This is What I’m Thinking II.
I seem to have no new thoughts. Or if I do, they are merely snippets.
I proof-read a bit of non-fiction today, and I was thinking that although non-fiction is a struggle, chore, and difficulty for me, the one fun thing about writing non-fiction is that you get to use colons and semi-colons.
I spent the afternoon basking in them. Punctuation is beautiful. (But I already said that.)
I also edited an old, old work for ebook release. I’ve been dragging feet on this one. The first chapter is unfixable, but really, aside from some word pruning, the story is a lot better than I thought it was. I thought it would scare away readers, but I think it’s fine. Actually, it’s got a lot of heart.
Lesson in that, I suppose.
You can get the word count from Amazon on lots of books, using this method from Alexis Grant. Isn’t that AWESOME? I love it!
“Every word wasted writing a blog post is a word that could have been spent on your novel.” That was updated around Facebook, and while it’s funny, I disagree. There’s a long line of writers throughout history who regularly wrote letters, journals and essays. So much so that I’d sooner believe these exercise are necessary.
For me, constructing sentences, organizing my thoughts, and finishing things helps me. Particularly the “finishing things” part. It takes forever to finish a novel. It feels good to finish something every day, even if it’s a blog post or an essay or a piece of flash fiction.
/start rant
And finally, do we need to have an opinion on everything? I just see so much invested, particularly as writers, in predicting the future and saying what’s right and what’s wrong. No one knows for sure what the future holds, and people get so worked up opinionating about ebooks and the dire state of publishing.
Really, are you in a position to fix the publishing industry? To change the future of publishing? Well, then why not look at things now, and see how you can position yourself now to make money or meet your objectives? Why not see what works for you now?
And does everyone need to follow your path, too?
Because that seems to be the gist of these opinion pieces. Everyone must self-publish, or everyone must delay ebook releases, or everyone must install DRM, or everyone must not install DRM.
I’m so over those articles/essays/blog posts. I don’t know where the future of publishing lies. I’m placing my bets on certain horses, and I could care less where other people place theirs.
/end rant
Anyway, what are you thinking today?
38 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
Natasha Fondren is a writer traveling the U.S. in a camper with her four cats. She is currently enjoying the lizards and desert heat in Arizona.
I really like your comment about how a lot of writers, and I think of Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft kept up voluminous correspondence and yet certainly wrote quite a lot.
Totally, Charles. That’s a great example!
I came to the same conclusions as you about the future of publishing. I’m living in the now, not worrying about the future.
I read the word count post. I’m going to Amazon to check it out on a friend’s book, and then I’m going to bed. I’m kid-sitting tomorrow, and have to be up early.
Me too, Edie. I love the word count thing. What’s funny is there are a ton of books I’ve thought, “I wish I knew this word count.” And now that I know how to find out, I can’t think of a one!
There’s a long line of writers throughout history who regularly wrote letters, journals and essays.
And novelists who wrote short stories, poems, speeches… Anecdotal evidence suggests the greater the variety in your writing, the greater writer you’ll likely be.
True, Stephen! I think I’m going to go work on some poetry now…
the one fun thing about writing non-fiction is that you get to use colons and semi-colons
I’ll admit I’m not much into colons, they don’t fit my fiction style, but I use lots of semicolons and anyone who doesn’t like it can bite me.
I often find myself reading a piece of fiction and thinking that obviously the writer doesn’t know how to use semicolons, because there are numerous places where one should have been used but wasn’t. It’s a tool, it’s handy. Getting all reverse-snobby about it is ridiculous.
I ran into submission guidelines for a tiny little online publication once where the editor waxed wroth about semicolons and promised to bounce any story which included them. I made a note never to submit anything there and went on to the next thing. [shrug] It’s not like we’re talking the New Yorker here, or even a genre mag that pays pro rates. This was a little bitty market that paid in peanut shells, and yet this editor thought he could afford to be that choosy about punctuation, and in a fairly nasty way. Good luck, dude. [wry smile]
Angie
Omg, Angie, I’ve read some interesting… guidelines. If they’re ridiculous, I just blatantly ignore them.
The semi-colon and colon thing seem to be prevalent, though. I ignore those, too, although I try to keep them in check.
I try to keep them in check.
To me, it’s not so much about how often you use semicolons (or anything else), but rather about varying your sentence structure. If you have a bunch of sentences in a row which have multiple clauses which require semicolons to link them up (and you didn’t do it deliberately and for a purpose, to create some specific effect) then the fault there is monotony, not over-use of semicolons.
Angie
Which is ironic, since semi-colons are so useful in varying sentence structure!
Writing non-fiction is very hard for me. My pieces look like journal entries. I haven’t the slightest where the publishing industry is going either. I would really like to make money doing the one thing I love to no end, the one job that I’d go to sick and not complain one bit, and even take the work with me on vacation. I’d like to make a living with the one job I’d work triple hours and skip meals to catch up on. *sigh*
Christina, that sounds fair to me. I’m crossing my fingers for you, big time!
My thinking was pretty easy.
Still got glitches with my W.i.P. so I decided to put it aside and try to see if I could write a short story (all voice, instead of a mixture of keying and voice) to jumpstart my creativity.
Success, sort of.
Can anyone say, “cannabalism”?
LOL, G! Wow, all with your voice? I’m impressed. That’s something. If I couldn’t type, I think I’d quit, LOL. I don’t know.
There is a certain mindset that comes to writing with voice. When you write with your voice, it forces you to relearn the basics all over again.
Can be somewhat annoying at times, but what am I gonna do?
