2016? Meh

Remember the last time you went bungee jumping? You were younger then, you did things for a laugh, you had no qualms at all about doing something so far out of your comfort zone it should have scared the pants off you. Oh - you don’t remember bungee jumping? Because you never actually did it? Maybe you wanted to, maybe you thought about it, maybe you were even in with a chance of getting on the plane once - but you never got to jump.

Hold that thought.

Swap bungee jumping for being ‘in love’ with someone. Swap signing up for the chance to try ‘dating’. Now put me there instead of you.

I haven’t ‘dated’ anyone this century. There were a few - a very tiny number - of close encounters that didn’t last longer than an evening. But after the last one, I realised I had absolutely no interest in the game whatsoever.

Friends don’t pressure me. When I say “I’m happy by myself”, they accept it and move on. It’s great, actually. But am I? I mean I think I am - when I think it through, the whole going-on-a-date thing and the whole charade of what is basically interviewing people with a view to occupying the position of new-best-friend-whom-I-also-shag, I just feel tired. I don’t like it. I haven’t done it in over fifteen years. It’s not in my wheel house. It’s not something I know anything about, or in fact care for.

So why do I feel like I should? Like perhaps I’m missing something? Is it like discovering a show you never knew existed - but once you see it, you have to watch the entire show, and it becomes a constant cult thing in your head, your life? It’s so good that once you’ve given the finale six months, you have to watch all the seasons all over again? And then you introduce it to your friends, and your family, and it gets to live with you on your shelf next to all the other blu rays? It’s like that, right?

Fucked if I know.

I think I’m just a little bit bored with my life right now. Work is slowly driving me insane with its soul-destroyingly predictable routine (not the actual day to day routine, but the drama that happens because of situations that are left to develop). I’m seeing patterns in shows and whilst I watch them anyway, I’m also checking tumblr on my phone. I can’t seem to write anything, even though I’ve had two really stunning ideas in the last twelve months. Why is this?

Inspiration. I just want to be inspired.

Sadly, everything is lacking. I’m in the throes of searching for alternative employment. I’ve changed hairdressers’ (and therefore my nail technician). I’ve gone through the sales and bought new workwear. I’ve been through all my old works and archived them, cleaned them off the virtual shelves, blown away the dust.

It’s not working.

I had an absolute belter of a Christmas and New Year. Three epic nights out over a week, and more fun than I could shake a stick at. It made me look at the rest of my winter and think “bloody hell, I’ve really let things slide”. Not in terms of me, or myself. But in terms of what my life used to be like when I lived in The Bright Centre of the Universe, as opposed to now, when I’m living on the If There’s A Bright Centre of the Universe, Then You’re On The Planet That It’s Furthest From. Yes, I know, I bang on about my old life abroad all the time on this blog. Yes, I get depressed thinking about what I’d be doing now if things had gone differently and I was still over there, having got the job I applied for. But why waste all that time and effort?


I haven’t been to archery in over six months. Mostly because I can’t get out of work on time. And it’s not like I can down tools and leave, not with the job we do. If I don’t finish something, it gets dumped on the person next to me to solve, causing them to leave even later. And so it goes.

Maybe that’s what’s grinding me down; I can’t take charge. I can’t do what I can clearly see needs to be done to get things moving. It’s holding me back. And I’m itching to go to two potential interviews for positions with better prospects. But again, I have to wait. And hope.

Then there’s writing. The total number of agents who have knocked me back so far (for one novel alone) is fifteen. The next wave of letters and submissions goes out when the Gollancz Publishing submission window has closed - as I’ve just sent it off to them for their kind rejection. That’ll be about March, and then the next salvo goes out and I start the wishing-and-hoping cycle all over again. But at least I’m doing something.

Boredom. That’s what it is. That’s what makes me open a beer when I get home, because it makes everything a little more amusing and it takes my mind off the banality of life. I keep the vodka for weekends. It’s more fun that way.

I still watch films and TV. I still read comics. I still people-watch as I’m walking to work. I just can’t seem to find anything on this planet that generates any excitement.

I just want something new, something I don’t know inside and out. Is that too much to ask?

What's in a name?

Apparently, if you’re an author trying to get a book published, everything. And I’m not talking about the title of your book. Wait, back up - we need context.

