STRUCTURE!

I'm revising the memoir and should soon have it ready to send to my agent. but argh! structural problem! book begins with a scene written in third person, a story about a little girl, kind of an urban...er rural legend. second chapter is first person, me as a little girl. i cannot figure out how to avoid confusion with the 2 girls. Readers are going to assume they are the same person. ( I go unnamed throughout entire book, so using names doesn't work.) I've cut and pasted this me-as-child scene everywhere, and it seems to only work at the beginning of my story, after the opening featuring ANOTHER little girl. argh.

PALE IMMORTAL

I've decided to publish Pale Immortal through Belfry Press. I'm antsy and tired of waiting to hear back from possible publisher (although in all fairness, they haven't had it that long). I doubt I'll break even after cost of formatting and scanning, but it will be a good test run. What I've learned is that scanned books, even after they're corrected in Word, are a nightmare to format. That's because they retain the original format, combined with Word format. So you can't just plug them into something like Smashwords. The text has to be converted to HTML and hand coded. And each format cost a minimum of $100, which, when you consider the formatter's time, is a remarkable deal.

Here is a breakdown of cost:

scanning: $100 - $250 (if you scan it yourself, it will take 8 - 12 hours, maybe more)
edit time: two weeks bare minimum
formatting: average of $100 for each format (I decided to start with one format -- MOBI and go from there)
cover design: $50 (I designed my own)

BATS IN THE BELFRY

Plans for the anthology are moving along. 16 contributors so far! I'm excited! Some have expressed interest in print books, so I'm considering our options. I'm wondering about using CreateSpace, which is POD, but also wondering about using a real printer. Kind of a profit-sharing writers' co-op. As an example--if every writer ordered an average of 50 copies for a total print run of 1000, books would cost around 1.80, and each writer could pocket his print book sales.

update: I've been talking to a friend who published a print-only anthology, and her experience was that most contributors didn't want to sell copies of the book, and many didn't want any copies other than one personal copy. So I really think going through a regular printer might not be a good choice. I'm back to Kindle/CreateSpace. Beyond that, a contributor could possibly handle formatting and submitting to print publisher if the desire was still strong.

THE DEATH OF A DREAM

navel-gazing Sunday


I wanted to write entertaining books, but it was never enough for me to write and get published -- I wanted to be rich and famous. But after twenty years I’ve come to realize fame and fortune probably isn’t going to happen, and I’m beginning to feel okay with that.

Most artists will experience failure of various proportions at various times in their careers. Most will reach a point where they wonder if they should continue, where they wonder about the role their art is truly playing in their lives. Does the damage overshadow the need to create?

For many, the gut reaction to massive failure is to walk away from your art, because, after all, it’s the thing that betrayed you. Wherever you are in your career, unpublished, unsold, unrecognized, recognized by a few, recognized by a handful, you have to be able to live with your own personal level of failure. You have to somehow figure out how to make peace with it.

Walking away isn't the answer (although time away might be a good idea). You have to restructure your thoughts and expectations. You have to think of that thing you love in a totally different way, and it has to take a different place in your life.

I always said I wouldn’t write a book unless I thought it had the potential to be something big. That was the driving force behind everything I did. Twice in my career I wanted to turn away from writing, but here is the question all artists should ask themselves: Where does this need to create fit into my life? How can it enrich without doing great harm?

The majority of my friends and family are artists. They are writers, musicians, photographers, painters, so I know how much art hurts. I think the secret is to make peace with your art, figure out how it fits into your life, and most of all don’t allow yourself to feel betrayed by it.

BATS IN THE BELFRY

Screw the business model.

Here's what I'm thinking. This is just the daydream stage, an offshoot of something I've toyed with doing for a quite a while. I'm wondering about publishing an anthology of Halloween stories, probably digital format only. A good launch date would be October 1, 2010. I'd pay very little. A friend suggested toy bats, and I like that idea.

But then you get into the problems of submissions. Open submissions? Too many stories to read, and I would feel awful rejecting people. Not sure I could do that. So maybe invitation only. I would do the content editing, but would pay someone else to copy edit, proof, and format.

I put this cover together in order to convey what I would be looking for. No hardcore horror. Maybe some humor, some quirky. But like I said, just mulling it over right now, don't know if it will happen, but I'm open to suggestions and ideas.

SCULPTING THE MEMOIR

A month into writing the memoir, I realized I was in over my head. I knew zero about nonfiction writing, especially memoir. So I bought several books on memoir writing. None addressed the problems I was having, and none dealt with taking fiction-writing skills and applying them to nonfiction. It had taken years to reach a certain level of skill with my fiction writing, and I was afraid it would take as long or longer to learn nonfiction through trial and error. So when I ran into an agent who wasn't interested in reading the memoir but wanted to rep me, it was easy for me to walk away from it. For a while. Later, when I returned to the memoir, I could easily and clearly see what I'd done wrong. The story was too broad. I'd told too much. It wasn't focused enough.

Quite simply:


With fiction, you start with a seed and build out.
With memoir, you start with a massive block of wood, or marble, or butter (if you live in Minnesota), and decide what to remove.


Deciding what to remove, deciding what to leave out, is the negative foundation that shapes your story and gives it strength and purpose.


(This sculpture can be found at Minneapolis Institute of Arts.)
MIA

AND THE WINNER IS:

I tried same image with Black Tupelo:



I'm still dealing with fallout from the Quartet Press mess, and have been unable to concentrate on my current project because of it. I was supposed to have received the EPUB file for Bad Karma, but it's looking like that isn't going to happen. I could say more here, but I won't because it would just be speculation. But the lack of the file has put me into another tailspin, and certainly put my own publishing venture on hold. And I absolutely cannot take any more time off from my current memoir project, especially now that I have an agent who believes strongly in the material and is waiting for my revision.

That brings me to Samhain Publishing. They've expressed interest in possibly publishing Bad Karma and Pale Immortal. And right now that seems appealing. I work on projects one at a time, and I spent combined total of two or three months on Karma and Pale, then moved them off my plate to concentrate on my big project. But here they are back on my plate. I can either put them aside for several months, or submit them to Samhain. If I put them aside, there's a chance I may never go back to them. If Samhain publishes them, they'll be off my plate and I'll be able to move on. (Although Pale Immortal might not be a good fit for them, and I could end up pubbing it myself.)

I also have something new I might pub (in future, time permitting), and I have a big project I'm working on with someone else that I feel could really be something. Right now we are in the idea stage. I'm not sure it will ever move past that, but if it does we will need a publishing house of our own.


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