In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. There are also elements of do I really have to do this shit. In writing, at least in writing for publication, every published or aspiring to be published author I've ever talked to has said in one form or another that the shit parts of being a writer are the promotional copy. Except the ones who are lucky enough to have people to do it for them.
The good news is, there's a certain pattern to the promotional copy you need to write. If you're trying to sell it to agents and publishers, generally they'll want something that's either one or three pages. If it's one page, they'll want a summary, if it's three pages, an outline. These are all different terms for the same basic thing, what is your story from beginning to middle to end. Including any twists you might have at the ending, because you're trying to sell them on the whole of your story, not induce them to read what's on the next page. Regardless of what the agency or publishing company wants, you're going to have to write a cover/query letter, so you're going to need to distill your work down to one to three sentences. This may or may not have a closed ending, and I'd actually recommend writing several different versions of it if your work is big enough that you can vary it that much. The odds of you having to write over five different query letters are pretty high, if your courage holds out. Finally, you'll also want a couple paragraph synopsis from beginning to middle to end as well, in case your submission requirements permit a longer query letter, or in case you want to vary your one page summary some.
That's your selling to agents copy, but there's also a school of thought that says you might want to self-publish someday, so you might want to write some promotional copy. As the room lets out a collective groan, yeah, I hate promotional copy too. I hate selling myself in text, I can write fiction till my wrists go numb and my hands fall off, but ask me to write promotional copy for my own work and I will do laundry or empty the catbox before I sit down to do it. I will cut raw cold slimy chicken, that's how much I hate it. But it's a good thing to have. Once again, there will be places (Twitter comes to mind immediately) where you'll need to summarize your work in the shortest terms possible, so figure this out first, because it's hard. Not only do you need to summarize, you need to do it in a way that will make people want to click and see what it's all about. Write several variations, then run them by your circle of first readers (you do have one by now, don't you?) to see which ones are accurate, which ones are most interesting. Hopefully the two will be the same, one thing you do not want to do is alienate potential readers by promising them one thing and handing them another. You want to have several kinds of accuracy: tone, factual, focus. Bait and switch very rarely works, so my best general advice to you is don't. You can put up these short blurbs on Twitter, on Nanowrimo, on your social media profiles preceded by "Author of [Your Title Here], [blurb]."
Next you'll tackle the longer blurbs. You'll need a back of the book style blurb, maybe a paragraph of plot that trails off before you reveal the ending and with the goal of inducing the person to want more, and then you'll want another few sentences summarizing the mood and setting. This will go either on the back of the book, in any flyers or postcards you might be passing out. Some publishing companies want you to submit them a back-of-the-book style summary in addition to your summary, they want you to sell them on the book. You might also put it at the closing of guest posts on blogs, "Author is currently writing [blurbspiel]" or hand it out for other authors to put on their blogs following a review "the book is [blurb]". If you're very lucky, you might be able to construct a book trailer using this type of blurb as a script. Fortunately, this is where this type of promotional copy stops, because promotional copy meant to be seen by potential readers rarely gets longer than that, and only in specific circumstances. Still, you should have a back-of-book length blurb, and, again, at least two variations. If you don't know how long to make it or how it works, look on the back of books similar to yours, see how it's structured. Then apply it to your own work.
That's the what, now for the tricky parts, the how and the when. Personally, I hate doing this like poison, so I get it over with as soon as possible. This means after I have the detailed outline of the work, because I'm a planner, and at the latest after I've started the novel and am still in the wild and crazy beginning, when I'm brimming with enthusiasm for the project. This gives me the momentum of new-project glee as well as the structure of having that outline, therefore knowing what the book is going to be. I cannot protest strongly enough against writing a book blurb based on that idea you have. When you outline it in detail, your chances of it becoming a workable idea in the same form as the inspiration drop drastically. Once you have an outline, you have a structure, and your chances are much better that the finished product will resemble your promotional and query copy. And if it doesn't by the time you have a first draft, you can go back and edit that copy while you make your first round of edits. Because you wouldn't send an unedited manuscript to a publishing house or agency, would you?
That's for planners. For panters, as Nanowrimo calls them, I'm afraid there may be nothing for it but to write the copy after you've written the first draft. But do it immediately, straight out of that first flush of holy crap I did it all and, again, for the momentum. The advantage this gives you is that you can see what shape your work takes, and your chances of your copy text matching the final work are about the highest they're going to be. So write the copy down, and then go back into edits flush from the success of having done all that tedious shit already!