Once upon a time, when my age was in single figures and life was much simpler, I wrote stories. Made-up, convoluted, sheerly-for-fun stories. When I was nine years old, I wrote my first fan fiction (although I’m not sure that word had yet been invented). It featured Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Watson and Mrs Hudson, and it bore witness to Mr Holmes bemoaning the lack of a case or in fact anything of interest to a visiting Watson. What it taught me was that (1) it wasn’t necessarily Holmes who was bored of life, and (2) I loved doing it. However, it would be a full five or six years before I would have access to something called a word processor, manufactured by the Raytheon Corporation, and I began making up my own stories in earnest.

A lot of things came next. Eventually I ended up living overseas, and had finally (through either luck or unconscious planning) secured myself a flat for one. I had come from a large family and the tenancy of a near-empty flat with no-one in it but myself was pure magic. I knew very few people and I liked it that way; I threw myself into writing in my spare time.

However, while I was typing away on what today would be considered an antique Sony Vaio laptop, I was conscious that my own stories were vapid, meandering, and definitely lacking in anything that might be called ‘plot’ even if you squinted a bit and tilted your head when studying them - but that was ok. After all, I was just writing for fun, for myself. No-one ever saw my output.

It came to be that a good friend of mine shared a love of good old-fashioned telly from old Blighty, and so we purchased a boxed set of Sharpe and got watching, beers on hand.

We went through the entire box. And in 2006, I wrote no less than four separate Sharpe stories - or fan fiction. These were published on a website I ran, and then later on, were added to the FanFiction archive. I received reviews. I read them. I read them again. And then I realised just how poor my writing was.

There was absolutely no doubt about the plots; they whisked along and questions were answered, puzzles were solved, some people died and some people were saved, and the story went pretty much the way of every episode in the telly series. No, what was poor was my actual writing. The language, the execution, the (mis)use of format - the basics that made it easy to read. But did I give up? Fuck, no. I kept right on writing and learning. Next came Doctor bloody Who and a total of eleven stories, plus two crossovers. I could see the improvement, and I could appreciate the constructive criticism that came with them all. I was very grateful people were bothering to read my work at all, and I made every effort to make every page of every story - every paragraph - the best that I could.

Round about December of 2007 I switched fandoms. I didn’t turn my back on Doctor Who, but I was running woefully short of things I could put the Doctor through. And so my new virtual voodoo dolls for torture became the brothers Winchester, of Supernatural fame. This time it was a case of fifty-one stories plus four crossovers - and I’m not sure I’m done with them yet. It also heralded my first script, my first semi-lucid experiment in abstract word art, my first out-and-out comedy farce, my first poem-like satire, the development of the ‘Sam rolled his eyes’ game, and some great feats of stretching in terms of actual writing skill and execution. In short, I loved it and some of those stories are still by far the best work I’ve done.

There were other stories, too, though. A brief bit of fun with an A-Team story, two Farscape stories, and even an Enterprise story (although that last one still makes me cringe, and every time I see it’s still there I want to delete it). A quick go with Burn Notice (which I still like myself), and then two Avengers stories (focusing exclusively on Hawkeye and Black Widow being badasses). Then came new obsessions, and a crossover between Supernatural and Constantine was as timely as it was fun. The most recent piece was a solo Constantine story, and I’m still very fond of that one.

I did bemoan in an earlier post the state of my current writing skill level. I was whining about how I thought the magic had all gone, that my stories now were flat, boring, dull and pretty much worthless. That I could see the ending a mile off, which meant any reader would too, and it was a monumental waste of my time to produce more stories when, looking back, I had written such exciting and well-executed pieces that felt like they worked on several levels at once. When I re-read parts of some of these, I’m reminded of how good I was, whilst riding the high of enthusiasm and fun.

So here’s where we are: one million, three hundred and twenty-seven thousand and six hundred words (give or take fifty) in nine years. Plus the eight books I have written, coming to around one million, three hundred and forty-nine thousand and two hundred words in themselves - and that was over the same time span. That means that, on average, I’ve written nearly three hundred thousand words a year for nine years. That’s just over eight hundred words a day - every single day.

Put like that, I seem like quite the writer.

