Jolly Motivation: Week Three and a bit

Goodness gracious where does the time go. My goodness. Saturday already! Nearly Sunday of all days. This past week-and-a-bit has been pretty good for getting allegedly important real life things done but absolute poo as far as writing is concerned. In any case my intended goals were:

PRIMARY GOALS
* Charlotte Powers #5 outlined.
* Charlotte Powers #4 sorted out in terms of continuity and such.
* Tactics Heart Episode 10 written.
* Tactics Heart Episode 11 outlined.

SECONDARY GOALS
* Tactics Heart Episode 11 written.
* Charlotte Powers #4 edited.

… and actually I did manage to write episodes ten and eleven of TH, so … well, I guess I did pretty well there. Some small progress was made with Charlotte Powers, too. Plus I got distracted in the middle and sorted through a whole bunch of stuff in early prep for NaNovember, so … well, I suppose I got more done than I thought. Even so, Will Try Harder.

Also, right now I really really want to just start putting Tactics Heart out there. It’s huge, it’s a massive thing, far bigger than I expected it to be—it is simply astounding how a straightforward two page episode outline can turn into 12k+ of actual words. I’m not even halfway through with Episode 11 and the silly thing’s already over 100k. Could even top 300k by the end, I’m still not sure how I’m going to e-book it—unfortunately there’s no real halfway point where I could neatly cut the series in two, I’d feel like I was just ripping people off if I did that, so … I don’t know, something to dwell on later. I keep thinking it should probably be a webcomic or something instead of a book, however episodic, but if it was a webcomic it’d take probably a decade to tell the story—pure text has its weaknesses, but as a storytelling medium it can be pleasantly efficient. Still, it’d be nice to have some illusts and so on for this, kind of a light novel vibe. I might start scouting DevArt for sickeningly talented artists.

Anyway, I probably shouldn’t start releasing it now. That would, perhaps, be a better thing to do for the new year. Fresh start, fresh serial, an episode a week for half a year. Which reminds me, I wanted to talk about NaNo.

Hello! Here I am talking about NaNo. This year I’m going to be a little bit ambitious. Fifty thousand words in a month isn’t exactly a stretch. So how about doubling it? 100k in a month? But even that feels a little on the manageable side. I want to push myself, so my goal for November of this year will be ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND WORDS.

That’s around five thousand a day, which is about my average when I’m in first draft mode. But consistently? Every day? For a whole month? Now that’s an actual challenge. Not all of these words will be on the same project, but I will proceed in a linear fashion—currently, my plan is to finally write that literary wibbly wobbly timey-wimey thing that’s been bouncing around in my head since before last year’s NaNo, then perhaps move on to Charlotte Powers 5 for tradition’s sake, then just pour everything left into Tactics Heart. Going into December I hope to have a whole bunch of rough as guts first draft words to polish up, as well as at least twenty episodes of Tactics Heart.

So, in order to do this I’m going to have to clear my slate. That means Charlotte Powers 4 has to be done, because it’s been hanging around too long already. I want to go into November fresh and clean, and so my goal for this month is:

SINGULAR GOAL FOR OCTOBER
* Sort Charlotte Powers #4 right out. Like published levels of sorted.

That means I’ve got three weeks to sort out the tangles, incorporate all the foreshadowing, and edit the living daylights out of the thing. To that end, here are my goals for this week:

GOALS
* Get Charlotte Powers #5 outlined.
* Sort out anything that needs sorting out re: #4/#5 connections.
* Get cracking on an edit of #4.

Everything else can just get pushed aside. This is what I need to be working on, and these are the goals I will have accomplished by next week.

So, with that said, see you then!

 

Jolly Motivation: Week Two

Lost track of the days and a little late, but hello! Goodness goodness doesn’t time fly. Getting straight to it, my goals for this week were:

PRIMARY GOALS
* Charlotte Powers #5 outlined.
* Charlotte Powers #4 sorted out in terms of continuity and such.
* Tactics Heart Episode 10 written.
* Tactics Heart Episode 11 outlined.