Right now, I'm working on a project called Black Ice. It's less of a novel and more of an anthology or, as I heard Mike Stackpole once call it, a braided novel. You may have seen me bitching about it on Twitter in various places. And it's something I'm self-publishing, so unless I have the money to hire someone more interested to write the promotional copy for me (hint: I don't) I have to write all the damn promotional copy myself. I still hate it more than cutting up cold slimy chicken. But in my folder of documents for Black Ice I have a file called "Black Ice Outline and Support Docs," and in that file on each page for however many pages it goes on is my chapter/story outline, an editing checklist of how far into it I've gotten, and my support docs. In this case, it's almost all promotional copy because I haven't tried selling this to an agency or publishing company, since it's not a traditional book model. So I have a one-sentence summary of Black Ice, a few sentence summary, a back of the book blurb, and eventually I'll fill it up with copy for the rest of the more idiosyncratic promotional type things I end up doing. The sequel project to Black Ice, called White Lightning, doesn't even have a full, finished rough draft yet (the bulk of it does, and I have the outline, but not the revised first draft), but it already has a "White Lightning Outline and Support Docs" file that consists of mostly outline right now. Thus do I remind myself that there are shit tasks ahead.
If you are one of the people who enjoys and can easily write promotional or query copy, I bow before you because you are a better person than I am. If you're like the rest of us, well, scutwork comes with every job, and there's not much to do but accept it and slog through the mud till we can get to the really fun stuff. Like editing. Oh joy.
Showing posts with label do process. Show all posts
Showing posts with label do process. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
In Which We Do Ten Things At Once
I'm cooking dinner and committing a minor act of bloggery that may or may not go anywhere, while planning out the menu for next week with the boy, while pondering the line edits I have to do, while keeping an eye on Twitter. And this is pretty much an evening in the life of Kitty. In another forty-five minutes or so I'll have dinner ready, and I'll sit down to chew on an episode of Haven and do line edits when my head is too full of that, and then chew some on an episode of Person of Interest since it's my week to do that. And undoubtedly I'll be fussing with something else, maybe chatting, maybe working some clay with one hand while I attempt to type coherently with the other. Maybe making a grocery list, because after menu planning comes grocery lists. See, there ist method in my madness. Maybe I'll be doing that translation I promised someone that, okay, is half done by now.
I do not, as you may have gathered by now, or if you know me from meatspace at all, do things one at a time. I gather to myself a collection of tasks that need to happen and sort them into categories of things that can happen simultaneously. And it does help that some of these things are things like "finish watching this TV show" or "finish that damn knitting project," or "explore some new bands," things that require different parts of my body and my brain. But sometimes it involves sitting on the couch or at the computer and leaning forward and tabbing between five windows at once, making progress on one project and then when I hit a wall there, even a small one, rapidly moving to the next one so I can make progress and use that momentum to go back to the first.
There's been a study referenced on the internet somewhere or another, I'd track it down if I had more than a vague supposition that I saw it around, that bilingual people multitask better. On the face of it, it makes sense. When you live in a bilingual household, you get used to switching your brain back and forth through two different but both fundamental ways of thinking. So it's not much of a stretch to go from that to switching your brain back and forth from editing in one window, writing something new in another, doing a bit of HTML code in a third, and chatting elsewhere. All similar but slightly different tasks. Or, alternatively and less single-category focused, mending a skirt and watching TV and chatting and writing a story in bits and pieces. While the front of my mind is focused on the conversation and not stabbing myself with a needle, the back of my mind might be taking in the TV show and churning out other kinds of fiction. Or, as I'm doing right now, keeping an eye on a pot of soon-to-be-mashed potatoes to make sure it doesn't boil over, while blogging, while making a meal plan and a grocery list, while chatting, while turning over aspects of my childhood in my head in case I need to pull them out and pass them over for their information.
Everybody does this. And even as I'm typing it there's an element of caterpillaring in here. You know what caterpillaring is. It's what happens when someone asks the caterpillar (or the centipede, as it seems to be more commonly known) how on earth does it move all those legs at the same time. Having to think about it, the caterpillar (or centipede) realizes it has no idea, and promptly topples over. So, Kitty, how do you cook and do household tasks and blog and chat and prepare anecdata all at the same time? I'll tell you! .... I don't know. But everybody does it, and the trick to doing it well is knowing what kinds of tasks you can balance and how many of each of them you can juggle before you and all your tasks fall flat on your face.