What of these eight books I’ve written? Where can you find them online or at a bookshop? You can’t. I’ve been trying on and off for the past four years to get the first of the sci-fi books published, and lately the stand-alone high-concept novel taken by an agent. As previously discussed, I’ve gone from getting very nicely-worded and appreciated rejection letters to being completely ignored by agents altogether. This is after I’ve taken advice from a book doctor, an agent herself, two books written by agents on how to get them, and countless blogs and online articles written by agents. All the submissions were to agents who said they were looking for the type of writing I thought I was pretty good at, and all of them were sent my work exclusively, one at a time. I was beginning to think that it wasn’t them but me - that I was completely shit and the old net myth of fan fiction writers being legends in their own minds was true (especially after certain arguably poorly-written ‘yummy mummy’ semi-porn novels have been published since with great fanfare). In short, it dawned on me that perhaps my work was simply badly written, and it was being turned down or just blatantly ignored due to its crappiness, not because of anything I had or hadn’t done in the submission process.

And then I saw an article that popped up on my tumblr dash. Someone else, a woman who had been successfully published herself, had shared a news story she had read. I read it too. And then I got angry and not only reblogged it, but then debated what to do about it as it pertained to me.

Female Novelist Learns How Far a Male Pen Name Can Take Her, an article over at the Mary Sue, left me stunned. (Short version: she submitted under a fake man’s name and got instant replies and even - GASP - taken up on her book. Repeatedly.) I was shocked, and I was angry. Why shocked? I had a sneaking feeling that this kind of thing still went on, but until I saw actual figures, I was reluctant to put much stock in it. Angry? I was all shades of raging. Why should anyone have to change their name to even get looked at? Why should someone’s identity make a difference?

Certainly, parts of the article made me wonder if this was the reason I was getting ignored by agents. But it couldn’t be, could it? How could an agent, who specifically stated they were looking for debut female writers, fail to even read something by a debut female writer? It’s not like I sent my novel to someone who only took in non-fiction about gardening. I bothered to check each agent’s website, I bothered to check if they would be interested in my kind of writing. I mean there’s optimism and then there’s just stupidity.

I did what any other English woman would have done after having read the article; I made a cup of tea. As I was waiting for it to cool sufficiently for me to drink, a lot of shouting went through my head. Should I change my name the next time I send my novel out? Should I take on a man’s name to get my novel read? Should I just keep to using my first initial only, and keep hoping for the best? And then the other side of the coin hit me: wait - why should I? I shouldn’t have to hide my identity to get ahead. I shouldn’t have to invent a Remington Steele just so someone would read my words. None of this was reasonable. And yet I was contemplating it anyway.

Because the Laura Holt part of me was thinking it through. What if I did send it away under a man’s name? And what if they did write back asking for the entire novel to read? And what if, after that, they wanted to offer me representation? Well then the jig would be up, surely. There would be a face-to-face meeting and they would instantly discover that I am not the Remington Steele they were expecting.
But then the Alan Shore part of me shouts “A-haa! It’s not for me to justify why I had to use a man’s name to get read - it’s up to them to justify why, when meeting me, they are disappointed that I’m not a man!”

The Spock part of me spots flaws in this logic. After all, it wouldn’t be fair to send it to an agent under only a man’s name, and then get all high and mighty when they do read and ask for more of the novel. Mainly because they never saw it under my actual name, so I have just assumed they wouldn’t even read it under my own name and skipped the part that would have made it fair. Then again, you can’t send it to them twice. This precludes any kind of fair chance and goes straight for the 50/50 chance of being read, instead of the 1/50.

And again, put that way, am I really going to be so stubborn that I refuse to improve my odds of getting read? That in just calling myself Bob or Dave or Richard instead of my first initial would give me a one-in-two chance of getting read?
But that’s not the real question at all. What it comes down to is this: does using a pen name to ‘fool’ agents into reading your work count as lying? Are you tricking someone into reading something, making their unconscious prejudices work for you? And if you are, does that constitute a lie, or a con, on your part? Or a self-inflicted wound to their reputation? Are you helping to perpetuate these prejudices by using them to aid yourself?

And that last paragraph, ladies, gentlemen, both and neithers, is where I come to a full stop. Using the system to my advantage only keeps the system in place; not using it means I never accomplish what I want, and what I have wanted, since I was nine years old. I morally can’t do one, and I physically can’t do the other. It comes down to how much of me cares about changing the system for others. How much do I want to stick it to The Man? And do I want it more than my book(s) published?