SECONDARY GOALS
* Tactics Heart Episode 11 written.
* Charlotte Powers #4 edited.

Of those goals, I actually did pretty well. Charlotte Powers #5 is proving to be a buggering buggery bugger, but I’m crawling my way through a rough preliminary outline scene by scene and starting to make some headway—it’s one where for almost every decision I make I have to stop and check things and think and make notes and those notes lead to more notes and oh and ah and blah blah blah. It’s a slog, is what I’m saying, but I am getting there. In any case I can confidently state that I am in a much better place with it now than I was a week ago, and that’s kind of the whole point of this. I also started making necessary changes to #4, just a few small things, but significant.

As for Tactics Heart, episode ten is finally done. Phew. Episode eleven is coming along nicely too—outlined and halfway written. It’s funny how the addition of a single brief scene can change everything. I also did some work on the overall structure and arcs and so forth, a bit tedious and time-consuming but necessary.

So, for the coming week:

PRIMARY GOALS
* Charlotte Powers #5 outlined at least up to the first big moment.
* Tactics Heart Episode 11 written.

SECONDARY GOALS
* Tactics Heart Episode 12 outlined/written.

Onwards onwards!

 

Jolly Motivation: Week One

Well, here we are already! Week one of my ‘come on old chap buck up and fly right’ self-motivation schedule has come and gone, so how’d I do? Well, not terribly, but not terrifically either. I have yet to achieve either of my goals, but I wrote quite a bit and sorted out a couple of tricky things that had been hanging over my head. The arrival of hideously addictive space roguelike-like FTL slowed productivity quite a bit, especially after I got it into my head to take notes during a session and it turned into something I just had to write (Crew Of The Osprey: A Recollection). That wasn’t such a disciplined thing to do, although I had a lot of fun and it’s been a while since I got into that kind of writing space, where everything was clear and all I needed was time to hammer out the words—it feels like everything I’m working on right now is fiddly and intricate, with a lot of things to balance and think about and consider, and just splurting out ten thousand words of straightforward space adventure was a nice break from all that. All in all I can’t say I regret it, but in terms of focus I feel that I need to improve.

Taking down the rebel flagship with fire bombs is an accomplishment, but is it productive? (Spoiler: No.)

So! My stated goals for the week were:

1) Charlotte Powers #5 outlined to a basic degree; connection with #4 firmly dealt with.
2) Episode 10 of Tactics Heart outlined and written.

And on both counts I have failed. CP#5 still isn’t outlined and the connection to #4 needs further expansion. Tactics Heart 10 IS outlined, but only around three-quarters written. So, in terms of actual new words over the past week (not counting the FTL thing), I got around ten thousand out. Which isn’t bad, but still, Could Do Better. With that in mind:

PRIMARY GOALS
* Charlotte Powers #5 outlined SERIOUSLY.
* Charlotte Powers #4 sorted out in terms of continuity and such.
* Tactics Heart Episode 10 very definitely written.
* Tactics Heart Episode 11 outlined.

SECONDARY GOALS
* Tactics Heart Episode 11 written.
* Charlotte Powers #4 edited.
* Stop playing FTL so much gosh.

See you next week!

 

Jolly Motivation: Goals, Dang It

Lately I’ve been lazy; so very lazy. (“Lazy” in this case meaning “Still working like an electric beaver, except on ‘easy’ things like proofing and making notes and research and such; not actually producing anything new and that’s what needs to happen”.) I’m out of the habit of writing and into the habit of all of the other activities that surround writing, and that’s not such a good place to stay for extended periods. I have all these projects and so many notes but very few actual written words—I mean, I do feel that when I actually do write those words that they’ll be very splendid words indeed because of all this groundwork I’ve done, but I also feel that until you’ve actually produced those phantom words that nothing’s worth much of anything. First drafts are the only currency of worth, everything else is just … everything else.