I'm bad at this. I'm better than I used to be, so we'll say I used to be really bad at this. There was a time not so many years ago when I would write six to eight projects around Nanowrimo pretty much because I could. There was no question of whether or not it was a good idea, or whether or not I could in the sense that I was capable of doing this in any sort of rational or healthy manner, I was physically and mentally capable of writing 350,000 words in a month, so sure, why not?
Oh the reasons I could give you why not. So many reasons do I have.
(When you're blogging no one can tell that you took a five to mash some potatoes.)
(Or decanting some spices.)
Doing multiple things at once isn't a bad thing. It's a sad truth that one's ability to do a task well goes down with every additional task you pile onto what you're doing; this is the reason people who talk on the phone and drive and put on their makeup and drink coffee, cause accidents. But it's also true that doing something, especially doing it well and to completion, gives a little upswing. A little bit of momentum or at least positive energy (aka dopamine) which can then be converted into forward momentum or energy for one of the other things you're doing. Just looking at my list of tasks, half of them involve short, simple things stacked on one after the other, next to one or two longer or more involved things. Probably half the reason I've been successful with my line edits so far is because I've been doing them in conjunction with smaller tasks I can finish so I'm not going dear god will this project never fucking end? Because I will. I know it, you know it, my editrix definitely knows it.
So, now I've almost finished making dinner. I've got my menu for the rest of the week, and the shopping list to go with it to give the boy since he's the one who goes by the store with the discounted meat and at the hour when it's discounted and stuck out on the shelves. That's three tasks done, and I still have a couple hours left in the evening to do all my blogwork, and whatever else goes along with blogwork. Most likely chatting and eating dinner, and possibly some line edits, and maybe some knitting, coding, or playing around with modeling clay. And whatever it is, I'm sure it will be full of little dopamine mines going off in my head and keeping me moving forward in any of the half-dozen tasks I've set for myself tonight. I may not get it all done by the time I trudge upstairs to bed, but I'll at least have a good chunk of things whacked out. And that's more than enough to be going on with.
I do not, as you may have gathered by now, or if you know me from meatspace at all, do things one at a time. I gather to myself a collection of tasks that need to happen and sort them into categories of things that can happen simultaneously. And it does help that some of these things are things like "finish watching this TV show" or "finish that damn knitting project," or "explore some new bands," things that require different parts of my body and my brain. But sometimes it involves sitting on the couch or at the computer and leaning forward and tabbing between five windows at once, making progress on one project and then when I hit a wall there, even a small one, rapidly moving to the next one so I can make progress and use that momentum to go back to the first.
There's been a study referenced on the internet somewhere or another, I'd track it down if I had more than a vague supposition that I saw it around, that bilingual people multitask better. On the face of it, it makes sense. When you live in a bilingual household, you get used to switching your brain back and forth through two different but both fundamental ways of thinking. So it's not much of a stretch to go from that to switching your brain back and forth from editing in one window, writing something new in another, doing a bit of HTML code in a third, and chatting elsewhere. All similar but slightly different tasks. Or, alternatively and less single-category focused, mending a skirt and watching TV and chatting and writing a story in bits and pieces. While the front of my mind is focused on the conversation and not stabbing myself with a needle, the back of my mind might be taking in the TV show and churning out other kinds of fiction. Or, as I'm doing right now, keeping an eye on a pot of soon-to-be-mashed potatoes to make sure it doesn't boil over, while blogging, while making a meal plan and a grocery list, while chatting, while turning over aspects of my childhood in my head in case I need to pull them out and pass them over for their information.
Everybody does this. And even as I'm typing it there's an element of caterpillaring in here. You know what caterpillaring is. It's what happens when someone asks the caterpillar (or the centipede, as it seems to be more commonly known) how on earth does it move all those legs at the same time. Having to think about it, the caterpillar (or centipede) realizes it has no idea, and promptly topples over. So, Kitty, how do you cook and do household tasks and blog and chat and prepare anecdata all at the same time? I'll tell you! .... I don't know. But everybody does it, and the trick to doing it well is knowing what kinds of tasks you can balance and how many of each of them you can juggle before you and all your tasks fall flat on your face.
I'm bad at this. I'm better than I used to be, so we'll say I used to be really bad at this. There was a time not so many years ago when I would write six to eight projects around Nanowrimo pretty much because I could. There was no question of whether or not it was a good idea, or whether or not I could in the sense that I was capable of doing this in any sort of rational or healthy manner, I was physically and mentally capable of writing 350,000 words in a month, so sure, why not?