One thing is for certain: I’m going to need more tea.

The Age of Miracles

Alright? Long time no see. I’ve managed to improve my lot in life. How, you may ask. Well, let me tell you…

It mostly started a few months back. Tired of trying every agent in the Writer’s and Artist’s Yearbook and getting rejected, I jumped at the chance of attending the 2014 Festival of Writing. I booked my Saturday, sorted two copies of the beginning of my book, and sent them ahead of me for perusal by the agent and book doctors with whom I’d booked discussion sessions.

Thing is, actually getting to York from The Sunshine Coast (A.K.A. not London) was shaping up to be a public transport nightmare. I would have to get a bus to the train station, get a train to The North, change to a taxi to get to the B&B I’d booked, and then rely on buses to get around.

After scratching my head over the possibilities of a flight from Southampton to Leeds Bradford airport, and how I was going to get to Southampton in the first place, and how to get from Leeds Bradford airport to the sodding B&B, I went with ‘fuck that’ and instead went about looking into hiring a car for the weekend.

Quite unexpectedly, I ended up buying a second hand car. A year’s tax and MOT came with it, and I was set. Literally all I had to do to get it to York and back, not a small feat at around an 600-mile round trip, was buy it some engine oil. Now that’s what I call a result.

Anyway, the festival was great. Walking into the hall and seeing all the people - the writers - waiting around just as I was doing was oddly pleasing. People were generally politely curious, happily chatty - ‘What kind of books do you write?’ - ‘Have you seen what Hodder & Stoughton are starting next year?’ - ‘What version of Scrivener do you use?’ - ‘Do you do that thing where you move the scene punchline six times before putting it back where you had it?’ - and so on. Not one person looked at me like I was a flake, someone who pretended to be ‘in the arts’ because they wanted to sound creative. It was… nice.

I don’t like to mix with people. So I didn’t. I was happy to be by myself, and have my one-to-one discussions with the agent (very exciting to hear her enthusiasm for my book) and the book doctor (who pronounced it a 9; if it’d had gone up to 10 or 11 he’d have taken it himself to hand to an agent). I was so stoked; I’d finally got a car, and it was all for booking this epic weekend for myself. I’d had professionals look at my work and decide that it was a biscuit away from being taken on by an actual agent. And to top it off, Saturday night after the festival my sister and I found a really nice pseudo Mexican place that did AMAZING chimichangas. Sorted.

And then it came to pass that my mate had a mate who had an empty top floor in his house. Yep, you’ve guessed it - I jumped at the chance of renting it. Back to no distractions, back to my own space, back to my own time and mood and feeling like I want to spend four hours writing and no-one can stop me. All the notes I got from the agent and the book doctor? Yeah, you bet I’m going to spend the next few weeks and months working on them, on my book, and turning it into an 11. I’ve spent too long sending it out and getting it turned away; this next agent on my list is going to look at this and demand the rest of the manuscript. And then it’ll all snowball into representation and a publishing deal. FINALLY.

A friend of mine once said that the year of the snake was my year. I think this year, the year of the horse, is turning out to be my year.

Soopytwist.

Playlist

Just finished draft 1 of book 2. As yet untitled. Got an idea though.

This is the playlist I used. Just for shits and giggles.

Self-publishing: a killer of standards?

Having sent books to agents a few times and been rejected, people have had the best intentions when telling me to ‘do what that bird did, or what that bloke did’ and publish my book(s) myself. Originally, I turned my nose up at this idea - paper books, real hard or paperbacks in a shop with my name on were much more appealing. However, after thinking I would be stupid not to check every avenue, I began to read up on all this self-publishing malarkey - and came across something that has made me re-think my plan to self-publish.


In a word: standards.

Now I don’t mean that your average hob-nob-snob variety of reader only goes for paperbacks on the train. In fact, it seems the whole eBook thing has exploded about 200% percent in the last two years alone. Amazon’s Kindle has its own apps for finding new titles and downloading straight to the device without needing a computer, and other e-readers (the Nook, the Kobo, etc.) have their own ways of getting readers their fix without needing a home computer. This is accelerating the market so fast, it seems online booksellers need to keep revamping their sales procedures to keep up, and keep the whole game as convenient and reliable as possible. If they don’t? They’re sacrificed for other eBook suppliers. Simple.

