Tag self-publishing

Me — Jan ’19 Update

Kasey-Rayn 1 Comment

It’s been some time since I’ve done anything with the blog, but I never intended the break to be permanent. I thought 2019 would be a great time to jump back in. I have several pieces of news to share, so let’s go.

As always, the Monthly Update Topic Order™: blog, writing plans, video games, reading/listening, school, and other things.

First things first, blog changes! Pretty simple, for now. I’m going to ease back into the updates, so I’ll only be writing two posts a week. Tuesday I’ll be posting ‘Me’ stuff, like this. I have a few months of things to catch up on, (I directed a play I wrote last semester, for example). Saturday I’ll be posting other stuff. Reviews, D&D, Improv things, etc. It may turn into three days a week, depending on how this Spring semester goes. We’ll see.

Unfortunately I don’t have much writing news to share. All my writing has been focused towards school (exclusively playwriting format these past few months), and that’s going to continue this semester as well. On that note, while I haven’t been writing prose lately, I do hope to get back to that soon, as I did enjoy writing the weekly short stories. In other news, I am in the composition process of putting together my second short story anthology! Unlike my first book which was published specifically as the first stories I had ever written, this new book will actually be a set of my best stories from the last two years, so you know, actually enjoyable. Stay tuned on that, I plan on an early summer publication, if not earlier.

Video games. This is going to need a longer post, but I’ve been a little all over the place lately. Most recently I bought a Switch. The joy-cons are definitely on par for the weirdest controllers ever, but their versatility is undeniably innovative. I’ve only got two games for now, but it’s a good console. Expect a review on Smash soon.

I’ve been slowly easing back into audiobooks lately. I recently finished Skyward, Brandon Sanderson’s newest novel. I have thoughts, so expect a review on that soon, too! Oh boy, I have more to talk about than I realized. Maybe twice a week isn’t enough… I’ll figure it out. Other than that, I’ve been reading lots of classic literature and plays for my classes. I have three books that are on my desk to be read, though, and at the same time I’ve also been trying to read the D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide cover to cover. I don’t do a lot of physical reading to begin with, so I have no further comments at this time.

The Fall 2018 semester was… a lot, as you might have guessed with my unprecedented absence. I directed my own play, and a wrote quite a lot of new stuff for some other classes, too. Some of it might even end up in my second anthology—it certainly won’t all be prose this time, I’ll say that much. What’s more, another play I wrote is being produced this semester, though I’ve elected not to direct this new one. The play I directed was about capturing the nostalgia for gaming culture in the early 2000’s. This new play is about forgiving yourself for loss, so while I think it will have just as much emotional impact, it doesn’t require a very specific kind of person to helm the production. Plus, I want to see what somebody else does with it, so I can’t wait to see how it turns out without my having had a hand in it.

Also tied to school, I’m hoping this semester, Spring 2019, will be my last. By the end of this semester I will have two AA degrees as well as a playwriting and a teaching certificate. I have no immediate plans for continuing a formal education, but you never know. So, 2019 is bound to be an interesting year.

Lastly, I think the thing I’m most excited for is the new D&D campaign I’m DMing for my brothers. I’m really excited, and I’ve already put dozens upon dozens of hours into prep already. Three maps, multiple pages of character descriptions, and a list of encounters complete with the music associated with each. I’ve also spent a big chunk of money on miniatures so that I have monsters to throw at the party rather than using dice.

So, excited for a lot of things. D&D campaign, production of my new play, last semester of school, and a new short story anthology. And good to be back!

Me — The Daily Dose Turns Two

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The Daily Dose of Derailment turned two years old yesterday, which led me to an interesting realization. If I consider the beginning of my writing career to be the first stories I ever started writing in 7th grade of middle school, the blog now takes up a considerable chunk of how much time I’ve spent as a writer. Roughly 25% of my life spent as a writer has been in conjunction with the blog now.

What’s more, since writing blog posts is considerably easier than writing actual fiction, a good portion of the time I’ve spent writing has been nonfiction at this point. I keep a Google Doc of all the things I’ve ever written and each of their word counts, but admittedly I haven’t updated it since September. It’s simply a lot of maintenance, which is a great problem to have. Even back then, though, over 50% of the words I’ve written have been blog posts, and by now I’m probably well past 500,000 total words published.