Because posts are more interesting with pictures, here’s a picture of the gaang as fruit.

With all of that out of the way, I think what I should do—and what I will do—what I will attempt to do—is begin using this bjournal as more of an update on where I am and what I’m doing. I’ll set goals and then chastise myself for failing to complete them, or else congratulate myself on a job jolly well done. And so:

STATE OF BJK
I just released

 

Creation of a Cover

I love mucking around in Photoshop. It’s so relaxing and fun, not like that troublesome ol’ writing lark.

why did I make this

Sometimes this mucking around leads to a cover, sometimes for a book I haven’t even written yet. I often find it to be a good sort of semi-distraction, something to focus on while my subconscious figures out little things and tries to find the shape of the story. Recently I’ve even been sketching out rough ideas before doing any actual fiddling. With the most recent story to occupy my head space, Blood Sisters, I had this grand idea for a dramatically epic cover featuring the protagonist standing over her wounded sister, facing down dozens of murderous bandits in a night forest lit by torches. I even sketched out a rough outline before remembering that I can’t draw. I’ll save you from having to see the offending sketch; instead here’s a portrait of James Townsend (Esquire), Lord Mayor of Olde London Towne:

“Hello.”

So then, given that my grand, overly-ambitious ideas for a cover were nothing more than idle dreams, I went the other way; simplicity! Striking central image! Colours! Bright colours! Red is a bright colour! Aren’t there some red flowers? I could make it a BLOOD flower!

Unt I did

Pretty decent first draft cover for a thriller, I feel. Except this book’s a fantasy story. Ho-hum. Still, I really liked the central image and the basic thing of the thing, so once more I fiddled and I faddled and I mucked and I … micked, eventually deciding that a more comic booky style might be more ‘fantasy’.

Or should I say, Doctor VON Scott?

Here I felt that I was on the right track, but that font … that FONT. (Trajan, incidentally, a good go-to font for mucking around with.) I decided that the best way to say ‘fantasy’ was to make a fantasy-ish logo-title-thing. Looking a bit like a comic book would not, I felt, be a bad thing. And so:

Just what exactly are you implying?

Now it was starting to feel more like a book I wanted to write. Still, it needed something else, it needed something more, it needed … fiddly bits.

So fiddly

At this point I started playing around with different ‘moods’ for the cover:

Literally hours of fun

Then I got distracted making a ‘series logo’, as this book would (eventually) (possibly) (hopefully) (if all goes as planned) be part of a larger collection of vaguely related but ultimately stand-alone stories united under the title of “The Song That Ends The World”. So, I made this:

Bang, zoom! Straight … to the moon

Which, to be perfectly honest, still needs a lot of fiddling to get right and I might change the font and blah blah blibbity blah-blah-blah. It’d do as a placeholder for now in any case, and so:

Phew

Still a lot of mucking around to do and who knows, I might abandon the whole concept or even go with a completely different title, but that’s the story of this first draft of the cover for Blood Sisters, possibly the first book in the Song That Ends The World series. (Potentially.)

In other writing-related news, since I’m here, Charlotte Powers 4: Rising Power is nearing first draft completion. Miya Black V is also in a state of near-readiness; just a couple of proofs before it’s ready for release. I’d say Rising Power is on track for a late-August release, while Miya Black V could be out before the end of this month, depending on how things go.

