This has been a really slow writing week for me. I started out on Monday by reading through Second Chance in order to determine what it needs to "be better". At least I'm now grounded in the reality of my challenge. Bottom line, I'm great at characterization, bad at follow-through. I do really love the characters in this story, except for the love interest, who's just kind of "there". I didn't turn him into a real person; just a means of advancing the plot. (He is, but I don't need to be obvious about it.) Additionally, I need some kind of incident, but I don't know what that might be. And I ended the story in the wrong place. The appropriate ending occurs too early, which resulted in me adding a bunch of padding that isn't very interesting. All in all, Second Chance wasn't one of my best efforts. Nice premise; bad execution.
The only "progress" I managed to make was to start a new paragraph to slot into a spot that needed more color. Tomorrow is a writing day, so I'd better have some course of action in mind.
In other news, I am now up to 206 newsletter subscribers. That puts pressure on me to come up with a July edition that is actually interesting. I thought about writing something about how my personal history ties in with Inn Dreams, but doing that seems "icky" to me ~ I'm not keen on sharing my personal life. Sure, I could do it in a lighthearted, arms-length way, but I don't even know if anyone would be interested in reading it.
I've weirdly discovered that I write better in a blog than I do in Word. Taking the above scenario, I do believe I could write something compelling if I started it off as a blog post, rather than sitting and staring at a blank Word screen. Maybe it's the compactness of the format; words don't trail all the way across the screen in Blogger, and thus it's easier to digest what I've written and continue on from there. (Or just shorten my margins in Word ~ duh.)
I've got to find out if Voracious
Readers Only will allow a different form of delivery for my book other
than BookSprouts. Stupidest purchase decision I ever made. Still
no takers for Inn Dreams after all this time. That's on me. I should
have researched the site more fully. If you're an author who doesn't
write romance, steer clear of BookSprouts! Romance is all its readers
want.
Every day I dutifully pull up the email account I used to sign up for Goodreads, and every day I find an exhausting list of Goodreads notifications. Sadly, none of them apply to me, so today I went in and unsubscribed from all the ARC groups I'd joined. By this point no one is interested in my book, so there's no point in checking. One thing that baffles me about all these ARC posts ~ a lot of people post that they're "ready and willing" to review books, when all they'd really need to do is scan the group and find hundreds of authors clamoring for reviews. I guess it must be one of those power moves. "No, you come to me!" I have zero interest in playing mind games. If any of these people wanted my book they would have selected it by now.
Yea, I'm becoming a bit crankier, which is actually not a bad thing. I was thinking last night about how I had to kowtow so many times in my job; agree with my boss when I didn't actually agree with her, take on extra work that wasn't in my job description and do it cheerfully. Be a people pleaser. But why do I need to do that now? I don't. So, I'm coming around to the mindset of, "Here's my work. Take it or leave it." An example of people pleasing was asking ARC readers what format they wanted. No, here's the format I have. Hope that works for you.
It's good to grow a pair in this industry. Stop apologizing for your work. Either people will like it or they won't. I blogged a while back about a well-known author who stated on his podcast that he'd just written "the best final chapter anyone has ever written", and I thought, wow, that's hubris. Now I say, why not? No, obviously not all my works are good. If they were, I wouldn't currently be revising one of them. But a lot of them are good. I don't like the term, "imposter syndrome", because it's way overused, but call it what you will, I definitely have it. After ten or however many books I've written, I shouldn't feel defensive. I'm about as good as any other indie writer. I remember the "award-winning author" (self-described) whose book was populated in a promo newsletter above mine, and what an ass I considered him to be. (If he's so award-winning, why's he paying ten bucks to advertise his book?) But maybe I had the wrong outlook. If you don't hype yourself, who's going to do it for you? I don't have any "awards", but, trust me, they're easy to come by. Just pay to enter some contest and you'll at least garner an honorable mention. It's kind of built into the price of admission. (No, I wouldn't stoop to that.)
It's good to develop a mindset of, "Here it is. If you don't buy it, it's your loss." Maybe if I was making any money off this enterprise, I wouldn't feel so confrontational. Or maybe I would. Best-selling authors don't have to beg for reads. I'm not going to beg, either. I'll do my due diligence and promote my book with the paltry funds I have. But I'll no longer flog my work to people on social media who don't give two sh*ts about me. I'll no longer do things I hate doing.
So, with a newfound air of confidence, I'm on a mission to make Second Chance better.
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