I have a lot to thank the blog for. Most importantly it’s held me accountable for actually writing, even when it’s difficult. One of my friends taught me something the other day, and it really works. To paraphrase his paraphrased quote from I don’t remember who: “Motivation is terrible. It won’t get you anywhere because it’s fueled by emotion rather than need. But discipline can give you results and force you to push yourself to be who you want.” I find that sentiment to be surprisingly valid.

The best part is, I really do feel like I’m growing as a writer. I’ve looked into how to grow your audience so that more people will read your work. It involves a lot of engaging with other communities and bringing them back to your own. Honestly, that doesn’t interest me much. I do it from time to time, but it’s mostly to see how others are holding up with their own work rather than advertising my stuff. So when I see I have well over a hundred followers without actually publicizing my work, I can be relatively confident that it speaks to the quality of what I produce more than anything else.

I’ve recently started thinking a lot about how I personally view myself, and I’m happy to say that I’ve finally started to unconsciously view my self-worth in terms of my writing. That’s good because I honestly feel like I’m, generally speaking, pretty good at it. I have a lot to learn, obviously, but after eight-ish years of writing garbage, I’m slowly gaining respect for the more recent stories I’ve been working on.

Last year I submitted an application for the 2017 Writing Excuses Retreat. Of the three writing samples I submitted, the three things I considered my best works, one was written in 2014, and the other two were written in 2016. I still think that they’re alright, but I don’t think that they can compare to newer stories like, well, any of the short flash fiction stories I’ve written in 2018. It proves I’ve made some progress.

By this time next year, I hope to be working on publishing a Lisa Stenton book, complete with twelve 5,000 word short stories. It wouldn’t be the first thing I’ve published, but it would still be a huge step forward for me. Here’s hoping.

Review — Wildcat

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I recently got through Wildcat, by JP Harker, sort of in between all the physical books I’ve been reading lately (I’m still in between books two and three of Lord of the Rings, and have been thinking about picking up a new series by Samantha Shannon). So I picked this one up and resolved to finish it before the end of the year, and I did! I’m pretty proud of myself on that front—while this is no Stormlight Archive, the book is pretty thick.

To my knowledge, this is the author’s debut novel, and I’ll admit it, it kind of reads like one. There’s a lot of choices made in the book that seemed off, and a lot of the plot can be called simple. That’s not to say the book is bad—it does have some awesome scenes that I thoroughly enjoyed—but it doesn’t knock anything out of the park.

I think a big part of the problem is the fact that really, I’m not the target audience for the book. I would have trouble pinning this one done to a genre, since some subplots get a lot of attention and the main conflict doesn’t come into the foreground until more than halfway through the book. There’s lots of action and threat of physical conflict towards the beginning and end, but it slows down a lot in the middle, and there were times where I wasn’t sure if this book was actually a romance in disguise.

The biggest problem is easy to diagnose, though: There’s just too many characters that are named. As in, 70% of the characters that this book considers “important” enough to name shouldn’t have been. It makes things really confusing for the reader when they have too many names to juggle. (I’ve found that the author often doesn’t see this because in their mind, the name is used as a label for a character they’re already familiar with. The reader doesn’t have this luxury.)

Imagine that every character name used in a story is a marble. Every time you introduce a name (even if its an alias of a familiar character), you grab a new marble, and set it on the table. Realistically, your table can see about thirty to fifty marbles (names). But eventually your table doesn’t have enough surface area to be able to lay them all flat across the table, so you have to get a bowl to hold all your marbles. Except, now you can’t see some marbles, so when you come across that name in the book, you don’t have any idea who it belongs to, because now the book assumes you remember.