What I mean is purely the standard of the printed word that is digitally obtained by whoever takes a chance (or, in the case of Amazon, enjoys the free portion they get as a sample) and buys it. Let me be clear:

You could write a book about your holiday, save it as an ePub document (easy as pressing ‘export as ePub’ when using Apple’s Pages application), and then register as a Kindle publisher. Some ISBN trifles, a few DRM ticks or un-ticks, and you can upload your own stuff. Anywhere between 2 and 4 days later, your title is available to buy (or get for free, if you publish it as such). Easy, right? Easy.

While trawling the net for people who have blogged about their experiences with self-e-publishing, or those who want to help others out of the kindness of their hearts, I have stumbled across what I hope is a phenomenon: bad grammar. If the people writing these tutorials or the ‘it happened to me and I’m now a published author’ blogs can’t put a sentence together, what does that say for their saleable matter? Now I’m the last person to point fingers - I regularly blog here like grammar went out of fashion with Beatles’ boots, but that doesn’t mean I can’t proofread what I blog. When I’m serious about the subject matter, you’ll notice a distinct improvement in my grammar and urge to get it across in a clear, proper way. Just because these people blog using sub-standard grammar, as I do, doesn’t mean they can’t write properly when they want to. I accept that.


However - and this a big however - after following a link to find the free sample at Amazon, one, to check it was real and not a scam page, and two, to see what the results were and how your published eBook appears on the sales page, I was horrified to see that the grammar matched that of the blog.


I’m not going to name the blog, or the book, as that’s just rude and to be honest, unnecessary. What I will say is that I found this elsewhere, too. I then found that the odd author actually attacks people who leave less than rosy comments on reviews of their book. Unprofessional? Completely. Childish? You be the judge. Perhaps if that author had an agent or someone who covered publicity for them, they would conduct themselves more like a struggling (?) author and less like a five-year-old in the playground looking for a good scrap over the colour of the paint on their fire engine. Everyone who’s ever written has had ‘bad’ reviews - and by that I mean someone has attacked their work in a manner that does not provide an opportunity to learn from what someone else considers a mistake. Proper readers leave comments like ‘I felt the main character did more telling than showing’ or ‘perhaps I missed something, but I don’t understand why the main character did that in chapter three’, etc. Simply writing ‘that was crap’, with no qualifying reasoning, is a waste of everyone’s time. S/he may as well write ‘penguin marmalade’, all the good it does. I’ve had my fair share of bad reviews - but the people were all kind enough (or intelligent enough) to tell me where they felt I had erred. In six years of publishing fan fiction on the net, I can’t think of one time where I’ve left the kind of review I’ve just described, or treated anyone who I’ve Beta’d for in such a manner. I’ve even managed not to reply to snotty, ignorant or blatantly flaming reviews - there haven’t been many, but on the odd occasion you have to leave that review for a day before braving it again. And then you let it roll around your head, let yourself be angry with it, be childishly petulant (on the inside) that someone in the universe doesn’t like what you like, and then get over it like a normal human being and move on. Perhaps time spent on the net has trained me, Kenobi-style, to see the bigger picture. Or perhaps I stopped scrapping over beloved toys when I was five.

All that aside, it’s standards I’m worried about. If you have a publishing house take on your work, they have editors whose job it is to check these things. There’s a reason they’re still doing big business and large publishing houses are stocked to the gills with proofreaders and editors. When people self-publish, you should get the best that the author can achieve by themselves. I’m not saying that isn’t up to the same spec. as editors - these authors have no doubt used their brain and asked for either professional or at least semi-professional help in proofreading. And lest we forget, some of these authors work in publishing houses or the media industry and are qualified editors or proofreaders in their own right. However, for every person who either learnt grammar at school or asked for help, there are a hundred who haven’t and didn’t. And the worrying thing is, some readers can’t tell the difference. That’s what really concerns me; the downfall of proper grammar being used in society.

