Learning To Not Write

I can't not write. I'm sure some of this blog's readership would say the same thing. We writers are an obsessive lot. We have these... ideas. An entire plot just pops into our heads (or so it feels like) and we must write it down. It's catharsis for us. It helps us keep the world in order. And it gives us hope that someday, our books too will be on shelves.

But what about when we can't write, meaning: the time or energy just isn't there? Sometimes for weeks. Perhaps even months. This used to drive me bananas! All these stories clamoring to get out and here I was embroiled in equations, or some such activity. I needed to get the stories down and the queries sent or nothing was ever going to happen. The frustration would nearly cause my brain to rupture. Of course, that's when you sit and check your email every 30 minutes to see if you've had any replies. Not a healthy situation!

For some time now I've been unable to write. Due to our current political situation, the funding for the satellite development program I was working on dried up rather suddenly in early November. One would think that would give me more time to write. Actually, the opposite is true. With bills to be paid, I suddenly had to engage the hyperdrive to find new business. The added anxiety took care of any free time by draining my creative spark. I even had to fall back on one of my hobbies to help bridge the gap.

However, I am now very much enjoying myself and have discovered that I can make money building cabinets! More than I can make doing engineering. The trade off is, it takes a lot of time and energy. Fortunately some consulting work also happened to pop up, working on a proposal for a DOD program. It has been long hours too. Very long. But also pretty darned satisfying. Not only do I get to do some engineering and keep that part of the machine well-oiled, it is, surprisingly enough, a lot of writing!

Of course, while all this is happening, I have absolutely no time to work on my writing. It's been frustrating. I'd been pouring a lot of energy into my writing for about a decade. Pushing hard to get out the next book. Sending out those queries. Marketing my work that is out there. Somewhere in the midst of this flurry of activity, it hit me. All that rushing, all that fighting the order of events, hadn't done me a bit of good. It was like swimming up stream. Maybe I'm just getting older, or maybe I'm growing, but I backed off the writing and just decided to let things unfold as they will.

The transformation in my own life has been remarkable. I sleep better. My wife sort of likes me again. Exercise is more enjoyable. The work I am doing is more satisfying. I get more relaxation from just reading, instead of constantly comparing. Sure, sometimes I get hit with that frantic feeling that I'm missing writing opportunities. That if I had just sent that query!!! But then I force myself to remember that hurrying doesn't help. I've tried it. Things will unfold as they will. I will write when I can. Market when I can. But live TODAY.

At the moment, I'm wrapping up two projects and have no time to write. At the same time, one of my books is a finalist for an award. Sales aren't too bad - considering I'm doing ZERO marketing. Some incredible (non-writing) opportunities have sort of materialized out of thin air. And, I'm making great progress on my next novel. That's right. I'm writing my next novel. Or rather, doing some reordering and revision of the last draft. Without all that frustration and anger I find I'm able to get a lot more done in my head. So, in the next few weeks when things calm down a little, I can start fresh and ready, with a host of ideas to turn this next project into what I really want it to be.

All of which leaves me wondering: Were I writing in frustrated anger, forcing out pages, would I be able to convey the messages I really want to share? Or would my frustration come out, and chase everyone away? Maybe sometimes, not writing is good. You just have to learn how to do it.

Until next time,

John C. Brewer

John C. Brewer is the author of Multiplayer an MMOG YA SF novel, and The Silla Project, a North Korean nuclear romance. You can learn more about him and what he is doing at his website, JohnCBrewer.com

Dream On by Renita Pizzitola--a review

Ah, dreams! What they show us can sometimes be amazing and bring clarity to a difficult situation. I'm a vivid dreamer and definitely have figured out how to solve a problem or two in my waking life during my dream one. I think that's why the premise of Renita Pizzitola's latest book, Dream On, really caught my attention. It sort of reminded me of a sexy version of that Eighties movie, Dreamscape. Here is the publisher's blurb:

Her quest begins when she closes her eyes.

Emory Bennett owns a lucrative dreamwalking business. Trained in weaponry and Muay Thai, she spends her nights entering the dream realm resolving her clients’ nightmares, whatever they might be: bad guys, scary beasts, or the classic forgot-to-wear-my-pants nightmare. Her jobs get complicated when a gorgeous man keeps appearing requesting her help.

