Making the Same Mistakes Over and Over

Put in about 15 hours over the past week.

I basically got robbed of about $250 bucks with my cover artist and that is the hold up on the book. Luckily, I found someone new: Renu Sharma. She's a genius, and also not going to fuck me over. I'll write up the problem with my other cover artist as soon as I get everything squared away with PayPal.

I've decided to go ahead with this next book. I've got a title, End Times. I'm really not sure if it's got any mass appeal, but if I can get it right--it certainly will entertain me.

When I wrote Dead Religion, I was maybe 10-15k words in when I deleted everything and started over. 

I saw today that the same thing is happening tomorrow on this one. Only, this time, I'm just 3,500 words in. Three thousand of them have to go. It sucks, will put me back some time, but I'm telling it all wrong, and this seems to be a recurring theme with my novels.

It takes some time to figure out the story in your ahead, and given my aversion to plotting, I guess this is normal. I titled this Making the Same Mistakes. They're necessary though. 

Allowing yourself to make mistakes allows you to reach as close to perfection as you can. We normally try to push these mistakes away, or sometimes consider ourselves failures, or even get fired over them. The profession I've chosen, writing, doesn't punish these mistakes--but allows you flourish because of them. I think that's something other professions could learn, if they could slow for a second. Mistakes allow growth, allow us to see the correct path.

Mistakes allow us to become perfect.

Beginning Again

Put in about six hours since my last update. Got super drunk Friday which meant no writing on Saturday. Put in my time today though.

Got another 5 book bloggers on my list to hit up when this book comes out. All I'm waiting on now is the cover. Really getting tired of waiting. Really getting tired of writing about getting tired of waiting. Just want it to be out.

I started a new book this past week, and I don't want to say this is the hardest beginning I've ever had, because I do remember deleting like 15,000 words in two different novels--but it is certainly tough. I stopped during my period of writing twice today, for like ten minutes, and thought whether or not I could write a book like this. I kept writing, but I'm still not sure. 

I'm about a thousand words in, and the book will be at least 70,000 words, with perhaps multiple volumes to complete it. This will probably be the biggest thing I've attempted yet, but that doesn't scare me. That's not why I'm doubting this.

I'm unsure how it's going to play out. The beginning and the end are solid in my mind, as they always are when I start a novel--but the whole middle piece is a cloud. The idea of being able to turn this into something exciting, because believe me--it seems like much of the middle has to be dull as of right now--is beyond daunting. 

I'm going to write on it some more this week. There's a character I'm developing that I think I've already fallen in love with, partly because he's the only character that is based largely off of me--or rather, what I wish I could be. I don't want to just give up on it, because I remember feeling much the same with the other three novels I wrote in the beginning. A vague uneasiness that there is no way I can put this all onto paper. Or the computer screen, I suppose.

I'm going to plug away, and hopefully my mind is able to grasp the words that will get this thing out of my head. If not, I'll be pretty disappointed.

I really like falling in love with myself, and such.

The Importance of Connections

Four hours so far this week. I'm considering by the domain name justafewmorehours.com. Would revamp the site, and all that good stuff, but I think it might be necessary. Running this thing off blogspot is nice and easy, but I can't do everything I want with the site. Just a thought.

I'm a believer that connections are everything. They're at least as important as talent. More important than hard work. In life, when you break everything down to the fundamentals, all you really have is connections. Friendships, lovers, family, colleagues. Everything builds from that. 

Don't believe me? Piss off a teacher in school and see how much extra help you get. Become a teacher's pet and see how much you improve in a year. You're route in life, from a very early age, is determined by the relationships you form.

This is a problem for me. Two things bug me above all else: rudeness and stupidity. I'm not always the most tactful person, but I honestly try to treat people with respect. When someone doesn't do that though, either to me or to someone else that I know, it's hard for me to hold my tongue. It's hard for me not to snap back. 

A mid level exec once told me that if you want to move forward in business (or life), someone has to be able to come into your office, take a shit on your desk, and you have to be able to smile and say thanks. I'm working on this, but it's tough. I won't go into my horrible psychology that makes me nearly unable to tolerate that behavior, but it's important that I get rid of it. It's important that even when disrespected, I respond with respect and not anger.

Because, what we're talking about here, are relationships. We're talking about future friends and acquaintances. We're talking about book sales. We're talking about furthering ourselves in life. I'm 26, and I don't know much about the world, but I believe that to be true. 

You can do nothing without other's investment, and to get that investment, you have to build relationships. You have to deal with rude people; you have to deal with stupidity. This might seem a bit Randian, or Darwinistic, that I'm saying we build relationships to further ourselves--but if you don't think that's true, then I'm not sure you're thinking about this the right way. Even with love, we are trying to find happiness, so we build a world with someone else who will help fulfill this happiness. It's self interest that does it. 

Build relationships, do it genuinely whenever possible, and fake it if you have to. But build them. Have someone that you can call for any situation and know that they'll answer. Be the person that someone can call in any situation, and make sure you answer. It's the only way to move ahead.

And remember to smile.

How I Wrote It

Tomorrow the editing begins. I'm ready for it. Ready to be done with this, ready to be put it out into the world. Ready to hear some form of feedback. 

I have other book ideas, but pushing those out aren't really concerning me right now. Having this done, that is all that really matters. 

I'm trying to setup book tours right now. One author emailed over 500 book bloggers. I'm going through a company to do it--I'm going to outsource until it gets to expensive to do so.

