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On a break

This week, I’m headed off for a break. It’s a writing break, a work break, and an at-home stuff break. My family and I are hopping on an airplane tonight (a few hours) to head off to LA (Yes, Disneyland). We’ve never all been on a vacation together, the closest we’ve gotten is a trip down to Seward or that one time we went to Fairbanks for a weekend. 

Normally, the airplane is a great place to write, it’s one of the few places where the distraction IS writing. Hotel rooms are also particularly productive, I mean, what else would I do? Last couple of work trips I spent my hotel and airplane time knocking out about half of Wine Bottles and Broomsticks. That’s even after dinner with co-workers and talking with the wife on the phone. This isn’t that sort of trip though. I’ve got the kids with me so there will be those distractions, plus I’m flying late-night flights there and back. I’m not going to have the energy to be creative or productive in any meaningful sense. 

At the moment, most of what I’m working on is line edits and various bits of polishing, not an awful lot of content creation going on anyhow. By taking a break like this, I’m hoping that when I come back, after I get a bit of sleep, I’ll be able to focus on not only editing book 1 of the Rick Basket stories, Wine Bottles and Broomsticks, but I’ll be able to start seriously thinking about plot details and outlines for the second book. I think a good break to absorb some of the real world will do wonders for my created world and make sure I stay excited about the project. 

In any case, I’m sure I’ll be all over Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook during my time off, so if you’re wondering what sort of trouble I’m getting in to, there will be a full-public accounting of that. Except for the moments where I’m getting told to ‘put that damn phone away.’

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Agents and Indies and Self-publishing oh-my!

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As I patiently move through line edits and more rounds of read-throughs of Wine Bottles and Broomsticks and begin seriously plotting the second book in the Rick Basket series, rather a lot of my mental energy is being wasted on the question ‘what comes next?’ I mean, after final revisions and copy-editing and things. I’ve thought I’d been to this point before, but not really. This time though, I really am. If all goes well I’ll be sitting with a full draft in a few weeks.

Obviously, I really want to get this thing published, you know, like a regular book – but HOW?

It seems like every writer out there has a completely different and thoroughly justifiable position on this.

The most promising initial path I’ve got for this project and where I want to take it is to try and connect with an agent. Of course, I’m completely unknown, don’t have any proven track record of selling books or meeting deadlines. Not only that, I’ve got to find a person I can trust and works in good faith and also won’t deadbeat me. It’s scary and, I suspect, very hard.

Another path, the sort of knee-jerk path, it seems, is to just start firing the manuscript off to various publishing houses. I have serious doubts I’d even manage to get read, let alone get signed. To make it worse, if I do manage to get a contract, I’m likely as not to screw it up and kill the project before it really gets off the ground. It’s my biggest fear in taking the next step here, actually. I like writing these characters and I want to keep doing that. It would really suck for me if I got derailed because of my own stupidity.

The last approach is self-publishing – a highly popular and sometimes successful way to go. The problem is that I don’t have much time and I certainly don’t have a lot of cash, so while I could self-publish, the amount of advertising I could do is pretty minimal. This, actually, doesn’t help either. It’ll be out there, sure, but I won’t be able to tell people who actually want to hear it’s out there that it is. Plus, and this is an ego thing, I won’t be able to walk into Barnes and Noble or the local indie store and find it on the shelf.

So, here I sit, heartburn chewing up my insides staring cross-eyed at a manuscript trying to viciously eliminate passive voice and unnecessary dialogue tags while stretching my plot-holes into compelling story that gets me over the 80K mark (77.6K at last count). Sigh – Any agents out there want to take a look? No? Well, had to ask.

photo credit: The Printing Press via photopin (license)

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Blog awards and things

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So I got this nomination today from Whimsical Wyvern – which is super cool, thanks for that! I think I’ve said before that these things are good for us* to help connect to each other. However, I’m super distracted at the moment and I always have an impossible time coming up with names because invariably those folks I routinely follow have already been nominated recently for something or generally don’t do these awards. All that said, I’ll give a couple of facts about myself, and anyone who reads this consider yourself nominated. Check out Whimsical Wyvern’s blog to scope out the rules 🙂

1.) I live in Alaska and I’m not leaving for love or money, unless the issue is that I have neither, then all bets are off.

2.) My life’s goal is to become a full-time, paid, writer, but I’ll settle for the life I’ve got now, but with a really good cup of coffee.

3.) I built most of my own house by hand. Yes, I literally nailed the frame together, stood up the walls, hung the drywall, and every part in between.

4.) The hissing of geese is one of my biggest fears. You won’t understand this until you’ve had a goose hiss at you.

5.) I usually wash my hair before I go to the gym.

6.) I’ve got a low tolerance for bullshit, make-work, and indecision. Except when it comes to dinner. I actually don’t care about what’s for dinner provided it doesn’t contain the following ingredients:

7.) I refuse to eat mayonnaise, cream cheese, cottage cheese, ranch dressing, and sour cream.

8) My iPhone Siri is the Australian one.

How’s that for enough details about me? What about you? Take the nomination answer questions. We’re all human beings and we’re a lot more interesting to each other if we each other and what the other absolutely won’t eat.

*Various bloggers who are just trying to connect with folks over things like writing or whatever it is we’re blogging about.