Grayson, a fellow dreamwalker, is stuck in the dream realm while a stranger inhabits his body. He needs Emory’s assistance in the waking realm, which he can’t visit if he can’t get back into his body.

Once Emory is convinced Grayson’s not a figment of her imagination, they concoct a plan to lure the body snatcher out. But as Emory begins to fall for Grayson, the line blurs between him and the stranger who inhabits his body. She must keep it together to get close enough to discover his secrets, or divide her very soul if she can’t bring the man she loves back.

WARNING: Strong language

A Lyrical Press Urban Fantasy Romance

 

So was Dream On as dreamy as the publisher's blurb? I'd have to say yes!

 

It's a fast paced, romance/action thriller with strong characters that held my attention. I thought the idea of owning a dream walking business where you actually help clients solve their problems was a good one. I liked that Ms. Pizzitola helped the reader understand Emory's character by allowing us to see her in action several times as she helped out her various clients. I particularly enjoyed the opening dream sequence with its reference to the movie Scarface. You gotta love a book that can blend in some great pop culture! I don't care what age you are--everyone knows Scarface.

 

I wasn't sure about Grayson at first--is he the good guy or the bad? His character made me think that he might have the potential to be the bad guy in disguise. Without giving more away, Grayson kept surprising me.

 

In fact, there were a few peripheral characters that I was unsure about when it came to their motivations. There's a best friend who falls for a psychic who too sweet to be a total bad guy. I really enjoyed the development of these friends and the way their plot lines were weaved flawlessly into the story.

 

The only thing that disappointed me was...well...it has to be said....the sex. There were lots of lingering looks, lots of hot descriptions about mugging down, and one "pretty close to the deed" scene that faded to black. I felt a bit cheated as I wanted more of the scoop on Emory and Grayson's sex life.

 

But then again, I'm nosy like that. And it did not deter my enjoyment of this story!

 

If you'd care to "Dream On" yourself, click on the Amazon link below or go to the author's website to learn more about her. I know that she is also on book tour all this month, too, and doing a giveway.

 

DREAM ON AMAZON LINK

 

RENITA PIZZITOLA

 

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Something for nothing? (Part 2 of 2)

Continued from last week ...

I hear a lot of nonsense about giving books away in order to get reviews and I'd just like to clarify that one while I'm at it. It's estimated that less than 1% of buyers bother to leave reviews and, of course, there's no guarantee that they'll be good. It's nice to see that Amazon have finally added some commentary in the reviewer's box advising against commenting upon Amazon's own services. I've already blogged about seeing 1-star reviews for products which have been delivered late or in damaged packaging (i.e. nothing to do with the author or manufacturer).

Have a cigar
 

I'm equally sure about Amazon knowing this percentage and, if the algorithm's got any sense, it'll be looking for anomalies in the percentage of sales resulting in reviews for a specific book. If that rises above a certain level (4 standard deviations above the mean I'd suggest), the reviews are likely to get scrutinised for ‘sock-puppet’ tendencies.

In any case, there are plenty of books which have made it to the top with lousy reviews and even more ones with cracking reviews that never see the light of day.

Continuing on the subject of nonsense, I'd like to dispel another little myth and that's the one about DRM which, for those who don't know, stands for Digital Rights Management and is intended to protect electronically-delivered goods (such as e-books) from being ripped off. I can tell you now that it's a very easy matter to get through the DRM blocking and so gain full access to the book's make-up file. Thus a book can be downloaded in mobi (Amazon's Kindle) or ePub format and, even with DRM, be turned into a Word document or HTML within a few seconds.

Having done that, the content can be used in any way the hacker sees fit.

As I've also blogged about, I belong to a commercial writing site from where I've taken on the odd job. In the last two years, there's been a phenomenal growth in spinning - the act of taking a document and, through the replacement of proper nouns, verbs and adjectives, turning it into an (almost) unrecognizable document which effectively says the same thing as the original. Spinning software is readily available and spinners (the workers) are cheap to hire. Thus a book can be downloaded, ripped off, spun and resold for no outlay (or virtually no outlay) whatsoever.

That could be your book. Think about it for a moment.

The long arm of the law won't reach them

It's no good consoling yourself with the notion that you'll just get hold of your friendly ambulance-chasing, pro-bono, bloodsucking legal-beagle either. Firstly you've got to spot the rip off (it may not be on the original book site - it might be a downloadable file from another website) and, having done that, you've then got to track down the author. My guess is that you'll be thrashing around in a thick fog. Even if you do catch up with the 'thief', you've got to find a way of punishing them. Well, good luck. I've had my stuff ripped off far too many times and never once been able to get anything done about it.

