For this week's Friday 5, here are five of my must-have writing tools beyond the obvious (computer, printer, paper). 1. Liquid Story Binder (writing software) http://www.blackobelisksoftware.com/ Kinda old now, but full of useful features and amazingly flexible. I can go from brainstorming and outlining to writing to revision and spellchecking all in one program. Scrivener is the really popular writing program now, and it has a lot of features in common with LSB, but I found it a little too regimented. This image shows a working layout from The Lost Book of Anggird, with a timeline, the Builder I wrote in (Builders are a tool that collects a lot of files into one larger file with a "table of content" on the side that lets you add, delete, and move smaller individual files around), and a listing all the files in that project. 2. Index cards. I'll confess, I kind of have a fetish for index cards. One of my desk drawers is crammed full of unopened packs in both 3 x 5 and 4 x 6 sizes. I use these for outlining, putting each scene idea on a card, then I can see where the blanks are that need to be filled in and also rearrange them as needed. I also use them for revision. I make a scene for each card (as described here: http://www.kyrahalland.com/blog/daughter-of-the-wildings-revision-progress) with a one-sentence summary of the scene, notes on the purpose of the scene, the situation or conflict it addresses, what changes in the scene to move the story forward, and what revisions I need to make in the scene. 3. Post-its. I use a ton of post-its, or sticky notes. I put them on my revision index cards to give myself an idea of how much work each scene needs (I'm almost never right) (also see the post linked above). I also use them to mark the place in my manuscript where I left off editing, and also to leave notes to myself in the manuscript of things I think of that need to be changed later on. For example, in the crossing the river scene in To the Gap (upcoming book 4), I put a sticky note saying "Mrs B rides across fully clothed". Cryptic, but I know what it means, and when I get to that part I'll know I meant to change that. (rides across fully clothed, as opposed to swimming across the river in her underwear like everyone else has to do, if you're wondering.) 4. Timer. I use this on days when I'm having trouble focusing, set for 15 minutes at a time. Or if I have other chores I need to get done, I set it for 30 minutes at a time, then go work on other stuff for a bit. Or if my work hours have been slipping, I set it for the number of hours I need to work that day to make sure I get them all in. 5. American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 1st edition. My parents gave me this for Christmas (or maybe my birthday? they're close together) when I was in, hm, 5th or 6th grade, and I still have it. This is the original edition, with an extensive section in the back on word origins, which is great for coming up with fantasy words. It's huge and heavy, and since it's over 40 years old its eleventy-gazillion entries don't include the latest slang and buzzwords (but since I write other-world fantasy I don't need those anyway), but it's my authoritative go-to for spelling, definitions, and usage (the extensive usage notes have been a lifesaver more than once). An oldie but goodie, and I have no plans to quit using it.
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Well, what do you know, it's a week into June already and I still haven't done the monthly wrap-up and look ahead. Basically, most of what I'm doing is still working on edits of To the Gap, book 4 of Daughter of the Wildings. It's going really well, and so far everything's on track for a release in the first part of July. I know I've blogged about this before, but here's a rundown of my writing/editing workflow: 1. first draft 2. deep, major revision 3. out to test readers 4. 2nd major revision 5. refine dialogue, descriptions, action, pacing, flow 6. fix mistakes, awkward sentences 7. proofread on paper 8. proofread on Kindle A lot of times, if the manuscript is really a mess, I do a second copy edit between steps 6 and 7. But so far, on step 5 on To the Gap, I'm not finding a whole lot of changes to make. So hopefully I won't have to do that extra step. On days when I finish my editing quote on time, I've been working on outlining the Healing Tree, a novel set in my world of Estelend. Should be ready to start writing soon. I found the perfect soundtrack for it, the new album Haven by Kamelot. Here's a video of one of the songs from the album: I'm still reading from A to Z. Up to V now; the end is in sight! For a while there I kept finding books that I couldn't finish. I'm not going to say what they are; this indie author gig is tough, and taste is subjective, and I don't want to be the one putting down a fellow author. Instead I'll just focus on the books I do read all the way through. I've been discovering some amazing reads; watch for another roundup soon!
