A Curmudgeonly Pontification on Editors and Self-Promotion

       I'm plenty old enough to be called a curmudgeon and I've occasionally written a post where I assume that appellation. A couple of observations have occurred to me lately that fall under that category.

      

Editors and Editing

 



Thanks to
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/composition/editing.htm

       I'm probably the only person around who prefers to indulge in that tremendous no-no, the violation of which shocks and horrifies!  I prefer to edit my own books.

       I have recently encountered someone who knew her book needed editing, so she hired an editor and paid good money, and then everybody who reviewed the book talked about how poorly edited it was (including me).  I am not about to waste money for somebody to do what I can do better, and I have no desire to be patronized by somebody who just assumes that if you're looking for an editor, you yourself are an uneducated simpleton.   (To be fair, I should insert a disclaimer here: I realize that not all editors are like that.)

       I have a sufficient academic background in English and language that I think I know how to write English using correct grammar and usage.  And I certainly know how to look things up, not only in the dictionary but in other tools.  I was a librarian, for goodness sake!  And when I first started writing when I was 29, I had my mother right there.  She was an English teacher and she's the one who taught me most of what I know about grammar and usage.  She and I proofread my early writing together, in the proper way -- with one person following the manuscript and the other reading in a slow, detailed way -- one word at a time, with all the punctuation verbalized.  Somewhere along the line I was taught that method, but it doesn't seem to be something anybody knows about these days.

       Now my mother is gone and I don't have anybody to proofread with, and I'm aware that when you proofread by yourself, you can miss a lot of typos.  So I apologize if a few typos slip through, or possibly the occasional small grammatical error.  Still, I trust myself to catch, for example, misuses of  homophones like "horde" and "hoard," a couple of words I always check out in every book so I don't have the Shshi sending out a "hoard" to found a new fortress.

       I think the reason people need editors so badly (apart from dyslexia, which can't be helped) is inferior education (and also poor typing skills, but that's a different problem).  Where were they during their high school English language classes?  Off in some adolescent haze, I guess, because it was obvious they ain't never gonna have no use for what the teacher was trying to larn 'em.  I think that's always been true to a considerable extent.  I'm quite sure many people who sat in my mother's classes back in the '30s, '40s, and '50s didn't learn grammar any better than the kids do today.

 

Self-Promotion

 

Thanks to
http://jezebel.com/5738957/social-minefield-how-to-self-promote-without-being-a-jerk

       We indie authors beat our brains out trying to get people to buy our books.  I list all my special prices on Twitter, Goodreads, Facebook, Google+, and in special forums and listings. I post them on my blog and I get promos on websites like The Story Reading Ape (bless his furry hide!)  I've been interviewed, and I thank all those interviewers.   I belong to several book promo groups on Facebook and Google+.  You put your posts on those and immediately they sink like a stone in the sea. 

       So I've decided all this is based on a false premise:  that people are actually out there trolling all these sites, looking for books to gobble up in order to fill their cavernous maws that hunger for reading matter. 

       I don't think this is true at all -- I don't think anybody is looking for books to read.  I'm basing this on myself.  I admit I hardly ever pay any attention to the myriad of books posted on these sites (not cites, you notice).  That's probably a flaw -- I should pay more attention, especially if I want them to pay attention back.  First off, who has time to investigate every book that's just been published?  Secondly, most of these books are in genres I have absolutely no interest in.  Erotic romance? Forget it!  Vampires?  Likewise (I have read one or two with vampires).  Zombies?  tha'sask|>|| as my Shshi would say.  Paranormal in general?  Nope!  I realize that my interests and the books that I write are literary in style and trends don't attract me.  I've even quit reading most high fantasy (dragons and elves and magic don't seem to appeal much to me these days).  I read tons of it in the '70s and '80s, as well as a good bit of more traditional science fiction.  Ursula K. LeGuin was my favorite, however, and I think everybody realizes her stuff is pretty literary in tone -- carefully crafted, with deeply dimensioned characters.   That's what I like, and I hope that's what I write, whether it's laid in the real world of the future or on a distant planet.

       There are many books that I would like to read before I die and unfortunately most of them were written years ago -- standards that I never got around to reading earlier, like The Great Gatsby or The House of the Spirits, by Isabel Allende.  I cannot possibly check out every book that crops up on a promo listing no matter how much I want to support indie authors. When I do, sadly, the books often turn out to be a waste of time.  It's not only poor editing -- it's that the authors think they can toss off a book in a week or a month and publish it immediately and have a masterpiece that sells a million copies.  They need to write ... and write ... and write ... and put the manuscript away and let it cook and then go back to it months or years later after they've gained more knowledge and experience, and then judge if it was really any good.  Perspective -- authors need to gain perspective on their own works by coming to them as if they were new.  I have no intention of ever publishing anything I wrote in the first eight years of my writing life.  I rewrote it so many times that the beginning became nothing but a jumble.  I do have a couple of manuscripts from the late '70s or early '80s (the period around the writing of "The Blessing of Krozem," my free novelette on Smashwords) that I may resurrect someday, but much as I loved the really early stuff when I wrote it, I think it's consigned to oblivion.  Juvenilia, they call it -- only I was in my thirties at the time! 