Opting out of the freebie days and ensuring that your book always has to be paid for in hard currency is, of course, no protection against this happening but it does discourage. A few dollars may not be much to you but it's more than a day's wages to the typical spinner. When there are easier pickings to be had, they're going to target those books instead.

I've no doubt whatsoever that some people have benefited from following the giveaway route but I've also spoken to many who haven't. This, of course, begs the question "How many of those who succeeded by using free giveaways would have done so regardless?". Every author must make their own decision and I'm not wanting to tell anyone what to do (or not to do) but I am urging caution and for you to go into the arrangement with your eyes open in just the same way as you might regard our anonymous benefactor whom I described at the outset of this article.

If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.

Clive West is an author himself and understands what it's like to be a writer. He also runs a book publishing company alongside his wife and fellow author. Any Subject Books is always pleased to hear from new authors.

Screenplay v. Novel Writing

With SXSW upon us here in Austin, the film scene is going crazy. Directors, actors, writers--they're all here this spring break and rarin' to go. I thought it would be nice in honor of that to repost this fabulous piece about the difference between screenplay and novel writing. This was written by Steve Metze.---Mary Ann

As someone with an MFA in Film and Video production, I’ve written a few screenplays in my time. Only optioned one, and any movies made from them I made myself, but still. I’ve also written my fair share of novels, with about the same amount of success, although I do feel my craft has improved consistently with every word I’ve written.
Having hammered out both, I wanted to take a moment to compare and contrast the two in case you were debating writing one or the other.

First, some basics.

Novels are long, screenplays are short. Novels tend to be in the past tense, screenplays in the present. Novels have some leeway for structure, although generally lean towards something with three to five Acts and a hook of some sort at the end of each chapter. For screenplays the structure is much more rigid, with painful scrutiny placed on pacing. Novels have many niche markets, while screenplays always seem to be aiming for that PG-13 audience.

Now let’s dig a little deeper.

With a novel, you are the creative overseer. An editor might make suggestions, but they won’t go in and re-write the entire ending with a new flashy location or three times the stakes. When you’re done writing a novel, you own it. Your style drips from every page. Your ideas, your characters, your detailed descriptions, they remain, all yours.

In a screenplay, you are, at best, writing a suggestion for others to go by. You’re creating a blueprint from which hundreds of others will tear off pieces and then rework those bits in their own image. If you want something that stands out as yours, screenplays probably aren’t the way to go.

As far as money goes, don’t be fooled. Novels actually published will make more money than most screenplays sold, and certainly more than those optioned. I’ve known many screenplays to option for as little as a dollar while a hopeful director holds onto to someone else’s work and shops it around looking for financing. A screenplay “hit” can sell for six figures, but then that’s it, the money stops. A novel “hit” can go well beyond that, and the money is open ended. Assuming you sell more than any advance you might have gotten, sales will drop down to a trickle and slowly fade rather than having a hard stop after a single lump payment. In addition, there are thousands of books published every year, and only hundreds of movies made.

But as a writer, someone who loves the act and craft of writing, they really are different animals. Novels can be internal or external stories, with action optional. They tend to focus more on characters and the true details of their lives. Screenplays can only suggest actions that suggest internal thoughts and feelings – you can’t even write what the character is thinking to help out the actor. The characters can show it or say it, but with very few exceptions (and then usually only in an opening or closing voice over) the omniscient point of view is right out. As far as descriptions go, you get a few lines to sum up the setting, and then it becomes someone else’s job to give that location or character life. This is not to say that screenwriting is easy, or that there aren’t opportunities to write creative character-driven works you can be proud of. In both cases clever dialogue goes a long way, but in a novel, the dialogue doesn’t have to be the primary form of transmitting information about thoughts and feelings.

So, bottom line, you’ll end up writing what you wanted to write, but my final piece of advice to you is pick one and stick with it, or at the very least don’t try to hop back and forth between the two. They are both skills, and both crafts, and even though they both tell a story, they use completely different languages to do it. Find out which one you’re best at, and focus on it. When you’ve had a real “hit” and can quit your day job, then you can dabble in the other…

Enjoy

A Different Kind of Writing

I hated English in high school. Middle school, too. Oh, and "Language Arts" as we called it when I was even younger. To be perfectly honest, I still don't know what a verb is. I know what a verb does, but point me at a sentence and ask me to pick out the verb and I'm going to struggle. I can get easy ones, and easy nouns as well, but ask me about adjectives and adverbs and I find myself recalling the jingles from Schoolhouse Rock and working from there!