 

State Of My Personal Indie Nation – December 2011 Edition

December was a fantastic month, and a great end to a fun and eventful year. Before anything else, some numbers:

December 2011 Sales

Charlotte Powers: Power Down – 57
Charlotte Powers: Power Play – 46
Charlotte Powers: Hidden Power – 37
The Undying Apathy Of Imogen Shroud – 6
Miya Black, Pirate Princess I: Adventure Dawns – 29
Miya Black, Pirate Princess II: Freedom & Responsibility – 6
Miya Black, Pirate Princess III: Fractured Lives – 5
Resonance Book One: Birds Of Passage – 16
The Boy & Little Witch – 3

Total Sales For December: 206
Sales/Day: 6.8

Releasing Charlotte Powers 3 this month definitely gave my numbers a boost, but it was the new KDP Select program that really brought in the sales, especially making books free (I know, it’s kind of paradoxical but giving books away really does help sales, mostly because of the magic of also-bought lists). So, aside from those numbers up there I also had a couple of thousand free downloads, and around thirty ‘borrows’. Giving away books is fun, and when it leads to actual sales it’s even funner.

So anyway, I achieved my goal of selling more than a hundred books in a single month. In fact, I sold over two hundred! And this with higher prices, too. (My new pricing policy is $3.99 for first-in-series, $4.95 for subsequent books.) (Seems to be working so far!) While I’m happy about these numbers, mostly I’m just pleased that I got to release Charlotte Powers 3 and that people like it. Number four is proving to be a tricky beast–there’s just so much I want to put in it, so many things that I want to explore, picking and choosing is really hard. I might have to write book five (or at least thoroughly outline it) before I continue on four, they’re pretty heavily linked.

Anyway! Since it’s the end of the year I figure I’ll make this a kind of wrap-up post too, so here come some more numbers:

2011 Total Sales

Miya Black I – 74
Miya Black II – 23
Miya Black III – 16
Charlotte Powers: Power Down – 425
Charlotte Powers: Power Play – 90
Charlotte Powers: Hidden Power – 37
Resonance One: Birds Of Passage – 34
Undying Apathy – 77
The Boy & Little Witch – 10

Total Sales for 2011 – 786

I started at the end of February so it’s not really a full year but whatevs. More than seven hundred books sold, some really lovely reviews, nine books released and a lot of valuable lessons learnt, I think that’s none too shabby for my Year One. Looking ahead to sparkly fresh 2012, I feel outrageously optimistic. Back when I started this whole indie author adventure I was really pretty directionless—just writing books and putting them out there with the vague hope that they might get bought or something. Now I feel like I might actually know what I’m doing, that I have a much better idea of what sells and why, that I’m comfortable with my simplistic, hands-off approach to marketing/promotion, and that (most importantly) I’m a much better writer than I was at the start of the year. That’s really the big thing for me, I feel much more comfortable and confident about handling a story now, I’ve got a good handle on my process for developing an idea into an outline and then a first draft, even editing and proofing is less of a chore than it used to be—just a necessary part of things that takes a certain amount of time to do properly. I don’t regret the hours I put into it. Anyway, all in all I like where I am now, and I’m looking forward to where 2012 will take me.

Moving on, to something I’ve been thinking about recently. I have two main long-term goals; to have forty books published before I’m forty, and to be consistently earning more than $4,000 a month from book sales. At this point in time, I feel that I’m going to accomplish the second goal before the first. Overly optimistic? Arrogant, even? Let me up the stakes a little; I think I’m going to achieve this before the end of 2014, and here’s why: by that time I’ll have twenty books out (at the least), priced between $3.99 and $4.95. In order to earn my target of $4,000 per month I’d have to sell around 1300 books/month, which is around forty books a day. Spread over twenty titles, that’s just two sales per day per book—not unrealistic, I feel.

But anyway. This is normally the point at which I’d talk about what I accomplished during the month but actually I didn’t accomplish much, mostly due to being in Japan for most of the time—I did edit and proof Charlotte Powers 3 to a publishable standard at the start of the month and fiddled around with a few things, did some rewriting on a couple of different things and did an edit/total freakin’ overhaul of Miya Black IV and picked away at Tactics Heart and Resonance 2: Resonate Harder but nothing of any real substance. I’m on holiday! I’m just relaxing. January will be more of the same (which is what happened last year too, I seem to recall), but once I get home things are kicking into gear—building a website for Bright Battle, figuring out more episodic mechanics, finishing Resonance Book Two (currently a priority), working on Charlotte Powers 4 & 5, maybe even working on this new ‘promises and sacrifices’ story that popped into my head like two hours before I had to get on the plane (that always happens). Plus I still want to do my timey-wimey story and and and argh there’s just too much. One thing at a time, though, one thing at a time. I think I need a new paragraph to help me collect my thoughts.