I keep telling myself I need to start thinking about what comes after Daughter of the Wildings. At the moment I have three novels in draft awaiting revision, a fourth about ready to be written, and a binder full of short stories related to Chosen of Azara and The Source-fixer. And I've started developing ideas for a follow-up series to Daughter of the Wildings; I know the basic series conflict and the basic plot of the first book. I've been so deeply absorbed in Daughter of the Wildings it's hard to focus on anything else. But at least I know I won't be running out of things to work on any time soon! I haven't posted all week because I've been working really hard on To the Gap amidst a number of distractions and other things I've needed to pay attention to, but now it's time again for the Friday 5! This week: five things I do besides write. There are actually a lot more than five things I do besides write, but most of them are boring, like doing laundry and cooking dinner and exercising. So here are five of the more interesting things I do (this was actually going to be a whole series of blog posts, but I decided they're not really THAT interesting): 1. Play Pokemon. Okay, so I already did a whole blog post about this. But I wanted to mention it again, mainly so I can post this picture that I took of my Pokemon Y character in front of the Pokemon League in my pink and black sparkly bolero dress. I seriously want this dress IRL. I've since started on Pokemon Omega Ruby, and I don't think you can change outfits in it :( 2. Secretary in the children's program at my church. No, I don't sit in an office and answer phone calls, thank goodness. I don't even answer the phone at home unless it's someone I really feel like talking to. And I don't get paid; it's volunteer. Though I didn't actually *volunteer*; they asked me to do it. Basically, I'm in charge of handling paperwork and supplies and being organized. Which is kind of funny, because me being organized is in direct opposition to the natural order of the universe. If I ever get my act together and really get organized, it'll mean the end of the space-time continuum as we know it. But someone's got to do it, so it might as well be me. I enjoy it; I love being with the kids and enjoying how cute and smart and spiritual they are, but I don't have to actually wrangle them like the teachers do. This picture is from the beginning of the year, when I was redoing the teachers' binders with the lesson manuals and picture kits. I had to get this all cleaned up so my husband could do the taxes on this end of the table, but the other end is still covered with stuff I cleaned out of the supply closet and am trying to "organize". 3. Scrapbooking. I've been doing this for about sixteen years now. I'd never really been a visually creative person, so it's fun to have a chance to use those creative muscles. I even combined my two creative endeavors in a scrapbook page about my books: Since I started publishing, I don't scrapbook as much as I used to. This is mainly because my scrapbooking table also serves as my writing table. Which means when I switch from one to the other I have to clean up after myself :P (I don't actually sew with the sewing machine, except for some mending once in a while. I mostly use it for decorative stitching on scrapbook pages.) 4. Watch anime. I started with watching Pokemon with my boys when they were little, and moved on to Sailor Moon, and went from there. Here's my current DVD collection: I've watched a lot more than this (and I haven't gotten around to watching everything I own yet). I've watched Monster, which was good but shied away from being as mind-blowingly weird as it could have been, and FLCL (the first time I watched it, I had a nightmare that night about being a Rod Stewart groupie. Which was really strange because Rod Stewart just isn't on my radar at all. So if you go to watch FLCL, be warned), and Fruits Basket, which is cute, and Bleach up until about episode 5734 when the same battle had been going on for the last 300 episodes (seriously, let's move the plot along already!) and a bunch of others, mostly when they used to have anime on Cartoon Network late at night. Sometimes I even make scrapbook pages about anime! One of these times I still mean to tell the story of how Sailor Moon got me back into writing. 5. Feed my cats. I must have the world's most high-maintenance cats. Seriously. Here's a picture of Themselves in a rare moment when they aren't eating: And now that I've told you what I do when I'm not writing, it's time to go write again. I should finish the second major revision of To the Gap today, then it's on to the fine-tuning and final editing stages. Still looking at a release date in July.