       So I apologize if I cannot pay attention to every indie-published book out there, and I understand why mine get ignored.  If I don't like to read erotic romances, the writers of erotic romances surely don't want to read character studies of giant termite people.  But somebody out there does want to, and that's why I don't give up.  You just have to find your readership.  That is what is important, and probably the hardest thing you have to do!

      

 

Man Who Found Birds: In Which a Writer Confesses Her Sins

       I naturally write long stories!  Mea culpa!  No matter how good my intentions are, this is something I cannot overcome!  "Monster Is in the Eye of the Beholder" (about 19,000 words) is the aberration.  The Termite Queen ran to two long volumes, but it never seemed long to me.  The Labors of Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head was planned as a three-volume series, but I'm chopping it into at least six moderately long volumes.  This works quite well because my termites' adventures are episodic.

       But then we come to The Man Who Found Birds among the Stars.  It is a hopeless, unfinished sprawl, with a middle where I started improvising, bunches of characters (each of whom shouted "Hey, you, I've got a story of my own!"), and an experimental effort in a later part that I'm going to have to abandon and completely rewrite.      

       So why does this happen?  It happens because of the reasons why I write.  I want to express what's inside of me.  I don't write intending to produce a commercially popular book or to appeal to a particular group of people, like young adults or fans of a particular genre such as paranormal or horror or romance or even generalized science fiction, although MWFB does fall into that genre.  In fact, I don't really write for other people at all, although of course like any author I want my books to be read and relished. But I can't compromise my own way simply to make people buy and read the books. I can't write in a particular form on demand.  Therefore, I will probably continue on my path of sin.

 

       So if MWFB is so imperfect, why have I decided to work at least part of it  into something capable of being published?  Well, I acquired one serious fan in the process of posting early chapters on this blog.  Those posts also received many page views, if that means anything.  People did seem interested.  I've had a few other favorable comments as well.  Maybe this book could actually be my break-out piece!

 

       The book is cast as biographical fiction written to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the death of Capt. Robbin Haysus Nikalishin, who commanded the first mission to a nearby star system and while doing so made humanity's first contact with intelligent extraterrestrials.  So there's my signature nod to scholarship:  the book is really authored by Prf. Tania Barden of Oxkam University in the Islands of Britan.  For comparison, The Termite Queen is laid in the 30th century, when interstellar travel and contact with extraterrestrials has become commonplace.  In MWFB, you'll get an occasional aside mentioning how things were done differently 50 years before, in the 28th century; otherwise it's a quite straightforward narrative.  I purposely tried to write a more colloquial style than what I used in TQ or in Labors (my termites are quite formal little beasties, as I've said elsewhere). 

 

       Now comes the painful part of my confession: the facts about the length.   The first 37 years of Robbin Nikalishin's life has consumed about 780,000 words, and that doesn't even get him to the stars.  I'm working on reducing that awful length, but I think this early part of his life will require three or four volumes (still undecided).  My tentative titles are v.1: Eagle Ascendant; v.2: Eagle Falling; v.3: High Feather; and v.4: Survivor.  It would be nice if I could shorten vols. 3 and 4 enough to make only one volume out of that, called Survivor.  If you've been reading my posted chapters, you'll recognize that those titles derive from the "Prologue."

       Volume One started at 179,173 words and after an initial cutting effort, it's now 175,203.  That's shameful!  I'm about to start a second pass-through, trying to look at each chapter objectively and determine if any huge chunks could be cut.  The best place to cut would be in the technical aspects -- my take on future fictional physics.  The problem here is, my fictional temporal quantum physics plays an enormous part in the unfolding of the plot, so I don't know.  I'm comforted by the fact that v.2 of The Termite Queen is 196,000 words, running to 572 published pages.  At least this one won't be that long!

 

       Now you may be saying, if this book is worth publishing, then why don't you hire a professional editor to cut it?  Arrgh!  Then it wouldn't be my book any longer!  I don't care how much better it would be -- I would have to disown it!  So I'm going to plow ahead and we'll see what happens.  The cover will be a problem, however.  No termites in this book -- it's all about human characters -- and I'm not much good at drawing anything but termites.  I might be able to do something with eagles.  If not, I might have to get some professional cover art.

       So please bear with me.  I think that in the long term you may just find this story compelling and captivating!  I know v.1 has the most exciting and suspenseful ending I've ever written for any book!

       Here is a facsimile of the title page of the "original edition," published in 2849:

THE MAN WHO FOUND BIRDS AMONG THE STARS

A Biographical Series

Issued in the year 2849 as Part of the Commemoration
of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Death of
Capt. Robbin Haysus Nikalishin
(10 May 2799)by
Prf. Tania Barden
Fellow, Brassnose/Queens’ College
Oxkam University

VOLUME ONE
EAGLE ASCENDANT

I decided to embarrass myself further
and post a cover I drew way back in 2004.
I got better at drawing faces as time went along, but these are not the best
and I have no intention of publishing with this cover.
Note that I originally entitled the early volume Ikarus.   
That's Robbin Nikalishin in the middle, of course.
Otherwise, the characters are, clockwise from upper left:
Sterling Nikalishin (Robbie's mother)
Robbie's friend Kolm MaGilligoody (horrible -- eyes aren't anything like right)
Dr. Madeline Souray (the Project's Medical Officer)
Wilda Murchy (Robbie's most enduring friend)
At the upper left is Robbie's toy space plane
and at the upper right is Kolm's medal of Mairin and Jaysus.