In terms of 2012 goals I want to get Charlotte Powers 4 & 5 out to complete the series, Resonance Book Two released sometime in the next three months would be nice also. Bright Battle of course, that’ll be an ongoing thing for most of the year, then I’ll probably kick Miya Black IV and V out of the nest too, they’ve been bumming around for far too long. I’d like to have fifteen books published by the time 2013 begins, which means six books over twelve months, but considering quite a few of them are already mostly written that’s not such an unrealistic target. Miya Black IV & V are easy, I just have the edit the heck out of them. IV is mostly done, it just needs around 20k added to the middle, it’s already vaguely outlined … maybe near the end of the year if I’m in a piratey mood (and if the other books are selling). I have around fifty thousand words of CP4 done already, but I’m not sure if I want to use them. The story isn’t as strong as it should be. Resonance 2 is about ninety percent written, I just have to do the last bit then take a good hard objective look at it and make sure the way I’ve structured things is the absolute best way to tell the story, because I suspect it’s not. Let me just give you a little tip here, if you’ve got a book with four concurrent storylines featuring dozens of characters … look, just try not to get in a situation where you’ve got a book with four concurrent storylines featuring dozens of characters. Sorting it all out and making sure everything lines up and makes chronological sense is a real headache.

Anyway, enough rambling. Let’s wrap things up with … a score tally!

[2011 CLEAR]

Words Written: 762,000 ……… 762pts

Titles Published: 9 ……… 900pts

Books Sold: 786 ……… 786pts

Stars Collected: 167 ……… 167pts


UNCOMPROMISED PRIDE BONUS ……… 50pts

EFFORT BONUS ……… 25pts


Total ……… 2690pts

RANK ……… B+

 

Reflections On The Release Of Hidden Power

Well, I admit that I pushed myself a little bit harder than I probably should have, but I’ve managed to get Charlotte Powers 3: Hidden Power released before flitting away to Japan (and with, oh, at least two days to spare). I did consider skipping a proof in order to release it even earlier, but decided against it—I only picked up one actual error on that last round but it was a doozy (‘baseball leg’ instead of ‘baseball bat’, I would have been horribly embarrassed to let that one through), so I’m glad I gritted my teeth and just did it. Cover graphic and link? Yes, I think so:

After actually publishing something I usually feel a combination of satisfaction and emptiness, and this time is no exception. I really do put everything I have into my books, no corners cut however tempting it might be to do so—that final proof is a good example, how much did it improve the book, really? By one percent? Less? It’s the law of diminishing returns, the first edit might give a twenty percent improvement to the book, the next ten percent, then five, then three, then two, then one, but even that one percent improvement, catching another error, tightening up those final few sentences that are just a little loose, killing that ‘she said’ which isn’t really necessary, adding that single line of description that really sets the tone of a scene, all of these things really are just so important to me. Little details. Little details are important. After the last proof I did on the book my feeling was that doing another could possibly catch another error or two, would maybe turn up a few sentences that could be better, but in terms of story and polish, I was (and am) happy. I think part of being not just a writer but an author—and in a certain sense a publisher—is learning when to say ‘this is as good as I can reasonably expect to make it; it’s time to cut the cord’. That’s probably the single most important skill I’ve developed through this whole indie author adventure; learning to finish things, really finish them, not just outlining and writing a first draft that I come back to every so often mostly because I want to read that scene I’m particularly fond of, but focused crafting of not just a story but a book.