Oh the reasons I could give you why not. So many reasons do I have.
(When you're blogging no one can tell that you took a five to mash some potatoes.)
(Or decanting some spices.)
Doing multiple things at once isn't a bad thing. It's a sad truth that one's ability to do a task well goes down with every additional task you pile onto what you're doing; this is the reason people who talk on the phone and drive and put on their makeup and drink coffee, cause accidents. But it's also true that doing something, especially doing it well and to completion, gives a little upswing. A little bit of momentum or at least positive energy (aka dopamine) which can then be converted into forward momentum or energy for one of the other things you're doing. Just looking at my list of tasks, half of them involve short, simple things stacked on one after the other, next to one or two longer or more involved things. Probably half the reason I've been successful with my line edits so far is because I've been doing them in conjunction with smaller tasks I can finish so I'm not going dear god will this project never fucking end? Because I will. I know it, you know it, my editrix definitely knows it.
So, now I've almost finished making dinner. I've got my menu for the rest of the week, and the shopping list to go with it to give the boy since he's the one who goes by the store with the discounted meat and at the hour when it's discounted and stuck out on the shelves. That's three tasks done, and I still have a couple hours left in the evening to do all my blogwork, and whatever else goes along with blogwork. Most likely chatting and eating dinner, and possibly some line edits, and maybe some knitting, coding, or playing around with modeling clay. And whatever it is, I'm sure it will be full of little dopamine mines going off in my head and keeping me moving forward in any of the half-dozen tasks I've set for myself tonight. I may not get it all done by the time I trudge upstairs to bed, but I'll at least have a good chunk of things whacked out. And that's more than enough to be going on with.
Saturday, February 23, 2013
In Which We Meditate on Meditating
Today seems like the perfect kind of day to tell you all about how I keep my mind in perfect (hah!) working (ahahah!) order. Stop laughing, I'm serious.
Semi-serious. I've had more experience than was probably wise at attempting to work through a turbo-charged, somewhat manic state -- somewhat manic both in the clinical sense of manic and in the colloquial, and more the latter than the former. And the fact that I have a coping mechanism for working through or coming down from a manic state of project-tackling is at least half-due to general practice at meditative techniques. I was raised by hippies, what can I say? They teach you this when you're young and raised by hippies.
So, my mental landscape is pretty well defined. It started when I was around twelve, thirteen or so, sprung out of recurring dreams and conversations with friends and far too many fantasy novels. It solidified into something resembling consistent form when I became involved in online text-based roleplay, which, since it was freeform, meant I had to consistently describe things like what my headspace was and who lived in it. The basement muse is a subject for another time entirely, but I did manage to get some sort of concrete idea of what it looked like inside the place where I went to plan things.
My headspace is vast and contains multitudes. The center of it is a tower, because little girls who dream of being fantasy heroes love towers, and Very Important People have them (just ask Neil Gaiman). At the ground level there are gardens and fields and hot springs and a big stone wall, but at the top of it is my private little headspace bedroom, and beneath that is the Workshop.
For those of you who haven't read Meredith Ann Pierce's Darkangel Trilogy, it's a young adult series in which a girl is given a spindle which spins, not wool, but thoughts and feelings. And when she's upset it spins an itchy, coarse thread, and when she's content it spins like fine silk. This also comes out, albeit less blatantly magical, when the protagonist of Wise Child (by Monica Furlong) is learning to spin and weave. And in addition to the hippies I grew up spending summers in the Appalachian mountains with my aunts and uncles, and they taught me all kinds of things like how to weave and knit, how to throw clay, how to sew, about feeding chickens and cows and riding horses, how to make baskets, how to spin and make yarn, how to take plain white or off-white things and put color onto them, and the idea that physically creating something tied into one's emotions flew into the blender with all of this and spattered all over my consciousness. The upshot of all this, I was surrounded by crafty people and books about how being crafty could be magical if you thought about it right, so of course my headspace would be full of magical spindles and spinning wheels and pottery wheels and looms and things. Physical crafts as a metaphor for mental crafts, right?