I’ll use a quote from the book to show you what I mean: “The town was now heaving with people and Rhia saw that her Aunt Eleri and Uncle Aeron had arrived, along with her cousins Pryder and Merrion, and their wives Eluned and Kira. Cerridwen, their sister, was chatting with her own husband, Natan, who was looking as red-faced as Rhia felt after her climb up the hill.” Now, as both a reader and a writer, I know none of these characters are important. They’re just furniture. This paragraph of nine unique character names has eight too many, because the only one that matters is the protagonist’s. (Side note: if these characters had actually turned out to be important, and the author had expected me to memorize who was who, that would have been even worse, but thankfully that wasn’t the case.)

In all honesty, there were times where a character that was in the beginning of the book didn’t get any scenes in the middle, but became important at the end of the book, and I had no idea who they were. The name was so unfamiliar to me that I didn’t even know where their name had come up before, so I couldn’t even use the book as a resource to figure out who this character was. I’m not exaggerating when I say with full confidence that there are probably over 200, maybe 300 unique names in the book. No, I didn’t go back and count, but realistically there shouldn’t even be 100 different names, especially since scenes like the one I described only serve to confuse the audience.

That said, that’s the most glaring issue with the book. If you have a notepad and write down all the character names and a short snippet of who they are as you read the book, it’ll be much more coherent. It’s a shame, because there are some awesome moments in the book.

So, final thoughts? While the book isn’t the best, it shows promise. Having the willpower to see a book through from start to finish is no small feat, and especially with a book this long, it’s commendable. To me, that says “I’m in it for the long haul”, and I can easily see future books really starting to shine.

Life — Nacre Then’s Beginnings and Summer Plans

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I have returned! With the conclusion of the spring semester, and the onset of summer fast approaching, I have some super exciting news. For today, I have two big things to share, and my blog’s weekly schedule will resume this Monday, starting off with a May update. Fun stuff.

First things first, I’ve self published my first book. It’s a short story anthology titled Nacre Then’s Beginnings. You can find it on Amazon for $7.99! “Why did this happen so suddenly when I’ve been working on other projects?” you may ask. Well, I was going through the writers group edits for my stuff, incorporating changes and setting aside copies that had no notes on them. I don’t go through this process often, mind you. This was several hundred sheets of paper I was going through looking for notes, and some stories were given to my group several months ago. By the time I went through everything, I had lots of copies that were left blank, and it seemed a shame to throw them away.

I made a post on Facebook about it, asking if anyone wanted some hard copies of my stuff. I was met with way more requests than I had anticipated, so it got me thinking. A lot of the people that wanted to read my things don’t use the computer very often, or simply wouldn’t know where to look if they did want to read my work. I thought it would be a great idea to make an easy way to access my work physically, and this meant self-publishing.

Putting this all together wasn’t really a big task. In fact I decided to put a lot of my older works into this anthology in case I decide to make this a more regular thing. After throwing in a preface, some author notes, and cleaning up the stories a bit, I went to CreateSpace, an online formatting service, and got it officially published for free. Easy peasy. I won’t get into how long it actually took, though. Start to finish, formatting the manuscript and making small edits took me almost ten hours of work. I partially blame the free service for that, but I can’t complain about free things.

My plans for this book are pretty simple. This isn’t my “debut” novel. A lot of it contains very dated and non-canon works. As a result, I’m not advertising it (much). I’m just going to inform friends and family (and interested parties) that it exists, and anyone that’s interested will be satisfied. As for future publications, that’s probably a long way’s off. I do want my first real work to be a novel, after all, and I haven’t even written anything suitable just yet. Maybe someday sooner than later, though.

 

In other news, I had plans to move to San Fransisco for the summer. I thought I had a job opportunity over there, and I thought it would be cool to get out of the house for a while. I planned on getting some quality reading and writing in, being away from my computer and video games, so while I would have had a full time job, my intent was that my free time would be spent much more productively.

But as it turns out, the job I thought I was applicable for wasn’t. So if you’re one of the people who I told this to, it turns out I’m staying. I’m not upset about it. Technically, it lends itself to the possibility of me being more productive, since I’ll have all day to work on reading and writing more. In practice though, we’ll see how that turns out.

I’ll outline my plans for this summer more thoroughly Monday, when I give my May update. I’ll give you a hint, though: I’ve got a cool idea for a book that involves a board game and gods.