Anyway, I hope people like this one. The ending is even more difficult than Power Play’s (which was pretty bad, in that sense), but it’s all going somewhere. I’m not just throwing these things together, I have a definite end in mind and know just what has to happen to reach that end. So after Hidden Power there are going to be two more books, Rising Power and then Power Overwhelming, and that’ll be the end of Charlotte’s story. For better or worse. After that, I don’t know. I have other projects and other series but I don’t want to let go of Charlotte’s world just yet; there are stories still to tell.

Anyway, for now I’m happy with where I am. I was especially happy at the response to my pre-release announcements—that there was any response at all was amazing. It wasn’t so long ago that I was just writing entirely for myself, making these little stories for no grander reason than my own amusement, and now here I am, slowly but surely getting my books into the hands of people who actually want to read them—who look forward to the next in the series enough to say ‘yay!’ or ‘hurry up!’ when I announce it’s coming. These sorts of things might seem minor but they really do mean a lot to me, and I’m grateful to all my readers. The simple truth is that this wouldn’t be nearly as fun without you.

 

Charlotte Powers: Power Play still not available to buy, so now it’s free!

Free, you say? That’s right, frustrated by Amazon.com’s continued non-action on the whole “people not actually being able to buy my book” thing I’ve made a little ‘secret’ page on my website. If you’re interested in reading the sequel to Charlotte Powers: Power Down, then it may be in your interest to follow this link:

You Found A Secret!

Also, this is just splendid, and I may have more to say about it at a later date:

 

Back from holiday, hurray hurray!

Back from holiday and feeling good. One highlight of the trip was discovering, on a country road in the middle of nowhere, ‘Excellent Street’. To be honest it didn’t look that great!

Anyway, Golden Bay was as pretty as ever–moreso, actually, due to it being spring right now and thus blossom, lambs, daffodils etc. were in abundance, and the weather was just sickeningly good. I also enjoyed watching my sister read through the Charlotte Powers sequel, she’s an ‘expressive’ reader and laughed and gasped and so on at all the right places (or so I assume). She also spotted a rather embarrassing error which I swiftly corrected. Anyway,

 

When You Have A SuperHammer, Everything Looks Like A SuperNail

Passed 15,000 words on Charlotte Powers 2 last night. So far it’s mostly character and setting stuff. Having a lot of fun fleshing out the ‘super history’. Part of Charlotte’s character is that she’s a total superhero geek–well, supers are real in her world, she IS a super, and her parents were two of the most high-profile supers back before The Event, also she spent the first fifteen years of her life cooped up in her family’s secret volcano hideout, she had a lot of time to go through the archives. So she basically knows everything there is to know about every superhero or supervillain there was, all their major battles and enemies and allies and how they used their powers, so when she starts enthusing about them it’s just like she’s describing a comic book series–except it all actually happened. It leads to funny moments and sad moments (things got dark before The Event) and hopefully some points of interest, and it’s really fun to write. I also got to write a big thing I’ve been looking forward to for ages, Mr Falchion’s famous “I live with an unspeakable blessing” speech, that was (pardon the pun) super-fun.

Love superheroes. So fun, so interesting, so charged with potential.

I may actually have to cut out some of this stuff I’ve been doing. Maybe. It’s good, I like it, but it’s just advancing the characters, not the story. I feel like it’s necessary to have a little bit of a ‘buffer’ in this part of the book, but it might be going on too long. Well, in any case today I’ll definitely concentrate on story. AND characters. Also I have to figure out at which point I’m going to make ‘the switch’, it’s a big POV change AND style change and it has to be placed well or it’s just going to bring the whole book screeching to a halt. The place where I thought I was going to put it turned out to not work, so … well, I’m not sure, actually. I’ll just write and see what happens.

Promotion, promotion? I’ve read in a lot of places recently that the best promotion is writing your next book. I’m forced to agree! So I’ll be putting my head down and working today. If these two busy girls let me.

BJK Factoid #102: I regret publishing under the name Ben White because there are like a dozen authors called Ben White. I should have gone with BJK White.