Inner critic

I follow story coach and writer Jennifer Louden. She’s one of those people who always comes across as enthusiastic and energetic. She’s so positive, you know?
One of her emails this month said she had decided after four years of effort, to scrap her current memoir.
Four years.
One hundred and twenty thousand words.
She confessed that it was not salvageable.
And I hurt for her. I know how that feels.
Today she had a soundcloud link to her talking about hiding. If I was her, after making that announcement, I’d be hiding. I probably would not have got out of bed, but here she is still working, still talking, still being positive and still trying to help others.
She asked listeners to write down their responses to their inner tribunal. She calls it the itty bitty shitty committee. The voice in your head that tells you you’re going to fail. You know the one.
Write down what you should say about yourself in response. So I write: I’m smart, I have three degrees, I’ve done amazing things, I’ve turned unplanned jobs into successes, I made more money for ANZA charity in Jakarta than anyone ever had before, I made speeches, I met ambassadors and world leaders. I’m the #8 reviewer on Goodreads. I have written and posted 78 stories on fanfiction. I have published seven short works that have been downloaded a few times. *runs off to look up stats on Smashwords - 9,130 times. [cool!]*
I write stories that people tell me they like. I have… *runs off to look up ffn stats*
Wait…
WHAT?
I have a total of 12,001,668 hits on ffn.
*jaw drops*
Twelve million?
I should be proud of myself. I AM proud of myself. So why does my inner voice tell me I can’t do this? I already am.
Dammit brain.

Links:
Jennifer Louden scraps her memoir  soundcloud
Jennifer Louden
mrstrentreznor fanfic

this post was posted April 24th on my wordpress account... I'm going to keep both. Why not?

Boxed sets

Hi, my name is AMG and I’m addicted to boxed sets.
Hi, AMG. *bored AA response voice*
I adore a bargain.
My brain sees a box of books as a better deal than a single title. I think… maybe they could be good? Honestly, I don’t get how my own brain works some days.
I’ve bought box sets for one title. Or one author. Or just because they seem like a good deal.
So my kindle is full of them. I’ll admit there are some dodgy ones. Bad writing, bad formatting, bad covers… no hot linked table of contents. Believe me that is a sin of the first order.
They aren’t easy things to organise as an author in the Amazon world. The reader might pay 99cents for their six, eight, ten books but Amazon cannot credit multiple authors separately for their share of that 99cents.
So one author has to take responsibility for the payment and the distribution of that royalty earning and that has historically not gone well.
It can get ugly fast. There have been disastrous boxed sets that kept breaking the Amazon 5,000 page limit. There have been attempts to milk the Kindle Unlimited page read count with overlarge titles. And there have been copyright issues once a box is published with another author’s name on it.
But for me, the ugliest thing has been my inability to know what I own. I kept buying books I already owned. This is the opposite of a bargain.
So, I ‘tidied’ up my Scrivener Goodreads file. I made a folder for boxed sets and I added in every single boxed set I owned; with a separate scrivener link to the actual review when I read each title. I review each title separately. [Why should a good book get sucked down for being in a bad boxed set?]
They are metadata marked as amazon, kobo, audible, library and so on… it’s super easy to search scrivener; easier than the kindle app. And I counted how many in each set I had read, and marked the completed sets as ‘read’.
Bless me, I got ORGANISED.
It took me days.
You want to know how many… right?
238 boxed sets.
*face plants into keyboard*
It’ll take me years to read ‘em.
YEARS.
*stares straight into the camera*
Bring it.

3 million hits

Back in May 2015 Best Friends Share Everything passed 2 million hits.

http://amgray.blogspot.com.au/2015/05/2-million-hits.html

Now it’s trundled past 3 million.

Well… I am amazed. It just keeps going. An odd pairing (okay triangle), a long story (over 200k), and for relatively minor characters like Embry and Quil. I certainly never expected it to be popular but almost every day I get a review from someone and it says something like: they’ve read it 20 times, or so many times they can’t count it; that the characters were their friends and they miss them.