Ducking in for a quick look back at March and look ahead at April. Yes, I know April is almost halfway over! I've been busy. March was basically working on revisions of The Rancher's Daughter (I discovered that about a zillion other books, mostly western romances, have that title, but mine's the only one with an old blue shaman dude on the front!). April is working on revisions and edits on The Rancher's Daughter and getting it out. Tentative release date April 28 (though I'm really shooting for a few days earlier). I still want to write The Healing Tree but right now I'm finding it hard to shift focus. Still, now that Daughter of the Wildings is almost halfway out, I've started thinking ahead to what comes after. I've got three novels waiting to go through initial revisions and a whole bunch of Estelend short stories including the Tales of Azara collection. And I'm still developing ideas for a sequel to Urdaisunia and for a follow-up series to Daughter of the Wildings. The A-Z reading challenge is still ongoing. Up to N now, been reading some really good things and some things that aren't quite as good. I'll have a round-up again soon with some recommendations and notes. *Phew* Was buried all week last week in the last large-scale revision of The Rancher's Daughter, cleaning up the last messy plot points, fixing descriptions and dialogue, and making sure everything flows well. The big battle scene took a while; in that scene, Lainie has three different enemies and one unreliable ally (not Silas; he's temporarily indisposed), and the battle is happening on both the physical and the metaphysical planes. I could only do a few paragraphs at a time, then I had to go rest my poor tired brain. *sigh* Lainie keeps getting herself into these situations, and then I have to figure out how to get her out of them. Anyway, it's on to the final edits and proofreading. If everything continues to go as it has been, The Rancher's Daughter will be out by the end of April. In the meantime, here's a snippet from the book: A rustling in the forest undergrowth several measures away drew her attention. From the shadows, a narrow pair of glowing, dark orange eyes stared at her. Below them, Lainie could make out a long, furry snout with sharp fangs poking up and down out of the sides of the mouth. Behind the head stretched a body the length of a man, covered in gray fur and set close to the ground on short, thick legs. Even in the dim light, Lainie could see the curving claws, longer than her fingers, that tipped each enormous paw. Two long ears stood straight up atop the head and twitched towards her as a thick tail, the length of the creature's body, swished back and forth through the litter on the forest floor. Time for another monthly review and look ahead. The main thing in February was the release of Bad Hunting, Book 2 of Daughter of the Wildings. It had a great launch, and the series has picked up new readers! Which I'm really happy about. I also wrote a guest post on fantasy-westerns for The Speculative Fiction Showcase, a blog that promotes science fiction, fantasy, and related genres by independent authors. The Chronic Fatigue Syndrome has been tough, but I'm managing to establish more or less regular work hours and also to stick with an exercise routine that's within my capabilities. Both of these seem to be helping my productivity quite a bit, especially the regular work hours. On the A-Z reading challenge, I got sidetracked on H, reading the entire Tormay Trilogy, by Christopher Bunn, that started with The Hawk and His Boy. Highly recommended. Now I'm on I. The only "I" book on my Kindle that I already owned is a contemporary political thriller, which sounded pretty good but it turned out to be a lot more political than I'm in the mood for. So I bought a book I had a sample of, Iron Flower, by Billy Wong, book 2 of the Legend of the Iron Flower series. In March, the main thing I'm working on, of course, is revisions and edits on The Rancher's Daughter, Daughter of the Wildings Book 3. This one doesn't seem to need as much work as some of the others, but it seems like I say that about every book. :P It does seem to be true this time, though. I'm saying a release date in May, though I'd love to be able to release it in April. We'll see how things go. There are a lot of other projects waiting in the wings for me to get to them. Preparing Tales of Azara for release, revision of The Source-Fixer, writing The Healing Tree (working title), planning the sequel to Urdaisunia, looking at my very first novel and its sequel to see if they can be revised to release-able quality (I think so, but it'll take some work), planning a follow-up series to Daughter of the Wildings... Right now I'm totally focused on Daughter of the Wildings, but