Onto today's topic.

For writers, I think there is a certain uncertainty when it comes to the specific way they write. I know there was for me for a long time. Actually, up until this novel I did not figure out the way that I write best. I've been writing since I was nineteen and I wrote this novel at the ripe, old age of 25. That's six years of writing, plus serious studying of how other writers completed their works. 

So I figure, I'll lay out my path to completing a novel in case anyone is ever interested. It took two novels for me to get there, two novels and another writer beating the shit out of me every time I let him look at a piece of my work. All I cared about was pushing out ideas, getting them on paper as fast as I could, and moving onto next. This led to a prolific amount of words, but quite a few of them were horrible.

So when I sat down to write this novel, I said: Beers, you gotta slow down. How can you make yourself slow down? 

The answer was easy. Write with a blindfold over your eyes. 

I kid, I kid.

What I did was write two pages. Then I went back and hand wrote those two pages, then typed them back up. 

That didn't work either. It kept breaking the creative process, so by the time I finished rewriting, I had forgotten where in the hell the chapter was headed. So I needed a way to slow down and to keep the creativity flowing.

I decided to do the same thing, but with chapters. As I was writing, I read a book by Joe Hill, and at the end he said he had five drafts for the thing. The most I had ever done was two, and that's what I appeared to be doing now.

What did that tell me? I wasn't slowing down enough. 

Currently, I was typing out a chapter, handwriting, and then retyping it in. I decided to add two more steps to it. Once I had retyped the chapter, I printed it out, read it over and made corrections on paper. Then I put the corrections back in. Finally, I read the chapter aloud, making corrections there.

I did that through 70,000 words. Each chapter constructed by itself, my mind almost lost in it--but I think somewhere the rest of the story was working its way out in the back of my mind. Truly, it was the easiest plotting I ever did. Chapter after chapter just came next, without me actually sitting down and writing a single word of plot out (I don't care what anyone says, plotting is the devil). What's crazy, is that it didn't take much editing of the whole book to make the whole plot fit--the pieces just fell where they should, and I think that's because I immersed myself in each chapter and allowed my brain to work through the rest while I was focusing elsewhere.

It took a lot longer to write this one, but I think the end result is a lot better.

Oh yeah, once I finished it, I went back and edited it once more.

Where Ideas Come From

So there's not much to write at the moment. I'm spending a lot of time scouring the internet, finding forums, and the like. Obviously much of this to build a platform, but I'm finding I actually enjoy it. Reading what others have to say on literature, or interacting with strangers on twitter, or asking questions that haven't been thought of yet all have their own satisfaction. I'm enjoying it and don't mind it one bit at all. 

I wanted to write a post on something I've been asked about a few times, and something that I don't really have to think about much--it just happens: where the stories come from. For the past fourteen months or so I have very few ideas for new novels. By very few, I mean I've had three. In the past week though, since I've known I was wrapping up Dead Religion, I've had maybe five ideas. 

It's like my mind knows where the creative energy needs to be going and when it needs to be going there. When I'm writing on a large piece, virtually nothing comes to me in the form of ideas for new work. When I'm done, everything I look at becomes a story. I was walking through the Air and Space Museum, and saw some of the old WWII uniforms. A story hit me at the site of them.

I think, though, that the most important--the strongest stories, for me at least--come from songs. Dead Religion was inspired from Hotel California. The line that says "you can check out anytime you like but you can never leave." That one line spawned a 71,000 word novel. Things changed, and the story expanded in ways I never knew when I heard that line, but the basic story is still here. 

Regina Spektor's Samson is definitely a novel that I'm going to write. It's one of the most beautiful and powerful songs I've ever heard, and made me think about Delilah, the biblical character, in a much different fashion.

My next book came from one line from AWOLNATION: kill your heroes. I'm still working out a lot of shit in my mind about it, but the underlying meaning of those words has a really good story in it.

I can put on Snow Patrol's Eyes Open CD and there is literally a story in every song.

A line from The Killers still sticks with me, but I haven't been able to find out the story behind it yet: they say the devil's water, it ain't so sweet, but you don't have to drink right now.

I'm not sure how my mind does this. I'm not sure if it makes me more or less creative, given that I'm using ideas others have already spun to create novels. There's not a lot I can do about it, either way.

So, according to this one post, I have about 4 novels to write. 

I'm okay with a back list.

First Draft Done

Put in about another nine hours over the past week. Didn't do much at all on the weekend, or Friday. 

Finished a book called Indie Publishing, helped some in the marketing realm and a lot in the publishing realm.

So, the first draft (which really means 6th) is done. I sent it to my editor this morning, and she is going to be the first person to read the thing. I'm nervous. Before writing those two words, I thought if that's what I meant, and I don't think it is. I'm fucking scared. I spent about fourteen months working on this thing. I gave up a lot of time that could have been spent with those I care about, and I put my heart into this thing. I cried at parts when writing and was genuinely scared at others. All of that is a very womanesque way of saying that I put a lot of work into it. I gave it my best.

Now the first person is going to read it and that's going to be a gauge of how well I did. There's going to be a lot more work to put into it, probably another 30-60 hours once her edit is done, but the core of the book is there. The story is told. It either works or it doesn't.

That's scary. 

It worked for me though. 

That's not enough to allow me to do this for a living, but it's still something.