I know people don’t often comment on older fics and I still respond to all the reviews that allow me to reply. I’m still just astounded.

I adore my three and I’m still struggling with trying to work out what I got right with that story because if I could somehow replicate it in an original work, I’d be golden.

And my total hits are: 11,898,571

And as always, Apologies is right behind it.

The banner was made by GoldenGirl and she even made a receipt with an employee discount as Quil’s mother owns the store.

Canva covers continued

Further to my experiments with cover making, I have now finished a ‘cover’ for all of my fanfics.

I obviously couldn’t use the picture that inspired the Casper story. It was nsfw. *grins*

I posted them all on my Pinterest page and I reckon they look pretty good. I certainly don’t know enough about this to design my own book covers, but for fanfiction, they look fine. If you do use images like this for book covers, make sure a commercial use is allowable. All of the images here are free for all uses, unless they come from the movies themselves.

What I notice now is how many things out there are made from the same templates. I see them everywhere from podcast headers to some real covers on Amazon. I know how to do that for myself.

And as an added bonus, I’ve noticed a few more hits to some of the stories that usually don’t even get one in a month, like my Vin Diesel one.

So, all round, it’s been fun and educational.

Links:

mtr’s fanfic Pinterest board

my last post about Canva 

Wattpad and publishing

This week I got a lovely review on Wattpad for ‘I’ll be Home for Christmas’.

[Thank god, I mean 10,400 reads and only two reviews… don’t get me started on Wattpad.]

But in any case, this is what they said.

And this confused me.

It’s not my story. It’s fanfiction. This is as published as it will get. The characters belong to Stephenie Meyer while the story - beyond the canon of the books - is mine.

Did they not know they were reading fanfiction? It’s clearly marked as such. The cast is listed as the people who played the characters in the movies, with some extra additions of my own.

Do they not understand that fanfiction cannot be published when the original work is within copyright? Not without pulling the names and changing everything. I write too close to canon to do this. And I feel it’s wrong, in any case. [I’m looking at you 50 shades]

I don’t know what they were thinking and I didn’t ask. I just reminded them it was fanfiction and thanked them for taking the time to review.

I can always write my own original stories. Assuming I can finally get around to getting them published. Still got no idea why that is more of an issue for my original stuff than it is for my fanfic.

Sighs…

I am the number 25 top reviewer in Australia on Goodreads

Yay, me.

I’ve worked hard on typing up reviews for everything I read and a few that I can’t even finish. I put in quotes from the work to support my critique. I think I’ve learned a lot about writing from doing this and sometimes I can see why a book fails for me. I only read genres I like. I’m not tossing out one star reviews for things I don’t have a taste for. That’d be mean.

But it is a personal thing. I am more likely to be critical of a book where the character expresses behaviour I don’t agree with. I saw a title on Bookbub this week where the author had got the racism right upfront in the book summary. Ewww.

One time, giving a one star rating and a long review that listed just why it was so awful attracted the attention of a sock puppet who then argued with me and gave ALL my works one stars in retaliation. What a dick. [Don’t sock puppet your readers. Don’t be a dick.]

Goodreads has a star rating system. According to the site, the stars have the following values:

• 1 star - I did not like it
• 2 stars - it was OK
• 3 stars - I liked it
• 4 stars - I really liked it 
• 5 stars - it was amazing.

There is one negative star. Four positive to one negative, if you want to look at it that way. I don’t give everything five stars either; that’d be equally pointless. My average rating is 3.39. I really hate the idea that you should be nice just because someone published a book. But what’s making me think about this is recently I’ve heard the same message from several different sources.

* Rachel Abbot says never give negative reviews because you always seem to run into those authors at book conferences, or trade meetings. She was talking to Joanna Penn in a video interview and she agreed.

* Dean Wesley Smith argues that every book critic is a failed writer. They turn their inability to finish and publish successfully into criticising others.