I'm hoping that as I get more into the routine of the work hours I set and find other ways to be more productive, I can choose a secondary project to work on. There are some publisher chores I need to get to, as well. Reworking the Books page on my site to make it more streamlined and comprehensive now that I have eight titles out and more on the way; looking at some additional sales platforms; redoing the promotional matter in my books. The to-do list never ends! So, that's what's keeping me out of trouble this month. In the meantime, through March 7, all my books are 50% off (except A Cure For Nel, which is free!) during Read an eBook Week on Smashwords! Use the coupon code on the book page to get the sale price at checkout. Yes, it's finally here, the day I turn the manuscript of yet another novel into a lovely ebook, the last step before releasing it into the world. The first time I did this process, it took 2 weeks; I've now got it down to a day or two, depending on length of the book (lots of chapters take more time to do). This isn't counting the paperback version; I do that in my spare time after the ebook release. So I'm taking a quick break between preparing the html file and running it through the ebook generating program (I use Sigil) to announce that Bad Hunting will be available in just a few more days at a wide variety of ebook sellers. There'll be some special promotions in connection with the release; to make sure you don't miss out, sign up for my email alerts. (I only send these out when I have a new release or special offer to announce; no spamming!) Also, this was cool, I had a guest post yesterday at the Speculative Fiction Showcase, a blog devoted to indie fantasy, science fiction, and related genres. One other bit of business, Facebook has become pretty much useless for announcing my blog posts, book news, buy links, and special offers. If you want to keep up with what I'm doing, there are several other ways you can do this: follow me on Twitter (not my platform of choice, but I do tweet my blog posts and release news) and/or on Google+, bookmark my main site, and/or subscribe to one of my blogs: main site, Blogspot, or Wordpress (same content, just different platforms and options for following). Time for lunch, then back to work! For the last six months, I've been doing an experiment with having some books exclusive on Amazon, in the Select program for indie authors. The perks of going exclusively with Amazon are that you can have your choice between running a "Countdown" sale or free giveaway days on your book, and also your book is put into the Kindle Unlimited subscription program. The idea behind these is getting more exposure for your work. I found the results of the experiment, for me, underwhelming. I did have some successful free giveaways, getting copies of those two books into several hundred readers' hands. But the long-term benefits are uncertain, and the days when a free giveaway on Amazon would give a long-lasting rankings and visibility boost seem to be long gone. As for Kindle Unlimited, some authors have seen their incomes soar with the program, others have seen drastic drops. The deal with Kindle Unlimited, as far as how authors get paid, is that an equal share is paid out of a monthly pool of money for each borrow, with a short story that would normally cost 99 cents to buy and a 500,000 word epic priced at $9.99 getting the same amount. When I put those two books into Kindle Unlimited, the share was around $2 per borrow. Which wasn't a whole lot less than I would get on a sale of those books, priced at $2.99 and $3.99. However, within a few months, the per-borrow share dropped drastically, to under $1.40. This meant that on borrows of my $3.99 book, I was making about half of what I would make on a sale. That's a pretty big reduction, unless you're getting tons of borrows (and exposure), which this book wasn't. So I came to the decision that the benefits of being in Kindle Unlimited (and the corresponding drop in payment) weren't worth giving up the wider exposure of being on other sales platforms. The upshot of all this is that The Warrior and the Holy Man, which came out of Select a few days ago, is now available at iTunes, Kobo, Smashwords, DriveThruFiction, and OmniLit, and it'll be coming soon to Barnes & Noble (it's been submitted; just waiting for the people there to do whatever it is they do to make it go live). Beneath the Canyons finishes its 90-day term in Select early next week, and will be going wide as well. The release of Bad Hunting has been delayed because I lost about a month of work time between the run-up to Thanksgiving and the start of the new year, but it works out because it should be coming out a couple weeks after Beneath the Canyons goes