Go on, call me a grammar Nazi. But the next time you’re chatting with someone down the pub and they use the word ‘irregardless’, or perhaps ‘medal’ as a verb, don’t blame me. They’ve read it in a book, see, so it’s perfectly fine. It becomes accepted into society sheerly through digital osmosis, and the next thing you know, everyone is talking like rejected failures from A Clockwork Orange.

Ok, I’m taking the piss with that last one. But basically what horrifies me is that, in twenty years time, words we wouldn’t have tolerated before will be used all over the shop, and it’ll be impossible to stop it. Call me a snob, and call me out-dated and old-fashioned, but I still think that any book should be properly spelt. Books like Trainspotting work because they’re not ‘proper’ standard English, but that’s their hook, their angle. If every single book is written this way, then what hope is there for authors like Stephen King or Suzanne Collins? Will the future show the entire former empire use this bastardised English, to the point where grammar devolves into whatever people let slip out on the street, as if the language were a rain-drenched washed-out slimy Blade-runner street that no-one cares about any more? Sounds like a sci-fi novel waiting to be written. Ooh, hang on - I’ll be right back…

Seriously though, someone needs to be checking these things. Simply saying ‘If the grammar’s crap then no-one will read it and the authors won’t keep publishing’ doesn’t wash. Have you seen how many indie or self-e-published books are on the market right now? And that’s only set to rise. Funny how the woman who managed to sell enough books to get onto the New York Times’ Bestsellers List still doesn’t have a publisher. Then again, does she need one? I haven’t seen her work, and even if I did, who’s to say I have better grammar than her anyway?

I have two Beta readers - one for the story, one for actual tough proofreading. Sometimes I need to know someone else has seen what I’ve written, precisely because I can’t always trust my own grammar. (I keep the grammar checker on my laptop turned off - getting real British English to stay on a foreign-made computer and play properly is more trouble than it’s worth. The spell check, however, is always on and ofttimes double-checked against Oxford in case of dispute.)

The point is, I understand how I’m not infallible and because of this, I get my work checked - because it has to be the best I can make it, whether it’s off my own back or that of a man who can. But does anyone else? There is a reason that 90% of these self-published books are not touched with a bargepole by agents or publishers before they’re released on the net. Then again, there are hundreds of ‘instant hits’ out there that are perfectly formatted and produced, but agents or publishers will not deal with for fear of losing money.

Of course, every author thinks they fall into the latter category.

That’s pretty much it. There’s SOPA and ACTA and all kinds of shit going on, but in the meantime, I have a book to push to any agent that will take it.

Soopytwist.

Tags:
~ fan-fic ~ writing ~ self-publishing ~ publishing

Playlist 3.1

Just finished writing a book. My third. Now the continuity in one and two can be fixed, and I can begin the nightmare that is finding an agent.
In other news - playlist! Here we go: the list of songs I had on whilst writing.
Enjoy.

That which we call 'writing', by any other name would read as awesomesauce

You know when you’re in the middle of writing a book and it’s not writing itself? Ideas dry up and you think: ‘ah bugger, guess I’ll have to leave it a week?’ Well it’s happened to me about three weeks in a row.

Never one to give up writing for longer than a shift at work, I went to something else I’d started but put down in favour of said book. And, ineluctably, here we are: another Supernatural fanfic.


“None Of Your Beeswax”
Rating: Rated T (for Dean).
Summary:
Sam and Dean get mixed up in something rather old and waxy that doesn’t concern them. Don’t you hate it when that happens?
Set during happier times. No spoilers for s4, 5, 6 or 7. Enjoy.
Also up at SupernaturalVille, the home of SPN fan fiction. Now at Fanfic.net, too.
Disclaimer:
I do not own Supernatural or in fact owt but the MacBook Air I typed this on. All I hope to gain from this is reviews. Which, obviously, you can’t bank.

Linky-link-link:






And there you have it. Chapters will be up mid-week and Sunday, just like the good old days!


Peach and lube, people. Peach and lube.

Write-list

So I’m writing a book (don’t laugh! I really am!) and it dawned on as I was walking to work the other day (while listening to music on shuffle on iPhone Dax) that some songs kind of lend themselves to the whole thing really well. So I made a playlist using my trusty iTunes and have played it a few times to get myself ready to do battle with a keyboard.


Here, without further ado, is a link to said list.


WARNING - it's getting on for 40 songs. Ahem.


Peach and lube, people. Peach and lube.