* Austin Kleon’s rule #8 was: be nice, the world is a small town.

* There was an article in the Guardian from an anon who had tried to write two books and had given up. In their letter they badmouthed female British literary writers. The next week’s opinion piece told them off for it, said the writer community supports each other, and pointed out two books was nothing. They called the anon a quitter not a failed author, and suggested they’d need a tougher hide if they really wanted to succeed. True that.

High level book reviewers get free advance review copies, publish their reviews on their own sites and (hopefully) earn some kind of return on their investment. I’d do it for free books! If I somehow managed to get through my ‘to be read’ pile first. But being a book reviewer isn’t my dream. I want to be an author.

So, maybe the issue is that if I want to be an author I can’t be a book reviewer as well? It’s like having a foot in both camps. There are a few people I follow on GR who do this but they’re in the early days of their writing career when the people listed above are all past that stage.

Plus, now Amazon owns GR, it is starting to send you a direct email with parts taken out of the reviews from people you follow for a book you just completed yourself. First off, I don’t understand this. I’ve finished the book. Why are you sending me other people’s views on it? I already saw them when I posted the review. Are we supposed to discuss it amongst ourselves? I don’t know that I want my reviews sent right to others. Some I even untick the twitter box so it doesn’t go out publicly.

I have always said that GR is for readers, but I also use GR as my ‘books I own’ record system; a failsafe so I don’t duplicate purchases. I am especially hopeless at updated covers; I see them as a new book. I can look up GR on my phone at a second hand sale and avoid that. My other book database is about to go offline and I’m looking for a replacement but not having a lot of luck so far.

I’d better keep looking.

Links:

Rachel Abbott - how to sell two million books

Dean Wesley Smith - the Essentials workshop week 2

Austin Kleon Steal like an Artist

The Guardian - you're a quitter

And then what happened?

This week I have been listening to Stephen Fry read the complete Sherlock Holmes.

One story, the Adventure of the Crooked Man, tells a locked room mystery. The husband is found dead, the wife is in a brain fever, there are mysterious animal prints in the room, and the door key is missing.

Spoiler warning.

After some investigation, Watson and Holmes discover that the couple were happily married, childless, and that the husband doted more on the wife. Nancy is described as ‘striking and queenly’. She had been into town to a church meeting with her friend, come home, had an argument with her husband that the servants could hear some of, and then the disaster struck. The local police think the wife hit him with a poker. ‘Coward’ was a word the servants overheard her shout at him.

On questioning her friend, she confesses that they met a disabled man in the street. The wife and he had quite a conversation that she did not overhear. He was new in town and did magic tricks for the soldiers.

The autopsy exonerates her. James died of shock. After some more digging, they track down the man she met and question him.

Watson says: “The man sat all twisted and huddled in his chair in a way which gave an indescribable impression of deformity; but the face which he turned towards us, though worn and swarthy, must at some time have been remarkable for its beauty.”

When Nancy was a young woman she had two suitors; both in the army. One was a sergeant James, and the other, more handsome one Henry, was a corporal. Her father, a colour sergeant himself, thought Henry was unsuitable as he had a reckless youth.

During the Indian mutiny, the town was under siege. Henry volunteered to try and get out a message for help. He discussed it with James, who betrayed him and then reported to her that Henry was dead. She and James married and thirty years later, are stationed back in England where he is now a Colonel.

Henry tells them how he was treated as a slave, tortured and punished each time he tried to escape, until he is the crooked man of the title.

The animal? “It was a mongoose!” Holmes cries as if that was the big issue, and off they go back to London.

It is famous for being the story where Holmes ALMOST says, ‘elementary, my dear Watson.’

But my writer brain wants to know what happened next.

Did Nancy and Henry reunite? How could she possibly compensate him? Can he claim decades of lost Army pension? Does she still love him? Can he forgive her for marrying his rival?

That’s the story I want to read. Sighs… maybe I’ll have to write it myself?