I just can’t imagine. I’m LUCKY if, in a conversation, I get ONE complete sentence with verb and everything. I’m lucky if I speak one GOOD sentence in a week. I don’t know what I’d do!
I admire you, for sure!
Oh, I love the: Do we have to have an opinion on everything?
Because, y’know, sometimes I don’t say anything because, well, I don’t have an opinion on it. Sometimes people (I’m thinking about band booster meetings, I guess) someone will ask me my opinion about something and I just shrug and say, “Don’t really have an opinion.” They always look annoyed. I think they view it as me being lazy or not giving a damn. But sometimes, well, I Don’t Have An Opinion. It doesn’t affect me, I haven’t thought about it, and although I know plenty of people willing to offer their opinion on subjects they clearly know NOTHING about, I prefer not to.
Doesn’t it get exhausting? And it seems they want the opinion to be so polarized. It’s like everything needs to be divided into two camps, and there can be no one who understands both sides; everyone must be far left or far right.
Amen on the opinionating without information, too. The most annoying thing about that, is no amount of information will change their mind.
Thinking about what Maass said about every page should have something special on it and that I should mine my old stuff for good lines to pump up my current revision.
Oh! Good advice! I love that book. Okay, I’m going to go over the short story I wrote, once more.
I try to avoid a lot of the online prophesizing. I know I need to know what’s going on, but when it’s pure speculation… meh. I have other things to do.
It occurred to me last night that I keep telling our writing group that I haven’t written anything this year, when in fact I’ve written a dozen blog posts. Whaddya know?
Exactly! And they get SO passionate about this speculation, too. Ugh. Just gets to me.
Yes, you have written, LOL!
“There’s a long line of writers throughout history who regularly wrote letters, journals and essays.”
Thanks for this reminder.
One of my WIP’s took to life from an essay I was writing.
Really, Paul? That rocks! That’s great!
Thanks for the mention! Let us know how the e-book turns out.
You bet, Alexis! Ebook will be fine, I’m sure.
Great thoughts, Natasha! I agree, writers don’t have to have an opinion on everything. But I suspect many of us like to wax bombastic.
Good luck with the ebook project.
And I disagree, quite strenuously, with that tired assertion that blogging will destroy your writing. Yes, you can use too much time blogging. But writing on writing keeps your head focused on writing, and I feel the ongoing conversation makes/has made me a better writer. (I just said this in my post for today, didn’t I?)
That said, you can go overboard, like anything else. If it ‘scratches the writing itch’ so you aren’t writing, that’s a problem. But it’s not the same issue, either.
This is true, Written!
Yeah, I disagree, too. I find all my writing useful. And a variety of writing helps me.
I loved your post today. I wish I could get my blogging mojo back!
Oh, and I use a ton of colons and semicolons in my fiction. I like them. They are subtle and provide distinctions that are very useful. But then, I like complex sentence structure–perhaps too much!
Oh YES. Colons and semi-colons are just BEAUTIFUL.
That’s so true about writers and letters and journals! I never thought of it that way! I’d say you just effectively squashed that argument.
I, too, am sick of the opinions about self publishing, not self publishing, etc. How many times can a person read the same thing? I just can’t participate in that, anymore. I’ll watch the field morph, and write for fun. I’d sure love if my movie was made, but I’m not quitting my day job any time soon.
Yes, that one, too! I mean, I really don’t get it. Let people make their own choices. It’s THEIR life! That’s another pet peeve of mine, lately: it seems we’re constantly judging others.
I feel like our race has immatured to Kindergarten.
I’m sick of it too, but then I get dragged in AGAIN, as I just did on Nicola Griffith’s blog.
My husband mentioned to me while reading an interview I was doing that I needed to consider my words carefully. Sometimes it’s safer to have no opinion, or at least no public opinion. I suppose that means I’ve moved well and good into the public sphere. I think I was anyway, but it made me consider my opinions more carefully, and the expressing of them! I too love semi colons and colons. Ahh. Basking indeed.
Really? I don’t visit her blog anymore. I’m totally into supporting marriage equality, I’d do nearly anything to see that happen in the next four years. She sat there and said if you can’t support marriage equality, then she couldn’t be friends with you. Fine. And then she totally BASHED THE HELL OUT OF my own sexuality, and I was outta there.
I was bummed about it, too, because I’d liked her quite a bit, really. Just seemed to me that someone wanting respect and understanding for their sexual preferences would want to respect and understand other sexual preferences. Guess not.
That’s one of those “Please stop being on my side” moments. :/ I understand the anger from people who’ve been abused and oppressed and treated like crap, but anger needs to be aimed properly to accomplish anything positive. [sigh]
Angie
My blog reading and writing has suffered since I went back to work. I deleted all blog links on my blog this weekend, not on purpose, so I’m only relinking to the few I really want/have time to read.
Trying to clear my head and begin blogging on a semi-regular basis. As a writer, I need that outlet. If it keeps others from producing pages, they should do what they see fit. But connecting/communicating with my writer peeps is what feeds me.
I’m trying to do the same thing, Heather. And failing. I don’t understand it, because I have so much more time than I used to.
I agree. Blogging feeds me, too.
I don’t think the sort of writing one does on a blog is enough like fiction writing to really interfere and I’m sure letter writing isn’t. Of course, just from the point of time, if you spend so much time blogging that the day’s over before you get to your fiction, then that would be a problem. Um…I don’t have that problem, obviously.
One thing I’ve been trying to do during the past year is to learn to ignore all the babble about publishing. It kills my writing just to think about it. And, after all, I am not a publisher. I am a writer. So that’s been a project for me to concentrate simply on the writing.