finally finish a first draft, it’s been so long since I wrote the beginning all the mistakes practically leap off the page at me. Also, all the changes I made along the way are still relatively fresh, so I can go back and set them up properly, and cut any superfluous subplots or characters in the process. By the time I reach the end it’ll have aged properly and I’ll know whether it works or not, or if it too needs to change.

That’s just the second draft, though. It doesn’t mean the book is finished. How long do you let a story cool down before you start revising? When do you know it’s truly done and fit to be sent out into the world?

Answer: you don't. It depends. I wrote the first draft of this book longhand two years ago. I let it sit for a couple of months before I got back to it. I’m not even through halfway through typing and and I’m still getting fresh ideas. This is what froze me on the series. What if I publish Book #1, get up to Book #3 and suddenly get a hot inspiration that would vastly improve the series as a whole, but contradicts most of (done and published) Book #1?

As I’ve said many times before: my brain and I have issues.

Which leads into another problem related to my slow pace. Back in the days when traditional publishing was the only game in town, it was okay if you only published one book a year. Two if you wrote genre and were popular. If you wanted to write more than that, you had to use a pen name (which, to return to Stephen King, is how "Richard Bachman’s" career started). But now we’re in the age of ebooks and self-pubbing, and all bets and rules are off. Prolific writers can put out a book a month, if they’re so inclined. There’s no publishing company to whine about flooding the market. In fact, oversaturation is encouraged. If somebody likes your book, they’ll want to read more, and they’ll want to read it now. If you’re writing a series, you can publish an installment every month if you’re up to it. In fact, a brisk schedule’s encouraged. We’ve got short attention spans these days. We don’t want to wait any more. We find something we like, we want to binge. Wait too long and the audience gets antsy and switches the channel. Or moves on to another writer.

Some writers can pop out a book every month (or more, if they’re writing to a formula. This is handy if you’re doing romance.) Some will actually be good. The bulk will probably be crappy because they weren’t given time to lie fallow between drafts. Some may not even get a second draft. If the readers don’t care then it doesn’t really matter. As a writer, though, you should care, unless you’ve signed a contract and you’re on a deadline. Or you’re hacking out stuff for quick cash. In that case, do what you have to and let mistakes slide. That's what the editors are for.

What I’m going to have to do is follow the second bit of advice that tended to come with the first one. Write your book, set it aside for a cooling-off period—and promptly start your next book. Pretty soon you’ll have a pile of drafts. Then you go back to the first one and revise. And so on down the line. At some point one of them will be ready to sub. You’ll know which one, and when. Send it out, start a new one, continue revising the others. When it sells and readers clamor for more, you’ll be ready for 'em.

That’s what I’ll be doing. At some point I will be writing a book a month. Doesn’t mean I’ll be subbing it the following month. Eventually I’ll have enough in the queue to start sending them out. Then there will be a deluge, and everybody will say, “OMG, she’s fast!” Once I’ve got a loyal following, and sufficient sales, maybe then and only then will I be able to slow down.

If we get to around September and my books start appearing on Amazon, you’ll know this worked. If not, it’s not because the plan itself is bad. It’s because I screwed up, or lazed  off, or got carpal tunnel or something. Or injured my leg because the floorboards in the laundry room rotted out due to the leak. Well, that’s getting looked at Friday. Updates to come next week. See you then.