It turns out, this is exactly what I needed. Years and years later, after one manic bout of Yuletide writing I was finding it hard to sleep. All the stories were theoretically in (that's a complaint for another time and place) and I'd wrapped up a last 72-or-so-hour marathon frenzy of writing, but I couldn't sleep, I couldn't settle down, I couldn't think. My headspace was in whatever the stage beyond disarray. So I made use of all this imagery and meditation training, and I put it the hell back in order. If I created stories and worlds and things out of cones of imaginary yarn and blocks of make-believe clay, after a few straight days of mad frenzied creating my Workshop was probably in a state of tremendous chaos and mess, like a meatspace Workshop would be if I'd done the same thing in the physical world. And if had done that, then it needed to be cleaned up, right? I could wipe down the tables and put things back on shelves and sweep the dust from off the floor, too. And by the time I was done with that, I was a lot calmer and ready to sleep again.
Figuring that out was one of those big revelations that makes your life so much easier, you can't imagine how you did it the hard way all these years before. And yeah, I still have days when the deadlines are creeping up on me, or when I have five different things in my head all screaming to get out, or when I've been up too late and early and can't focus anyway. But having one more tool in my kit to put my mind in order doesn't hurt, and does help quite a bit.
Semi-serious. I've had more experience than was probably wise at attempting to work through a turbo-charged, somewhat manic state -- somewhat manic both in the clinical sense of manic and in the colloquial, and more the latter than the former. And the fact that I have a coping mechanism for working through or coming down from a manic state of project-tackling is at least half-due to general practice at meditative techniques. I was raised by hippies, what can I say? They teach you this when you're young and raised by hippies.
So, my mental landscape is pretty well defined. It started when I was around twelve, thirteen or so, sprung out of recurring dreams and conversations with friends and far too many fantasy novels. It solidified into something resembling consistent form when I became involved in online text-based roleplay, which, since it was freeform, meant I had to consistently describe things like what my headspace was and who lived in it. The basement muse is a subject for another time entirely, but I did manage to get some sort of concrete idea of what it looked like inside the place where I went to plan things.
My headspace is vast and contains multitudes. The center of it is a tower, because little girls who dream of being fantasy heroes love towers, and Very Important People have them (just ask Neil Gaiman). At the ground level there are gardens and fields and hot springs and a big stone wall, but at the top of it is my private little headspace bedroom, and beneath that is the Workshop.
For those of you who haven't read Meredith Ann Pierce's Darkangel Trilogy, it's a young adult series in which a girl is given a spindle which spins, not wool, but thoughts and feelings. And when she's upset it spins an itchy, coarse thread, and when she's content it spins like fine silk. This also comes out, albeit less blatantly magical, when the protagonist of Wise Child (by Monica Furlong) is learning to spin and weave. And in addition to the hippies I grew up spending summers in the Appalachian mountains with my aunts and uncles, and they taught me all kinds of things like how to weave and knit, how to throw clay, how to sew, about feeding chickens and cows and riding horses, how to make baskets, how to spin and make yarn, how to take plain white or off-white things and put color onto them, and the idea that physically creating something tied into one's emotions flew into the blender with all of this and spattered all over my consciousness. The upshot of all this, I was surrounded by crafty people and books about how being crafty could be magical if you thought about it right, so of course my headspace would be full of magical spindles and spinning wheels and pottery wheels and looms and things. Physical crafts as a metaphor for mental crafts, right?
It turns out, this is exactly what I needed. Years and years later, after one manic bout of Yuletide writing I was finding it hard to sleep. All the stories were theoretically in (that's a complaint for another time and place) and I'd wrapped up a last 72-or-so-hour marathon frenzy of writing, but I couldn't sleep, I couldn't settle down, I couldn't think. My headspace was in whatever the stage beyond disarray. So I made use of all this imagery and meditation training, and I put it the hell back in order. If I created stories and worlds and things out of cones of imaginary yarn and blocks of make-believe clay, after a few straight days of mad frenzied creating my Workshop was probably in a state of tremendous chaos and mess, like a meatspace Workshop would be if I'd done the same thing in the physical world. And if had done that, then it needed to be cleaned up, right? I could wipe down the tables and put things back on shelves and sweep the dust from off the floor, too. And by the time I was done with that, I was a lot calmer and ready to sleep again.
Figuring that out was one of those big revelations that makes your life so much easier, you can't imagine how you did it the hard way all these years before. And yeah, I still have days when the deadlines are creeping up on me, or when I have five different things in my head all screaming to get out, or when I've been up too late and early and can't focus anyway. But having one more tool in my kit to put my mind in order doesn't hurt, and does help quite a bit.
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