wide and will be available on all my current sales channels, hopefully giving both books a nice visibility boost. I'm also looking into adding some new channels, including Google Play (tricky because they do a lot of discounting, which Amazon then price-matches, even to the point of making a book free when you don't want it to be free), and setting up direct sales from my site. Also tricky because of the wild and wacky world of sales taxes and VAT, but there are some shopping cart sites I'm looking into that handle the tax stuff. Right now, getting Bad Hunting ready for release and getting back on track on my writing schedule is the first priority, but I hope to be able to get these expanded sales channels set up before too long. Update: The Warrior and the Holy Man is now available on Barnes & Noble. The cover image, however, is not. Hopefully they'll fix that soon; B&N tends to be kind of laggy with updates. Updated Update: The awesome cover of The Warrior and the Holy Man is now showing on B&N. Yay! Once again in December I seriously overestimated my ability to get things done when life was busy and I was exhausted. But lots of fun was had, and lots of yummy food was made and eaten. The edits on Bad Hunting are still ongoing; I'm still really hoping for a January release but it might scootch into February. I also got another Estelend novel, The Healing Tree (bad working title) planned out; writing will commence once life settles down and gets back to normal. Tales of Azara and The Source-Fixer are complete and awaiting revision. Looking back on 2014 as a whole: I only released two books, Sarya's Song and Beneath the Canyons. I've done some experimenting with various kinds of marketing and distribution, with mixed results. My health scare at the beginning of the year set me back, and the Daughter of the Wildings revisions ended up being a lot more work than I anticipated. But I kept going, and at least I got those two books out and also wrote Tales of Azara and The Source-Fixer. Looking ahead to this year, I expect to have at least five books out, the rest of the Daughter of the Wildings series. I hope. It would be great to also get Tales of Azara out, and some more short fiction. The Healing Tree is next in line to get written, and I'm working on some short fiction ideas and also have plans for a sequel to Urdaisunia in the works. In the past year, there've been a lot of shakeups in the indie author scene, and I'm mulling over some different ways to approach this crazy business of writing and self-publishing. Looking at some more distribution options, figuring out how to make Amazon exclusivity and Kindle Unlimited work for me instead of against me, becoming less dependent on Facebook, concentrating my marketing on more effective approaches instead of just random self-promotion in any old place where authors don't get chased away for mentioning their books, experimenting with pricing and packaging. I'm coming up with some interesting ideas; stay tuned! On the reading front, I'm now at G on my A-Z challenge. It's going faster now that I'm choosing shorter books! Coming up soon I'll do a more detailed post, listing the books I've read so far and giving links to the reviews, or at least my thoughts on them. It's late and I'm brain-fried and we've got a couple more busy days coming up, then everything should get back to normal. *knock on wood* Busy busy with editing Bad Hunting and getting ready to write another Estelend novel, and oh yeah Christmas and stuff, but I wanted to take a minute to link to this very useful post on Indies Unlimited: Calibre for Readers, part 1. Calibre is a free ebook management program, which a lot of authors use for doing ebook conversions. It's also designed as an ebook library, where you can list all the ebooks on your computer, group them by authors, series, and tags, transfer them on and off of your ereader, and other cool stuff. If you buy ebooks from a variety of stores such as Amazon and allRomance and Smashwords, it's a great way to aggregate them all in one place. If the book doesn't have DRM, Calibre can also be used to convert ebooks from one format to another (for example, if you find yourself with a book in Kindle format and want to convert it for your Nook). You can also use it to convert personal documents in various formats, such as DOCX, PDF, RTF, and TXT, into an ebook file for easy reading on your ereader. I've done this with fanfictions I've written, just for fun :) Anyway, Calibre is a very cool and useful program, and it's free (though they welcome donations), so check out the blog post for more information! |
AuthorI am Kyra Halland, author of tales of fantasy, heroism, and romance. Sign up for my email list
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