There are a few reasons I have this trouble. For one, I was pretty much blind through 6th and 7th grades. At that age image and appearance are everything and no way I was getting glasses. I'd seen other kids crucified for wearing glasses and dang if it was going to be me. But I couldn't see the chalkboard. When the teacher was diagramming all those sentences it was all just a blur to me. I didn't even copy down the homework most of the time. Memorizing the eye chart helped beat the crude screeners at school and kept me out of the optometrists office. Eventually an adult at church found me out at a Wednesday night bowling league. The jig was up though it was nice to be finally able to see. I got razzed a bit but it didn't change my fortunes with the girls at all. I was still dismal.

I said there are a few reasons and here's the other one. My brain doesn't work that way. Period.

However, my dad always said that writing was important. I didn't know what he meant at the time, but having become a writer myself, I now wish I'd gone to glasses a bit earlier. Perhaps diagramming those sentences at school would have made a tad more sense. but then again, my brain doesn't work that way, obviously. Which is why I became a rocket scientist.

I'm not going to go into how I wound up writing and loving it, but I can go into how being a rocket scientist really helped my ability to write novels. Much of what I did, and still do from time to time, involved developing mathematical models of aerospace systems, like missiles and aircraft and satellites, and translating those equations into computer simulations. These simulations could be hundreds or thousands of lines long and contain dozens of separate variables and modules and subroutines. It is critical to hold all of this in your hear and how it relates to the overall structure of the program.

Sound a bit like writing a novel? It is. Characters, setting, and plot all require us to hold a lot of interrelated information in our heads so we can complete the story and have it make sense. Then, when we have to "go back in" and make changes, we must remember everywhere that change then effects the story. Just like in code. Sure, there are a lot of things about writing a novel that have nothing to do with computer programming, like lines of tension, drama, and character development, but I got plenty of that working for the DOD as well. Talk about characters!

I'm now starting a bit different part of my professional career. Having done the simulation thing for a long time now, I've found a way to combine my two loves; writing and technology. I'm writing proposals. The government and the Department of Defense release a lot of RFP's or Request for Proposal. When they need something built, everything from a new jet fighter to a redesign of the Army's shovel, the contract it out. Companies spend a lot of money writing proposals, competing with other companies, to prove they are the ones that can do it the best. It isn't writing novels, but just as coding helped me in my novel writing, novel writing has helped me in proposals.

One of the things that was hardest to get through my head when I began writing, besides nouns and verbs, was the idea of audience. I would write stuff that I thought was cool, and my friends thought so, but it didn't really have an "audience" as we writers understand it. Everything from word choice, to plot complexity, to characters define your audience. I'd finished three novels before it finally dawned on me: yes, I'm writing for me, but not just for me. If I want to share my ideas, I have to express them in a way that draws in an audience.

So, when I began writing proposals, I immediately thought of my audience. While I strongly feel that our team is the best for the job, I needed to make sure the people reviewing this proposal realize that. So I ask: Who is going to be reviewing this proposal? What are their problems? What kinds of programs have they funded in the past? Have previous contractors done a bad job? How are we different and, more importantly, better than the competition? They are the same questions we ask about characters, setting, and plot as we develop a story for a specific market.

It was some time before I realized I was doing this and the surprise was pleasant. As a result of this kind of thinking, I feel we are shaping what is ultimately going to be a winning bid that's going to result in my client receiving about a $70,000,000 contract. I was also quite surprised when I realized that I was really enjoying this! It is, in fact, a great complimentary 'day job' to my 'night job' of writing. I get to hone my ability to string together words, focus on audience, hold a lot of variables in my head, and work on something with a beginning and an ending.

Sure, it's a much different kind of writing, and I don't like it as much as writing novels, but there is something that I really enjoy about it... Getting Paid To Do It!

Until next time,

John C. Brewer

John C. Brewer is the author of Multiplayer an MMOG YA SF novel, and The Silla Project, a North Korean nuclear romance. You can learn more about him and what he is doing at his website, JohnCBrewer.com